Beefin' Up the Ranks.

Aww hell, there's a time and place when alcohol decides to leave you. You've smacked it around, you've shit on its chest, it's taken a lot from you. But one night, it'll turn on you. It'll cut your dick off and toss it out the window. Consequences, kids. I let hard liquor grab ahold of me for years, putting it in me daily, slowly putting bloody holes in my stomach. Then one night, I gangbang a bottle of 151 rum and up comes the rum and something else, dark, almost purple. And someone's twisting a Phillips-head screwdriver into your gut. Congratulations, a new kind of pain. So I spent months sober. Months on months. Christ, seems like the best analogy I could give is like relocating from Brooklyn to a beet farm in Wyoming. Going wild with a clear mind, forced to deal with the real world without a filter or a machine gun to mow down annoyances. But one day, someone offers me a bottle of wine and my stomach mans up. It can take Pinot Grigio or a decent Chilean wine. But the results are no good, alcohol is alcohol to my body now. The outcome is dirty, unkempt, the fun is gone. I devolve.

Coming back from Chicago recently, I found a stain on the sidewalk in front of my boy Saleem's apartment. Some poor kid got his head canyoned open the night before, must've been a big bullet. The murder rate is about to rise up, again, to where it was before the FBI rolled into town with shotguns on their shoulders. The local cops broke with the Fed gang-unit recently, supposedly about to create their own division. Welcome to the eye of the storm: three to six months before the locals get on their feet gives a window of time to the out-of-town down-syndrome-Scarfaces to get their White down south, over and over through this hollowed-out city. And in the meantime, kids caught in the crossfire and genocide popping out of the barrels of glocks. I hear good ole boys in the rural country count the seconds between lightning and thunder to determine how far away the storm is. We got our comparison, counting the minutes between the gunshots and the sirens. What a sense of humor. 'Cause there's a Mexican and a nigga in the whip, who's driving? The boys in blue, kiddo.

B.P. was in an earlier post talkin about us cats that ain't post too often on here. Yeah, I apologize. I really ain't ever got shit to say when I'm live through phonelines; I get everything out over coffee in the 9th Street diner with my peoples, or painfully downing warm saké on the front stoop. But, hell, shit ain't ever as bad as it sounds. You get a roof over your head and enough money to eat daily and everything's just fine. Peace to the labor office and the blood-plasma donor center.

Puttin' it down,
-V.