WHEN A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE

Antique Coffee Grinder Circa 1900

A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE AS SERVED IN THE MAN-CAVE: 

A Taste For Bitter Rethinks A Sweet-Coffee Culture…

Antique Cigar Vending Machine Cica 1890

Whilst enjoying the morning and my coffee the serenity of my garden and the heady smoke of my cigar whirling about me moved me to contemplate the gentlemanly virtues of coffee. And having to ask myself what exactly that might mean how I might quantify and embody each manly ground became its own self-prophesized answer. So I ran with it enjoying how handsomely  the flora, the coffee and the cigar welcomed me into the new day… it was kismet. I listened as is my habit while the morning waxed… the industrial bustle which quickly began to overrun the outside-world was still buffered by my quiet little street and of course by my little garden. The only clamour was that of the many animals and insects awakening all around me. By these I mean the bees, the birds, the crickets and grasshoppers, the spiders,  mantises and the ants… all of them getting it in early as is their custom... In my garden little else goes on save the incessant weeding, raking and pruning, planting and such including the pollinating, feeding, playing and mating of the thousands of critters populating every corner. The garden finite as it is… remains quite a realm of its own. The insects, animals and I have learned to quietly share its small boundaries.  They tolerate me in our little garden unaware perhaps of how I have slowly designed and built its handsomely-vegetated world just for them. It is a home to all of us… and a refuge too... My coffee and cigar are but incidental ornaments in the landscape… transient modifiers of my own garden-self… seasoning the lens through which I experience it at different times of the night and day... Likewise, my garden and its inhabitants creatures and plants alike who remain there in my absence must surely wonder at my comings and goings and I wonder if they remark of my prudent pufferations! The term “pufferation” is the most gentlemanly coinage of a locally famous cigar aficionado by the name of Van Landingham. It immediately struck me as the personification of the entire experience of inhaling, exhaling and the olfactory enjoyment of a fine cigars bouquet and smoke-aroma.

Antique Coffee/Spice Grinder Circa 1790

You might say I created a garden for critters, coffee and cigars but it was not originally conceived that way. That is how things turned out. I built the garden as a meditative space. It was intended to force the eye to look inward excluding the outside. So I moved forward evolving it as an ornamental garden intended to evoke the soul as a contemplative place, somewhere to escape the rat-race of the world… someplace to relax. Fewer twenty-first century men have or seek such places and many who do underutilize them. So I’ve kept my garden as an active landscape year round… no less full of color and life in winter than in summer. It is intended to be a place for contemplative resolve.

Antique Mahogany Cigar Vending Machine Late 1800's 

I only drink coffee and smoke my cigar or tobacco pipe when I have time to relax. These pastimes define a special place in my day and psyche. Over the course of time my garden included places where I could enjoy coffee and cigars. Both have an earthy bitterness… (my coffee and my cigar ), and a manliness that makes my DNA whistle and humm because it is an extension of what you might call “man-cave realness”. That is to say when a gentleman such as me takes his coffee the experience speaks from the depths of his manhood. So I  opine on coffee this morning hoping to convey something of solid relevance to the men who read my writings. It is not such a tall glass to fill and I intend to flood the entire vessel. The whole point is to celebrate manhood by exploring its many rivers. By mapping them right down to the smallest water molecule and pebble. I welcome you to travel with me along this small rivulet so feel free to light up your cigar, pour a coffee, a draught of whiskey… a spirit of choice and let us gentlemen proceed…

