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This is Volume 2 of "Growing Up Brilliant and Black in 20th Century America". It begins in Oct'90, and as of this revision, concludes in Aug'93.
Volume 1 is titled "Face Down in a Tray of DEKTOL". It begins in Nov'69 and consists of two handwritten journals and around 10-12 hours of audio tape that covers the years from 1975-78. It contains poetry dating back to 1976 and photographs up to 1990, but there is little recorded during the years in Michigan, 1983-88.
The following entry was made after the first archive of 6 months recording with a Poqet PC. [The digitized photographs were added later.]
-=DAH=- 28-Sep-93
God grant me the Strength to change the things which I can,
the Serenity to accept the things that I can't,
and the Weaponry to make the difference.
Allah has been most merciful and generous to me; He has gifted me with superior intellect. In a world where a black man must work twice as hard to get half as far, He has given me the advantage. I have yet to test the limits of my potential, thanks to His grace. Many have failed their tests. I have survived and excelled (more than most, not as much as some).
I have kept a journal since Nov'69, beginning when I was a sophomore in college, living on "sabbatical" in Baltimore, MD. I "lived" by photography in those days. (Mostly, I just took pictures, did drugs, and got laid a lot.) I got credit for my portfolio when I returned to Rochester, NY, and even had a show exhibited in the College of Graphic Arts & Photography at R.I.T.
I also got married and divorced … twice. No childred. (Well, one of them was.)
Over twenty years of my life has been preserved on various media. Why do I feel the urge to resurrect old ghosts? What is there to learn from my past mistakes and triumphs? Could anyone else profit by them?
What makes me think that my life is so special that people will want to read about it generations from now? Nothing. So I don't. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. (It could happen!)
Throughout history people have written autobiographies. This is the first generation in which a person can publish and distribute copies during their own lifetime and reap the rewards while still alive. (O.K., people have been doing that for centuries. Yeah, but only the Rich&Famous, not the Great Unwashed Masses.) I didn't realize that when I began, but now that I'm twice as old as I was then (old enough to be a grandfather), I feel the need to bring it all together at least once, if only to remind myself and ask if I have learned my lessons.
The present is too painfully close, and others would be compromised. Besides, we live in the present most of the time, so for entertainment we either go backward or forward in time.
I'm different from most people in the world. I'm better off than most. I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful to Him that I have a right to worship Him without someone holding a gun to my head and telling me that I can't. I don't know if that's a Right for which I'm willing to die. (I certainly am not prepared to kill for it!)
I have incredible resources at my disposal, so why not use them? The beauty of it is that my only directive is to use a tool for its intended function. In this case, the tool's function is to create new uses for itself! Allah has granted me both the opportunity and the aptitude to take advantage of it.
There are some members of the human race who can't deal with computers. I knew a guy in college who couldn't master Freshman Algebra well enough to pass the final. (We coached him through a second term, but he just had a mental block against higher math functions than arithmetic. To his credit he's gone on to acquire a better level of "computer literacy" than most of the population.) I started this journal on paper, and attached photographs to the pages of the spiral-bound notebooks. Perhaps I'll have some of them digitized and append them to this file. (There is a percentage of the population that may understand the last sentence, but they wouldn't know how to go about doing it.)
Now that I think back on it, my life as THE WIZ only lasted about six years; it started a few years into my Xerox employment, and it ended a few years before I left Michigan. Oh, the vestiges of THE WIZ began further back and may have lasted longer, but the bulk of it is unrecorded, just as my life with Jean [wife #2] is virtually unrecorded. (Certainly not as well as my life with Beth [wife #1, the child].)
I guess I'm off on this train of thought tonight because of some things that Ann said earlier this week. Her friend Cotting, the pottery teacher, was apparently casting aspersions on my Mensa membership. (Ann was rather upset with the way that I occasionally flaunt it.) When I asked Ann how come I was the only subject of Cotting's ill-will, she explained that she'd defused her by saying, "The only reason I joined was to meet men". I asked her to inform Cotting on their next meeting that my reason for joining was to have something to put on my resume to explain why I was thirty years old and didn't have a college degree.
Somehow my Islam has not come under discussion, except for Ann to assert that she refuses to discuss it. I guess that's O.K. - there are aspects of Ann's life from which I'd just as soon be excluded. But this is end of Ramadan, and I'm feeling guilty about not having written my Annual Letter yet.
A lot has happened this year. My grandmother died last Spring. I got to take her out to supper a few weeks before her death. (Now that I think about it, that was also during Ramadan, because I was fasting and we went to the restaurant after sundown.) I will remember her for contributing to my Dream. After seeing her for the last time, I realized that all I'd every really wanted since childhood was to live in Massachusetts and to drink Cranberry juice whenever I pleased. Praise God, I do both, and have been that way for the last three years. I guess that means I've made it.
Some years before that, I took the name Abu Huryra, which means Father of the Kitten. I'm still driving the car I bought nine years ago in Rochester, but the current plates say, CATS PA. I'm recording this with the computer I bought eight years ago, and I use it to run a shareware business that has recovered it's original purchase price (over three thousand dollars) every year for the last three years. Keep the old as long as it is good, take the new as soon as it is better. (Wish I could remember when I first learned that.)
FurFace is in good health. Ann is my upstairs neighbor, but she's in the process of buying a house. We share a common love of cats; she has two. I guess she's the closest thing I've had to a romantic interest since leaving my life with Jean and coming to Computervision. Ann's always known WiZ WORX as a viable supplement to my income that also keeps me amused on weekends, but she only caught a glimpse of THE WIZ one night at a costume party.
