: lower black pain.

1958. A Nebraska editor creates a series of study guides for Shakespeare plays that sell over 58,000 copies in six months. The editor’s name? Clifton Hillegass. By 1964, his company was selling over one million books from the “Cliff’s Notes” series annually, summarizing everything from Greek myth to classic literature. It took much less time to finish one of these pamphlets than to read the actual...

I’ve always had a problem with Darth Vader™ sheets, a specific concern that does not include the tapestries, house slippers or “comfy throw blankets” depicting the character, as it is not the simple combination of legendary cinema maniac with home textiles that disturbs me. It’s the children’s bedsheets depicting Darth Vader in a classic menacing stance, or sometimes as many as four or five action...

Birds are easy to draw when they’re flying - pointy oval with a triangle coming off of each side. A basic airplane shape, admittedly, closely mimics that of a flying bird, at least for the models and styles most often seen above our cities. But PEOPLE, even with their hands on their hips , do NOT look like pointy ovals with two triangles coming out of them… even from far away. This is why the whol...

Last week it was stiflingly hot; a result of which was the unprecedented difficulty I had writing my column. The little room where all my creative-y stuff is sequestered doesn’t get the air conditioning from the living room, so the temperature was about 94 degrees. My computer kept shutting itself off because it is more intelligent than I am. As it turned out, full sentences that I was absolutely...

About 100 degrees. For three days. Humidity: 70 percent. Such heat can add weary to worry, extreme to exhausted, and vaseline edges to focus. Even in air conditioning, the sun penetrates brick, mortar, steel, skin, and bone. Yet and still, I saw people jogging . In the park. Without a lion behind them, or an open full Brink’s truck rolling ahead of them. These are not “my people”; they do not exhi...

We have a storage unit, a 6 foot by 10 foot room in a gigantic warehouse building down by the docks: most likely used to be a processing factory for something that came in off a ship a couple of blocks away. It is a de facto “extra room” of our apartment, one of three we desperately need in order to not vividly project the lifestyle of “artistic madpeople”. Or at least make it a little less obviou...

I’m allergic to milk. While others stood in line at Baskin Robbins for ice cream cones, I sat on our front porch eating ice milk bars . Yes, it has the word “milk” in it, we saw the irony, but our before-the-internet and no-one-in-our-family-was-a-doctor logic assumed that CREAM was a more harmful word, since as everyone knows cream has more milk in it than milk does. Non-surprisingly, ice milk ba...

I started a little garden at work, in the window. Our office is on the ninth floor of one of those old-time office buildings that looks like an old-time office building - all brick and stone and evenly spaced windows with bold lentils. It’s a building that is easily drawn with a pencil, perfect for Superman to fly by or Spider-Man to swing from as he’s rushing uptown. The building is about 100 yea...

I left work yesterday whistling a sea shanty. I do not know many; I understand they are a quite popular genre in some circles. One of my first “favorite songs”was “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?” which for some reason we sang in Montessori - an odd choice given our landlocked position in Kansas City and lack of experience with alcohol. I don’t know that I can categorize the song I sang...

I have been called a maximalist, by both absolute strangers as well as people with whom I share the same silverware drawer. I’m forever “cleaning up”, “straightening”, and “organizing”. The trick is to just put things “back where they belong”. Most things have “a place to go”… books, for instance live on the bookshelf, vertically. Except for the few that are too large for the case, which have to g...

There I was, after work, standing at the front door looking out at the pouring rain, feeling all misty-eyed and wistful. So as the soundtrack for my two-and-a-half block walk to the subway, I played a song called “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters. [Note to youth: The Carpenters were an incredibly popular brother and sister band in the 1970s, like Billie Eilish and Finneas.] The song is in...

“…hey. pal. how do i get to town from here?” “…well, just take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall , go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway , take a left at what's going to be the new sports center , and keep going until you hit the place where they're thinking of building that drive-in bank . You can't miss it. ” * Laurie Anderson [Big Science] If I was...

