I’m sitting in a hotel room, 90 minutes from home, off to make a bit of scratch for the rest of the month’s adventures. From the speakers, Beck. Outside, explosions.

As this is a holiday, there’s supposed to be reflection. This day is supposed to mean something to each and every one of us.

Maybe something about freedom. Or independence. Or how great the U.S. is. Or how, when I heard the president say that “this is the best country on the planet,” I actually thought about it. And figured maybe top five. Maybe. But number one? Canada, right there, that place has just got to be better.

My strongest memory of the fourth of July is the time we went to my great aunt’s house to shoot off some fireworks. I couldn’t have been older than seven as I set alight a weird blue spinning firework, that instead of staying in one place, spun its way under my great aunt’s car. We all braced ourselves for trouble, but it just spun under and out.

Such a thrill.

I hope you all saw something explode today. If not, there’s still the rest of your life. Go make it happen.

I am ready to bounce from the city and see some damn fireworks. I want hot dogs, piled onto hamburgers, piled onto red, white and blue BUNT CAKE. I will garnish heavily with Black Cats and M-80s. I will sleep in a cot made from farm fresh corn under a starry AMERICAN sky. I will dream of punching Osama’s lights out and of building Disneyland-Baghdad, effectively ending Middle East aggression with the introduction of Space Mountain. I will wake up and fill my dune buggy with PREMIUM twenty-dollar a gallon gas and drive it to the dairy hut with my babe. Hell, I’ll drive it THROUGH the dairy hut, right through the middle of it! I will make myself sick with America this coming weekend, and if for some reason I don’t make it back, know that I died in a country I love, stuffed with the very fruit of our land (and some fruits from China). God Bless America!

My best friend the Virg* and I are going to hell. We always go back and forth over who’s saving whom a seat, but no matter which of us ends up behind the wheel, we both know in what direction the vehicle’s going—down.

After nearly a decade of friendship, the past couple of years the debate over who’s going to sit shotgun has turned into a game of one-upmanship, each of us trying to best (or would it be worse?) the other. The Virg always likes to whip out her tried and true phobia card—fear of the midget (aka Lollypopguildophobia). I’ve gotten not one, not two, but three panicked phone calls from her when she’s had no choice but to get up close and personal with a little person. She thinks they’re going to bite her ankles.

I typically counter with my inexcusable and legitimately unintentional mockery of genuinely mentally and/or physically retarded people. I don’t know what my problem is, but I can’t help but consistently stick my foot in my mouth when in the presence of said individuals.

Just last weekend, for instance, I attended the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade. It was a long metro ride out there, and it was made all the more longer by an obnoxious kid who kept screaming and shouting and just making all kinds of strange noises.

“God help me if I ever have a child like that,” I whispered to my friend. When the look he shot me nearly gave my eyes paper cuts I knew I had committed some kind of egregious faux pas.

“Tuffie, that child has Down Syndrome,” he said.

Oh, right… That would explain why he was strapped to a wheel chair. (more…)

I trust that all of you had a grand weekend of simultaneously grilling hotdogs, throwing frisbees and SLAMMING down tequila shooters. As for me, I took the ultimate luxury, wasting the best day of the year weather-wise, entirely indoors. I flung open all the windows, let that lovely breeze wash out the stale air and did nothing… for hours. It was heavenly. But one thing continues to spoil my open window good times: the storefront church across the street, the other Tabernacle if you will.

This website was in part inspired by said church, with its humble simulated pitched roof (boards in an “A” shape nailed to the front of the building) and it’s generally squirrely, renegade vibe. But those fuckers can really bang some tambourines and sing. Sing for Goddamn hours, multiple times a day, with the front doors wide open, blasting the neighborhood with Jesus shockwaves. I literally can’t hear my own TV with the windows open because it’s all “Laalalalaaaa hammeeooojehallllla lalalallal (tamborine banging) lalallallllaaaaa boholljjjalllla” (repeat for 8 hours).

I started to wonder what constitutes a noise complaint in a neighborhood where garbage trucks rumble the foundation of my building at 3AM. And if the music is good, there are no complaints. The music is not good. It’s horrible. There are no Grammy’s being given out to these fuckers. So what can I really do here? As a neighbor, do I approach the minister (who lives above the church)? Do I just call the cops? Can you call the cops on a church? I think maybe yes.

