Thursday, December 29, 2011

Back to the Flashback: VHS

[caption id="attachment_1581" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="If all the tape is on the left then it's rewound right?"][/caption]

I could always tell the caliber of people I was around by their VHS collection. Nevermind what movies they had, I'm talking about the actual tapes themselves. If their tapes had labels and the writing on those labels was printed up in a factory and accurately said what movie it was, then I was in wealthy company. I can tell you for a fact that not one movie in my house had a real label on it. 99.9% of our movies had a blank tape label with the name of the movie written in black magic marker.

I guess I should say movies (plural) because we never used the high quality SP recording speed. That was the one that only gave you two hours time, but the movie actually looked like something. No, we used the EP speed which gave you six hours and you could fit maybe three movies on there. Of course they looked like they were recorded with viewmaster and had all those lines going through it. Sometimes we had a good working VCR with a tracking button that could fix it. Other times, we just dealt with it. Besides, crappy picture was the least of our problems.

If your movies have handwritten labels then you only came across that movie one of three ways: Bootleg, copied from another tape or copied from TV. Every good ghetto person knows somebody who could get them a "good copy" of a movie that was still in the theater. Usually it was the dude in the barbershop, because they'd actually play the movies in the shop like it was Circuit City or something. There'd be some huge out of focus picture on the cover box, and the tape itself may or may not have a fake sticker, but the movie was somewhat clear. Ironic, this goes on today with DVDs.

[caption id="attachment_1588" align="alignright" width="277" caption="Anybody else remember Erol's?"][/caption]

Then there were the movies that people copied themselves. Sometimes people were balling like that and had two VCRs. They'd rent a movie, play it through one while recording it on the other. At first that would get you a real clear copy until Erol's Video, Blockbuster and Hollywood caught on to that. Then all of a sudden you'd be sitting in someone's house and the movie would go dark for a second, come back light, turn red...do a lot of weird stuff to deter you from copying their movies. Of course this didn't work because these were the same people watching bootlegs with people walking in front of the camera and half the screen out of focus. The last thing we cared about was some distorted coloring.

Ironically, the most ghetto of all methods wasn't the bootleg from the theater or the badly tinted Blockbuster rip off. The most ghetto was the one that crept up on you. You go over someone's house and start watching a movie. You get about fifteen minutes into it and all of a sudden the bumper from the network comes up and you see a commercial.


[caption id="attachment_1589" align="aligncenter" width="257" caption="Hold up..."][/caption]

CBS MOVIE OF THE WEEK: DIE HARD! Will be right back


Hold up, did you record this off REGULAR TV?  That's when you start laughing your ass off. I don't know what's funnier, the people who try to pause during the commercial break but just mistime it or the ones who don't even care and just record straight through. My grandmother has just joined the 1990s and has a VCR now. She buys tapes from the flea market. In the middle of The Color Purple a commercial for Windows 95 came on. I'm still laughing over that one.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Flashback: Tapes

I bought my daughter an iPod Touch. She's one and a half. I was twice her age before I got a music player and it was a suitcase-sized Fisher Price Record Player. It got me thinking about how far we've come.

[caption id="attachment_1580" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Remember Tapes?"][/caption]

Remember these? Do you remember scrambling for one when a new hot song came on the radio and you just had to record it? Remember how you used to grab the first tape you saw and do a quick mental assessment of whether or not you could tape over it? This was back before they started playing the same song over and over on the radio. Even though your recording was gonna start halfway through the first verse, you recorded it anyway. Remember accidentally taping over something you liked and being pissed? You get halfway into a song and then hear a new song start playing.

