I left the house bundled up like an Eskimo and headed to school. It was freezing cold outside. I had on my new, rabbit-fur lined boots. I loved those boots. They were fluffy outside and knee high. Mom tried to get me practical boots that were big, ugly and waterproof but I wasn’t having that. I protested until I got what I wanted.
Life was alright. We had just moved into an area called Bexley on the east side of Columbus. Our townhouse was really nice. Mom was working for the post office. It was just the two of us and we were doing pretty damn good.
We had new furniture, new TV’s, and beautiful paintings. Mom had a new car and even my bedroom set was beautiful. It was something like you’d never seen before and it was imported all the way from Mexico. It had neon yellow and tangerine colored flowers’ surrounding the antique brass handles with lime green leaves on the stems of the flowers. Read the rest of this entry »
About three years ago I was in Orlando trying to escape my ex when I sat at my computer and opened an email from my exes new, much younger wife. She was just 19 years of age at the time and he was 15 years her senior. In the email she was cursing me out, referring to me as a whore and bitch and saying how I was old and washed up and how I was angry because my ex (we will call him Monster) didn’t want me anymore.
After years of physical and emotional abuse from Monster, I had finally convinced him to stop playing with my emotions after tearing his apartment to shreds one morning about a year before this day. He loved seeing me squirm and he loved playing with my emotions. At the time, I didn’t have the emotional strength or self-esteem to resist his advances, so I figured if I did something harsh enough, he might decide I wasn’t the person to drag through his emotional mud anymore.
Monster informed me a few months before I moved to Orlando, that he wasn’t going to help me financially with our daughter any longer because he didn’t feel that he needed to help me anymore and suggested that I take him to court. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a warm Saturday morning during the summer and I had just finished putting the rubber bands around all of the newspapers I had to deliver on my paper-route. I shoved the newspapers into my big canvas pouch that read “Columbus Dispatch” in big neon orange colors and headed out the door. My dogs, Lady and Muttly stood right by the door dancing and prancing around. They loved accompanying me on my paper-route and couldn’t wait to get out the door.
This was our daily routine and they both knew when I was wrapping up my papers that we would soon be headed on our long walk to deliver them.
Lady May (as Mom liked to call her) was always the first one to dash out the door and Muttly was always right behind her. You had to be really careful when you opened the door with Lady around, because if you didn’t she would run you right over or knock you down. She was pretty big and very strong. Lady was a Doberman pinscher mixed with what some call “working Dobe” working Dobes were a little thicker and more muscular than your typical Doberman pinscher. Muttly was an old stray my aunt Julie had rescued from the streets.
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This Fourth of July I decided to do something I rarely do. My close neighbors, a very nice, older Jamaican couple always ask me come by and join them whenever they have a cookout or family get-together, so I decided to take them up on their offer.
I usually don’t join them because I’m not what you would consider a very social person and their events usually consist of a 10 to 1 ratio of men to women (much more men). Most of the men who visit them are family and they are visiting from Jamaica. In addition most of them are married, yet they still try to see if they can sleep with you.
I left my daughters grandmothers house and it was about 9:00pm. When I walked into the house I could hear my neighbors laughing really loud. It sounded like they were having a lot of fun so I decided to go on over. When I walked up everyone was still laughing. The older couple I knew and their daughter and her husband were there. There were also six males. Everyone was drinking and having a good time. I said hello to everyone and my neighbor’s wife (we will call her Vee) asked me to have a seat. I was wearing big grey sweatpants and a brown tee-shirt and flip flops. I probably looked like I was wearing pajamas.
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When I was growing up, my mother was pretty damn broke and we ate a lot of baloney sandwiches. I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio in an all African American, poor neighborhood. My sister and I were what they called back in the day “high-Yellow”.