Champs, welcome to Thursday. Some of you have already been enjoying Thursday for hours, others are coming in a bit late. The update here is that the weather is spotty and as my mom would say “muggy.” Even when it wasn’t muggy, my mom would drop the muggy bomb when describing a summer day. And now that I think of it, this might a good time to invent a term for pooping. Here it is: Muggy Bomb. Use it as much as you want, hell, call it your own! And in a weird way, you can thank my mother for it. Good game everyone.

No-Heart Megan from the LBC just dropped us a line, and some astrological science. So now we gonna share it witchu:

“How you livin, Libra? In living color, right.about.now. It’s time to turn up the volume on that game you been spittin to the hunnie from around the way. If you don’t let a lady know that you’ve been checkin her flava, she’ll be thinkin that you’re not a playa you just crush a lot. Tell her trifilin ass friends to mind they biznass and take her to the kick back this weekend.

Brace yo self, Taurus! You been putting in work and the boss is taking notice. It’s time that them co-workers learn how we do. Holla at the boss for a raise and if you make sure he know what you smell like, he’ll be bout it bout it. But you gotta get right, son. You been forgettin your peeps and you betta give them pound or you might be getting somethin that ya might not like. But you don’t hear me tho.”

My sister and I were talking on the phone the other day when suddenly she interrupted my diatribe with: “Shit! I just hit my funny bone! It’s like a tear in my eye!” While technically that last sentence made no logical sense, I instantly knew exactly what she meant—it fucking hurt.

I’ve heard it said that the bond between twins is sometimes so close they create a special language that only the two of them can understand. My sister and I, however, are not twins. We are actually nearly three years apart in age (and she is, ahem, the older sister). But, despite not having shared the same womb for nine months before becoming members of this world, we are about as close as two people can get without being legitimately attached at the hip or head. And this means we do oftentimes speak in tongues.

For starters, we both call each other B. This confuses pretty much everyone. To complicate matters, the origins of this one letter name-calling completely defy logic. Allow me to elaborate.

Although the letter does match the first initial of my first name, contrary to popular belief, that is not where the moniker came from. Rather, it stems from “Little B,” as in “Little Bitch,” a warm and cuddly nickname my sister developed for me in high school. And when I say warm and cuddly, I mean it. For the most part, my sister and I have always gotten along and she truly meant it as a term of endearment. It’s much like the way “bad” was used to describe something “good” in the late 90s.

The B I use to indicate my sister is also lazy shorthand for a nickname that she deemed inappropriate and undesirable for me to shout out in public—Beavis. The spurious logic only gets worse in that “Beavis” was not created in retaliation for Little Bitch. It was just something that I started calling her because it felt right, the way frozen yogurt and oreo cookies feel like they were made to be swirled together. Truth be told, not a single thing my sister does resembles in any shape or form said MTV cartoon character.

What compounds the issue further—again, only for others—is the fact that my sister and I nearly have identical voices, oftentimes making it hard to identify who shouted out the B. Back in the day, we used this to our advantage, calling in sick from work for each other when nerves were too high or breaking up with the other’s boyfriend when emotions would’ve gotten in the way. (more…)

This could very well be my father’s Carlito’s Way moment.

At the end of that film, Carlito, reformed drug kingpin, has gotten his old girl back, turned his back on his criminal buddies, and escaped from several sticky situations. He and his lady are in the subway, tickets to some island paradise in hand, when he’s gunned down by some mook he pissed off back in act one. The film ends (SPOILER ALERT) with him on his back, between life and death, but you’re pretty sure that he doesn’t actually make it.

My dad used to be a criminal. From grade school until around 48 he ran in the streets, making money the way he wanted. There was violence, drugs, money flowing like water. Good times and bad.

Of course it all went south, but after a short jail stint he came out clean, sober and, as he calls it, “square.” No more crime, no more drugs, no more being in “the game.”

He’s spent the last ten years building a straight life for himself, regaining custody of his children, finding a good woman to build a life with, getting his degree as a drug counselor.

Last week was his graduation.

Next month the plan was to have him interviewed by the BAT’s very own Tuffie, as part of her thesis. Finally I’d get to hear the complete story, as opposed to selected anecdotes.

So, naturally, friday he has what was probably a severe hypertensive episode, causing his kidneys to go haywire, shocking the heart, causing the lungs to fill with fluid.

