4/21/04 5:46 AM: The following is a random series of thoughts I've had over the last day or so, some of which have been germinating in my brain for some time. It may even break into song. Consider yourself warned.

There's a commercial on TV, where three Black guys are sitting on a couch, eating chicken and watching the game. I got no beef with that. I've done that at least twice in the last month. However, this appears to be happening at a home one of the guys shares with his girl. She walks in, and asks what are they doing? "Eating Kitchen Fresh Chicken," one of 'em says. KFC, for reasons I can't begin to fathom, believes that they can rebrand themselves as KFC after generations of people remembering Colonel Sanders associated with "Kentucky Fried Chicken." That was before the company was owned by Pepsi, who also owns Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Anyway, that's all unimportant to my real point.

The sister, a skinny little thing with a Toni Braxton haircut (and I loathe Toni Braxton for similar reasons, come to think of it) looks around to see her mother puttering around in the kitchen, and then starts reading the guys the riot act. "I leave for two hours, and y'all got my momma in here cooking for you? Got her slaving over a hot stove making you guys ..." Then mom walks out with the bucket, she realizes they got take out and she's overreacted like a jackass, and everybody laughs at her.

My beef is that her first instinct was to assume the worst of a man she'd clearly decided to live with. I get that. I've always gotten that from Black females. Instead of asking me, they make an assumption (almost always based on incomplete or bad intel) and attack me, only to later realize that they're wrong. My mother made an art of this. Most fun of all, in my experience females are really pretty crappy at making up. Reverse the situation, and have a guy come in yelling. He'd be making up to her for weeks, dreaming up creative methods for her anger to calm down to an everyday simmer. A sister may apologize. Maybe. If she does something, she'll cook him something, or show up naked one time, and consider it a done deal. It's sad, really. More on that in a bit.

Anyhoo, so there's another commercial (I stayed home ... uh, three nights in the last four days, so I've watched a bunch of TV) where a Monopoly board comes out, saying that Indian tribes have to pay their "fair share" during California's budget crisis, a quarter of their eight billion dollar annual revenues. This infutriated me for a variety of reasons.

First and most egregious of all, wasn't, oh, I dunno, getting freaking decimated and shoved on to crappy little parcels of land payment enough? The fact that there is a California means that scores of tribes were put to the sword (or musket, or disease-ridden blanket, whatever). The nerve of these (mostly) white people to say, "Yeah, we know we killed a lot of you and stole your land, but now you gotta pay up for messes we made too." Oooooh!

Then I go look around the web (a brother with a Google search can get into all kinds of mess) and found a quote from this site which says, "As government operations, tribal gaming revenues are not taxed by other governments. However, revenues from tribal government casinos are essentially taxed at a rate of 100 percent, with all revenues providing for the welfare of tribal members. n addition, some 41,200 employees working at tribal gaming facilities pay more than $280 million a year in federal income and payroll taxes. Ninety percent of tribal government workers in California are non-Indians. Only enrolled tribal members living and working on their own reservations are exempt from paying state payroll taxes. Indians living off the reservation pay the same property, sales and other taxes that all Californians do. 'California state government does not pay taxes. Its citizens do,' said CNIGA Executive Director Jacob Coin. 'Indian governments also do not pay taxes. Indians do.'"

Once I got over my fury that these people have to pay income taxes (that's really, really cold, white folk, and y'all know it), I get the picture. The state (as in "nation state," California is a republic as well) is shaking down a smaller, poorly armed sovreign nation for what amounts to tribute. Bigger guns equal making the rules. I understand that well enough. I just would prefer people to not couch it in terms like "fair share." If you wanna call a spade a space, call imperialist extortion what it is as well.

In other news, Dwight Trible (pictured to the left here) will be in concert, celebrating the release of his new CD Living Water. If you haven't heard Dwight Trible ... well, you're missing a lot. His voice is a miracle. He could easily be the finest vocalist I've ever heard. Anyway, he'll be at the World Stage (and I'll be forgetting about the $800 they screwed me out of on a web design contract) this Friday at 9:30. Sadly that means I'll miss Cameo at the Hollywood Park opening, but oh well. Anyway, after the month I've had, hearing Dwight sing will be like a healing for me.

