Wattree

Eric Wattree is a writer, poet, and musician, born in Los Angeles. He’s a columnist for The Los Angeles Sentinel and The Black Star News. He’s also the author of A Message From the Hood, and a contributing writer to Your Black World, and The Huffington Post.
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THE EULIPIANS

Some of the greatest minds I've ever known held court while sitting on empty milk crates in the parking lot of ghetto liquor stores. At their feet I embraced the love of knowledge,and through their tutelage defined self-worth in my own terms.

These are the "Eulipians"—writers, poets, musicians, painters, and uncommon drunks—those shade-tree philosophers who contemplate the fungus between the toes of society; Who dance with reckless abandon, unfettered by formal inhibition, through the presumptuous speculation of the ages; Who live in county jails, cardboard boxes, alley ways, and luxury Apartments; whose very existence exposes the scam of Great Bruteland.

While these obscure intellectuals stand well outside the mainstream of academy, I’ve watched with astonished delight as they sang, scat and scribed their philosophy into the mainstream of human knowledge; as they rammed forth the proposition that knowledge is free, thus, will transcends all attempts to be contained through caste and privilege.

Malcolm, Bird, Langston Hughes, John Coltrane , and Gigglin’ Willie--They all sang but one song:"Man’s innate thirst for knowledge will someday overwhelm his passionate lust for stupidity."

Eric L. Wattree
A Message From the Hood