A Trying Day

First appeared in Flaming Hydra.

The day started with me missing my 6 a.m. flight because my iPhone alarm didn’t go off for some reason. According to reddit, this is a fairly common problem.

Changed to a new flight at 1 p.m., at triple the price of the original flight.

Forgot to pack my Marni trousers. That may not sound important, but it mattered to me. I was headed to Detroit to be part of my nephews’ baptism, and I wanted such a special occasion to be marked by the boys knowing that their uncle is a wonderfully dressed man. I wanted one of the first images that they saw after they entered into their new life to be of me in a white shirt, Marni pants, and black loafers, so that they could have a good sense of how an angel would look.

Because I was assigned to the last boarding group for the new flight and the overhead compartments were full, my carry-on suitcase was tagged instead, forcing me to pick it up at the baggage claim when we landed.

As is natural, I had to wait at baggage claim for an extended amount of time for my bag to appear.

The reason I like to carry my bag, rather than checking it in, is so that I can leave the airport as quickly as possible; since I had to wait for the bag, the Uber from the airport to my parents’ house, which usually is about $40, was double that because of, I don’t know, traffic on a Saturday afternoon?

There’s a bus that runs from Detroit airport to downtown Detroit, which stops quite close to our house and costs only $5. Not wanting to pay $80 for a 25-minute ride, I took the bus instead.

I have a friend who says that sometimes I’m unnecessarily cheap, especially since I spend my money on expensive things elsewhere, and this behavior almost always costs me in the long run.

The bus took forever to go half the distance. The more people it picked up through the journey, the more chaotic the scene inside became. The midwest has dark energy, but dark energy that’s different from a place like New York City. In my opinion, the dark energy in NYC is external, whereas in a lot of Midwest places, it is internal. When people in NYC are going through something, it’s expressed externally and everyone else has to become a witness or bystander to their particular event. You get on a train and a guy is sitting bloodied in one of the seats telling a story about the time he worked in fashion, loudly, to no one in particular, and all you can do is be part of the story for however many stops you have. It’s why the most valuable personal characteristic I think a person can have in a city like New York is a great inner solitude. You have to be able to go into your own world and shut out what’s happening around you, because it’s none of your business, and it’s the only way to really protect your sanity. You can’t let the chaos overtake you. But in the Midwest, outside of people having direct problems with each other, that kind of dark energy tends to be internalized. Maybe it’s because of how spread out everything is, or being close to Ohio—it’s worse there—but people there seem to be going through some blinding spiritual disturbance, or they behave like they’re not part of the world around them. When someone’s going through something, it’s as if the whole battle is taking place in the world in their soul, and while their physical body might be next to you on the bus, their consciousness is so far away from Romulus or Dearborn Heights. Most of the time, you can just leave those people alone and go about your day and they won’t bother you. The problem is that when you pack a bunch of those people in one bus headed to downtown Detroit, then it’s like being on Charon’s boat on the River Styx.

WELCOME ABOARD bus, on Charon's boat with the Damned, who are writhing in anguish.

Photo illustration by Joe MacLeod. Bus: Google street view. Charon & co.: Gustave Doré

Along with the spiritual battles that were happening, there was also the pretty banal event of a group of men harassing a woman whom they had sandwiched in her seat when they came on the bus; after she got up and walked away from them, they continued to harass her. She pretended not to hear them. And naturally, they started harassing everyone else who looked at them with annoyance.

I got annoyed with the state of things on the bus and got off early. Even though I had been on there for an hour, I was still far from where I needed to be.

In my book, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, I wrote a bit about the way that poverty constricts the soul by lessening the possibilities of your life and what you can see yourself becoming. A small world shows up in a small imagination. As John Berger wrote in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance: “Poverty forces the hardest choices which lead to almost nothing. Poverty is living with that almost.” But maybe even more than mentally and spiritually, poverty is evident physically.

