The Liveliness of the Short Distance Walker

Lucky to have Monday the Juneteenth off from work—I chided my buddy Rick for being employed by a company that screens 12 More Years a Slave on this day, or so it must be assumed based on his toiling away in the resale ticket world on a federal holiday—I marked the occasion the finest way I know how: by playing culturally significant albums created by Capital B Black artists. Nina Simone’s covers album, To Love Somebody, began the festivities and was followed by Pharoah Sanders’s jazz landmark Karma, both outstanding for uniquely different reasons. [Editor’s Note: Please do listen to Ms. Simone’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” the single finest take of a much-recorded tune, and one of my five or ten favorite cover songs in existence.]

Having already committed to taking a walk, a self-centered thought surfaced. While I’d detailed my love of walking in “Annex High,” the second essay in the LBS, I eschewed play-by-play for a broader overview of why taking walks has come to play a significant role in both my mental and physical health. Comparing the idea of a step-by-step chronicle to a live blog of feet in a morning email to Moore, I decided to document the internal monologue that occurred for the ninety or so minutes my legs did the visible heavy lifting (as my brain shouted out, “I’d trade places with those barking dogs any time!”).   

After I parked in the usual lot at my old high school, a shaded spot decorated by the prickly brown balls that plummeted from an adjacent sweetgum tree, I gathered my walking essentials: two sticks of mint gum, one menthol cough drop, a bottle of cold water dressed in a small (faded) white bathroom towel, a green notepad, a black pen, and an iPod with wired headphones (screw you, blue teeth!). Sporting a peach-colored hat, Selena Gomez concert tee shirt, purple shorts, and gray running sneakers, I pressed play on "Hova Song (Intro),” the opening track on Jay-Z’s Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter. Many walks are accompanied by hip-hop, but today’s choices purposely continued the morning’s desire to laud melanin-heavy musicians.

During a polite if abrupt detour into the street to avoid stepping on the freshly paved driveway of the house nearest to the Annex, I had dinner on my mind. Sue and I had recently scored baby bok choy from two tiny, elderly Chinese ladies at a farmers’ market in Amherst, which yielded one of the best dishes I’d cooked in ages: bok choy, broccoli, vegan sausage, and garlic seasoned with red pepper flakes, coriander, chives, and ginger mixed with Thai basil-infused brown rice and coated in a sauce consisting of olive oil, lemon juice, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, sesame seeds, brown sugar, and chili crisp. Upon ecstatically securing more bok choy—hold the baby (no, thank you)—over the weekend, I couldn’t resist making a fresh batch, but began cracking up at the thought of an anecdote Moore had relayed that left me cry-laughing so hard it awoke Mo the Cat soundly sleeping in my lap as I read it.

“There was an inmate here in 2010 they used to call Billy Bok Choy. Fat mess of a white/Asian dude, farted all the time. Ripped one in the cube, so Pete punched him in the stomach so hard he shit his pants. A week or so later, Billy Bok Choy got packed up. Not before Pete wiped his ass with Billy’s pillowcase and shoved it back in his property.”

How could I eat such deliciousness again, a dish I’d named Bok Choy Billy, without pouring the sauce in the defecator’s honor? When visiting Moore a week ago, he also detailed a story about a man at a nearishby strip club who wanted to view the, well, goods, but insisted on simultaneously enjoying a sandwich. “It was a real Sophie’s Choice about where he’d get his roast beef,” I said to Moore and his cousin, Jamie, who was visiting with me, both laughing loud enough to momentarily halt other conversations in the room. Moral of the story: a roast beef and bok choy sandwich is now known as a Prison Streep. Best cheese on labia? Head cheese. You can close your browser now.

Upon eyeing Smirnoff Vanilla and Fireball nip bottles, now more pervasive than extinguished cigarettes as environmental detritus goes, I rapped the line “Thug nigga till the end, tell a friend, bitch,” and began a debate I’ve had with myself countless times: If the n-word (hard r or not) is included in a song, why do the creators request that all non-black listeners not repeat it aloud? Kendrick Lamar infamously made a spectacle of a white female concertgoer, inviting her on-stage to rap along with him prior to chiding her for repeating a word that even Richard Pryor himself stopped saying following a visit to Africa. This is a simple position: if you include something in your art but don’t want certain folks to repeat it…don’t include it in your art! Imagine if the lyric booklet was censored? The last thing we need is the equivalent of book banning (or burning) in music. Music masking? Forget it, I don’t wanna see such a term surface.

