Sitting On My Porch Part Forty

Any day now (barring dental work and fires) Lil Wayne will be headed to prison in New York to serve his sentence after pleading guilty to gun possession. In the neighborhood we like to call people haters when they don’t go along with our decisions and lifestyle. You can officially call me a hater. If wanting to see him enjoy his kids and all the things success has given him makes me a hater then so be it. Guys like Lil Wayne, T.I. and Gilbert Arenas get in trouble because they think they have this allegiance to the hood that requires them to keep it real at all times. I feel an allegiance to my hood (Lower Nine all day baby) but I choose to take a different route. We can all represent were we come from and tell the world about the reality of life there while at the same time trying to change the reality and making sure we are not in the same situation as the cats we are speaking for. We keep telling the world that we act a certain way when we are broke and have no opportunity. When you get both of those things you have to change. That’s just the way it is. I hope Wayne gets out and focuses his time on all those babies. He’s made enough to stay busy.

The earthquake in Chile was so strong that it shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day by 1.26 millionths of a second. I am sure no one felt that but that’s a little scary. There was another quake in Taiwan today that registered 6.4. So far in 2010 the person making the biggest statement is Mother Nature. She’s showing everyone that there isn’t a damn thing we can do if she decides to flex her muscles. All we can do is sit back and hope for the best. I know Pat Robertson has something to say about this.

They tore Mr. Bob’s house down today. He was our next door neighbor before Katrina. He and his wife were animal lovers and would even nurse squirrels back to health. I remember when he used to practice his golf swing on the lawn while she sat in the chair and watered her rose bushes. To the people outside of New Orleans, the fact that they are just tearing that house down in 2010 is reason number 433,533 why we still can’t let it go. It would be the good neighbor’s house that gets demolished. The neighbors that are a pain in the rear end probably have the strongest house on the block.

Senator Jim Bunning learned that after giving billions to all kinds of corporations it probably wasn’t a good job to take a stand against money meant for every day people. I’m sure some people thought he was being a maverick and it might have worked if his own voting record didn’t show he voted for all kinds of bills that weren’t paid for. Anyone that thinks unemployment is some handout that will put you on easy street obviously has never been on unemployment. I was on unemployment for 4 months. Since my salary was pretty good I got the maximum amount, a whopping 258 dollars a week. I was balling out of control with just enough money to pay my light bill. I kept thinking if I got the max at the amount I was making, what a person does if they were making twice what I was and had to drop all the way down to 258 dollars a week. When I was reading the comments after the story on Yahoo there was some lady talking about Americans need to stop whining about having tough times when her and husband survived four years on 1000 a month and all that jazz. I know that’s possible but don’t act like when you were living off 1000 a month you weren’t miserable. America is designed for broke people to be miserable because if we ever figured out how to be happy and broke we wouldn’t need to spend money and the economy would collapse. Why do you think people drive 2 hours from their suburb to the city in the morning for work when there are empty houses three blocks away from the job? They are trying not to live around all those miserable broke ass city folks. Trust me, none of the folks on unemployment are happy about it so go ahead and pay them before we have riots.

Just a few quick things before I end this……………

Just for the record, I believe there is a form of shadow government by way all of these different commissions and business groups that influence decisions in the city. I just don’t think they have anything to do with Mayor Nagin’s performance.

If enough Democratic senators sign on for the public option and the bill ends up getting killed I think I will be cool with that.

I like when the panhandlers at the stop light give you one of those little papers after a donation so the next time you pass by you can show it to their friends like a receipt.

If I only watch the Oscars when black actors are nominated does that make me prejudice?

The best thing on television is classic episodes of Soul Train on the Centric channel. They make me smile.

Did you ever notice there’s been no talk of cell phone companies having any financial trouble at all?


Get well Guru.