How about wanting to tape something so badly that you stuck a wad of paper in that little hole on top or put scotch tape over it so that you could record over it? Then people would come over your house or see the tape in the car and think it was whatever album was on the label and you had to tell them, "Naw I taped over that. This is off the radio" and nobody had a problem with that. Instead of calling you out on being ghetto, they actually wanted to hear what was on your tape. "Yo, this is a good tape. Can I dub this joint?" Everybody had either a double tape boombox or the dual cassette player that was on the "multi-thing" stereo. You know, the one that had the record player at the top, the radio in the middle and the tape player at the bottom. And all of them had that little three digit counter as if you were gonna sit and calculate how many seconds were in each song. Those were the days...and I do not miss them one bit.

Especially  this:

[caption id="attachment_1584" align="alignleft" width="203" caption="Cassette Tape Rewinder"][/caption]

Soul Sister

No baby book will tell you this, so you're lucky to be hearing it from me:

Children sleep just to screw with you. It's in their constitution somewhere. I'm tired. My job is Daddy Day Care and I do it well, but unlike real day cares, there is no relief person. That means that I don't get to go on break, or take a lunch. The illusion that most people have is that children are small versions of humans. They eat, drink, run around and eventually sleep to replenish energy. Common mistake.

Children run on various forms of energy: Food, solar, nuclear and the souls of others. That last one is what mine is running on right now, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The child woke this morning and I fed her. We then began our day of singing songs, dancing, learning what things are and all the usual child-rearing stuff. Around noon, I started getting tired. Picking up a 28 lb weight over and over again, letting it fall on you, jump on your ribs and scream at you tends to tire a person out. She switched to solar power.

We played for another hour or so before I started running on fumes, so I closed the blinds and tried to put her to sleep. She switched to nuclear power. I got desperate and turned to the electronic babysitter (television) and let her watch Sesame Street while I attempted to make a sandwich. She didn't like that episode so she found me in the kitchen.

I gave up and decided to just go to the store and pick up something for dinner since she had no intentions of going to sleep. I got her dressed (A feat that would make an excellent challenge on American Gladiators) and then we were on our way to the store.  kept saying, "If she falls asleep, I'm turning around." Of course she fell asleep as we were walking in the store. I ran through that store like it was one of those shopping sprees on TV. In and out in under two minutes. I damned-near ran home. It took me 5 minutes to go 10 blocks uphill carrying bags and pushing a stroller. Add that to the two minutes that we were in the store and she slept a total of seven minutes.

Why did she wake up as soon as I put the key in the door? I know I didn't make any noise. I did it so slow and meticulously that you would've thought I was disarming a bomb or something. Strollers and car seats are like those external cell phone battery boosters. You know, the ones that charge the battery in like two minutes. You can be gone seven minutes or seven hours. It doesn't matter;The minute you bring that kid back in the house, they're gonna wake up.

So that brings me back to my original point: She's gone from food to solar to nuclear and now she's feeding of the souls of others...me.

 

Friday, December 23, 2011

Ipod? Touche?

Christmas Eve. It's finally here! That's not excitement, but rather relief. I welcome today like someone from the Titanic welcoming a rescue boat. They--and by they, I mean retailers--started the Christmas season back in July, so naturally I'm a little tired of the guilt trips in the store. Speaking of guilt trips...

I've been wrestling with this all week: Is it wrong to give a toddler an iPod Touch for Christmas? Two years ago, I would've answered my own question with a resounding yes. Now, I'm not so sure. We have a Macbook, iPhone and iPad. All three cost a human organ, so naturally we put them in high places to keep Gizmo away from them. But kids get into things. They're like those raptors on Jurassic Park. They never attack the same place twice...they remember.

One day she got her hands on the iPad while I was in the bathroom. My heart sank, at first, when I saw her with it. Then I noticed that she was actually using it like an adult. She sat it on the ottoman and was standing there looking at photos. Not erratically pushing the screen. No, what she was doing was methodical. I pushed the home button, closed the cover and sat it back in front of her. She opened it, slid the unlock button and pushed the weather app. She looked disappointed, pushed the home button again and swiped around until she got back to the photos app. Somehow, just by watching my wife, she figured out how to use it and she knew that the only real button--the home button--started you over again.

