Born to become the first Nuclear Warrior
(Where Our Hero Writes His Combo Flag Day, Father's Day, and Pride Month Summative Life Assessment)
Happy Flag Day!🇺🇸
Happy Father’s Day!🖖🏾✌
Happy Pride Month🌈
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15858203
USAF Colonel Paul Tibbets died in 2007 at age 92. He believed in the righteousness of his cause. Part of his lived experience required maintaining a belief in his supremacy and superiority over a hated enemy.
The vaporization, incineration, and slow and painful agony of radiation poisoning was, for Colonel Tibbets, necessary collateral damage for all who have ever died as a direct result of his efforts on
August 6, 1945. In an absurd and ironic coda to his life, Tibbets' preference was to be cremated with no tombstone or other type of memorial marker. The most famous warrior in American history acknowledged his role as part of America's mass industrial nuclear (defense system) complex by choosing to be buried in a virtual " potters field" anonymously. He shares the same burial tradition as millions dead from HIV / AIDS.
HIV/AIDS was the first pandemic that has never been declared over. There is still no cure for HIV/AIDS. Long-term survivors without access to botox injections have tell-tale facial wasting. Conveniently, the extra-deep wrinkling enhances the socially acceptable facial appearance of an aging pink-skinned hetero-appearing male. On people of non-pink skin color, this is not as "natural-appearing" and a visual marker of "infection" whether or not a potential sex partner discloses their STD status prior to protected or unprotected intercourse. Intoxication by legal and or illegal substances is usually common in HIV/AIDS transmission. 100% of all closeted gay black males are more likely to be having sex without disclosing their HIV/AIDS status. Truth-telling around infectious disease status was a major health and civil rights concern until treatment of the pink-skinned voices in the LGTBQIA+ tribe became 100% effective for those who were able to consistently take the "HIV/AIDS WONDER DRUGS."
The sometimes fatal opportunistic diseases of AIDS still occur but are typically delayed in age-at-time-of- disease-onset. Although herd immunity is a pipe dream, death from HIV/ AIDS for high net worth openly gay and or closeted gay folks happens right along as expected for people who die after age 50. In 2021 as was true pre-Rock Hudson especially, you could attend a funeral for a closeted gay man who remained closeted after burial/ creation unless a former partner with unedited sex tapes and blood and DNA samples got up and spilled all the tea at the wake, funeral/ memorial, and or graveside services.
A once lucrative market for post-mortem revelations of lifelong sexual expression outside of procreative sex can only be consistently counted upon to discredit and or erase a person's scholarly work. However, if enough wealthy and powerful people decide the work is essential to maintain the status quo, even the most well-documented LGBTIQA+tribe member will never be outed or their work denounced. ( e.g., J. Edgar Hoover, Harry Cohn, famously infamous and or famous to their allies and or haters).
And so we have a Flag Day- Fathers Day- Pride Month story for June 2021.
Let's Hear It for the Boys, a gay anthem in my sex-free Summer of Love in 1984.
https://youtu.be/yaOHFu0YqrI
I was besotted by 99.999% of these classic, iconic, and truth-telling songs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1984
With my first career in defense aerospace with a secret clearance in a town where the only gay bar opened one night each week on Sunday nights, I lived in the best of all possible communities, Northeast San Bernardino, CA, about 15 minutes from the CSSB campus. Once I joined and became a choir member at Loveland Baptist Church, I was always busy or traveling for the USAF on Sundays. Monday through Saturday was 100% remote off-site and or on-base office work, housework, and laundry to get ready for the next week.
One night, I thought I would stop by the Sunday night-only gay bar only to arrive as it closed and locked its doors. I would not go out on my first date until the summer of 1984.
He was Mormon and actively being pursued by the LDS Recovery Team. Active " in the community and willing to disclose if asked directly," he was a bit jealous that I had a clearance and hoping that our professional friendship at work and our passionate friendship after hours might help him achieve his secret clearance. Our partnership was not "at-risk" by anyone who could out us to discredit us for being gay at this point. At least that is what R. H. believed.
