The Wonderful Adventures of Nugie

 


Not much to say. I need a cut and a shave. But I still look good 

My brain that is. I’m tired of thinking. I have come to the conclusion that it is a seriously overrated activity. I can’t stop thinking about everything and anything. Lately I’ve been focusing on the negative and so there should be a switch that involves less effort and pain than a lobotomy or a bullet through the head.

It’s sad I feel this way too. I had a relatively good weekend. We went on a choir tour in Maryland. The bus ride down was relatively pleasant. I made friends with the bus driver and got a free meal. I made better friends with people in the choir. I was the wonderful charming Adam Carnegie. Our host family was idyllic and honestly inspiring, even the typical oldest child of privilege. Yeah he drinks and he’s only 18, rebels against his father’s business, but at least he still respects his mother. I saw a friend at a show. I saw my mom and family. And I wrote some stupid rhymes and my freestyle skills are getting better.

Drizzle says that the passion is gone from our relationship. I wonder if my passion has been redirected into activities that are unnecessary. Or maybe I suppress the passion I feel cause it makes me seem vulnerable. Maybe I just want to avoid the silly arguments we used to have and the passion might have been a part of that. I don’t know. But I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling. It really hasn’t gotten me anywhere. I run in circles like a chicken with its head cut off.

I think I have wanted too much. Instead of wanting everything to work, I just should have shot for things to work enough. Maybe then life would be much simpler. I just want to stop drowning.

I got an email today from a friend that said she’s been reading this little thing I got going here and I was reminded that I hadn’t tapped you into my stream of consciousness for quite some time. Its not that the stream has suddenly gone dry. Over spring break, I had a number of things I wanted to talk about. I even did research for one. Something about being home drains my energy of doing anything constructive.

When I got back to school I was smacked with the most melancholic feeling I ever felt in my life. I just wanted to sit in the middle of the campus green and cry. No lie. Just utter despair. I would lie in bed for an hour just sad. Over what? Who knows. I kept trying to tell myself I wasn’t as pathetic as my mind was letting me believe. I mean I’m breathing, I look good in a suit, and I eat on a regular basis. This amongst many other things should tell me that while I had a bunch of things to work on at least I still had a chance to work on them.

I don’t know. I screamed at the now current girlfriend Drizzle and that seemed to start to bring me out of the mire. Sunday I actually woke up interested in doing work for the first time in a long time. I eventually succeeded, culminating in the writing of six not-so-bad pages in a two hour period.

I still have the premonition to just disappear sometimes. All of a sudden I am faced with the prospect of really leaving Neverland but the customs are unbearable. I think it’s a smack in the face to realize that all the time you thought you were flying with Peter Pan, he was really jerking you with an illusion. The real flying can occur outside of Neverland, when you actually believe in yourself, not in some farce about eternal youth. Flying is growing. I know it probably sounds like I’m snorting pixie dust and maybe I am, but shit that’s my prerogative. Anything to ease the flying period that is to occur.

You need to know I’m in a perpetual motion mood. Must be the Spring Break that I have unofficially begun. I think it’s a carryover from the weekend in the City. Just bubbling kid. So this installment is full of songs that make me move or move me or both.

Mario – C’Mon (Just Blaze Remix) (S)
De La Soul ft. Yummy – Much More (S)
Playa – Don’t Stop The Music (S)
Nas ft. Jadakiss & Ludacris – Made You Look (Remix) (S)
Blackstar – Bright As Stars (S)
Craig David ft. Mos Def – Seven Days (DJ Premier Remix) (S)
Glenn Lewis ft. Kardinal Offishall – Back For More (S)

It’s Been A Long Time….
I shouldn’t’ve a left you/without a dope blog to read to

Oh my goodness. It’s been a crazy couple a days. Okay it really hasn’t been that crazy, just busy. But at least it all got to happen in the City of Justice, City of Love: The one and only NYC. So I went home Saturday night after my marathon of front desk coverage and ended up sleeping on my riding partner Baby MD. Funny I made accommodation so that she could rest easily and I end up sleeping on her head. Lucky for me she’s like 14 inches shorter than me. So after a snafu with the van dropping her off, I was on my way. You know one thing that I love about the city is that if you walk long enough you’ll find what you’re looking for. Like I get off the van and I’m just walking to the train, looking for scraps of manna out the side of my eye. Then the flashing lights catch me. It’s a storefront fried chicken place. $4.00 later and I have three pieces of chicken, a roll, and french fries. Beautiful wonder.

