Hot Air LeBrons

Call me bitter. Call me old fashioned. Say I don't have fashion sense or any sense of style. Call me whatever you want, but there is nothing in this world or the next that could convince me to spend $315 on a pair of tennis shoes. If you get paid hourly and, worse yet, you get paid with a physical check that you have to pick up from your job every two weeks, and you go out and buy these tennis shoes...

You deserve to get your ass whooped in the parking lot on your way back to your "car-note-having" car.

So far Hakeem Olajuwon is the only basketball player who gets my respect with his tennis shoes. For those who don't remember, back in the mid 90s Olajuwon decided to endorse some $35 Spalding tennis shoes saying:

"A mother with four children can't afford to spend $400 on shoes that will wear out in a couple of months...Parents must teach their kids a sense of value. Paying more doesn't mean it's better. That's not value."

Lebron James is just upping the ante on the exploitation that Michael Jordan perfected. It's not that the shoes cost upwards of $300. Actual designer shoes cost twice that. My beef is with the market they're geared towards. They're not going for the upper-upper middle class. They're going for the working or  looking-for-work class.

If I play devil's advocate I guess I would have to say that if people are willing to buy them then I shouldn't knock the hustle. I just wish someone would endorse a textbook or damned health insurance plan.

SMH

I'm not even gonna dignify those shoes by posting a picture of them. Enjoy this instead...

[caption id="attachment_2645" align="alignnone" width="447"] The true cost of being in style for some people[/caption]

Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don't

So this past Sunday I was invited back once again to The One Mic Stand radio show with Simply Nay, where I will be henceforth and forevermore (or until the government shuts us down) a guest a la J. Anthony Brown to her Tom Joyner. The main topic was Slutwalk DC, but we dabbled in a few other topics prior to that, namely the state of Black affairs. In that vein we were talking about some black lady on one of those reality shows who misspelled bitch and whether or not there was a responsibility of the producer (who is also a black woman) to edit or reshoot that scene. The idea being that we have a responsibility to protect our image. I voted no, the host thought I'd lost my mind and a discussion ensued. But that's not the topic of today's article. You can follow the link to hear that. No, today I want to talk about what happened after the show was over.

I went to the website of DC's ABC affiliate, WJLA, where I read an article about the unfortunate soul who was severely beaten and placed into a coma this weekend following a robbery that occurred while he was walking home from a bar. Normally I avoid the comments section of their site, because a lot of it is just racist drivel. Some sites now require people to register using their Facebook accounts to cut down on the He-Man complex that comes from anonymity. WJLA does not require this so people post things that even offend me and I have very thick skin.

For whatever reason, I found myself scrolling through one racist comment after another. They always amount to the basic ideology that Black people are violent and if they were removed from DC then the crime rate would go down. Someone suggested that there is evidence to support the claim that black people are the more violent race. It's been my position in the past to not even dignify such things with a response, but I figured why not.

I sought out this mythical data and found myself on the FBI's Uniform Crime Report site. You can read it for yourself here, but I'll summarize it for you: I'm done. That's my summary. I joked about this back in (what was it?) 07? Whenever Three 6 Mafia won that Oscar for It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp I said that I was done with the Black race. I was cutting up my Black card and entering the Race Draft. After reading those numbers, I couldn't do anything but shake my damn head.

Of all murders in this country during 2009, slightly more than half were committed by a Black person. Considering that we make up about 13% of the population, that's a damned shame. The only other major crime that we seem to lead in is robbery. For just about everything else on the list of approximately thirty crimes, we come in second. Now that's nothing to be proud of at all. Take aggravated assault for example: 64% White vs 34% Black. Remember, we make up 13% of the population! Why are we committing more than a third of the crime?

What confounds me even more is that Hispanics and Latinos aren't carved out in this data, so I'm thinking that they're being lumped into the White category. That skews things even more because the White category includes two races worth of crime yet we still beat the cumulative efforts of both for murder.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hate my race. I'm not Uncle Ruckus. You won't see me running around talking about I have reverse-vitiligo, but I'm done trying to defend it. Yeah I could go down the route of talking about the systemic economic and educational disparity between the races that modern crime theory attributes to the seemingly one-sided crime rate in major urban areas. We could get historical and look at the WTF handling of Reconstruction following the Emancipation and how that laid the foundation for the plight of our people. But I'm not doing that today! Because the truth of the matter is, if a Black person hurts someone close to me today, the last thing I'm going to do is try to understand how the system made them this way.

