okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

I came across an interesting website that actually breaks down, by hourly wage, how much money it takes for an hourly worker to afford a two bedroom apartment.  Metropolitan areas are listed alphabetically beginning with yours truly, Akron, OH, where someone looking for a two bedroom apartment should be making $13 an hour.  Though these figures date back to 2004 it is interesting to note that the situation has not changed much over the years.

In order to interpret how much of an apartment you should be looking for keep the following in mind; you should be making 3 times as much per month as your rent costs or your annual salary should be 40 times your rent.  The latter figure is often used by realtors in the New York area to determine affordability, though 36 times your rent would be fine in most cities the New York real estate market is a bit different.  So in essence, someone making $13 an hour should only be spending $4 of that on rent, or their rent should be $693 per hour, which is consistent with what a decent apartment in a relatively safe neighborhood runs for in that town.  That sounds easy enough, but making $13 an hour in Akron, OH is going to require some education; you may get as far as $10 in a service industry job with a high school education.

If you can’t make the $13 easily enough, which means that you aren’t stressed out or in over your head with a job you are trying to wrap your mind around to get and keep that job, you have some other options.  Getting a roommate or staying at home with Mom and Dad.  A look at the same chart suggests that someone in New York brings in $19 an hour.  However, most New Yorkers would probably tell you that you are insane to attempt to live there on such a meager wage.  What would $19 an hour get you in New York?

A $1,013 a month apartment, which isn’t much at all.  Now of course you will find apartments in New York for that much, but would you want to live there?  You may consider staying in New Jersey for $1,000 a month, and commuting into the city.  That doesn’t sound very glamorous, but it isn’t as though New Jersey is suburbia either; I mean people talk about New Jersey as though you would be out somewhere with single family detached homes or something.  But is New Jersey really cheaper?  It depends, according to that chart, all of the cities in New Jersey that are listed are actually even more expensive than New York, with the exception of the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

The question then becomes, well how far is Camden to New York City?  Okay well it is an hour and a half away by automobile.  But perhaps if you were to chose any of the many cities in-between you could get somewhere.  It must be better than San Francisco, which requires a whopping $29 per hour so you can get a $1,546 apartment.  It sounds strict; most people who make $29 an hour will spend $20 of it on an apartment.  But a $3,200 apartment can get you into a lot of trouble.  First off that only leaves  $1,440 in your pocket, which seems like a lot but isn’t giving you a lot of room to save money to get out of an apartment into a house.

If you have a car payment there goes $400, plus $100 for insurance, and whatever you are paying in gas out the window.  That takes you down to $940 a month, then another $300 a month for utilities, and if you want cable television and internet another $100 a month, and you’re down to $540 a month.  After you buy your food, have a few nights out on the town and pick up some clothes you have nothing to your name; you may have $200 a month.  However, if you spent half as much on that apartment you would have an extra $1,600 in your pocket.  You’re probably saying that a $1,500 apartment is in a slum somewhere, even in a cheaper city like New York or Chicago in fact about the only place you would even consider attempting to get by with a $1,500 apartment is in Atlanta, and you are probably right.  But keep in mind that downtown is a money trap for most, and a tourist destination for others; chances are if you spend your money out in suburbia and focus on the essentials you won’t burn through as much.  The temptation to walk around the city and loose control, as opposed to having to drive into the city or take a few trains or buses to get into the city core, is going to change your thoughts about being as loose with your funds.

I have made, all of the aforementioned mistakes trying to keep up, and a few more I’m not willing to go into detail about.  The city is only as good as what you can afford, and there are thousands of young people trying to live in a major city that are skipping meals attempting to get by on cheap protein, and you don’t want to be part of that crowd.  The crowd that only has $10 for that day, and can’t afford to get a meal from the cafeteria if they want to (not that you should, the work cafeteria is usury, but just in case you wanted to splurge) and couldn’t if their life relied upon it.  You get that first job making $20 an hour and it is more than you have ever seen before and you think that it is a lot of money, it isn’t …

I have a long and sordid history with racism.  I have been called a nigger, been beat up for being Black, and because I am not your prototypical African-American, still find myself in positions where people feel comfortable enough with me to test the limits of their bigotry.  You will never be close enough to me or know me well enough to talk candidly about the fact that I am Black and your personal hangups about this.  I get a text from someone calling me a negro and a tweet asking if it was true what they say about Black people, and I didn’t respond to either incident very well.