So I get home and say my birthday salutations to my father and my mom hugs me forever like I just got back from Iraq. But of course as I am often humbly reminded, everything is not about me. It seems she had a war of her own against her day. I never got the complete details but I know tears were involved and it probably had to do with my father’s extended state of depression. There’s no other reason for her to be sad. She just started a new job and everything, but his presence and maybe his disappearing act at the same time must be constant reminders of confusion. It’s why I don’t like being in the house for extended periods of time.

Anyway I went to sleep and woke up around noon on Sunday. Watched some basketball, abused some Kazaa and finally got my ass out the door and walked over the bridge. You know it was too nice in the city cause the bridge was filled with traffic. Entourages of tourists armed with strollers and cameras clogging up the paths. I guess I’m just very possessive of the bridge. Sometimes I want to push them into the streaming traffic below. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuugggggghhhhhhhh!

On my way back, it was much better. I mean the same amount of traffic was there, maybe even there was more, but it was kind of endearing going back to Brooklyn. You know noticing the babies, whether hyper or sleeping, or just people working hard to capture the perfect New York picture. I felt very proud of the city. Maybe I was placated because I just spent some money. Maybe it was I was returning to Brooklyn. I always feel good going back to Brooklyn.

So I spent an hour in AT&T Wireless waiting to get a new phone. Although I was treated to entertainment by chickenheads cursing out attendants and the manager (BITCH!) all I got was a recommendation on what phones I should get when I call AT&T directly. That’s right. They told me to call because they could give me a better deal on the phone. What the fuck? Are you not the same company? What does the store not have that the phone center in Texas has? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Whatever. I walked over and treated myself to some sick ice cream thanks to the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (Note to admirers: Peaches and Cream pays the toll on the road to my heart) and looked over the East River as I murmured rap lyrics to myself. When I got home I was lazy as usual and subjected myself to the creative TV meal my father cooked up which consisted of the Oscars and a healthy fixing of college and pro basketball.

Obligatory Oscars Section: Jennifer Garner is hot. Scarlett Johansson is hot. Angelina Jolie is gonna end up as one of those classic Hollywood beauties, as long as the knives are kept locked in a drawer. Uma Thurman looked like a futuristic bar wench but she’s still appealing. Maybe I was just really thirsty. The Nugie Award for Best Moment during an Endlessly Boring Telecast: Jack Black & Will Ferrell – The Cutoff Song. First off I should clear up that I am a huge Jack Black fan. If you do not own the Tenacious D Masterworks, do yourself a favor and get your hands on a copy. The dude is straight genius. And for Will Ferrell, I didn’t like him at first on Saturday Night Live, but I grew to love him. I haven’t watched one full episode since he left, except for the one where Jack Black was host. I knew when I saw them together I was gonna laugh and I wasn’t disappointed. That song should end up in the Oscar pantheon.

So I overslept the next morning to get to practice for the Carnegie Hall performance that my choir did on Tuesday. Don’t get too impressed. We were a backup choir and we sang from the balcony. But I did get to sing in Carnegie Hall. Anyway, I dawdled but it worked in my favor cause I got there 15 minutes after they did cause they got caught in traffic. Then we practiced with the main choir. Those smug bastards. Why were those cats like “Oh yall sounded good even though you went out of tune a couple of times?” Shut the fuck up. We learned the music in a week and we didn’t even use printed music. Memory baby. Plus only like 10 of the 55 or so people that were singing are music majors so people need to recognize the real.

