AND YOU THOUGHT THE DEVIL WORE BLACK
Friday the 13th. Funny I'm a superstitious girl. Don't leave a hat on my bed. Won't find me walking under a ladder, and don't you dare split the fucking post when you are walking with me.
But Friday the 13th never mattered to me. It was always the fodder of shitty slasher movies where sluts and bad girls are slaughtered and gender neutral virgins prevail. I'd be dead if I believed in that shit.
So today is Friday the 13th. I wake up late and rush to work. My daughter is going to have her first horseback riding lesson in two years after a bad ankle break. I could be anxious, but I'm not. I just want her to do well and be happy and healthy. Simple.
I pause in the morning to post a daily Dead Rock Star on my Instagram to promote my art show. Send messages home about shoelaces and riding gloves. Call the horse ranch to deliver cautionary tales about broken bones and taking it easy.
This is in between working hard to earn a living to care for my kid, keep a roof over my head, perform the nuts and bolts of existence.
But then the wind changes direction. Suddenly rock n roll means slaughter. Over a hundred dead. The city my daughter dreams of living in is exploding with bullet riddled bodies. The Eiffel Tower drips blood and then goes dark.
Surely people drop dead by the hundreds and thousands every day. Hospitals and schools are bombed. Mothers gunned down in streets. Children used as human shields against automatic weapons. Drones wipe out entire families. Leave children orphans. Mothers widows. Fathers with a burning need to take up arms against the enemy.
But which enemy? And how do we walk forward through the day knowing we are part of the enemy. The killing machine. The wars that never stop.
Those taxes come out of my paycheck, and I have little say where they are going. I could be cashing in bullets at the bank. I am aware of my own sense of privilege and isolation from everything I protest.
Tiny handcrafted Eiffel Tower earrings sparkle at the side of my daughter's face. A gift from me on her 17th birthday because as a mother I want to believe in magic and dreams even when I have survived nightmares and know that the book of End Times is growing so thick and sour, made of old skin and poison. It keeps growing. Bones and babies fall from between the pages. It is becoming so deep that soon we could be buried In darkness.
The Eiffel Tower is black. The non-violent “criminals” who fill our corporate owned prisons are black. Bombs dropping from US air strikes are black. Smoke is black. Bodies are black when they lie charred in streets. Young men shot down by white cops are black. Police uniforms are black pretending to be blue. Maybe because the world is black and blue. Black churches are burning. Black rage is rising. Paris goes black, and suddenly the world is paying attention.
We occupy a time of extreme trauma. A triage is in order.
I get through the day in a blur. Go through the motions. Meet deadlines and obligations. What does it take to break the whole thing apart?
I question what to do on this Friday the 13th. I have no appetite for food. A slasher movie is out of the question.
I put on my sneakers and run through the night. I run far. I run hard. I run under a sliver of a moon. The sky drapes its dark cloak over the landscape. I howl with coyotes. I leap over jack rabbits the size of dogs. I run to the twitching beat of TV screens flickering behind locked windows.
When I'm done I grab my camera and shoot a house. A random shooting on a random street. Not with bullets but with a 20mm lens at a 60 second exposure.
I don't see the cross in the view finder. It's too dark and besides it's really a power line. Transmitting calls of distress or a pizza delivery order. Delivering whispered warnings straight from the ghost of Jesus Christ himself. The man nailed to some sticks of wood and fed to the vultures.
God and guns and ammunition. A gust of wind catches an American flag across the street. It flaps its wings like death ascending.
What are they watching in the house with the glowing windows anyway? News from Paris? A basketball game? The Discovery Channel airing a show on big game hunting. The one where the blond girl with a pink automatic rifle stands with her pink combat boot pressed into the sand-colored fur of her fresh kill. The cat’s body rolls like sand hills in the Sahara. The girl poses for the camera. Her pink lips spread into a smile almost as big as the mouth of the lion she just murdered.
And you thought the Devil wore black?