Beside a vacant lot, I watched two Asplundh employees removing branches from an overgrown tree. One man did the cutting while the other “observed,” or talked on his cellphone and puffed on a vape pen. Unaware of the company beyond its unfortunate name, I learned that the plundherers of as(s) netted almost five billion in revenue in 2021! Hell, in 1990 they acquired a company named B&J, and at the rate they’re going, their logo is soon to be switched to a pussy willow and titmouse. As far as toilet humor is concerned, my mother recently revealed that my father used to call me Cooter when I was a baby, mainly because they watched America’s Most Wanted and John Walsh’s son Adam was known by the moniker. What I’m getting at is: The Cooter spying on Asplundherers is not the Juneteenth anecdote anyone will be telling his/her/their children, but it’s a potential Brazzers threesome origin story, no question.

A fat, shirtless man on a bicycle blithely pedaled by as I regarded a pillowy mound of mashed potatoes better known as a cloud formation in the sky. “Could acid rain look like gravy?” I thought to myself until snarling at two plastic-wrapped, decaying newspapers at the foot of a driveway. How onerous is it to either bring them inside or deposit them in the recycle bin? Or maybe Gen Z residents don’t know what’s black and white and re(a)d all over, leaving them too terrified to touch folded physical information? Betcha dug that grade school keeper, huh? Perhaps digesting the goat cheese and mushroom croissant plus blueberries from lunch was making me grumpy.

Nearing the nursery where Sue taps the timepiece (she simply will not punch anything, clocks included), a planned detour to say hello while continuing the walk by moving in rectangles around the property with her, sits a house with a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN flag occupying the garage wall. The middle-aged white man who I assume proudly admires it daily was washing the tires on his truck with his helpful offspring as I tried, once again in vain, to conjure the perfect zinger to yell while strolling by from the opposite side of the street. Would “Declassify my balls in your mouth!” be too much? Was “Hang Mike Pence but frame him first!” too cerebral? How about “January 6th makes 9/11 gay”? At last, I resisted muttering, “I bet Melania named him Baron so Fat Retard knew her vagina was off limits going forward.” Make America Great Against the Law, Grain, & Wind. What. Better luck next time, Me.

The smell of laundry in a dryer perked me up, or was that just my boxer shorts digging into my thighs? Here was the (almost) halfway point of my walk: the petunia-decorated entrance to the nursery. In search of Sue, I waved to her co-worker, Kelly, in the distance, complimenting how comfortable she looked in a straw hat and long sleeves to protect her freckled skin from her ultraviolet nemesis. Sue approached from my right in a pink-and-blue ensemble: pink hat with blue beads, blue tank top beneath her gray work tank top (conveniently with blue lettering), pink-and-blue socks, pink Crocs, endless color-coded pink and/or blue bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, plus a blue barrette near the base of her head along with flashy pink-and-blue shorts she’d grabbed at Goodwill a few months back. It’s been sixteen years and change, but she still surprises me with her commitment to colors. (Will it be sixteen more years before she shows such commitment to organizing her fridge?!) When Sue revealed to Kelly how she keeps a running list of what she’s worn to work as a method to avoid repetition, I was downright shocked at how easily she’d given up the ghost, typically one area where her (conveniently but strategically pink-and-blue-painted) poker face is immovable.

I called back a meme I’d texted Sue the previous night about how the banana no longer works as a stand-in for a phone; the memer nominated an ice cream sandwich to replicate a cellphone, a sad but realistic reminder that nothing yellow can stay. Stubbornly clinging to my banAndroid, I asked Sue about the pretty flowers she was replenishing (geraniums), disclosed that Gwen Stefani had announced a concert in Anaheim (“She’s got a new single out!” her biggest Sueperfan replied), and informed her that mangoes were on sale for forty-nine cents apiece at one of the two grocery stores we both often frequent. “An old lady next to me said that sometimes their mangoes are sour, but I don’t recall eating a sour mango, ever,” I said as Sue quickly furrowed her brow in agreement. After our fourth loop—when Sue disclosed that a customer named Linda Susan had returned to chat with her, regularly worrying that The Management were silently scrutinizing them—I, too, feared my time was up, but not before complaining about the uneventful final round of yesterday’s U.S. Open, the milquetoast El Lay crowd and Rickie Fowler’s inevitable bed-shitting two particular sticking (and stinking) points. Seeing a dreadlocked kid in all black, specifically a Judas Priest shirt, provided the upbeat ending we always seem to land on.

