mojo workin’

We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like the river.

I’m feeling myself, as it were, feeling the power within exposing itself slowly to the desolation awaiting it in the cold and heartless world.

I’m alive, for once it seems, purely and individually, alive with possibility and anticipation. Alive with arrogance. Alive with fear and alive with fury. I inhale today and spit out tomorrow. And rest assured, you motherfuckers, you’d best not fuck with me.

Fear and loathing being too often aligned, from revelation to cliche, though in their way they describe this moment perfectly, pregnant with potential. At the crossroads of righteous hatred and uncertainty, where old women with cork burnt blackface ride the metropolitan transit systems accompanied by duct tape infested coleman coolers, amid abandoned flip-flops waiting for attention perched between the escalators. Here I am. Look at me.

Something about the southern soul sings out for the surreal. We adorn our days with it and during out late evenings it crunches loudly underfoot. We indulge its wild abandon as one must a petulant monarch. The surreal, as the name itself suggests, lives just beneath our reality – but it is the southerner who lives out this underworld amongst the waking hours. Our embrace of that nether region parallels our understanding of evil and scum and rottenness buried deep within the cold hearts of our neighbors – the bastards, the frauds, the motherfuckers living just across the lawn. We hate minutiae as much as the goddamn Nazis. People who stand too closely, folks who tell the facts and not the story, and those who take unwelcome liberties in their salutations, for those we reserve the Ninth Circle of Hell – the sonofabitch called me by my first name, I shoulda done him in right then and there with a salad fork. And goddamn it, he should have. The essential thing, the beast of it all is that we are right. We are right in our utter disgust of all things improper, and absolutely correct to distrust those we wave to everyday as the very essence of evil. Because the truth at the heart is that words have power, and no one, NO ONE, is to be trusted. Things are not as they seem. If nothing else, believe this.

We are warriors still.

everything in italics is Hunter S. Thompson. the rest is me.

0 thoughts on “mojo workin’

  1. and it is just now that i realize i have missed this. you write, anthony. other folks may try, but you write.

    “folks who tell the facts and not the story, and those who take unwelcome liberties in their salutations”

    sprouted in the north from southern roots i sometimes feel as odd in the presence of southern elders as i do in the presence of Africans [yes, capital A]- they are not foreigners, i am. but even i know the value of a good story and the chinese finger trap of a stranger’s first name.

    anyway, i have work to do. happy tuesday.

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