i am davidbrothers dotcom

Do More: ‘nuff said
Stack Paper: Having money’s not everything, but not having it is
Tell More Lies: I want to write more fiction. The only thing stopping me is me. If I sit down and do it, I’ll do it. Eventually, I’ll be happy with it. It’s that easy.
Don’t Waste My Gift: I’m good at one thing and straight at several others. I’m blessed enough to have a day job that lets me make rent and still have enough free time and energy to write. I’d be a fool to waste my time propping up an industry I’ve come to loathe. Any time spent writing about something I don’t have anything to say about is time wasted. Write more about what I like, and not just some dumb old comics.
Go Out: I had a lot of excuses over the past couple years to not go outside and hang with people. Depression, anger, fear, whatever. Time to man up.
Meet New People: “My presence is a present.”

I spent some time at a client’s office for a rush job, and had to catch a taxi partway back to the city. I got into the cab and the driver said, “Where’re we going today?”

“Uh, Millibrae Station.”

“Where are you from?” he asked in the same accent all the Africans in the movies have. I told him Georgia, but that I live in San Francisco. He laughed and said, “I thought you might be African, brother! We’re all black, especially when it comes to the police. He’ll look at you and knock you down and call you nigger whether you’re from Africa or America!” He had a habit of laughing while he talked, making words a little longer, but a lot more interesting, than they would normally be.

I laughed and agreed, so we built on what I guess is that neo-Pan-African tip for a while. We talked about Oscar Grant and traded police brutality stories. In 1974, when he was still new to the States, he was working at a restaurant. He left his gig at 3 in the afternoon, and before he could get to his car, two cops had run up and thrown him onto the hood of a car. They thought he was someone who had been running around stealing purses from ladies. He insisted he wasn’t, that he’d been at work when the crime happened, but it took his manager noticing the scuffle and coming outside with his schedule to convince the two cops that he’d done nothing wrong. He called them bastards at one point, enunciated thicker than everything else.

He said he’d given his son some advice about the police once he got old enough. I said “Be respectful” at the same time he said “Be nice to the police.” We laughed. We talked about how black kids, black boys at least, aren’t taught that the police are protectors. We’re taught to fear them. The police are invaders, monsters with canine-filled jaws and a thirst for black blood. We’re taught to be as polite as possible, to make no sudden moves, to smile, to not smile too big, and to be submissive. When I got my learner’s permit, I got a very serious talk about how if I ever got pulled over, I needed to drive to either a location with a lot of people, no matter how embarrassing it was, or to a brightly lit lot. He’d told his son the same thing. He said heard Jessie Jackson say that years ago.

We talked about politics, and how Republicans are disrespecting Obama out of proportion to the usual political attacks. We talked about how politicians lie, and how welfare queens got Ronald Reagan elected. We talked about how people do and believe stupid things when they’re broke and depressed. “They’ll vote for the Devil,” he said, “if the Devil promises salvation.” He said that twice over the course of the conversation, but it’s true. It needed the emphasis.

Herman Cain came up. We agreed that he was a dog with Republican masters, a tool they could use to say the most outlandish garbage about Obama and get away with it. “We’re not racist! He’s black!” Cain didn’t last long, though, and it was his weakness for women that brought him down. The cabbie mentioned that power is an aroma, an aphrodisiac, but those Cain was a fool about it. I laughed and said “Monica Lewinsky.” He laughed, too.

Toward the end of the ride, he looked back at me and said, “I’ll tell you, among all the men, the black man is blessed.” I asked him how so. “The black man has a bouquet of women.”

I rolled that over in my head for a moment. We have… a lot of options? We can get any woman? Was this a philanderer thing? I asked him, “What do you mean?”

“The black man has a bouquet of women because we have all of the colors. You can see a black woman that’s so light she looks white, and you won’t see the Negroid features until you look real close. There’s dark, dark women from Africa. They’re all black.” I laughed, and realized I agreed. We got to Millibrae and I paid and caught a train back to the office.

Later, thinking about it, part of me wanted to stamp on that thought, the bouquet of women, and kill it. I wanted to kill it like I did the idea that black people were kings and queens in Africa, but slaves in America. I wanted to wipe it out, to point out that all races have a spectrum of tones. I wanted to correct it. But then a bigger part of me realized that I really did agree with him, and that the bouquet was a beautiful thing. It’s a knowledge bomb, in a way, or a jewel.

I thought about all the different girls whose skin tones took my breath away. Method Man saying “I got a love jones for your body and your skin tone.” Kanye West talking about going to the club with “some light-skinned girls and some Kelly Rowlands.” Black girls being lightened in magazines because white is closer to right. Foxy Brown. Trina. This actress I recently discovered, Adepero Oduye. “Coke on her black skin made it stripe like a zebra.” Aaliyah. Sadé. I thought about “Brown Skin Lady” and “Yo Yeah,” both of which are from that first Black Star album:

“Black is.
Black is something to laugh about.
Black is something to cry about.
Black is serious.
Black is a feeling.
Black is us.
The beautiful people.”

I thought about all the beautiful brown-skinned women I’ve known and seen and decided that, in a very real way, I agree that the black man is blessed with a bouquet of women. The kings & queens thing is a fiction, but a useful one. It gives men, women, and children a sense of intrinsic value in a land where they’re probably starting so far behind the eight ball that they can’t even see it. A bouquet of women, each of them a unique flower, is less untrue than that. It’s a concept that works for me. I’m glad he said it.

(Part of me hates that I can’t accept this in and of itself, but a different part of me appreciates all the thought it has sparked.)

