Modern Marvels

Today we pay tribute to one of the greatest technological marvels of all time. More important than the light bulb, penicillin and the combustion engine, I present to you

[caption id="attachment_1064" align="aligncenter" width="280" caption="...Let heaven and nature sing"][/caption]

The George Foreman Lean, Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine

I don't care what race, gender, sexual orientation or economic class you came from, you know what the hell this thing is. I went to college dead broke and, trust me, that's the last thing you want to be at an HBCU. The food in our cafeteria was so bad on some days that there was a line to get to the boxed cereal at dinner. And please God, don't let them run out of milk! When I was on my last dime, hungry and considering pawning my Playstation to eat, The George Foreman Grill turned the tides of the economic war.

It started out with just frying bologna on it and slowly grew into having dorm dinners where we'd buy cheap cuts of pork chops and steak and fry them up. Then, one day when I was down to my last ten bucks, I was possessed by the ghost of Hustlemen Past.

I went to the grocery store and bought a box of knock-off Steak-ums, store brand cheese, some bread, a pack of Kool-Aid and paper plates and cups. I went back to the room, opened up my door and placed my box fan facing out into the hall. Then I fried the Steak-Ums on the floor in front of the fan. It took all of two minutes for the dudes across the hall to ask if they could "hold a sandwich."
"Three dollars!"
One of em said no, but the other was too hungry to argue and when I offered to throw in a cup of Kool-Aid, I had him hooked. In ten minutes I was out of Steak-Ums and started selling fried ham and cheese sandwiches for $2 a pop. By the end of the night I had enough money to go back out, put gas in the car and buy some real food.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Hot Dogs, hamburgers...you name it, room 301 was selling it. I did that at least two weeks straight before the RA tried to shut me down. Gotta pay the authorities off, so he ended up eating for free. I got so gangster with it that I leveled the grill off one day with a real thin book from the library. I poured like a tablespoon of grease in between each of the little slots and made some damn french fries with it.

So today, I give thanks to George Foreman and his might grill. I don't know about knocking out fat, but it sure as hell knocked off hunger pangs.

Broke 101

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Broke 101

If you find yourself looking down this aisle, you're broke. I'm issuing this public service announcement for any kids out there who, like me, may not be aware that they're broke. It wasn't a secret that my family tried to hide from me. As a matter of fact, every time I asked for something they seemed eager to tell me that they didn't have any money. I even remember my mother telling me that if I answered the phone and the person sounded White then tell them that she isn't home.

Still with all of this ingrained in my head, I somehow didn't know we were poor. That is until I went to school bragging about how I had a potted meat sandwich for lunch. That's when I learned that turning my nose up at Spam was quite hypocritical considering that potted meat is probably Spam's slightly retarded younger brother.

So yes, if you have to shop on this aisle you are broke, but fear not...being broke makes you resourceful in your later years. If not for my training as a child I would've died of starvation in college. I was the only person cooking Lo Mein in my dorm room with vienna sausages and Ramen Noodles. (The secret is to marinate the vienna sausages in soy sauce overnight, cook on a Foreman Grill and then toss into the noodles. For a cajun take on this dish you can stir fry them by leveling the Foreman grill and dropping the noodles onto the grill for no more than 1 minute.)

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

One In A Million

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I can't believe it's been ten years. I was in high school when Tupac and Biggie got killed. People were shocked. For starters, no one thought Tupac could be killed by bullets. After he made Hit Em Up, I remember the DJ on the radio saying that Tupac's days were numbered. When Biggie died it was more surprising because it seemed like Tupac had JUST died.

But Aaliyah was something entirely different. Aaliyah's death stung a little bit. There was something about her that made people react as if they knew her personally. I remember hearing about it on the radio while sitting up in my dorm. This was before Facebook so everyone jumped on AOL Instant Messenger and the chatrooms to talk about it.

The next day was just morbid. People in class were sad about it and I remember scouring BET to listen to a choked up Timbaland and Missy weigh in on it. It really hit close to home to hear DMX sobbing. What was it about her that made a dude like him break down? For me, she was special because her calm and friendly demeanor seemed genuine. Her MTV Diary was probably the most personal I've seen.

