: lower black pain.

Hyperthemesia sounds exhausting. It’s exhausting to say, quite honestly. It is the rare ability to accurately remember nearly every day of one’s life in absolute detail - what you wore, ate, saw, said, and did. Every day. Of course there are days that I remember…well, pieces of days. Mostly glimpses: brief sequences - photographs, edits. My memories are clearer and more distinct when associated wi...

We live in a Brooklyn apartment; no basement or attic, so we have to rent a storage unit in one of those huge warehouses that used to be a factory for something. What’s stored there is a point of mild contention - things we thought we might need someday before we actually got to Someday, memorabilia of moments we’ve already forgotten, and tons of books, cds, tapes and tools that have since been re...

Commencement speeches are engineered to inspire those beginning a new phase of life. They are meant to be epic, a benediction offering direction, courage and motivation, an address to the fresh battalion, a manifesto unique to a specific group of people and moment in time. I’ve been watching a lot of them online recently: movie stars, scientists and comedians dressed in colorful and entirely unear...

They were free but did not know But they were always free until somebody kidnapped them transported them by sea and took their language, names and history and held them in captivity until December 1865 when that was legally abolished and prohibited across the USA good news for all law of the land peace in our time all bonds released new national reality no human would be property but they did not...

Allow me to begin by firmly stating that every day is a “loving day” at our house, a so-pleasant stream of consideration, kind words, pleases and thank yous, and (very often) unsolicited cups of tea. Which is all very nice, but during this exact time of year such Loving shines a bit brighter, as we collectively remember that the legal right for our family to exist in the United States is one and a...

I don’t know if you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis, but your disbelief can calmly hover regarding the existence of time machines because I have one - and this week, I’ve used it to bring my very first guest to this column: Judge Cordell D. Meeks...

I realized this week that there is a story I have skipped, a fixed point in my timeline that was seminal to my understanding (such as it is) of the world. Given the “generational grimoire” intent of this column, I will tell it now. Perhaps the telling will reveal the reasons I took so long to tell it. Let’s see. Velcro. I loved it in high school. An engineering miracle. Velcro was a piece of The F...

Each night at our home, in those twilight moments betwixt dinnertime and bedtime, I wash the dishes. It’s the end of the day, days long and deep and somewhat stressful, but a wholesome meal and bright conversation at the dinner table have soothed me, and all I have to do is make a clean bridge from that delicate balance to well earned slumber… …so I wash the dishes. But every so often, there at th...

I used to have to read the book before I saw the movie. My prime example is Jack M. Bickham’s “The Apple Dumpling Gang”, a 1975 summer family film that I earned a ticket to upon completion of the paperback. Disney changed a great deal from the original novel (its first line is, “ The fact that John Wintle was drunk didn’t matter .”) and I had to discuss, compare, and contrast the two versions of t...

This time of year is CRAZY busy, with May Day and Mother’s Day and Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo and our anniversary and Eurovision and Beltane and Free Comic Book Day… the days are just packed. Mixed into this is the birthday of this column, which is technically the second Thursday in May, which means that this is the week we mark the completion of four years of :lowerblackpain , together. Some...

Dorothy Parker is my favorite writer. She was born in 1893; by the 1920’s she was one of the most famous writers in America, with an unmatched rapier wit and seemingly endless supply of clever verses. Much of her work was famously collected in “The Portable Dorothy Parker” a rather thick volume covering the majority of her fiction and reviews. I’ve had five copies (I gave two away as gifts). She m...

The CORIOLIS EFFECT is a scientific principle describing how one object on Earth can be accurately propelled to meet another object on Earth while both objects, the air around them, and the Earth itself spins at 1000 miles an hour. The coriolis effect also explains why, even though the Earth is in constant motion beneath us, we can’t just hover in helicopters to travel long distances or jump in th...

Coming from a family of diabetics, I never really ate a lot of sugar, but sometimes my mother would buy Thompson seedless grapes and put them in the fruit bin in the refrigerator. Since they were a little bit expensive, we would very carefully ration them. But grapes have a bit of a half-life (though not quite as severe as avocados, which seemingly are able to morph from solid to liquid as fast as...