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1850

Thankfully there are still men who quietly understand and enjoy being men and who continue to cultivate the gentlemanly arts. It is healthy to define ones manhood as “other than" womanhood. All the more reason why men need time to just do man-stuff, to think and say man-things, to inflect their entire psychical experience and explicate it in the vernacular of manliness. Gentlemen of these times will be challenged to rethink the culture of masculinity on every level and that may be a very good thing indeed because I am certain it is long overdue topic to be rethought. I like to periodically  cut away the fluff and get down to the nitty-gritty. Manhood can be obscured by a plethora of decorative themes. A gentleman understands where manhood truly begins and ends. He does not parade mahood as a symbolic statement… but exudes it as a comfortably intrinsic energy… what we see (or imagine that we see) is flux. For those men who like myself truly enjoy the art of being a man nothing about manhood can be too deep or taboo to explore. This means that nothing is too sacred to be revised or discarded. After all being proper gentlemen is what we do so it must be correct! Interestingly the evolving culture of cigars and even coffee have radically redefined long-established mores and folkways associated with manliness. Twenty-first century men who cultivate the gentlemanly arts must contemplate them however arbitrary or trite they may appear. There will always be some cultural backlash  from men poised to resist natural change. But let us ask if it is ethical to perpetuate a genuinely obsolete version of gender-specific culture. And let us consider the wisdom and prudence of resistance in todays obsessively paranoid and myopic world? There are those happy and care-free times when men may socialize alone and with the blessings of our womenfolk. O' the hythe of the gentleman’s coffee and cigar lounge which may never be his alone! Indeed, I believe there is judicial tolerance for the man cave. We gentlemen have a unique and civilised set of folkways with which to smoke our tobacco pipes, take coffee, smoke cigars, converse, etc., and there is certainly room enough in this wide world to celebrate those traditions amidst those of our kind... that is the menfolk…

Antique Wall-Mounted Coffee Grinder Circa 1890

Coffee is an ancient libation the root traditions of which have spread from Ethiopia to every corner of the planet. However, in the late twentieth-century many American men have orphaned coffee taken black or with plain cream adopting a heavily marketed litter of artificially sweetened and  modified designer coffees. It could be argued that the gentrification of coffee was in fact a feminization of whatever manly virtues it may have been believed to possess but that argument is not for me to undertake. I should be remiss to ignore it. I just like strong, bitter coffee and that is what I intend to discuss. Gone are the days of the clear, watery stuff found lurking in an institutional pyrex beaker… or the thick, black acidic brew of the espresso machine. America has re-invented those primeval draughts I lovingly called coffee and I think with no semblance to its former self save in name. But what exactly did and does this mean within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American culture and more specifically how might it have impacted the gentlemanly arts? Coffee has become nothing  less than an entire social movement and it seems that I had reached that conclusion some 30 years ago. Looking back now and forward again I find clear confirmation. I can say with complete confidence that I prefer coffee as it was; simple, clean, rustically manly and uncomplicated.

Antique Coffee Grinder 

Having planted that seed I digress now because I must… because every great storyteller does so in order to give his story something of a soul…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Three decades ago I was just beginning to seriously explore traditional southern Black American cuisine. It was a bittersweet revelation. Ironically while soul food evolved as a direct product of oppression its reprise has always been its undeniably good taste. Soul Food fueled the hearts of folk who learned to cook with what little they were given combined with what the earth freely afforded, what others did not want, or did not want to know about… That was the culinary science I sought to master. I learned that real soul food  was not vegan, not gluten free and not militantly vegetarian, anti-pork and anti-beef. It was none of those things.  Soul food was about survival! It taught the lesson that something intended or expected to be distasteful, (actually and ideologically), could be made good… I discovered a culinary tradition that many modern Black Americans increasingly frowned upon rather than preserve as a sacred rite of passage. The point being that as with soul food in order to truly understand the nature of coffee I had to divest of its politicizations and prettifications going directly to its source.

