Tea with your demons or... (Part Three)

Tea with Your Demons Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Life (Part Three)

5) You know, life can be brutal. This is the kind of place where slavery can happen and does. It’s a world where genocide happened and still, tragically does. It’s a world where a nation enters a seemingly intractable war, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent (and maybe not so innocent) human beings. Human being the operative word.

The loss of 4,000 soldiers (and sadly, so sadly, still counting) and the loss of these soldiers (again, innocent and maybe not so innocent but they’re human) to mental illness, depression, PTSD and …guilt. This is a world where whole communities are being reduced to “memorial” plaques on condos, built over the razed remains of theaters, churches, boutiques, restaurants.

You’ve seen it. It’s happened to Maxwell St. in Chicago, to my beloved U St. in D.C. I just about DIED when that tanning salon opened and that mediocre-ass Thai joint moved in. Mediocre Thai restaurants are harbingers of great evil. Seriously. Whenever I’m walking through a rough neighborhood and I see a sign on a warehouse like:
‘Coming Soon: [Insert tired, pretentious-sounding one-word title here] restaurant excuse me, Pan-Asian-Thai-French-Hungarian-Slovakian fusion project’

I’m all, “there’s a disturbance in the Force.”

6) My future. The future. Our future.

I tend to live inside my own head. I imagine different scenarios, constantly wonder “what if?” and “what’s going to happen to me?”
“Am I going to ‘make’ it?”
“What’s going to happen to my country? (Because as much as America makes me wanna holler [the way they do my life], I’m an American and I’m not going anywhere.)
“What’s going to happen to Darfur?”
“What’s going to happen with Bush II? Will he ever learn the correct way to pronounce ‘nuclear’?
"What’s going to happen to the 12 year old kids I see out by themselves at like, 2 in the morning?"
"How will I afford an apt. of my own and bills and film and groceries working in a field where absolutely nothing is guaranteed. [sic]"

Seriously. Photography can have you living the good life [AN: vocoder not included] or you could end up like this. Not killed with a shovel in the desert by a Luke dancer, I just mean ASSED OUT.

But…I know me and I know that at the end of the day, I’ll find a way. I always do.

I just never realized it until this week.

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