really, who gets to be weird?

strangeness is a luxury.

I’m back (home?) in Los Angeles, looking out into the distance at the houses stacked up on the mountains in the Hollywood Hills over yonder, squinting against the blue, against the glare,

or I’m driving past the strange-band billboards flanked by evergreens. I’m letting the sun fold into me, hitting the corners of my day-exhaustion. I want to be in a million places at once, seeing and doing, but I am on the ground, teaching myself completeness. (Some semblance of it).

Sometimes, in the black morning, I feel quite fearful. We are so fallible, so vulnerable, so each our own, so tribal. I notice it at odd hours, catching up on politics, or hearing the coyotes yip up the trail. I remember we are animals circling our territories. I am thinking about art, about the narrow ways we’re allowed to show ourselves. Our surreal, our uncanny, our experimental is so often mistaken for error. I’ve seen it. As a black artist, free-writer on Substack, and maker of books in different genres, I’ve been there. The questions come, again and again. Is this marketable? Is this relevant? Will people understand?