But I walked away quickly after RH chided me for not being willing to be the dominatrix to his sex slave.
Four years before I would have the courage to confront my parents about the incest, I already had healed enough to never settle for any violence and or abuse in the long-term partnership I longed for at that time. Yes, I had even investigated becoming a single parent or a gay couple adoptive parent. My experiences as a social worker for DeKalb County Georgia, roughly a decade later, would forever end that dream life of marriage and family. With no partner on the horizon, I now understood that for me, single parenting was impossible without access to a loving biological family.
But the point to my story? The moral, for lack of a more accurate term, is as follows: A life consumed by work and religious orthodoxy allowed me to survive the plague years and become an official mourner. I learned with much practice that I never asked to have to face death, have a good laugh and cry at its expense-- and move on. As a young, gifted, and black heir to imagined generational wealth that mainstream culture had convinced me I could achieve, I accepted/ settled for an imaginary and solitary life alone-- until my mother and her baby sister called me one Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2014. By spring 2015, I had relocated to Oak Creek, WI. By spring/ summer 2016, mom had passed, I had returned to California and was working full time and living in my 2014 Silver Gray Ford Focus SE hatchback.
Homelessness while engaging a new professional community only during work hours left me alone with human contact only when I called a small circle of friends. No one talks about how friends and churches that happily took your tithes and volunteer hours now would not return your phone calls and would publicly shun you in activities you had come to enjoy as brothers from different mothers.
None of the people or public/ private institutions who historically served as lifelines to black folk always too far away from their ancestral and or family homes were actually serving as lifelines, emotionally or economically. And I was told by social workers at the LA LGTBQIA+ Center and KP Healthcare Pasadena campus that I had not been unsafely sexual enough to seroconvert. That would have guaranteed me a permanent affordable housing placement in a walkable neighborhood with access to full health insurance-covered services for PWAs within 24 to 48 hours.
Yes, if only I had pleasured myself, leaving who knows how many broken relationships in my wake and helping to spread a deadly disease with no cure except a lifetime of at-risk for fatal disease status. Then I could have kept a wonderful subsistence level wage that was inadequate for housing. Housing would have been subsidized until my death from HIV/AIDS. Crazy, bro, awesome and hugely insane! But true.
Meanwhile, the great wide white world of sport was imploding concurrent with the onset of my second pandemic COVID 19. There was relief that it was airborne in transmittal and that just by wearing masks, not gathering in large groups, and practicing good hygiene, you could avoid catching a deadly and fatal novel corona-shaped (?) microorganism. I could do all those things easily. Between my mobile home and storage unit, as long as Motel 6 was in business, I could make life work.
But as March became April, May, and June, LA COUNTY began leasing Motel 6 rooms to house homeless persons who had contracted COVID19. Paying customers with essential services jobs faced having to out themselves as homeless to principals and school districts with no supports for teachers that would need access to classrooms in buildings with sketchy HVAC systems or risk And to make matters worse, for someone like me with Benign Blepharospasm since 2010 in both eyelids, the 24/7 actual schedule of SPED District Interns was impossible without a workplace accommodation they had chosen never to grant until I had barely survived my first two years as a certificated ED Specialist.
As with every "Lord of the Flies" professional culture, LAUSD has no desire or willingness to do for District iCAPP Interns what Federal regulations and policy mandate it to do for 100% of its IEP families of students with different abilities.
And a termination for cause was not how I wanted to transition to my chosen retirement career at VernonNickersonSchoolcoach. So resignation and filing a complaint with the CA Department of Housing and Education we're the only viable options.
The " "housing" set up by an agent of The Los Angeles Coordinated Entry System turned out to be illegal. An illegal landlord left me with no 30-day rights to stay housed, which typically would have given me 90 days before I would have had to secure and relocate to market-rate housing, albeit when no one was renting or showing units due to fears and misinformation. At the same time, deaths surged and were increasing every time after Trump held his series of "super-spreader events." Even as his "social media" friends and donors showed up to such events and subsequently died, death and infection rates continued to rise. By the fall of 2020, working for what would turn out to be a full-on scam company, legally a storefront business in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, I was eventually able to secure housing fit for human habitation in November 2020.