Her death was quickly overshadowed two weeks later by 9/11, but there's something about her that still elicits a remorseful sigh when we look at what the entertainment industry has to offer these days. No drugs, no scandals, no blatantly feigned "down to earth" demeanor. She was the real deal...one in a million.

The Ground Moved. Nobody Bothered It. It Just Moved.

My daughter was asleep on the living room floor and I was in the bedroom playing my 360. The bed shook and it felt weird but I told myself that it was just someone moving furniture or doing some work on the vacant apartment next door. My nigganess didn't completely buy that, so I was trying to imagine what kind of equipment would shake my bed from the other side of the wall and then the bed shook some more like the floor was wobbling. The TV shook and I noticed the blinds swaying.

Activate Inner Nigga

I don't remember putting down the controller. I don't remember moving the nachos out of the way. All I know is that I ran to the living room, scooped up my daughter, got dressed, grabbed her some Gerber food, filled a sippy cup with water, grabbed my wallet and keys and ran for the elevator. All of this happened before the controller hit the floor.

Now an earthquake never entered my mind. I live in Washington, DC. When was the last time you ever heard of an earthquake hitting DC? I thought it was either the ghost of Bin Laden blowing some shit up downtown or my building collapsing. Because I was moving at Last Dragon speeds my brain perceived time completely differently. I figured that I must have been moving around the apartment so fast that I was somehow moving faster than the building could collapse around me.

I thought about 9/11 and how those people crowded the stairwells and died in the WTC so I made the (probably stupid) decision to take the elevator. I got outside and someone told me it was an earthquake. I really hauled ass to the car then. Somehow standing in front of a highrise full of glass picture windows during an earthquake seemed...risky. I hopped in the car and drove a few blocks while trying to call--anyone.

No answer from the wife, no answer from my friends so I drove downtown to go find my baby. I did all kinds of illegal shit to make it through traffic, but I got to her job and found several thousand people outside crowding the streets. I found her like Will Smith in Independence Day and we got back in the car and got the hell away from downtown.

Now I'm watching all of the people on the news sitting in traffic trying to get home.

Hell of a day.

Don't Trust the Sun Because All Aint Well

If you're money is currently living at Suntrust or Wells Fargo/Wachovia then this post is for you.

Starting in the Fall, both banks will charge a monthly fee for the privilege of using your debit card. Wells Fargo is charging $3 a month while Suntrust is swinging for the fences with $5. Suntrust is also eliminating their Free Checking account. Unless you sign up for direct deposit of more than $100 each month then you'll be hit with a $7 fee. At first the $7 didn't bother me. I have direct deposit--who doesn't these days? Then I remembered the other accounts. We have a joint account and two individual accounts. The direct deposit only goes into one of the three so that's $14 a month for the other two. In the event that we pay for gas at the pump, buy a farecard with our check card or just choose not to carry cash since it tends to be stolen/lost, then that could be another $15 a month. So now we're spending $30 a month for something that used to be free.

I have a problem with that. I'm a smart guy. I know where this is coming from. The government has been reeling in just how much banks can make through fines and fees. Last year they changed the way overdraft charges are applied. This year they're cutting how much the banks can charge merchants each time you swipe your card. Since they can't get the money from the stores, they'll get them from you, the customer.

They have a business to run--I get that--but they make more money off of customers already. It's not like the bank takes your money and keeps it in the vault until you pull up to the ATM machine to get it back. They take your money and use it to loan to someone else or invest in something. For the use of your money, they pay you interest. Let's say you miraculously get five percent interest from them. Well, they're gonna give that money to someone else in the form of a loan or credit card and charge them way more than that. Ever heard of 21% interest credit cards? Yeah, they are getting paid. If you're a poor schmuck like me then you don't even get interest on your Free Checking account so they get to use my money for free. Now all of a sudden they want me to pay them to screw me? I've never been into prostitutes and don't plan to do it now.

So what's the next course of action? We're moving the money to a Credit Union. Free Checking, quarterly dividends and no charge to use my own money.

Deuces!

What...The...Hell?

