Idea Lab

The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker.  When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever.

Let's connect the scattered dots.

David Ellison-Bey and I are still up.  The police are still searching outside.  They have the measuring tape out.  A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a gunfight.  I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I thought, I must get there before they ticket my grandmother's car.

She told me today, don't take her car, it has gone through so much. When I let it overheat two weekends ago, so that the green antifreeze gurgled out onto Devon street, her mechanic explained that it was only good for short trips.  She was afraid that it would break down and have to be towed.  She loves me, but I got that $50 parking ticket last Tuesday at David's house, 6726 S Parnell Ave, in the heart of Chicago's South Side, when I didn't notice the Street Cleaning signs, which I supposed went up that same morning.  The youths on the porch across the street disagreed when I approached them regarding that.  I was fearless.  I said, alert us next time, if you see our cars out, which they surely thought bizaare, but they heard me out.

And my grandmother shook the phone bill at me last week. She said that I spoke too long to Lithuania, but no, I realized that AT&T had billed $100 for my 12 minutes.  When she came back from the hospital, she had told me, could it be that God had brought me to her this summer, just before she fell and broke her hip? She recovered from hip replacement surgery like a beautiful athlete of 91 years, a peasant girl from Lithuania.  Today, she trotted out to the yard with her cane, and I trimmed the bush for her.  I was good, but why do bad things happen to me?  I need to help David, he needs to make his foreclosure payment, and such, and his car is not running. But those are not my problems, those are David's, she says.  Oh, I've been using her car to hop back and forth between her house and David's, but not much longer.  She tells me, as in recent years, that she'll not renew her driver's license, though we hope she might, yet I sense she frets so about her car's life.  You may take it, she relents, but I slip a notch deeper in depression.

Now the car, if that was hers, was diagonal in the street, I presumed smashed. I walk up among the three officers around it.  This is my grandmother's car. And what is it doing here? There was not a nick. I suppose some youths lifted it up, and set it down?  No, it had been pushed out into the street by a car that had rounded through the grass lot, apparently driven by a man who had been shot, who thereby managed to speed away down our one-way street, the wrong way, only to come to a final stop.

I just spoke with a policeman.  Two people died.  He advised me that there will be retaliation, back and forth, with the west side of the 7th district.  Take precautions.

My grandmother's car has a guardian angel.  Everybody else is doomed.

David has a car and a truck.  Neither has run this last half year, but he gets hundreds of dollars in tickets.  I know his street mechanics.  Lovely people.  One is so gentle, so friendly, so mechanically attuned.  He has no car, so David and I picked him up with my grandmother's.  He diagnosed all its sounds.  I showed him Marcin Jakubowski's Factor E Farm videos, the open source tractor and the solar turbine.  We can do that in David's yard as part of the Moorish Cultural Workshop.  We can build that in the empty lot.  Someday, we could buy that lot.  I encourage him, what does he dream of?  Yes, he would love to. I meet his wife. They have been married for thirty-three years, an eternity.  David, you agree? He explains, and without knowing any facts, I am left with the thoughts, that the most lovely human can be a heroin addict, for whom no dream can ever be greater than heroin. Today, I find David at his kitchen table with another adviser, a helpful man who loves me like a brother.  David notes later, this man is a registered sex offender, convicted of raping his wife.  And so the South Side of Chicago is a country of second-class citizens.  The best of us have names, but I can't share them if I want to share the truth, which is to say, hearsay.  The rest of us don't have names, while we roam "freely" on the streets.  Slaves don't have names, I challenged the nameless youth at the corner store.

Christopher Russell came by today.  David told him not to keep anything at the house, but Chris didn't want to hear it.  David's 72 years old, and it's not for him to care for 24 year old Chris, and deal with his tribulations, who shot at who, who steals what, who is after him, where will he spend the night, his baby boy Chris Jr., his baby's mom.  I keep my goodness small.  Some hot milk with honey.  A book on Zen Buddhism.  I drove him to the El with my grandmother's car, when he feared that he might be jumped.  I didn't let him into the house and he got insolent, yet I stood up to him and he backed down.  He asked me to keep after him to do the right thing.  He took me to his Kingdom Hall. I took him and David to the House of Culture, 618 E 71st Str, that creative hope, where Lord Cashus exalted David, the only real Moor in the house.

David, I say, I know that you can't take on Chris and his challenges.  Yet you are my link to him.  You attract him. Thanks to you, I might help him, if others might help me. And he might help us reach out to the youth on the porch. And they might share Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice, as the Prophet says.

Next to the house with a porch is a memorial.  Now it is a T-shirt on a chain-link fence.  Before there was a pile of stuffed animals.  David was there when he was shot, two years ago.  Walter.

This late-night episode is a retaliation, a memorial, for two men who are so distant.