I Done Wrote Some Letters

“…letters mingle souls” - John Donne.

Since I’m something of a handsome expert on everything, I’m familiar with therapeutic techniques. These are the tools that psychiatrists use to keep you coming back for repeat business, and getting “in touch with yourself,” instead of compressing all of your feelings into a tiny sponge ball regularly saturated with grain alcohol and non-prescription medications.

While I’m skeptical of therapy that doesn’t involve punching through a concrete wall or slashing somebody’s tires, I’m an open-minded individual. And so we reach my first reason for writing today: I’m want to explore my inner psyche through letter writing.

I’m going to write letters to people and things, explaining exactly how I feel, and never send those letters. It’s widely accepted in “the field,” as we call it (however, there will be no emo music playing in the background, and my on-screen love interest won’t find the letter at the worst possible time causing a montage of brooding scenes at the end of which we hook up anyway).

I am also hoping that these letters will be saved, long after I’m dead, and reproduced in a best-selling novel about my life. Sort of like that did for that guy that broke it down with a sick flow at Gettysburg. Just in case that does happen, future historians, here’s a tentative title for my biography “Sapien: Abdominals like Tank Armor.”

And here it is: The Collected Correspondences of Joseph T. Sapien.

Dear DMX,

I recently read your interview, in which you were surprised to learn that a black man is running for president, and asked “What the **** is a Barack?”

This is an excellent question, and there are no answers forthcoming. You’re an insightful, unique man, and I am sure that if you and “Barack” were to throw down in a freestyle battle, you would almost certainly **** his ****, and then **** the **** over and around his ****.

Also, arresting you just for ramming into the airport with your car was – in my eyes – incredibly unfair. Read More »

Living Las Vegas

Las Vegas only makes an impression if you don’t look past the illusion. Peek beyond the veil that the corporations have cast and its nothing more than a series of asphalt lanes and bus routes. For a tourist it bears the promise of endless pleasure, salivating strippers, heaving hedonism.

For a resident, on the other hand, Las Vegas is the fat black guy with dreads who spends his day time in the bookstore discussing politics (with a guy carrying a briefcase too big for his body) and at night moves to the 24 hour café; playing chess against the bespectacled white guy called “The Tutor” who makes his living hanging out in the university library, getting hired by students to do their homework.

The real Las Vegas is the stripper named “Ana” who came from Texas three years ago because her parents are dead and she is putting her sister through college.

Read More »

The Beauty Monster

I grew up in a family that did not hold beauty in much esteem.

Both of my parents were uncomfortable around people who fit the cultural standard of physical attractiveness. It’s not that they were particularly unattractive - it’s just that for them, brains were more important than beauty. I was raised with the notion that vanity was bad. Spending time and money on your looks was wasteful. Wearing clothes that emphasized your physical attributes was pointless, because “Why would you want people to look at you that way?” Living in University towns all my life kept me in the company of other people who valued brains before beauty, so it felt normal.

When I married and moved away (yes, I lived with my parents until I married. They didn’t charge rent and the food was free), I was suddenly in the company of people who habitually wore makeup, dressed (to my eyes) provocatively, and emphasized beauty over brains. It was awkward, to say the least. My practical and very modest wardrobe appeared drab and mousy next to all that radiance. My lack of makeup had people confusing me for the new Sister at the local Catholic church. I don’t even want to talk about my hair. Read More »

A Southern Autumn

I’ve lived in Georgia and Alabama since 1974. I was nine when we moved here during Christmas break. I want to describe life here, so people who don’t live here won’t think we’re all uneducated hicks…then again maybe you will, but if you do, I can tell you with certainty that we don’t care.

I’ve lived in both large and small towns. The large towns are, for the most part, pretty much like any other large town in other parts of the country. There’s ethnic, racial and economic diversity, opportunity for employment, even lemongrass in the grocery store sometimes! Small towns have diversity as well; it’s just usually not culinary diversity. That’s another topic, though.

One thing this town does right, and I mean that in all sincerity, is the Parade. Read More »

Only. Skin. Deep.

