Resolutions are for fat people.........

Well.............we made it, sports fans. 2009. The year of the jackrabbit. Obama is in, autotune is out (I pray to the ceiling), and Ghostface Killah is still out there somewhere fuckin' fans as we speak. I'm fully aware that this is usually the point where any self-respecting cool (read: cynical) writer would shit on the previous year and focus on it's failings, but I gotta admit.........2008 was pretty fuckin' awesome for me personally. It was great. Then again, I have a habit of judging every year based on how good I'm doing compared to my friends from the neighborhood who are either dead or locked up for 40+ years, but still, on it's own merits last year was undeniably a hallmark of memorable moments in the life of me. Let's go down the list real quick.............

1. Daughter was born on January 16th. Amani. The most beautiful girl I've ever laid eyes on. Don't know if I'm ready for those teenage years, I feel sorry for any pimple-face pud puller that knocks on my door to take her out for a date. I'm just gonna start swingin'.

2. Performed at SXSW music festival for the 2nd year in a row. Shoutout to Matt Sonzala, a cat that truly inspires me everyday. Keep doing what you do, and a million thanks for puttin' us down once again. It was an honor. We'll cross paths again.

3. Joined the US Navy. Signed the dotted line and swore to protect and obey the president. And this is Bush we're talking about since it was still 2008. The things a man will do for his kids. I'm sure I'll be making a shitload of positive and negative remarks about this particular year in my twilight for this alone.

4. I finished not one, but two full albums that I'm really proud of.

5. I didn't get buried alive. That's my biggest fear, however irrational since I don't practice voodoo and I'm not Uma Thurman, but still..........any year I don't get ambushed and forcefully locked in a coffin and covered in dirt is a great year in my book.

6. Barack Obama was elected president, and I voted for him. As much as I may disagree with many of his individual platform issues, I can forever look my mixed-race children in the eyes and say, you too can be president, you can be whatever you set your mind to, we live in America the greatest nation on earth, for all it's faults, in capitalism the greatest system man has yet invented, for all it's faults, where your success is directly measured by your drive and ambition. You have no idea how much that means to me.

7. Gnarls Barkley "The Odd Couple" dropped, one of the best albums of my generation. You really think I give a fuck if you agree? Ha! See how far that gets you. These are two real life geniuses in the flesh we're talkin' about.

8. I'm alive, and so are you.

"New Year's Day is every man's birthday".
- Charles Lamb

Get drunk and get naked. Peace.

The Bible had singing animals too, didn't it?

Earlier today wifey took the kids to Chucky Jesus. That's what my son calls Chucky Cheese's, which needless to say makes me nervous everytime he says it because........well.........I think we all know there haven't been too many scenarios involving christians and toddlers in the last decade that haven't ended in new laws named after little girls. No offense to anyone, I just don't want my son to be the first male with a rape law named after him, just because some pizza-pushin' pedo priest asked him if he wanted to go "play in the tunnels". And it doesn't end there, then we'll have to deal with the ripped-from-the-headlines Law and Order episode. They'll have the dude with the creepy huge muppet eyebrows grillin' some curly head Italian child actor playing my son, since they still don't allow mixed race people to get SAG cards in hollywood. It'll just be a big mess.

Matter fact..........I figure if I can just get this kid to 18 without him becoming a case study of ANY kind for pre-law undergrads, I should get a big A+ on my daddy report card. That's your job description as a father. Don't let your kids set any precedents.

I know, I should write a parenting book. You're welcome for the free words of wisdom. Each one, teach one, that's what I always say.

I never say that.

Cuban Miss Crisis

So today I decided to go down to the Jacksonville Public Library and get myself a card so I can do me some book-learnin', and I pretty much just ended up sittin' at a table by myself reading Spin magazine for an hour because M.I.A. was on the cover with two colors of lipstick on. I'm easily distracted, what can I say. We could spend the rest of this post psychoanalyzing the fact that I didn't lose interest even after realizing she was pregnant in all her photo-spreads, but I don't feel like being judged by nerds who read blogs all day, so let's get back to the story I wanna tell. DO YOU MIND?!!

Okay, so I fully expected to get distracted by a female at the library, real or in print. Honestly I expect that regardless, anywhere I go. But what I didn't expect to happen was for one of the best things I've ever seen at a public library to unfold right in front of my eyes. Not the best, mind you. That honor still goes to the time I saw a dirty ass homeless dude with no shirt on reading Marques De Sade in a downtown Austin library. But one of the best, definitely.

So I'm just sittin' at the table, minding my own business, reading some incredibly hilarious graduate student/Spin editor yap about how wrinkled and irrelevant Madonna is these days. Yeah.......kinda like your own writing career, right Studs Urkel? I'm sure his parents get a free Spin subscription every month and use it to wrap fish patties. Anyway, where was I........oh yeah, so I'm sittin' there when this older hispanic lady comes and sits at the table in front of mine (I was gonna say Mexican, but I forgot I'm not in Texas anymore. Fun fact: Cubans will fight you for calling them Mexicans, don't ask me how I learned that). So she sits down, pulls out her cell phone, and apparently calls her husband's divorce attorney because the conversation that proceeds is one of the loudest, most spiteful, curse-filled tirade I've ever heard. Not just in the middle of a library, but anywhere. The fact that it was in a library is what took it from slightly uncomfortable to high comedy.

She's screeching about how her "crazy fucking" daughter needs counseling, and how her "dumb dick" husband isn't gonna get anywhere near either of them ever again, or she's gonna call the police so he can "get fucked daily in prison like he's fucked me every day for the last 7 miserable years."

After like 4 long and hilarious minutes of this, a security guard finally stops laughing for long enough to get up and tell her, very politely, to take her phone call outside. The lady stops mid-sentence, stares at the security guard like she just crawled through her bedroom window to tell her to stop talking so loud, and she just says........no, let me put this a different way, I don't think I'm doing it justice..........she doesn't just say this, she yells it. All at the same pitch, no breaks or breaths or punctuation. She goes:

"CAN YOU PLEASE GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACE I'M HAVING A SERIOUS DISCUSSION HERE THANK YOU!!!"

The security guard tries to keep herself composed, and now she's asking her to leave. The lady's trying to continue her phone call. The guard asks again nicely. The lady walks five feet over to a rack of romance novels, picks one up and hurls it at the security guard's face. It just barely misses.

