Forget the bickering, back-and-forth and ballot measures. What we’re now doing — and I use “we” to mean whomever accesses city coffers or pulls capital and/or operating budget purse strings — is putting the streetcar before public good and public interest.

Politicians here are like helicopter parents, mishandling the city in the same blatantly narcissistic manner as parents who bear children for the sole purposes of shaping those children in their images.

It makes me sad, angry and bewildered every time I see a black person littering, just blatantly tossing down with impunity and careless disregard for their surroundings the remnants of their ghetto diets and their ghetto lifestyles

At the end of past spring classes I’d spend weeks in a thick-headed fog, obsessing over the state of America’s education system; I was confused by our simultaneous political demonization of China and our dependence on Chinese students to grow and improve our science and technology departments. Wow, I used to think. Then in spring 2009 — after three years of teaching it — I realized how piously I had been thinking.

The only movie I can clearly recall seeing on the West Side screen is Lady Sings the Blues in 1972. My parents were finally splitting up the same year that movie came out and I took to the darkness in movie theaters from that point on as my own private Idaho of insular thinking, mourning and disappearance. Darkness: visible.

I’d pay to see a lineup of all the children and grandchildren of right-wingers — especially those directly responsible for legally shoving their definitions of “family” down all our throats — all come out publicly in a public square. I bet there are a shit-ton of ’em.

Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati’s Black Pearl Sings! is a play come as a warning shot foretelling the modern-day recording industry (such as it is) and its sad history of theft by corporate henchmen. More obviously and tellingly, the play is also a dance of race relations, race politics and the sometimes heartbreaking history of relationships between black and white women.

 What work ethic I have — especially the stamina and energy to plow through until the end — I got from her. Our mother never stopped. My three blood siblings and the four stepchildren she raised can all attest to the fact that she never stopped parenting us.

LaSalle High School is in denial about its drug problem. Anytime students stupidly decide to trick an armed drug dealer with counterfeit money, all kinds of socioeconomic and chemical problems are in play beyond the pranksterism and tomfoolery of bored white teenage boys.

 Every single time Carol and Clyde or Rob and Cammy blankly read the teleprompter, telling us of yet another black-on-black murder, then move to the weather or traffic, I sit quietly devastated. I am not ashamed to tell you that sometimes I cry.

 Though Norwood is merely five miles north of downtown’s city center, it may as well be smack dab in another time and another place with its barely-there lane lines, its shameful-but-glaring classism and racism for a city its size and its perpetually broke and broke-down demeanor.

There was trouble at the University of Cincinnati the night of Aug. 6, 2011.

Real, life-and-death trouble.

 We can wake up and be poor, under-educated and -employed, invisible during the “conversation” around representation in the rarified air in corporations, education, sports management and ownership. Meantime, we’re constantly being objectified.

It’s 2013 already. The rate at which calendar pages blow past means there’s not enough time to school you on the ever titillating suffixal differences — which are also cultural and racial — between the -er and the -a. White folks want to say the word soooo badly it’s funny. 

I am a compulsive list-maker. I keep the calendars that kept the appointments, lists and abandoned ideas from years gone by.

The end is an equation with a repeating decimal. Worse yet, the end is like spending decades watching a television stuck on a channel broadcasting shows with dreadful, predictable endings, yet living another day to watch those same shows again.

There is a profoundly false sense of security not only on the campus of the University of Cincinnati but also surrounding it, and this isn’t anything new.

 Even Christopher Smitherman and Christopher Finney must roll over in the middle of the night in the strange bed they share and look at one another and wonder: How the hell’d this happen