One of the things that stands out about poor people is their bad dental health: missing, decayed, and crooked teeth, for example. When you have money and good insurance, problems with your teeth can be easily fixed even when they’re frustrating. Fillings, crowns, root canals, and having wisdom teeth out are irritating to deal with, but a good dentist will make the process as easy as possible and will do everything to make you comfortable before extracting a tooth, as well as providing the preventive care that keeps you from having to endure the more gruesome procedures. But poor people don’t get that care, so that normal dental issues like cavities, which could be easily addressed early, grow and become severe problems that cause terrible pain and eventually lead to rotting or missing teeth. And then, even when you have the chance to get care, you get the worst version of it. What you get are dentists who can barely do their job, let alone do it well. Fillings that fall out easily. Cheap crowns that come out and don’t preserve your teeth. Painful root canals that lead to the teeth being pulled regardless. And all of that is accompanied by unbearable pain. Toothaches, exposed nerves, tooth sensitivity, dry sockets, and so on. Tooth pain isn’t the most physically painful thing you can experience, but it dominates your mind. It paralyzes you and makes routine functions like eating or drinking water traumatic.

About half a year ago, while I was home, I noticed that my dad was eating slowly and taking care to chew slowly on one particular side of his mouth. When I asked him what was wrong, he said that he had been having tooth problems for damn near half a year and wouldn’t return to the dentist because the pain was a result of the dentist having botched a previous issue. He was willing to live in constant pain rather than risk having the dentist possibly make things worse.

I knew from experience that he was right to be angry and wary of the dentist, a man we had all gone to, whose office was close to us on the west side of the city. In the past, he had made one of my own issues worse and at one point attempted to pull a tooth that only really required a crown. When I got fed up with him I called a college friend who had a dentistry practice in one of the suburbs, and he was able to fix my issue with little pain, as well as correct the shoddy work the other dentist had done. I suggested him to my dad and set up an appointment. After a few appointments, my dad’s issue was taken care of and he’s been able to eat and drink water pain-free.

Going to the dentist isn’t fun, but going to a good one helps prolong your life and the quality of it, and going to a bad one can make your life considerably harder. And the difference between a good or a bad one tends to depend on who you are, how much money you have, and as a consequence, where you live.

In that short trip on the bus, that’s what I paid attention to the most. All the people there with missing, crooked, or decaying teeth, and how it symbolized the lower quality of life and care that poor people are forced to endure.

After I got off the bus, I called an Uber from the bus station and got home almost two hours after I had landed.

I had to get ready to go watch a Detroit City FC soccer game with a friend. I suggested that we eat before going to the game and picked a restaurant. She suggested another one which she considered better and I agreed to try that one out.

When I got to the house, I was told that my older brother had taken my car to the mall and wouldn’t be back for several hours, too late for me to make the game in my car.

After showering and changing, I called another Uber. This driver, a maverick, refused to follow the suggested path on his maps app, deciding instead to conduct a full conversation with a friend while having to make several U-turns to correct missing routes.

When I got to the restaurant, I was told that there were no tables available and only one chair at the bar. But, one of the waiters said, I could sit at one of the tables awaiting a reservation if I wanted, and if I would be able to eat within 50 minutes. Expecting that my friend would be arriving shortly, I took their offer.

I ordered ginger beer and chicken katsu. Thirty minutes later, they brought me pork ramen. I don’t eat pork.

My friend texted me several times to say that she was running late, and then never showed up. Later, at the game, I found out that her car had died and she was embarrassed about letting me know, but at the restaurant, before obtaining this additional information, I was furious.

I scheduled an Uber to pick me up at the exact time the reservation for my table was supposed to arrive. Then something told me to check the scheduled car about ten minutes before the pickup. When I did, I saw that I had somehow canceled the trip while the phone was in my pocket. Because it was a scheduled trip, I was still charged full price.

I ate some of the vegetables in the ramen, but the taste of the pork broth was too much for me. I asked for the check. The waiter who brought out the check / machine for me to pay was happy to give me the news that the reservation for the table had been cancelled and so I could sit there for as long as I wanted.

I called another, more expensive Uber.

I don’t know if I would consider myself religious. Like many other Catholics, I’ve had to distance myself from the church and as someone who distrusts groups and institutions in general, I have a strong aversion to ideologies that people diffuse their identities into and the ways in which those ideologies and organizations have helped spread misery and suffering around the world. As a Black African, I also know what the Christian religion has been used to do to people in Nigeria as well as the United States, even when I am aware that there’s an equal history of Black Africans and Black Americans resisting evil through the same scriptures and teachings. I know how that religion is still being used to oppress in the present world. It’s complicated, as they say. I can stand with my nephews as they’re baptized and renounce the devil and his works, and feel part of the grand order of existence and a greater force that animates the world. At the same time, I see the human blood that the walls and floors of the churches are covered in and the doubt that always has me asking, let me see and feel the holes in the hands and the feet. Regardless, I don’t feel the need to resolve this tension.