I lost it. My sides were hurtin'.

The security guard didn't find it as funny as me, she definitely had to remind herself real quick she was a library employee and not Layla Ali, cuz I saw the fire in her eyes. The old lady woulda got molly-wopped in the home & gardening aisle for real, she had no reach and I'm pretty sure she was on some kinda pills. Sadly there was no fight though, instead the security guard just sat back down, calmly picked up the phone and called the police. But at this point the lady has her back turned, so she's still goin' on with her conversation like nothing happened. Then, I swear to god, she looks up right at me and gives me this look like "Can you believe some people? Geez", like she just stood up to a schoolyard bully or some shit. Like we're all on her side. I gave her a look back like, "bitch this ain't the mighty ducks, why are you acting like the cops aren't coming? I hope you ain't on that pretty pink iphone pissing off the only lawyer you know right now."

Fast forward to 10 minutes later, Jacksonville's finest are in front of the library. She walks up to the front to give her side of the story, but they ain't wasting any time, just start escorting her out and to the car, and she's doing the famous let-go-of-me-I-can-do-it-myself move that old white ladies seem to love to bust out whenever the cops come. She's trying to tell the cops something, but they're not listening. She's telling them she left her purse at the table. I didn't even notice. I looked over, and there it is.

And there it goes.

Some kid just walks by and grabs it all nonchalant, looks at me with a big ass grin on his face. Got himself a new pink Iphone.

I bet Twain ate some fried ox tail............

Well I officially live in Jacksonville Florida now. That magical land of dreadlocks and intolerance, where every mall is the "hood mall" and all the restaurants seem to be competing for which one can have the most passive-agressively racist name (actual sign a block away from the Navy base: "Ying's Chinee Takee Outee").

If you ever feel the need to make the 15 hour drive from Texas to Florida in a moving truck through the land that time forgot (or more likely, left on a doorstep crying and wrapped in newspaper) called the South, hey how about this, first try chopping off a finger. And if you're still conscious and haven't had enough self-inflicted suffering after that, here's some quick tips to help you on your journey.

1. Don't drink and drive. You'll lose the competition you didn't even know was happening, and it's the semi-finals.

2. Don't be an interracial couple. It just confuses people. Bathroom breaks in Mississippi mostly just brought me and my wife the kinda looks that say "wow, he sure does give his slave girl nice clothes."

3. If you lose your mapquest directions, don't worry. You'll know you're halfway there when the only radio station (FM or AM) that isn't a re-broadcasted church sermon from 1973, is a "classic rock" station that seems to only play "Copperhead Road" on repeat all day long. It's all downhill from there!

As easy as it would be to spend the rest of this post making fun of Alabama, it really is like steppin' into an alternate universe. It's like David Lynch meets Deliverance meets a Bosch painting in some places, and by some places I mean anyplace that isn't a cemetary or a book section, and even those can get kinda..............Left Behind-ish (you decide which one I meant). We stopped in Birmingham to get some gas, and some random 30-year old black dude with an eyepatch a fur coat came up to me and said, "You from Birmingham?"

"No."

"................Are you lost?"

I said no, but in retrospect the correct response was probably, "aren't we all?" Just a weird philisophical moment in Alabama, from a guy who I might add seconds later walked off to fill up a 2 gallon gas can and took it into a nearby Waffle House, presumably to light himself on fire like a tibetan monk in the name of some righteous intangible truth in evidence of human freedom, or because he was high on meth.

As a bonus, at the very same gas station this festive christmas ad was on the wall above the pisser:

Nothin' out of the ordinary about that. No sir. Perfectly fine christmas present for loved ones of all ages. Why, I remember as a young kid, I couldn't even sleep on christmas eve I was so damn excited from the smell of deisel fuel coming from under the tree. It was the only thing I asked Santa for in my letters. If I listened close enough...........I could swear I even heard hooves dancing on the rooftop and a sleigh taking off into the night. With "Copperhead Road" playin' in the background.

I'm really not just trying to pick on Alabama here. I mean, it's a weird fuckin' place, but Texas ain't exactly the stuff of Jane Austen novels either. I always love goin' North past Dallas and driving through the great town of Fate, Texas, just to see the big sign on the highway lettin' you know the next exit takes you to "Bass Pro Drive".

Ahh Bass Pro drive..........the lifeline of a bustling metropolis. As Rue Saint Louis en l'Ile is to Paris, so Bass Pro Drive lays in the midst of the cultural hub of the western world, Fate Texas. Where the socialites drink the tallest of tall boys and the sculptures are mullets.

Hey, I also saw this somewhere:

And I don't doubt for a second that it did. But when I woke my son up at 2 in the morning to tell him this hilarious story, I don't think he fully appreciated the sarcasm.

That's about it. Nothing else exciting happened on the road. Nope. Nothing at all EXCEPT THAT SOME BRAVE SOUL FINALLY CAPTURED AND KILLED SASQUATCH!!!!

It's true. Now, you may be the skeptical type. You may be wondering why such a legendary creature, after being wrestled and killed, would be left sitting on top of a Ms. Pacman machine in rural Georgia. Allow me to answer that question with another question. Are you lost?

Way too happy...........

I was goin' through a shitload of photos from all the concerts I been to this year (way too many according to wifey), lookin' for the best ones for the portfolio, and in a group of shots of Dred Skott at Emo's I caught somethin' in the crowd that made me crack up for no reason.


That dude is awesome, but I also kinda hope he got in a horrible car accident that night.

Oh yeah, and Dred Skott are some homos. Word up.

Tequila Sunrise..........

I didn't just wake up hungover today.........I woke up drunk. That's always a frustrating couple of minutes when you realize your cunning plan to sleep yourself sober was pointless, and you coulda stayed up doing jumping jacks and finger painting for 6 hours and still felt exactly the same. Fuck it.

My friends threw me a going away party last night at my brother's house, and boy oh boy did it get wild. Not really, but I learned if you just say "Boy oh boy" in response to any question about a party, it makes people think it was a Caligula-style blowout, and not just a quiet get-together in an apartment with nice platters of coconut shrimp.

"Boy oh boy? Wow, it must have been too wild for him to even describe! What a hip cat, the guys want to be him and the girls wanna be with him!! What a handsome rake! A real ham dinner!"

