Finding the Root for the Sprout

Next time I’ll story board but I’m still proud of doing something at all.

My relationship to craft is honey on the side of the bottle without hand soap or rags and I know my teeth don’t even really need honey but I just must open the lid, ignore the honey spill inside, squeeze the bottle, ignore the honey spill again as I clip the plastic back and return the bottle upside down. I aim for perfection. I aim for perfection even when I don’t have access to the gun, to real bullets, I aim when and when I do not have the strength to pull the trigger. I aim and I judge and I feel shameful watching my dreams fly off year after year without me. They chirp out to me about next round being another opportunity and how there is always another opportunity for me to walk my path. It’s mine. It’s the wheel of fortune. I’ll see.

The thing is, honey doesn’t clean itself up. Honey attracts ants, gnats, cockroaches with babies ready to hatch from their assholes and I’m on somebody’s sofa imagining shooting a gun. At the same time though, there ain’t no ants here, or cockroaches and the gnats don’t seem worried about the honey and the honey almost gone anyway and once it’s on the last squeeze I’ll pour the tea kettle water into the bottle and around the lid for that just enough sweet taste and honey don’t really make my teeth hurt no how, it’s the sugar.

So let’s say I meet the craft around the area where the responsibility to clean the lid and the bottle bridges towards the side of the river where the shame of being a dirty Nigga lives. It’s disgusting when I think about it. The bigger picture comes in when I’m asked if I believe I’m not doing enough.

So here goes a piece of a draft of an unstoryboarded tall tale about where my perfectionism came from:

The first person who saw the house was Grandpa Spoon. He rode the bus to and from work and he was looking forward to a hot meal and a night cap, something he preferred every night. He worked hard. The door wasn’t there, but he opened it. The floor wasn’t there, yet he walked down it, above it, through it and towards his liquor cabinet. He had told Lillie, my Momo, that a glass house up, up on a hill in the bay would eventually fall. She told him what the white man told her, “the house is up on strong, strong glass stilts and sure, they sway and tilt to the rhythm of the rain, but it rarely ever rains in California”.

Grandpa Spoon always had liquor available, any kind, all kinds, all the time. He cherished his bar and would buy the most beautiful glass bottles and pour the liquid out of them all and then into ready to go stainless steel flasks. He then would gift his empty liquor bottles to Crystal, my Mama, who would fire them down and make ornamental figurines.

Spoon took a flask of brown down and walked out back. The house was glass but the porch was all wood. He sat down and looked out towards the San Francisco Bay, humming, watching the clooouds…fade to grey…

Lamont and Tommy came home next. Just like children, they started recounting the last things they’d done and if anything could have attributed to the glass pouring from their yard, across the sidewalk, and out into the street. “Y’all, come clean this kitchen up before ya mama get home,” Spoon called from his chair. He was smoking by then, a habit he was curbing but he figured his house crumbling was reason enough to at least finish the tobacco he already had.

Spoon ain’t never wanted to come to Californa, not really. He was Southern. He liked to see black as sweet as his skin on other faces, hands, and children. California was for Lillie and he heard her before he seen her coming up the hill. Lillie come from Hills, but she was a Fischer before Spoon. Lillie Witherspoon, once was Fischer, comes from Vivian Hills and some man who was replaced by the bushman who brought them from Crowley and across the longest bridge in the world to Eunice. It was the biggest and longest for Lillie until she finally did see a hill. Cause in the country you gotta name your children things you’d want them to see one day. So here walks Lillie, who was always a vowel higher than the Hills, up, up the hill somebody a long time ago dreamed of her seeing one day, and on this day, she looked up broken. She had Crystal with her, Crystal is my Mama, remember? See this whole story is a way to tell you a little bit about perfectionism in my own life, but I just have to bring you back a ways, okay?

So here comes Lillie, mournful, mournful, leading Crystal, a bundle of reflections and Lillie was wailing, Crystal was weeping, and they both walked into the house gripping and collecting all the broken glass they could hold. All sharp and shattered and shinning in that golden hour light on their brown hands. Lillie wrestled with the sofa cushions and peeled the plastic back, frantically searching the fabric for any glass that might have gotten through. She ran her hand along the stitching, she turned the pillow over. She took out the next pillow and did the same. She hustled to grab a rag and gently brushed the back of the sofa and the inside of the sofa and she wiped away all the glass she could before slowly unzipping the last pieces of plastic covering, smoothing the fabric from the top, to the head rest, to the legs, and she turned around, right into Spoon’s fist.

Crystal walked away. She found the kitchen and swept the glass down to the foundation, through to the dirt of the Earth. She didn’t want her Daddy being any more upset than he already was. Usually she was able to stay ahead of the housecleaning. She was proud of how good she was, obedient. Lamont and Tommy weren’t really doing anything by that time, matter fact they had already slinked towards their room to to stay clear of the rubble and the rumble. There just wasn’t no way for Crystal to have planned for the house to fall apart but she still felt responsible for her Mother being punished for the rain.

• May 5-6, 2023; May 9, 2023

*pictured: Ai generated art about grandma’s hands hand sewing a quilt of the future & such.