Freedman's hospital

This is the view from the rooftop bar of a swanky joint called Brixton. Never mind the racial implications of the name (for now), or that census records show my great great grandmother lived on the next block over. Being able to see HUH while I drink makes me feel strange inside.

My grandfather was an alcoholic. The kind of alcoholic who keeps drinking past when his wife, children amd pancreas have abandoned him. As a child, when my father was speaking to him, I remember visiting my grandfather in this hospital. Every time he was there, it was his fault - something related to his affinity for Kool-Aid over health. I never knew him very well. My father's strained relationship with him limited our interactions to Kool-Aid and Nintendo games.

And this hospital. He wasn't fortunate enough to die there. Instead, he died in a diabetic coma less than a mile from the school where I currently teach, where my father worked in the early 1980s.

And so, despite the fact that I am neither an alcoholic nor a diabetic, I suppose I feel immense amounts of guilt for partying here.

I suppose, as well, that I'll have to get over it. That's what Jollys do.