In case you're wondering, this hypothetical is taking place in a 1927 speakeasy. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever used "ham dinner" as a slang term. But it gets better when Al Capone walks in and shoots this guy in the face.

Back to sane topics, my co-workers also threw me a lil'............don't know what to call it..........shindig?........luncheon. It was a luncheon, I'll go with luncheon. Complete with nachos and beans, and let me tell you, friends and countrymen............nothin' makes you feel better in the middle of the worst hangover of your life than soakin' up all the tequila still coating your stomach with beans, bell peppers and velveeta. If you aint' picking up on the sarcasm yet, don't worry it's probably just hidden underneath all the vomit.

Boy oh boy.

In other news, I got rick roll'd on the street earlier. Now.......I'm no fan or supporter of 2-years-past-stale internet memes, but that had to be the most awesome shit that's ever happened to me that didn't involve a warm vagina. You might be wondering the logistics of how a rick roll works in real life, and what kind of person would even do it. Basically I was standing outside of the state building where I work catchin' some fresh air, when this 30-somethin' year old asian guy pulls up next to me in a pickup truck, literally stops by the curb in the middle of traffic, turns up his stereo to full blast and it's "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you doooooown!!", and he's singing along and dancing in his seat so hard it's shaking the truck. Complete stranger. Then he just turns the radio off like nothing happened and drives off.

I laughed so hard I almost coughed up my own alcohol diseased liver. That guy deserves to go to heaven, despite having no creativity whatsoever. Small criticism for a great man.

Anyway, that's my friday so far. It's all downhill from here. Thanks and much love to anyone readin' this that was at the party last night, I won't miss any of you simps but you can write me letters when I'm gone anyway.

Good riddance, please don't leave............

Judging by the complete lack of comments/e-mails from non-texan readers on the "R.I.P. DJ Screw" post a couple days ago, and the overflow of e-mails from drunk white friends of mine wanting to argue (with their fists) about the "Chinese DemoCRAPcy" post from yesterday, I think it's safe to say I've alienated a good chunk of my readers. Impressive.

And while there's a weird part of me that wants to just go ahead and get rid of the rest of you by posting turtle porn or "fun" thanksgiving recipes, I think I'll play this one safe and just post some things we can all agree are awesome.


1. The House Party scene from Fresh Prince.

2. Radiohead doing the Smiths live on a webcast. At least one part of that sentence has to warm your cockles.

3. This picture of Rosario. This picture? No stupid.......this one.

4. Japanese children's show from the 70's called "Gimmie Gimmie Octopus". No wonder they all grew up to love tentacle porn.


Okay. That's all I got. If you're still around, please feel free to leave a comment tellin' me what it would take to alienate you and make you never read my blog again, and I'll try to get around to that next week.

Yeah, more like Chinese DemoCRAPcy...........

Sorry, I been waiting a long time to say that, whether or not the new Guns N Roses album was any good or not. It was inevitable, like WWII or herpes.

Anyway, don't worry this ain't gonna be a review. This is NOT a review blog, and if it ever becomes one feel free to load a gun for me to take to the woods and bite. I just came to say that I'm really enjoying myself watchin' all these "hardcore metal" fans bend over backwards to defend an overly-polished pop/nu-metal album (which is exactly what Chinese Democracy is) just because of the name of the band on the cover. It really has been the highlight of my whole year so far.

First black president? Boring. Olympic summer games? Do I look like a pedophile? Nah, my choice for the cover of Time Magazine's "person of the year" is definitely this chick, cuz I'm sure this album release is the best thing to happen to her since the successful conviction of the guy on the right at the date rape trial.

To be honest I don't really have an opinion on the album, in the same way I don't have an opinion on the Jonas Brothers or cabbage soup. I could easily just say "this fucking sucks" and be done with it, but the truth is it just ain't my cup of tea. Cups of tea aren't my cup of tea either, and really just cups in general. I drink everything out of wine goblets. My point is that I don't just write blog posts to be negative. I'm a good person. All I'm sayin' is it's hilarious to me that the same people who shit on douchebag nu-metal bands (and rightfully so) with spiked hair, white contact lenses and zombie make-up from the November 1st Walmart clearance section, are now fawning over an album that makes Static-X look like Black Sabbath. That's all.

And don't get me wrong, I think it's great that 2008 could be the year when all the Metallica and GnR fans collectively found peace in their hearts, and finally got excited about something other than filling their autograph booklets with all the B-list celebrities they give cart-rides to at their airport security jobs...........that really is a heartwarming finale to the last few decades of being condescended to by record labels, stand up comedians, and VH1 rock docs...........but I find it really hard to believe that anyone waited 16 years to hear Axl Rose sing lyrics like "If the world would end, would our love slip away" over Oceans 14 soundtrack-esque strings, with guitar solos that sound closer to skinemax sex scenes than anything Slash ever bothered me with. But hey, keep up the act as long as you can.








And it fucking sucks.

Ok I'm done. Enjoy the record, guys.

Good Mourning...............

"Around that time, I heard my first gray tape/
1994, Hurricane Duck, up on the playscape/
That Soul II Soul intro, ironic cuz it brought me back to life."
- Sandman- Screw Shop Freestyle

So yesterday was the 8th anniversary of the death of the man who had a MUCH bigger influence on my life (along with every other kid from the hood in Texas in the mid-90's) than Biggie, Pac, and Eazy E all put together.

Talmbout DJ Screw, noamsayin'. Robert Davis Jr, fool. The originator. You forgot my gunshots, Screw yoooooooou.



So why didn't I make this post yesterday? Cuz he died on the 16th, but I found out on Nov. 17th, so this is my day of mourning, ya feel me.

I remember walkin' up to the back of Crockett High on that day in 2000, to the woods where all the gangbangers chilled on benches smokin' blunts before class, and for the first time ever it was quiet. No music, no yelling, no shameless girls dancing tryin' to fill the void their foster parents couldn't (yeah, it was a lot more fun than sittin' in the lunchroom next to the nerds playin' with magic cards). Everyone was just sittin' with their heads down. Black, white, mexican kids, all sittin' together lookin' like they saw a ghost. Or maybe hoping they would. When they told me DJ Screw died in his studio the night before, I just sat on the bench along with everyone else and couldn't say anything. The bell for first period rang and nobody moved. After maybe 15 minutes, someone popped in the gray tape of "The Final Chapter" from '96. Not the best tape he ever made but the most fitting eulogy any of us dro-baked dumbasses could put together on the spot.

