Get up.

We went to creep around the Geffen before the lights were on. So good, so hood.

It just seems like he has a crew.

Trains.

rainbow warrior

the best hour of any day.

!!

BB! Getting a girl's name up never goes out of style.

yeah, that.

symbolic.

To be human is to be blessed with forget.

yeah you know me.

do the damn thing.

♥♥♥ ahhhh-ndre...

the devil inside

"Regardless of the outcome, you feel so much better about yourself when you do what you think is the right thing. That alone is worth the risk." 

- Bruno Bettelheim

As I was falling asleep I awoke with a violent start, feeling like someone had drop kicked me from the unconscious to the conscious realm. I carried with me an image of a young female prostitute sitting on an old, ratty brown couch.  As I watched from somewhere in the ethers, she crouched away from the fist beating she was receiving from a handsome, professional looking man who stood behind her.  He beat her on her shoulders, back and head. She was beautiful and indifferent, even as she was beaten. She was imbued with a real natural beauty of the most enviable type that she was obviously fighting against.

Some dreams just resonate.  They come from the most unacknowledged areas of existence. They open the door to those hazy, buried bits of experience that didn't suit us and ended up packed away where we forgot we'd had them. And here, right here, was a room, door flung open, waiting to be cleaned, emptied and sorted out!  I'd been searching for this place for months.   I excitedly noted that I should write this down to consider it further in the morning. That thought was interrupted. The interrupter was loud, persuasive, genderless: "it's not important to remember that".

Who was telling me not to remember?  Who thinks they know what's important and what's not? Will there ever come a time when the unconscious is not provocative?
I went back to sleep. I did not write it down.

The hours passed uneventfully. Thirty minutes before my alarm was to go off, I awoke again. I had been dreaming the same dream again.  I had been dreaming the same dream again. Repetition increases importance and draws the attention.

The girl was slightly different, as was the scenery and the appearance of the man, but the theme was still the same: a beautiful, desperate girl being subdued with force by a strong man, shamelessly acceptable even as he acted so vile.  The woman was curling into herself, not fighting back.  She had no fear, no pain.  Without a sense of self-worth, it's not so shocking to be treated as if you are worthless.

And now, the ground is filling with a rumble. The change is reaching the shoreline. Can you feel it coming your direction?  It is palpable if we let it work its way into us.  Love is our right.  No fear.

Forgiving All My Enemies

Chris Brown doesn't want to be a minute man.  And he's sick of everybody bringing up that sh*t from the past. His latest album F.A.M.E. was released last month with the singles Yeah x3 and Look at me now dropping a little bit beforehand.  The album sounds good with a decent dose of RnB music history, rappers behind it and some undeniable club bangers.

Being that Chris Brown is best known by most Angelenos (Americans?) for beating his girlfriend pretty badly on at least one occasion, you'd think most intelligent people might choose not to support Mr. Brown by becoming fans of his music.   He admitted guilt and was charged with 2 felonies for assault and making criminal threats following the beating. And a couple years later almost 500,000 people bought F.A.M.E within the first month after it's release.

Should we be concerned that so many of us are willing to forget about sustaining a moral compass because the media tells us a product is desirable?  Or is the real issue that the American public is so over saturated with media of both the corporate and independent variety that Chris Brown's situation has become forgettable in the first place?  Perhaps, we all want things like this to be forgettable so that we can feel safe that our own reprehensible mistakes can be wiped from our own personal histories.  Possibly the old 'moral compass' is irrelevant 235 years after capitalism became our religion.

Whatever the cause may be, we let Mr. Brown tell us to take a chance with him, girls, because you know that he won't do you no harm. Even though we have seen the harm he has done to other women with our own eyes.  And we are all one.  And some things do not change.  This is a lesson often learned the hard way.  Is forgiveness always a good thing?  Are there people and things that are just plain unforgiveable?  Is it important to learn to forgive the unforgivable?

Luckily, most of us still have a bit of control left about what we publicize and what we don't.  Maybe Mr. Brown has been a victim, too.  The collective has a gang mentality and the damage that can be done by bullying/gangbanging is sometimes really difficult to repair.  Because so many of us want to hear his music (all girlbashing and distasteful referencing of girlbashing in his lyrics aside) Chris Brown does not have any control over what aspects of his life are presented to the public.   He is forced to dance for us like a puppet and we feed him Benjamins in return.   Look at him now.