"The Prime Minister then handed out giant checks to the bereaved
A sign, he said, that the state would take care of those who have lost so much"

— Thailand nursery attack (BBC report, October 7, 2022)

Giant checks, devoid of meaning
Thoughts and prayers, the theater of grief
A parade of penance and ritual tributes

Giant checks, post-facto regret
Consolation payments, the language of impotence
The wages of acceptable loss

Giant checks, base calculations of uniformed men
Seasoned with blood, whither the monopoly of violence?
Witness the performance of authority

Giant checks to the bereaved, a duty of care
Not to mention the provision of little urns and coffins
A fine display, the toll unbearable, the final indignities

Giant checks, props for a national calamity
The sobbing and shrieks, a symphony of despair
An unending stillness in others, more worrying are these vacant stares

Giant checks, empty gestures
Roused by tragedy, the coup maker's show of concern
Balm for communal numbness

Giant checks, strictly by the numbers
Effigies erected to solace, pain underwritten in large print
Sorrow in sans-serif and block letters

Giant checks disbursed in the aftermath of death
Survivor's guilt by way of comfort and healing
Mandatory compensation for those still breathing

Giant checks, lottery winners
A failure to protect, pageantry in the wake of slaughter
This too could happen to you

Giant Checks, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Check out your Mind by Curtis Mayfield
• King of Sorrow by Sade
• Can't buy me by Femi Kuti
• Sorrow, Tears and Blood by Fela Kuti
• Meaningless Money by Kuber Bhaskar
• Sorrow doesn't Resurrect by Ark Patrol

See previously: Action Items

File under: language, hatchet job, outrage, satire, violence, blood, theatre, Thailand, military, crime, humour, culture, observation, perception, grief, mourning, Observers are worried, Buyer's Remorse, poetry, toli

Writing log. October 7, 2022

On Mondays I go to Lidl on my street.

I know I should not go on Mondays. I know because they still haven’t restocked the goods that fled the shelves over the weekend. The carrots look like worn soldiers after a battlefield; the spinach is a rumour; the spring onions resemble survivors telling stories no one will believe. But shops do not open on Sunday, and on Saturday I am always exhausted from dancing all night on Friday. I should go on Tuesday when I have noticed many trucks come, when the apples are plump again and all the aisles become abundant again. But I like cooking on Mondays. I like the ritual of food prepping for the week, beginning with steam from the pot where I make broth. And because ritual is stubborn, I am always missing something—fresh vegetables especially. So I end up going again on Tuesday and telling myself that I should not shop on Mondays.

I think I know why I am afraid to adjust this routine by even one day. When you struggle with ADHD—the vintage stuff, not the shiny TEMU-ADHD that everyone seems to have nowadays—and you have against every instinct in every fibre of your being, managed to build a routine that works, you treat it like a relic. You are petrified that one thing out of sync will cause it all to unravel. You fear that if you skip Monday you will procrastinate on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the kitchen will look at you with the hard face of a landlord. You will spend all week staring at the pots like they owe you money, wishing you had the will to just get up, go to the store, buy food.

During the worst times, paralysis has been a flat mate. I have sometimes lost weight not from discipline but from decision fatigue; not from fasting but from the thousand small acts I could not begin. There are days when the list is simple—garlic, onions, tomatoes—and still it feels like being asked to push a bus uphill.

And yes, I could go to a different store. I am not loyal to any business. There are at least a dozen different stores within a one-kilometre radius. But that, too, comes dangerously close to ruining the routine. So I hold this one thing I can do in the palm of my hand and squeeze tight—tight enough to keep out the sunlight, the drafts, the temptations of novelty. You might call it rigidity. I call it survival—harm reduction for the brain. There are grand solutions and there are small ones; on Monday mornings mine is a plastic basket that will not let me drift into the sky.

There are advantages. The people who work in the grocery store know me now. I know this because their eyes are softer when they see me. Two years in, they still do not say hello or even nod. But this is Berlin, and to judge the warmth of Berliners by the standards of any other city would be to judge a fish by its ability to climb trees. Rudeness is a love language here; economy of warmth is a municipal policy. I know I have become a Berliner because it no longer bothers me. Instead I use a new scale. I treat the softening of the eyes like warmth.

To understand this you must know where I started: invisibility. From sometimes not even being heard when asking for help finding groceries. In the Gospel According to Berlin, you do not interrupt or speak to anyone working in a grocery store except at the till—confession is only heard at the register. So when those stocking the shelves let their eyes rest on my face and allow them to soften, it can feel like a hug. I accept it like an official stamp on a quiet application for belonging.