I don't care what caused the cancer, I just want it gone. I'm certain someone will take offense to this. Somebody out there has a degree in African American studies and thinks I've sold out or lost my mind. Fine. Whatever. It's annoying walking down the street and having half the people you pass cross to the other side or clutch their purse. It's even more annoying when I look at crime statistics that make me understand why. If you told me that there's a 1 in 3 chance that the car I'm riding in might explode, I wouldn't trust it either.

NKL Negro Kayaking League

Oh man, what an adventure I've had this weekend!

Lately I've been thinking about my own mortality--not as much the dying part as the I'm getting old part. Watching the finale of House a few months ago didn't help. At the end of the episode they played the Louis Prima cover of Enjoy Yourself, so that's been stuck in my head all summer. It's later than you think! Enjoy yourself while you're still in the pink. The years go by as quickly as a wink. Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think. I've been trying to cram in a bunch offuture memories via new experiences. So what did I do this weekend?

I went kayaking!

That's right, you're looking at the world's first Black kayaker. It doesn't matter that I saw four other Black people out there. I didn't see them when I put my kayak in the water, so I choose to believe that they saw me from the harbor and were inspired by my courage. That makes me Jackie Robinson and they're everybody else. And now that I have integrated the sport, I'm retiring.

That shit scared the holy hell out of me. I don't do water. I've written numerous posts about it. Up until I was about ten years old, I took showers with my back to the shower head for fear of drowning if water went in my face and up my nose. Laugh if you want. I don't care. I don't do water. That's why my integration of kayaking is so significant. If I die before the year is up, please make sure they mention that part during Black History Month. Fearful of drowning, and water in general, Ordale Jackie Robinson Allen got in his kayak, The Proud Mary.

I don't know what possessed me to go kayaking. I'll blame it on The Olympics. They make everybody think they can do something that they can't. I watched that little Gabby Douglass flip off that balance beam and almost broke my damned neck trying to show my daughter how to do a cartwheel. And because she's the beneficiary on my life insurance policy, she just stood there egging me on. When you're two and haven't quite mastered the English language, Dad-dy! Dad-dy! sounds a lot like Die,Die! Die, Die!

The motivation is irrelevant. What matters is that I went down to Thompson Boat Center and before my nerves gave out I jumped in that little yellow boat and drifted down the bacteria infested waters of the Potomac. The first thing I noticed is that there's a lot of water in the Potomac River. You don't really notice it from the street, but it's almost like an ocean's worth of water. Lot of room to drown there.

Kayaks also give off an optical illusion to passersby on the street. From the vantage point near the Kennedy Center (which is where I was when I made the decision to get in one of those damned things) it looks like you sit up kinda high. I mean, I didn't expect to feel like I was in a single person clipper ship or anything, but I felt more like I was riding some lawn furniture from Cuba to Florida more than I felt like I was in a professionally crafted boat.

With that in mind, you can imagine how terrified I was when a real boat went by me with it's engine roaring (insensitive bastard) and created this huge wake that made my little refugee raft bop up and down violently. It might have been nothing to an experienced kayaker, but it was a tidal wave to me. In the raging sea, I lost someone dear to me: My chapstick. I have a waterproof case on my phone, so I decided it was a good idea to pull out the phone and turn on my Runkeeper app which has a GPS map on it. That way, in the event my kayak went Titanic on me, they'd know where to find me floating on my large piece of wood.

Eventually, my fear subsided and I started enjoying myself. At no point did I acknowledge that I was enjoying it for fear of Poseidon or whatever swamp mutant lives in (and has dominion over) the Potomac River smiting me for my hubris. I stayed out there for two hours and by the time that I ran into those other Black people that I mentioned earlier, I looked like a pro. One of them almost crashed into me and I dipped my paddle in the water and made my boat turn out of the way. The lady yelled out to me, I'm sorry. This is my first time and I don't know how to turn. Like the Olympic Kayaker that I am, I yelled back, It's okay. Eventually you'll get the hang of it. Everyone struggles their first time.