In retrospect we couldn't have picked a better tape, since a) it was a Tupac heavy tape, and b) it had Lil' Keke flowin' over the beat for Bone Thugs "Crossroads".

8 years later, and every year it seems Screw's legacy is fading more and more, even in Texas. Some people like to blame it on the new generation of Houston rappers not paying homage enough. Others use MTV along with the trendy "hip hop is dead" meme to scapegoat the new generation of young fans out to be undereducated or ignorant. I don't buy into any of that bullshit. To me it's a lot simpler than that. Screw was an isolated phenomenon in one small region of the country. It was a huge movement, but an underground one that never crossed over to the mainstream (though definitely in some dope backdoor ways that few people noticed). Those thousands of kids who it did touch, called themselves (to this day) "screwheads", and that's how I'll always describe myself as well. But look around..............look at your friends...............the screwheads are grown now. Even those of us who were in the youngest group of Screw fans back in the mid-90's (I was 9 when I heard my first screw tape in 1994), are in our mid-to-late 20's now. To put it simply, Screwheads got kids, got married, got corporate jobs, moved out of Texas, and just generally became squares. So who are the ambassadors to carry on the legacy? 30 year old computer programmers drinkin' purple margaritas at Baby A's with their co-workers?

Just face it. It was a moment in time that doesn't translate real well to the new millennium rap scene, and let's be real, didn't much translate to the 90's rap scene either. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Why does it have to be? Music movements come and go. I'm sure there was a lotta Cocteau Twins fans pissed off when the 80's ended and they realized that the shoegaze walls of sound that changed their lives weren't translating too well to the grunge takeover of the 90's.

Fuck it. The Kids are Alright. Just because the movement you were a part of isn't relevant anymore, doesn't mean it was somehow taken away from you forever. As long as we got the tapes, we have the culture. And really it just makes the music that much more meaningful to the holdovers who don't forget, who I might add were already obsessed with hoarding rare gray tapes back when there was a lot less rares than there is becoming now (shoutouts to TheScrewShop.com, home of the rare-tape hermit crabs).

Still it's weird to think that the next generation of kids in Central Texas won't grow up in an environment where you can't walk past a stoplight without ten cars bangin' screw so loud it shakes your eardrums like maracas.

I remember ridin' with my boy Donnie at 4 in the morning bangin' "Da Funk is on Your Mind" tape over and over, sittin' in the parking lot of Chalmers Court projects for hours jammin' the Fat Pat and Keke freestyle, still one of my favorite tracks ever.

I remember in 9th grade sneakin' a bottle of apple juice filled with Tequila into english class, and gettin' so drunk I fell asleep on my desk with my walkman on. Of course, I woke up with an empty walkman, and someone had stole my "Still a G at 27" tape. Whoever it was, I hope he/she got as much pleasure out of it as I did, cuz I wore that cotdamn tape out.

I could go on like that for pages, but I'll leave it at this.

R.I.P. DJ Screw

Thanks for giving Texas something of our own

Birdies that don't chirp........

2002- Sandman & ESG, backstage @ Dorris Miller Rec Center

From the vault (vault = shoebox)

How I Almost Killed the Mexican Shang Tsung........

I fully planned on coming back from lunch today and updating the blog with just some random youtube clips of blaxploitation flick trailers, that are all just as good (and sometimes better) than the actual movies. But something happened to me on the way back from lunch that is seriously making me reconsider whether there's such a thing as divine intervention. Strap yourselves in because this one is a real nail-biter.

It all started with me driving down Riverside, a.k.a. the taco truck mating fields, just minding my own business (listening to Lionel Richie "Dancing on the Ceiling" on Jammin 105.9 which as I said is MY OWN PERSONAL BUSINESS), when out of the corner of my eye I see this older mexican cat walkin' up a hill from this chicken joint. He gets up to the sidewalk, where logic would follow that he would stop and wait for the extremely heavy traffic flow to teeter off before he crosses the major street............but logic did not follow, dear reader. On this day, logic was blind and it's seeing eye dog was shot with a nailgun by Macaulay Culkin. This guy just keeps walking as if he found a new secret crosswalk nobody knows about yet. Apparently if you drink enough cases of Bud Light, the standard pink elephants turn into crossing guards. He just keeps on goin'.

Fine, I think to myself, I can deal with this. Everyone who knows Sandman can tell you I have the reflexes of a cat (and if any frozen burritos are being microwaved in the general area, the sense of smell of one, too). So I slam on my brakes, thus beginning the time-honored tradition of the near-pedestrian-murder experience we've all been through a million times, on both sides of the coin. We all know the drill. It's a 5-step process:

1. The pedestrian almost gets hit.
2. There's a moment of confusion, like both of you just woke up in bed with St Louis style pizza in your underwear.
3. Blame is assigned to the guilty party through facial expressions and telepathy.
4. The pedestrian moves back to the sidewalk (not so subtle foreshadowing here)
5. Both parties go on their way cussin' like sailors*

It's tradition!

But no.........this guy ain't having it. He's a rebel. A desperado, if you will. He says "chinga tu madre" to tradition and sticks his pinky in it's stinky. Basically what that boils down to is that instead of moving back on the sidewalk like a normal person, he stood in front of my car for what felt like infinity plus uno, just staring into my eyes with a confused look. He never got past the second stage of the process. After a while I'm yellin', honking the horn, whatever to get him to snap out of his stupor and move so I can get back to my very important job, so important that I have plenty of time to relate inane, rambling stories on a blog.

Finally he does move and I do drive off. But is that where the story ends? You'd think so, friend..........but you'd be dead wrong. Prepare for the shock of your young life. The horrible twist to this tale.

See, if this had all been happening in someone else's lane and I was just a spectator, I would still probably be writing about it here right now, because it would have been fucking hilarious regardless. So that this happened to me and not someone else is besides the fact. Also besides the fact is that this exact same refusal-to-move-after-near-accident situation happened to my wife on the same street literally less than a month ago, which in and of itself brings up disturbing trends in traffic laws south of the border. All of that is besides the fact, though. All of it takes a backseat to this new revelation that hit me somewhere around the 340th second of this guy staring into my soul with his unsteady drunken brow waving like a scuba buoy............the revelation was, "Hey, I recognize this guy."