With both my parents safely dead and buried, conversations with a nationwide network of cousins, each in their family bubbles far away, yielded enough family history from people my father had forbidden us to have anything to do with when he was alive to finally reveal what a TwilightZone life story that living as a Nickerson-Walker had been. Truths long denied or hidden were revealed. With every " unprecedented revelation as 72 million registered voters chose fascism and racism and xenophobia and transphobia and homophobia and The New Handmaids' Tale as the heterosexual religious idolatry guidebook, my cousins confirmed my lived experiences as an incest survivor, abused by my father.
After we had witnessed his remains buried at the VA Cemetary in Fair Lawn, NJ, my father's self-proclaimed best friend, boss, pastor, and almost gay-phi-a grad chapter frat brother came to my parents' townhome. He got me alone in the upstairs two bed, one bath section ( with one safe exit) and verbally abused me for about an hour. Yes, it was the pastoral visit from Hell.
Even though the truth was I had since September 1981, always lived 2500 to 3000 miles away from my father and had chosen unconditional love and forgiveness since our father- mother-middle son reveal about the incest back in 1988/89, he was still attempting to Bible-thump, shame and officially shun me. Almost identical to the TRUMP minions' rants of 2016 to the present day, the attack was light years away from actual facts or truth. Dorothy Collins Rowe, Ed. D, who had never been one of my k-12 or undergraduate or graduate school teachers, had "never thought I was smart or talented." I especially note this accusation BECAUSE it had no basis in actual fact. Hater gossip? Definitely. Actual truth with a concurrent offer of support** never came. But I was this "horrible gay person" apparently, according to her husband Rev. Dr. Albert " Prince of Darkness" Rowe, TH.d, D. MIN., etc. Pastor Emeritus of The Historic Calvary Baptist Church of Paterson, NJ.
What was amazing about this abuse is that it was exactly the opposite of the academic and socio-emotional professional support I was given by all of my full-time credentialled licensed k-12 educators: Swartz, Strickland, Schwartz, Whitney, Vodzik, Huntington/ Jaffee/ Fogerty/ Holterhoff, Pierce/ Hall, my German emigre manual arts teacher, Glover, Murner Ruberto/ VP Freida Van Rensselaer / Coach Sherman/ Rugys/ Silverstein/ Mrs. Powell, Sra. Santana and Sra. Rayas and the librarians at the South Paterson Branch of the Paterson Free Public Library. Now you know how profoundly, pervasively, persistently, and perpetually low my opinion of the Rowes my opinion was, and evermore will be. Neither one of the Rowes had ever asked me to share my story, yet they could sit, stand, and walk while believing only what they could see in public. What foolish and blind guides they apparently always had been! Furthermore, that they could privately share their toxic aggression with me and not know for a certainty that I would have to share everything with my mom and my aunts showed me how little they had ever bothered to really know any member of my family in any meaningful way.
Of course, after they left me wounded and bleeding profusely with no visible blood or bruising, my mother looked at me and demanded the truth after her sister Carrie Celia Walker Banty asked point blank, " What just happened? You look like somebody just beat you up!" She was right. And I could never lie to my mother alone, nor to my mother, my aunt, and my godmother, gathered before me. All three were skilled natural empaths, so lying was not an option. So, I told them exactly what happened-- this confession saved my life. They remain part of my great cloud of witnesses to the present day.
Between my mother and her sisters and my life in the community at Fuller Theological Seminary, I salvaged three precious artifacts out of a spiritual practice I cling to until this day:
Unconditional Love ( filial to agape)
Unconditional Positive Regard
The Golden Rule
And I get comedy gold and entertainment value watching the great and powerful fake wizarding empires steadily implode daily.
