This No Tournament. This for Real.

I'm in today's New York Post

So after a nice poor man's meal of garlic chicken, red beans and rice and collard greens, I found myself at the 711 compound, home to my main man Richard Louissaint and his roommates, Ariann and DJ Contrasounds, the greatest "Ebony and Ivory" combo since Gibson and Glover.

I needed wi-fi and mine was down. Ariann was home. Chris and Rich were out at a Platinum Pied Pipers listening party. So I came through and took a proper trip to download city with season one of Dexter as my in-flight entertainment.

I have a feeling that these are (I'm praying so) that these last days of a certain phase, my penance for being a certain kind of hard-headed in matters of art and business. I saw so much of this coming so long ago: the plucking of hip-hop culture from the hands of its own media outlets, a shying away from in-depth articles in favor of celebrity fluff, a publishing community that at one time was the last safe bastion for smart people in this country dumbing it down because it's cheaper than actually working to market it's products. I saw it all, but my ego told me that there was no way in hell that it was going to affect me.

In a life filled with misadventures, I've always able to speed out of the blast area just before the doomsday explosion. But this time I got caught up in the details. I whined and complained (here and out in the world) for so long that I went from tortoise to hare. I got beat because I got lazy.

Whether I ever admitted it or not I always had this attitude that being talented was enough. My scripts didn't have to adhere to industry rules because the ideas were just too dope to be ignored. I didn't have to alter the way I structured my life because I'd never had to do that before.

It was the little choices, little decisions that slowly eroded the lead I had on so much of the competition. I needed to lose in order to see what it takes to be a winner in a brave new world that gives less of a fuck about the individual than it ever did before.

But the beauty of having the Creator and the orishas and one's ancestors directly involved in your life is that there are always second chances, always ways to salvage tough situations and spin them into gold. All you have to do is follow the rules.
But that's not always as easy as it sounds.

So as Ariann and I chopped it up about life, love and her crew's philosophy that every man goes into a category of "date", "fuck" or "marry" (I was happy to find out that I she classified me in the third slot), I had Haagen Daaz Rocky Road ice cream for the first time in my life (and felt a real ass for not doing it sooner). I watched Weeds and Mad Men at the crib without my cable subscription while I sipped on homemade blackberry iced tea and crafted yet another plot for world domination.

The winds of change are circles all around me, exfoliating what's left of the last time I died and making way for the peace and stacks of paper on the rise like this morning's sun. Out.