Slackness, Ghetto and Acceptance

A member of my family unit recently decided to relocate due to the unrelenting tensions in the familial home. It was a sad indictment. I found no satisfaction in seeing her leave albeit she would have gladly gloated over my departure. That has always been the difference between the learned and the untutored. The ignorant find amusement in life lessons. I have asked God repeatedly if he sees any errors in my judgement, please reveal them to me because I am only human and to be mortal is to be flawed. 

I thought for the most part that whatever issues we had as a family could have been resolved without this drastic measure. It became clear to me that those without any iota of introspection are liable to commit the same infractions repeatedly. If you cannot look into yourself and see your mistakes then you will be unable to implement any corrective measures to your life. If you cannot see the errors in your ways then you are doomed. 

Sometimes I am embarrassed when I read the comments labelled against Ghetto people, Vybz Kartel and those from lower socio-economical stratum. But in my quiet moments often foddered by recent occurrences I realized that they may be right in some of their contemptuous diatribe.

  Poor, illiterate people are some of the most difficult people to deal with.  Irrationality is the name of their game. They like hearing their own voices than conceding an argument because of what they know is right. It's about scoring points, winning quarrels and defending warped, unsound opinions. They put up with slackness and expect everyone to tolerate their almshouse thinking. In the Ghetto when you have nothing, you have the most friends and the minute you show signs of progress even your own family becomes your arch rivals. Everybody loves you until you become their competition. 

People unwilling to reconcile differences are dangerous sociopaths, who despite the damage  their aberrant behavior engenders find no fault in their destructive behavior will create problems regardless of their location. 

Those who support wrongdoers will surely become their victims. If you fail to tell a loved one when they are wrong then rest assure that you will one day be a victim of their lopsided thinking. Those who partake of slackness will be retributed tenfolds. 

I am not in any position to condemn another human being. Those of us who came from the gutters know that from time to time a piece of us will break off and float back to the floor from whence we came.

  Wealth can gray your eyes at the edges, money does not make you hover above human qualities, you are only a flawed being with much material gain. 

There is nothing that haunts these streets like ignorance and irrationalism.  These streets carry their own rules often quaint to those who live outside the zinc fence and stench of poverty.

I cannot say adequately that I understand the fashion of these rules, I can only imagine that they serve to somewhat moderate the turbulent climate of these streets. It is not within my capacity to cast judgement, I will try my best to understand, resist from condemning but there are notions that I will never accept or condone. 

Ten Signs the Jamaican man you dating is not as Single as he Claims he is

1. You cannot call him certain time a night.

2. You need an appointment to see him. You cannot just show up at his workplace or Home.

3. You do not know where he lives and probably have never met him anywhere where he frequents.

4. You do not know his friends or have never met any of his immeadiate family. His entire life is a mystery to you.

5. He cannot take you to sleep at his house because he lives with his parents.

6. He cannot sleep with you because he does not like to sleep elsehwere other than in his bed and he has to wake up early and get to work.

7. Never available for special holidays like christmas and valentines. Birthday's worst. He leaves the presents you buy him at your house because he cannot possible take them home.

8. Insist that you do not get pregnant despite telling you that he loves you and want to start a family with.

9. Has no problem with you having other sexual relations. He is not jealous of your new boy toy only insist that you save a slot for him. He is either not interested or is already committed.

10. He disappears for days at length. No phone call. No contact. Then reappears and spends weekend then vanishes against.

Woman Scorned: Excerpt from Book

Love is an elusive emotion. You can't help it. It just happens, unexpected, unbidden. It is like a disease, a drug additive, constant and obsessive. Our reaction to someone we like is fascinating, intricate and confusing. Our angst about love and relationship is tied to our fantasies and ideation of what being in love is and suppose to be like. 

We might not admit it but we all have a checklist in our head of what we are looking for in a partner. We want that other half that we believe completes us. It is this mode of thinking that opens a trap door for obsession and addiction to love or the idea of being in love. Love is a powerful

Drug. A lovelorn woman's lover is a drug addict looking for a next fix. The slightest comment, look or embrace triggers a state of euphoria sending doses of dopamine into the blood stream. 

This explains why it is very difficult almost unlikely for a woman crazily in love with a man to be able to resist the temptation to call him, to seek out that "cocaine like high" we all experience in a new relationship.

And like the literally drug addiction, a high is often followed by an abysmal low. The perverse magic and materiality of love is a timeless obsession since the beginning of our existence. It is this unmerited, offhand feeling that makes a simple quirk of the lips or upward tilt of the eyebrows unmistakably sensual. 

Love lends an inimitable pleasure to the deep baritone of a man's voice, a seductiveness to the power of his leg strides and a breathtaking aura to his presence. Love transforms the growls, snarls and grrrrrrr of a man's voice into the sexiest attribute. You either have it or you don't!!! 

Love transcends the simplest of gestures into something extraordinary. Eyes that once behold the world become Windows's to ones soul, limpid pools of pleasure, glances of indiscretions and light feathery touches sending tingles from skin to bone. Your entire body awakens, fluids rushing into places and sensational sounds emits from ones lips involuntarily. 

When you fall in love. You unknowingly place your happiness at the mercy of another's companionship. Those who say otherwise, have only skipped cross the raggedy terrains of love in a parachute and from the other side -beckon you to come across its steep landscape barefeet. 

Writing tips from Kurt Vonnegut

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
   
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Jamaicans intervening in brawls before they become violent

When I was a child, a young lady was stabbed and killed before my eyes. A confrontation escalated between two teenage girls in the presence of several of their peers and none of the spectators sought to defuse the argument but were standing in amusement taking in the scene like a night at a cinema. 

Their expressions did not change until one girl repeated landed stabs to the upper torso of the other. My father ran to the girl, tore his shirt off and wrapped her wounds so as to prevent the bleeding. He placed her drooping body, weak from exsanguination on his bicycle, took her to the police station and they carried her to the hospital where she died. I thought even at my pubescent age that if one of the friends had intervened instead of treating the altercation with amused indifference then that little girl would be alive today. 

It is not only unique to our culture where people make light of others' tragedies and find malicious satisfaction in the failure of others. We have become an insensitive people quite apparent in how our children react to acts of violence in school, I am referring to a video that when viral of the stabbing death of a teenage girl at Anchovy High School.  We see it in the policeman and cabby shooting video of this week where everyone was laughing when the cabby and the police officer were tumbling on the ground like torrential lovers but everyone got angry and outraged when the officer shot at the   Cab driver in order to stunt his advances. Why didn't they intervene before the matter at hand escalated? 

Are our lives so out of sync? Are we a fatalistic people with nothing to do with our short existence that we would find happiness and fulfillment watching others fail or die? What does that say about what we are teaching our children? We have allowed cable television to brainwash us into thinking that conflicts and violence are entertainment, death in these incidents reminds us that any disagreement, no matter how small can result in serious consequences. We cannot find amusement in violence. We are not going to sit aside and allow people to kill themselves over foolishness, we must learn better conflict resolution skills. Violence is not entertainment. We must be committed to changing our reactions to fights before they escalate. We must quash a quarrel before weapons are introduced, not fuel the fire with laughter and spectatorship.