 

Knockoff

One weekend back in the mid 80s my mother and I housesat for one of her friends. Her son and I were the same age, but worlds apart financially. Stepping into his room was like walking into Toys R Us. There was something on his dresser--something I'd never seen before--that caught my eye. It was a Nintendo. I was probably five or six and was the master of all things Atari, but this was some new sorcery. I played that game all weekend long, only stopping to use the bathroom and beg my mother to buy me one when we got home.

For the next few months leading up to my birthday that's all I talked about. I tried to discreetly drop hints like, "Do you think Santa Claus knows that I got all A's on my report card? Should I send him another letter asking about my Nintendo?" Either that or, "Hey Mommy, did you know that Zaire's (Ames) sells Nintendos too? I thought only K.B Toy Store, Toys R Us, Lionel Kiddie City and Children's Palace sold them, but they sell them at the Zaire's on Rhode Island Avenue."

Finally, my birthday came. I wanted two things, a real Ghostbuster Proton Pack (like one that shoots actual electron beams) or a Nintendo. I awoke to find this:

The word of the day, boys and girls, is asshole. Do you know any assholes? I bet you do!

[caption id="attachment_2631" align="alignnone" width="315"] The word of the day, boys and girls, is asshole. Do you know any assholes? I bet you do![/caption]

You should know by now that I have a great memory, but seeing this box was so traumatic to me that I don't remember who gave it to me. I opened the box on my birthday in '88, a voice said "You wanted Super Mario, right?" and the next thing I knew it was 1989. Everything else is a blur.

The same thing happened several years later in high school. Personally, I never gave a damn about brand name clothes, but the girls in my school did. For most of junior high I got clowned for wearing JC Penny's finest and because no one had any cut cards, a random "tag inspection" was common. I had this shirt that looked like Polo, but one day someone pulled the tag and read it out loud "What the fuck is King's Court?" That's when everyone noticed that the man on my shirt wasn't holding a polo club, rather a jousting lance. Do you know how hard it was to live that down? That's why I was so good at joaning (cutting, the dozens, etc) on people. The best defense is a strong offense.

In 9th grade I said that I didn't care if it meant I could only have two shirts for the whole year, I wanted something brand name. So, I went out to Landover Mall and the mysterious person whom trauma has erased from my mind took me inside this store where I was told everything was dirt cheap for some reason. "Must be because they get it wholesale." I saw two shirts, one was a Polo shirt and the other was a Tommy Hilfiger shirt. I bought them both.

The first thing I noticed was that they were kinda itchy, but maybe my ghetto skin just wasn't accustomed to wearing brand names. So one day I'm in school and I start joaning on this girl that I liked. It was playful for the most part, but we drew the interest of other people in the class. I made a joke offering her some lotion for her ashy black jeans and the next thing I know she said, "I know you not talking with that fake ass Tommy Hilfiger shirt!"

What?

"Fake? Man you better check my fucking tag. This joint is all real!" She just started laughing like some kinda cartoon villain. "No boo-boo. I aint gotta check the tag. I can fucking spell. T-O-M-M-4-E-V-E-R. What's that, your Wheel of Fortune shirt? I'd like to buy a 'Y!'" The confused look on my face made her laugh even more. "Oh shit, you didn't know!"

(Attention passengers, we're losing cabin pressure)

I looked down at my shirt and realized that I was a dumb ass. It was written all over my shirt in big letters and I never noticed the 'Y' was missing. The brain sees what it wants to see I guess. At least my other shirt was real.

"And didn't you have on some fake ass Polo shirt the other day too? POLOGAME? Ralph Lauren makes Polo, Ordale, not POLOGAME as one word."

Just as it was with the Super Mario handheld, everything after that is a blur. The next thing I remember is that it was summer after 9th grade and I was standing at the register in Hechts in Wheaton Mall asking the cashier how he could be sure that my new shirt was actually made by Nautica and what their return policy was if I determined later that it wasn't.

Dear Bill Collectors

Dear Verizon, RCN, Student Loan People, Et al,

Today is the 15th which is Bill Day in my house. All of you should have received money from me, most of it you don't deserve. We've been going through this for a while and I feel that I know you all well enough to speak candidly. Even if we aren't that close, you have enough of my money that I feel comfortable, and entitled, to speak candidly.

