Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier (interchangeable)

(image via laughyourspleenout)

If I had known the Cha Cha Lounge sold In Living Color trading cards I would have shown up with my rainmaker bills.

I can’t hardly recall the important political and social events that shaped 1990-1994 (I was 5,6,7, years old you get it you get it) but I can remember being obsessed with the In Living Color characters Homie the Clown and Fire Marshall Bill.  I wasn’t supposed to be awake at 11PM on Sundays.  Or did it air on Fridays?  Not being allowed to stay up late meant I had to hide the fact that I watched it by closing the room door and lowering the volume. It also meant I had to figure out what the racier/racial jokes meant on my own… and that I couldn’t videotape the show.

I wore out a lot of VHS players and my parents wasted a lot of money when I came along (I’m 1 of 5).  Music videos, commercials, Liquid Television, 120 Minutes were all programs I recorded with permission.  I shamelessly loved MTV programs.

Regarding In Living Color though, I had one shot to memorize catchphrases and mannerisms.  I had to pay attention when watching so I could perform them on the elementary playground the next week.  My older brothers and sister encouraged me to act out my Vera DeMilo impressions for their own personal amusement.

My sister (who has a good 20 years on me) fondly remembers that whenever it aired, everyone in her apartment complex would have their windows/doors open be watching.  My sister painted me a portrait of what it was like to watch, nay, PARTICIPATE in pop culture. Here’s what she remembers:

Sunday night, no wait…I think it was like Friday!  Heck, I really can’t remember.  BUT, yes you are sooooo correct, it was totally funny to hear the echos in the apartment complex.  I swear the whole place was totally cracking up!  Guess, I lived in the ghetto near LAX!  Okay, we lived in Westchester at the Belford Apts., 2nd floor and 2nd apt to the corner where it turned to the right.  So the apts. continued on our left (if standing at door looking out) and then one apt. to our right then there was a little stairwell, then the apts continued into the next apt bldg., but there was an opening and trees in front of our apt and there was a pool that we could see from our bdrm window…

I gift her a(n) In Living Color DVD set for Christmas every year.

so wrong it's right

This is my friend Danny’s tattoo.  He is better than you.

It's all about the Jeffersons, baby.

Handwriting sample

see back of photograph

Little parts of me are leaving and hurting and healing over and becoming something else, becoming a stronger part of me, memories forever etched into my soul, moments reenacted for eternity, and tremendous pride swelling throughout my spirit.

• I hope you never smoke that cigarette, Mike.
• I still listen to that tape.
• Yes, I was excited for Conan O’Brien.

Gnarly brah

Whenever I think about the impossibility of physics and the multiverse and string theory and consciousness and other such things that my pitiful uneducated human brain made of meat can’t possibly comprehend, I remember that I’m stuck in the Universe where I co-exist with Narwhals.

What Facebook was made for.

A sandwich apologized to me on Facebook.

(the reason)

My credit on the Piebald documentary DVD "Nobody's Robots"

I finally coughed up the shillings necessary to purchase the Piebald documentary “Nobody’s Robots” and was pleasantly surprised to see that I was credited for helping preserve the evening on tape for future generations.

The setting is the middle of your night.  How many drinks vanished into your bloodstream at dinner?  Enough to wake you with this urgency.  You don’t bother to open your eyes or put on your slippers or do anything requiring a minimal amount of neuron-firing.

You feel like you’ve already started to relieve yourself before you’re positioned rightly over the toilet bowl.  Almost as instantaneously as the wave of relief washes over, you smell it.  You wonder – what is that – did you eat asparagus or something?

You have your muscle memory to thank for flipping the light switch, but now you couldn’t open your eyes even if you wanted.  Did Glade make a pepper spray air freshener?

Then the horror of realization sets in, and you’ve only begun pissing.  Somebody was cleaning the toilet.  The chlorine reacting with your personal ammonia is taking your breath away and scorching your retinas, and you yell in pain and frustration at the agonizing situation but before you have a chance to think or cut your stream off, you envision how the emergency workers are going to find you pale and asphyxiated.

Dick in hand.