During the summer, the local swimming pool served as “free” summer camp for my sister and I. We took swimming lessons, joined the swim team and spent our entire day at Maryland pool from 7am until sunset. Maryland Pool was huge with 3 sections. One section had shallow water for small children and people who didn’t know how to swim. Then came the middle section, which included the 50 meter “lap swim” section and finally the deep end which had 2 low dives and one high dive. Read the rest of this entry »
I was in the Army for a short time. While I was in basic training at least 5 privates under the age of 21 either died or committed suicide. Two of them collapsed from being pushed too hard to run and just keeled over. One stabbed himself by ramming a pencil up into his nasal passage. Another hung himself with a shoe string. I forgot how the other died.
You never hear about this type of sh*t in the newspapers do you?
My recruiter drew up false child-custody papers on my daughter to get me in. I almost lost my child because of them.
The health care they give you is equivalent to what public assistance gives you. Most of the time you don’t even get to see an actual physician – you are usually treated by a RN or Physician’s Assistant.
They say they are going to pay for your school. What they don’t tell you is that your “financial aid” is based on senority and it is distributed on a first come/first serve basis. Then there’s the issue of them moving you around from state to state and country to country. How can you possibly earn any type of degree when you’re being moved around constantly.
Lies, lies and more lies
You WILL be deployed, often! And when its its time for you to actually go home it never happens – or it happens two years later, even though you are promised otherwise.
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I went on MySpace to maintain my page as I typically do on any given Monday or Tuesday evening. I go to my “friend’s request” link and I proceed to click on the “select all” button at the bottom of the page. This day was not unlike any other Monday or Tuesday and I probably had perhaps 7 to 8 pages of friend requests. When I state this fact, I am by no means implying that I am special. I would tend to believe most people probably have this many friend requests if not more, especially if they are half-way decent looking or even if they appear to be under 35 years of age. I believe that’s all it takes.
Anyway,
I select all and bam, like an instant “friend magnet” I have about 50 or 60 more friends (if that’s what you want to call them). I flop off of MySpace and get back to the real reason I’m on the Internet in the first place and that was what? Oh yeah, to do my homework.
The following day, we will call that Tuesday; I receive a few emails from some of the friends I accepted the previous day. Most of them were thanking me for my acceptance of their friend request – most of the time I try to respond to them with a “you’re welcome” email. One particular email stood out for me because the guy in the picture was wearing a suit and holding a book in his hand. Read the rest of this entry »
Approximately 9 years ago in April of 2000, my friend and I, we will call her Glo, were headed to South Beach to go see a friend of mines open up for the rap group Mobb Deep. Anthony asked me to be there early so that I could go on stage with them and help hype up the crowd. I knew I would be moving around a lot so I wore my hip hop gear, which then consisted of black Dickie boots, loose Dickie overalls and a leather jacket. I know it sounds weird but it was really cute at the time.
Glo and I were running late so I decided to speed all the way there. I was driving a 2000 gold, Dodge Mini-van that a producer friend of mines we will call him Mr. Producer, let me borrow because my car was broken down at the time. Mr. Producer was always in an out of town and always had several cars around. When he saw that I had no car he told me that he had an extra van that was a rental that he wasn’t using and that I could borrow that until I got my car fixed. It had been two weeks since he loaned me the mini-van and by then I had my two-years car seat in it, my fishing rods, mail and anything else I could fit in it. It desperately needed cleaning, but I was too busy working on my so-called music career and working to have time to clean it out.
Back to the story…..here we are riding over the I-95 expressway eastbound Read the rest of this entry »
After Grandma Beasley died, everybody in the family went haywire. I never realized that Mom wasn’t really around that much, because I loved Grandma so much that it didn’t matter to me one way or another. Aunt Gretchen started drinking really bad. Aunt Mary started shooting Heroine. My favorite cousin Roosevelt became a pimp. And me, well I guess I was left to the wolves.
Mom got heavy into the church. I hated the church. This had to be the most corrupt place with the meanest people in the world in it. All everybody did was talk bad about each other and put each other down. The kids at church were more prejudiced than the ones at school. The pastors were all screwing all the women in the congregation and damn that shit lasted all day long. I thought if there was a hell, this had to be it. Read the rest of this entry »