So those are two less friends in cyberspace I have, one less person that is following me (and I was following them too).  I used to know when I was a nigger in Ohio, it was very plain and out in the open and people were at least honest enough with you to let you know where you stood.  People were open with their bigotry and racial indifference in Ohio.  Where I live at now it is politically incorrect and people try to befriend you and you find out in the worst way who they really are.  I can’t respect that, and you shouldn’t be able to live with yourself.

Things are differently now you have a lot of people who are confused and do not know who they truly are.  I like Radiohead, Thom Yorke, Calvin Klein, alternative rock hell I might even listen to Martina McBride if the mood hits me.  But I know that at the end of the day, I am Black, and I am still going to be there for you at the end of the day if you need for me to.  If you don’t, because you don’t know that you are Black, or you have issues with it, that is your own problem but you are still alright with me in my book.  I will accept you regardless of what your peers think of you.

This is always the way that I have lived because human beings need to be there for each other, despite and in spite of race.  If some don’t that is their own problem but it isn’t mine.  It is a beautiful thing when people of all races, all creeds, all nationalities, can find some common ground, at least it should be, to a racist, well perhaps not so much.  So I guess that I am disappointed more than anything, ashamed and disappointed of humanity; for what it is worth.  But racism is not going anywhere, is very alive and well, and will persist until the end of the time.  That is the way that it has always been, and the way that it will be when I have left this earth.  What you guys chose to do about it, is your own business …

I’m sick of hearing about Tiger Woods. He isn’t that much of a personality, and would otherwise be quite boring if it weren’t for what happened in his personal life recently.  The media seems obsessed with the fact that a quiet, gentile, African-American (or what exactly I’m not sure because Tiger belabored this point home on Oprah that he was not African-American, but something other than), upstanding individual would cheat on his wife.  Or is it the fact that his wife lost her marbles and let him have it, and that he had sense enough to get away from her (well that worked out really well didn’t it), oh okay, tried to get away from her and crashed his Escalade.  Or perhaps, it is the fact that he isn’t speaking about it publicly; whatever it is I don’t know.  Let’s look at the fact.

Okay first about him cheating on his wife with beautiful buxom blondes, and brunettes.  If anyone noticed Tiger is bringing in well over 100 million a year and is on his way to be considered a billionaire.  Tiger seems to be attracting women that are trying to climb up the ladder of social status into high society.  The like the attention, he delivers the goods, and got caught with his hand in the type of cookie jar that attracts women in millionaire dating clubs.  Is this really a big deal, are we really surprised, or should we just get a life?  Tiger has his endorsements, and others, like Kobe Bryant, or Chris Brown, lost theirs.  Really, last I remember what they did was a lot worse; Kobe was a social misfit that did not get along with his team, and a loner, so trouble was going to find him one way or the other because he wasn’t playing by the rules, lacked fraternal etiquette.  Chris Brown was a thug that was smart enough to come across as the man that everyone knows that Tiger is; but he messed that up when he punked Usher and other stars that were trying to make him feel bad about what he did to Rihanna.

Tiger on the other hand, is still the same individual he always was.  So he cheats on his wife, and she will probably go back to him; that is their business, I mean is she even working anymore unless she walks away with half of his money, and has a payday like Paul McCartney’s ex-wife, I don’t see why anyone would be surprised.  Listen, Tiger Woods has a life too, and just because he can get a piece of a beautiful woman you never could in your wildest dreams doesn’t give you the right to hate on him unequivocally.   Give the man a break, his old lady let him have it and embarrassed him beyond all means, and he has a few mistresses coming out of the closet; there is no reason to continue to add fuel to the fire …

I’ve noticed a few things with some of the album releases as of late.  Experimental records, such as those by Kanye West and Kid Cudi, not only get my attention, but actually force me to stop and pontificate.  The beats are startling, but the lyrical content can stand on its own, and the match seems to be a marriage made in heaven.  In the case of prototypical rap though, albums from Jay-Z, Nas, Game, and about the last five releases by Snoop; artists seem severely uninspired.  The latest album from 50 cent proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

We are in a point in the game where hip-hop has matured and moved on, and true listeners will follow true artists on tour and dig through the crates and download the mixtapes, but the artists worshiped in the media are not the real artists at all.  Artists that were hungry and made a lot of money have essentially, in spite of the commercial success “gone soft”, and relative unknowns that could have been great, Wale for example, fail because they did not push the envelope far enough.  Rap music has been around since at least the late seventies; when in the seventies is up to debate but for all intensive purposes, rap has been around since the seventies in one form or another.

