Day dreaming, and I'm thinking of you ...

Yo, people. I've been doing a little writing. Here's a small sample of something I'm working on... It's the start of this screenplay idea that's working through my mind and onto my laptop slowly but surely. Here's a sample.

WADE
It’s when you start dreaming with your eyes open, that’s when you really begin living.

JAY
A wet dream, right? That’s what you’re talking about? (Jay laughs, Wade smirks but isn't amused) For real, that’s about the only type of dream I want to experience awake.

WADE
You need to find some way to get the sewage out of your mind.

JAY
Wade, please. You act like you’re holier than thou. Last time I checked, which was about three minutes ago, you were determining whether or not that breezy over there was questionable or probable for a late night extravaganza.

WADE
But what does that have to do with what I’m talking about? (JAY shrugs his shoulders) Right. I’m on a serious tip. I feel like I’m having a midlife crisis, man.

JAY
You’re like 25, so unless you want to die a young corpse at 50, you might want to rephrase that to “quarter-life quandary.”

WADE
Quarter-life, mid life, I just know I don’t want to spend every day of my damn life waking up at seven a.m. to get to a job where I begrudgingly sit behind a desk, typing and responding to e-mails that end with exclamation points, only to come home with just enough time to catch two minutes of SportsCenter before I fall asleep and wake up to do the same thing the next day. I want more. Ya know?

JAY
Yeah, I know what you mean. You start feeling like a zombie.

WADE
And I’m not spending the best years of the rest of my life sleep walking. I need to live.

JAY
Then you need to find a few dreams to live for – a wet one and a real one. (they both laugh)

WADE
I couldn't agree more.

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Don't Get it Twisted

Just because I sometimes spell Vic Damone, Jr. "Vick," please don't think I started that to have any affiliation with the idiocy that is now known as Michael Vick, veteran quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons and currently No. 1 enemy of PETA.

If you haven't heard about Vick's latest mishap, you've been hiding under a boulder somewhere, maybe in Colorado.

Vick, for all intensive purposes, is done. He may play football this season, but he may also find himself playing for the gridiron gang in the federal penitentiary. He was indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury on charges surrounding his alleged ties to the dog-fighting subculture.

I was watching ESPN when the news came down. My first thought: "Man would it be hilarious if ESPN had given him a slot in its Who's NOW bracket. He certainly would get ousted by the fans because he's done."

But he wasn't a part of the bracket. But that I checked to see should tell you how majorly crazy this is. In Black America (especially the South), this is the equivalent to Martha Stewart being indicted and heading off to the slammer.

Mike Vick is the Atlanta Falcons. He personfie(d)s a sense of cool. He's one of Nike's front men. He's on the cover of one of the past editions of Madden. It makes little sense that he got himself in such a precarious situation. I guess this saying is true, an idiot with money is worse off than an idiot without.

When you make that much money and are as high-profile a name and figure as Mike Vick, there are things you just cannot do - and being involved in illegal dogfighting is one of them.

When you get his type of notoriety you go to work, red carpet events and then home. That's it. You don't go Nate Newton and get caught with nearly as much marijuana as your playing weight.

You don't make it rain in strip clubs and cause unnecessary drama to unfold ala Pacman.

And you surely don't, especially if you're as big as Mike Vick is, get brought down like this. That said, there's a better chance that Barry Bonds get to 850 home runs than Mike Vick runs for another 1,000 yards in his NFL career.

The Feds are going to make an example of him, and it sucks. But then again, maybe the ignorant sector of Black America wakes from the slumber its been in since Laurence Fishburne's character in School Daze yelled at the top of its lungs.

"WAKE UP!"

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Your heart is true ...

I've become a bad blogger. I used to give you two to three posts a week. Then life kind of happened. It was already going on, but I just kinda got mad busy. But anyways, as always, I'm going to try to be better about this.

Here are a few thoughts running through my mind:

I loved Transformers and Ratatouille, though the later bothered me some when it first started. Ratatouille is the movie about the cooking rat, but it started off as though it were about a family of rats who were black slaves in the 1800s with references to rats "not being able to read" and the rats taking a trip on an "underground" waterway. I wonder if anyone else noticed this. Beyond that it was a good film.
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I had two very drunken encounters this week, one was justifiable. On Independence Day, I forgot to eat before I started drinking, and that led to black spots in my evening and a two-day hangover. Ugh.

I swore off alcohol for at least a month. But I didn't last 72 hours.

On Saturday, seven of the nine of my line brothers (or pledge class) were in Kansas City. A few of us got together, and it was an ignorant, but great time. I felt like I didn't have much of a choice but to enjoy the time with the fellas. At least I ate, and didn't have any semblance of a hangover when I woke up the next morning.

The one bad thing I did do was have a Red Bull and Vodka. I think I only got two hours of sleep before I woke up and couldn't fall back into my slumber.

No matter, though. I'm still taking a prolonged break from alcohol. Approximately, a month.
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One of my good friends ended an AIM conversation with me last night by typing "thank you for being a friend."

She was in a bad moment, and I didn't want to laugh, but I couldn't help it because the theme song to the Golden Girls started running through my mind.

Hopefully you get the title because of this last bit. If you didn't, good for you. That means you had your head in a book and probably didn't watch too much television as a child as I did.

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Karaoke is for the birds

I went karaoking with a group of friends on Friday night. I've only done karaoke twice before. On both occasions, I was ridiculously drunk and that fact aided in my screwing up a couple of good songs - Kanye's Gold Digger and the timeless classic, Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On.