That was two months ago. Fast forward to yesterday and she's sitting on the couch with my wife's phone. She turned it on and then took it to my wife because the input unlock code screen came up. My wife typed it in and my daughter took it back to the couch. She looked at pictures and videos of herself for a second, then went to one of the apps that plays nursery rhymes and a few minutes later she went to the Music app, turned it sideways to get to coverflow and swiped around until she saw Stevie Wonder and started listening to My Cherie Amor. She put the phone down on the couch, got up and started dancing.

Now there are only about thirty songs on my wife's phone since she uses Rhapsody most of the time, but the few that are on there are just songs from my daughter's in the car playlist. I highly doubt she thought, I could really go for some Stevie right now. In all likelihood, she just pushed a random song, but it's the fact that she knows how to navigate to only the stuff she wants that makes me think she's ready for her own iPod Touch.

I've heard the arguments about development and that kids need three dimensional stimulation from toys and real books. She spends most of her time pretending to read her board books and playing with her illogically-expensive brain toys. Back in the mid 90s, all of the commercials for computers showed adults doing spreadsheets, word processing and kids looking at extremely dated games. Today, commercials for Windows 7 show kids doing spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to ask their parents for dogs. We live in the 21st century. Five year olds use iPads in school now. Is it absurd to see an almost-two year old with an iPod Touch or is it preparation for things to come?

 

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Elf Magic

Me: Grandma, do you think Santa Claus will bring me a...

Her: Santa Claus? Your mother aint tell you about that yet? You are too old to still be believing in some damned Santa Claus. We buy all that stuff. There aint no Santa Claus. 

Me: Huh, but where do you keep it?

Her: We hide it somewhere or she puts it on layaway and picks it up at the last minute. That's why she be so tired in the morning, because she's been up all night wrapping that stuff. You aint never notice the handwriting is the same on the presents?

Me: No.

Her: Plus, how does he get in the house. We boarded up the chimney before you was even born. And when yall lived in that apartment, how was he getting in there? You know he aint climbing through nobody window over there. They woulda been killed him.

Me: Why did yall tell me that then?

Her: Because it's special. It's nice to have something to believe in when you're young. But, hell you almost nine years old. You don't need to be walking around here with that in your head. At some point you just look foolish.

I remember that conversation like it was yesterday. I don't know how most kids feel when they learn the truth, but I wasn't really devastated. More than anything I felt stupid for wasting my time writing all of those letters. I was a super nerd as a kid. What's worse is that I didn't have anyone to play with growing up and I was always by myself, so I had a LOT of time on my hands.

I used to write Santa Claus a letter at least once a week. And these weren't your typical letters either. I approached it like I was writing a grant proposal or something. There would be about a page dedicated solely to listing every accomplishment of the week, every opportunity to do wrong that I avoided and a reminder of past good deeds from previous weeks' letters. The second page would be an updated list of what I wanted along with footnotes. The final pages (yes, pages--plural) would be an appendix complete with charts, schematics and concept art for the custom toys that I wanted the elves to build.

I never wanted just the stuff you could buy in the store. Ironically, I felt like my mother could go buy the stuff out of the store, Santa had a workshop and should therefore present me with a custom made gift. So I had ideas for radio controlled planes that turned into cars and ran on AA batteries instead of those bulky D ones. I drew diagrams for what I thought would be cooler versions of the Transformers already in the store.

It used to take me hours to draw these things up and then I'd run to the mailbox and drop in my letter. A guy from the post office came to my school one year and told us that we didn't need stamps on letters to Santa because they traveled by elf magic. To this day I wonder if any postal worker ever saw that thick envelope and wondered who the hell was sending Santa Claus a legal brief.


Monday, December 19, 2011

Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em

I just want to vent...

Facebook is a gift and a curse for the stay at home parent who desperately misses daily social interaction with people who don't ride around in strollers. Today though, I'm just annoyed.

The religious zealots have one mo' 'gin to send me a request for Bible Wars, Bibleville, or Bible With Friends. Also, until you take those half naked club pictures off your profile, lay off the Bible verses inside every status update.