The doctors have kept him sedated since then, waiting to see if the kidneys start working again, hooked up to a ventilator in an attempt to let his lungs rest enough for him to be able to breath on his own.

There’s a decent risk of pneumonia and/or infection, the nurses are keeping an eye on the fever that comes and goes, and his several chronic conditions, which brought this on in the first place, don’t make any of it any easier.

Of course, this may all be his attempt to keep from having to work for a living.

So we’ll see. Were he’d awake, he’d see the cinema in it, whichever way it worked out. A consummate storyteller, he’d be the first one to recognize the Carlito’s Way comparison.

The problem is, I can’t think of a movie where something like this works out.

Daily, for more years than was healthy, I whipped through my neighborhood on bike, foot, or skateboard, rain or shine to deliver a junky local rag called the Patriot Ledger. My friends teased me about it and I left many a pre-teen-light-stuff-on-fire-session for it, but come Christmas time, I was the one looking crispy in a brand new hundred dollar shirt, bought with my own cold cash.

What I will tell you is that I got to know every single person in my neighborhood, their dogs, how well they tipped and how they looked surprised in a bathrobe. My customers sit in my head, not aging, just paying, or not paying, complaining or complimenting. They are the people who populate Suburb, USA. Maybe they are the future us, lawnmowers, pets and all. God help us if they are. I present to you The Route, Part 2.

Mr. Bronson
Whether the result of some paper route turf war, a paper boy devoured by suburban dogs, or just a new subscriber (never the case), once in a while I’d get a visit from the head office with news that I’d have to add the so-and-sos to my route. The Holy Hand of the Patriot Ledger reached down from the heavens in the form of Mr. Bronson to deliver the news. He drove a light blue Dodge K car, was bald with a sandy mustache and in retrospect seemed, um.. alcoholic? Is that the word? Yes it is.

He always wore a stained dress shirt which I thought defeated the purpose of dressing up. He had way too much shit on his dashboard, keys of various kinds, empty coffee cups and empty packs of Newports. He kept it brief, I was only one little shit he’d have to deal with in a day. He’d hand me a barely readable digital printout with the new customer’s name and address and was gone, chugging down the street in his crappy car. I would later come to understand that this is what happens to you when you are a paper boy… for life. (more…)

This city is covered with street graffiti, subliminal advertising and guerilla marketing. You can’t walk a block without seeing a sticker on a sign, or paint on the sidewalk, or a billboard. Or all three in the same place.

So it is refreshing to see some authentic shitbird crazy where I would regularly see a hastily placed advertisement for some bottom basement hip hop group.

Of course I assumed it was more marketing, maybe some new movie, or some shitty book, or some hipster website.

But no. Not only did a dense google search turn up no ulterior motives, it showed that indeed, there is a man out there who believes the CIA is fucking with his brain, stealing his money and keeping him from his many celebrity children.

And god bless him. God bless him for sharing his nutjobbery with us. For it is a mighty, multimedia beast. Not only did he put up signs all over hollywood, he went on the internet, (HERE, second comment down) and HERE, to share with us the complete inner workings of his psychosis. Mmm, mmm, crazy.

This is the kind of strangeness that guerilla marketing aspires towards, but so rarely attains. The kind of freakshow ad-folks get paid millions to imitate.

We breed that here in LA. What they manufacture, we grow. Take that, Cincinnati!

My mother and father are frugal. They are not cheap. They are not stingy. They do not want to be buried with their bank accounts fully loaded. But they do pinch pennies, or at least they pick them off the ground when they find them, regardless of whether it’s heads or tails.

“It’s free money,” my mother says. “That automatically makes it lucky.”

My mother’s favorite store is Big Lots, which is sort of like a dollar store, but not really. It’s an emporium of sorts that somehow acquires all the old and expired merchandise (anything from granola to candles to mattresses to vacuums) that nobody else wants. It then sells it at way discounted rates. My mom buys food from there, but removes the telltale price tags when she knows I’m coming to visit because I won’t eat it otherwise.

Last time I was home, I took one bite of my Cheerios breakfast and knew something was up.

“Dude this tastes stale,” I said, spitting out the mashed up nastiness. “Mom, how old is this shit? You bought it from Big Lots, didn’t you?!” I flipped over the box, its’ dents and faded color no longer looking innocuous.