The penultimate column of the third year of lowerblackpain. I never saw it comin’. But here we are, together. Thank you for your time. There is a popular internet trend where two photos are displayed next to each other, the first labeled “how it started” and the second “how it’s going”. The juxtaposition implies that between the first image and the second a great deal has occurred: First image: a...

Dear Grandpa, I haven’t been up to much: went to a new dentist this week because our old one stopped taking our insurance. The hygienist took 45 minutes to survey my mouth, racking up a list of potential things they could charge for: I felt like a car on the rack at a disreputable mechanics shop. You could almost hear the “ca-ching” sound of an old cash register every time she poked and prodded so...

April in the US has been officially designated National Poetry Month . April in the US has also been officially designated National Brunch Month, National Jazz Appreciation Month, and National Welding Month. Not wedding; WELDING.April is also Stress Awareness Month as well as National Cannabis Awareness Month, two Awarenesses which seem to entirely offset one other. It’s a lot of things, April - a...

Ok, the world is nuts . I never really write about how crazy the world is because I’m always writing to The Future. I don’t want to be too time-specific in order to be relatable to my great grandchildren , who will read aloud my quips and jibes in their blue reflective jumpsuits, marveling at the simplicity of the writing (“…perhaps Great-Grandpa took a sharp blow to the head as a child?”) and the...

In 1976, my family celebrated America’s bi-centennial with red, white and blue Jell-o™ parfaits that used Cool Whip™ for the white part. These fancy desserts represented the United States of America. I knew from the flag that the white represented the states, and because my mother was a teacher, that the red was courage and the blue was justice. The ad with this recipe had been printed in nearly e...

This was the first year I forgot to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. I knew what day it was, and I did have a clean green shirt in the closet, but I rocketed through the house getting ready in the morning and it just didn’t register. Hours later, I’m sitting in a meeting and realize what’s happened. There wasn’t even green on my socks… I had the blue ones with the little clouds on. I’m not Irish....

I was going to write a poem, but quickly learned that nothing rhymes with the word “ avoiding ”. The line I was trying to rhyme with was “…all the news that i’m avoiding” Often I begin writing poems in the middle, and then branch outwards, like a pre-school child distributing a glob of finger paint on a large sheet of construction paper. This line was my glob of paint, and would not properly sprea...

During this time of year, I always try to learn something new. This year I have once again approached my guitar, dedicating myself to learn one scale well enough to be able to play Frank Zappa inspired solos atop lydian chord progressions. It’s going well. I made an apple crumble from scratch yesterday morning before I left for the office. That worked out. I am still attempting a chin-up and pull-...

When I was 13 years old, I wanted everyone to call me “Han”. And to speak fluent Latin. Just admitting that up front as research material that’ll be helpful in a few minutes. Also, I knew I wanted to make music, but my favorite album was a toss up between the Star Wars Original Soundtrack and Barry Manilow: LIVE. And then… disco. Ok. The local Board of Education just wrote us an email asking our o...

Dark physics are occurring in our spice cabinet. My research has been extensive and the results undeniable; when opening the cabinet, none of the labels, on ANY of our spices, EVER point FORWARD. A simple need for marjoram immediately necessitates a complex fingertip ballet, where jar after jar is delicately turned around to view its label, which covers about half its surface, but never the half f...

Subways are concrete tunnels containing smaller concrete tunnels, with the only sound absorption provided by the organic objects which move through them (on two legs or four). Thus the full-throated voice of a child careens about the place, bouncing off everything, naturally amplified to a level matching the screech of a mythical banshee. Of course we all look around to make sure there isn’t some...

My mother would find “her shade” of stockings by holding a large plastic egg shaped container upside down to see the color swatch printed on the bottom of the paper sleeve it was in. They all looked brown to me, just various browns, like the multi-tone color cards in the paint section. She would hold the container next to the back of her other hand and kind of tilt her head to the left and narrow...

During the Pandemic I had the opportunity to work with a group of black artists to produce an event during February, which naturally became associated with Black History Month. But since the event’s content focused on science fiction, it was decided we would celebrate Black Future Month instead, telling stories that focused on what might be rather than what had been. This appealed to all the artis...