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You know you're in a hood mall when...
One of the stores not only sells off brand clothes, watches and gear but their claim to fame is their Rest In Peace T-Shirt business. If there was a logo for all that is ghetto it would be this damn store right here. I went to Business School, so I get it: See a need, fill a need. But...Damn, do you have to put up samples of your work with scotch tape up on the front window?

There are like fifty pictures taped to the window: R.I.P Black, We Miss You Tee-Tee. You know I have no shame, so I'm standing there taking pictures while the people inside the store are like, "What the hell is he doing?" Then the thought occurs to me, "Why the hell are all of the photos from these shirts taken at the club?" Y'all couldn't find any other pictures? I know you want to put up something recent, but did the nigga die right on his way home from the club? I mean, this is DC so it's totally plausible.

Damn Black People...damn!

SMH

Experience Required

I've been keeping a journal ever since I was eleven years old. I was an only child for nine years, so my little sister offered very little in the way of companionship when she popped out. By the time she'd learned to talk and be remotely interesting, I'd learned to keep myself occupied. Writing advice to my future grown-up self in the form of a journal was one such way. It's a practice that I keep to this very day. In the present time, I feel like an idiot. Looking back at stuff I've written...I'm not too bad.

One entry is from a few years ago. I wrote:

There are 25,000 days in your life. Your death will only happen on one of them. Don't waste the other 24,999 worrying about how you'll feel, what you'll regret and what you'll wish you'd done differently. Live your life now so that when you die, you can look back and see that the majority of those 25,000 days were good days.

Experience is a resource without which you can't expect to really do an efficient job of living. Either you start off by borrowing from the experiences of others, namely your parents and older relatives, or you go out and acquire your own. The latter is more time consuming and the opportunity costs associated with it are huge, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
(In simpler terms... If you start out with a strong support network of parents and family who've been there and done that and are good at sharing their life experience without being overbearing or alienating you then you won't have to make so many mistakes on your own. You won't have so many setbacks. Maybe you'll go far in life because you had a good start. But...if your parents aren't around, or they didn't do much themselves or they are horrible at explaining life without being dicks about it then you'll have to make your own mistakes to grow into the person you are destined to become. It'll take more time. You'll find it much more difficult, but you can't beat yourself up over it because life requires you to learn and grow. How you do it is sometimes out of your control.)

Random thoughts and journal entries. Just thought I'd share. It is my website after all.

Been Here Before

Dear Internet,
I'm writing this because no one else believes me. Maybe after I'm gone the news will google me and find this entry. I put my daughter in her high chair and gave her a cut-up banana. She wanted me to give her my spaghetti, to which I responded aloud, "I suggest you eat that banana and drink that milk. If the banana is not to your liking, you are welcome to contact our regional manager, Mommy, when she gets home."

It's hard to describe in words what happened next, but I'm gonna do my best. You know the Black woman eye-roll? Take that and add it to that weird looking Jigsaw doll from the movie Saw and that's what my daughter did. It was kind of like, "Nigga what?" but at the same time kind of sadistic like, "Don't go to sleep." She did it twice and then started laughing.

Now she's only 13 months old. I am so close to safe dropping her at the hospital, but my wife won't let me. So, I'm taking alternative measures. I'm in foreign territory because exorcisms never happen with ghetto kids, so I'm trying to improvise. I figure regular holy water won't work, so I put some unopened packs of Kool-Aid inside a bible for ten minutes. I mixed that up and I'm gonna pour it in her sippy cup. I also thought about putting a picture of TD Jakes up over her crib, but if she bursts into flames inside the house our renter's insurance might not cover it.

I'm scared, so if you see on the news where a 29 year old man was bludgeoned to death by a Glow Worm and the police have no leads...please point them in the direction of this website.

The Time Traveler's Stomach

I don't remember what I was watching but it had something to do with time travel and the thought popped in my head, "What would you do if you had a time machine." Everybody probably thinks that at some point. Does it make me a greedy bastard that my first thought was to go back to 1987 and go to McDonald's?

