Let's Get It Started
When You Must At Last Unleash The Horses
I want to start by confessing that this substack was begun in a fit of community and a haze of I-had-writer-friends-over. There were beautiful Black women in my living room, and everything sounded like a good idea. It’s my version of blackout drunk. My point is, with regard to questions like “what is this” and “what do you do here” and “why are we here” and “I have better things to do”:
Patience. Little brother.
Patience. Little sister.
Whoa-whoa-patience, patience.
Eddie Murphy sings “Patience” in Dreamgirls (Paramount/Dreamworks, 2006).
This whole experience is gonna make a lot more sense if you’ve seen every movie I’ve ever seen.
I can’t talk about the NY subway lynching (with audience) and the white men shooting citizens for offending them (including children), and I can’t promise not to talk about it. I am numb, or enraged, spurred to action or despair, and I have to stop demanding of myself some mandate that I will act in some particular way, when these are not abstract things, but events in my real world, that threaten me and every person in my society, and have a traumatizing impact on me and you. I have to accept that sometimes I am debilitating, and have to stop trying to “keep going”. I have to stop persisting, if I want to survive. So I’m pausing writing this post until I can again, whether that’s later tonight or two days from now, and I’m telling you because maybe you need to know that everyone who is speaking right now isn’t magically or inexplicably “stronger” than you. Hopefully, they took and will take the time they need to process, and what you’re seeing is them when they can be a person again. Like I said on Twitter at the time of composing this section of the post: I don’t know what to ask for, but the fire this time.
Tweet by @BCMorrow, reading: We have such brainrot as a nation that when a news headline mentions the latest “reason” a man opened fire with a semi-automatic and killed people, people in the comments concede that the supposed provocation IS annoying. God must weep.
So my son is basically finished with his freshman year of university—and it feels both completely normal (I’ve been along for the ride the entire year, so this makes sense) and simultaneously bonkers. If you follow me on social media (@bcmorrow on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok, but the latter is completely haphazard because I’m contrarian), you know Imma post about my baby. We’ll see how much I will deign to post about here though.
OBVIOUSLY IMMA INCLUDE A PICTURE, BE REASONABLE.
Last night, I did a book club visit with a group of women in Georgia who recently read Cherish Farrah. Firstly, what’s hilarious is that I put it in my calendar just as “book club visit” without any additional information so I would truly have gotten on there expecting to talk about Mem (the majority of my book club visits, honestly) or A Song Below Water (runner-up). Luckily, this was actually my childhood bestie’s club, and we chatted earlier in the day so I could tell, “Oh, cool, I was way off.”
The best part is actually that the majority of my visit, after talking writing process (and unique process when you’re releasing three books over the course of nine months, as was the case in 2021/2022), was regaling them with stories from our childhood. Yes, she was very much telling the truth, we are besties, and we have the embarrassing community theater stories to prove it!
Photo of myself and my childhood bestie, circa 1997, receiving some sort of acknowledgment. And my glasses are rotund. And my jeans are….whew, chile. Lord Jesus, come.
So, if we know each other, and you want me to prove it to your book club, I totally will, and I’ll tell them things you forgot, but I didn’t, because that is my superpower.
Welp, let’s see how y’all feel about this little amuse-bouche, shall we? Do let me know what kind of content you’d like to receive. I’m thinking storytimes, reviews of things, surely skating will come up (I’m feeling very garbage about it at the moment, which is my own issue with wanting to be able to constantly do new things and also not being willing to be seen not knowing how to do things, I’m garbage), what was I talking about…
Anyway, hair flip!
i am about to buy rollerskates to join a skating club that apparently operates out of my apartment building. any recs???