In this book I'm in the final throes of writing, I spend a lot of time revising about home, my home, Tulsa, Oklahoma, the six years I lived in Norman covering OU football, the bus rides to and from Stillwater in pursuit of my own self-respect,
in this land nations of people alongside the diaspora were banished to & made habitable, profitable, home, by pulling from the ground what no one else had & finding enterprise where others found red dirt & drawing out what it means for me to call Oklahoma home
at a time when my friends, my family, our best & brightest leave us for a place that's better and brighter & then we have to defend ourselves all over again from tornadoes & tornadoes of criticism
& floods & floods of our valid feelings for being left here, again, at home, in a place Zebulon Pike once called American Sahara & discarded & treated as if we ain't no thing & what did we expect when we're just Oklahoma & lighten up
people leave & ask us to be less invested in the place that raised us, that created us, that has been a cauldron for clashes, creativity & smash-mouth, wishbone & pass-happy football where the Dust Bowl laid waste, the Murrah memory looms,
we've rebuilt, remade, even as we stumble in our way, home, & beg respect because football, we're so good at it, and we must be good at it, because it's our birthright & our driver license &
we feel so like fighting for a place that once no cared to notice until we made them notice with 47-straight, Heismans, national championships, a 33-year-old wundekind with ambition & now we must do it all over again amen.
