Not New to the Game The Voices I’ve heard it a thousand times from people speaking near me or directly to me. I’ve heard it in movies and music as both a joke and a serious charge. White devils. White people are evil. On the subway kissing a girl and hearing "I hate seeing white people kiss, it's disgusting!" Or in the most recent iteration as the closing line to a successful Netflix series... “I fucking hate white people.”  I’ll tell you what, so do I. Am I evil? I remember getting into it one time on Flatbush Avenue at the junction near Nostrand somewhere in 1998. I was walking home and noticed some black guys all dressed up, as my friend Kate would put it, in their Star Trek costumes. I had to take a look.  They called themselves the Black Israelites and they definitely believed the white man was the devil. How do I know, they said so as I walked by. So, I took a seat on the ground right in front of them. I am a pretty liberal guy. To me, that means I believe...

Be Here Now Colorado In 1996, I read this book called Be Here Now by Ram Dass and after reading it, I listened to Nas' It Was Written for the first time. I left the house and walked to a nearby park with a river and sat, listening to the water. Looking at the scene. I was with friends. We decided to go for a drive through Boulder, CO and up to the small town of Nederland, CO. I played chess with the woman that would become my wife in a small cafe with a squeaky wooden door. Maybe I had coffee... or tea. But I loved the old furniture, chess, the view of the Rockies. I was right there, right then. We hiked up the mountains outside of Nederland. Up to the treeline. There, we were overtaken by the sleepiness that Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man faced in the poppy fields outside of the Emerald City. We slept there, in the short grass and flowers of the treeline beyond Nederland. I had the distinct sense that all things were one thing and I was a part of ...