It’s rare that tottering around YouTube finds one a new classic of the internets, but today it did indeed and in truth do even so. Behold, the London Gay Men’s Chorus performing Coming Out at Christmas:
and these are not the lyrics, but they ARE amusing.
Given the transition of Faceless Day into a new face for raincoaster, this seems like a good time to introduce this video by Franco-Canuck Mylene Farmer. It’s the first song that made me aware of her, and it only did that because of the awesome power of this particular video, which just happens to be near-perfect.
Sorry, my French is a bit rusty, but I think you get the gist.
Mine is creepy. Swell.
What Your Playing Cards Tell About Your Future |
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Your emotions are currently tied to a close friend or confidant. You have known this person for a long time. Your closest friend always can cheer you up… whether it’s through flattery, funny stories, or simply just being there. The near future will bring a new competitor or rival – in business or love. This person may seem like a friend at first. Beware of some very bad luck coming your way. This unlucky streak will make your life difficult in the short term. |
Well, that’s par for the course.
My mother, you see, always warned me against getting my fortune told; not because she thought it didn’t work, but because she thought it did and it couldn’t be the forces of light and goodness that were sneaking tips from the future into our space and time. She figured it was a very Dark thing, and from my experiences, she was right.
Mind you, she’d get her fortune told at least once a year. She got her palm read once and the woman said she’d very soon be going to a hot, sandy place and that she’d have a health scare first that would get cleared up but later would come back to haunt her. Five years previously she’d applied for a job in Saudi Arabia, and six weeks after the palm reading she got a call out of the blue: she was hired.
But first, she’d need a clean bill of health.
Which she got, except that the first time they did the chest X-ray it came back with a spot on the lung. The radiologists thought it was a flaw on the film, so they did it again, more carefully this time. It was clear, and away to Riyadh she went.
Only to return, eighteen months later, with a fatal case of lung cancer.
It just hit me: I’m actually older right now than my Mother ever got. Somehow that feels like a betrayal, although she wouldn’t see it that way and in fact I can hear her lecturing about it right this second.
But, be that as it may, she always warned me against fortune telling, because while it might work, you’d be dealing with the dark side and there’s no way to do that and ultimately come out a winner.
She was odd, for a Buddhist, my mother. She used to hang out at the Pentecostal Church because she loved the music. I think I got it from her, my tendency to shop at Buddhist shops for exotic, flashy Christmas ornaments.
But I have a couple of friends who are good with the tarot, or so I’d heard, so one day I pestered one of them into doing my cards for me. He laid out the cards with great solemnity (I should explain at this point that when I get my cards done, which I’ve only had done about four times in my life, it is always primarily, if not entirely, Greater Arcana, and I tell the card reader as s/he is laying them out that they’ll be mostly Greater Arcana and they all chuckle and say, “I don’t think so. Do you know how rare that is?” and I actually freaked one of them quite out because it was all the CGA of Particle Accelerators and the Ninety-Nine of Spades and the Grand High PoohBah of Wonderbread and many other Greatest Hits of the Greater Arcana; she paused, sat back, goggled at me for a bit, and tried to duck out of reading the cards. She, herself, did not want to know) then snapped to full height with a crack like whip, sucked in his breath right sharply, and put both hands to his mouth.
Suddenly, I was not feeling optimistic.
There was a lengthy pause.
A.
Lengthy.
Pause.
“Um,” I said, firmly. Or maybe not. “Um, so I don’t mean to disturb you, but what do you see?”
A.
Lengthy.
Pause.
with bonus guilty expression stealing across his difficulty-having-when-lie-telling face.
“Weeeeeeeelllllllllllll,” he said, “What would be your idea of ultimate luxury?”
“I guess to wake up whenever I pleased, never have to answer to anyone, not have to be anywhere at any particular time, and read whatever I liked, all day long.”
He paused. Again. Then he said, “that’s all going to come true in the coming months.”
Then he grabbed up those cards like they were kittens he was saving from a rabid wolverine, stuffed them into the silk sack and abruptly changed the subject. I think he asked if I wanted to see what was on tv, but I could be mistaken about that. And, no matter what, he would never tell me what else it was that he saw.
And, a few days later, I noticed some bumps at the base of my throat and thought I’d be all proactive-like and go to the doctor about them. Fourteen days later I was in chemo for third stage cancer, and I took an entire year off work during which I woke up whenever I pleased, never had to answer to anyone, never had to be anywhere at any particular time, and read whatever I liked. All day long.
I didn’t write this, Lennie James did, but I’m glad to have this opportunity to pass it along (an Open Letter is Open, right?). This appeared in the Guardian a few days ago, but realistically I can’t think of a time or place in any city that this wouldn’t be important to read.
To whom it may concern,
My name is Lennie James. I am a 42-year-old father of three. I grew up in south-west London. I was brought up by a single mother. I was orphaned at 10, lived in a kids’ home until I was 15 and was then fostered. I tell you this not to claim any special knowledge of how you’ve grown, but to explain how I have, and from where I draw my understanding.
I want to talk to you about the knife you’re carrying in your belt or pocket or shoe. The one you got from your mum’s kitchen or ordered online or robbed out of the camping shop. The knife you tell yourself you carry for protection, because you never know who else has got one.
