Raven Moore's Blog, page 16

Michael Jackson’s Nikki Minaj

How come I never hear anyone complaining about how Nikki Minaj makes her skin look lighter? Is she just another Michael Jackson to everyone – an artistic oddity that people still love? But, it’s not entertainment if no one is talking about it. It’s just some f@$%ed up reality that people accept. What about nose changes for dogs? Would anyone say anything then?… I’m not saying I’m mad… Because I’m guilty of accepting strange things, too. I don’t think that anything that changes with too much frequency can last, however. Take the sun, for example. It’s been doing what it does for longer than anyone knows about. It suddenly deciding to take a vacation would mess everything up on the planet. Really, I’m just trying to figure out if Nikki Minaj’s color wars, nose changes, and teeth implants are somehow putting me off balance. Am I feeding myself love or am I feeding myself hate every time I look at the manifestation of her feelings about herself on her face? #justwriting

Getchyo’ Hand Out My Pocket !

‘It’s cultural.’ Don’t you hate it when someone says that? That just means, “I don’t understand why you did that but okay. I don’t have time for an explanation and you probably can’t give me one anyway because you’ve been doing that all of your life.” When someone does something weird is it really cultural or is it just weird? Aren’t there basic, universally accepted ways to act? We’re all human. If I shaved the head of everyone on the planet, we wouldn’t feel that different. So, how can we be so different? We have all the same body parts. And, by the way, this analogy is just cultural. You don’t have to know where I’m going with the hair thing. Just accept that it’s along the trajectory of my current thought process… because I’m American… and don’t always feel the need to be clear… and you can make some sense out of it later… if you want to.

From culture to culture we do, in fact, seem very different—thousands of languages that use different words to say “I love you,” thousands of ways to cook vegetables, millions of ways to make music, so many ways to design with cotton, and forget about all the ways you can avoid getting a job—like going to grad school without knowing why or marrying the first person who asks you because they bought you a TV. Greetings are the only things I can think of that don’t surpass the number ten. Not that I know of ten ways to greet, but I’m sure that’s a safe number.

Everyone either kisses, hugs, bows, smiles, or shakes hands. And, it’s not by block, neighborhood, or even city, but whole countries and continents that are unified on this principle. The perfect way to greet someone gets very little resistance. And, it confuses me because as much as we fight, disagree, rape, and kill each other, there are at least a billion people who will very happily hug someone in greeting that they don’t know, another billion who will kiss someone on the cheek in greeting that they have never seen before, and another billion people who will shake hands with someone who could have been doing anything with their hands just a minute before.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a germaphobe and I think all of us living today—plants, humans, other animals, and all other existing life forms—somehow made it for millions of years without hand sanitizer because we didn’t need it… or because we didn’t have hands. But, I’m just saying, a lot of stuff that humans do is inconsistent. Birds and ants are more consistent. Maybe when humans have been on earth as long as birds and ants have, we will be as predictable.

How did all the different greetings evolve? Well, it’s said that the handshake originally used to be proof that you weren’t carrying a gun. But, guns first came on the scene about 1,000 years ago in China and I don’t see Chinese people shaking hands to greet. So, yeh, that handshake point is actually cultural… or circumstantial. Everyone kisses and hugs although they may do it at different times. I can’t quite allow myself to put kisses and hugs in the cultural category yet. It’s just what people do unless you wanna’ compare people to something else—then it would be cultural.

By the time guns got to Europe around the 13th century, did it become so dangerous there that millions of people had to agree on a way to know whether or not someone was getting ready to shake them down or send them to their maker? And, if that was the case, why don’t handshakers just put both hands up in the air whenever they meet someone? Maybe they were doing that and then someone, like myself, said, “hey, woah, this is getting a little ridiculous and it’s too late to start kissing now like those other billion people over there so let’s just go for a one-hander.”