Antique Coffee Bean Roaster

Coffee will probably never be the same as it was because it is no longer just about the redeeming qualities of a burnt and boiled bean. Americans did not know in the late 1990’s that they were watching the last essence of twentieth-century culture evanesce… it was the end of an era of rustic coffee and perhaps of soul food too…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

I watched the transmogrification of coffee from a bitter but practical, morning or late-night concoction to a frothy, sugary libation scarcely resembling the thing it had been. It was the victim of the infamous postmodern genre, “The Makeover”!. Had I known I should have emerged therewith as the self-proclaimed high priest and savior of the venerable brew. My followers would cultivate the arts of coffeeism elevating it to a gentlemanly art form adapted to cure the manic pace of modernity. Coffee served at the altar of my virtually-conceived  chapel of earthly culinary delights would be dark, heavy, bitter, pleasantly nutty and marvelously acidic. Votaries of the coffee bean coffeeists practicing coffeeism would either consume it in its raw visceral form perhaps with chicory or cleverly cut with a rich, decadent dose of heavy dairy cream. My followers and I should have then saved the rustic manliness of coffee from an unseemly decoration.  For to sweeten the masculine earthiness of a strong, aromatic brew (other than with half a cube of sugar) is in my opinion…. sheer culinary villainy! I say this without malice, with an understanding towards change but a fealty to simplicity.

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1840

 

I have always imagined coffee as a distinctly manly drink. Its dark-woodsy colour, its intensely aggressive flavour, and its density do not at all suggest anything but a truly masculine libation nearly tantamount to a beefy-dark beer save for the alcohol. I acknowledge that my attachment of masculine characteristics to a mere drink is unscientific, fanciful, completely arbitrary… an artistic interpretation licensed thereby… its intent being to explore its aesthetic attributes from a masculine persuasion…

Antique Coffee Grinder

So this article might as easily be entitled, “Serving Coffee In The Man-Cave". As a matter of fact this will be its subtitle. We gentlemen do have our own etiquette now and to redefine where lines have blurred it let it serve as a creative threshold not as a bible…

Coffee Grinder Circa 1700's

For that reason I have always aspired to perfect a coffee that is markedly over-burnt having been reduced from multiple  brewing’s for a patently robust flavour and aroma. Yes… this manly etiquette for making coffee preempts the mere consumption of coffee- flavored water or o’er-sweetened confections all of which effectively neutralize the manly taste I crave…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Burning the bean adds a distinct  smokiness as when food is grilled over an open fire or like a good full-bodied cigar. One must not be afraid to scorch the bean a second, third or sixth time as it brews for this amplifies its bitterness. In many cultures there are foods and drink beloved for their inherent bitterness and coffee happens to be one of them. If one’s point at taking coffee is to be awakened then why not shock ones consciousness into sublime wakefulness through sippings of an ancient and bitter brew.

Antique Cigar Vending Machine

Multiple brewing’s of a strong, regional cache of exquisite coffee beans enriches the flavor, by thickening its texture and amplifying its intensity. For that reason I re-brew my coffee at least 6 times using an antique percolator thereby releasing every drop of the essential oils and minerals locked into the crushed beans.

Antique Wall Mounted Coffee Grinder Late 1800's

Concentrating the essential oils of the coffee bean releases its emboldened olfaction. I cannot describe the heady sensation I get whilst inhaling that heavy, cloud of flavour that fills any room in which a proper pot of coffee is being brewed.

I raise my bitter cup of coffee to you gentlemen encouraging a revival of the ancient ways. Next time take your coffee black or with fresh, heavy dairy cream… relish each manly  draught and be redeemed!

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Written by Bigdaddy Blues

Antique Coffee Grinder

THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS A HUMAN JOURNEY TO REALITY

THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA

When I was a young collegian I was blessed with one of the most remarkable critics. I was in my first year of architectural studio and he was a seasoned, gifted architect and communicator who transformed the tedium of my freshman curriculum into a pleasurable and by virtue of this reminiscence, fondly-memorable experience. His secret was that he used vignettes of his marital trysts and trials as a metaphorical structure for comparative analysis softening the learning process with humor everyone could relate to. I wonder now how the banalities of married life and sex could have been compatible with building design and answering myself realize that life like architecture is all about solving problems. Whether his stories were real mattered less than their effectiveness as a teaching-tool… the moral being that people pay more attention to sex than anything else. Hence, we live in a culture that uses sex to convey most of its messages and as sexual entities we are none the worse for wear…