Dwight used to throw the most amazing Kwanzaa parties every New Year's Eve, opening up his home to the Afrocentric artistic community and having a blast. Alas, Dwight and his wife broke up late last year (we ran into each other at Simply Wholesome, and he asked, "How's the family and homestead?" I replied, "I'm not really in the family way anymore, brother." He said, "yeah, me too." It got awkward after that, especially since he sang at my wedding), and she got the house, so those are done for. It was a relatively quiet New Year's for the Leimert Park crowd.

Time for a quote from a rap song! Xzibit in "Handle Your Business."

... I was raised to love Blacks but sometimes
Black folk wanna sweat you harder than the one time
never participate, dumb deaf and blind sh*t
plus I got my little man so daily I'm reminded
the ride only gets rougher,
but I'll be damned if me and my n****s suffer
smother this motherf**ker with the raw sh*t i'm blessed with
lookin' at the world burn for the young and the desperate
you showed heart but got cardiac arrested
more than a n**** with an image and a press kit ...

So I stayed home today. I was supposed to go to Santa Monica and get my oil changed, and was all set to endure the shock of my service writer for the last four years, Chris Hines. "He doesn't work here anymore," the service department told me when I called to see how long the wait would be. I was stunned. Change is bad. Mercury is retrograde. I took it as an omen and stayed at home.

I was unable to really relax, however, because every twenty minutes or so, two portly motorcycle cops would BRAWK BRAWK their horns and pull some poor bastard over. The northbound hill on La Brea has a good angle of decline and a blind corner, plus very few impediments to speed. It's a favorite speed trap. I know better, but lots of people don't. So all afternoon, BRAWK BRAWK, BRAWK BRAWK, BRAWK BRAWK. It was driving me even crazier than normal. Plus, as we all know, me and law enforcement professionals are not getting along well this week ...

Around five (after the tenth BRAWK BRAWK, it's really bad on Tuesdays) I decided I was gonna walk to the Ralph's a block away and buy some frozen fried chicken. I had no food in the house, and eating frozen fried chicken is an alarmingly large part of my diet. So I walk down, and I see these two chubby bastards (really, they were both maybe six foot three and easily 250 pounds, round at all the edges. On foot, they couldn't catch their breath let alone somebody else), one on each eastern corner of Coliseum and La Brea, ticketing jersey-clad young people with poor pattern recognition. I wanted to choke them -- many afternoon sleep sessions have been disrupted by that horn. I debated getting some posterboard and a big marker, walking up the hill and posting signs -- "SPEED TRAP AHEAD, PLEASE SLOW DOWN OR THEY'LL TICKET YOU." Probably cause more wrecks than stop these morons. Ah well.

So I go to the store, and I've got my iPod on, and I'm quietly singing "The Scientist" to myself (it's been haunting me for days now, the interplay of percussion and piano is simply splendid) ...

... I was just guessing
At numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart

Tell me you love me
Come back and haunt me
Oh and I rush to the start

Running in circles
Chasing our tails
Coming back as we are

Nobody said it was easy
Oh it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard

I'm going back to the start ...

... and wandering amongst the aisles, when I notice this sister looking at me. She's attractive, I suppose. Straightened hair. Kind of a Saved By The Bell late-seasons Lark Voorhies face. Nice flat tummy, curves in the right places. She's wearing a pink belt with the words "bad girl" spelled out across the back side of her waist (which led me to think she was either dangerously young or still clinging to youth). I smiled at her as she looked at cheeses in the back of the store, and head back to the frozen food aisle to see if I can find anything else worth buying (I'm trying to cut back on spending for a variety of reasons). So I'm there, reading the funniest package I've seen in a while for some BBQ veggie burgers, and she strolls down the frozen food aisle behind me, kind of slowly, not really looking at the stuff in the cases.

"Does she want me to talk to her?" I wondered suddenly.

