The State of My Economy: RSVP

"Brotha, can you spare a line?"

I've never treated this space as a blog; in fact, it was deliberately poised somewhere in the in-between, somehow to suggest that there was a middle ground, a somewhere-something else that could be figured in hyperlink and badly sketched ink-snark. Non-linear, hypertext creative non-fiction. Essays, my peeps. Plain and simple. Look it up, um I mean "Google it," or um, well, just, yeah, here. Essays! Why not? They get around.

Essays and doodle snarks! (WTF?)

The ink was bad, but man, was it ever fun. Drawing on Dunkin' boxes or Gym Membership Paraphernalia and the standard Customer Service Survey, I felt free to fuck with the clutter-fuck of our familiar.

Almost a year since my last, and we need no lesson in Russian Formalism to reckon our rude defamiliarization. (I'm teaching undergraduate Lit Theory this semester, so alas, you're going to get one too many of these kinds of references, Dear Reader; apparently, I still firmly believe that we can resolve our economic crises with some revolutionary theater. . . well. . .)

These pieces spoke of memory palace malls and lonely grocery ghosts--hunger narratives, really. They are all, and always, hunger narratives. And perhaps it's because this is what I see. I can only call it likes I sees it, you know? And I've been itching, itching to return.

"Return Policy: Exchange Place"

Hello!

I would like to exchange this for this.

What? This?

Yes. This.

But, um, it's the same thing. I can't do that.

No, no. You see? It's like this.

. . .

It's like this, folks. I find myself talking that back-talk of the state of things, the kind of talk that finds itself amazed at our current state of synecdoche; the kind of talk that gets tounge-tied at the way we seem "shovel-ready" to build ourselves audience to the Mega Church of Howie Mandelism, the kind of talk that wonders at the small and quiet ways I witness and experience the loud, loud internal-rhyme kinda suffering of folks around me whose credit cards are declined at the check out line. I guess what I saw today was no different than what I ignored yesterday, but it was enough to get me here.

And I want to make a return, please.

While this space has always been a question, a matter of form, I will take my number from those and other folks who can certainly tag themselves into the hyper-literary canon; I seek my bearings, wander about, and will blog on.

In May 2008, when I posted last, I wondered if we could re-figure the color line, especially when it is built into the very point of purchase display we call life. But there are so many lines. So many spaces to read in this in-between.

Check out, dotted, raced and erased, I can't help but wander-wonder and consider the line.

And like any good blues, which is any good life, I want to keep troubling the line.

Return.

And wander back again.

Hello.