Version 2.0

Culture, healing, politics and bullshit - Not necessarily in that order

The general, socio-political and very personal rantings and ravings of a hip hop head from the hood hustling for change... Of himself.

You all know me and are aware that I am unable to remain silent. At times to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence.
—Miguel de Unamuno



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Monday, December 09, 2013

Just Buy The Damn Ticket Already!!!

So I eff around and test out of my classes, seeing as I couldn't withdraw that late in the program/semester for medical reasons and I end up scoring a 76, 79 and an 87 om three of the final exams and passed the two certification exams I planned on pushing back to February.

I'm have a job manifesto to email and take my final final later on tonight. I'll probably pass that one too. Not bad for a cat that only attended a half a semester.

But get this:

I can add the titles  (Cisco) CCNA Security as well as CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) to the end of my name along with a few other accomplishments.

That leads to the next thing:

A job offer in Nassau

And nope, not New York state either. There is a Information Security Associate/Engineer position at a financial firm (banking systems infrastructure) in the gawd damn Bahamas...

*crickets*

Yeah, and a 2 bedroom/2 bath condo is around $386k in that market too. That's a 4 bedroom house here in Chicago. And no, the Bahamas ain't calling me like that... Common sense is.

It'd be my luck to go over there to interview and it to get got by another candidate that's been in the workforce for a minute and not rehabbing surgeries and going to school for the last few years.

I'm not coming down on myself.

Shit, I'm trying to start over, What happens if I take the interview, get over there and actually LIKE shit? I know that I must cut ties with damn near everybody, but damn, so soon? No goodbye sex?

And why are condos so damn much over there?




Monday, December 02, 2013

I Stand Alone

I am thoroughly and utterly disappointed in everyone I know. As I lay in a hospital rehab facility this past month recovering from 2 surgical procedures where in the first I expired and had to be defibrulated to be brought back to this realm and in the second I lost the usage and finction of my left eye, it occured to me that no one really gives a fuck.

Where were my so-called family and friends during my time of need, my struggle? Nowhere to be found. Not even a phone call to check in on my stankin ass or even someone to be in the waiting area with the families of other people with life-threatening and altering injuries and episodes... No one to sogn me out of the hospital, no one to help me through 28 days of vestibular and occupational rehab...

Janaye called... And Stephanie did her usual Good Nurse thang.

And then I found out that even though I had indicated on facebook my whereabouts and actions like I promised I'd do when this all started. folk kept up mess about me not facebooking them back and such.

So I checked and found that people I once called friend were so self absorbed in their own self-inflicted bullshit...

Regurgitating lies that sound somewhat like religion

Quoting self-help gurus and spiritual leaders, not once invoking any of that shit into their own lives

Bitching and complaining about their first world problems like their demise was near...

Broke, unhappy and playing up their shortcomings as if that shit outranks someone else"s...

All of that talent, education and so-called common sense...

I even spoke to a chosen few after I got home from rehab last week...

My friendship and kinship with these people is pointless. I never thought that the people I chose to spend time with and have influence me and folk I call friend were so self-destructive, selfish, lazy and gullible to the ways of society (the Matrix) that the choose to be unsuccessful and unhappy. I tried in vain to get at a few of them, but in the end, I can't fuck with these people anymore. The zeal for life and the overstanding that life is both fleeting and precious is llost upon them. They'd rather choose to live in the past, aren't open to change and wear pain like a sporty new outfit and hide from living life because they are too busy being cowards.

And then I was listening to The Robert Glasper Project and it was explained to me in vivid detail by Common and Michael Eric Dyson...

And I now understand.




"The irresistible appeal of Black individuality - where has all of that gone?

The very people who blazed our path to self-expression and pioneered a resolutely distinct and individual voice have too often succumbed to mind-numbing sameness and been seduced by simply repeating what we hear, what somebody else said or thought and not digging deep to learn what we think or what we feel, or what we believe

Now it is true that the genius of African culture is surely its repetition, but the key to such repetition was that new elements were added each go-round. Every round goes higher and higher. Something fresh popped off the page or jumped from a rhythm that had been recycled through the imagination of a writer or a musician. Each new installation bore the imprint of our unquenchable thirst to say something of our own, in our own way, in our own voice as best we could. The trends of the times be damned

Thank God we've still got musicians and thinkers whose obsession with excellence and whose hunger for greatness remind us that we should all be unsatisfied with mimicking the popular, rather than mining the fertile veins of creativity that God placed deep inside each of us"



Dr Michael Eric Dyson - I Stand Alone


My Daddy used to always tell me: "Niggers know the prices of EVERYTHING, yet know the value of NOTHING"

and

"You get what you pay for"

Fuck em... Time to wipe the slate clean and go shopping. I'll be god-dammed if you weren't there for me during my struggle that I'm sending you an invite to my triumph party to celebrate. Fuck you! Can't make you a priority when I was never a option in the first damned place.