When I was five, McDonald's was the shit. As a matter of fact, all food was the shit in the late 80's. Me and the wife were at a diner one day and I got a Coke and the first thing out of my mouth was, "Taste this, it tastes like Cokes from back when we were little." I don't care what it was: Froot Loops, Filet-o-Fish, Now-and-Laters, even Cup o' Noodle soup--All of it tasted better back then.

What the hell happened? The natural assumption is that everything is overprocessed these days, but I highly doubt that back then they had a real chef cooking up soup and then drying it out to fit in those little cups. All I know is that food today sucks.

My fat man rant is over. Carry on.

Random Question

When you watch PBS all the time with your kid, you have to find ways to keep yourself sane. Today's thought is:
When the time comes, how do I explain to my daughter what The Count is? Explaining to her that he's a vampire just seems kind of...wrong. She'll ask what a vampire is and that'll just open a whole new set of questions. "So he sucks the blood out of people to stay alive?"

Of course that does make me wonder...Is that why all of the people I remember being on the show are gone? The Black guy had a wife back when I was a kid. I'm sure in reality she probably died, but on the show...did the people of Sesame Street sacrifice her to The Count since she was old anyway? What happened to that deaf lady? Was he kind of like a gas pump counting the quarts of blood as he drank them to death?

I'm just going to tell her that he's a politician, maybe a Republican, and that's why he crunches the numbers so much.

Broke Phi Broke, We Aint Got It!

Today I lost a shit load of money trading stocks, so much so that I'm considering quitting that for good. My wife's company got bought out and while the head honchos are saying, "There's nothing to worry about," they're packing up their desks and moving to new companies. And if that aint enough, those school loan payments are starting back up again. I'm on track to becoming president of the Washington, DC chapter of Broke Phi Broke Innnnnnncorporated!

It is with all of this in mind that I find myself thinking about those murder-suicides that kept popping up when the economy tanked back in '08-'09. The idea of killing myself and my family because I'm broke just seems...retarded. I know we're not supposed to use that word anymore, but nothing else comes to mind. I'm broke. People want money from me. I don't want to give it to them and guess what...I don't have to. Why? Because I'm broke. It sounds like a problem that solves itself.

Also, I grew up in a broke family. Correction: A broke-ass family. When your parents borrow money from you and you're a kid...yo ass is broke. I hope to never go back to the days where I have to eat food from the food bank, the government or be on food stamps, but guess what...I'd do that before I'd go killing myself.

Plus, I've been close to death already. It's not cool. I tell this story a lot, but it's a good story to tell:
My doctor told me that there was a mass in my liver that might be cancer. He left that shit on a voicemail at 4:55pm on a Friday. By the time I called back, the office was closed for the weekend. What made it so bad was that the call came a week after I had heart surgery. So imagine that you're 27 years old and you find out you have a life-threatening heart defect that could kill you at any moment. Then you find out you could die during the heart surgery. You come to grips with that, survive the procedure and a week later have someone tell you that instead of dying suddenly like the heart issue, you might die slowly over the next year or so due to cancer...and they tell you this on a voice mail.

In the words of the great Negro entertainer Katt Williams, "This shit right here, nigga..." trumps any "oh I'm broke and want to die" thought that might ever run through my damn head. I have one hell of a "I wanna live" mentality. So, on behalf of The Church of Unemployment where the Right Reverend Ordale J. Allen is our pastor, I want to encourage all of you to remember that being broke is a problem that solves itself. Also, Broke Phi Broke will be having a fish fry next Saturday behind the church.

Happy Birthday!

Can you believe that a year has gone by since I started this website? I can, and so can the people at GoDaddy because they canceled the damn site for non-payment. So, if you tried to find this site over the weekend, you probably got the "domain for sale" message.

So, for my website's birthday they got $12...and I got a bill. Cheers to the freakin weekend!

I'll drink to that!

Unfriend

I find myself becoming increasingly annoyed with Facebook. I've always maintained that Facebook is the highlight reel of people's lives. A friend of mine constantly gauges her success against what she sees on people's Facebook page. They're married, they have kids, they have good jobs. I keep reminding her that people tell you what they want you to hear. Yeah, some people are married with families and jobs. That means they have a lot more things going on in their lives and the more stuff going on in your life, the more room for error. Basically, just because you find yourself in a place different than those people you see on Facebook, it doesn't mean that they're better off. It's not like people gonna post, Jane's husband cheated on her and her son is getting held back a year in school. Oh, and Jane hates her fucking boss and is seriously underpaid.