Let’s look at where music was during the seventies; heavy metal was the status quo for rock music, rhythm and blues fought vigorous with soul music, which had been propped up since the sixties, for relevancy.  Rhythm and blues, which had a simpler and more straightforward sound during the Motown era, became more complex and melodic during the Philadelphia era.  Arguably the genre had no choice; the Philadelphia era was cool for mainstream MOR listeners, but the real excitement was with funk music.  While funk never enjoyed the mainstream success of seventies R&B even it had to deal with an even more aggressive approach to music when R&B merged with other forms of music and disco was born.

What happened then is exactly what is happening with hip-hop.  Those too young to understand it think that it always will be like this and those old enough to know better but cannot articulate it cannot describe the phenomenon well enough.  Hip-hop is in its disco phase.  It had been for a while now, but the fact that the cheap and shameless production techniques to techno music (the 90s equivalent of disco) is now being brought into hip-hop.  The old tactics of hip-hop production are dead on arrival, and the fact that militarized, or dance/techno/emo techniques are being brought into hip-hop suggests that the white flag has been waved.

Look at it this way, every genre of music comes around to a disco like phase.  It happened with Jazz music in the 90s when artists like Kenny G were hot, and that genre had peaked perhaps somewhere in the 40s or 50s.  Sweet, sugary, hypnotizing, spell-like sounds to deaden your intellect.  Hip-hop was unusually creative when artists were attempting to push the envelope with jazz samples.  The honest truth was that other samples were used before those production techniques became commonplace but artists were getting sued left and right and could not afford to pay off the artists they borrowed from for the usage of their material.  Jazz music may have just been cheaper to use; yet as innovative as hip-hop was, it never came across as a cop out and actually did a lot to pique the interest of a whole new generation to vintage jazz.

However samples gave way to cheap drum machines when the independent era of hip-hop was ushered in.  A newer, though arguably, cheaper sound was ushered in.  Then hip-hop changed once again when a short lived sound came into existence brought about through producers from Miami.  That latest about two years, and now we are in an age dominated by Atlanta music producers, and of course, Kanye West.  In the beginning, around the mid nineties, beats were very complex (arguably more so than they were when samples were layered), but then with each new phase, occurring every two to three years, beats were “dumbed down” even further.

One thing I will agree with Jay-Z about is auto-tune.  I doubt it is going anywhere soon, but the formula is extremely limited in scope with in-perceivable variations on notes and chords.  In fact, for all intensive purposes it is about as simple as rap music has ever been.  Some fretted that this would happen when snap music was popular, but snap didn’t last and died in around two years.  There is a difference between what artists are doing now and what Schooly D and Run DMC did back in the day, or even Audio Two.  The beats were not more complex back then, and the rhymes were deceptively simple, but the wordplay was about 20 times stronger and infinitely “more memorable” than anything you hear now.

It still seemed new.  That is the problem when you have artists like Jay-Z and 50 Cent push the envelope on beats but water down the lyrics to the point where Treach from Naughty By Nature sounds forward thinking.  Arguably, Naughty By Nature had a commercialized version of the grimy beats that dominated the New York style at that time, but you could loose yourself in the lyrics.  That is not the case with any of the mainstream albums that have been put out this year.  The media killed hipster rap, and arguably, a lot of it was a rediscovery of eighties lyrical inspiration with wordplay from this millennium.  The beats sounded as though the producers from that era were working the boards right now, twenty years later.  The idea of the eighties was a huge part of the appeal, but the reality of how dated the songs sound is what made it difficult to take it seriously.

