I Eight It!

TheFreeSlave has spoken and, being as he's got it like that, I respond accordingly with eight random facts about myself or habits (ahem!) to which I am attached.

First, the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Second, the "secrets":

1. I'm getting ready to move in three weeks to a state even more known for its "Southern-ness" than the one I've been in for the past eighteen years. This is a major move for me, as you can imagine, and I'm nervous about it on maaaaany levels.

2. I've only had a mind or mood-altering substance in my body three times in the past sixteen years -- twice right after major surgery and once six years ago when I lost my mind for a minute.

3. My only son died seven years ago (two weeks before his twenty-third birthday) as a result of his addiction to heroin. I suspect it was murder, but I'll never know.

4. My favorite form of physical exercise is swimming laps. It used to be sex, but that was before I got tired of all the drama. I don't do relationships well. Or maybe I just pick badly. It's been a while, so I really don't know. Maybe I've/it's changed. In any case, I haven't yet been willing to take a risk and find out.

5. An audience of nearly four hundred African-Americans gave me a standing ovation two years ago when I performed a spoken word piece entitled "You Called Me A What?!?" The word "what" stood for "nigger-lover." It was raw and I'll never do another spoken word performance because that was my first time and when you start at the top, you can only go down from there.

6. I decided this week to begin looking into the possibility of finishing my Ph.D. and publishing some things I've had in a file cabinet for-ever.

7. I've already written a book on race. A couple of authors who are highly published on the topic of race liked it very much, but it crosses genres and I don't know who would publish it. The working title is Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself.

8. The last thing I bought hasn't even arrived yet. It's a collector's item: one of only three hundred copies of an epic poem published in 1964 and written by a man who eventually became my friend, Calvin Hernton. If I'm not mistaken, Calvin, who died a few years ago, once told me he was only nineteen when he wrote "The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong," the story of a White woman thinking on her hundredth birthday about her Black once-lover for whom she bore a child. The lines that knock me out: "The double dying of she who rides in the middle of the wind will reign in the world like an idiot fire and every woman sees in whichever man she gives her sex the potentiality of her whorehood." Whew! I first read these lines more than twenty years ago and they still make me think.

Lastly, the eight bloggers I tag. This meme has been around to most of the bloggers I read, I think, so if I tag you and you've already done it, you can just let me know, pass on the tag, or do it again (you know you've thought of eight more things to tell us!). In no particular order, I'm tagging:

Charles at Kill Bigotry!, dna at Too Sense, Sokari at Black Looks, Stephen Bess at Morphological Confetti, M.Dot at Model Minority, Kyle de Beausset at Immigration Orange, Professor Zero, and The Angry Black Woman.