I’m reading every profile I can find of O.J., researching for a retrospective, confounded, implicated. My father knew him, they drove the same car and lived in the same L.A. neighborhood for a while, and soul fragments from each man must have traveled together in some astral realm where they both agreed to Ellisonian rigor and Ellisonian devastation. Hyper-visibility can be transmuted easily because the looking becomes so routine you see these men with your memory, affixing them to familiar descriptions and the parts of their reputation that align with your biases and fantasies. Digression, but I’m writing about Orenthal James Simpson now that he’s dead and what I realize looking into Nicole Brown (Simpson) born the same year as my mother and sharing a birthday with Malcolm X, is that we were spared or protected, or I was, somewhat, from proximity to narratives so abject and foreign that all spectators know how to do is glamorize them obsessively, as if they’re gnostic gospels.
© 2024 Harmony Holiday
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