I'm tired of hearing about your relationships:
Day 1- I met someone who is great, praise the Lord.
Day 2- My person is the second coming, praise the Lord.
Day 3- I'm gonna marry this person and devote everything to them even though I've known them less than a week.
Day 4- We're having a baby.
Day 5- My person's ex better stay outta the picture because I'm the new flavor of the week!
Day 6- F@%K these B$#$#(# who don't support our love.
Day 7- I'm in pain.
Day 8- I hate everything
Day 9- I can't believe my ex is a deadbeat parent. I thought I knew my person so well.
Day 10- I met someone who is great, praise the Lord.


I would also like to see some fact checking before posts go out. I don't want to be the one who always has to correct someone. I read something the other day that made absolutely no sense, but how would I look to be commenter #25 who said, You know this is an urban legend right? I checked Google after reading the first sentence of your post and all of that is just BS. That makes not only the poster look stupid but the 24 other people who also didn't think to verify it first.


Okay, I'm done venting.


 

Occupy North Pole

I've been going to the mall a lot this past week and, for the life of me I can't understand going broke for the sake of Santa Claus. I understand wanting to keep the magic of Christmas alive, but I personally think that Santa is the perfect scapegoat for keeping your financial sanity this Christmas.

Feel free to copy the note and apply it to your own child. I plan to print mine out in calligraphic font.
Dear (child's name)
I can only give you one toy this year. I'm sorry that I couldn't do better. Just know that you have two parents who love you and vow to put your needs before their own and that is something many kids do not have. You've been so good this year and you deserve an explanation: This has been a challenging year for me both mentally and financially. After that Amnesty International piece about sweatshops, things just went downhill. We lost a lot of elves to the Occupy movement, some just quit out of principal. Oil prices went up when the Libya conflict began and it made importing goods from overseas just too expensive. In the end, it was PETA that did us in. As I've said on record many times, the reindeer never submitted a formal complaint about the working conditions before! With so many things eating into the bottom line, it was inevitable that the North Pole would be forced into bankruptcy protection. The best I could do was smuggle out gifts from the estate to give to kids who really deserve them. You are one such child. While I remain optimistic that we'll be around next year, just in case, I want you to wish you Merry Christmas for all future Christmases.

With Love,
Santa


Saturday, December 17, 2011

It's Not Mission Difficult, It's Mission Impossible

[caption id="attachment_1537" align="aligncenter" width="604" caption="That, boys and girls, is what Santa would have to do if PETA took away the reindeer"][/caption]

(No Spoilers)

Go see Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. I haven't enjoyed a movie that much in almost forever. I went into it expecting it to be just so-so. I figured the last one was okay, the second one sucked and the first one was pretty good, but aged pretty badly. This one would probably have one or two good scenes and be a nice way to kill two hours and $19.

Yes, it cost me $19 to see this movie--a fact that I spent 15 minutes cursing about as I watched the little "buy your tickets" timer run down on Fandango. My wife had to be the one to push the button for me, because I cannot understand how movie tickets went from $7 five years ago to $18.50 for one person today.

I share that rant to highlight the fact that I went into the theater ready to criticize everything, but I came out grinning from ear to ear. Was it a thinking man's film? No. Did the plot make much sense? Not really. There was just enough plot thrown in to explain why they were shooting at people and to give the sound system a break in between making explosion noises. As cliche as this sounds, the scene from the poster above literally took my breath away. I never get excited in movies, but I even let out a loud "YES" when that scene was over.

Also, it doesn't hurt that the new Dark Knight Rises trailer premiered before the film. I don't want to get my hopes up, but it made The Dark Knight look like that old Adam West Batman movie.