In Waiting for God by Simone Weil, translated by Emma Craufurd, she writes about her aversion to belonging to the Church: “I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows, merging into the crowd and disappearing among them, so that they show themselves as they are, putting off all disguises with me. It is because I long to know them so as to love them just as they are. For if I do not love them as they are, it will not be they whom I love, and my love will be unreal. I do not speak of helping them, because as far as that goes I am unfortunately quite incapable of doing anything as yet. I do not think that in any case I should ever enter a religious order, because that would separate me from ordinary people by a habit.”

What I feel responsible for is the wonder of existence and the rejection of evil, in myself and others. Evil to me comes down to doing harm to others and reducing their ability to share in that great wonder of being. To dominate someone is to infringe on their freedom to express themselves fully in the world, to reduce their ability to discover and become the fullest version of themselves. I have a great disdain for any systems or reasons given to why domination or hierarchy must exist. Racism, sexism, misogyny, queerphobia, power, wealth, eugenics, tradition, religion affiliation, corrupted law, and so on. Anything that assigns a lower class to another, whether temporarily or permanently, is repulsive to me, because it says, this other person should not be able to experience the fullness of existence in the same way that I do. They should have less of the world. They should have less of life. I think evil is silly, and the reasons given for it are pathetic.

All that to give context to a very ridiculous part of me. From youth, I’ve thought that God was trying to kill me. This is both an ironic performance and the way that I deal with problems, little to big. Each of us tells a heroic story about ourselves to ourselves, and mine is a story of defying the heavens. God is trying to kill me but I keep escaping and surviving. Some might say that I am a modern-day Gilgamesh, but greater, since he was not as handsome; nor was he living in the age of technology, which is also trying to sabotage me. Because of this tension with God, my way of dealing with things going bad is to lean in further. To embrace the setback as part of my story. That’s not to dismiss or belittle what happens to me, especially when the lives of other people are involved, but to go further, to give myself over to the event. For example, on a day when every small thing seems to be going wrong, I don’t resist it, even as I bitterly complain. Instead, I want to see how far that day can go. Where does it end? How will I play my part to reach that end?

When I was a teenager, my dad and I got into a car accident while he was driving me to soccer practice in Dearborn. We were going through an intersection when a lady in a jeep who was distracted on her phone sped through a stop sign and hit the passenger side of our car. Both cars spun around. Miraculously, beyond whiplash, I wasn’t hurt. My dad asked if I was all right and I was laughing because I had escaped again.

I think I was very affected by the circular nature of myths when I was young, where the destiny of the characters is determined at the beginning of the story and the gods are mischievous. To them the lives of humans are part of their game. What I do, for the good and bad days, is to try to play along with them.

I try to be worthy of the events that happen to me, as Gilles Deleuze said in his lecture series on Leibniz and the Baroque: “Every event precedes itself, every event follows itself. In a certain manner, one might say: every event waits for me! And it’s already that. What interests me is a morality (une morale) of the event, because I believe that there is no other morality than that of the nature of people in relation to what occurs to them. Morality is never: what must one do? [Rather] it’s: how can you stand what happens to you, whether this be good or bad?”

Naturally, there will come a day when the game ends. Or when the event will overwhelm me. But then again, the expression of pain or sorrow could also be worthy of the end of the game.

Deleuze, ibid.: “There are some who take wailing to a level of poetry, elegy, and elegy means the complaint … There are some that complain with such nobility; think of Job. Job’s complaint is worthy of the event.”

Leaving the restaurant, I was prepared for whatever else God wanted to throw my way. I was wondering what it would be. Was I going to get a driver who would take me to the wrong part of the city? Was I going to get to the game only to be told that my ticket was invalid and that I was going to be arrested for using a fraudulent ticket? Was the hamburger at the stadium going to give me a stomachache, so that I would throw up in the VIP section, and be banned forever from seeing the team? Regardless of what it was going to be, I felt ready.

As I was walking out, a lady sitting in the previously open seat at the bar called out to me. I turned around wondering if I’d dropped something but that’s not why she wanted my attention. Instead she said something that no one has ever said to me. She told me that I had such beautiful eyes. I was so flustered that I could barely get the words together to thank her.

Outside, waiting for the Uber, I was suddenly so angry. Damn it, I said to myself, God was playing dirty with me.