theblackdostoyevsky

The title of this blog is a misnomer. I like it, though, from a marketing perspective. Even though my wife didn’t even know who Dostoyevsky was until I told her he’s the guy who wrote Crime and Punishment, to which she shrugged and gave that blank acknowledgement that she’d understood but didn’t want to hear any more about it. Desirous of her approval, I added, “He’s Russian.” She nodded quietly down to her planner and began again affixing stickers and jotting reminders beside them.

“It’s one of those IYKYK kinda things,” I thought.

But, yeah. A misnomer. The word “the” gives it away, immediately. If I’m “the” anything it’d simply be my first and last name following, but I tacked it in front because, heck, I gotta stand out in this veritable sea of scintillating opines and blistering ambition, right? Everybody lies and calls it marketing. Then we network those lies to others who are lying so we can trade our worthless reputations for goods worth less. But I digress. “The.”

So, if I can shine this shit up and call it gold and pray that someone broker than me tithes to my Patreon account so that I can persuade myself that I’m one step closer to the writing life, I can completely and officially abscond from ever having to interact with any of you in real life ever again and call it a career. That’s the goal. I’m kidding, of course. I don’t have a Patreon account. But by all means, if you enjoy this blog, please like and subscribe, and if enough of you follow suit, perhaps we can, together, make this reality a nightmare.

You see, it isn’t sex that sells. Audacity does. In the final estimation, it’s arrogant to broadcast publicly mysteries designed to remain private. Why should you be made subject to my internal delusions of grandeur? What right have you to the nakedness of my privately sinning soul? For what cause would I be compelled to expose my own wretchedness to the entire world? How much value is in my vanity? That’s what I’m trying to discover. We stopped selling products a long time ago. Now, we sell people. We sell images and ideas of being. How else could you explain a woman shooting poison into her fatty parts and braiding colored rope into her head and gluing spiders onto her eyelids and painting a mask over her chemically depleted face skin just to look like a whore? How else could you explain a man selling dope to the mothers of his eight children to cop a $2,000 Monte Carlo and put $20,000 worth of rims and paint on it to park in front of his mama’s Section 8 apartment, just so that he can get profiled and shot by the cops for flexing on the ave? You can’t write this stuff. Well, Donald Goines could, but only because he lived and witnessed it. Otherwise, nah. Everybody frontin’ anyways, so what’s a little three letters in front of the domain name I copped before anybody else had an imagination for it? I know niggas ain’t reading Dostoyevsky.

Second misnomer: I ain’t black, either. I’m brown. I ain’t never seen a black person in all my life. But I done seen lots of brown ones, of different shades. Some looked nearly black, I can’t lie, but still brown. So already, black’s a lie. And besides, there ain’t no Jew or Greek in Christ (and now all of my Christian family are judging me for cussing earlier. Father, I confess, I got carried away.). Neither is there slave, nor free, nor Barbarian, nor Desi, nor Latinx, nor however else you wanna identify, in Him. And I like it better that way.

“Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?”

Nobody who identifies themself after the flesh, that’s for sure. I don’t trust none of y’all. No offense. You’ll probably be offended, anyways. And if so, this paragraph is gonna sting. I don’t care what color your skin or the blood type beneath it. If you aren’t born again by water and the spirit, we can’t rock. Ain’t no blood thicker than the water of baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We can be on the same team, be family, if you repent and come over to this side, but that’s it. Jesus said, “He who doesn’t gather with me scatters.” I’m gathering with Him. All the rest of y’all’s allegiances and loyalties and pledges and oaths and rallies and committees and denominations and ethnicities and lodges and parties and memberships and companies and organizations and tax brackets and bloodlines and secret societies and patriotisms ain’t got nothing to do with me. I don’t claim anything but citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven, where I’m seated with Christ, with the rest of His body. That’s my family. The rest of that is for the birds. But don’t worry, He makes sure they get fed, too. It’s the goodness of God that leads us to repentance. But I digress, again.

This is an old saying but still true: I’ve been burned by as many dark-skinned as light-skinned. Sin don’t care the skin you’re in if you ain’t yet dead to it by the work of Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior of all the earth, on the cross. May you find Him now. And where He is, you’ll find me also, with a face so bright I ain’t even got a skin color. So yeah, “black” is a misnomer.

And finally, and most obviously, I’m not Dostoyevsky. I’m not even Russian. I’m not even Asian. I’m not even some distant descendant of his. I have no Russian anywhere in my blood. My American ancestors’ slave masters were mostly Irish. The only remotely Asian blood in my veins is Near Eastern, but that’s a whole nother conversation. Remember, though, no loyalties after the flesh. Wink.

But not being Russian isn’t the reason “Dostoyevsky” in my domain is a misnomer. It’s because, and I find this difficult to explain, it feels impossible to maintain thought on the level he did, anymore. Modern society has fried and is frying my brain. I can’t hold a thought in my head as long as I could ten years ago, today. I can still recall being able to lay on my back in an empty room and construct entire stories, treatises, arguments, scenes and polemics in my mind, while staring at the circling ceiling fan, and hold them there. I recall being able to pull them up in relevant conversation and run ’em off like Shakespearean soliloquies. Speaking of Shakespeare, twenty years ago I could still sit with a single scene of dialogue for an hour and mentally pass through and discard each level of internal, petty sophistry, descending the same spiritual staircase as the man himself must have once, twice, ten thousand times walked down within his own soul, and locate the seed of truth and suffering as it rolled off the paper tongues of imagined men in earthen vessels, warring with eternity. I can’t do that anymore.

Too much dopamine. My tolerance for the drug has skied so high that I didn’t cry at the birth of any of my children. Only my spirit felt joy, but my soul was numb. I’d needed a shot of whiskey, if you wanted tears. And a toke, no lie. But that was then; I’m sober now. Off an on for the past seven, eight years, so don’t go clapping for me. I don’t deserve it. And still, I don’t feel feelings like a used to. Not the good ones anyways. The ill ones still come with force, so much so that they paralyze me from time to time. Anxiety, I know well, but I’m not even sure that’s an emotion. More like a glitch, like Miles Morales outside of his dimension. That’s why I don’t like being around people. They’ve got a tendency to aggravate that malady. But I digress.

Dostoyevsky could, ostensibly, sit with a single facial expression, the twitch of an expression, for extended periods and ascertain its every link to an emotion, to a thought, to an intention, to a lie, to a desire. I panic and look away when I witness some else’s shame and discomfort, and before I’ve had an opportunity to ponder why I’m so mortified, my phone goes off and I reach for it like an infant for the nipple. I dare you, try to stare at one spot on a blank wall for twenty seconds, without shifting your gaze. It’s impossible. All these screens and reels and cuts. Darkness hidden between scenes.

Maybe that’s why I’m back on this unicycle, trying to ride. Maybe I’m hoping I can get back what I’ve lost. Or maybe this is just the attrition of entropy. And if that’s the case, cheers to devolving more slowly than the rest of you. But then again, do I really wanna be the last sane man on the earth? That’s a terrifying proposition, and it’s also the reason I think Jesus asked whether or not he would find faith in the earth when He returns. In that case, I’m thankful that I’m not kept by my own power, but His.

I ain’t the only, I ain’t black, and I ain’t Fyodor. I’m a sinner born again and, day by day, being conformed into the image of Jesus Christ. Clearly, I’ve still got a trillion miles to go, but at least that’s the truth.