We need someone to come out of the shadows, literally out of nowhere, and take hip-hop in a new direction.  None of the current mainstream artists are going to be able to do this because none of them can unlearn the lyrical tactics that they have mastered and none of them are willing to create a new playbook.  Older artists want to posit the idea of what hip-hop used to be in the nineties, and quite honestly, what hip-hop was in the past is not going to work for the future.  I heard Rakim’s new album and was severely disappointed; he sounds like an eighties rapper that has not evolved that is attempting to hold on twenty years later.  Jay-Z and Nas sound like nineties rappers that are trying to hold on; 50 Cent and Game sound like rappers from the first decade of the new millennium trying to hold on.

Hip-hop has to be destroyed and rebuilt, re-engineered, but not re-tweaked or merely redesigned, as it has been, to move forward.  No gimmicks, no producers with their hangups and prejudices and none of what we have become accustomed to and are jaded in deference to.  Just some new s* that is completely different, that no one is going to expect, that no one would ever predict.  That is why I listen to hip-hop, for some new s* that no one else is going to do.  Instead I see techno, house, and every other European, Asian, and African form of dance music creeping into hip-hop, and I am disturbed by it.  This is something that hip-hop cannot buy, that has to come from what used to be the heart and soul of the music.  Something that you cannot talk about how much money you have to make interesting; something special that you have, that no one else can acquire …

This is great fun, and in the interests of good taste, you should be able to read this article at work.  Okay perhaps what is fun is great for one person, but another person has to deal with a lot of shame and guilt after the experience.  I think you know where I am heading with this.  But I wonder, or perhaps I digress, because other addictions deal with someone who is supplying something to some other person who is a consumer and is in essence breaking the law.  With this addiction, the person themselves is that product, that addictive substance, to that other individual, and there may or may not be anything lawless about the exchange.  In fact, because we do not take this seriously, we see no harm in enabling individuals that more or less, have a serious problem, and clearly need to experience some rejection in order to help themselves.

Then why do we continue to do this “thing” with them then?  On a certain level, it makes us feel good about ourselves as well.  Unlike other addictions, where the person is annoying to be around once that high has worn off, with this people are fun to be with as long as they are in the depths of their problem.  This is where the issues begin.  Like take for example certain visual materials that are supposed to get my in the mood.  As long as my needs are being taken care of elsewhere, I have no use for those materials.  Sure I may try to take a glance occasionally, but I just cannot get into it.  On the other hand, if I am lacking, that material seems really good and I cannot consume enough of it.

By now I am sure that we have all heard of what happened to Eric Benet, which so many of us men were upset with when his infidelity destroyed his relationship with who many still believe to be the most beautiful woman in the world.  He said that he had an addiction, and I tend to believe him.  Even though you can have the most beautiful woman in the world, and she can be extremely boring and you may start to look elsewhere most men would just put up with it because they feel that you are the most beautiful woman in the world.  This guy, no, he has to get caught and suffer the embarrassment of having cheated on the most beautiful woman in the world.  People want to know what he was thinking, I know exactly what he was thinking.  What everyone else who gets caught up in the rush of infidelity does; he was not thinking clearly enough.

If anything whatever led up to the decisions he made conveniently threw out the risk of the embarrassment he was about to suffer when the world learned of his “problem”.  See in our society, once an addict, always an addict, and it could have been 20 years ago people are going to experience some doubt because they knew that you could not control yourself before.  Technically, you should not amuse an addict in any way, shape, or form, but if you are lonely yourself you are willing to take that risk of getting hurt.  You may have even lied to yourself and felt that in spite of their issues you would even get closer to them because of your acceptance of the issues that they are going through.  Then you get your feelings hurt all over again, because it does not seem to have been as personal of a decision to them as it was for you to have went there with them. 

This addiction comes in many shapes and forms.  Some wait until well within a relationship, and then try to introduce other people into it in hopes that you can derive as much satisfaction from the experiences as they can.  You say that you do not want to be part of such tomfoolery, and so they go out behind your back and find another third party to play this game with.  They tell you that they have a thing for their own gender, and you say that you aren’t interested and to keep that to themselves, and that they do.  The next thing you know you have ended up with HIV or AIDS.

