A Horrible Poetic Accident

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.”

and i, in the middle of cursing out the shitty old copier, was not prepared for this conversation. “what? why does that matter? it’s just a name change.”

“name’s matter. personnel means they at least acknowledged we were people. human resources means you are given the same consideration and care that goes into the cost benefit analysis of whether we really need new copy machines, or if the old ones are good enough.”

and i think about that a lot

anyway this is the same man that saw me at pride, introduced me to his husband, bought me a margarita, and did not say one word about the fact i was only wearing a sheer lace dress over a bra and panties at the time

Sometimes classics can be improved upon.

The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries : an alternate ending for Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree by Topher Payne 💯🌳❤️

Art dump part 4

okay story time

so my art teacher assigned us to do a chalk pastel still life of fruits n shit and I was like “no”

so I drew a banana instead.

and my teacher came by like “you need to have more than one fruit in your still life”

so I was like “k”

and so I put that cherry on top of the banana and titled it “Banana Split Without The Ice Cream Because Life Is Full Of Disappointments: By Fall Out Boy“ and I turned that shit in.

Sometimes I turn on the radio and just listen to the fuzz. Do you know what that sound is? It’s a million little bits of lost information, parts of something bigger, a greater idea you’d never be able to fathom in your wildest dreams. Even if you split it up, made neat little piles of similar sentiments, you’d never be able to construct even one iota of the meaning behind the grit and weightless sand. 

I like to listen and think I could understand some of the messages coming through, but it’s chaos. I know how little it means if you have no idea what it looked like before it was broken down to simple little categories, white, black and gray. Ducks in a row, beans you can count, sense making lies seem sane.

When you tried to make sense of the pieces, you lost the meaning behind them. You don’t know what it is, but it’s all yours, and that’s all that matters in the end, right? Owning what falls off of something bigger you hadn’t a chance in hell of understanding. Cutting little parts, bits to show to your friends, saving little scraps for a book only you will ever look in.

They gave me a number to shoot for.  It was about twice than what I had been making at the time.

So I went online, did some research, found some figures backing up my claim, put it all together and went to my boss.

I got what I asked for.

If it hadn’t been for that person in accounting telling me I was way underpaid, I’d have never known.  I went from barely scraping by to being able to have a savings account and getting all my debts paid thanks to them.