I want to talk to you about what that knife will do for you. If you carry it, the chances are you will be called on to use it. It is a deadly weapon, so if you use it the chances are you will kill with it. So after you’ve killed with it, after you’ve seen how little force it takes for sharpened steel to puncture flesh. After your mates have run away from the boy you’ve left bleeding. When you’re looking for somewhere to dash the blade, and lighter fluid to burn your clothes. When your blood is burning in your veins and your heart is beating out of your chest to where you want to puke or cry, but can’t coz you’re toughing it out for your boyz. When you are bang smack in the middle of ‘Did you see that!’ and ‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ here’s who to blame…
Blame the boy you just left for dead. Blame him for not believing you when you told him you were a bigger man than him. Blame him for not backing down when you made your chest broad, bounced into him and told him about your knife and how you would use it. Blame him for calling you on and making you prove yourself. Tell yourself if he had just freed up his phone or not cut his eyes at you like he did, he wouldn’t be choking on his blood and crying for his mum.
Then blame your mum. When the police are banging down her door looking for you, or she hears the whispers behind the ‘wall of silence’, tell her it’s all her fault for being worthless. Cuss her out for having kids when she was nothing but a kid herself, or for picking some drug or some man over you again and again. Even if she only had you and devoted herself to you, even if she is a great mum, blame her anyway. Blame her for not being around more to make sure you took the chances she was out working her fingers to the bone to give you.
When you’re done with her, blame the man she picked to make you with. Blame him for being less than half the man he should have been. When he comes to bail you out and starts running you down for the terrible thing you’ve done, tell him straight: ‘I did what I did coz you didn’t do what you should have done.’ Even if he did right; respected your mother, worked to provide for his family financially and spiritually, taught you right from wrong and drummed it home everyday… Even if he nurtured you as best he could, blame him for the generation of men he comes from.
The one that allowed an adolescent definition of manhood to become so dominant. The one that measures a man by how many babymothers he has wrangling his offspring, or by how ‘bad’ his reputation is on the streets of whatever couple of square miles he chooses to call his ‘ends’.
Damn them for letting you believe that respect is to be found with gun in hand or knife in pocket. Damn them and everyone who feeds the myth of these gangsters, villains, thieves and hustlers. Anyone who makes them heroes while damning hard-working, educated, honest men as weak, sell-outs or pussies.
If you are black, blame white people for the history of indignities they heaped on you and yours. For the humiliation of having to go cap-in-hand or get down on bended knee or having to burn shit down before you are afforded something so basically fundamental as equality. If you are white, blame black folk and Muslims for taking all your excuses. Failing that, blame a class system that keeps you poor and ignorant so the ‘uppers’ and ‘middles’ can feel better about themselves.
You have good reason to blame them all. I wouldn’t be you growing up now for love nor money. Your generation has so little room to manoeuvre. We had more space to step around the bullshit. We weren’t excluded at the rate you lot are. Teachers hadn’t given up or lost their authority over us. They still tried to protect and guide us even through our most disruptive years.
The police stopped and searched us, but we fought that right out of their hands – we hoped into extinction. But they want to bring back that abusive practice. They are still hooked on punishment rather than prevention. They seem ignorant to the fact that they are feeding you acceptance of an already prevalent gang mentality. As far as you can see, the police are not protecting and serving you, they are coming at you like just another street gang trying to boss your postcode.
When I was where you are now, generations of state agencies, social services, policy-makers and politicians had not abdicated all responsibility for me. We weren’t left to our own devices like you have been. Is it any wonder that you end up expressing yourself in such a violently pathetic way?
We should be ashamed. I am. You have shamed us into a desperate need to do something about ourselves. We have collectively failed you and we should take all the blame that is ours for that… but so should you.
I blame you. I blame you because as a generation you are selfish, self-centred and have little or no empathy for anyone but yourselves. You are politically stunted and socially irresponsible and… you scare us. What scares us most is that you would rather die than learn. Your only salvation may be that still most of you aren’t playing it out dirty. The vast majority of young men, even with all that is stacked against them, are finding their way around the crap. The boy you will kill, should you continue to carry that knife, almost certainly had the same collective failures testing him. He probably felt no less abandoned and no less scared. He also, almost certainly, wasn’t carrying a knife.
Whatever it seems like, whatever you’ve read, whatever you tell yourself about protection being your reason, statistics show the life you take will be that of an unarmed person. That is what that knife will do for you. It will make you escalate a situation to where it is needed. It will give you a misguided sense of confidence. It will make you the aggressor. That knife will make you use it. It will bring you nothing worth having. There is no respect there. The street may give you some passing recognition, but any name you think you might make will soon be forgotten.
Your victim will be remembered long after you. Name me one of the boys who killed Stephen Lawrence. Once you’ve bloodied that knife you may as well be dead because you’ll be buried for 10 to 20 years. Banged up for that long, only a fool would look back and think it was worth it. You’ll be nothing more than a sad, unwanted, unnecessary statistic.
If you were mine, this is what I would tell you. I would make myself a big enough man to beg. I’d get down on bended knees if I had to. I would beg you to take that knife out of your pocket and leave it at home. I would tell you that I know you are scared and lost and that I know the risks involved in what I’m asking you to do. I know that what we could step around, you have to walk through, and that there is always some fool who isn’t going to make it any other way but the wrong way. I’m just begging you not to be that fool.
Be a better man than that. Let the story they tell of you be that you exceeded expectations… that you didn’t drown. Don’t spend your days looking to be a ‘bad-man’ – try to be a good one. Our biggest failure is that our actions have left you not knowing how precious you are. We have left you unaware of your worth to us. You are precious to us. Give yourself the chance to grow enough to understand why.
Be safe.
Lennie James
Well, it’s practical. This has to be the cheapest method of governmental family planning assistance of which I’ve ever seen. Truly, this is brilliant.
raincoaster 