If you meet someone and they are brave enough and have confided in you to the point of telling you of this problem what do you do then?  The right thing would be to offer yourself as a friend, but leave it at that and move on.  However most of us would rather just use and exploit someone in that position for our own amusement, only to live with our own conscious to deal with what happened when things did not work out.  It is a vulnerable position to be in, but someone has to put it out there like a disclaimer or a warning of what lies ahead.  How many of us are really mature enough to understand this and be of some help?

You can call it a joke or you can take it seriously, but from my understanding, all of the same physical traits that are underlying symptoms for other addictions exist for this addiction.  Theoretically, there is an infinite supply of this thing to be addicted to, though this addict is quick to leave a full reservoir in search of greener pastures long before they ever reach a point where replenishment can become an issue.  This addict has a hard enough time keeping his lies straight, and is certain to anger the wrong person that is not willing to let go of what they did to them, which can bring about their own demise prematurely.  It is an addiction that one can easily fall into, and one that can claim you as a victim under the right circumstances.  One that I would never want to have the pleasure of dealing with …

I am fascinated by human beings.  That sounds weird because most nerds are fascinated with things, thoughts, concepts, ideas, but for me the fascination is with human beings.  As a child I had my own issues with people that started at home with my old man.  I was largely rejected for being different yet curiously, never gave up on humanity, though I may have myself at times.  The best way to go about life is to accept people for who they are, recognize that no one is perfect and that people will fail you, not because they want to, but because they are human and can’t help but to do so.

The way that I see it, men should be men and take up their responsibility for the relationships that they get themselves into.  But life is life; often the relationships that we want to get into are with people that do not reciprocate our interest in them.  At the end of the day, it is the same girl, just different women with different faces, that is doing the rejecting.  You two can be friends, and that is great, but you can never really get past it to be the one who she really looks forward to being with.

You want someone who was interested in you early on, not someone that you were friends with for like three years who has ran out of options or just bored or curious in what you have to offer.  You want someone that you could be good friends with, but that did not tell you about their previous relationships or go into intimate detail about those situations.  You need to know that you are making some type of impact on this individual, that you could be an asset, that you are more than just someone who is trying to get with them.  Everyone is trying to get with them, men, women, doesn’t matter, so you need to stand out from the rest somehow.

A huge mistake men make is in going after women that love the attention.  Everyone loves the attention, but sometimes you can get close to someone because you are giving them more attention than everyone else and you are too naive to realize why nobody else is.  I’m talking about women that don’t have any friends themselves, while you are neglecting yours to be with this girl, women of which you do not have a clear balance of your needs or a clear perspective on why you even want to be with her.  She pays attention to you and listens to you, and you listen to her, and that is essentially about all that is ever going to be.

Everything is fine until you try to lead and take it somewhere.  Another interesting phenomenon is when we give up on our Black women and think that the grass is greener elsewhere.  Just because it looks different does not mean that it is different; so what happens later on down the line when that true person comes out?  Are you interested in their hangups, with men of their own race, with what they perceived you as being before they got to know who you truly were?  Are you ready to address your own issues going into this type of a situation?

You may have noticed that I attempted to come at this from the point of view of a lot of women looking in at the situation from the outside.  Because it is not always a matter of giving up, but it is a decision that can bring you to a crossroads.  One thing I have learned is that you aren’t letting go of anything; friends will be friends and for everyone that is against you in your decisions to look outside of the box you will find someone else that understands completely.  There are a lot of stereotypes being perpetrated on the Internet about people in interracial relationships.  As always, there is grain of truth, but it doesn’t apply to everyone.

No I am not going to say anything to a Black woman that is out there as well.  That is completely ridiculous, I am married have been for a while plus I was doing the same thing myself back in the day, and is it any of my business?  If anything confrontation is only going to push it underground or create an even bigger problem in her mind with other Black men, so why even bother.

I’m not so sure if anyone just gives up; people say that they do, but I am more inclined to believe that people just want to take a break and are just infatuated with the attention that they are getting from other races.  Human behavior suggests that people will naturally gravitate in the direction where they receive the most attention, and the highest worship and adoration.  This is how people are programmed to desire who they desire to begin with.

Most people may have started out wanting or desiring a certain physical or psychological trait in other human beings early on in life, just to have those ideas challenged.  If they got what they wanted, then they continue to pursue the same line of reasoning.  If they did not get what they wanted, then they tried something else.  If they didn’t get anything, they may begin to explore ways in which they can make themselves a better person.  Some of these ways are superficial and external, like buying expensive clothes or working on loosing weight.

