All my heroes are dead.

I’m naked so I’m not going to VLog. I don’t want to go put clothes on. And I’m boring tonight.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the "dangerous" north part of St. Louis this week, installing and repairing service for people I’d never know otherwise. Some good people there, up north. People scared of each other, yet they still live there because they feel they aren’t welcome anywhere else. I see why African-American stereotypes are perpetuated by isolationism.

One woman in particular inspired me quite a bit. She lived in a nine-room house, more a mansion than house really, on a block of eighteen room homes. Yet the windows were covered in delicately hammered wrought-iron, a reminder that none of her possessions are safe. I thought where I lived was iffy. No. I don’t have bars on my windows. Yet she was nearly fifty, vegan, vegetarian, and in great shape. I dare say she was an attractive woman. We spoke at length of everything from politics to gardening to thieving on the block to the abandoned house next door and IT and all the things in-between. She talked about how run-down everything was, how broken the block had become. Nobody cleaned up after themselves.

I notice a pattern in how people up north live: a smattering of stuff in rooms that don’t fit. square rugs in circle rooms, chairs and couches in dining rooms, shelves of stuff, beds in the family room. Beds beside beds divided by freestanding doors. Dark, low light. Poorly lit. And then, complex patterns in the weave of the window shades, in the bedsheets, in the paintings and clothing. Not necessarily bright. But garishly complex. I wonder how much of it is the culture, and how much of it is the ancestral memory.

I told her about Baraka, the movie, and Samsara, both made by the same director. She started watching Samsara on Netflix before I even finished the work.

I found a small vase, down the street, full of car keys. Seemingly discarded and ignored by the twenty or so passersby I saw while doing paperwork. She said the neighbors never waved. She said, "we don’t respect each other. How should we be expected to do anything with the greater community?" Windows to a culture I’ll never know.

The next repair was a woman who unlocked four sets of deadbolts to let me in, then four more to let me in the back door, and she talked about gardening, and what a wonderful young man I was. While the neighbors screamed and threw beer bottles at each other in the street, brand new honda van double parked in the middle of the street getting the brunt of the violence. All dented up. "Hush and come in, now," she said, locking her doors behind her, "they don’t bother me none, but I don’t want to be embarrassed to show a guest around my neighborhood."

And my White Man friends make fun of colored skin on Facebook, sometimes, and my cousins call me "too liberal" to handle Texas (when they were kicked out of Missouri for being too racist). I don’t get my own people.

America is a country of mutts. There is no native culture here, save the touristy Native American stuff, and the deep, stone-saturated religion that will never leave the land. We murdered our fathers for the sake of our relatives across the lake, and here we stand and beat our chests saying, "We’re America. We aren’t Muslim. We aren’t terrorists. We are the greatest nation of… Americans. Get those Illegals off our land."

I nearly weep for the ignorance. And by weep, I mean scream, "Vampire Potter, you Motherfucker!"

Sorry. I just read some particularly bad Harry Potter Vampire Fanfic.

I like people. Consequently, people don’t impress me. Now that Bethany’s gone, I have no role model, and that’s strange. Nobody to look up to.

All my heroes are dead. I guess it’s time to grow up.