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July 14 - July 17, 2024
I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation.
Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
Oh, the dancing and singing are great. Beautiful, in fact, but I’m afraid of all the Indians who aren’t dancers and singers. Those rhythmless, talentless, tuneless Indians are most likely going to get drunk and beat the shit out of any available losers.
Both of us were pushed into the world on November 5, 1992, at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane.
The Andruss brothers never did figure out who cut their eyebrows and hair. Rowdy started a rumor that it was a bunch of Makah Indians from the coast who did it. “You can’t trust them whale hunters,” Rowdy said. “They’ll do anything.”
Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.”
“Listen,” he said one afternoon in the library. “You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm. It’s like riding a raft down a river. You’re just paying attention to the currents. Do you understand that?”
“The second time you read a book, you read it for its history. For its knowledge of history. You think about the meaning of each word, and where that word came from. I mean, you read a novel that has the word ‘spam’ in it, and you know where that word comes from, right?”
“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”
He was an extremely weird dude. But he was the smartest person I’d ever known. He would always be the smartest person I’d ever known.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “What do Indians have to be so thankful for?” “We should give thanks that they didn’t kill all of us.”
There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.
Everybody in Reardan assumed we Spokanes made lots of money because we had a casino. But that casino, mismanaged and too far away from major highways, was a money-losing business. In order to make money from the casino, you had to work at the casino.
It would have been un-American not to love the best football player.
And Roger, being of kind heart and generous pocket, and a little bit racist, drove me home that night. And he drove me home plenty of other nights, too. If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
Rowdy could be so crazy-funny-disgusting. The Reardan kids were so worried about grades and sports and THEIR FUTURES that they sometimes acted like repressed middle-aged business dudes with cell phones stuck in their small intestines.
“Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”
“So, back in the day, weird people threatened the strength of the tribe. If you weren’t good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.” “But we’re not primitive like that anymore.” “Oh, yes, we are. Weird people still get banished.” “You mean weird people like me,” I said. “And me,” Gordy said. “All right, then,” I said. “So we have a tribe of two.”
“The quality of a man’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.”
I’ve learned that white people, especially fathers, are good at hiding in plain sight.
When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
In one of his plays, Medea says, “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?” I read that and thought, “Well, of course, man. We Indians have LOST EVERYTHING. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.”
“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. “By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
I know that death is never added to death; it multiplies.
“You’re going to play for Seattle, man.” “Yeah, right.”