Please stop bullshitting me with the "Go Paperless" thing. Every single one of you has something pop up online when I try to pay my bill saying that I can save the environment "and the hassle" by going paperless. Let's get something straight. You don't give two damns about the environment, nor do you give a fraction of a damn about the "hassle" I go through lifting that half an ounce envelope from the mailbox every month and using a team of oxen to carry it back to my apartment. You care about money.

You see, the only reason I've had money to give to you people the last few years is because I had a job. One of the perks of being a powerless mid-level manager in a thankless capacity is that I got to sit in on meetings where people who did have power complained about how much was being spent on administrative costs. Buying paper, printing a bill on it, stuffing it into an envelope and putting it in the mail falls under administrative costs. By signing up for paperless billing, I cut some of your costs. What do I get from this though? Not a damned thing. Until you start offering to reduce my bill by whatever miniscule amount I'm saving you, then you better cut down every tree, bush and shrub to send me a bill every month. I don't care if I'm just saving a tenth of a cent. You better cut up a penny and mail me my part.

And while we're having this heart to heart, please stop asking me about automatic bill pay. If I let you tell it, people "forget" that they have to pay bills each month. Trust me, no one in the working class forgets that they owe people money. Bills are why we get up each day and go to work. You think I woke up one morning as a child and said, "When I grow up I want to sit in a cubicle and listen to people complain all damned day." That wasn't a part of career day.

No, people don't forget that they owe money. They just don't pay you when you want them to pay you. I went to business school. I understand opportunity costs: Money today is worth more than money tomorrow. It works both ways. On an irresponsible person's end, opportunity cost means that this might be the last time I get to buy that shiny thing over there or go see ____ in concert and that will make me really happy vs waiting down the road to do it, so screw (Insert company name), I'll do a payment arrangement. That doesn't work for you, so you want people to pay you as soon as the bill is due or as soon as they get paid. It's a valid argument, but I fall into a different group.

I'm very responsible with money. Always have been. I'm fortunate and thank whatever deity guides my life for the fact that (so far) I have your money the day you send the bill. I'm still not paying you until the last minute though. Why? Because my group is called the "kiss my ass" group. You want your money when you want it. I want my cable to work every single day. I don't get what I want, so neither do you. You want me to pay the first day. I want someone to answer my call in the first minute. Until you start doing what I want, I'm not doing what you want.

Finally, stop acting like you care about me. You don't. You write these heartfelt letters to me like there's some guy named Verizon T. Johnson sitting at a desk made out of telephone pole wood writing these heartfelt memos to me hoping that I enjoy the effort he's put into personally connecting each one of my calls, but the truth is that you're just a corporation whose goal is to make money. I know this, because I own some of your stock. Stop pandering to me. Just give me my service and I'll send you your money.

We're in bed together, but we're not lovers. When it's all over, the money's on the nightstand. Please get up and leave. And don't give me that "I care about you" crap, because you knew what this was when we started.

Eye of the Tiger

Well, the Olympics are finally over. Good riddance! The Games always bring back painful memories. I don't usually like talking about this, but I guess I can share it with you since it's just me and you... I was supposed to go to the Olympics. Yes, that's right. You've been in the presence of an Olympian all this time.

The year was 1994 and 11 year old me had a huge crush on this girl in my class. She didn't know any better at the time, so she didn't like me either. I asked her to level with me and tell me why. I remember what she said verbatim, "Blah, blah, blah nerd. Blah, blah, poor. Blah, blah, dress like a bamma. Blah, Blah, short. Blah, blah, fat." You know me. I channeled the spirit of Jay-Z before he even came out: On to the next one, on to the next one.

I asked the next two top girls in the class "for a chance" and I got similar responses. Finally it was my best friend, my home girl, my ace who put me on the level. "You are kinda annoying and nerdy and you do dress like a bamma but you can't help that because you're poor and then you are fat but that's just because you're short but I'm sure it's a girl out there somewhere who is shorter than you." The mind hears what it wants to hear. These girls don't like me because I'm fat. Cue the Rocky music.

Like, seriously. Cue the Rocky music. It came on TV that weekend. I don't know how I managed to never see any of the Rocky movies until '94, but that famous montage inspired me. Sixth grade was almost over and I'd be moving on to middle school, but I swore that things would be different in seventh grade.