I am certain that were my old professor alive today he would not have the freedom to teach the way he did then. The intrusions and unjustified implications of a world driven by social media would crush the colorful personality of such a magnificent man… sign of the times I guess…

I was a late-comer to dating and ironically to the world of social media. Like my contemporaries I learned about the human dimension of socialization the old-fashioned way, by meeting face to face. In many ways my delayed romance with virtual reality equipped me with the ability to filter and thereby manage its innately intrusive and cryptic nature. For what it is worth I prefer the old way and like many others have discovered that both virtual and real socialization have similar dynamics. Social media has the ability to expand the ocean of possibilities and for captains of sound vessels this is wonderful news. I do not have to say that a word of caution is in order as in every situation for there are decidedly treacherous waters within the deeps and shallows of social media. It is my purpose to navigate the good waters and I believe that is the better part of social media… Like it or not men will set sail and enter this watery realm of strange and unexpected virtuality. Let us pray they will land on hospitable shores with their objectivity intact… and if prayer alone will not suffice let us employ elixirs and libations to celebrate all mankind redivivus.

Oftentimes a mans privacy is his virginity. Most men prefer keeping their private life private. Whether an instrument of control or a sanctimonious mirage it nonetheless speaks to an aspiration for virtuosity… Men are more secretive about their emotions more hesitant to explore anything intimate beyond pure and noncommittal pleasure. That being said I shall revise my statement to declare that social media has more metaphorical verisimilitude to a virtual acquaintance rather than a date and it most definitely does not approach the status of a virtual romance whatever that might be. I feel as-if a footnote should follow to explicate the suggestion poised by the last breath of the last sentence. To repeat the phase, “a virtual romance whatever that might be". My opinion of virtual dating definitely leans toward a cool subjectivity, biased in aura and decidedly suspicious. Of course, a virtual romance is precisely what it is... and there is no moral weight tipping it toward either the sacred or profane… nor any particularly neutral force balancing it in the middle. Wisely I have always imagined that I have maintained a safe-distance from the hypnotic virtuality of social media attributing my philosophical hermitage to the singular fact that fundamentally I am a realist.

Realists like me do not appreciate too much speculative uncertainty. We like to know and examine what we are dealing with the goal being to better understand our prospects for compatibility with our understanding of expected outcomes.

I might risk defining virtuality as a quality nearer to fantasy but only because virtuality possesses some of the magic of the unseen. Electricity was the great magic of the 19^th and 20^th century but today it is little more than a mis-understood service. How many that use it know how it works? I believe that the spirit upon which the internet phenomenon of the twentieth century owes itself was the brainchild of Tesla who first envisaged a virtual community (both local and cosmological) of energetic interconnectivity but in very in practical, tangible terms. Input, output, synthesis and all the glorious array of happily intermingling and attractive electrons, protons and neutrons sing his praises as an awakening force on the advent of human freedom. Cheers to Tesla who certainly would have marveled at social media for its fluid electro-magnificence! But we must also ask ourselves if he would have lugubriously sighed… well chaps there is only one fix for that so Bottums-UP!

It would be a short argument to debate the difference between virtual and real especially when it comes down to sex. Sex again? I guess it is unavoidable after all when discussing social media, so I shall chalk it up as a necessary and integral force of attraction mirroring life. How else should I hold my readers captive save with thinly-veiled, carefully placed allusions to sex? I  wonder that mundane documents such as legal papers, technical manuals and physics texts are not liberally inundated with nude, lude and lascivious pin-ups of all sexes and sexual persuasions to keep those heavy eyelids lifted.

Virtual sex can only really exist in the mind. It is a raw, conceptual bundle of possibility whilst real sex is both mental and physical. It is the bridge that separates physicality from imagination that cultivates the virtual landscape of social media preventing it from ever becoming real even though it may be experienced in real-time… the fantasy-value of social media lay in this technological anomaly. Social media in real time is truly the last human barrier to the time-space problem that caused Einstein to envisage his theory of relativity. Only when time and space can bend so that they can connect over vastitudes of existence will the fantasy of social media become reality. Now that is certainly a lid-lifter of a thought.