On Friday, I thought that if I monitored my adult beverage intake and only got tipsy before it was my turn, I'd be able to have the gall to do it and still be sober enough not to embarrass myself.

Boy, was I wrong - about the embarrassing part.

I chose an extremely safe song. Kanye's All Falls Down. I've been singing along to this tune since it dropped in February of 2004. I know every word. Every ad-lib. It was a lock, right? WRONG.

The song started so quickly. I expected to hear the chorus ("Oh, when it all ... all falls down") like I heard a million times to introduce the song. It never came.

So there I stood, looking at the words change colors on the karaoke machine's screen, and nothing was coming out. I felt like 50 Cent during the 2007 BET Awards.

I would post the link to my silence, but then I'd be embarrassing myself on the Internet. I recovered, like 50, and got through the second and third verses without pause. But I felt so bad that I kept drinking.

Next thing I know, I'm singing lead to R. Kelly's Bump N' Grind to close the evening out. And no, I didn't mess it up. I finally found a song I can karaoke to and not screw up.

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Something going through my head right now: The way is a path emblazoned by a light that will blind you if you're not prepared. But making a blind walk is often better than making a drunken trek down a trail already traveled. I'll take unknown road every time.

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JUST (DON'T) DO IT

To any spouse, girlfriend or boyfriend who is considering murdering your significant other:

This is an open entry to you. I'm not going to take too long in making this point, but I feel like it's one that definitely needs to be made somewhere. If you are pondering the idea of killing your spouse, stop now. Don't follow through with that dumb-ass thought. You cannot get away with it, and I'm going to tell you why.

Over the last 25 years of my life, I've seen plenty of episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, America's Most Wanted, CSI and Forensic Files. I watched the OJ chase and case live in the mid-90s. I lived through the whole Laci Peterson ordeal.

All of these things have taught me this simple fact of life: you are an absolute idiot if you think you're going to kill your spouse/significant other and get away with it.

You have a better chance of taking HGH and steroids and hitting 74 home runs in a single 162-game season than you do of getting away with killing your spouse/homey-lover friend.

Don't be an demented idiot like Bobby Cutts, Jr., who allegedly killed his girlfriend and mother of his two-year-old son and likely his unborn daughter. If you're having Cutts-like thoughts, push them out of your mind.

You will be the No. 1 suspect, and you will go down. More over, you will ruin the lives of your children, if you have any, and cause plenty of undue stress to all involved.

That's all. My prayers go out to the Davis family and to Bobby Cutts wife and children.

dmansmi

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I know, I know ...

I know I owe you all a little something. I've had a pretty tough week, so I've been lacking for words, something that normally isn't a problem for me.

I think I want to move. It's weighing heavily on me right now. But I'm almost certain that's what I want to do. Don't know where just yet. But it's a thought. I'm in a good position to make it happen, too.

I've started hashing out an outline an plot for this story I'm calling Tryangles. The title is a reference to the quadry that is the love triangle, and all of the different perspectives that must be considered in said situation. We'll see if I find the drive to bust my butt on it.

My i-Pod is over 3000 songs for the first time (after crashing about 24 times while on the way to the 3000 benchmark).

Okay, that's all for the moment. I don't think I have anything else. Ill check back in tomorrow.

Holla.

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I Am Enthralled

Y'all I know how I get when it comes to good music (see the end of the last post).

So to jump-off this week, I've got some exciting news. I'm feeling this Chrisette Michele. I found her new album online this weekend, and have been bumping it like I was at the amusement park (sans 50 Cent) and just tall enough to cause some carnage during a bumper car session.

Chrisette Michele's I Am is an oxygen-machine full of fresh air in the congested, carbon-monoxide heavy mess that is black music today. If you love music the way I do, I definitely recommend dropping by your Best Buy or Target, or wherever you purchase your music, and picking up this gem.

Chrisette, a DefJam jewel who can be heard on Jay-Z's "Lost Ones" and a few tracks on Nas' Hip Hop is Dead, kicks the party off with "Like A Dream," a classy ditty about meeting the right person at the right time.



There's the current single "If I Have My Way," which is a ballad reminiscent of Alicia's best, but also hearkens you back to a time where Anita and Whitney owned our hearts.

Chrisette provides an abundance of great music and vocals, but there's nothing like "Let's Rock," a song that I think will easily be the favorite of most who hear the album. It takes simplicity being a fine line between elegance and plainness to a level of beauty unseen to most eyes. It has the feel of the perfect stepper's groove (so watch out, I'll request it).

Her voice's flow makes you want to dust off the Nancy Wilson, and kick back with that special someone. The lyrics are simplistic, never reaching for something that's not there. Her voice is harmonic-balancing Neo (not Ne-yo) to Keyshia Cole's (and this is not an insult) Agent Smith, light, but somehow full of substance and unmistakable soul. A soul that might help define that it sound so many of us have been searching for in a new vocalist for quite sometime.

I am loving it. I am enthralled. I haven't felt this good about an album since John Legend dropped Get Lifted, and before then it was Musiq Soulchild's debut (I'm not looking up the official title, he shoulda just spelled it right). Chrisette, this is the way love feels.

I started to title this post, "I Am Engaged," but thought better of it. That would have setoff some serious ignorance.

Also listening to:

• Tank's Sex, Love & Pain
• T-Pain's Epiphany
• Carl Thomas' So Much Better
• Hidden Beach Recordings' Unwrapped 1-4
• Fabulous' From Nothin' to Somethin'
• Joe's Ain't Nothin' Like Me

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