But that's not even my reason for Facebook annoying me. The newsfeed keeps showing me more and more insight into people's lives and reminding me exactly why some people are JUST Facebook friends. I want to stay in touch with these people for nostalgic purposes. Occasionally, I drive through my old neighborhoods to go down memory lane, but that doesn't mean I want to move back into those shitty apartments. The same goes for some FB friends. The way I see it, people grow apart for various reasons. Lately my Newsfeed has been highlighting some of those reasons.

This doesn't apply to everyone. If you're one of my FB friends reading this post then more than likely it doesn't apply to you (lol).

Law Abiding Citizen

There's an article on CNN.com about a recent bust where about seventy people were arrested for belonging to this child porn website. I realize that I pay more attention to stories like that since my daughter was born. I usually just write the people off as being sick fucks, but this shit was on a whole different level. The site they were on required members to upload videos of them raping a child in order to join and view content. They had to post new shit frequently in order to keep membership and membership status was on a tiered system. The highest rank required the child to be screaming and visibly upset and devastated or some shit like that. I can't bring myself to go back and read it to get the wording right, but it was very fucking sick. What really pushed me over the edge was the part about them having categories on their site and Infants being a damn category.

They caught seventy of the people and they all face thirty years in prison. The Attorney General said basically what I'm saying now, thirty years isn't enough for what they did. I always hear that child molesters and rapists get what they deserve in prison, but even if they send them to one of those prisons from that show Lockdown, it isn't enough for me.

I have a daughter, she just turned one and it's sick shit like this that has made me so paranoid that I don't trust anyone to babysit. I don't even let my mother babysit and it isn't that I don't trust her. It's that I don't know when she might go visit a friend of hers and run to the bathroom or something and they might do something. A year ago I would've told you that I'd never shelter my child and that I wanted my daughter to grow up hood tough just like I did. When I was five I started catching the metrobus by myself. In NC I thought those kids were so soft because they were driven everywhere. Well, I'm eating crow because I won't let my child out of my sight because of shit like this.

So what do I think these guys deserve? First off, I'm not saying we just go kill people without a trial. They had to post videos to join the site, right? Well, let's go to the videotape! If John Doe is on camera and we, the jury, see him raping a child. He's guilty. But his ass ain't going to jail... at least not right away. We're going Law Abiding Citizen on his ass. I'm talking torture, smelling salts and blood transfusions to make sure that he experiences pain that pushes him just to the brink of death and then we pull him back, let him heal and start it all over again. Then he goes to jail and gets the shit beat out of him each day.

I don't even know how to end this post, because I'm so damn mad.

Rise of the Planet of the Toddler

True story, no exaggerations:

I took my phone away from my daughter and put it on the back of the couch out of her reach. Now the couch is up against the wall in the living room and she isn't tall enough to climb up on the couch without help, so you can see my logic in putting the phone there. She got pissed, started screaming and when I wouldn't let her get the phone she got mad and went storming into the bedroom. She's only one, so she isn't old enough for the "who the hell are you yelling at" or the "I know you didn't just storm away from me" ass whoopings. I let it go and went in the kitchen.

I hear a noise and look over the bar to see her dragging the big empty Pampers box into the living room. Like most ghetto families, we feel that a cardboard box is a vast realm of fun and adventure for our child, so we don't throw them away. I thought she was going to get in the box or play with it or something. At no point did it enter my mind that she was going to turn the box upside down, push it over to the couch and then use it as a step ladder to climb onto the couch to get to my phone.

What in the hell do you do in that situation? She's only twelve months old so a part of me respects the ingenuity. Most kids have the memory and attention span of a fruit fly. For her to look opposition in the eye and go build a damn ladder is amazing. On the other hand, she did act like I wasn't even a factor in the whole process which shows just how little she thinks of me. I swear to God living with her is like living with one of those velociraptors from Jurassic Park. If she ever figures out how to open doors, it's over.