But from where?

It wasn't until I got back here to the safety of my half-cubicle-half-toolbox thing that I'm sittin' at right now that I realized where I recognized him from.

Yes, that means another story, but I'll make it quick.

About 3 years ago, I'm driving past a 7-11 on my way home (yeah, to another apartment complex on Riverside. Who the fuck are you to judge the rate of my progress in life? HUH??!), when I see a circle of people, mostly high school kids, standing around jumpin' and screaming. Which we all know can only mean one thing. One beautiful thing.

FIGHT!!!!

Needless to say, I immediately pull into the 7-11 parking lot and get out to watch. And it's a good ass fight, too, it's two black kids maybe 16 years old, and they both had hands like a good metaphor for something with a lot of hands. But I could barely concentrate on the fight cuz on the other side of the circle, there's this guy........this old mexican guy.........and he's yelling over and over "FINISH HIM!!!! FINISH HIM!!" It was just weird and uncomfortable. He was completely ruining the mood of what otherwise is supposed to be a clean family event. And he wasn't even directing it at a specific fighter. Dude just wanted to see somebody get finished, didn't matter who. Eventually the cops came and everybody ran away. In the words of the great philosopher Cam'ron, "All you hear woop woop, want want, beep beep". But I never forgot that old man sincerely screamin' a Mortal Kombat catchphrase in the middle of a high school fight.

Fast forward to 3 years later, and I swear to zombie christ it's the same guy that I almost "finished" with my front bumper earlier today. With Lionel Richie almost providing the soundtrack to the final twilight of his life, which apparently not unlike mine, was mostly spent on and around East Riverside Lane. Proof that there's a God somewhere up there, who smokes a lot of angel dust. And I don't mean the dust of angels either, we're talkin' huge amounts of PCP, in all likelihood purchased from behind the 7-11 on Riverside.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Now that I think about it.........whoever made up that phrase was a dummy, cuz I coulda fictionalized the fuck outta that story and made it a million times stranger. Like I could've gave the old mexican guy a duck beak and my car could've been the pope-mobile.

Truth is still pretty strange though, you gotta admit.



Footnotes:

*Or any other profession that's filled with enough morally bankrupt people as to be singled out and stereotyped with an activity that everyone on earth does on a daily basis.

Screwtape in the (poop) deck..........

Damn I'm gettin' closer and closer to boot camp everyday. Life is gonna be hard for a while, but I just remind myself I'm doing it for my kids. And they better appreciate it, too, goddamnit. Seriously. I want a hand-drawn letter of appreciation every single morning waiting for me at the breakfast table, with some cool spaceships and ducks in cowboy hats on it, and those cute backwards letters that kids do in the movies.


That's just a quick artist rendering of what I'm lookin' for, but I don't expect my son or daughter to turn out anything THAT high quality. They're just children after all.

I just wanna drink beer all day and do music, you think the Navy would agree with that? I hope so. I hope there's a specific rank just for that. Petty Officer Third Class Drunk Rapper. Accelerate your life. Maybe I'll legally change my last name to Morgan and work my way up to Captain, and then just start reporting to duty wasted every day with a Halloween pirate hat on. I like to think MY United States Navy has a sense of humor, and will totally appreciate these improvements on their uniform and daily activities (ie: drinking rum and making fake toddler drawings instead of watching for dangerous Iranian speedboats).

We will see.

Land of the lost..........

The Epic Quest of the Security Deposit.......

So in 2 and 1/2 weeks I'm gonna uproot my family and move them to Florida to get them set up down there before I go to the glacier cave to slay the ice worm (a.k.a. Navy boot camp in February). So needless to say we're about to start the fun part........moving. My wife was trying to remind me to call Budget Rental earlier, but there was a communication breakdown (all praises due to Plant).

What she said: "Call and ask about the dimensions of the storage space."

What I heard: "Call and ask about the midgets of the storage space."


I know it's crazy but for a minute I thought we had a troll problem. No offense to little people, ain't tryin' to play with offensive synonyms, all I'm sayin' is that for a split second I got excited and started brushin' up my riddle game. Thought I was about to embark on an oddysey.

I seriously forgot how to spell oddysey, woulda been completely lost without the spell-check. Some match I'd be for a 2,000 year old riddling troll. I was about to have to resort to phonetic spelling, which would have REALLY fucked me up even more. I wonder what the outcome would be if you phonetically spelled the word "phonetic"? Pretty phuckin' shocking, I bet.

Gotta go. My wife just brought home a puppy named "Barbie", so I gotta go in the bathroom and check if my balls are completely gone by now or just fading like Marty McFly's siblings on polaroids. Peace.

Romero = Riefenstahl

Now that Obama is president and human racism is over, I think we need to start workin' on the racism in other creatures. The obvious first choice would be German shephards, but I'm gonna go against the grain here and say they're probably not that big of a threat. I mean, even if some kind of "Hitler-Shephard" hypothetically rose to power in one neighborhood by barking his hateful message through the fence, he'd probably get run over by a car or eat some chocolate out of a garbage can and die before he could escape and establish any serious, viable movement with other racist dogs. But if you still wanna picture giant armies of Miniature Schnauzers marching in cute SS hats, I won't judge you.

Matter fact, let's just rule out animals, period, cuz they don't have souls. So what other creatures can we teach tolerance? My proposal...........

Zombies.

Think about it. Has anybody ever seen a zombie? No.......and yet in all the horror movies, the zombies are always either green or blue. Who the hell made that rule? One green zombie wrote a screenplay and now the rest of the zombie community gets disenfranchised? If (when) the zombies take over the world, I think we'll see that they come in all colors and disgusting shades. This is just Hollywood perpetuating yet another bullshit racist stereotype. It shouldn't matter what color the flesh-eater's flesh is colored. Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of the fact that on the inside, all of our brains are gray. And tasty.

Speaking of green zombies, Joni Mitchell turned 65 today. I wonder how much that is in human years?

Happy Friday everyone. In the words of the great philosopher Mr. T, "Everybody gotta wear clothes, and if you don't, you'll get arrested."

