If you have to thank someone for letting you be yourself, they have power over you. So I thought watching Summer of Soul, a documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, which segued into Sly Lives!, a documentary about Sly and the Family Stone, the group behind the song, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” At times we all feel like mice or elves, about to be squashed. But why? If we are doing nothing criminal, why should being ourselves be treated as a criminal

I’ve waited my whole life to give someone a good death. Presence grows out of absence. As I lay dying as a teenager, my family reacted like marionettes with their strings cut. I was dying but I was much more alive than the stiffs who surrounded me, people who loved me but who could not act on their love. So it is with a fierce energy, a tremendous passion, that I approach the sickness and death of others. What I was not given, I give in spades. I have the words, the actions,