Wednesday, November 16, 2005
I've missed my blog.
I thank everyone who is still reading this site; I understand that my post absence has not helped. My short, quick, Portsmouth, Virginia public library PG-13 explanation? My parents are sick. I flew home two weeks ago to find my father suffering from complications of triple-bypass heart surgery and my mother hospitalized from a shattered knee. I spent four days last week where the only people I spoke to face to face were confined to hospital beds, with various medical technologies and tubes hooked up to their aged flesh. Sirens wail, numbers flash, and electronic signals constantly monitor the utter frailty of human life.
It was my executive decision to return home. My sisters are busy with their own lives, as they should be. My younger sister assisted my parents when my father had the major surgery, and my older sister has been helping out the family since time immemorial. I chose to assist now. I was not prepared in any sense for the ramifications of that decision.
I hate Virginia. I've always considered myself from the Old Dominion, but not of the Old Dominion. In the past six years since I started college, every weekend or short visit to my hometown bleeds difficulty and heartache, shattered friendships and omnipresent ostracism. Virginia is my own personal hell. I'm enveloped, saturated, drowning in the guttural, gun-barrel, ghetto mentality of every Southernplayalisticadillac wannabe musician and each curvy, busty, voluptuous, bottle-blond, sedentary, collard green, fatback, cornbread-fed big booty Brenda with three children under age five, freshly manicured nails from Ms. Trang's and more fake hair than the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria penthouse suite during eleven A.M. checkout when Shawn Carter awakes Ms. Knowles with a sweet shoulder kiss after a rambunctious night of passionate, athletic, fresh-to-def lovemaking.
Yes, my friends, the Roc is in the building: the crack rock responsible for the walking dead who appear on my parent's suburban streets at three in the morning as I return from Virginia Beach clubs, the diamond rock reducing all my demographic to materialistic, petty bourgeoisie, desperate for the recording contract or the lottery winnings that will transform their minimum wage weekdays and marijuana haze, strip club weekends into a permanent Young Jeezy video, replete with butter pecan Ricans half-naked, feeding grapes on command and dark-skinned apartheid refugees nasally singing their nursery rhyme hooks. Hell, that's probably attributing too much to the C-student Black P-Town multitude - since youth imagination was the first casualty of war in urban Reaganomics' Iran-Contra, since community pillars leave ethnic enclaves as integration benefits the educated, since no one in my hometown really cares if Tim Kaine beat Jerry Kilgore with a wink and a nod from Governor Mark Warner (D-VA), let's be honest. All we want today is Laffy Taffy.
D4L, with the new album Down For Life, detonated the urban music scene with their annoying, distasteful, anti-intellectual, and downright ignorant improvised explosive debut Laffy Taffy. Ladies and gentlemen, coonery has been digitized for your i-Pod enjoyment. Down here, that simple synthesized bassline pops on, and within the first three notes the dance floors are filled with the bouncing breasts and popping posteriors of every sista in the club, dancing with reckless abandon the syncopated simpleton shake of absentee Negro respect. I'd love to find some redeemable creative quality to this excuse for popular music, but I can't. I hit the wall, stand motionless, and wait for the new Three Six Mafia hit to come on. To be real, I'd love to love my people, but I hate to watch my people hate themselves. But no one cares; everyone's too busy. My people get rich or die tryin', and the morgues always have more room. I've seen the hospital beds we leave behind.
I thank everyone who is still reading this site; I understand that my post absence has not helped. My short, quick, Portsmouth, Virginia public library PG-13 explanation? My parents are sick. I flew home two weeks ago to find my father suffering from complications of triple-bypass heart surgery and my mother hospitalized from a shattered knee. I spent four days last week where the only people I spoke to face to face were confined to hospital beds, with various medical technologies and tubes hooked up to their aged flesh. Sirens wail, numbers flash, and electronic signals constantly monitor the utter frailty of human life.
It was my executive decision to return home. My sisters are busy with their own lives, as they should be. My younger sister assisted my parents when my father had the major surgery, and my older sister has been helping out the family since time immemorial. I chose to assist now. I was not prepared in any sense for the ramifications of that decision.
I hate Virginia. I've always considered myself from the Old Dominion, but not of the Old Dominion. In the past six years since I started college, every weekend or short visit to my hometown bleeds difficulty and heartache, shattered friendships and omnipresent ostracism. Virginia is my own personal hell. I'm enveloped, saturated, drowning in the guttural, gun-barrel, ghetto mentality of every Southernplayalisticadillac wannabe musician and each curvy, busty, voluptuous, bottle-blond, sedentary, collard green, fatback, cornbread-fed big booty Brenda with three children under age five, freshly manicured nails from Ms. Trang's and more fake hair than the floor of the Waldorf-Astoria penthouse suite during eleven A.M. checkout when Shawn Carter awakes Ms. Knowles with a sweet shoulder kiss after a rambunctious night of passionate, athletic, fresh-to-def lovemaking.
Yes, my friends, the Roc is in the building: the crack rock responsible for the walking dead who appear on my parent's suburban streets at three in the morning as I return from Virginia Beach clubs, the diamond rock reducing all my demographic to materialistic, petty bourgeoisie, desperate for the recording contract or the lottery winnings that will transform their minimum wage weekdays and marijuana haze, strip club weekends into a permanent Young Jeezy video, replete with butter pecan Ricans half-naked, feeding grapes on command and dark-skinned apartheid refugees nasally singing their nursery rhyme hooks. Hell, that's probably attributing too much to the C-student Black P-Town multitude - since youth imagination was the first casualty of war in urban Reaganomics' Iran-Contra, since community pillars leave ethnic enclaves as integration benefits the educated, since no one in my hometown really cares if Tim Kaine beat Jerry Kilgore with a wink and a nod from Governor Mark Warner (D-VA), let's be honest. All we want today is Laffy Taffy.
D4L, with the new album Down For Life, detonated the urban music scene with their annoying, distasteful, anti-intellectual, and downright ignorant improvised explosive debut Laffy Taffy. Ladies and gentlemen, coonery has been digitized for your i-Pod enjoyment. Down here, that simple synthesized bassline pops on, and within the first three notes the dance floors are filled with the bouncing breasts and popping posteriors of every sista in the club, dancing with reckless abandon the syncopated simpleton shake of absentee Negro respect. I'd love to find some redeemable creative quality to this excuse for popular music, but I can't. I hit the wall, stand motionless, and wait for the new Three Six Mafia hit to come on. To be real, I'd love to love my people, but I hate to watch my people hate themselves. But no one cares; everyone's too busy. My people get rich or die tryin', and the morgues always have more room. I've seen the hospital beds we leave behind.
