4/27/04 3:24 AM: "I bet you think this song is about you ..."

I met my ex-wife today at the mall's parking lot. Most of our post-marital business has been conducted around the environs of the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, as it's on her way to work and it's near my house. I never let her know my new address, as a kind of morbid complete disassociation. I don't drive much on Western, where our old house was and her mother's home still is.

Anyhoo, she had a box of my papers -- academic reports, blue books, old stories and songs, et cetera -- and a collection of photos and awards from my childhood. It seems that my great aunt and uncle (who raised me as parents, and who still are the first thoughts in my mind when I think "mom" and "dad") were insanely involved at Calvary Baptist Church in Milwaukee, as they have a veritable phalanx of plaques applauding their service to the congregation.

She started talking to me. I wasn't too chipper about this, but I went along with it.

"Oh my god, what happened to your car?" she asked.

"I had a bad experience," I chuckled, using the predictable Mos Def joke from The Italian Job.

"Well, what happened?" she pressed.

"I had ... a bad ... experience!" I smiled, providing the punchline. "Or, as I say so often, 'that information is all on my web site.'" To be honest, I wasn't trying to go into a great deal of detail with her. There was a great deal of me trying to open myself up to her in our marriage. Now there's no profit in doing that, so she gets precious little information about me, and even less energy.

Anyhoo, the real meat of the conversation is protected under an agreement I made not to discuss online the specifics of things she says with me (which I will abide by, and only discuss those things in the non-fiction book I'm allegedly working on ... hey, it's not my fault she wasn't specific enough about the terms). However, worth noting is when she talked about coming to the Virgo Birthday Bash this year, an annual celebration of the zodiac's most irksome sign that she actually started, with my help. It now is carried on by my friends, many of whom, sadly, are Virgos.

"So do you ever think this space between us will be normal?" she asked, her eyes squinting behind her sunglasses. I saw myself -- bleary from sleep and not wanting to be there at all, reflected in her lenses.

I considered that for a moment. I finally said, "No," calmly and slowly. Even as I said it, it resonated in my chest with a grim certainty. "The same way I knew we wouldn't be 'friends,' like you suggested back when we divided the CDs."

The rest of her conversation is, again, under the agreement and out of consideration for this, but she did talk about "hope." I laughed aloud.

Sisters are always talking to me about hope. My mother hopes that she can find a man she can talk to. My old editor hopes her husband will share more of the child-rearing burden, and said there's always "hope" I could end up back with my ex-wife (which is a fate that seems so horrible I can't imagine what I did so bad to make her wish that on me). A woman I care deeply about hoped that I would get over my terror and personal issues enough to throw in my lot with her, along with her adoration of the concept, saying she's grown up with hope and it got her through hard times.

"I bet you think this song is about you ... don't you?"

Some people I know have told me I've changed for the worse. People who've known me for the last decade recognize that I've returned to my older beliefs and patterns of behavior. As they said in Ghost Dog, "sometimes the old ways are best." Hope never did anything good for me. Hope got Adolphus Greene body slamming me into the flag pole in front of Raineshaven Elementary School. Hope got me screwed out of three quarters of a million dollars in inheritance money (said great aunt and uncle managed their savings quite well). Hope got me left in the lurch by my "brother" Spencer on a lease agreement. Hope led me to believe, my favorite mistake of all.

Hope is for suckers.

I work in certainties. In hard work and empirical evidence. It's true that I may never again experience the euphoric heights of joy, but neither do I intend to open myself up to the chasms and horrors of truly being shattered by disappointment. Where once I walked with faith, now I look at things as business. In truth, I did just that about six years ago. Then I allowed myself to get distracted by picket fence dreams and date movie delusions.

Not my bag anymore.

However, I can admit I'm pretty happy as a whole. Aside from the fact this impromptu tour of my own emotional Baghdad made me forget to go to the chiropractor, I was pretty chipper most of the day. I did two loads of laundry, watched The Practice, made it out to sing, picked up two new karaoke discs full of songs I adore, got groceries, did my column for CBR, and generally maintained a decent level of productivity. I even helped my neighbor Miss Rosie get her computer online. I smiled more than I frowned, and on a day such as this, that's a major victory.

So I hung a great photo of me with my great aunt and uncle on my wall (why was my afro lopsided in every picture I ever took as a child?) and I came home to eat food I prepared. Sat here listening to Dwight Trible's Living Water CD for probably the twentieth time since I got it last Friday. As I was reminded at his CD release party (if there is a finer vocalist in the world than Dwight Trible, I defy you to show such a creature to me), we are all part of that one grand spirit, and therefore all that occurs was meant to. As a droplet of that divine ocean, how much bad can really happen to me? What can I not overcome?

That's not some pie-in-the-sky, "hope it works out" sort of thing. That's the kind of hard evidence that shows Black people thriving even after centuries of treatment that would have (and did, i.e. the Tasmanians) kill other groups of people. I don't need faith when I have the evidence of me standing right here as proof that my life cannot be denied.

No, this song isn't about you at all.

It's about me.