SONG OF THE DAY: Brown Out

There was an article about Ruby Ibarra being a scientist working on a Covid vaccine, which you can easily google and find yourself, and it’s probably behind a paywall so you’ll have to do an incognito window or some shit. Ibarra’s pretty great, and it’s bothersome how immigrants from elsewhere that’s European get absorbed as American but non-whites don’t get that same benefit, and will always have this otherness still attached to them. I mean, it’s like that in European countries as well, and I just started reading Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, and aside from the normal Galeano ability to have a fucking quotable sentence on every other page that I want to scribble really high up on the walls at my house so nobody can reach it to cover up or try to scrub away, it also is making me want to really re-invision how I think of America, as a pre-existent entity to the United States, and one that will likely exist long after the United States. We get too caught up in our present reality as being dominant throughout time, when really it’s just some shit happening right now. Shit, the United States isn’t even that big of a presence in the history of the Americas. But it’s certainly a problematic one now. But if you take away thinking that shit is all-knowing omnipotent over history, you also take away some of the hopelessness that comes with the bad side. I mean shit, people ain’t even been speaking English all that long here, which is probably why the frogs get quiet when I try to sing with them at the pond at night, because they’re expecting me to be speaking Monacan, but the only Monacan words that still exist are ones that people named places with. And the biggest one I can think of repurposes Rassawek, the big village that existed at the confluence of the Rivanna and the James near present-day Columbia. But the folks who did that named their big ass winery Rassawek and host weddings there. Seems weird to resurrect dead tongues for wedding destinations, but what do I know? I’m just a piece of shit from nowhere shooting words into space.