Michael Richards
Topic: Clueless
I can deal with Nigger. The KKK image to me was worse. When you get into describing how you wish that it was 50 years ago and black people were strung up, how can anyone not think you're racist?

This Guy Has a Point

The hecklers probably should have just left. If he's not funny why sit there? Ask for your money back. Why eat a meal that's stank? Why pay for something that isn't quality but to berate someone and then wonder why he goes off?

People always comment when I complain about a shitty meal and send it back. What else am I supposed to do, eat shit and happily pay for it? No I send it back. And if a waiter/waitress is an ass about it, I don't tip them. There are ways to deal with complaints in a civilized society. Only a dumb ass sits through a stand up routine that he hates and heckles the comic with no signs of stopping for not having the same sense of humour as him. I never did get the point of heckling. Both sides were wrong.

You shouldn't have used the N word Michael, (said in a Chris Rock growl), you know you wasn't right, BUT I UNDERSTAND!

EY

Betty Boop and Buckwheat
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: Roy Ayers
Topic: Clueless
Thursday 5:35pm 31Aug06

Betty Boop my trusty ibook is feeling a little sluggish. Seems I'll have to give her a clean up and see what's bogging her down. Could it be the 10,000 songs in itunes? Could it be the ebooks galore? shiit!

Today was an Earth, Wind and Fire day for music. Weirdly enough, on my walk home from work, I heard Let's Groove as I walked past The Keg and then heard it again coming from Aldo when I walked past there. I had to play it as soon as I walked in the door to see if there was some hidden message. No hidden message but it reminded me of when it first came out. I was in high school. I hung out with a French Italian girl that only went out with black guys. She ultimately dated my best friend "J" but then had these odd jealous moments saying to me that he and I should be together because we got on like a house on fire. We are best friends, that's why we get on like a house on fire. We both had step dads we hated, we liked the same music, he was the only person that never called me a cry baby and understood that I was super sensitive and cried at the drop of a hat. He is still one of the only people that I feel comfortable enough to cry in front of. On different occasions our mothers had asked us why we never got together. We truly were and are best friends, that was a line we were never going to cross.

I remember that I would always tell my mother stories about J. J said this, J said that.
"Who is this guy? You need to bring him home so I can meet him."
The night he walked me home after Rollerskating in Ville LaSalle my mother was lying down in her bedroom with all the lights out because she wasn't feeling well. J sat on the edge of the bed and chatted with her and had her laughing so much that she told him, "You need to leave now."

From there on in my mother asked, "When you bringing J home again?"
She was the one that told me to ask him about his relationship with his step dad when I had an especially bad day with mine. The day I asked our friendship took on a different level of closeness and openness with each other. It's nice to have lifelong friends. People who know you through your awkward stages. People who know the real you. His son said, after I was home last summer, she laughs a lot. J told him, "that's all we ever did when we were kids, talk stupidness and crack each other up."

There have been times when I went home and J, his brother and I have sat in the kitchen until 4 am, talking and laughing. Their girlfriends go to bed alone shaking their heads wondering about the three of us.

We've long since lost touch with the French girl we used to hang out with. Apparently she gave up on black men and married an Italian. Boy some of those black guys pimped her bad. It was brutal. I remember when she spent the night at J's house and neglected to call her parents, when she got home, her dad had left the bible on her bed. ha! After awhile she got funky with us and started going to the Vous (a Montreal hot spot) a few nights a week and hanging out with racier black people. She dated a pimp in a cute naive white way and disregarded our warnings that the pimp would ultimately pimp her. We didn't know him like she knew him. He knew she wasn't a hooker.

He held her hostage in her apartment and then was going to transport her out of Canada and had it not been for another friend of hers calling the Police because he had a bad feeling, she might still be hooking. J and I discussed it recently with a "can you believe that shit?" air. Here we are telling her, be careful, that's not the kind of black person you want to hang out with. And she thought we were jealous that she was happy.

Yeah, Let's Groove, brings back a slew of memories of a past with a cast of characters. J and I knew of that black life and we knew that it held no interest for us. No good could come of it. Guys we hung out with in our Rollerskating days have died of drug overdoses and been killed in robberies and jail and police shoot outs. Girls we knew became hookers and drug addicts and died beside their men in hits. Craazy.

I used to say that my claim to fame was coming out of high school alive. My high school was raided for drugs and guns. For awhile in my 20's and early 30's there was news on a regular basis of some one we went to high school with getting killed in a botched something or other. It was quiet for good long chunk until a football player we went to school with beat up his wife in front of his mother and pastor because she refused to reconcile with him and beat her to death with his mother pulling on him trying to make him stop. His defense was that he was depressed because of the end of his career.

Some where in all that is the reason why I don't like nicknames that some people will call black people like buckwheat or that saying from different strokes, "what you talking bout Willis." Being black is no joking matter for black people. There is so much underlying stuff and associations and shit. Being seen as an individual first is so important. I know without having to look in the mirror that I'm black. I've felt bad enough and still feel bad enough when there are news reports of a killing and I have to keep my fingers crossed that the suspect isn't a black person. And when it is the sentence around the city is, "Ah man why'd he have to go and do that."

One of Chris Rock's best routines is the difference between black people and niggers. We laugh because what he says is true. There is a difference and I'm not interested in being associated with niggers. There are so many beautiful things about black people, do you really think we all say the same idiotic things like, "what you talking about Willis?"

Buckwheat was a part of an image of an era when white people portrayed black people in the way they were comfortable with seeing them. Buckwheat was of a time when a black actor couldn't expect to have regular decent roles. Black actors could be maids and thieves and pimps and drug dealers but they couldn't love each other in film, or be educated. They had to skin and grin and play second fiddle to even Shirley Temple. Yeah Buckwheat was a cute kid but the associations to that era and how black people were treated wasn't cute.

I don't want to beat this into the ground and yet feel that I haven't expressed myself well enough.

EY

Computer Illiterate
Mood:  amorous
Now Playing: Rahsaan Patterson
Topic: Clueless
Farting around. Have not figured out an easy way to add images (the odd one) to my blog. It'll soon come. I just realized that I finally had a use for this image. If you are a writer and you have balls of steel check out http://www.nanowrimo.org
before November.