I shrugged. I'm not really interested, despite the fact it'd be a good chance to practice my jump shot. I get into the express line (all I have is the chicken) and she (with a huge cart overloaded with all kinds of stuff) gets in the line next to it. Remember, I have the iPod on, not loud but you know. I started to notice that she'd angled her body sort of towards me, like she's open to say something. She looked right at me, and I smiled and nodded. She said nothing, and neither did I. So I go through the line, and she's not too far off, and some do-ragged guy starts talking to her. I can hear through the music that she's politey brushing him off. I pay for my food and walk out.

Outside the store, I stop and think about waiting to talk to her. Offer her help with the groceries, maybe, or just be honest and say I don't really know how to approach strange women in the store. But I thought about it and decided not to, for a wide variety of reasons. First of all, she was cute, but she wasn't that cute, to the point where I'd be fiending for her. Second, I'm not exactly prime dating material with a messed up car that can't even let her in the passenger side. Third, there's not really a shortage of "kind of cute" girls in LA with no ring on their finger, whereas there does appear to be a shortage of educated, fun, romantic, smart, affectionate, not-gay, not-imprisioned, not-married, not-balding, brothers with no kids. I had the headphones off when she got into line and when she walked down the frozen foods aisle. I gotta be the hunter all the time? Fourth, I'm not exactly hungry for female attention, I'm fairly pleased with what I'm doing right now. So why go to all the work, when I was hungry, and my chicken was in hand, and I had a newspaper and a column to do back at home?

My brother Inpu would say I talk myself out of more sisters than I talk to, but I prefer to think of it as maximizing profits.

So that brings me back to TV. Every week I tape The Bernie Mac Show and his televised wife Wanda is like an ad for brothers not to get married. She's smart, dangerously fine, dresses well and makes good money. But she also spends like a mad bastard, is insanely lazy when it comes to actual wife and/or parenting issues, and often leaves Bernie in the lurch dealing with emergencies. Not a real team player. Now, the writer in me knows they do it because Bernie is funnier than the actress Kellita Smith (who I'd punch nuns to sleep with, if only for one night, I saw her in person once and she is indeed breathtaking), but I see it from the perspective of a guy who got stuck with a lot of those types of emergencies (even some of the ones with kids, mostly girls' nieces and nephews) through my relationship history.

It's no better for women. Raymond? Homer Simpson? Hal on Malcolm in the Middle? Aside from the clear joy I can tell many of them derive from penises (penisi?), I have no idea why women put up with men at all. It's like everything on TV is an ad to not get into a relationship with anybody. Maybe part of that is me dealing with this time of my life, but other people have said the same. "You just kind of get used to a certain level of suffering and remember that you at least can sleep next to somebody warm," a brother told me at the comic book store. I shuddered. I've been that brand of unhappy, numerous times, now I think about it. I never wanna do that again. As fine as Kellita Smith is, I wouldn't put up with her for a week, let alone the years it would take to be married to her character's triflin' ass. Yowza.

Confession time: since I was in my teens, I've had recurring dreams about a kind of "dream girl." Same personality, same identity, even though she never had a name I could figure, and she rarely looks the same (these days she looks a lot like Merrin Dungey, who used to be Sydney's Black roommate on Alias). These days she's morphed into a busy sister with a normal job who enjoys middle of the night conversations with me whenever I come to sleep and who asks virtually nothing more of me than to enjoy the time we actually are together. I even figured out how to have kids with such a person -- I stay up long enough for the two people to get 'em off to school, I sleep until time to go get 'em. Kids go down at 9, kick it with her until 11ish, work until morning It seems logical to me. I'm sure my married friends and friends with kids would mock me ruthlessly for my naive delusions. Still ... I still have picket fence dreams, to borrow a page from my dawg Mike Datcher, I just don't have any belief they can come true.

Most sisters, however, would want me to be up in the daytime for dumb reasons, shmucking around furniture stores and visiting relatives they don't even like. I'd rather sleep. I'm honest about that now. I'm lonely a lot, but to be honest with you, I'm happy a lot too. Happy easily outweighs lonely, especially when you factor in how much time I'm alseep.