I got up one morning and ate a raw egg. After that came back up I went for a "run" and I use that term very loosely. Blockbuster was about a mile and a half from my house, so I decided to run there to take some movies back. Ten minutes and two mild heart attacks later, I was about four blocks from my house. I started to think that maybe Sylvester Stallone lied to me.

Pushups and situps were a little better. I could do five of those at a time, which I thought was great until I read an article in Sports Illustrated for Kids that told me I sucked. I also started to notice that pushups did absolutely nothing to build muscle. Someone told me that I needed to lift weights, but where the hell was I gonna find some of those? (Light bulb!) I took all my old encyclopedias and stuffed as many as I could into an old backpack. I put it on the scale and it topped out at 20 lbs.

I took my shirt off to let the bird (chest) out its cage and started lifting "weights" in the mirror. I wanted to watch as the muscles exploded out of my chest. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. If I couldn't do five pushups, imagine what happened after two reps. My arms locked up, I got a cramp in my side and my chest started to spasm. As I lie on the floor writhing in pain, I imagined all the girls I was doing this for. Women (or parts thereof) are a hell of a motivation. I got right back up.

By the end of the summer I was skinny. I'm sure puberty helped with that, but the ability to do about 50 pushups and situps in a row, run a six minute mile and lift my ghetto-fabulous backpack weight was all me. What does any of this have to do with the Olympics? Two years later in '96, I watched Michael Johnson run the 200 and 400 and decided that if I could go from the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that I was in elementary school to the iron man competitor that I'd become, then I could do that too.

All I needed was motivation. And then Rocky came on TV again...

Licensed to Drive

It was this day in history that I got my drivers license. Fourteen years goes by fast.

I remember studying that little stupid book like it was gospel. On my 16th birthday I went down to the main DMV office and got my learners permit. A part of me was expecting them to note my perfect score on the permit like, "We got a genius over here." They could care less and, judging by how most people drive in this city, I can see why. Nonetheless, I had my permit and was ready to go out and do some "learner-ing."

And for the next three weeks not a damned thing happened.

No one took me driving. No one even offered to discuss the rules of the road with me. Everyone who owned a car got ghost. So what did my crazy ass do? I went over to the carnival, bought one of those unlimited rides wristbands and practiced on the bumper cars. People looked at me like I was crazy riding around the joint trying not to get hit. I even parallel parked the thing in the corner before it cut off each time.

It was about a week before the test when my aunt came by and I asked her to take me out to Forestville Mall so I could practice driving on Crusin USA at the Time-Out Arcade. That was enough to earn her pity and she took me out driving. We crammed an entire Driver's Ed course into a few days. That following Monday I went to the Brentwood location to take the road test.

I think they had a quota for how many people they were supposed to fail each day, because they didn't even bother tallying up stuff. They just failed you as soon as you made your first mistake. Don't stop at that first stop sign when you leave the parking lot AND stop before you cross over the sidewalk...They pull the emergency brake. Cross over that bold white lane divider line at the top of the hill...They pull the emergency brake. If you've ever driven in DC then you know the least of your concerns is someone switching lanes at the last minute. They need to have something like, "Crater-Depth-Pothole avoidance" or "Distracted tourist collision maneuvers."

Half of my friends failed before me, so I kept a mental record of everything not to do. First and foremost was "Don't get the mean lady with the bush." Her whole purpose in life was to fail people, so I made sure to let the girl behind me go ahead of me when I saw her standing there. I knew I needed a strategy, so I played the same card I used to get into R-rated movies: Old people relatability.

I got in the car, turned down the stereo, checked my mirrors and then asked the guy if he wouldn't mind double checking to make sure his seat belt was taut. I think he was about to call bullshit on that one, so I brought out the big gun. I closed my eyes and prayed over the vehicle and our safety. Then we were off and running. I made idle conversation, played up the whole "I'm a nerd that goes to Banneker" thing and how my license is going to allow me to take my grandmother to Bible Study. By the time we got back I think that man was so tired of hearing me talk that he passed me just so he'd never have to see me again.

It doesn't matter what I had to do to get the license. All that matters is that I got it. It was August 10, 1998 and 16 year old Ordale J Allen was now a licensed driver. Not that it's saying much, but DC believed I was ready to drive alone and that's exactly what I was planning to do.

And for the next few months...not a damned thing happened.