IGES Version 5.0 was published last October, with my name on the title page as IPO IGES Project Manager. I resigned that position at the quarterly IPO meeting in San Diego last week, but I'll be the Editor for the next version. It think this require less effort on my part, since I'd do half the work anyway, but I've got a feeling that twenty hours a week won't be enough.
After all of these years (since 1976??) I've finally got an office with a window. On the other hand, my new office is half the size of my old one, and I can only put my maps on two walls instead of all four. (One wall is window from edge to edge, and the door fills the opposite wall.) I have four computers in the apartment; the KIM in the closest, the Rainbow with a 40 Megabyte hard drive, the Amstrad portable (currently on loan), and the POQET PC, which I carry with me at all times. (Yes, I still carry a Bag of Holding, but the contents is ever so much more powerful than in my Xerox days when The Wiz carried one.)
I drove to the IGES meeting in Buffalo during the Summer of 1989. I stopped in Rochester and Stockbridge. I met some people I hadn't seen in almost nearly a quarter of a century, kids I played with in the sandbox during the summers. It makes me think of another gap in my life; I haven't seen anyone from my school days in D.C., the nerds I grew up with. Maybe it's just as well.
My father had surgery to restore proper circulation to his legs. When my mother visited him at the hospital, she ran into one of the members of the old Explorer troop. He said he saw me in the article about Mensa in EBONY a few years ago.
So, IGES and Mensa are the activities that occupy most of my time. And Wiz Worx. I still haven't written a line of code for Computervision since I started there three years ago. IGESPEEK, my flagship shareware product, has lead to my joining the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP). I hand out floppy disks (orange, for thirty-nine cents each) or put copies on Bulletin Board Systems, and I get checks in the mail. Sometimes, I sell a copy of the source for a thousand dollars (some programming required, compiler not included).
My Islam does not occupy as much of my life as I had intended, but it permeates it in a way that makes me content. Abu Huryra is a kind of bodisatva (one who forsakes enlightenment it order to help others achieve it), a role which I hadn't imagined for myself. My Way lies not so much in leading others to find their Way, but my Dream Walk is an inspiration in itself. I trust that Allah has set me on the Straight Path, and that He will not let me stray as long as I let Him lead me.
I gave a talk on Lunar Astronomy and the Islamic Calendar for muslims at the state prison. One of them asked me how I reconciled Science with Islam. I told him that for me, there is no conflict. Science is merely the attempt to study and understand that which the Creator has set in motion. God doesn't make mistakes; that's how he got to be God. All of our questions will be answered on Judgement Day, but that doesn't mean we can't spend our time looking for answers to His riddles and new questions to ask about His universe. I even started the lecture with a quote from Qur'an:
He has made subject to you the Night and the Day;
The Sun and the Moon;
And the stars are in subjugation to His command;
Verily in this are signs for people who are wise.
One of the inmates asked me, "What makes the moon shine?" Nobody laughed. He just hadn't thought about it before, and most of them probably hadn't, either. There's no shame in not knowing an answer, but much in leaving a question unasked.
The Japanese have a saying, something to the effect that a person can only eat a single bowl of rice, and only sleep on a single mat. The message is that no matter how much we have, there's only so much that we can use, and even less that we really need. I have enough, and I'm thankful for that. Thankful enough to try to break my routine five times a day to get down on my hands and knees and touch my face to the ground as an expression of my gratitude. It's not enough in itself, but I feel it's a start.
-=DAH=- 20-Apr-91
As I speculated in the entry I made over two years ago, I've had some snapshots digitized and added them. This is the story of adding the figures.
These figures are the result of several different scanning sessions. Most are 300 d.p.i. b&w scans of Polaroid snapshots. One is a 2048 d.p.i. 24-bit (16 million colors) scan of a 35mm slide on a Kodak Photo CD. The images reside on disk in several formats, most commonly TIF, BMP, and WPG (WordPerfect Graphics - bit mapped).
The figures are referenced in order and are identified by their file names on the hard disk, e.g., "92SEP01E.TIF" is the fifth (letter E) of a batch that was scanned on September 1, 1993. Some reflect an index relative to a particular Photo CD, like "04250088.WPG". I have copies of some of the figures in several formats.
WPG files are optimized for printing from WordPerfect on a 300 d.p.i. LaserJet IIIP or equivalent laser printer. They have 256 shades of gray or color, and do not look as good on the computer monitor.
BMP files are brain-damaged files that anything can process - they represent the lowest common denominator. They only have 16 shades of gray, and they are 256x384 pixels so that they will fit in a small window on a screen.
TIF files are a mix of 2, 256, and 16M color files in various resolutions. This is the exchange format that I use the most right now ... the Kodak PhotoEdge package writes 24-bit uncompressed TIF files from Kodak's proprietary PCD format, then I use Paint Shop Pro (PSP) to convert the TIF to WPG.
A few weeks of experience dealing with these tools has shown me that I need distinct files for viewing and for printing. The problem has to do with density and contrast - the screen can show more than the printer. I'm learning that 16 shades of gray (4-bit color) is the best compromise for a single file format to both view and print, as well as being the smallest size on disk.
(The above paragraphs are inoperative -- all images referenced by WWW pages are either 16 or 256 color GIF files. -=DAH=- 04-Jun-95) (Because of concern for down-load times, the images have been moved to individual HTML files. -=DAH=- 03-Feb-96)
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