Life in green and electric skies............

Just shot a roll of Kodak Portra last weekend (yeah, I was kinda exaggerating when I said it all disappeared off the shelves, but I did have to hunt it down). Half the roll was a small photo shoot I did for a friend of a friend named Frank, who is a dope rapper by the way and I'll post some of his shit soon, and the other half of the roll was some random personal shots. Here's some of the better ones............

NOTE: I have no idea why it ain't showing the whole pictures, but just click on each one and it will enlarge.












These are low quality grainy versions since a couple weeks my son felt it was necessary to step on my scanner and break it. I told him gently (ie: not with my fists or broken pieces of the scanner) there's other ways to reach his cup, like for instance, not breaking equipment that is essential for making money to put things inside the damn cup. Anyway, I happen to like grain so I guess it doesn't matter and I should shut my whiny mouth. I'm just sayin' all this to say this now............I can't believe how vivid the colors on this sunset came out. I took this last week in a wal-mart parking lot. This shit really happened in the sky, I felt like there should be crowds of people hugging and crying, with national geographic film crews on top of the building. But no..........all the fat slack-jaws pretty much just kept movin' towards the food section (away from the garden section) with their heads down, eyes on their shoes. Welcome to America.




And of course, no roll is complete without the obligatory shot of Adrian, a.k.a. Lil' A, a.k.a. A-dro, a.k.a. Dro Budden. If you look close the face he's giving me is "Oh sorry daddy, I stepped-ed on your picher scan thingy. I can has juice now?"

"Witness to Changing Hands"..............

Listen, this is all I'm gonna say tonight.

Don't let the conspiracy theorists or partisans steal this moment from you, whoever you are. Don't let anyone tell you America isn't a great nation. Don't let them tell you that McCain's concession words or Jesse Jackson's tears were disingenuous. Don't let the hateful write history. No matter who you voted for, all politics aside, whether you're republican or democrat or libertarian or none of the above, if you're not feeling some real deep pride and patriotism right now, then hate in one form or another rules your life and it is a problem. And now your personal problem is fully exposed to your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers in this historic moment.

I have the next 4-8 years to criticize Obama's policy decisions the same way I did Bush and Clinton before him, but for now me and my black wife are beside ourselves watching something unfold that neither of us ever imagined would happen in our lifetimes. Remember that sometimes perception can be far more important than literal politics, and no matter what Obama actually does during his term(s), his platform of positivity and progressive evolution of our nation will change, and in many ways has already changed and lifted, the consciousness of not only America but the world. He spoke directly to the WORLD in his victory speech. Don't let anyone tell you that was wrong.

E Plurbius Unum, boys and girls.

"I may not get there with you.............."

"I found my special purpose!" (c) Navin Johnson

So the other day I was chillin' with a friend of mine, and he said "Did Goodie Mob and 8-Ball & MJG ever collab? I don't think they did. That would've been dope."

Would've? Would have? See, these are the kinds of moments in life where my 15 years worth of unbridled Dungeon Family dickriding finally has a purpose. My time on this earth has meaning. I can help someone.

A lot of people don't know but back in 1995 when Soul Food dropped (and exploded my skull), that same year a vinyl single for the title song also dropped with some remixes on it. One of those remixes was done by legendary Houston producer Crazy C, the man behind so much of Scarface's early shit, Mr. 3-2's underappreciated "Wicked Buddah Baby" solo Rap-A-Lot album, a lot of Woss Ness's later stuff, and the infamous Rap-A-Lot group Too Much Trouble with the white midget. You know, the one billed as the "Baby Geto Boys". Nobody I know admits to liking that album, for obvious reasons, but the production was as much on point as any other Rap-A-Lot release.

Anyway, back to the point, Crazy C did one of the remixes and on that "Suave House" remix, friends.............were none other than Suave House artists 8-Ball & MJG. The track has been on a million underground mixtapes in Texas for the last 12 years, but I guess it's relatively unknown outside the south. Well, here ya go...........

Goodie Mob- Soul Food (Suave House Remix feat. 8-Ball & MJG)


Definitely a classic. And not in the douchebag "real hip hop head" way that Big Noyd or Jeru the Damaja albums are "classic", but in the real way, in that people actually listened to it.

And then if you wanna get looser with the definition of "collab", Cee-lo was on the track "Paid Dues" off 8-Ball & MJG's "In My Lifetime" album, but that one ain't rare at all. If you call yourself a Hip Hop fan and ain't heard that track, please eat a grenade. Or just listen to it. Either way.

Don't really know how to end this, so hey.............since we're talkin' about Dungeon Family songs from 1995, here's the best one:

A Toast to Old Drunk Guys..........

So today there's yet another poll up on some ("respectable") news site asking which candidate you'd rather have a beer with. That's like the 7th one I've seen throughout the election, and every single time I voted the same way. And this has nothing to do with politics or who I actually voted for in the booth.............but in that hypothetical pitcher-swiggin' scenario I'd definitely choose McCain. No question. All bullshit caricatures aside, he seems like a funny guy who's seen and done a lot and could drop some old school wisdom on you, while Obama seems like a genuinely uptight nerd that would have very few interesting stories to tell about his life. Let's be real for a minute....this is a guy who wrote and published not one, but TWO books about his life before he ever accomplished anything worth writing about, including becoming a senator, which as a general topic crams the memoir section of any bookstore enough to make the whole endeavor seem about as meaningful as changing a flat tire. Again, nothing to do with politics, that's just a self-important douchebag activity (like having a blog). McCain on the other hand was by all accounts a "wild party animal" in his teens and twenties who was in a war, flew planes, crashed planes (a lot), spent years as a POW, married and divorced like 17 different women who all happened to be models, hung out with presidents and dictators and warlords, got caught up in political scandals, is probably on the private list of every "washington madam", and by his own admission doesn't spend a lot of time on the internet.

Does any of that make him a good candidate for president? God no. Some of it makes him unelectable and probably a little mentally unstable. But that also describes most of the people I call my friends and prefer to drink my 151 with. And I damn sure wouldn't want any of those knuckleheads running the country, either.

So next time you see one of these goofy polls and wonder who the 23% is that went against the grain and voted for the old guy, just think of me passed out next to an empty box of bud with a dumb smile on my face.

