Kevin Powell is one of the nicest brothers I have ever met.

We met while standing in line to buy Chinese food @ Ho Kwong’s in DaCosta’s Mall, Bridgetown, Barbados back in 1998.

I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and said, “That guy looks like Kevin Powell,” in my mind and turned away. As the queue moved forward, and I happened to have another look, I said to myself again, “Well, well… this fella, REAL looking like Kevin Powell.”

You must understand: The only reason I knew who he was at all was a combination of being in Trinidad and having cable TV the season that he was on The Real World, and being a music writer in Trinidad and devouring many of the magazines he was then writing for.
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Back in March, during a frightfully short trip to Trinidad, I accomplished one of my short term goals: acquire a tawah.

This tawah for me, is part of my enforced liberation from bad roti experiences when outside of Trinidad. This consists of course in learning how to make roti. I’ve gotten the curry part down… it’s the paratha that is the hardest of course.

I tried buying skins from the super markets here locally, but O.H. G.E.E.D.! NASTY! When they weren’t showing mould in the supermarket freezer and hence un-purchasable, they were not very pleasant when eating.

So I determined the solution was to get a tawah and just practise how to make them until I got it right. however, acquiring a tawah in Barbados is not an easy prospect… this is not really tawah country if you feel me. Read more…

My 15 year old God-daughter: I held her in my arms, fed her, changed her, bathed her and now she is flowering into a woman and it’s both wondrous and a little shocking to me. How fast the time flies… how quickly it all goes.

She has a Facebook page, and a boyfriend, and well ‘looks’ like the one she’s currently smouldering into the camera! I mean, she was just a little thing just yesterday!

She’ll be all grown soon, and I’ll be like a great-auntie before I know it and well… I’m becoming my mother and there’s no way to mitigate it. I love this little girl… loved her her entire existence, before she was even a serious bump. I love her, because her mother is my oldest, dearest friend and her children and my children you know?

Facebook | Angelface Williams’s Photos – Profile Pictures]

Back in November of 2008, faced with the need to begin travelling again post-baby, I made a largely fruitless trip down to Trinidad to renew my passport.

After the easy, smooth, frictionless experience of having it extended while I was in London, I found the arduous two-to-four-day process in Trinidad horrifying, and as I mentioned before, without ultimate success.

Why, in 2010, with Trinidad’s 2020 deadline for ‘progress’ looming, the process being demanded for acquiring official paperwork needs to be so cryptic, so time consuming, so mired in pointless wasted bureaucratic niggly wiggly nonsense, is beyond me.

The worst part is, if you are a Trinidadian and living in Europe or North America, you can post in your passport and documentation, and have the whole kit and kaboodle posted back to you. If you are resident in the Caribbean, you are basically fucked.

You cannot post in your documentation, you must go to the expense of traveling to Trinidad and submitting yourself to the demoralising experience that is this unbelievably time consuming process to get your paperwork.
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If a photograph is worth a thousand words, then my recent profile pic update (see it to the right) is speaking volumes.

I am thirty five years old. I’ll be thirty-six in April. This year proved to be trying and trial, but most years present this way. This year was hell on everyone I think.

I made and did amazing things and despite the global financial situation, and my enormous challenges, I had some really interesting developments. I may write more about these later. Now the story of the little red dress.

In February I was diagnosed with chronic gall bladder disease. Because I opted not to have my gall bladder removed, managing it with a change in my eating habits, it has led to some of the most dramatic weight loss in my life. I’ve dropped from the 16-18 I’ve pretty much been since I was 19, to somewhere between a 8-12. Something like 60 or 70lbs.

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I am sitting as I type this, in Bean & Bagel in Sunset Crest. I feel a little ‘dark’ since I happen to be the only person of colour sitting at the tables. The help is still not very clever… and still answer questions with a blank dazed look

I am in the approximate location, of the infamous in my memory “Coffee Friday” limes that Keffi and I made every effort to attend every Friday for roughly a year and half.

I am sitting here, like I sat so many times waiting for her to come and meet me so we could smoke, drink coffee and talk shit. We’d order two coffees in one cup, fight over who was paying for everything and burn through a pack of cigare

I am sitting here, and I can’t help myself from scanning the entrances, waiting for her to appear in her red bank uniform, red lipstick, cornrows and adorned with that fantastic smile of hers.

How do you define grief? How do you ever really get past that ‘missing’? I haven’t been able to do it. Not a day in nine years has gone by that I have failed to think of her and miss her. My memories of her, are always of her smile, her smile, her smile. Which is ironic, since she was in such constant pain that to remember her smiling means something to me… I wiped away so many of her tears, but those memories are blurry….

I miss my sister. I miss her. I still haven’t figured out how to get used to her not being here… I still catch myself wanting to call her and tell her stuff.

When I was leaving, I saw preciousc. Ironic huh? Pity about preciousc… but you can’t use the memory of someone’s dead best friend to inveigle your way into their good graces, slash and burn them, and then expect to be held in high esteem. I am not mad… it’s kind of interesting. I have so few reactions to seeing her, and now it’s the second or third time I’ve seen her in the same place. I see her and my heart doesn’t pulse with anger, I don’t see red, I don’t feel sadness, nothing… nothing. She is one of less than a handful of people I have completely excoriated from my emotional space… and I ain’t fucking sorry about it either.

I just think it’s funny I was there, thinking and missing Keffi, and preciousc appeared. Not sure what that means, but I’ll tell you, I don’t miss preciousc at all… and Keffi’s memory still burns flame bright in my heart, and it often pulses with an ache that doesn’t really ever go away..

Meh horse Ozy shared this on my FB page this afternoon.

At first, I was elated! Estatic to find Daddy on youTube, but I played the clip and my grief rushed over me and instead of hearing Mansa Musa, master drummer for the Orishas, professional rebel, original loudmouth, educator, musician, playwright, I heard my DADDY.

And I missed him, I miss him… I miss my Papi.

Video – Mansa Musa – Tribute To Ogun.

Somehow, by some miracle, the small amounts of money I could gather and put against my goal, was joined, and joined and joined, added to by friends and completely anonymous strangers over the last few days and now I am within striking distance of enough money to buy a backup computer.

Still a little more to raise, but we’ve managed to raise almost all of it. So if you want to pitch in, we’re still trying to make it.
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I sighed deeply, before I started typing. What a week this has been. So here’s what’s happening with this sad, sad iMac story I am telling.

Last week when I first wrote about what the last two months have been like, I cross posted my blog post to Apple’s discussion forum. I got a number of responses and a few of these were extremely rude, I must say.

A few people read (you must read ‘skimmed’ here) my first post and made a couple assumptions about how my computer went on the fritz, and decided that my case had no warrant.

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Jorge Heine wrote a piece about “The Demise of Maurice Bishop” for the Gleaner, and as I read, my gut twisted a little more over everything that happened in Grenada in late 1983.

I was a tad uneasy that they released Coard. I understate. I didn’t like it. As I watched/read news about his release, one thought repeated over and over: “Why?”

I don’t claim to know ALL, all, all, all the details about what happened in Grenada in Oct. 1983. I was a very little girl then, nine and a half. Old enough to begin thinking my own ideas about things–my mother up until that point made every effort to encourage me in this–but still innocent in my views of the world.

I can’t tell you I really knew who Maurice Bishop was before that either. At that time, I was Sea Child, living on a reef, covered in dried salt as much as not. That was my life then. I was cementing my life as a mermaid-waterchild.
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