As promised, here’s another quick update with another writing-related announcement. Before I get to that, I wanted to point to this piece I published this morning at Medium about CeeLo Green and whatever terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad mess is going on with him right now. There are a few reasons I didn’t publish or cross-post it here, but I’d love it if you went there and read it. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment here, letting me know what you think. Here’s an excerpt:

The truth is: all the music men will disappoint us. They’ll make exceedingly wack albums or be rude and dismissive in person. They’ll abandon art for commerce or go into hiding. They’ll catch the most absurd, unsettling cases. You’ll live. Sometimes, if you’re a die-hard fan, you’ll give them the widest berth, remembering the good album, the great guest verse, all that as-yet-unrealized promise.

But a time may come, as that artist approaches midlife, when you realize he has let the ugliest parts of himself go unchecked. He has shirked rehab, reason, or the idea of reckoning. And if he’s anything like CeeLo, nothing he’s ever done will disgust you and chill you clear to the bone like knowing that despite your patience, despite his vast exposure to the extravagance and cruelty in each corner of the world, despite the eventual responsibilities to the next generation that come with advancing age, your favorite music men could hit 40 still believing and imposing as rule of law that respect, tenderness, decency and even acknowledgment of women’s humanness is some sort of meritocracy, individually earned, publicly debatable.

The other news is a little bigger. If you’ve been visiting this blog for a while, you may recall that I guest-blogged for Alyssa Rosenberg’s Washington Post page, ‘Act Four,’ for a week back in May. (It was big. I’m talking major milestone.) Well, I’m back on tomorrow for another week, as Alyssa screens films at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Since this is my personal blog, I’m going to let you all in on a not-so-secret truth: this work — this incredible, high-profile, quickly turned-around work — is no less scary for me this time than it was the first time I did it. Part of that is that Alyssa is pretty brilliant and she makes the most interesting connections between histories, events, and media — and she does it daily. I don’t want to bore or disappoint her loyal readers. Part of it is that I don’t often know what I’m going to write from day to day — and the better part of a day may go by without an idea coming to me. The third part is that my daughter’s embarking on her full days of pre-K (9-11:45am), starting tomorrow, and I’m her drop-off/pick-up person. And I also have another work-from-home job, so you know. Life’s hectic. The fourth part is just your run-of-the-mill writerly nerves and doubt.

To calm myself, I am thinking of Langston Hughes and his poem, “Theme for English B.” When I was in high school, it was one of my favorite things to revisit — and I’m coming back to it now, like a student timidly knocks on the door of her mentor, days before her thesis is due. I won’t reproduce the entire poem here, only the part that I love most (made all the more relevant by the lone comment left on Alyssa’s kind re-introduction post):

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like

the same things other folks like who are other races.

So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

Word, Langston. Word.