Wait till you see my ____???

A few short weeks back while I was helping my son clean his room over Christmas Break, I ran across a MP3 player. It was an object foreign to my house, and my children know not to bring home anything from other children.

I took the player down to my computer and played a couple of the songs. I was appalled to hear The Whisper Song being played from the player. I immediately called my son downstairs and my wife, my son, and myself had a little talk.

What the hell is going on with the music today? I feel like I can’t even listen to the radio anymore. I certainly can’t listen to the radio with my son and four year old daughter. What I do know is that I don’t like what it is doing to our women, to our young girls with so much ahead of them.

It is time to be involved. Believe that music like this is not being marketed to you. No, it is being marketed to your high school, middle school, and in my case elementary school child. It is being marketed by the “cool” videos with the “cool” cars, and even worse, its biggest contributor is the child in your child’s class that they play with and spend all day with. Be aware of what is going on. Don’t allow you children to walk around all day with music plugged into his or her ears. You don’t know what they are listening to. Don’t allow them to be on the computer with the door closed; again you have to know what is going on in your child’s life. They are your responsibility.

We have to think different. It is obvious that the music industry is not going to allow us to do that. Black love is real, and it should be something that we all want to have. We should not want to date any Bitches, Hoes, Pimps, or Hustlers. Instead we should be looking for black people that are going to be productive parts of society and good parents to the future of the race.

Today

This weekend was a three-day weekend in honor of MLK. I certainly appreciate the extra time away from work. I have to take the day off work because my employer does not give it to us. I did not have anything to do today, but I took the day off anyway. The wife would have stayed with the kids, and I would have been clear to go to work. I took the day off because of principle. It is a NATIONAL FUCKING HOLIDAY, so I stayed home and will continue to do so.

No more soapboxes; that is not why I am here.

I am here because there are just some days when I feel alone. I feel alien to everything around me. I spent the day with my beautiful wife and children and yet I felt alone most of the day. I sometimes start up conversation with my wife to chase the loneliness away, but it is always there, and I do not know what it is.

Outside of keeping this online journal I have also been drawing a lot lately. It has certainly helped. I feel as though there is an artist inside me that wants to get out and live. I thought a lot today about where I am at with my art, and where I am at with my school, and about the job.

I have two more years of school if I keep at the same pace that I am going now. I guess I am just feeling restless. I am not doing a major that enhances me as an artist, so sometimes I feel like what am I doing?

That has been today.

Mom

I just got off the phone with my brother and I am not quite sure what to think. What’s beneath every conversation that I have with either one of my brothers is an incident that happened almost twenty-five years ago. For the longest time we called it “The Incident”.

In August of 1981 my mother was shot to death in the kitchen of our Cleveland home. In the house was my younger brother, who escaped somehow and fled to our downstairs neighbor, myself, who was in the bathroom at the time using my body to wedge between the bathtub and the door, my older brother, shot twice, and my father, shot seven times.

My mother, I believe, was shot once to the head. She is the only person that did not make it.

It’s not something that I think about everyday. There are times that I feel like I grew up normal. I have children of my own now. When I had my daughter I thought about her a lot. The resemblance of mom’s baby pictures and my daughter now is uncanny. I talk to her, but it has been some time since I went to the grave, but we talk. We, the brothers, made a promise to visit every August, but that only lasted a year. Some days it’s like it never happened. It feels like I just never had a mother. That might sound bad, but that’s being honest.

Yet, it’s there. It’s there when I talk to my brothers. It’s there when I look at my daughter. I wish that she could have given me advice on women, saw me play football, been there for the birth of my child. I wish that I could call her now, take her to dinner, or make a speech on how none of this is possible if not for my mom.

One day I was going to my mother in laws house with my family. We were on the highway and I just happened to notice that there was an exit that had a long line on each side. It was Sunday in the middle of the day, almost in the middle of nowhere, and I was thinking to myself what the hell is that all about? Almost immediately it hit me. That day was mother’s day, and the people were visiting the cemetery. I was driving and it took everything that I had to keep the car on the road. I cried so hard with my wife next to me, and my kids seated behind me.

It’s like that. That is exactly how it happens. I could be watching a movie and a scene that I did not see coming will catch me and I’ll just lose it.

My older brother was the closest to mom. We did not have a father that stayed with us every day. My father would come and visit once a month or even once every two or three months. My older brother was the man of the house. He was twelve when it happened and even after mom was gone and we moved in with other families and eventually with my father, my brother was the man of the house in both me and my younger brother’s eyes.

Today my older brother struggles to deal with the events of 1981 in a way that I cannot even begin to imagine. As a brother I don’t think that I have ever reached out to him the way that he might need. He was the man in charge so long, but now I see that he needs someone else to help him and take charge. He needs me to be there. Sometimes we act normal like we grew up like everyone else, but we didn’t. We need each other. We can save each other. We each need saving in different ways, because we have each dealt with our loss in different ways. After today’s conversation, for the first time I am hopeful.