Exterminated

Let me start by saying that I don't normally dream, or as some psychoanalyst would put it: I have less vivid dreams and don't recall my dreams during my REM sleep.  Anyways, I had a crazy dream during my REM sleep last night about whole populations of people being herded for extermination.  Bare with me as some of the details are fuzzy to me now in my awakened state.

I recall being in a mountainous region, something similar to Arizona or somewhere.  I say Arizona because there was red clay and plateaus for miles and also they say we don't  dream about places we've never been or people we've never seen.  So since I've been to Arizona once before I assume that was setting of this dream.  There was a group of us, faces that I didn't recognize, being chased through these mountains by some rangers I guess I would call them.  Next thing I remembered was seeing thousands of us, and by us I mean black people, camping out in tents.  Some people were just sitting, perched on ledges, still unable to escape because of armed guards patrolling the area.  We were given an excuse, via television, on why this was happening this way and that if we remained calm over the next few months final destination will commence and our lives will return to normal.  After a few weeks the number of captives went from a few thousands to hundreds of thousands and people were beginning to get restless and defiant.  At one point a group of people attempted to storm one of the guard stations only to be answered with shots fired into the crowd by the other guards.  As I sat on the ledge watching the confusion, and turmoil it dawned on me, "why would you house thousands of people for a few months only to return them back to their "normal" lives?": unless you're going to exterminate them and use the mountains as a burial ground!

Then I woke up in panic.  And if you're wondering, no, my TV wasn't on while I slept.  The reason I felt to post this is because it all seemed so real and vivid that you don't know how relieved I felt when I realized it was only a dream.

Who Cares?

Okay...Mother's Day has passed, now what?  Oh yeah, that's right, Father's Day.  Do anybody even know when is Father's Day?  Does anybody even care?  Father's around the world can't get a fair shake against mothers.  I mean, think about it, if you were to stumble across a homeless man with his homeless dog, who would you pity?  Me: Somebody get that dog a home.  All weekend I couldn't count the number of songs I heard dedicated to mothers, single-mothers, grandmothers, and not one song gets played for the mother-fuckers.  Sigh. It's okay though, we still push on anyway like unsung heroes.  To all the real father's out there, keep your chin up, this Buds for you.

Suckeeerrrr!

I just had to share this. I thought about it this morning and it was kinda' funny.  If you didn't know I just moved into a new home, everything is going great and I'm feeling blessed.  Only one problem - I have a 150 gallon bow-front aquarium and nowhere to put it.  You see in my last house the living room and family room/den was combined leaving me plenty of room for my tank.  Well, this time around not so. The configuration of my new home is far different than my last so the tank gots' to go.

Here's my ad on craigslist:

150 GALLON AQUARIUM WITH SOME ACCESSORIES AND SOLID WOOD STAND. I NEVER USED IT. THE OWNER BEFORE ME USED IT AS A FRESHWATER AQUARIUM. CAN ALSO BE USED AS A TERRARIUM IM SURE. EVERYTHING RETAILS FOR ABOUT $1500, I'M WILLING TO LET GO FOR $800, OBO. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY!!! IF YOU WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT IT, I'M AVAILABLE DURING THE WEEKDAYS AFTER 9PM, BUT ANYTIME ON THE WEEKENDS.

A week later, I get a call Sunday morning from a guy in Gloucester Co. that's interested in buying it.  "Sure, it's still available," I told him, and gave him my address to come out and take a look.  No one is going to drive all the way from Gloucester Co. just to "look" at a fish tank - that thing was as good as sold.

So he and his wife arrived about an hour and a half later and while we're loading his truck with the tank and stand he starts to go on about how rare my aquarium is, and, unless you're lucky, to get another like it you would have to get it custom made.  Honestly, I did the research on how much a 150 gallon tank would retail for, but now it explains why I couldn't find anything on bow-fronts specifically.  And the guy just couldn't shut up soon enough about it, he just kept needling me and needling me with it.

Anyway, I'm glad it's gone and out of my hair.  Plus, the money I got for it is going towards my new 55" LED TV before football season hits.  HEELLZ YEEAH!

112 Days

It's kinda' hard to fathom that its been 112 days since the start of my first semester of college.  Within 2 weeks I was thinking to myself, "What in the hell?"  It has been a rough couple of months of getting used to studying again, actually doing homework this time around, and the dreaded anticipation of wondering if I passed or failed a class.  If I was asked the question, "So if there was one thing you could take away from this first semester of school, what would it be?", my answer would definitely be - learn time management.  Because at the end of the day there's no excuses.  No "my kid is sick."  No "but I had to work overtime at my job."  Nothing that starts with "See, what happened was..." is going to bail you out.  Suck it up, it's only the beginning.

Throw My Mother From the Train...Please

I'm just joking.  I LOVE my mother for life.  But unfortunately I don't like her - let me rephrase that - I can't live with her.  I don't know how I did it for the first 19 years of my life?  My mother is sweet and she means well, but a lot of times her own idiosyncrasies gets in the way of me enjoying being around her .

Despite all this, about a month ago it seemed like a good idea to drive up to Queens, NY to bring my mother back home to Virginia to live with me.  Understand that at the time I was really concerned for her health and well-being up there and plus, there were incidents that made me feel uncomfortable about her living situation.  So the plan was to bring her back to her birth place, help her get readjusted to living here again and help her get her own housing eventually.