It was in my Lidl, on a Monday morning, that I first experienced that eye-only smile —as though the eyelids were small lips acting on their own, knowing that the heavy Berlin face need not be burdened with a full smile for a stranger. The woman’s eyes did their little smile and it felt so warm. I, in return, gave a full-faced smile. It was my way of saying: I see how far you have come toward me; I see the warmth ladder you must climb to meet me at my level.

This, perhaps, is the second reason I will not simply go to a different store in my neighbourhood. I have accrued years of micro-progress—stamps in a human passport I am not about to forfeit. Leaving now would be like emigrating the year before your permanent residency arrives. (This analogy makes more sense if your passport is currently a provocation to consulates.) I am one step before a full-face smile. (It took three years for some neighbours to begin saying a brief hello when we pass on the stairs, a shy treaty signed in the stairwell.) I am not going to waste that progress at my supermarket.

I practise a choreography: onions first—always—then garlic, then ginger; then apples, cucumber, spring onions—an unbroken liturgy. The rest may improvise, but the overture never changes. Before I surrender to the till, I take one last lap of the aisles, a slow reconnaissance of everything on display, in case memory has mislaid a small necessity. At the register the old ritual returns: phone ready to pay; and before the cashier asks if I have Lidl Plus, I scan my barcode—then return the things to the basket—and say: mit Karte Bitte. On the Lidl app, which I installed particularly to be faithful to this routine, I have opted not to receive a physical receipt, so I roll the basket away once the payment is authorised and begin emptying the basket into the black bag which opens like a suitcase: large, flat items at the bottom; cylindrical items along the sides; leafy vegetables and fragile items on top.

The middle aisle—the bazaar of unlikely futures—is my Monday test. A large pillow for €9. A stack of pastel notebooks promising that new stationery will inspire me to write more outdoors. A tool set that makes me remember everything that needs fixing in my flat. “No,” I have to say to myself. ADHD is not only forgetting; it is also wanting. Wanting a thing that will solve a problem you have named poorly. Wanting a fix. But I am learning to walk past the inflatable kayak and toward the tomato paste.

I could wait until Tuesday, the trucks will come and the shelves will look like hope. This is true. But Tuesday requires flexibility, and flexibility has, in the past, opened into a week-long absence. Monday is not optimal; it is anchor. The point is not efficiency. The point is I cook. The point is I eat. The point is the sizzling of onions in butter is louder than the static of postponement.

Some may say routine is the enemy of spontaneity. I say routine is the scaffolding for it. I say my small Monday pilgrimage to Lidl is a pact with myself: I will meet the week with food in the house and the dignity of having done one necessary thing. I will accept that some days the onions are weeping more than I am and that is fine; we will share the task.

There is also the matter of being known—not by name, not by biography, but by pattern. The staff may not greet me, but their eyes recognise the recurring Monday man who buys too many apples. In a city where it is easy to drift, where you can pass a thousand people and remain a rumour, a softened eye feels like a receipt that says: you were here; it mattered to someone for a second.

So on Mondays I go to Lidl on my street. I greet the week with onions. I practise being a person. And if—so help me god—on some future Monday the full-face smile arrives, I will respond with a full “Hallo!” complete with a small wave, a nod, the kind of extravagance that, in Berlin, borders on opera. Perhaps I will even add the dangerous flourish: “Na?” Perhaps she will blink in shock and the eyes will smile again. Perhaps that, too, will become routine.

Holier than thou, words like uplift and sanctify
Fingertips outstretched and touching, mist in the eye
Apt at any stage to tear up, so caught up, as he is, with devotion
He takes a few moments to collect himself, overcome with emotion

A full plate of sanctimony embodied in his very person
The righteous testimony he shares, those enduring lessons
The earnestness of his commitment cannot be denied
That apt word again resurfaces: he is sanctified

White handkerchief out, he mops his brow when in a state of beatitude
In a trance, or is it a rapture, the care of his religious attitude
The justness of his cause goes without saying, the certitude
Be thankful for what we've got from the most high, the gratitude

Praise be, he's ever prone to alliteration
Acceptance, adjudication, alacrity, anticipation
Sanctity, sacraments, sanctuary, salutations
Concern, contemplation, corruptions, conjugation

Still, you'll note a deliberateness to his every utterance
The obvious corollary to the seriousness of his countenance
A curious otherness even with the pose of the man of the people
For it is clear that in God's presence every sinner is equal

"We stand here, pious servants, on these hallowed grounds
We greet the occasion with keen reflection and sober sounds
Look no further, my brethren, as we embrace the promises of healing"
Said as if he was the sole one in this audience in touch with his feelings

Authoritative in demeanor, keywords: calm and steady
Serenity now, humorless yet always a smile at the ready
Judge not however, he'll shower you with grace, blessings and kindness
But do know he'll never let you forget that you're in the presence of holiness

Small mercies and hosannas, a focus on morning glories
The full suite of values imparted in his salutary stories
The Very Reverend - get the title right, this righteous teacher
Don't ever mistake him for your garden variety preacher