Go see MI-4...and see it in Imax. It's worth every penny, all one thousand eight hundred and fifty of them.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Segregated Santa

Random Christmas Memory #6

The Maury Elementary School Christmas Breakfast of 1988

I used to feel so special at the thought of Santa Claus coming to my school personally to find out what we wanted for Christmas. Every year we'd all gather in the multipurpose room--The poor school's all in one gym, auditorium and cafeteria complete with tables that either folded down out of the wall or folded up perfectly so that they could be rolled up against the wall.

That year we had something that resembled grits but tasted like a burned box of Rice-a-Roni, a piece of sausage that also tasted like burned Rice-a-Roni and an oven-warmed pecan twirl (Again, poor school). Santa sat up on stage, occasionally belting out a ho ho ho, while the rest of us ate and Mrs Claus led us in a few carols.

Finally it was time to line up by class and go up to take a picture with Santa (if your parents sent in the minimum $5) and when it was finally my turn, Santa came down with a bad cough. Mrs Claus told me to come have a seat by her until he came back. We talked for a minute or so and I happened to look over to my right where, behind the curtain, I see Santa pulling off his fake beard and drinking a Coke. My whole world shattered.

My teacher, Ms. Turner, told me that I was just seeing things. Of course that was Santa Claus up there. When I got home, my grandmother had a different explanation:
Was he Black? Well then you should've known something was wrong. Ain't no such thing as a Black Santa Claus. You think these White people around here are gonna let some Black man go running around their house at night and not call the police? No, child, that wasn't Santa Claus. It was someone who works for him. The real one can't be everywhere all the time, so he sends people out who pretend to be him so that they can find out what you want for Christmas. He sends Black ones to places like Iverson Mall over there by Montgomery Ward and Woodies and then he sends White ones downtown to Hecht's and all those places with White people.

Of course I went to school the next day and shared this with my teacher who simply told me to never tell anyone else that. I look back, and I'm kinda thankful for that. Well, not the whole segregated North Pole thing, but the fact that she knew that I wouldn't buy anything less than a overly detailed explanation. In doing that she allowed the magic of Christmas to go on just a little while longer.

Disney Revisited: Beauty and the Beast

A lot of these movies seem a lot darker after watching them again as an adult with my daughter.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="202" caption="Ten bucks says he eats her."]Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)[/caption]

Beauty and the Beast has to have the worst fairy godmother/witch/whatever the magic lady was at the beginning. Okay the guy was an ass, I get it, but you punished his entire workforce? There were like a hundred spoons and forks alone in the Be Our Guest musical number. When you throw in the people turned into plates, glasses, bowls, tables, mirrors...it gets up into the hundreds.

I assume everyone didn't live in that one castle. Imagine all the families wondering why Ma or Pa never came home from work. The tea kettle had her grandson with her. His parents probably thought he was dead. They moved on and had another kid. I mean, what do you go home to after all those years of absence. Wives remarry. Houses are evicted. And all of this because your boss did something? Was she an evil fairy godmother or something?

Did the beast even learn anything? He was put into that situation in the first place because the witch wanted to teach him that things are not what they appear. So what did he do? He fell in love with the prettiest girl in town. Where's the lesson? Now if she gains a bunch of weight after the wedding, pops out a couple of kids, divorces him and takes half the castle, gets child support and then a few years down the road he learns that the kids are really the candle stick guy's then maybe that would be some kind of twisted lesson. Now that would be a tale as old as time.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Well I Was A Poor Black Kid

There was an article on Forbes.com the other day entitled If I Were A Poor Black Kid, where the author reveals his strategy to overcome adversity if he were...well, you know.

As you can imagine, the article pissed a lot of people off. Surprisingly, it didn't offend me. He says that he would focus on getting good grades, using free resources from the internet to fill in the gaps that public education can't and eventually working hard to get into college. Near the end he even admits that most kids don't know the resources exist because their parents and teachers are too overworked to be able to lead them to it. It didn't sound condescending to me, but that's the whole point of this post:

Have I lost touch with my inner city roots?