“Is that an overturned elephant or donkey?” I pondered about the stuffed animal behind the windshield of a parked truck until the most pleasurable flute sound I know hit my ears. It’s big pimpin’, baby! “Go read a book, you illiterate son of a bitch / And step up your vocab!” will forever be an all-time hip-hop couplet as Bun B promotes literacy amidst detailing the art of whoremongering. As I echoed Pimp C’s reminiscences of hollering at broads at the mall, a black sedan with an IMNOTOK custom plate exited the skate park parking lot where I usually stop to use the sole porta potty stationed on my walk. (Luckily, I used one at the nursery after hugging Sue hello.) What a plate choice. Safe to assume DIESOON, KILLME2, and LIFESUX were taken.

Once I reach the Family Dollar parking lot, the three-mile marker halfway point, I begin my loop back, this time waving as two teens on bikes blasting music zipped by unwilling to acknowledge my friendliness. Not long thereafter, I swallowed my saliva down the wrong pipe and had a coughing fit beside the cape house where I occasionally see a fit brunette woman in skintight jogging clothes watering her lawn, unsure why she didn’t emerge to show me how to properly dispose of the fluid in my mouth. “You really went to such lengths to set up that joke?” Uh, are you new here? The Jay-Z album ended, and I selected The-Dream’s first album, clearly obsessed with music released by African American artists with hyphenated handles. Was I trying to make Juneteenth more about me? No comment.

“Shawty is Da Shit” played as I remembered how my co-worker Hillary once asked what I was jamming in my cubicle. As she took off my headphones three-plus minutes later, she told me, “I would’ve never guessed this is what you listen to,” and when I burned her a few Dream CDs, she confessed that for a month straight she kept “Shawty is Da Shit” on repeat to and from work (a twenty-minute drive). “Did you notice that Sugar Honey Iced Tea spells out how Shawty is a da S.H.I.T.?” she asked me while, I assume, planning her Terius Nash thesis paper. There’s something unforgettable about turning people on to music they love, a mutual obsession full of pure unity.

Tucking my towel into my shirt to function as the most useless neck pillow ever designed, I glimpsed Print Shop Road, a strip of tar dedicated to being open, honest, and direct. Does that mean I should live on I Draw My Shades Prior to Opening YouJizz.com in a Private Browser Six* Nights Per Week Drive? Despite my run of seeing a few does at the clearing of the woods opposite one of the many companies operating on Oughta Be Industrial Park Boulevard, my luck was up, but I smiled as a lonely bird sat on the electrical wire running overhead, singing a snippet of Leonard Cohen in tribute while The-Dream compared his girl to a fast car.

Chuckling to myself while I viewed a couple obstinately tall natives, or Sue’s nickname for “weeds,” poking through sidewalk cracks, I locked eyes with a pensive rabbit chomping away at the tree farm where they tend to hang out. A teenager blazed down the strip in a white Kia as The-Dream detailed a thong “chuh-chuh-chuh-chewin’ on her asshole,” keeping Shawty’s shit at bay. Towering, dark maples stood opposite a dirt-filled field where tobacco had begun to sprout, soon to be sucked on by cigar lovers everywhere. I’m surprised every year when I recall how fertile the tobacco fields in my hometown are. Do I have ADHD or am I simply smitten with new stimuli no matter how familiar my surroundings may be? [Redacted.]

As I spotted the shaded sanguine scooter in the distance, I imagined the container of ripe, bulbous strawberries I would be carefully procuring after my walk. Sue had rustled around in her wallet during my stop, flipping through the same three singles and a Hamilton while I watched, me ultimately saying, “Just loan me the tenner, Silly!” since I preferred to give cash to the local farm where I occasionally buy produce, pies, and/or pickles. I wondered what team led in the Tennessee/Stanford College World Series game currently airing, grateful Teenage Me couldn’t witness my disregard for an idiosyncratic event I would’ve never foreseen myself ceasing to passionately care about. Two Decades Ago Me—why the sudden nickname change?—also would’ve been repulsed that I skipped the game to walk in the heat, but contrary to what They tell us, people are capable of change. I’m with you: who was my target there?

I unlocked the car, paused my iPod, and grabbed the water bottle placed on the floor to ensure it stayed as chilled as possible while my mini cooler rested comfortably at home in the basement. Hoping cantaloupe would join strawberries in my receipt total shortly, I extracted my phone from the middle console and walked away from the road to call my grandmother beside a locked green shed-like structure where book donations are accepted. It was an atypical ending to the six-mile hike, but this piece didn’t get its punny title for no reason, did it? I unlocked my Chiquita and dialed Constance.

Then I sat down.