An Interview with Newamba Flamingo - Page 3

NF: Just as I received your message, I took a massive dose

Fuck yea!
How many mgs?

NF: Not sure, but probably 300 or 400

 

 

Newamba’s happy for me. He knows this is one less fight I have to worry about and it’s been so long since I got some resolution to this fiasco of litigation and financial ruin. When his well-formed wisdom comes through over text, I think of how far he’s come since his days of wearing trench coats, ski masks and tightie whites on Youtube, brandishing a plunger and threatening his flip phone camera for effect. His poems were like baseball bats catching me between the eyes as I turned the corner of a familiar street. 

Those days come up in general conversation and quickly become a topic of discussion on one of our open mic shows via Zoom every Friday/Saturday night. Sometimes we talk about major victories, minor defeats, trailblazing insights, and regret for unintentional harm we may have caused…

***

I'm at odds with the handles and angles in my kitchen, let alone my life and on the day I'm finally free of any legal obligations to the state of Colorado, I wish I was in fucking Bangkok.

People commonly mistake neurological disorders as mental health issues. Yes there is a thin line between defects and inherent flaws, and often resulting symptoms/prescriptions are shared. But let’s say, for instance:  

 

While a single concussion is rarely permanently disabling, up to 30% of patients experience Post-Concussion Syndrome (PCS), where symptoms last for months or even years. Permanent, irreversible brain damage from a mild head injury is very uncommon, but persistent, debilitating, and sometimes life-altering symptoms can require specialized, multidisciplinary medical intervention.

-Deadscroll Junk-

 

I was never studied to see if a skull fracture I suffered at the age of 9 had any correlation with my “anger fits”; I was admitted to Lincoln Trails Behavioral Health Center when I was 13, given a RX of Gabapentin (anti-convulsant/psychotic) and a lot of bad press from therapists and legal guardians.

***

It’s 7/16/26 and the gran mal from last Sunday has been harder for me to recover from; I'm sitting outside 3E waiting for the last 2 years to fall from my shoulders like an ill-fitting trench coat. There's a certain time of night when the horizon line is stationary. My feet stick to the floor. If we're just checking boxes: inner muscle tension, bouts of hysteria, star quality- I'm a model, an inert worm of circumstances and circulation.

My lawyer is adamant that there's no reason to continue the probation period and the DA says they're not going to object to ending my probationary term, until they hear there is a small debt left to pay. The judge asks what I would like to happen, and before I can finish blathering on about grace periods and getting my shit together again, my lawyer waves it off and settles for another 3 weeks of term and an eventual settlement with a collection agency. 

Newamba Flamingo has always kept me from buying in, on an investor level, to this harpsichord of utter failure and personal delusional trips. I can pinpoint several instances in my life where I could’ve used his counsel and we’d just lost touch. I don’t want to say he keeps me from getting the better of myself, but he keeps me from fucking all the way up on a regular basis.  Wrap caution tape around the murder scene, the investigation is underway. Speak from a position of self evidence and forget so easily that not everyone's mask was put together by Elmer's glue factory. I love the phrase, it's not brain surgery. It never held as much significance as it does for me today. When I speak with Newamba Flamingo, I feel like I've had a successful temporal lobectomy, that my quality of life has improved beyond meaning/measure. 

[Don’t jump] to conclusions because KY is the hottest state in the nation rn, and just because your messages aren't being delivered doesn't mean you're blocked-

If my inner voice isn’t completely rattled by the constant chaos, it ends every exchange with the word 

[mang].

It’s his voice that gets me more than anyone. It was Newamba who used to read Infinite Jest over Skype while LL and I were 7 circles into our separated consciousness and maybe 6 hours into 1 of many acid trips in a moth-ridden attic of the Route 66 Hostel. It's Newamba that always has a fresh perspective in the chamber:

NF: And mang, I was listening to hardcore hip-hop this morning, and I started wondering if maybe there's a God

Odin?
I've started praying to him.

NF: It just speaks to my soul, mang. Juicy J, 666, really liking Moneybag Yo

Maybe there's a reason, a purpose 

Hope you can move to a new place, think that’d be good for yr soul

 

 

Meth[OD] Lab Radio Episode #11