That first week I thought to myself, "What the fuck was you thinking?".  I just recently moved into a quiet residential neighborhood filled with old, white folks.  Right up my mother's alley right? Peace and quiet.  Wrong.  My mother is LOUD.  As soon as I turn the corner to go down my street I already know she's on the porch.  She is that loud. For two reasons; first, that's just the way she is, and second, for the last five years or so she's been having to talk over a house full of crying kids.  Even when she realizes she's loud she she gets louder.  She hasn't figured out yet how to turn herself down.

She also, unknowingly, suffers from insomnia and has been that way for as long as I've known her.  I can maybe count on one hand how many times I've actually seen my mother asleep....with her eyes closed.  So it's nothing to find myself awakened at 2:30 in the morning from the sound of someone downstairs rustling through the refrigerator for a snack, or "silently" talking on the phone.  How do you tell your mom, "Will you carry your ass to bed!....please?"

All my mom's conversations start something like this: "I didn't get to sleep 'til about 3 o'clock last night."  Long pause.  Even longer pause now.  You see, this where I'm suppose to chime in and say, "So why didn't you get to sleep 'til 3 o'clock?"  And then, by law, she can continue to explain why.  Honestly, it's the funniest shit ever.  "Ma, why can't you just tell me why you were up 'til 3 instead of me having to pretend like I'm asking?"  No answer.

Well, it seems she's not ready to come down and stay for good just yet (every time I say that I uncontrollably jump in the air and click my heels together).  She lives with my younger brother and his wife and they need her to help out babysitting my three nieces (daycare in NY is a bitch).  A big part of my mother's being is the joy of raising children.  I don't have one yet for her to raise so when she's here she starts to feel a bit unuseful.  So, this Saturday I'll be driving her back up to NY until the next time she gets stressed out and needs to come back home to relax.  I'm okay with that because her short stay allowed me to learn a little about myself, and that is that I'm not ready to deal with my mother full-time yet.  Saturday can't get here fast enough.

Give a Little, Live a Little

"You give but little when you give your possessions.  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."
- Kahlil Gibran

Lately, I've been following this blog, 366 Random Acts of Kindness, simply because I was interested in what this guy had to say about his random acts.  If anyone out there follows my blog then you remember in an earlier post, Give Forward, where I mentioned the 1000 Shoes for 1000 Smiles organization that I wanted to be involved with.  I was successful in contacting the organization and received an email thanking me for wanting to help.  I guess now I just wait until someone contacts me, which should be around the time everyone is out shopping for school clothes, to come out and lend a hand.  (Finger tapping on my desk) So what am I to do in the meantime?  Well, since my days are already sliced up into 25 hours, devoting my time to someone or something is a bit of stretch for me.  This is where the 366 Random Acts of Kindness comes in.  I figured if someone could conjure an act of kindness for 366 days, hell, I could donate to 53 different non-profit organizations each week.  And blog about it.  So that's my mission for the year.  I'm not out for recognition or anything like that, I just feel a need to give back.  I've been blessed over the past few years of my life and everyday I wake up I remind myself that this day is an opportunity to either make something better or make something new; or both.  If you're reading this and know of an organization that could use a little help, please comment.  Talk atcha' next week.

Annette Larkins

Since 16 years old I haven't eaten a morsel of pork.  For about the next 5 years I was "off and on" with the beef thing until I decided that too had to go.  I haven't been able yet to fully rid myself of chicken or turkey though.  And seafood....forget about it, I can't even imagine my life without fish.  I still have stark images of my uncles coming through my grandmother's front door lugging a garbage can full of fresh, live crabs just waiting to be steamed and served. 
Fortunately for me I grew up where Hip-Hop was fresh, raw, original and most importantly...conscious.  There were groups like Gangstar and Brand Nubians, to name a few, that stirred my awareness to pork, lard, and other dietary ills that I never gave much thought to.  KRS-ONE was solely responsible for arousing my consciousness to the deathly manufacturing of beef and offered a more holistic alternative to the way my friends and I were eating.  Public Enemy would wisely drop names in their songs to dare you to do your research.  How else was I going to know who Assata Shakur was, otherwise known as Joanna Chesimard?  Or Geronimo Pratt, Nelson Mandela (before he was internationally known), The Last Poets, Frantz Fannon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Che Guevera, the MOVE.  These weren't people that I was able to go to my school library and check out a book on.  Back then the public school system thought it was better for inner city kids to learn that Reaganomics was a good thing.  The Honorable Elijah Muhammad published a small, narrow book called "How to Eat to Live", that I read from cover to cover.  This book, for me, was revolutionary.  It marked a turning point in my life, and not by just what I fed my body but what I fed my mind as well.  By this time I was what people now refer to as a pescatarian, a person that abstains from eating all meat except for fish.  That has worked for me up until about five years ago.  I started back consuming chicken and turkey in order to convenience family and friends at times when they would prepare meals for me.  As of today, March 1, 2012, no more.  Thanks to Annette Larkins I've had it with chicken and Turkey for good.  Who is Annette Larkins?  I'm glad you ask...