“Noooo,” my mother said, bursting into a fit of giggles. She thinks its funny to feed me expired food.

My father, on the other hand, enjoys embarrassing me by collecting recyclables at the park and local construction sites for what he calls “Vegas spending money.” He keeps tabs on exactly how much he makes because he’s obsessive. In 2006, he told me he recycled a total of $1,800, while this past year he only scored $1,550. The decline wasn’t for lack of effort—construction slowed down reducing the number of applicable sites to plunder. (more…)

Another monday, another boatload of music I’ve “acquired” and listened to, culling the wheat from the chaff, setting you up for a muxtape mainline of good feelings for yo ears.

Going On - Gnarls Barkley - Best track on the album, which gets better every time I listen to it. I’m beginning to realize that there are two kinds of good albums: the ones that hit you in your feel good spot right away, and the ones that you have to let swirl around in your ear canal for a bit, let the sound simmer. This album’s one of those. My first thoughts were that it was slower, more down-tempo than their first album, but then I went back and listened to that one, found that I was only remembering the faster tracks, that Gnarls Barkley is all about the slow introspective jams.

This one’s a go-er, though.

Let’s Make Forever Last Forever - Apes & Androids - Started seeing different blogs blowing up about this band earlier in the week, hell, Muxtape even made them “featured members,” whatever the deuce that means, so I went and gave it a go on the ones & twos(by which i mean my computer. not even close, but there it is.). And by the end of the first listen, I was IMing as many folks as I could, John the Baptist-ing this band. My description when asked: It’s as if Midnite Vultures-era Beck and Of Montreal had a baby, said baby then being breast fed by The Scissor Sisters, with Prince as a nanny.

Everyone Nose - N.E.R.D. - An album that didn’t sound too strong on the first listen, it’s definitely growing on me. This track is, though the single, actually the funkiest track on the album. I’m still waiting for them to bring something as epic as their first album, but until then, this one’s a good ‘un, far superior, far more even than their last attempt.

Good to the Earhole - Funkadelic - Several years ago I heard this on the radio, some independent station, spent several days listening to every Funkadelic album I could get my hands on, because I’d missed the name of the song. Had that feeling of the good old days, when you had to give something the Good Hunt, searching for that CD in the stacks, that comic book in the long boxes. So rare these days, everything at our fingertips.

Also rare? A funk song this goddamned good.

American Boy - Estelle(feat. Kanye West) - Due to the folks I’ve been hanging with of late, I’ve been dipping back into the hip-hop pool. This one was recommended by a 21 year old white girl from Boston. Welcome to the future, people. It’s now on my growing Summer Jams ‘08 list.

Shempi - Ratatat - Great “make-out” album. Nuff said.

Lollipop - Li’l Wayne - More from my current hip-hop phase. Damn song is on every “urban” station in town. And by that I mean, I actually listened to it end on one station, changed the station, where it was just starting. Finished, switched stations, only to find it PLAYING AGAIN. This song is bigger than us all.

Punks Jump Up To Get Beat Down - Brand Nubian - Um, no idea. This one’s Danny Eagle’s. Ask him about this 90s shit. It is the 90s, right? This band still together? Were they ever together? Who the fuck is Brand Nubian? Fuck does that name even mean???

Unprepared - Superdrag - Okay, so I went to a Superdrag concert. JUST HOLD ON. I remembered that song, Sucked Out, from back in the day. Liked it. Turns out a buddy of mine liked it so much he followed them ever after, big fan today. Got himself some tickets, asked me along. And since I figured I’ve been hearing too well lately, I figured it was time to go to another concert.

In preparation, I got all their albums. And they’re good. One album in particular, In the Valley Of the Dying Stars. Starts with a drum-awesome song, keeps it going, then gets all sad right about this here song. Cuz the lead singer’s granddad died or something, so this album is all about that.

And I’m a sucker for those songs that build and build and then crescendo with a repeating chorus. Sue me.

Always Where I Need To Be - The Kooks - And let’s stay strong with some more power pop, this time from across the pond. It’s good. It’s on both the indie rock and the super popular alt. rock station here in L.A. What ya gonna do, listen to NPR?

