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    The IncluderEpisode 3The Chain of Angels

    by Andrius Kulikauskas
    October 7, 2008

    The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker
    When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we’ll all be
    one
    , in life and death, in our evergrowth – our choice to grow forever,
    to live forever.

    Let’s connect the scattered dots.

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    David Ellison-Bey
    and I are still up.  The police are still searching outside.  They have
    the measuring tape out.  A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly
    crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a
    gunfight.  I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I
    thought, I must get there before they ticket my grandmother’s car.

    senelekresle2007.jpg

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    She told me today, don’t take her car, it has gone through so much.
    When I let it overheat two weekends ago, so that the green antifreeze
    gurgled out onto Devon street, her mechanic explained that it was only
    good for short trips.  She was afraid that it would break down and have
    to be towed.  She loves me, but I got that $50 parking ticket last
    Tuesday at David’s house, 6726 S Parnell Ave, in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, when I didn’t notice the Street Cleaning signs, which I supposed went up that same morning.  The youths on the porch across the street
    disagreed when I approached them regarding that.  I was fearless.  I
    said, alert us next time, if you see our cars out, which they surely
    thought bizaare, but they heard me out.

    And my grandmother shook the phone bill at me last week. She said that I spoke too long to Lithuania, but no, I realized that AT&T had billed $100 for my 12 minutes
    When she came back from the hospital,
    she had told me, could it be that God had brought me to her this summer, just before she fell and
    broke her hip? She recovered from hip replacement surgery like a
    beautiful athlete of 91 years, a peasant girl from Lithuania.  Today,
    she trotted out to the yard with her cane, and I trimmed the bush for
    her.  I was good, but why do bad things happen to me?  I need to help David,
    he needs to make his foreclosure payment, and such, and his car is not
    running. But those are not my problems, those are David’s, she says. 
    Oh, I’ve been using her car to hop back and forth between her house and
    David’s, but not much longer.  She tells me, as in recent years, that
    she’ll not renew her driver’s license, though we hope she might, yet I
    sense she frets so about her car’s life.  You may take it, she relents,
    but I slip a notch deeper in depression.

    davidshouse.JPG

    Now the car, if that was hers, was diagonal in the street, I
    presumed smashed. I walk up among the three officers around it.  This
    is my grandmother’s car. And what is it doing here?
    There was not a nick. I suppose some youths lifted it up, and set it
    down?  No, it had been pushed out into the street by a car that had
    rounded through the grass lot, apparently driven by a man who had been
    shot
    , who thereby managed to speed away down our one-way street, the
    wrong way, only to come to a final stop.

    I just spoke with a policeman.  Two people died.  He advised me that
    there will be retaliation, back and forth, with the west side of the 7th district.  Take precautions.

    My grandmother’s car has a guardian angel.  Everybody else is doomed.

    David has a car and a truck.  Neither has run this last half year,
    but he gets hundreds of dollars in tickets.  I know his street
    mechanics.  Lovely people.  One is so gentle, so friendly, so
    mechanically attuned.  He has no car, so David and I picked him up with
    my grandmother’s.  He diagnosed all its sounds.  I showed him Marcin Jakubowski’s Factor E Farm videos, the open source tractor and the solar turbine.  We can do that in David’s yard as part of the Moorish Cultural Workshop.  We can build that in the empty lot.  Someday, we could buy that lot
    I encourage him, what does he dream of?  Yes, he would love to. I meet
    his wife. They have been married for thirty-three years, an eternity. 
    David, you agree? He explains, and without knowing any facts, I am left
    with the thoughts, that the most lovely human can be a heroin addict,
    for whom no dream can ever be greater than heroin. Today, I find David
    at his kitchen table with another adviser, a helpful man who loves me
    like a brother.  David notes later, this man is a registered sex
    offender, convicted of raping his wife.  And so the South Side of Chicago is a country of second-class citizens
    The best of us have names, but I can’t share them if I want to share
    the truth, which is to say, hearsay.  The rest of us don’t have names,
    while we roam “freely” on the streets.  Slaves don’t have names, I
    challenged the nameless youth at the corner store.

    davidinside.jpg

    Christopher Russell came by today.  David told him not to keep anything at the house, but Chris didn’t want to hear it.  David’s 72 years old,
    and it’s not for him to care for 24 year old Chris, and deal with his
    tribulations, who shot at who, who steals what, who is after him, where
    will he spend the night, his baby boy Chris Jr., his baby’s mom.  I
    keep my goodness small.  Some hot milk with honey.  A book on Zen
    Buddhism.  I drove him to the El
    with my grandmother’s car, when he feared that he might be jumped.  I
    didn’t let him into the house and he got insolent, yet I stood up to
    him and he backed down.  He asked me to keep after him to do the right
    thing.  He took me to his Kingdom Hall. I took him and David to the House of Culture, 618 E 71st Str, that creative hope, where Lord Cashus exalted David, the only real Moor in the house.

    David, I say, I know that you can’t take on Chris and his challenges.  Yet you are my link to him.  You attract him. Thanks to you, I might help him, if others might help me. And he might help us reach out to the youth on the porch. And they might share Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice, as the Prophet says.

    walter.JPG

    Next to the house with a porch is a memorial.  Now it is a T-shirt
    on a chain-link fence.  Before there was a pile of stuffed animals. 
    David was there when he was shot, two years ago.  Walter.

    This late-night episode is a retaliation, a memorial, for two men who are so distant.

    Tagged: chicago dysfunction faith memorial racism violence

    3 responses to “The IncluderEpisode 3The Chain of Angels”

    1. http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/1206320,sside100708.article

      beautiful wrote:
      Andre was a great man and wonderful Father sad that this had to happen to him he just recently lost 2 brothers they will all be missed. You are in a better place now may you R.I.P

      I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU

    2. Perry Recker says:

      Very Good. I want to read more. Reminds me of works by Sudhir Venkatesh, American project : the rise and fall of a modern ghetto and Off the Books. Perry the Librarian.

    3. Andre was a good guy. He always stayed to himself. He was always on the block, kicking with the guys. Just having fun. Trying to stay out of trouble. You didn’t really see him too much hanging around because he always had a job most of the time. And when he got out of jail, he changed a lot. But I think when you’re around negative people, you get negative, and the innocent ones always get killed, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time. And I think all that stuff would have been avoided if his brother-in-law Darrell Migll would have avoided it. None of that would have happened. Andre would be here today to see his kids. Sometimes you have to avoid trouble and let things go. Some people say life is hard, but I think make their life hard because if you be around positive people, you get positive. So I think it’s best for people to stay around their kind of people. If they want to do positive, hang with positive people. If you want to do negative, keep negative where it’s at. And always put Jehovah first. Cause wherever there’s a will, there’s a way. God don’t put too much on you that you can’t bear, because he allows things to happen, but he don’t cause things to happen. And I think none of that would have happened if they would have just let it go and let the man upstairs take care. The end.

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