On the other hand, if they get everything they want they may ultimately end up finding it difficult to make a choice or difficult to stay faithful once they do decide to be in a long term relationship with someone.  Now you can make choices for yourself and aggressively go after people and win them over, and a lot of people do this.  You can also put about a minimal amount of effort because people naturally gravitate towards you.

The irony is that what appears to be a minimal amount of effort from where I am sitting could actually have been years of studying human behavior and having learned the hard way on your part.  Everyone likes to flirt; if you can’t get a pretty girl to smile at you or talk to you then there is something that you are doing wrong.  Chances are you may come off as being too intense, no one wants that pressure or anxiety of having to live up to such expectations.  You might have also been weird or difficult to read; that works for one person that wants something mysterious but for someone that does not like change that is not going to work.

Men like to say that certain types of women are high maintenance.  I beg to differ, if you aren’t maintaining her, someone else is, plus, there could be a real chance that you simply have not arrived at a challenging point in your relationship.  Women aren’t any different than we are, there could be a clear reason why you do not feel the pressure to maintain, and that may not necessarily be a good thing at the end of the day.  If you aren’t trusted with any responsibility, you may not be as important as you think that you are.

People that do not maintain anything and for the most part, do not have any responsibility, can be at a standstill in their development without even realizing it.  This is nothing to say negatively about an independent woman, but chances are, if I have a limited role that I am very good at and have no need for anything else and am never asked to do anything else I cannot in good conscious expect for this arrangement to last forever.  This is where certain relationships are often too good to be true.

This is also where you need to determine your level of involvement.  Because if you say that you are okay listening to the problems and giving advice, then perhaps that is all that you will ever do.  I mean if you really want someone then how long are you going to allow yourself to remain at that level?  It could be physically or psychologically, if you start to get into her a bit and realize that you want more you are better off taking that chance at loosing it all than remaining complacent with where you are at.  You are better off to move on if there is no reciprocation.

Sexual circumstances that worked in the beginning of the relationship are not going to work a year from now.  You may even find yourself going back to that place where you were five years ago.  The bottom line is that there is always a shift, a change in where this is going.  The worst thing you can do, is fall into the trap of getting into something with someone else because it sounds better than what you are already doing.  People will say anything to get that attention, and then will have you in their hands like putty.  Could you try a little bit harder to get back into that place with this strange individual?  Then before you know it one is on a series of declining returns and you could have just tried harder at home.

What is the worst thing that can happen but for someone to say no?  Do something different; find a place to go to even if it is a watchtower somewhere.  Well okay the chances of your finding a watchtower are rare, but you get the point.   Relationships and interactions with other human beings is one of the most unpredictable and intriguing explorations you will ever take in life.  Don’t take it too personally, like no one else can have you I will kill you type of personal, because that defeats the purpose.  At the same time taking it slow and enjoying the ride is often as good as it gets, and typically costs you far less then when you try to rush things and force something to happen that ultimately, never will with this person …

When I talk about being an individual, I am not talking about the rhetoric of going against Christianity, organized religion, or subscribing to conspiracy theories.  This is the type of rhetoric that so called “leaders” or wanna be “independent thinkers” will try to sell you onto.  Often, in following conspiracy theories and failing to do your own homework, you are just as much of a follower as those that feed into the rhetoric being propagated through the mainstream media.  One must study for themselves and come to their own conclusions instead of blindly following another man, regardless of how seductive that man’s arguments may be and believe me, there are some very convincing and seductive arguments out there in this day and age.

Individuals get you to follow them through manipulating your emotions, which can then control your thoughts and cause you to buy into something out of fear.  Let’s say your weakness is a penchant for fashion, say you are what they call a shopaholic.  Behind the craziness is an adrenaline rush that comes from handling a new item (or just something different that is new to you), looking better than everyone else in the room, and a fear of having to do without.  The worst fear of a shopaholic or someone that is fashion obsessed is that they will have to go without one day and be rejected by society as some mythical outcast.