I don’t usually dream. Either that or I forget them shortly after waking up, but the end result is the same. Last night I had a strange one. It’s remained pretty vivid over the course of the day, too.

I just got done doing something. I don’t know what, exactly, but it feels like something that happens onstage with a microphone. Not singing, but maybe public speaking. Something stressful, but fulfilling. I’ve pulled off my shirt, leaving me in just a white tanktop and blue jeans.

I walk into my dressing room, or some type of nice-ish room, and there’s a girl sitting on the couch. She’s latina, with pretty brown skin and black hair. She’s got her legs pulled up on the couch, knees close together. She’s looking at me from behind her knees, her bangs sitting low on her forehead, but I can tell that she’s smiling like she’s proud of me.

I lean over her knees and kiss her. It’s a short kiss, just on the lips, but it kinda lingers, too. We stop and I look at her. I touch her knees. She shrugs, still smiling. I cock my head, my eyes narrow, and I look at her smile. I smile a half smile, a resigned smile, turn, and walk out, just in time to wake up to my alarm (I think it was “Island Radio” by Hard Nips).

It felt weirdly final, like a door closing.

November: terrible weather, a lonely birthday because I’m an idiot, return of my old friend Depression, realizing I hate a large part of a thing that I thought I loved, late paychecks, money issues, my ruined bathroom, fights with idiots, discovering a stunning and incomprehensible lack of confidence in the only thing I’ve ever been good at, travel plans going up in smoke at the last minute, and a generally unpleasant time.

And then, between 1700 and 1830, November took three more shots at me.

Good riddance.

I was in Powell Station waiting on a BART train to the East Bay. Sitting on one of the round ceramic benches, earphones on, Kindle out, working my way through Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. The bench was mostly empty when I sat down, since I’d just missed my train, but there were a few people sitting near me and a more milling around. I could hear a loud talker through my headphones, but wrote it off as typical San Francisco. It wasn’t that late, maybe 1715, but it’s easy to find loud drunk people. I kept reading.

A girl sat down near me, close enough to make me notice. The lady on my left was sitting a ways away, comfortably distant, but the girl on my right was within inches. There was no more room on the bench, I guess. I looked up from my book and saw the girl share a look with her friend, another girl. One of those looks that’s full of information. You know the type. “This is awkward.” “This is weird.” “This is a little scary.” “This is really awkward.” I saw the look and pulled my earphones out. I slid over, and offered the other girl a seat. With my headphones out, I could hear the loud talker even clearer. He was on my left, just past the lady, standing close to and talking loudly at an older white lady.

“Happy Thanksgiving!”

The old lady smiled and said, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You’re older, you’re my grandma’s age!”

Silence.

“I like you! You’re pretty!”

“What’s your name?”

“I like the cute ones, you’re real cute. What’s your name?”

“I’m gonna think you’re racist if you don’t answer me!”

And on and on and on.

And I watched him, waiting to see if he’d do the usual drunk douchebag thing and wander away, but he kept it up. I put away my Kindle, zipped up my bag, and said something to him. I don’t remember what, exactly, probably some variation of “Hey man, leave her alone. She’s not interested.” Dude jumped like he got scalded.

“Yo, blood, I wasn’t—I wasn’t even talking to you! Don’t butt in!” He turned back to her.

Leave her alone. Back down.

He turned to me instead, talking over the lady to my left. “Hey, hey, you got a big mouth! Nobody was even talking to you.”

I don’t care.

“You need to mind your own business, man.”

Yeah, sure. So do you.

He got madder. “You… I’m just trying to charge my phone and you’re over here bothering me.” He kept on for a bit. “You… you got a mohawk, man! And you’re talking to me!”

It’s true, I do have a mohawk.

“You need to cut it!”

He wandered off, briefly, and the girl I offered a seat to whispered “That was sweet” in my ear. He wandered back, but he kept his distance this time. He was slinging weak arrows from safety.

“You can’t have that mohawk! That’s not for us! If I had a mohawk, these people… I couldn’t go outside!” I got what he was saying—mohawks aren’t for colored folks—but I didn’t care. “You need to—you forgot to cut the rest of your hair!” He kept on trying to explain why I was doing wrong. “You need a fade! You need to get some dreads!”

I told him that my hair’s too short for dreads and the lady to my left laughed under her breath. He ambled away again, fuming, and then ambled back.

“You should kill yourself. You need to jump down on those train tracks and kill yourself and your mohawk. But it’s okay, I’ll stop the train before you die. You should commit suicide and kill yourself!”

He moved to walk away. I said, “That guy must really hate mohawks.” The lady on my left laughed. The girls to my right did, too. He didn’t come back around. Eventually, maybe ten minutes later, my train showed up.

2011: making money

2012: Going to Canada for a vacation, becoming a mediocre photographer, building my own bike, learning how to dance (optional, but probably shouldn’t be)

Money over everything only lasts so long, I guess.

“and you’re number one through ninety-eight”

I’ve been wrestling with this since biking home after a particularly long day, after a long month, after a long year. It seemed like a good idea on the ride home, and then I came home and took a nap and woke up and it still seemed like something I was led to do. And as much as I hate the very idea of complaining about my life online, I don’t think I’m very happy, and maybe crystalizing the myriad reasons why will be helpful or healthy somehow.

Or not.

I dunno. You should probably skip this. Sorry. There probably aren’t 100 things, I just liked that line from Copywrite’s “7 Light Years.” It’s just a maelstrom of guilt and self-loathing, probably. Writer, write thyself, right?

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