On a serious note, I really do wish this election would never end. It's been hilarious and historic and I enjoyed every single horrible minute of it.

This day in history..........

Important historical events that happened on November 3rd:


20,000 BC - Neanderthals discovered cocoa beans, and quickly began crushing them and covering the butter on ants, raisins, and their own ashy kneecaps.

1546 AD - Martin Luther nailed a church door, and was arrested for public indecency.

2006 - Saddam Hussein, having been captured in a spider web 3 years prior and held for trial, shocked the world by bringing Johnnie Cochran in as his legal defense. The trial only lasted 13 minutes, wherein he lost and was sentenced to death. Some blame the brevity of the trial on the fact that his representation was a dead, lifeless corpse.


THE MORE YOU KNOW

Analyze this..........

I had a lucid dream last night. It was awesome, as lucid dreams usually are. In the dream I was talkin' to my brother Lowkey and my homeboy Bosnian (huge departure from my real life) and a naked redhead that looked like my high school algebra teacher walked past on the sidewalk. Not only did I realize at this point that I was dreaming and got really excited about that fact, but I chose to also share this new info with my brother and Bosnian. Who, if you're keeping track so far, were not real. Only existed inside my dream. Okay. It went kinda like this:

Me: "Yeah man, we should go to the banana death camp dungaree conventi...........what the hell? Is that a naked lady?"

Dream Bosnian: "Where?"

Me: "Wait this can't be real. Am I dreaming? Ohhhh shit I'm dreaming! ha!"

Dream Lowkey: "What? You sound crazy right now banana death camp."

Me: "Nah mayne for real, check this out. If it wasn't a dream could I do this?"

*walks up to naked lady and punches her in the titty*

Me: "See?!? She just smiled. She don't even care. Females usually care when you do that, or........so I heard. Anyway I didn't feel it either. DREAM!!"

*Dream Bosnian turns into huge lizard and tries to eat me while Dream Lowkey starts dancing in circles*


And then I flied away. Because really, what the fuck else are you gonna do in a lucid dream? Save the world? Just fly and get it over with.

Nowhere to go but down.............

The Pinnacle of Youtube




The Pinnacle of British People

The Pinnacle of Taffy-based Candies

The Pinnacle of Songs About Weed Featuring Fiend

The Pinnacle of Horror Movie Posters

The Pinnacle of MTV

The Pinnacle of DMX's Career

The Pinnacle of Songs about Pinnacles

The Tale of the Last Fogelberg Fan...........

About a week ago I was at the HEB on south congress and Oltorf pickin' up some film.......which by the way, is becoming an even more expensive hobby than it already was, since apparantly all those dedicated photographers who made me fall in love with 35mm are fuckin' sellouts now, driving the whole market towards digital faster than Gary Busey towards the big "In Rememberance" screen at next year's Oscars ceremony. Seriously, this shit is a perfect lesson in supply and demand, the B&W film I buy like crack went from $4/roll to $9/roll almost overnight, and the color film I used to buy isn't even being made anymore! It just disappeared from the shelves. I felt like the main character in every cheesy ghost story.........

"Yeah I'll have some Kodak Portra please."

"Kodak Portra? I'm sorry we don't sell that."

"Really? Man that sucks, I just bought some last week."

"Sir, that's impossible...........we haven't sold that film here since 1945. It died in the war."

Dum-dum-duuuuuuuum!!!

Anyway, all recent fuck-ups of capatalism aside, here's the real story. The adventure. The event that changed my life forever, and may very well change yours when you have finished reading the tale. So there I was walking up to the store, minding my own business.........and by that I mean lookin' at all the mexican women at the paleta stand and wondering if maybe the real Montezuma's Revenge is a flat ass........when all the sudden I almost stepped on something on the ground in front of me. A small white object. What could it be? A dead albino squirrel? A flattened bag of cauliflower someone drove over? Bird shit in the shape of an Ipod?

No, an actual Ipod. Cool, right? No, not cool at all, because while it didn't turn out to be literally made of it, I did find some bird shit.........on the inside. When I turned it on, this is just a sample of the playlist that greeted me:

The Eagles
Foo Fighters
Billy Joel
Duran Duran
Coldplay
John Denver
Buena Vista Social Club
Norah Jones
Dan Fogelberg
Tom Petty
Foreigner
John Mayer
Billy Idol
Rod Stewart
Yes

Now, any one of those artists by themselves would have been fine. But all together in the same playlist, this thing could be put in a goddamn museum and studied for future generations as proof of the failure of the human experiment. And yes............you read that last band name right. Yes. YES!! If just seeing the name doesn't disturb you enough, allow me to take you all the way down the rabbit hole now, friends. There was not one, not two, but 3 WHOLE ALBUMS worth of Yes in that folder. Think long and think hard about that little tidbit. That means that not only is there some unabashed Yes fan walking freely the streets of our safe neighborhood, where I let my KIDS play, but this man/woman/evil robot sat down at their computer and spent no less than an hour importing their proud prog rock collection into Itunes, plugged up their Ipod to update with a dumb smile on their face and said "I see nothing wrong with this scenario." Jesus christ, even if you switched that mental picture to a dude sittin' in front of his computer watching child porn while wearing a Mitt Romney halloween mask, it somehow still wouldn't disgust me as much.

So needless to say, finding this Ipod did not give me the warm feeling you would get from, oh, I don't know..........finding a free Ipod that wasn't pre-owned by a sociopath. The pure level of douchebaggery contained within this device made what would usually be a cool discovery into more of a mix of success and shame, kinda like what I assume is felt by any dude who ever woke up with a hangover next to Yeardly Smith in the morning.

So for the last week, I've been obsessed with this guy, the owner of this thing. Who is he? What does he do for a living? How does he dress himself every morning? After a lot of sleepless nights and crumpled notepads full of algebra calculations, this is my best reconstruction of who this man is, based on the evidence on the Ipod and the location where it was found...........