For the sake of intellectualism I will digress upon an Einsteinian towpath delving into the mystique of quantum physics whilst maintaining a firm grip on my glass of whiskey… (another version of the quintessential lid-lifter). In my minds-eye I have this opportunity to bedazzle my readers with a metaphysical presentation that is both sexy and heavy… if you would refresh your libation I feel as if this journey might be significantly more entertaining. So, lets immerse ourselves into the wet-world of quasi-reality contemplating a hypothetical phenomenon originally based only in the dry...

Two lovers who have been separated for seven month's kiss one another while video-chatting.  By this I mean that they begin to actually kiss the screens of their laptops so great is their longing for tactile gratification. The lovers live on different continents in real time but not in same-pace. If space, the physical element separating them could bend itself upon itself bringing them to the same place, in the same time by fusing their coordinates in time through time and space so they would be in the same physical place then they could taste each others lips and feel the heat, texture and pressure of each others embrace. The virtual-displacement of their experience of their existence, their location would be superseded bringing them together in a real-time event. It would be like throwing a crushed-paper ball from Washington, D.C. to Lagos, Nigeria in nanoseconds… Such a phenomena when it becomes possible will revolutionize the way people live and communicate on every level. For now it is just an intellectual vignette intended to titillate the imagination… much the same as sex… For the intellectual imaginative creativity is the virtual surrogate of sex.

Which is ultimately more gratifying, real or virtual sex? To answer that switch tracks to the mundane. Which is most gratifying real or virtual chocolate cake?

Is it necessary to delve into the myriad of pattern-similarities between phenomena originating in a virtual context expanding into the real by virtue of a fundamental human tendency to graduate from fantasizing virtual chocolate cake and setting out to experience a real slice?

While this theory would seem to explain the implosion of human civilisation in the twentieth century it merely matches identical scenarios sampled from every century, every era of human existence… it is one of those seemingly brilliant things which once uttered becomes vanquished by, (get a load of this image), a glamorous and husky-voiced socialite poised to slay the banter of o'er-cocktailed dilettantes. She, the femme fatale-virtual speaks in a richly calculated lilt as if talking through a mouthful of foire-gras whilst holding her billowing gold cigarette holder in the air saying in a heavy French accent,” Surely you don’t believe that nonsense dolling!” rolling her bejeweled head and neck back like a swan as she motions to the barman to fill her champagne glass held expectantly in the other hand…. as if it should have been refilled hours ago though she just swallowed the last drop…

Let us drink with her and toast to her brilliant and beguiling vituality.

At its best social media is a helpful tool possessing the innate ability to empower people on a global scale. At its worst social media mimics the most corrosive and puerile characteristics of its inventors… mankind…

In layman’s terms this means that social media can be a good date or a bad date… and from a realist's perspective the comparison pivots between a fond or unfortunate acquaintance...it’s only redeeming quality is also a haunting one rendering the phenomenon known as social media a mysteriously intangible phenomenon poised to follow and contradict human nature.  It is but really isn’t there, can you touch it or see it? It can appear or disappear in an instant, it is a totally blank canvas allowing us and everyone we think we know to become a masquerade.

This is precisely why I choose to remain grounded in the real world. The extent to which virtuality is pure fantasy is relative to context. At every turn each virtual party is forced to verify themselves against uncertain faiths. Now if you add faith and religiosity to our comparative analysis of social media and to the concept of a virtual landscape, acquaintance, date, lover, husband, wife, savior, etc. we find the possible suggestion of a virtual marriage. But a marriage to what? I suggest that social media forces a shotgun marriage to the unknown the un-verifiable. For many men this would trigger our desire for privacy and anonymity it would repel and attract us. The nonentity of social media would allow us to flirt, court, entice and consummate even to marry without any real ties, investments or consequences. The fantasy of social media appears to be a complete virtual package like a bag of chips but containing only air.

