This is really a retrospective because I didn’t talk about seeing Andy the other day. Andy Young, that is. Former congressman and now ambassador to the United Nations Andy Young. He comes up and kisses me and give me a hug and Stony Cooks does the same and it struck me as so bizarre that I know the man well enough to get kissed. I think of the famous black folks I have met: Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sr., Coretta Scott King, Andy Young and Julian Bond and Maynard Jackson and ColemanYoung and Tom Bradley and LeRoi Jones and Ron Karenga and some others I have heard speak but didn’t meet, like Eldridge Cleaver. And the poets and writers I’ve met: Nikki Giovanni and Don L. Lee and Gwendolyn Brooks and Ed Bullins and Ron Milner and Richard Wesley and lots of others during that golden period when everybody was writing poetry, and me, too. And everybody had a poem to scream at the masses to change their lives, and me, too.
I am in love with Joni Mitchell. I don’t wanna fuck anybody while I’m listening to her music, though. Her music is too much a part of the revolution for me to want to fuck to it. I just think she is something good and pure sort of, although I know how fucked up and pretentious that sounds! Who cares? If nobody sees these pages but me I can be as pretentious as all hell and it’s my own business.