It's Always Kind Of Hard (To Always Be Losing Nothing)

I’ve got a friend who, in 2014, still won’t cross the United States by car.

He ain’t scared.

It’s just a precaution.

And there ain’t shit you can say to change his mind.

His skepticism of white America’s “goodness” is true.

He don’t need to hear no history.

Conservatives think they invented this message with Bill Cosby

He got a history.

He got a family.

He know what white people "think" is important.

Some of my friends insist on reminding me - since I’d been so thoroughly “integrated” into the white world that I’d been to Yerp - I’m also lucky to be alive.

It was as though I was venturing a little too far, out there, where a phone call is even less of a help.

Together, we’re corks in a violent ocean, bobbing in agreement with history.

Out there, we could be used for target practice.

Be a suspect of whatever.

Traumatized.

Whatever white supremacy rules.

Together, we teach each other what’s out there - how it go - like John Travolta schooling Samuel L. Jackson about Paris’ “Royale with Cheese” in Pulp Fiction.

Or we explain how to get something, or how a word is spelled.

We buoy one another when, inevitably, rocked by government bureaucracy, or it’s results.

Everybody wants to know if “You doin’ alright?”

Children are a common topic.

Weed pushes away despair.

Agreements are made.

An offer extended.

We go on.

I heard a friend died from exposure today.

It was also said he was fortunate it happened that way.

A few days ago, another friend from another state called, to ask what his employer was doing to him: a racist practice we traced back, to the end of the Civil War, not that very long ago,...