And, how do Germans greet, by the way? This is really another pending question for me. I’ve never seen a German kiss or shake hands with another German. And, me not knowing this, is also cultural. It’s not that I’m dumb. It might be that I’m dumb. Just call it ‘things that I culturally wouldn’t have an inclination to know… because I’m American… or because I’m from New Jersey.’ I can get as many as 4 kisses in France, 4 in Gabon, 3 in Switzerland, 3 in the Netherlands, 3 in Cote d’Ivoire, 2 in Spain, and 1 in Colombia. It’s so odd to kiss on greeting, for me as an American, that I kind of think it reflects some profound difference in brain chemistry. I’m just not as happy as a French person, I guess…

In any event, unity in greeting is a consistent force that is bigger than Facebook. Maybe it didn’t spread as quickly as Facebook and maybe there are a few variations, but this unity encompasses whole regions and almost whole continents that have been unified in this way for over 1,000 years. It’s our proof of the human connection. And, it’s cultural. Don’t try to understand it, Raven. Just accept it. It’s called world culture and we need more of it. There are only so many ways you can greet someone and I don’t think that’s for lack of imagination but because people, for the most part, think alike even though—with all our crazy hairstyles, crazy music, crazy food, crazy rituals, crazy religions, and crazy clothes—we seem so different.

Not that many ways to go to the bathroom, either—toilet, latrine, grounded Japanese toilets, bidets—there are even less ways to poop than greet a person. But, that’s a sad world cultural fact. There really should be more toilets that accommodate accidents. Just ask my sister. And, toilets came way before the handshake so you’d think there’d be more diversity in that, too, but no. That’s one thing we as humans have agreed upon the most. And, the kiss on the cheek came way before the toilet. I mean it had to. Like, when the husband (or wife since women are usually the ones that keep it clean), went to go work on that first toilet invention several thousands of years ago and the wife sent him off with a kiss saying, “Don’t let that toilet nonsense make you late for dinner, honey. We can just go in the woods like everyone else.” Kisses and toilets, I’m glad we all agree on those things at least.

Whatever the order, it obviously takes us a really long time to universalize things that make sense. Maybe healthcare will be next—“Getchyo’ hand out my pocket! I don’t know you!… But, gimme’ a kiss.”

 

 

 

How I write

How I write is hardly a way that people should emulate but I’ll give it to you as something is always better than nothing. For me, it has always been about scraps of paper. There’s something about being given a large 8×5 or a fully blank computer screen that says absolutely nothing to me. But, a piece of scrap paper? Yes. When I look at it, I know my words are always going to spill over and that I’ll need another scrap of paper to complete that great thought that gets greater and greater with every word I add. And then, those scraps of paper will start to pile up so high that I get annoyed and run to an 8×5 to rid myself of the clutter. Those 8×5′s build up and scream “Create an outline! Organize your shit!” after a few pages. Then, I do. And, after I do, I see a book just waiting with every sub-line of a chapter in the outline to be fleshed out.

I mean really, you’ve got to start small. How else is a good idea going to become a great one? Do you think books just fall out of the sky? Do you think that writing is art? Yeh, sure, it’s art once it’s done and everything has been all cleaned up, accounted for, and filtered, or added. But, in its raw state, nothing is beauty. Nothing is art except the vision we have and work so hard to finally reach. You’ve got to work for it. So, in all honesty, I see no real way to write and you should know this. You just write. Just like you just cook and whatever spills wastingly, you clean it up and find a replacement. Whatever tastes off, you throw it out, and start over again, or like a canvas, paint over it until that bad taste in your soup disappears. Let’s face it. No matter how you approach writing, you’ll have to do work. You’ll have to work over it and over it and common sense will always guide you in the right direction as long as you listen.

Please

These termites conjur up images of native peoples on TV in different parts of the world, sitting down to munch hardy on insects. When Céline serves me up a plate of termites, however, I suddenly have a feeling for what is really going on. Those people you see on TV don’t wanna’ eat that. Man, if you have got to climb up a tree to pick termites out of their hole one by one, cook them up, sauté them with some onions and peppers, season them with a little bit of Cube Maggi and salt for extra flavor, and eat the poop in the middle that tastes like wood (of course), you ain’t enjoyin’ that. You hungry! And you’re eating whatever you can get your hands on when the real meat is harder to hunt. When you go from Futu Banane with savory peanut sauce or delicious okra sauce, you know that you’re struggling when all you can find are termites with onions for dinner! Please. Every Ivoirien that I have met so far takes pride in being able to put together a meal that takes forever to prepare. Termites only take a few minutes. Please.

