the ends of April

 

THE ENDS OF APRIL

(random thoughts on Friday)

 

Pandemic is a poor reason for becoming an alcoholic.  It is a fantastic excuse for being a wino.

 

According to the Corporate Internship Leadership Institute, college students are commodities. Ah, capitalism, I need x-ray eyeglasses to read you , to read how human beings are traded on Wall Street.

 

Pandemic makes me aware of confinement and duration.  When I was very young, time moved like molasses.  A week did not pass quickly.  It waddled along  like a Peabody Hotel duck.

 

When I taught college courses, Fridays were special.  They marked the beginning of weekend relief. Pandemic makes Fridays advents of anxiety.  Time and my body are rushing me to a terminal.  The journey to casket or coffin or an undistinguished hole in the ground would not be so bad if COVID-19 did not exist, if pandemic did not limit my options.  These days I wear a mask in an invisible cell.  I know what and why an inmate curses.

 

Pandemic terrorizes me (and a billion other people I suppose) with unending tragic news and a surplus of instant raw data.  I have given up on trying to make sense of what is happening around the globe. Esther Phillips and Curtis Mayfield sing my theme songs.  And Tina Turner, our finest example of pure poetry,  almost convinces me that many African American women know the secret of remaining young forever. She gives eyesight to the blind.

 

Does anyone I know read Vital Speeches of the Day?

 I spend time writing vital speeches of the night about absurdity.

 

This morning I discovered a new example of absurdity, namely an online site called Uncyclopedia, a comic parody of Wikipedia.  Uncyclopedia's entry on "scatology" begins  ----"Scatology is a newly-flourishing field of scientific study that has come into prominence only in the last twenty years. With the emergence of more foul-mouthed and smell-liking people in the last decade, however, it is a field that has exploded in popularity …especially with new college students."  This entry is a beautiful lie but an astute commentary on the American mindscape of 2021. Our nation has wildly embraced political scatology as it pollutes ethics and morality.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            4/30/2021 10:43:47 AM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Musings, February 8-9, 2021

    MUSINGS OF THE DAY   The mother- and father-ships of sanity have landed   Let our enemies of whatever color they be know this as we eradicate them with the tools of insanity.   Mr. Ramcat informed me this morning that I need to tie up loose ends and thank all the people who have made my life a rich and satisfying experience of 77+ years.   If you deserve my gratitude, you know who you are.   Four quotations to brighten the day------   "I don't regret my years as a prosecutor assigned to juvenile court.   In some ways, I think it is why I was put on this earth." ---Daphne R. Robinson   "While there are books and articles concentrating on young black men in the social sciences and education, thee has been comparatively little input from scholars in the arts and humanities/" Howard Rambsy II   "The hashtag 'black lives matter,' which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and int
Read more