‘i got high to flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. and if the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.’
‘i was living in new york on ninety-fourth between second and first, part of that unnamed shifting border between east harlem and the rest of manhattan. the apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer that didn’t work, so the visitors had to call from a pay phone at the gas station. none of this concerned me much, for i didn’t get many visitors. i enjoyed exchanging pleasantries with my puerto rican neighbors, and talking to the boys who hung out on the stoop about the knicks or the gunshots they’d heard the night before.’
‘it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude.’
‘i spent my first night in manhattan curled up in an alleyway. i found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me and fell asleep. in the morning i found a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet. across the street, a homeless man was washing himself at an open hydrant and didn’t object when i joined him.’
‘i chose my friends carefully. the politically active black students. the foreign students. the chicanos. the marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rockers. when we played our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. we weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. we were alienated.’
‘three o’clock in the morning. the moon-washed streets empty. the revelers tucked away by now, paired off or alone, in deep, beer-heavy sleep. and now just the two of us to wait for the sunrise, me and billie holiday, her voice warbling through the darkened room, reaching toward me like a lover. “the trick is not caring that it hurts.” i tried to remember where i’d heard the line, but it was lost to me now, like a forgotten face. no matter. billie knew the same trick; it was in that torn-up, trembling voice of hers.’
these were written by our president elect, barack obama, in ‘dreams from my father’, about his college years in l.a and manhattan.
you might know that i’m kind of fond of our president elect…
but can you believe that we have a president elect who writes well and writes poetically and writes honestly and who spent his first night in manhattan sleeping in an alley and bathing with a homeless guy in a firehydrant?
if you haven’t read ‘dreams from my father’, you should, it’s a remarkable book. particularly remarkable in that it was written by our president elect.
i was talking to some friends the other day and i was saying that it feels as if my smartest, best friend from college is president elect and that he’s going to be wearing a joy division t-shirt when he’s sworn in on january 20th.
moby