Once again I consoled myself with walking, this time with my boy/producer Boy Wonder. Once again the city proved itself true with providing with what I was looking for just by walking. Wonder got a mixtape, I got beef patties, and we got a bootleg DVD that we watched later that night. As an added bonus of pleasing the carnivores in our posse upon our return, we got to leave early so I rode with Baby MD and Wonder on the train. Our plans to roam the city took a detour when MD’s friend was asleep and couldn’t let us into her dorm room to drop off their stuff. So we look like a bunch of tourists as we walked from the Village all the way down to Canal. I did get two cool watches for $20 bucks though. MD got one for like $5 but that’s because she’s a cute girl and her zipper was down. I had to pull it up for her.

She came to my house later with her sleeping roommate friend Raina, who actually turned out to be a very bubbly Irish-Puerto Rican, and we all ate at my house as I played a regular Martin Stewart, serving plates and such. We watched that bootleg we bought, Honey. Hey Hollywood needs to understand something. Just because someone might have a little more melanin than the average white person does not mean you can stick them in a movie and give them slang and it will come out authentic. When Jessica Alba does it, it’s not as annoying as usual, just comical. And her dancing was pretty good. But please stop. Oh and Lil’ Romeo needs to stick to whatever he was doing before he was in this movie. But watching the bootleg is a very awesome experience because you get like a built in laugh track with the audience that actually paid for the movie. Everything is accentuated. We laughed more at them than we did at the movie.

Quick side note: Why do girls always want a guy’s approval of their friends? Like MD comes up while I was making a plate of food and asks me what I think of the Raina child. Did I ask to be hooked up? No. And it wasn’t a hook-up. But why do girls need to have approval of their friends? Is your self-esteem truly tied into acceptance not only of yourself but of your friends too? Goodness.

So I walked them to the train and then me and Boy Wonder talked to our friend up here at school and effectively pissed him off cause he was jealous that we were in the city and he wasn’t, which I totally understood. We’re enjoying nice weather and New York City, while he was up here alone at our ugly campus and could do nothing about the good weather the Lord had provided. Dem’s the breaks.

Tuesday, the major thing was the Carnegie Hall performance. And even though we were just backing up another choir and not the feature choir it was still exhilarating. I mean minutes before the performance as we were seated I thought to myself “I’m singing in Carnegie Hall!!!!!!!!!” One more thing to add to the things on my rather slim accomplishment list. Lucky for me, my friend Will drove down so I didn’t have to be subjected to 60 people in a bus for like 4 hours.

That was pretty uneventful too until the end when the Barney Fife squad was following our car for a couple of miles. See two black men in a car at 1 in the morning in the boondocks is obviously suspicious material so they must have been running our plates cause we were like 10 under the speed limit and all the damn lights on the car worked. Thank God dude wasn’t speeding cause his license is suspended for another week.

All in all a fantastic weekend in the city I love. Plus I brought back jerk chicken. Fuck you campus cafeteria. Your slop is now unnecessary. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Da Booty

My ass is starting to get numb since I’ve been sitting here abusing the cable modem here at home. But I started thinking about how good my ass has been to me and what would happen if I lost it.

My posterior has always been of a significant size. It was much bigger when I was a husky 13-year old but once my growth spurt kicked in, the storage fat was redistributed to other parts of my body. Still it has remained rather sizable, yet manageable. It sits high. It sits firm. I’m very proud of it.

My friend Yann, a self-professed butt connoisseur has given it high marks, and her standards are impossible. I must say that sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in my wall mirror and I smile. It is sad that there are no culturally accepted dances for heterosexual males to shake their bootys. Lucky women and gay males. Here I am sitting on a great ass and all I can do is just wear boxer briefs and nice pants so that it isn’t totally overlooked.

One of the video vixens from BET with one of those super bootys was giving tips on how she got hers. Squats and walking and all that good stuff. Yann, through her endless research, read that sexual intercourse is one of the best exercises for the butt. Is that where I was getting it from? Even though I did exercise, bimonthly I think that was to thank for my excellent rump. Now I have to do that exercise shit to keep it.