I grew up almost-poor. I figure you're poor if you don't have food. I never went hungry so I wasn't poor. But I sure as hell met all of the other criteria. I slept on the floor, couch or cot in the living room for a couple of years, no heat, hot water or gas, phone cut off for months at a time, two pair of pants, couple of $5 t-shirts from Dollar Tree, and eating out of cans with white labels and black lettering. I got my deodorant and toiletries from those little bags they gave out in gym class.

Sadly I often feel the need to validate my near-poverty growing up so as to not feel bad for where I am now. I live in a decent neighborhood. Ward 3 actually and that's the part of DC where the rich White folk live. There's a person at the front door downstairs and it isn't a H-U-D cop.  I distinctly remember heating water on a hot plate and pouring it into old soda bottles that I'd put in the bed with me in order to warm up at night when I was younger. Now, I just turn a knob on the wall and the room heats up. It's nice, but I don't take the shit for granted. I remember what it was like all those years so I'm thankful for it everyday.

Still, I don't feel a connection like I think everyone wants me to. I remember being afraid a lot growing up. I didn't have a neighborhood full of cousins to protect me. I ran A LOT. To the store. To the library. To the bus stop. To church. I was like that little Black boy in the old PSA's. "My teacher says to just say no, but where I live they don't take no for an answer. They may be afraid of the police, but they sure aren't afraid of me." It's hard for me to agree with the rhetoric that "All these kids in the inner city need is someone to take an interest in them. All the schools need is funding." I remember mysterious organizations donating stuff to our school and those little bastards would break it the first chance they got. I remember the so-called "educational" camps in the summer where college students would try to teach us about math or science and the kids in the programs would have soldering iron fights a la Star Wars or throw random chemicals from the chemistry sets at each other. There were so many instances where teachers, counselors and volunteers would throw their hands up like, "I'm never coming back here."

I'm not saying that I don't believe in helping youth. I'm certainly not saying that it's a lost cause. All I'm saying is that these are some of the experiences that led eight year old me to think that most of the people around me were gonna end up in jail and that I had to do my best to get good grades so I could go to college one day and not end up in jail with them. I read encyclopedias from the 60s and 70s, I walked myself to the library and read every book I could find on any subject that interested me at the time and occasionally (but rarely) a teacher or counselor came along who pushed me in the right direction.

How is that any different than what that guy said in his article? And unlike him I don't have say IF I was a poor Black kid because I was a almost-poor Black kid.

 

Monday, December 12, 2011

Another Man's Treasure

Little known Black History Fact:
Some families have a special routine that they follow each Christmas when friends and family come over. It's called "put your stuff up before ____ comes over here, or else ____ is gonna either break all your stuff or steal it."

Ah, what a time honored tradition in my family. So one year I had the bright idea to put all of the good (and expensive) new toys in a black trash bag along with all of the discarded wrapping paper and boxes. Just to throw em off my trail, I left the crappy toys out under the tree and put the bags over by the door.

It was a mighty plan and it worked. The clepto-friends stayed for an hour or two and then left and nobody was the wiser. They left around eleven, I fell asleep and woke up the next day ready to play with my toys.

Then out in the alley there arose such a clatter.
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window, I flew like a flash
Saw what was going on and let out a WTF gasp!

There were some kids in my neighborhood who we all pretty much knew were just biding their time until they each went to prison. Well these little hellions were notorious for playing in the dumpster in the alley next to my house. I woke up to the sound of one of them yelling, Hey I just found a bag full of Transformers!

Apparently my grandfather wasn't in on the trash bag charade and he threw both bags away.

I can't describe what came over me as I watched them pull my toys out of that bag one by one. Normally those little bastards scared the hell out of me because it was so many of them and they would occasionally chase me home, but not on December 26th 1988! Oh no, that day I was goddamned He-Man. I don't remember getting dressed, I don't remember going downstairs, hell, I don't even remember picking up the mop handle that I ran outside waving around like it was my Moses staff.