It never happens.  Instead they never go without because their mind continues to find creative ways to get more with less.  That fear has inspired teenagers to kill each other for a pair of Jordans or adolescents to make fun of each other and denigrate each other to make themselves feel better and to take the heat off of their own inadequacies.  You can literally feel like you are completely naked going out in a “pedestrian” manner, it is truly sickening.

Everyone talks about leadership but in reality this often means playing on each others fears and desires and rarely doing anything constructive to help anyone out.  You may come up to me and say that you are going to college, and I could feed you a line of bull talking about my own experiences with college and that you are just being trained to be a good employee and never be rich.  Not that it is not true, but it is not necessarily relevant to your objectives for going to school.

If you want stability there is no better way to do so in this environment than by educating yourself.  Particularly considering that a college degree can help you make more than $15 an hour.  You may not even want to be rich, but I brought it up to convince you to think about it and put it in perspective with your goals.  See that is what people that like to act like they are leaders do; act as if they are true individuals and have all of the answers.  Well if they have the answers why can’t they help you to get to their level?

In fact, if you have all of the answers it shouldn’t concern you if I were to get to your level or not because clearly, with your answers, you can always get further than I have.  It’s like if you ask me about a business opportunity that has presented itself to you and I tell you not to spend any money.  Well you never asked me for any money; am I upset because you have the money to spend on it and my own affairs are not in order, what am I really saying?

These are the same clowns in the African-American community that like to talk trash about the opposite sex that are coming completely out of nowhere with their rhetoric.  No one had ever asked them what their opinions on the opposite sex are, but they engage in this psychological warfare to create division and find a way to enrich their own coffers and stay relevant.  Your entire career is built off of talking about the opposite sex; what experience do you have, how well are your own relationships before you tell me anything about something you have obviously failed at.

This is how things go in our community; come out of nowhere with some rhetoric to differentiate yourself from everyone else.  If you’re really good at perhaps you can make a nice living, that is just the way that it is.  Those who didn’t make it have a million excuses as to why this never happened.  We learn this as a child, if you can’t hold your own people will steal your lunch, figuratively and realistically, so you must find a way to stand out.

Then we tell that lie that we do not need our institutions anymore, that they are all irrelevant and we can just assimilate into the mainstream.  Ironic considering that everyone else still has their institutions intact, and aren’t considering giving those up any time soon.  No, people want you to give up your institutions, practices, and culture, so they can create confusion and divide you and pit you against each other.  One can only take a look at what happened to the few institutions that we did have that were sold out to larger, mainstream corporations to see what happens.

I don’t expect anyone to be an individual in adolescence, though that is a good place to start. It is becoming harder and harder to stand out and be your own person.  You have the onslaught of the media, which has always been there, but has gone to new lows with the proliferation of the Internet.  It amuses me to see companies that have clearly, hired apologists in the way of writers that initially appeared disconnected from any corporate interests take to social networking sites or writing sites creating articles to further their agenda.  They fail as copywriters, but they are good enough to spread the rhetoric of the organization in blogs or on Facebook and Twitter.

Have you ever had someone speak out against the mainstream on one hand just to push someone else that is just as much a part of that mainstream on the other hand?  The media plays this game with us everyday, comparing apples to oranges when they are part of the same mediocrity.  One just appears to be a little enlightened, but at the end of the day, both are out to make as much money as possible.

There are perilous times; a lot of you talk a good game, but if push came to shove, and everything was under a single umbrella, as pundits often say that day is going to come, you would just fall into line with everyone else.  If you can’t stand on your own two feet now and need acceptance, what makes you think that you ever would in the future?

Listen please stop talking about skinny jeans, or lumberjack shirts, Pendleton, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Vans, or any other nuances from the ivory towers of fashion they would like the masses to follow.  Then they try to make it seem as though this was the idea of the people and that these looks came from the streets, such a sad myth indeed.  See, people are so leery of the large corporations and so quick to gravitate towards what they think are the streets they would rather accept some Hollywood idealized myth of what the streets are like that they can conveniently enjoy in their suburban homes.  Men are so focused on what is “gay” they are failing to recognize their own femininity; it is sickening.  Men preoccupied with ideas about femininity are more feminine than men that are comfortable in their own skin and free to wear anything this is how it really is and always will be.

