Forward

 

C.O.V.,

Where I’m born,

Where I’m raised.

I reminisce on the days

When nobody wore braids.

 

These are the beginning lyrics to the one and only rap song that I penned as a teenager with two brothers who were my childhood friends; Demetrius and Adrian Smith. We named our rap trio Coming Out Victorious and for that summer in the early 1990’s, as we jokingly masqueraded as Kris-Kross wannabes, we abbreviated our group’s name to C.O.V., in reference to the three letter abbreviation used by the United States Postal Service for our hometown of Covington, Kentucky.

Back in the summer of 1978, as the first child born by way of in vitro fertilization was ushered into the world in Great Britain, a single mother in Newport, Kentucky was going through labor with her first child. That child would go on to live a life full of ups and downs, spurring him on to graduate high school at the age of 16, to serve in the United States military as a non-commissioned officer in the Military Intelligence branch of the United States Army, and to eventually fulfill his life’s dream of becoming an author.

​

The last four decades seem to have flown by for me. Most of my life feels as though it has been compressed, with so many life changes crowding together. In late 1989, there were three months that year that saw many world changing events take place; the end of communist power in many countries in Europe, the falling of the Berlin Wall and the United States invasion of Panama. Those of a certain age will also remember the Malta summit meeting where the presidents of the United States and Russia called for an end to the Cold War.

 

In 2016, I, like most of America, experienced a sort of temporal acceleration causing nothing less than a vertigo-induced coma. In April of that year, I found myself unemployed, contemplating a huge shift of my living situation and, feeling as though there wasn’t a place in this world for me to rest my head without feeling out of place. This, of course, was on top of how later that same year, President Trump shocked the world (and I think himself as well) by tricking the United States Electoral College to elect him as our president.  

To be sure, the things which I’ve experienced in life don't compare to the most truly interesting moments that many in this world have experienced, but like with the just-mentioned, the things that I went through rocked my core none the less.

 

In the last few years America has seen an escalation of the overall climate of terrorism, foreign and domestic, with incidences of mass killings at music festivals, elementary schools and places of worship. This, coupled with the increased killing of Black men by the hands of our law enforcement had me contemplating emigrating…seriously.

And who could forget the summer of 2016 when a gunman, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, killed 49 people and injured 53 more when he opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, at the time, the largest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

 

The refugee crisis, terror attacks, Zika, Brexit, police shootings, Syria, Trump, record-hot temperatures, the loss of Prince, David Bowie, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher are just a few other occurrences that made the last few years difficult to handle.

 

As I move closer to turning 40, I find that my tolerance for mediocrity is disappearing. It’s literally like I’ve turned a corner and I became a Black male version of Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of Joan Crawford in the film Mommy Dearest.

 

This book serves as a message. It is a compilation of the essays, blog posts and published articles I have penned since 1996. They show what was on my mind, what we need to do to fix problems and who needs to be involved in the solution, both globally and locally.

As former military intelligence noncommissioned officer, with only an associates in Korean Studies from Monterey Peninsula College, I have worked hard for my voice to be heard through print and online journals like The Covingtonian, The Anchor (Northern Kentucky University’s Black Faculty/Staff annual publication), Awesome City Magazine, Search & Employ Magazine, The River City News, Soapbox Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Encyclopedia, many of which you will find in this book. Not any big hitters there, nor can I say that my education is anything spectacular, but I do know how to do one thing...and that's LIVE!

 

Despite living openly as a gay man, both later in my military career and in my civilian life, often times I felt as though I was living the life as an invisible man as Ralph Ellison wrote about. So much so, I began to continually affirm my presence by embodying a quote made famous by the character of Celie from the motion picture The Color Purple:

“I’m poor, Black. I may even be ugly. But, dear God, I’m here. I’m here!

In 2006, to help with this affirmation, I created my own episodic blog entitled Cincinnati Namja. That’s when I became infatuated with writing. I posted the following discovery of a phenomenal compilation of work from some of my favorite authors.

​