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."][/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.

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.

 

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?

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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]

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]

Cain is Able

It's almost like one of those prescription drug commercials:

Do you have a vagina? If so, you may have been sexually harassed by Herman Cain. Ask your bank if coming forward is right for you.

The latest woman to come forward says that she had an affair with him for 13 years. That's not an affair, that's a second marriage. Maybe he should be President. He definitely has the multitasking thing down. Keeping two women happy for 13 years while simultaneously sexually harassing four other women and running The National Restaurant Association. I have one wife, no women on the side and I'm stressed out most of the time.

I may have been wrong about him.

 

Hurry Up and Wait.

Well, Black Friday has come and gone...Thank God!

I like to think that I didn't grow up under a rock, but the first time I ever heard of Black Friday was during my sophomore year of college. I thought it was something my girlfriend at the time had made up. It would be another four years before I'd hear the term again when I let a coworker convince me to go to Best Buy to take advantage of "crazy deals" back in '05.

As a testament to my ignorance regarding Black Friday, I showed up at Best Buy "early." Like, ten minutes before they would normally open. So at 9:50 in the morning I found myself as the umpteen thousandth person to arrive. Obviously I went home empty handed.

Six years later, I showed up to Best Buy at 11 in the morning. I learned my lesson. I just don't care. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade. Some people have family traditions. I imagine it would be fun to go camp out in line with your mom or cousins after a great Thanksgiving meal. Maybe you and your best friend made a pact to go Double Dragon on em in the store. I don't know. What I do know is that I'm too picky, cynical and impatient to be a Black Friday'er. The minute someone pepper sprays me for a damn video game console that came out six years ago, it's gonna get Black real quick.