It feels like a thousand goddamn years since the primary started and the way it ended was more like the latest Indiana Jones movie than the big, long-anticipated, buzzer beating end we all hoped for. The air let out of the balloon and slowly but surely the Clinton campaign is finally closing up shop. Not all at once mind you, party here, talk here, and hopefully, by tomorrow it will be official. Jesus F. Christ, thank God, the story is so old.

I pay close attention to the news, maybe too much attention. And maybe I’m getting fooled, but I’m getting fucking psyched. The weight and embarrassment of the last 8 years feels like its finally being shrugged off. Every time the creeping suspicion that we, as Lou gently put it, will just get fucked again by our next president, I find a little bit of hope. Again, maybe I’m being naive, but I think the pendulum is again swinging in favor of the good guys.

On a historical note, we’ve got the first black presidential nominee in our history which is a massive, huge deal. 150 years ago it was still legal to have SLAVES. As late as 1965 the government was actively preventing black people from VOTING. We’ve come a long way. Racism is still alive and well no doubt, as shown by people’s various reactions to Obama (”he’s so well-spoken!”). But this is big. Fucking huge.

Believe me I was raised to strongly mistrust the government and media, raised on a steady diet of skateboarding and Dead Kennedys, but for every ounce of innate mistrust I have, something filters through. Yesterday it was Obama saying that that the DNC will not be taking any money from lobbyists or political action groups. FINALLY.

We got a long way to go. I haven’t witnessed a president accomplish even a tiny bit of what he hoped to before elected, but I’m hopeful (which is odd in and of itself). I got a good feeling about this one guys. Don’t be afraid to throw out that cynicism, little by little if you have to and start a careful watch on things, because they are, believe it or not, changing for the better.

Before last weekend, a single “Sex and the City” episode was all the insight I had into the Hamptons. Which meant I knew to watch out for crabs, and I’m not talking about the sand-dwelling variety. That said, upon arrival via the notorious Jitney Bus (during which I was provided with better beverages and snacks than my last cross-country flight), the beachy conglomeration of towns was exactly as I had expected: lots of rich New Yorkers with too much money to spare, looking to party and get some color. Oh, and let’s not forget, relax.

This is where I came in. I was hired on as a second babysitter for a family of four (mom, dad, two boys, ages four and five) that a friend of mine works for. The woman’s brother and wife were also coming out, along with their three-year-old and twin fourteen-month-olds, to celebrate the long Memorial Day weekend. Five children required two babysitters to occupy them so that the parents could, functionally, relax.

Aside from the autistic-like tendencies of the three year old who treated both my friend and I as if we were the plague, and listened to nothing we said, the weekend was actually a total breeze of duck, duck, goose—or buttocks, buttocks, diddle, as the giggling boys preferred to play it—peppered with freeze tag and Red Rover. Other than being woken up at 7:30 am every morning to feed the kids Cookie Crisps (this being, the one time of the year they are allowed sugar cereal), I can’t complain.

What’s more, both sets of parents were fucking awesome. (Did I mention Father Unit #1 slipped us each an extra bill at the end of the weekend?) In addition to not treating my friend and I as if we were hired help, they also encouraged us to help ourselves to the liquor cabinet once the kids were fast asleep. (more…)

I’m listening to an NPR report at this exact moment. It’s dissecting Hilary Clinton’s election bid, trying to figure out why it failed. Naturally the fact that she is a woman is mentioned and examined. Which led into the “balancing act” that all women in power have to attempt, to be strong without being perceived as too aggressive, and also without denying one’s “femininity.”

All of which is true. Which got me to thinking about Obama, and how he must struggle with the balancing act of not seeming too “black,” with being aggressive without fitting squarely into society’s perception of black rage or impetuousness. His well-crafted, admittedly hollow speeches are compared to other black orators, his locution tailored to appease white voters.

Which really leads me to believe that voters really just want a White Man as president. Even from the non-white non-male candidates they want as many “white” attributes as possible. Why don’t we just come out and admit it. “Senator Clinton, in what ways are you most like a man?”

“Senator Obama, in what ways are you most white? And please highlight any ways in which you may be non-white, but still non-threatening.”

Because, really, no matter who we choose, they’re gonna turn back on their campaign promises, they’re going to make decisions that compromise their ideals, steer our country further towards collapse with their back-alley deals with lobbyists, their concessions to political operators, their inability to think of the greater good.

We’re gonna get fucked, no matter what.

And it looks like, at heart, Americans really just want to get fucked by a white guy.