Another analogy might compare the virtual nature of social media to a popular video program where people, families and communities may be virtually manufactured only to be discarded at the end of the game. It is a uniquely modern mindset. The creativity and fragility of such a world view must demand that we carefully map our progress into the future of human social evolution…

Prior to the virtual age the nuclear age aroused mankind’s awareness of his proximity to disaster based on his misunderstanding of the nature of a divine cosmological creation. It is the idea that matters most. Evil is an unstoppable idea. The arrogance of men who play at virtual creation and decimation is way over my pay-grade… one hopes that with time mankind’s awareness of the power of the virtual will arm him with ability to replace ego with compassion. True to form, he will certainly rely on sex in order to sell the new brand of virtual humanitarianism.

Sex, marriage, consumerism and their antithesis anti-culture and anarchy all haunt the virtual landscape of social media and they are the cumulative mind-fucks of a world that is no longer grounded in reality. Social media is not evil, it is actually a marvelous invention. The iceberg of human culture we have built over the past 100,000 years far surpasses the novelty of mankind’s newest toy, social media. As such social media should be a mirror of healthy human culture inspiring men to aspire to new heights. Though I openly laugh at such optimism I also rejoice at its prospect. Life afer 56 years has taught me to shoot for the moon in order to reach the stars!

If social media were a citadel everyone would have a key or only some would have keys that worked. Who would have the working keys and how they would get them is purely a matter of consequence.

The first key to the proper use of social media is understanding and demonstrating respect for privacy and the second is demonstrating respect for human life and dignity. At the end of the day the better lesson of social media is that no matter how a man defines what is real or fantasy he can find a place where men can escape the harsh and banal circumstances of life to explore positive and fulfilling experiences from which they may bring back with them greater hopefulness for and confidence in tomorrow. This confidence is optimized by their ability to connect with other people in places meant to celebrate beauty of the human experience…

FIN

CHEERS!

Written By: BIGDADDY BLUES

A GENTLEMANLY VALENTINES DAY

Gentlemen, Bigdaddy Blues wishes you the warmest of times on this day set aside for love... I always remember this verse I wrote many Valentines Days ago and on those times when I was blessed to be in love I recited them to see if they fit.

"My heart and soul are whisked away,

By my lover his love on Valentines Day..."

This year I have written a collection of special Valentines Day poems. This is a special Valentines Day for me because I am in love again... I hope that you will take time to read through the poems and I hope they will move you to think more on love...

The collection is called "A GENTLEMANLY VALENTINE" please view it at:

http://twenty-firstcenturylove.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-gentlemanly-valentine-poems-from-2018.html

CHEERS!

BIGDADDY BLUES

ON THE NATURE OF HIM

WHEN THE RIGHT MAN COMES INTO YOUR LIFE…

A MATURE DISCUSSION

OF THE NATURE OF “HIM”

PROLOGUE: By Bigdaddy Blues

Difficult as it is to capture the emotional essence of what we believe to be true love in plain words I believe we must at least make an attempt to do so. The documentation and study of love is the most neglected science in twenty-first century culture… Love it might be argued, is practically completely ignored if not altogether mistaken for sex…

But every man who has been fortunate enough to experience the very best of both love and sex will agree they are related but otherwise remarkably different creatures in their own right…  

I do not seek to define either love or sex through poetry, that would be impossible. Love and sex are as uniquely branded as the two or more people who share in them… this means that the role of poetry is rather to document the experience. If any definition for love or sex exists it would be credible only as a purely explicative tool fashioning a virtual but esoteric model of life. A poem like a newspaper conveying a story about something someone did should pull the reader into the very soul of an event that is already past or future history.