Fisher Price makes toys for small children. An American institution since 1930, the company is most famous for their line of “Little People”: colorful, nearly indestructible 2 inch tall figures depicting different occupations. Long before hoards of mega-achieving Barbie™s dominated toy store shelves, these Little People represented “real jobs”, and as a child, these career options seemed very feas...

So I went through my closet and drawers for spring cleaning, but there isn’t all that much there that I don’t wear… save one specific category I realize I may have legitimately grown beyond. I had three years of wearing slacks and now I’m kind of done I bought them all online, on sale They weren’t all that much fun. Up ’til then, trousers were a breeze my grown-up job required easy-fitting newish...

It’s Spring Cleaning time, which must be like Black Friday for the famed home organizer Marie Kondo . Her books fly off the shelves at this time of year as hoards of us peek out of the dusty doorways of our winter shelters, squint at the newly blue skies, and resolve to simplify our closets, basements and garages. Her “Konmari” organization method, where one throws out any object that does not “sp...

For the last two hundred weeks , I’ve written an original American humor column in what seems some of the grimmest times in the history of this great nation. It was to be a salve, a balm, an analgesic to relieve the legacy pressure of undeniable, inescapable, and unavoidable identity. It was to stand as proof to the next generation of those considered exceptional yet disposable that history, thoug...

J ohnny Carson, Weird Al Yankovic, and Ryan Reynolds were all born on the same day of the year as me. My daughter thinks the Ryan Reynolds part is cool, as she believes this might indicate a mysterious source of Deep Rizz that I may be astrologically heir to, and perhaps could still emulate…someday. But the big news for me this year is the return of my lunar zodiac sign, the Fire Horse. It only ha...

I’ve never completed a marathon, but I imagine it’s running without the luxury of choice - one can’t pause for a quick cappuccino or afternoon film matinee. Exhausted and bedraggled, one is driven to complete the activity due to the pressures of publicly expressed determination, earnest self-promise and significant financial investment. Plus the fact that new technologies allow friends at home to...

Popular media in the 70’s and early 80’s did not uniformly reflect a kaleidoscope of cultures - the most prominent and consistent staple being a popular family comedian who shall no longer be named. The watershed moment came in 1977, when ABC aired the mini-series “ROOTS”, based on the personal genealogy research of author Alex Haley. Everybody watched that. I felt kind of exposed the day after ea...

I don’t think he ran the race to win, I think he ran to try to show 2 million kids like me that we should never shy away from being in the human race, and that our faces weren’t forbidden or a burden or exceptions as we all could be exceptional. I think he ran to hold a door that he would not walk through but had opened first by Douglass, passed to Phillips, Chisholm, Fauntroy, then to one midwest...

Back before we had a kid, I didn’t take a vacation for a little over seven years. Sure, there were times that work was supposed to be closed, like Christmas and New Year’s Day and weekends and nights, but I ended up on some phone call or finishing a project or had to show up in the office anyway. My wife found the entire situation distasteful, though she did appreciate my somewhat maniacal dedicat...

The genesis of this column was a desire to alleviate my daughter’s legitimate angst regarding her annual recognition of Black History Month, which she found heavy with legacy. Yes , I said. You’re absolutely right , I told her. It’s not a pretty story, and we don’t just tell it every year, it’s written in our eyes and our hands and our skin. But that is not our only story. We have marvels and mira...

Getting older is fun, but feeling older is not my absolute favorite. Quite often there are aches, and sometimes pains. My grandmother used to call them “miserys” (miseries?) and was proud to tell us when she wasn’t experiencing them. I’m not quite that dramatic (ok. well.) and I do understand that my specific physical experience, while admittedly disconcerting and exhausting, is mild in comparison...

I enjoy making hot chocolate. Ironically, I can’t drink it, as I’ve developed a myriad of late onset allergies, but it’s incredibly satisfying to whip up in the winter for the family, and always brings at least three levels of happiness. * First the audible “ Oh! ”- eyebrows raised in happy surprise, * then the reach with both hands to take the warm mug, * then the closed-eyes smile as marshmallow...