If you wonder why I am this way part of it is because I live in a region dominated by Macy’s and WalMart where the majority of the jobs are with the military.  Small businesses are trampled and walked over by consumers looking for stuff that is not all that great.  Coming from a town that had their own local department store where large corporate entries like the aforementioned were far and few between it interests me.  You ever notice how they talk about the fact that Detroit does not have a national grocery store in the city limits as a bad thing?  That may have went over a lot of people’s heads, but cities like New York are not reliant upon national grocery stores either.  In fact if you really want to experience New York, you need to appreciate it for what it is worth, as opposed to looking for larger versions of what you have at home.

American cities and towns used to be known for that individuality that New York once stood for.  That stands in the face of business expansion, which is why corporations like WalMart fight as hard as they do to open stores in cities like New York or Chicago.  They would like nothing more, than to replace the local shopping scene with their homogenized scene, strip the place of its culture and take over.  The stores should remain at the edge of town in suburbia, and should not be allowed in the city core at all.

When you are assaulted with the same five songs on the radio all day, and the same mindless television shows on the networks and cable, what else are you going to do but to follow in the path of everyone else?  When people see you doing your own thing, and I do mean see you, not hear you talking about it, and you have your stuff together they will come to you on their own to try to figure out what it is that you are doing.

It would be easy to sit here and try to encourage you to buy this or sell you onto the latest “that”.  Clearly, there is a lot of money in doing so, and a lot of writers are out there trying to find more subtle and inconspicuous ways of doing so. A lot of us are in the habit of making people feel good; we can’t do so in face to face situations because we’re shy but we can do so with the words we write.  Test out the theories that people come to you with, ask yourself if people are really looking out for your best interests and realize that no one can ever see it exactly the way that you do.  No one is supposed to understand and believe in your dreams the way that you do …

You know that it was going to come to this. Pundits who had long compared Tyler Perry’s films to those of Spike Lee insisting that the only skills Perry had mastered were those of coonery and buffoonery finally get to hear Perry respond to Spike Lee’s own comments about the matter on 60 Minutes.  Perry is upset and ticked off because he feels that there are those in the community that do not want to know that those characters exist.  On the contrary; Spike Lee has shown his own characters from the ghettos of the Northeast, as opposed to those in Atlanta, that have engaged in a more sophisticated form of coonery and buffoonery that Tyler Perry does not want to portray, and conveniently hides that fact.

Many of the characters from Spike Lee’s films were ignorant and at best, sophisticated buffoons.  The only difference is that Spike Lee shows up in his films, or has an actor like Denzel Washington become the protagonist and work on his behalf, and bring some perspective and resolution to the buffoonery in the film.  That is the only thing that seperates Spike’s films from thsoe of Tyler Perry.  In essence two directors are fighting against each other but are in essense the pot calling the kettle Black, because they both are shortsighted and fall short of the mark.  Spike Lee’s films taught us about racism, first Black against White, and then later on, Whites against other Whites.  Tyler Perry’s films teach us about God, though in strange and controversial ways because he alternates back and forth from dressing up like a woman and appearing as himself.

Both directors engage in what are essentially, predictable and monolithic filmmaking.  Spike Lee in essence denigrated Tyler Perry and said that his tactics date back to Amos and Andy.  However you have to ask the same reliable and predicatable questions about Spike’s motives though.  First off why now, Tyler has been doing this schtick, rhetoric, tomfoolery, whatever for a while now, why hate on the man at the top of his career?  If Tyler Perry does not evolve he will fall back into irrelevance just like Spike Lee did five years ago.  The second question I would have to ask is that considering that Spike Lee went to school and was in essence the Kanye West of his generation, why would he expect anything different from Tyler Perry to begin with?  This is like Kanye West hating on Young Jeezy, it just does not make any sense.

I am not saying that Tyler Perry’s films are right; clearly he needs to evolve and embark on more ambitious efforts.  However, he has attempted the latter and no one has come out to support him.  So Spike Lee should talk to those other 30 or so Black filmmakers that are bringing the intellectual heat that he conveniently avoids, open up a television studio and get his own work on cable I mean even Ice Cube tried his hand at doing so and put his money where his mouth is.  Spike Lee should also put out something that isn’t freaky and sexually deviant as he has done in the past and show African-American women in a positive light as well …