Even as I stay connected to a dying planet by actively seeking to engage the social entrepreneurial small business and conventional professional employment markets, I remain empowered by UL, UPR, and TGR.
Living alone and happy with a mind, body, and soul, knowing finally how to embrace loving myself unconditionally as a gateway to the daily call to UL, UPR, and The Golden Rule in 2021, I am eternally grateful to COVID19, POTUS46, and my 72 million fellow travelers still wanting a world and nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
I would still like to explore more of this Big Blue Marble. I no longer "must" have a partner to be blissfully sexually satisfied and perennially happy and surprised by joy. And the more time I have without Chronic Blepharospasm, the more work I am able to produce, often in great phone and Internet conversations with extraordinary people around the world.
Life is okay. It will always beat the alternative- until the alternative becomes my penultimate ending that is always a beginning. Sort of "INTO THE UNKNOWN," release 2.0, so to speak.
A short but cohesive story arc prompted hundreds of hours of meditation, reflection, reading research, and writing from September 1997 to June 2021.
June 2021 is the month for a specially- triggering Trifecta:
A.). Flag Day- which yearly demands considering how we came to the Pledge of Allegiance we now recite.
B.). Father's Day - when only positive memories of mindful and unconditionally loving and listening fathers are demanded. This demand drives most children with fathers in the USA to anger, disappointment, exhaustion, and sadly self-harm and even deadly rages, with unsafe drunken sex and other risky behaviors until the run-up to July 4th begins midsummer celebrations in Daylight Savings Time.
C.). Pride Month- another on-demand remembrance of a Camelot that was sex drugs and rock-and-roll or too many rapes and microaggressions in the name of LGBTQIA+ unity around Stonewall and the summers of love for some, somewhere, sometime, someplace... OVER THE RAINBOW. I love and adore primary colors because they are a part of school, my favorite safe space beyond ( and since COVID19, WITHIN) my domicile. For that particular reason, I choose to embrace The Pride Flag in Primary Colors. Scientifically, it signifies UL, UPR, and TGR, the motive forces in my life. It also reminds me that we have all been given access to abundant resources provided we share all the human and natural resources we have been given.
And, in closing, there is always more! For example, when I think of America, The Beautiful, Land that I love, I sing " Lift Every Voice and Sing"-- proud of every verse, ashamed of NONE. That is my national anthem.
As for creation stories, I embrace The Creation, by James Weldon Johnson. I tolerate the Old Testament because it makes sense only because the black poet speaks his truth and attempt to make sense of his lived experience which was shared by my ancestors extant at the time it was written. There is no proof throughout history that biblical canons in over 530 different translations were ever 100% perfect and complete. There is consistent evidence that critical thinking has sustained life on earth since millennia before I was born and through to the present day.
I have never met a bad student, yet I know students who make bad, stupid, and deadly choices. I also know many learners who know better and aggressively choose not to do better. Everyone can still learn anything. We are all learners, even when we do not understand how some learn or why they make choices against their best interests.
Well, time to rest in preparation for another engagement with my neighbors. They are typically nice, except for the one lady who openly flirts with the little dog. She warrants consistent cordiality while I wait for circumstances to say we can be friends without benefits until I make other possible choices in my virtual world. No need to burst her bubble just yet.
And so it goes. This ends part 1 of the story of the gold heart that contains a living chunk of Willie Curtis Nickerson's beating heart from the one moment of pleasure when he was fully transparent in his loving-father-and-son relationship.
Now, whenever Vernon achieved bliss during tantric practice, they were, over and over, happy together, in the way the best teachers are delighted and proud of their apt pupils.
Yes, as that gold locket was pressed back into Vernon' cardiac cavity using nanoparticles, he now understood that it was the locket he felt leaping for joy throughout the days leading up to 6.19.21, 12: 27 am
*( Support for struggling students is part of the unwritten character traits hard-wired into all true excellent educators -- with Unconditional Positive Regard for all students)
(C) VernonNickersonSchoolcoach 2021 All rights reserved.