I skipped class tonight (Tuesday), stayed home and watched two hours of 24 on tape (holy crap!) and did my work. I was told via email that everybody would think I took the day off for "4/20," which is allegedly like a holiday for people who smoke weed. I do not smoke weed. Nor drink. My addictions are white sugar and Black women, and honestly I've been cutting both back to just the weekends (funny symmetry there). So I didn't go in and sing ... what is it ... "Get Me To The Church On Time" (which is a funny choice for a variety of reasons). I really have enjoyed spending more time at home, to be honest. I like my apartment a great deal, and despite the fact that it can get lonely, it's a soothing place.

Putting together my newspaper every week is, I've noted, a lot like playing Tetris. I get the run sheet, put the ads in, and then have to make the photos and text fit in the spaces that remain. I can do things Tetris can't -- extend the length of text pieces, for instance. It's still very similar. I chuckle about that once in a while.

Lessee, what else ... I've tried to start this month's chapter of The Crown three times in the last week and never gotten it done. I've got the whole story outlined, I just have to write it. I've been waylaid by karaoke and anger and sleep and indifference. Argh.

Speaking of things I procrastinated, on, I really intended to do The Smackdown Awards for comics again this year (done in 2002 and 2001), but the grind of gathering the info, making up the jokes, getting the images edited, and so on ... it just never seemed worth the time. To be honest, more and more doesn't seem worth the time. I could be clinically depressed, or becoming more of a nihilist, or maybe I just don't give a crap. I don't know, and really can't be bothered to find out, and I'm okay with that (which, really, probably crosses out clinical depression). Oh well. Nobody seems to have noticed, to be honest, despite some regular "fans" who read my work. I just get my jabs in at comics through the reviews, now at UGO (somewhere ...).

My iPod has been popping up "Sophisticated B*tch" by Public Enemy a lot recently. I wonder why. Never "I Told Y'all" by Petey Pablo. Rarely "Purple Stuff" by Big Moe or "Dark Sun Riders." Mmm.

Speaking of, I miss GarageBand. Another casualty of my lack of time. A girl who is attracted to me but won't date me (oddly enough, I know two or three of them -- they sicken me, so I try to avoid them) has a MIDI keyboard I could use with it, and I was supposed to go use it, but that sheriff's thing ... blah. Anyway, I have two songs in nascent stages that I wanna work on, and which are agonizing with a mouse (they'd be mad easy with a MIDI keyboard). Part of why I'm curtailing spending.

Time for more random quotes from a rap song! This time, some bits of "The Next Movement" by the Roots

Yo, one, two, one-two one-two
That's how we usually start, once again it's the Thought
The Dalai Lama of the mic, the prime minister Thought
This directed to whoever in listening range
Yo the whole state of things in the world bout to change
Black rain fallin from the sky look strange
The ghetto is red hot, we steppin on flames
Yo, it's infliction on a price for fame
and it was all the same, but then the antidote came
The Black Thought, ill syllablist, out the Fifth
This heavyweight rap shit I'm about to lift
LIKE, a phyllum lift up it's seed to sunlight
I plug in the mic, draw like a gunfight
I never use a cordless, or stand applaudless
Sippin cholorophyll out of ill silver gauntlet
I'm like a faucet, monopoly's the object
There ain't no way to cut this tap, you got ta get wet
Your head is throbbin and I ain't said shit yet
The Roots crew, the next movement, c'mon!

You need to buy a CD and stop rewindin this
I'm the finalist, shinin like a rugged amethyst
And at your music conference, I'm the panelist
Listen close to my poetry, I examine this
like an analyst, to see if you can handle this
Check it out
You, got the groove, emcees
freeze, stand still, nobody move
unless you dealin with The Next Movement

I used to make a lot of money. Now? Not so much. I mean, I'm not technically poor -- I'm still a few thousand over that line. I'm a lot closer to starting school teachers (now) than I am to special effects designers (which I was a few years ago). A really dangerous lesson in Ferengi Rule of Acquisition Number 99: "Trust is the biggest liability of all." Whenever I think of something I want -- a smartphone, a MIDI keyboard, a weekend car rental -- and I have to think so long to figure out how to make it work, it eats at me a little.

That's about enough blogging for now. Spin this one around, and pick out which ever bits you like.