I want to thank you for taking the time to visit me and the display of works I have chosen to share with you all. It means the world to me that you’re here, I hope you enjoy what I am constantly working to refine and revise.

As so many of us were, I was basked in the now quizzical days of saying pledges every morning, learning five militant songs appropriate for not only Independence Day, but Flag Day and Memorial Day and Veteran’s day as well. It is odd to think how that was interlaced with teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and the writings of Anne Frank.

Once, when I was quite young, a Holocaust exhibit was erected within the newly built theater building at the local high school. As collective Grades, we were bussed to the site, ordered off and into neat lines, then marched through a series of darkened, tunnel-like exhibits walled in the most atrocious horror ever visited upon society. At the time, I might have almost certainly been too young for some of the content on display - certain aspects remain foggier than others - but it left an unmistakable stain on my consciousness which even today I think on on occasion. What we were assured of was that justice had been done for the victims and survivors.

That was the most important lesson, I think. Justice must and will be done. A guarantee built on the bedrock of bombs still finding their way to the surface a near-century later. The allies? Delivered justice and freedom and liberty to Europe at-large. Granting them the honor of their own emancipation from tyranny with the landmark Nuremberg Trials. A neat bow presented, a perfect perspective delivered.

The perspectives of the few Black voices we were given in American History classes were harder to deliver with such closure for a youth steeped in what was just the seedling of booming Black™ cultural capture across the Western world. The sanitized words of Martin Luther King Jr. fell flat in a world generating stacks of profit off the traumas of Black American experience and history.

Justice, it seemed, was nuanced.

The history and standards of my own disparate family largely mirrored that of the ideal US citizen. Split across the country by time and circumstance, seeing one another required hours of driving and weeks of planning for working parents. Nonetheless, we did just that when we could. Some come from share-cropper stock, my grandad and his father lived the genuine mid-century experience of running a small family trucking company which, while short-lived, left a longitudinal and geographic memory of my forebears in our values of equality, opportunity, and hard work applied.

As I got older, it became clear that justice was not only nuanced, it could be selective and arbitrary, violent and senseless.

A high school dropout, I decided to get a degree a bit later than the average university freshman and while that came with some extra baggage, the prior life/work experience proved invaluable in applying the lessons of the insular college environment to the real world events unfolding around me at that time. Upon the murder of a man by police for no other reason than being a blight in the view of some house in the foothills, the constitutional law book in my hands turned to lead.

Today, I’m a nobody. Just a guy who likes to talk to my friends and family, enjoys a good book or bit of theory, and has chosen to keep a sort of journal-exhibit here. To those who are so kind as to read and support my work by either chatting, sharing, or even donating: I can’t thank you enough!

See you, space cowboy!