When I write about love, and this poem is mostly about love with accessory sex… I aspire to tell the audience what I learned about love and of course sex… It is as much a training manual as it is a fanciful mirage intended to freeze my memory of something profoundly moving and inspiring… I write about love because it is always upon my mind and when it is not a dark and story reflection as in this case it can actually be quite gay… pardon the pun… most important it is the documentation of a real experience.

So what I am saying is that I enjoy the sensory dynamic of my man… spending quality time together close and intimate. Our response to one another is mutually enchanting but it is a magic based in real life practicality. In other words we are both sexually and spiritually compatible… After years of painful experimentation with appeasing the worlds opinion of our relationships we have both decided to ignore the extra-social dynamic and spend the energy previously squandered there on understanding and appreciating one another. Since we are both mature men the prospect of living out our lives together is far more poignant and the reality of both our mortality is a reality we cannot ignore… This makes our journey all the more serious and at the same time it is cause to make the ultimate concession to each other’s truths… If this is the man I think he is I look forward to growing old with him and dying with him as my last and ultimate earthly love…

HIM…

As long as my man's, ebon-skin and the many handsome parts of him,

touch me, or lay near,

i’ll be a lion basking in recumbent bliss,

adoring the aparitif-cocktailed-whispers of his vernal kiss…

Because I know the timbre of his heart,

is but the gentle stroke of a chamelion’s brush,

fond of painting a joyous landscape,

upon the strata of my soul…

composing a familiar roar twixt loves intermittent hush…

Our un-solicited program boasts a seasoned cast of volcanic affections,

erupting from the lusty ambitions we’ve molded,

into gentlemanly doses of sexual nonfiction,

each climactic episode defines a rustically masculine cinematic direction,

keen to dramatize erotic hallmarks subtly floated above evidentiary detection…

My man and I have disobeyed the worlds intrusions, so our anonymity may replace the pretense of illusion,

freed from life's circus I’ve decided to always make him smile,

Rejecting love’s burgeoning basket of promises but for his,

believing the years will martyr me for trying,

Should I live to find my peace with him… I shall rejoice in it whilst dying...

Written by BIGDADDY BLUES

THE BLUES TRADITION LIVES IN BLACK AMERICANS

Over the centuries that Black Americans have struggled to achieve equality dignity in a hostile nation the blues has continued to be a powerful vehicle for the dissemination of wisdom and consolation in the face of unimaginable adversity. It has used the lessons of love, life and spirituality to document the black man's journey here.

I often write in what I call, "Traditional Southern Black American Vernacular Dialect". which is a actually a euphemism for what some call "Slave-English". There is no shame in the art of communication. I find the many variations of TBAD to be fascinating and whenever I am fortunate enough to actually encounter someone who still speaks variations of the old-language it captures my imagination.

I have written a poem of love, a Blues Poem in Traditional Black American Vernacular Dialect" or TBAD. It is called "MAN I GOT'S THE HIDE-OUT BLUES". Please check it out at my Blog, Opening A Twentieth Century Kind Of Love:

http://twenty-firstcenturylove.blogspot.com/2017/10/man-i-got-hide-out-blues.html  

BIGDADDY BLUES

UNDERSTANDING FREEDOM...

In order to truly appreciate the struggle of our ancestors who endured enslavement in America we must mentally connect with the realness of their struggle, therein lay solutions to the current challenges facing Black Americans... 

Join me for a reflection on this phenomenon at my other Blog, "THE STORIES OF BLACK ME"

AT: http://thestoriesofblackmen.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-to-get-free.html 

SEE YOU THERE... 

BIGDADDY BLUES

VICTORIAN HIP-HOP BLUES...

Over the years my poetic and prosaic style had changed as has every prolific writer who strives to explore the phenomenon of literary expression.  I have finally found a comfortable fusion of the antique style I love with the freshness of twenty-first century literary expression and I call it Victorian Hip-Hop Blues. Please visit my blog, Opening A Twenty-First Century Kind of Love at this link...

http://twenty-firstcenturylove.blogspot.com/2017/06/soliloquy-of-after-valentine.html

 FROM: BIGDADDY BLUES