Diaspora Daze

I'm back in DC, having spent the past 2 days in recovery for the most part. I gotta say, I had the time of my life on the road these past few weeks, but I'm also slightly zonked out from all the running around.

I did make 2 attempts to try and end this journey on a raucous note. After spending Friday night with 4 Kenyan women drinking far too much champagne and dancing and singing every Michael Jackson song we could remember, I woke up late Saturday morning praying for the sweet release of death. But part of the reason I roused myself was because of the most obnoxiously loud thumping bass line I've ever heard in my entire life, emanating from the gigantoriffic-ly big speakers being used at the annual DC Caribbean Carnival, which was taking place on Georgia Avenue, about a block from where I lay moaning and groaning.

Figuring that my headache probably wouldn't ease in that enviroment, I headed out to catch a bus to the Ghana Cafe, where I would likely be one of a handful of Americans brave enough to watch the USA-Ghana World Cup Soccer Match. Buses had been re-routed because of the carnival, so I knew there'd be a wait. An hour later, in miserably humid heat, with no taxis to be found, I abandoned that plan and headed back to my hot-flash cave, aka my brother Peter's guest bedroom.

Later that night, I made one more attempt to secure public transportation, and was greeted by an elderly gent who fell in love at first sight, and spent the next hour and a half trying to persuade me to move in with him. He was actually a pretty interesting cat, a Smithsonian Institution retiree who says he used to travel a lot through South America cataloguing new animal species. The brother admitted to having a lady friend from Trinidad, but vowed to drop her like a bad habit if I just said the word.

Even though I was about to faint from the heat, I stayed there talking with him out of sheer fascination. Granted, I am closer to his age than he probably realized, so under the right circumstances, it might well have been a love connection. Say if he'd his own teeth. And several tens of millions of dollars. But OG didn't let those deficiencies stop him. I considered the encounter an anthropological expedition of sorts; what could have possibly led him to think he had a shot?

One answer was fairly obvious. He was one of those light-skinned, light-eyed brothers who you just knew was a stone cold PLAYA back in the day. If this was 40 years ago, and I had been 28 instead of 8, Lord KNOWS I might have taken the bait. But I guess I wanted to try and figure out why he was so persistent. And why that's pretty much been my fate through the years.

I am like freakin' CATNIP for old-assed men!!!!!! My goal, for the foreseeable future, is to elicit this same kind of earnest, persistent, heartfelt response from a man who has not yet formally enrolled in the Medicare program.

That encounter aside, I will say that spending time in DC has been a bit of a tonic for the ego. When many Black American men like what they see, they're not the least bit shy about letting you know it. I haven't felt this fine in ages! Kenyan men aren't as publicly aggressive about their appreciation of the feminine form. Except for the Maasai warrior who rushed me with the spear a few weeks ago, and made me seriously consider the wisdom of wearing adult diapers. Other than that, I almost feel invisible on Kenyan streets, even when I'm rocking my finest duds and looking all good, and smelling all good.

Anyway, this is quickly devolving into a erratically rambling riff, so let me try and glean some meaning from this posting. A lot of times in DC, I'm struck by how many different ways of being black there are. There's Island black, and Ethio-black, and Kenyan black, Ghanaian black, Nigerian, et al. But when you get right down to it, it's all from the same source. And even though I still feel very "alien" living in Kenya, I'll remember that whether they know it or not, I realize I'm rocking the same African flava as them.

It's a Diaspora thang, you dig?