Merry Christmas!
I've got two vastly different things on my mind. One is definitely safe for Christmas cheer atmosphere and the other not so much, but I'll hide that under the extended entry.
Listening to Kings of Crunk (a Christmas present), I was thinking that now I really need to learn how to drive because this is an album that made to blasting out of car windows, you know?
But, on the more serious tip...
Sometime around 7am, I found myself on a couch surrounded by various illicit paraphernalia and people lolling about, trying to focus on Carlito?s Way and then King of New York playing in front of me on DVD. The room and apartment was somewhere in Queens and cast in a red glow from the light bulbs around the house. A phone was constantly ringing with people calling to get shit. The quiet kid in the corner with his hat cocked to the side, sincere-looking and trying to strike up a conversation with me in between the haze, would answer it, give them what they wanted and come back to the same spot.
I had a strange moment of clarity minutes after this one kid set a chain of events into motions. He, unable to handle his shit, came into the room in a way that struck me as weird and my first thought was that his hand behind his back held a piece and that I should be prepared to spring away at any moment. I eyed him steadily and suspiciously until he left the room. Then, a few minutes later, I heard him arguing with other guys around the place on the other side of the apartment and I thought of the neighbors calling the cops. I plotted out which shit should get tossed first in case they bust in and realized that I all of a sudden knew instinctively how likely I would be to turn into a Kemba Smith if that happened. He got tossed and that quiet kid and his friend talked for a while that boy was stupid cause in any other situation, he would've "gotten his ass shot in the face or something." I actually looked at what the fuck I was watching and where the fuck I was and was just struck all of a sudden that I just hit a rock to break my fall on the slippery ass slope I've been traveling the past months.
Though no one ever believes it, I grew up in East New York, where I saw people decimated by jail, crime, poverty, drugs, and disease -- and that was just in my family. Though I spent most of my time in my house walls reading books, watching TV, writing, and practicing escapism across the street from the police station, it was impossible to not see the bad always threatening to overtake good people just trying to live their lives. I've been away from there a long time. My parents and most of my family have since moved away to settle in other parts of the city and country. But, if I said I don't remember or know what can happen by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I'd be lying. In the pursuit -- or rather, the interest of fun and adventure, I've forgotten that I?m the sort of person with an addictive personality and the potentially dangerous habit of finding myself in sketchy situations with sketch people and hanging back observing. Over the past year, I've done more than a few of the "I would never" list things and noted that the first time is tough, but that matters less the more you do it. Last night/this morning, I cast my detached eye on myself and noted bitterly that I really didn't need to go $40,000 in debt to be a stupid nigger caught up in drug shit begging for something to go down. It confirmed a truism that a person is never too smart to be utterly stupid. People, places, and things will drag your ass down in a minute.
The moral of this story is: I'm laying low for Christmas and probably the rest of this year (yeah, the whole week) to figure out where I went wrong and the best way to redirect myself while taking a hard look about the circles I've been running in lately. I've been taking the whole "try things out and eventually you'll find what you like" a little too literally in some aspects. Life's getting a little too fucking grit for my interests right now.
Posted by Candicissima at December 25, 2003 07:09 PM