Preacher, a playlist

I'm a little conflicted about the soundtrack for this note, the long piece I've been mulling on a country preacher was diverted into this hatchet job on a Very Reverend One. Pardon the imprecision, but I can't pass up an opportunity to share a playlist with Cannonball and Jimmy Smith. (spotify version)

• Country Preacher by Cannonball Adderley Quintet
• The Sermon by Jimmy Smith
• The Preacher by Horace Silver & the Jazz Messengers
• The Love Sermon by Al Green
• Wallk Tall by Cannonball Adderley Quintet
• The Preacher by Jimmy Smith

Bonus beats: The Preacher's Tune by Jimmy Mcgriff and two versions of Son of a Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield and Aretha Franklin

File under: humour, satire, hatchet job, culture, observation, perception, shell game, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 9, 2022

Morning thoughts, of birdsong and optimism
Mist and dew drops collecting as the sun rises
Overnight, the mulberry tree is laden with fruit
Dispensing morning glory in bite-sized increments
Settle down, be thankful for these small mercies

A light breeze courses through - refreshing, a revival
Crepuscular beasts vaguely going about their routines
Before humanity's predatory imposition visits these lands
Sensible, these early adaptations and background activities
Triumphant foraging, observe the contours of these proceedings

For if, for mankind, morning is a time of beginnings
To perceive the reverse of the coin, on coming to an end
For our counterparts, it is the dawn of our modernity
A stillness in time, a weighted pause for deliberation
We make to savor these quiet sparkling moments
Full of careless comfort and fleeting joy
Before, like them, we fall back down to earth

Morning, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note, one of my favorite playlists - there's something about the theme. (spotify version)

• Good Morning by Gregory Isaacs
• In the Morning by Omar
• Morning Glory by Jamiroquai
• Morning by Amel Larrieux
• Happier than the Morning Sun by Stevie Wonder
• Greatdayndamornin' by D'Angelo
• The Morning Papers by Prince
• The Morning After by Alexander O'Neal
• I Think I'll Call it Morning by Gil Scott-Heron
• Good Morning Heartache by Billie Holiday
• Morning Loving by Carleen Anderson
• Morning Sunrise by Twennynine featuring Lenny White
• Joy in the Morning by Alton Ellis
• Early in the Morning by The Gap Band
• Morning Bird by Sade
• Good Morning Blues by Count Basie

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time.

File under: culture, observation, perception, life, nature, sensory, lyricism, covidious, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 17, 2022

Harbingers of malnutrition
The Four Horsemen of hunger season
While the first three duly entered our vocabulary
The fourth, left to shame, was pushed to the recesses of memory

The drop was the most embarrasing of these musketeers
Because, when first encountered, he caught you unawares
The sudden drop of your clothing - you were now half your size
Exposing your nether regions to the fresh air and curious eyes

By the time you got to the chain or the accordion, you'd find yourself spent
Having long made your peace with this state of affairs: eternal Lent
Accustomed as you were to - call it by its name, starvation
After all, you were living through a proper People's Revolution

Marking the spot on your belt where you would pierce the extra notch
Or wearing belts where you previously had none - acceptable loss
Improvised contraptions for your skirts and trousers hopefully holding
Under military rule, we were at a remove from skirt-and-blouse voting

The second horseman, the chain, spoke to tears and sorrow
A cynical description of a neckline that was now hollow
Jewelry of a sort, a macabre, if fashionable, decoration
Thriftiness embodied in your very person, a celebration

The third horseman, the equal opportunity composer, the accordion
Orchestrated skinny rib cages visibly appealing to both old and young
A skeletal music of fatigue, unmet needs and quiet exhaustion
He devised a twelve bar blues, if you will, of quotidian suffering

As to the fourth, rickety, he mainly dealt with little children
Confounding in his physicality as should be readily apparent
Kwashiorkor, quite a mouthful, the dreadful disease
The characteristic bloating, the ironic mark of the beast

Weight loss, hair loss, failure to thrive, and apathy
And then we come to those now-distended extremities
And even with the outrage and the sense of violation
The question still remains, why were these men laughing?

Nature may be a cruel companion, what with droughts and brush fires
Yet it was a man-made disaster, preventable, and caused by these liars
With limited food resources, this had all the makings of a tragedy
Worse, they were warned well in advance at the time yet they carried on stubbornly

Quite bewildering though, and damaging to the psyche
To be branded as requiring all the world's charity
Stalking horses of hunger seasons past, harrowing and dubious legacies
Ancestral memories passed across the ages, fear and survival strategies

The fourth horseman, although it must be said, was rather solicitous,
Didn't lend himself to a coinage that was quite so felicitous
The lived experience was stark and dispiriting, disturbing in its dismay
Awful enough that even that angel Euphemism couldn't summon an uneasy phrase

Drop, chain and accordion, then, were the fateful entries
Albeit History gave unkind placement in the dictionaries
They would be prefixed in the lexicon by his name
To the Flight Lieutenant's great and everlasting shame

Such however is the way of privation, the nature of its exigency
That, even in the darkest hours, in the depths of an emergency
Gallows humor reigns, it calls forth linguistic innovation and whimsy
Proverbial zingers, sharp aphorisms, etched forever in memory

...

