[b]Russell Banks
Since my adolescence I have read two and sometimes three newspapers a day, frequently clipping an article that for obscure and soon forgotten reasons attracts me. I usually toss the clippings into a desk drawer, and later, often years later, I’ll find myself reading through the clippings, throwing most of them out. It fills me with a strange sadness, a kind of grief for my lost self, as if I were reading and throwing out old diaries.[/b]
You get this or you don’t.
…I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality is death.
Hardly the opposite for many Christians.
It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.
He thought: Name one. But, sure, for others, point taken.
A tattoo does that, it makes you think about your body like it’s this special suit that you can put on or take off whenever you want and a new name if it’s cool enough does the same thing. To have both at once is power. It’s the kind of power as all those superheroes who have secret identities get from being able to change back and forth from one person into another. No matter who you think he is, man, the dude is always somebody else.
No super powers. No tattoos. Only one name. But often somebody else.
In some countries, I said to myself, the only life you can properly desire is that of destroyer.
Anyone here live in one?
Poor, deluded fools. Because their skin’s as white as the rich man’s, they believe that they might someday be rich themselves. But without the Negro, Owen, these men would be forced to see that, in fact, they have no more chance of becoming rich than do the very slaves they despise and trample on. They’d see how close they are to being slaves themselves. Thus, to protect and nurture their dream of becoming someday, somehow, rich, they don’t need actually to own slaves, so much as they need to keep the Negro from ever being free.
So, does this describe you, Kid?