First of all, he is a he. The Norah Jones and Billy Idol had me leaning towards the female box on the checklist but at the end of the day, we all know no woman has ever been satisfied by Dan Fogelberg, musically or otherwise. So this is a dude. His name is Marcus Dzienkowski, he's 49 years old and he works at a store that sells reflective biking gloves and coffee beans. As a kid nobody could pronounce his last name so they just called him "fat head", on account of his head being way too big for his freakishly small body. Which in reality was a sign of malnourishment from living with his senile grandmother who sent him to bed at 6:30pm every night with only a werther's original caramel candy for dinner. One time in the elementary school lunchroom, the cool kids let him sit at their table. "This is it", he said to himself, "I'm finally being accepted". But as he ate his usual lunch of bananas and ketchup, the kids started to laugh. Eager to please and naively thinking they were laughing WITH him, he smeared the ketchup over his face and did the traditional polish dance his grandmother taught him. The kids laughed harder and harder, and finally realizing the situation, he began to cry. "I'll show them. I'll grow up to be somebody special!" And so the day he turned 18, he left his small town and moved to Hollywood. He worked as a waiter and went to the gym constantly, building up his body to make his head look smaller. He eventually became a somewhat successful saxophone player, and can be seen in the movie The Lost Boys playing for a large crowd of people who appear to be enjoying themselves, proof that at one time (or, as we call it, the 80's) his brand of simpishness was acceptable in society. It was during that same year that, while both backstage at a Corey Hart concert, he met his lover and life partner Lorenzo, star of the wildly popular gay porn series "Lorenzo's Oil (in the butt)". In late 1999, Marcus found a job in Austin choreographing chinchillas in tap shoes for a performance art piece, and Lorenzo followed along, deciding to enroll in the University of Texas graduate program working towards his PhD in Plant Biology. They still live in Austin to this day, jogging town lake every morning and handing out Scientology pamphlets in the afternoons. On his way inside HEB to buy a bag of sweet coconut herbal tea, Marcus dropped his Ipod.

The End.........to be continued?

Nah, not really, I just always wanted to do that since I saw it on an episode of ALF. Truth is I gave the Ipod to a friend of mine since I already have one of my own, filled with lots of unbelievably great music but also a couple albums by people like Sufjan Stevens and Danzig that would probably make anyone who found my lost Ipod say "Man, what a huge douchebag."

My Guardian Angel.........

10 reasons why I turned down Brandy's marriage proposal.......

Some of ya'll may or may not know this, maybe you read it in the trade papers or saw the video of us sunbathing on TMZ, but it's true............multi-platinum R&B recording artist Brandy and me have been seeing eachother for a while now. It's been a fun couple of months, we went to Disneyworld, ate spaghetti with no forks, got matching star tattoos on our inner thighs. She ain't really one for tradition, but she shocked even me when she got down on her knees and popped the question last tuesday at Joe's Crab Shack, right underneath all the romantic lights and plastic lobsters wearing tie-dye shirts. It wasn't easy, but I've thought about this a lot and finally came to a decision. If you're reading this Brandy (and I know you are), I think you deserve an explanation, so here's my reasons why I have to say no.........


1. Your parents gave you a dog's name. Those are no in-laws I want over for Thanksgiving.

2. Your eyes are farther apart then your nipples. Anatomically, that does not sit well with me. Many cultures would label you a witch just for that alone.

3. You were single-handedly responsible for "five-head" jokes gettin' played out in the 90's, and now Rhianna is gettin' a free pass!! Unforgivable.

4. You look like Sam Cassell and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch had a baby together. And that upsets me because I don't like thinkin' of the late great Sam Cassell as a pedophile, let alone a toon sex fetishist (don't know which is worse), so I'd rather not wake up to a face that suggests such slanderous things.

5. Two of the actors who played your pretend boyfriends on Moesha have died horrible deaths in real life. Your vagina is obviously cursed, whether it's acting or not, and not cursed in the manageable Erykah Badu "oh no now I gotta wear green skull caps" kinda way.

6. Puttin' peanut butter in your mouth everytime you have to talk would get old really fast.

7. Countess Vaughn would probably show up at some get-togethers, and everyone knows how bad our break-up was. Awwwwwkward.

8. The episode of Moesha where Moesha meets Brandy, the R&B singer, fucked off my whole view of reality, relativity, and causality. And I needed those!!!

9. You named your daughter "Sy'rai". That's one letter away from Syria. You hide it well but you're obviously a one-woman sleeper terrorist cell who has already infiltrated the television, movies, and music industries, and in a post-911 world I just can't support that.

10. Insert whatever alien/praying mantis/doberman jokes are left.


So Brandy, that's why I will not marry you. I hope we can still be friends. And also please note that there were no jokes about you killin' people in car accidents because you were on a cell phone, cuz that would just be in bad taste. But seriously, stop texting me on the highway.

Love,
Sandman

The big question...........

Why another blog, Sandman?

Well, let's look at the other two blogs I've had.

Dirty Ass Aisles was kinda fun, and I did one funny interview that people all over the world still send me e-mails about with "LOL's" in 'em. And I got some sweet hot sauce out of the deal. But I only did it to get a job at a local publication that was lookin' for critics, and I needed SOME kind of resume or writing to show them. That failed predictably, and so now I don't do that blog anymore, cheifly because I hate critics and hated myself for pretending to be one, even for a little while.

Speaker Madness is great, it's only 5 episodes deep and already has hundreds of listeners and people seem to love it. That's not going anywhere soon. But the SM blog itself serves a single purpose, to post new episodes and polls and all things podcast-related. It's not my personal space for thinking and typing. It belongs to the other two hosts just as much as me, I just happened to have a blogspot account already.

So that's why I'm startin' this new blog for myself. I'm going into the Navy in exactly 3 months, and after that I'll be stationed on a ship somewhere, and after that I'll be stationed most likely in a foreign country. There's a lot of people who (for whatever masochistic reason) enjoy reading what I write on the internet, and while I do have a myspace page where I post regular blogs, I don't think it's fair to punish people by having to go to myspace to read them. Plus it's a music myspace page, and as my brother Lowkey says, "blogging is gay".........so I obviously can't have the gayness mixing with the hardcore rap image, cuz!! Blucker blucker!!

So basically what I'm saying is this is gonna be my outlet to the world for a while, it looks like. And I plan on updating pretty regularly. Not everyday, but enough for nobody to get bored and forget it exists. Post a comment if you're excited about that, or if you're ashamed of excitement, just post the title of your favorite made-for-TV movie.

Sandman a.k.a. Slick Talk a.k.a. Slick Moranis Honey I Shrunk the Haterssssssss
Peace