It’s worth it. It’s a beautiful thing.

We currently have precocious teenagers visiting our campus for a music clinic. The little bastards have been mostly annoying except for this one story this girl told today. It seems that during the Blizzard of ’96 her family was stuck in the house for five days. Still, in true testament to the gumption of New Yorkers, or maybe the almighty dollar, the Chinese guy still delivered. Not only did he perform the act of providing sustenance, he even shoveled them out. Here’s the kicker: Girl’s father didn’t even give him a tip. How gangsta is that? Was he disappointed in the job? What did the guy have to do? I couldn’t stop laughing. Maybe it’s just cause I am writing this during my 11th hour of work.

Maybe I’m just envious that I have no extravagant stories like that. My experiences have been quite vanilla in comparison. My repertoire includes no story that begins “I remember….” That results in amazement, not even mildly amusing. If I have anything resembling that, it is only because I am retelling someone else’s story just as I just did. I guess the world needs blank canvases like me to make all the other things seem more vivid.

This is the section where I let you know what music currently dominates my MP3 Player/CD Player/Winamp Pantheon.

Amel Larrieux - Bravebird (A)
Nellie McKay - Get Away From Me (A)
Miles Davis & John Coltrane - The Complete Coulmbia Recording Sessions 1955 - 1961 (A)
Dionne Farris - Hopeless (S)
Nikka Costa - So Have I For You (S)
Nirvana - Rape Me (S)
The Beatles - Michelle, While My Guitar Gently Weeps (S)
Pete Rock - Petestrumentals (A)

So I am on overnight shift here at the front desk in my ninth hour of duty and my mind is wandering. But I started to think about kissing in my lifetime. I must say that it is one of my favorite activities. It’s the reason that Hi-Five song I made the title is one of my favorite thousand songs.

It all started with a rainy day game of Truth or Dare at summer camp. Somewhat sad that I don’t remember my exact age but I had definitely achieved double digits but I was not officially a teenager. Our small clique was in a corner of the game room playing, unencumbered by counselors. It came time for Jennifer’s turn and she chose dare. The dare was to kiss me on the lips. She hesitated because of the potency of my lips, but she ended up relenting because she could not resist their siren call. Yeah whatever.

As defining sweet childhood moments go, it was pretty nice. She had soft, delicate lips that I longed for before the kiss was over, even though it probably lasted a split second. The feel was on my lips the entire night. I was kind of upset the next morning when I didn’t feel it anymore. For the rest of the summer, I kept wishing for rainy days in the off chance we would get to play the game but God only rewarded my horniness with acts that literally hurt my manhood. I must have been the only tween considering wearing a cup for kickball.

Serves me right. But I’ve had a healthy appetite for kissing ever since. That slight, curly-haired Egyptian Jew sent me on the path of no return. The years have seen me get compliments on my kissing. Then again, you have to like the way a person kisses to keep doing it with them. So maybe I shouldn’t be so egotistical about it. At least I know they didn’t suck terribly. It’s even more remarkable considering I learned my kissing philosophy from the occasionally amusing, oft-repeated sitcom Wings.

The two main characters, whose sexual tension drove the show, got into a conversation on kissing, debating how to do the act consistently well. Of course, they end up in an experimental state and it becomes a Goldikiss session. She decrees the first kiss is too soft. The second one is too hard. Of course, the third is just right and the longest kiss is the result. The implicit principle came through though. Kisses should be forceful yet yielding. Your partner should know you’re there, but want to get more of you. I don’t know why I trusted a not-so-smart sitcom about white people in Nantucket, but it hasn’t foiled me yet.

Over time, I’ve had some blow away kisses. I’ve had extended kisses in the rain. A number of kisses were enhanced by the illicitness of the situation. In the library, parents in the next room, on the roof of my apartment building. I never thought that something that quite literally leaves me struggling to breathe would feel so utterly fantastic. Now I’m worried I don’t know where my next one will come from. I wouldn’t mind a hit.