Pray and . . .

Don’t just pray. Think, feel, pray, and DO.

Hot

Jean-Michel Basquiat

makes me

makes me

makes me

hot

with passion

and fears

no stones

disappear

they’re there

waiting for you to fight

Crazy Lady’s Baby

She drags herself around with a confused mane of knotted clumps upon clumps of curls on her head with white hair in splotches. Her eyes are blood-shot red. Her clothes hang from her body on the last strings that hold them together. Her breasts sometimes swing into view from behind these meager clothes that manage to stay on her body. She slides her feet forward, a boulder on her back. Sometimes she stops and speaks to no one in particular, a distant look in her eyes.

Homeless – a virtual impossibility here. Where does she sleep at night? Who takes her in? Who talks to her? In her condition, no one I presume. Sometimes I see her with scraps of food. Do people give her things? She is very much a stranded individual yet somehow, through all her vivid haze, beyond all the piercing alienation, she finds herself pregnant.

Has she made love to the invisible person we always see her mumbling to and sometimes arguing with? Whoever has done this to her has taken advantage. It is safe to conclude that she has been raped and in spite of her condition, in spite of her mental state, in spite of not having food on a regular basis, in spite of being susceptible to sudden and seemingly unprovoked fits of anger, crazy lady is a full house.

She is ready and able to deliver and has not been to the hospital for any vaccinations or quarterly check-ups. What does she think to herself? Does she know that she is pregnant? Does she feel the kicks in her stomach? What has made her go crazy or is she crazy at all if she can carry to term? Has she thought of a name? Does she wonder if it is a boy or a girl? She is a much older woman. Fifty-years-old at least but she is still muscular so she knows work.

Crazy has a source. I don’t assume to know homeless people. Maybe he is always raping her. Maybe they. Yeh…maybe they made her crazy.

God is.

I don’t hate religion but

religious people scare me.

is it natural

grabbing at

God so much?

religion –

is what I breathe every day.

every day is

what God is. . . . .

everything is.

God is.

I don’t displace him

merely by my thoughts.

I don’t discover him

merely by my words.

I don’t feel him

merely by my touch.

religious people scare me

grabbing at God so much.

Sweet

Sweet, buttery sounds penetrated her ears as she stretched and pulled in preparation for her morning journey. Miles was her man this morning. He tickled and teased her with notes as colorful as the sunbeams transformed into rainbows as they burst through her wall of windows. Her legs were stradled on the carpet which soaked up the rainbow beams. She allowed her hands to slide down her leg from her thigh to her ankle; loosening the sinews in her quadriceps and arching her back to create the love embrace that her leg received from her breasts. She repeated this same embrace as she switched to her left leg. Then, she streamlined down the middle with her hands facing each other and both legs now making 30 degree angles with the rest of her body.

When she stepped out and into the morning dew that bathed her bare feet, she was met by a warm breeze that coated her hairless scalp with its thickness. She learned to live without it after having to pick up clumps of hair that clogged the drain in the bottom of the bathtub after every shower and after mornings of finding hair on the other side of her pillow.

She disguised her fears by proclaiming, “Maybe I should have my own talk show. I look better than Montel Williams.”

This morning she planned to run away – at least for the next hour. An hour of thousands of kisses between her feet and the pavement would be her escape. Once she travelled down Strawberry Street she took a smooth left and eased onto Mulberry Avenue. From there, her feet did the thinking and she let her strong limbs steal her away down the road strewn with October’s leaves that covered every color that exists on every face in the human race.

The trouble began on her nose then, spread out on her forehead and slid from her temples down her cheeks to end up dangling from her chin. She tasted the warm, sour salt on her lips and what escaped into her eyes, stinged. But although she was oozing of sweat, it was a good salty taste and the sting that made her eyelids flutter to protect her eyes from the sea potient was a good type of sting.

The oceans of sweat that bathed her in between her legs, that slid down the middle of her back, and that clung underneath her breasts mollified her.

Learn How to Smile

If I was from Africa

I would smile

If I was from Africa

I would be rich

If I was from Africa

I would do everything

If I was from Africa

I would dance

Africa is the richest continent in the world

We are all from there

Learn how to smile