Cobb: George Is Your Friend

April 28, 2003

George Is Your Friend

As you may have surmised, I am going through a rather tender period on the matter of friends. I have underestimated the emotional impact of simple statements like 'George is your friend'. It really made my day. In fact, I owe quite a bit to George for a number of reasons I don't believe I've said out loud.

The first thing has to do with my blogroll. I have categorized them into chunks, one of which is 'Existential' which is short for 'Existential Partners'. When I moved to NYC back in 1991 it was quite a shock for a socialite of my standing in Los Angeles to lose all credibility. For the first time in my adult life, I didn't have a built-in audience. I would go to clubs and there would be nobody there I already knew. It seems silly upon retrospect, but it was quite a revelation at the time. My whole LA buppie clique, even though I dissed them for the afrocentrics and the dreads, was nowhere to be found. I had no reputation with party promoters, no clout with bouncers, and even my shoes were wrong. That was part of the problem.

The other part of the problem was, having a well-paying slightly sub-professional job, I was bohemian. Or more properly, boho. If you were one of the people who read Nelson George's book, you know exactly what I'm talking about. To be more precise I was a bap gone boho. I was writing poetry for the underground slam scene, writing software for a Fortune 50 corporation, and writing as one of the first 5 blacks on the Well, not to mention panix.com. It was a terribly alienating experience, especially considering that I wasn't happy with any of that. I was trying to connect with an emergent black literary scene in NYC that really actually wasn't happening. Most importantly I was trying to find my perfect woman. She turned out to be Zadie Smith, although it might have been Suzan Lori-Parks or Lisa Jones.

So at this particular time in my life, it was extraordinarily important to present the proper identity. What I needed was the safety of a clique of people who could keep me sharp in the ways and means of a bap/boho representing the next wave of black cultural production. I needed existential partners: folks I could count on to laugh at jokes about Ousmane Sembene. People who would jump at the chance to go hang out with Gina Dent at the Studio Museum. People who weren't overwhelmed at the talent and significance of Terry McMillan. In fact, to be a real partner, you had to reserve a certain level of contempt for Terry McWriter. But also people with a sense of humor about it all, who wouldn't be above cruising chicks at Audre Lorde's funeral.

I never met my existential partners - the NYC black writers collective I imagined as The Wigs or the Tribe of Gorgik. I endured a series of near misses, failures of nerve, mind numbing frustrations, commercial hack hateration and increasingly debilitating alienation; you know typical poet stuff. Fortunately for me I was rescued from that alien world by my wife and children who took me off the path of unsustainable righteousness. Nevertheless as I continued my writing projects in cyberspace, the idea continued.

I should say that two of my best friends ever, I did meet in cyberspace, and they have a lot more in common with my bap side than my boho side. Charles and Kenny are men I wouldn't want my son to grow up to be because then he'd be too much like me. Other than the fact that they owe me money, they're as good a friend as I could hope for. But I never see either of them on a regular basis, they're just out there in cyberspace, and like most people as obscenely geeky as I am, they are unmarried and without children.

Then there is George. Someone whose writing I admire and whose coolness is beyond question. A man with a conscience as persnickety as mine and certainly better taste. The man who blogged 100 posts in 24 hours and still kept coming up with interesting things to say. He has the discipline of the writer I sometimes attempt to be, and he walked right up to my website and offered his friendship. Just like that. In fact, he said he had been reading me since my very beginnings online. I am humbled by his attention, and then reinvigorated. In many ways he is the existential partner I was hoping to clique up with in Brooklyn back in 1991. But it's too late to cruise Audre's funeral and I got kids who watch Scoobie Doo the Movie.

So even though it was mediated by some beta software, the impact of 'George is your friend' was not wasted on me. It's almost as good as 'What are you wearing?'

Posted by mbowen at April 28, 2003 08:15 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.visioncircle.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/64

Comments

Thank you.

Posted by: George at May 1, 2003 03:50 AM