first and foremost, i know this is late for me to say but…
goddamn, barack obama is our new president.
our new president-elect. someday, my commander in chief.
and i am still honestly speechless at that fact. the giddy happiness is like nothing else i’ve experienced. i still sometimes wake up and believe it’s all been some amazing dream. barack obama is our president.
yes, the next few years are going to suck. they would have sucked anyway, but i honestly feel like they will suck less, that america will be moving in a fundamentally different direction, fueled by a fundamentally revived sense of hope.
and though i’m not a christian, amen to that.
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honestly. fuck one thirty nine. i’m fighting at one fourty nine, because i can’t finish the drop. weak sauce. but rather fight strong and small than fight weak and big.
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so… on tuesday, i made the ridiculous crap-tabular-bus ride evar. no suspension. bus breaking down. dude next to me who smelled like old dude cheese and four shots of jim aftershave.
but at the end of the night, it was all worth it. when i met up TIAN and JOHNATHAN, two of the brothers of pdpsi, they took me to get food at the local market, and on the tv screen we saw that obama had pretty much clinched the election. food and obama winning, there is nothing this mohawk wearing, poet speaking, eating disorder having fighter-artist-boy likes more than that.
i spent the rest of the night watching first the mccain concession speech, then the obama acceptance speech. both amazing pieces of work, great calls to the future and with real understandings of the troubling times ahead. but even more than that… i spent my time with the pdpsi boys, getting to know ‘em, hanging out with ‘em… and as inevitably happens when it comes to me…
getting my drank on with ‘em.
by the way, for city residents, it might be worth it to roll through cornell for the sheer cheapness of the alcohol.
the next night was the show, where i opened for ill-lit and the highlifes. the space was gorgeous, as was the rest of ithaca, which JUN was kind enough to show me around. really though, the views were breathtaking. leaves falling off the trees with the big victorian style houses was something that reminded me of boston, and goddamn, that slope had literally stole the beat from my heart for a second.
i did my thing, had a great time with a really responsive crowd, did a completely new experimental poem that i had been working on and it went off perfectly because of the participation of the really interested crowd that managed to make the mostly empty space seem filled to capacity.
ill-lit, as always was dope as heo. got the crowd moving with all the momentum and natural electricity of a bay area freight train. their integration of music, poetry and visual/audio stimulation blew my mind. they were fresh, full of flava and as amped about the obama win as i was.
afterwards, i went out with ALVIN, KAITLYN and a few others and had a smashingly good time, even if jens pulver got smashed and urijah faber got smashed. i missed my one o clock bus and so ended up getting more drunk… telling embarassing stories about myself, hearing hilarious stories about the life and times of cornell university and just generally making merry. the best part of life, and the best part of doing what i do.
thanks again to the asian/asian american forum, the chinese students assoc and pdpsi for bringing me out. lets do it again sometime. much love, as always, to those who showed me hella love and hospitality. hit me up if you’re eva in the CIT-EH.
vinh with the pdpsi boys and ruby from ill-lit.