Drug dealers (can you, the drug dealers) please give it a break. But no. I was walking down Duval when two out of town (this is always the way it is in Key West) chicks pulled me into Sloppy Joe’s. Sloppy Joe’s Hoes, things get very dark, and so many people have killed themselves (all the usual ways) who dared to confront the question: Why Are You Here.

They were here to pay the rent this month. They were here to make the rich richer. All the usual. Ordinary.

They were here to buy the shit they were told to buy. They were here with the pool cue and the balls. Popping them in holes. One cue hole at a time.

Most pool halls will not allow me into their blue-lit paradise of wretches. I knew when I first heard the idea of teaching truth that Critical Race Theory would hit the proverbial American brick wall.

American systems don’t work much of the time. The sewers did not work. No water. No way down. Hope is just a siren. Been there. Done that. How many infestations in one lifetime.

We were losing everything everyone said we would. It all unfolded as if it were happening through the changing focus of the telephoto lens. Canada was the attack of the lizards. Lizards were now the status quo. Cats ate the lizards. But these lizards would eat you from the inside out.

Someone said – critical race theory – but I do not know who it was. I have disappeared again. Don’t even go there. This is America. No one gets validated in sex work. Crawling, begging through the gates of beautiful as children no matter what these boys call themselves. They hurt. And they deserve better. The landscape of American tongues and published dialogue will burn when the gravitas reaches the indifferent spectators, and Americans are spectators (like me) caught up in the uncivil, indifferent addiction of rewriting who and what we really are.

History is not reincarnated Razzle Dazzle. We are found not guilty. The North was as racist if not more so than the South during the great unpleasantness. It still is. We do not have to revisit the past because the ramifications are dire (like having to wear masks again), we want to run but there is nowhere to go. Did you really just read the benign but banned ideas above this sentence. Perhaps we do not teach critical race theory, but what we do teach is, of course, a warning.

The warning transcends school. The warning is about consequences. When I was teaching kids with HIV, history was who died last night. It’s grim out there – still. The civil war taught us nothing. The people in that war died for nothing. The NYT gatekeepers keep ideas they don’t like articulated in any way. Ideas like capitalism are dangerous. Gatekeepers will shut you down and kick you into the street with impunity. Ideas are why the bosses and the American aristocracy shakes in historical shoes. You are your history.