A few years ago, I boarded a plane heading to a small American college-town. It was my first time in the United States, and I was starting my freshman year at a prominent institution of higher learning I will call Undisclosed University. I had traveled from my country of birth to Chicago, where I spent a week with a former classmate, before heading down South.

I am originally from a Muslim country. I’d lived in the UK before, and had traveled extensively throughout the world, but the US had hitherto been something of an enigma to me. I was incredibly excited at the prospect of spending the next four years of my life at one of the U.S.’s premier institutions. I remember sitting at O’Hare, waiting to board my flight. At one point, I asked one of the airport staff as to the reason for the seemingly unending delays. The staff member in question happened to be an African-American. As much as I tried to decipher his response, it was completely beyond my grasp – his manner of speech was completely unfamiliar to me, and took me by surprise. I had never before interacted with an individual who spoke what I would later learn to be Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English. At first I assumed that it was a regional American accent, and was surprised to discover its racial history. Over the coming four years I would learn that the colour of one’s skin determined a whole lot more than merely a way of talking. Read More »

Resisting Expectations: An American in Accra

I can’t count the number of times I was asked the question, usually from locals whom I had met only moments earlier: “So, is it what you expected? Is Africa what you thought it would be like?”

Despite the (ironic) expectations that also come with such a question, I almost always disappointed my questioners with the boring truth—when I set off for Africa this past June, I really didn’t have any expectations. Nope, none at all.

I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true! As I shoved in my last few pairs of underwear and zipped up my bags for Accra, Ghana—my first trip to Africa—I was more concerned whether or not I would have internet access to update my blog than whether or not I would have cold or hot water, whether or not I would catch malaria like some of my friends had, or whether the poverty would be too much for me to handle. Read More »

Marie Antoinette

Every single person I come across seems to hate this movie. It’s “silly.” It’s “weird.” It’s “NOT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE!”

While I don’t think the film is a stunner like “Lost in Translation,” it did rock my world on several levels.

First of all, I wish the humourless drones harping on about various inaccuracies would lighten the hell up. This isn’t a period piece. It takes the lush landscape of the doomed court at Versailles and subverts it. It exists in a time of its own. The timeline largely concerns itself with the history of emotions, rather than with a history of events. People who missed out on that crucial bit of information and are bursting at the seams with righteous indignation ought to take a chill pill. Or a chill suppository. Read More »

The American Ways

“THE AMERICAN WAY” is possibly the catchiest tried and true maxim of all American clichés. It is most often used by Americans in fond reference to matters which make them proud, and there are many, but when these same words are spoken by non Americans, their meaning sometimes takes on a different twist, one which was not intended by the fathers of American lexicology.

There are some implied suggestions in the use of this expression which may carry many secondary meanings, such as: “This is the way we do things in these parts”, or “Doing things our way is how we got here in the first place and we are not about to change.” or simply, “Don’t tell us what to do.” Read More »

Burkhas, Bikinis, and Other Lies

“You’re in deep doo-doo now,” was my 6th grade math teacher’s favorite expression, the one that signaled a mini-Apocalypse in the form of a D grade, or a detention, or a shrill call to the parents demanding an explanation of one’s behavior. I never got along with my math teacher, but the phrase has stuck to me somehow, and I remembered it recently while doing research on Islamic bloggers for this article.

Only the words “doo-doo,” despite the horrific memories of my awful math class, seemed a bit too gentle for the mess I encountered. Read More »

It’s the Movies, Stupid!

George W. Bush won for a simpler reason than all political pundits would like to admit. It has nothing to do with the economy, security, Iraq , gay marriage or moral values – all highly sophisticated issues for the average uninformed and apathetic American voter.

Bush won because Kerry has an emotionless, expressionless face that did not seem to be capable of getting fired up by either anger or jubilation, no matter how hard he tried.

It is as simple as that. Bush won because Kerry is too much of a nice person who does not possess the qualities – nor the looks – of a macho American hero to whom the American people and culture are so incurably addicted. Read More »