Basket cases
Tiny coffins
Circling vultures
Calmly watching

Weeping mothers
Hunger pangs
And the crowds
Scrambling for crumbs

...

Starving children don't cry
Tears waste too many calories
Shame, that so many had to die
Shame, again, their swollen bellies

Hunger, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Pearls by Sade
  Melodramatic as befits the tragic scene she describes, mournful this ode to wounded pride.
• Hungry Blues by Jimmy Johnson & His Orchestra
• Never Mind the Hungry Blues by Larry Carlton
• Got the Hunger by Alice Russell
• Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) by Bob Marley
• Man Hungry by Sugar Minot
• When Hungry Walks by Gregory Isaacs
• Hungry Belly Pickney by Freddie Macgregor
• Hungry Belly Dub by King Tubby
• Very, Very Hungry by Brian Eno & David Byrne
  An instrumental track from the experimental album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Bonus beats: Hungry Belly by Frankie Paul & Pinchers, mainly for the title for this is a story about girl from Flatbush named Aisha. And of course, three live versions of Sade's Pearls, a show stopper ever since she composed it.


...

After Hunger for Sale (Talking Drums, October 3, 1983)

And also for that friend who startled me with the vehemence of his reaction when I teased him about his short stature. "Some of us didn't have our growth spurt during those years, we had Rawlings chains instead". A brief, damning silence ensued before joviality made its return. With my vaunted exile meshed with his explicit denial, our friendship, perhaps, was salved by the balm of the musical imagery. But the bitterness lingered.

And if archeologists can detect the evidence of famines and stunted growth like tree rings, etched in human bones, linguists and social historians can similarly escavate matters. Both earthquakes and man-made disasters leave their marks. Dzorwulu becomes 'the place that dropped', the valley of urban remembrance. Drop, chain and accordion as pointed modes of resistance in our hunger season.

Poetry as cultural memory then. Coinages bear the tide marks of social distress. In any case, this one's for you.

See previously Identification Haircut and, retrospectively, AFRC Member

File under: humour, hatchet job, satire, culture, observation, perception, language, Ghana, Africa, coup, rogues, dictator, military, famine, disaster, failure, outrage, memory, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 18, 2022

He started muttering to himself in French
Because that's what you do at such times - sigh
Then switch to your native tongue or thereabouts

"They don't see me
... Again ...
They don't see me"

The tiredness of an immigrant
The tiredness of an African
The tiredness of an older black man
The face of someone who has seen too much

"No, they saw you. I think they'll serve you... eventually"

Surprised that someone had understood what he'd said
Someone from the old country or thereabouts was here
Speaking his language
The hint of a smile began to broach his weary face - well-lined

"I know. They saw me but they didn't see me.
That's how they are.
They don't see you in this country. They don't see you.
If you only knew what it takes for them to see you..."

He was getting into it, winding up, getting ready to make a scene

"Well I see you, my uncle. I see you. Have faith. I see you"

Tonton, he appreciated that. That I named him. That I saw him

"They don't see you. Ils sont impolis dans ce pays. Impolis..."

Raised voice

"Well now they've heard us. They know we are waiting. Now they see us"

He chuckled.

"They don't see you. Really...
They don't see you.
They hear you, but they don't see you"

There was movement
The young man roused himself
Slowly making his way from behind the counter
To attend to this foreign crew now chatting away at the front
The old man was purposeful when he was finally addressed
And deliberate. He made him wait
He finished telling me his story before he turned
Then he cleared his throat,
And tried to summon up the English words
He started to explain whatever it was that had brought him to this place
As I went my way moments later, he again interrupted himself

"Au revoir, mon fils"

Then, loudly again, in English this time

"They don't see you"

They Don't See You, A Playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• You Don't See Me by Amel Larrieux
• Invisible by Alison Moyet
• Breakfast at Denny's by Buckshot Lefonque
• Invisible by Courtney Pine
• Don't Keep Me Waiting by Kwesi Arthur
• You Don't See Me by Al Jarreau
• Don't See Us by The Roots ft. Dice Raw

See previously Defensive Accounting and Normalcy Prohibition

File under: immigration, culture, observation, perception, life, race, USA, displacement, Buyer's Remorse, poetry, toli

Writing log: September 20, 2022