What I do remember is looking the big one dead in the eyes like Dae-Dae from Friday After Next, I'll die for this shit. We had our little moment from the Michael Jackson Bad video where we stared each other down for a while. I didn't budge. Five minutes later, the standoff was over and I went back in the house with a trash bag full of toys.

My grandfather: Why are you bringing that bag of trash in the house?

[gallery columns="2"]

Thursday, December 8, 2011

The Gift of Life

It's amazing how many different ways I inadvertently try to kill myself. From near-drownings to drug store shootings, I seem to find myself in perilous situations. This week's excitement is a twofer: Chemical warfare and Do-it-yourself-car-bombing.

Chemical Warfare

My aunt asked me to take her to go get some oil for heat. I'm surprised at how many people have no idea what that means. For the privileged: Not all houses are heated by electricity or natural gas. Some people have tanks that need to be filled with oil in order to be fed into the furnace and burned for heat. My aunt's house is one such place.

I thought she wanted me to take her to the office so she could pay for it and have a truck come deliver it. Nope. She wanted to get some kerosene for her personal heater. We put two 5-gallon cans in my trunk and went to the gas station. We were a block away from her house when some jackass slammed on his brakes to make a turn at the last minute.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion. (That's called inertia)

One of the gas cans fell over. I thought it was just a minor spill so I decided to just clean it up when I got home. The ride home became increasingly bumpy, earthquake-like almost. The only problem was that the violent shakes were all in my head. The fumes became unbearable even with the windows down. That's when I pulled over and double checked the trunk. I lifted the trunk floor to discover that the entire wheel well was full of kerosene and the spare tire was submerged. I BP'd my own damn car. The guys at the fire station told me to put kitty litter in it to absorb the gas and then just vacuum it out. They said it'd also help the smell.

I spent the next four days filling my trunk with kitty litter, letting it sit overnight with the windows down, vacuuming it out and repeating. Didn't help. That brings us to part 2 of the story...

Do-It-Yourself Car Bomb

Today I went to the car wash to try and clean the trunk. I took a few household items with me. At no point did I consider how I would look to other people on the street. Imagine a guy getting out of his car at a self serve car wash at 8 o'clock at night with a black hoodie, dark jeans, skull cap, one of those masks the women wear in nail salons (the fumes), a pair of latex gloves, several bags of kitty litter, a jug of Tide, a gallon jug of vinegar, some white powder in a zip lock bag (baking soda), and some electrical tape. And, because it was dark and I'm from Southeast, I kept looking around to see who was watching me. It's no wonder that everybody left at the same time and every car that pulled up afterward peeled out when they saw me.

So anyway, that's not even the car bomb part. I ended up taking the trunk floor out altogether, because it was too heavily saturated. That's when I noticed a set of wires running underneath the exact area where the can spilled. The wires were still soaked in gas. I look on the underside of the floorboard and there's this huge charred section where I guess they either got hot or sparked a bit. So I immediately thank whatever deity guides my life for keeping me, my daughter and aunt alive.

Apparently as I was riding around with two 5 gallon drums of kerosene in my trunk, one tipped over spilling two gallons of kerosene directly on top of a set of electrical wires. All of this inside of a trunk which sits above my car's gas tank. All it would've taken was one spark to kill all of us. As far as I'm concerned, that's my Christmas gift.

[caption id="attachment_1460" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Who learned something from this experience?"][/caption]

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

A King Walks Among You

I absolutely love my neighborhood. I'm like royalty to these people. Just last night I was walking down the street and every single person went out of their way to avoid making eye contact. You can't look royalty in the eye, you know.

The women switched their purses to the outside to avoid accidentally hitting me. Can't hit the king with a commoner's luggage.


Some people went so far as to actually cross the street when they saw me coming. I guess they didn't feel worthy to walk on the same side as me. 

I wish I had a house. That way they could honor my wife, Tammy, by lighting a bunch of lowercase t's in the front yard.

[caption id="attachment_1354" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Good morning my neighbors! Yes, yes...Fuck you too!"][/caption]