Intelligent Discourse?

Where has it gone? Why has the water cooler conversation deteriorated to discussions about reality television, Lady Gaga and hockey fights? What do these things say about the direction our society is headed? Is this the sort of thing that lead to the downfall of the Romans?

I'm not here to endorse this web site but the image really resonates with me. Every time I'm find myself listening to to or involved in an asinine conversation, it makes me feel as though my soul is being stolen. New York City used to be home to interesting people who did interesting things, and clearly there are still people here who embody those characteristics, but it seems as though they are few and far between. I'm not suggesting that in order to live in NYC you need to be a card carrying member of MENSA but I am strongly suggesting you have read a book in the last few weeks, months, or even year. I am strongly suggesting that taking advantage of living in arguably the best city in the world, entails more than pub crawls on the Upper East Side.

NYC I'm begging you to stop dumbing yourself down in order to make yourself more palatable to the masses. In fact, I'm not begging, I'm demanding you find the edge you once had. I'm officially calling for a return to the glory days when the topic of the day had more to do with the art/music/fashion scene exploding out of downtown rather than the Real Housewives of New Jersey. I keep hearing that May 21, 2011 is doomsday. Lets not allow that prophecy to come true. Lets change fate to make May 21st become the day we as a city (as a nation even) bring back INTELLIGENT DISCOURSE!

Black Men Can't Jump

Black Men Can’t Jump

If you can’t walk the walk, talk the trash.

Most of the guys I associate with don’t stay off their couches long enough to engage in anything more strenuous than grabbing the occasional imported beer. I am not one of these men. I live and die to play basketball. Call me anytime, night or day, rain or shine, if you use a game of basketball as your bait consider me hooked. I don’t just show up either. I show up to play. If you happen to be watching courtside you just might be fooled. To put it mildly, I am an awful basketball player.
I may be coming down a bit hard on myself because basketball ability, like most things falls under the huge umbrella that is Einstein’s theory of relativity. Put me on a courts with a bunch of mentally challenged midgets and I’m a superstar, but with true ballers, not so much.
Whenever I play with white guys who don’t know me they automatically assume that because I’m a black man I must be basketball’s Second Coming, here to bring them to basketball’s promised land. This has got to be some undocumented sort of racism. Being thrown an alley-oop from center court, I’m expected to air it out like Lebron James, and jam it home. Unfortunately I have a hard time jumping over a piece of paper. You may be asking yourselves, “Why would this moron put up with such abuse? Why not choose another sport, like table tennis or Yahtzee?” Call me a self-loathing simpleton. The real reason I play is to excursive my verbal gymnastics.
What I lack in athleticism I more than make up for it in mouth. I’m not above saying something rude about your receding hairline, or poking fun about your vast waistline. These little quips are usually enough to take the average player out of his or her game. If theses tactics fail me, however, my next assault will be on his or masculinity, or her lack of femininity, with a comment about his affinity for pink pashminas and her love of the women’s locker room. I’ve been know to ask you to take it easy on me because I have damaged knees, only to blow by you seconds later on my way to the hoop. Of course, I usually blow the wide-open lay-up.
The point is even though I’ve already told you that I am probably the worst baller ever, with that said; I’m still better than you. So before you start suffering from a serious bout of a superiority complex, know that I’ll treat you like a redheaded stepchild burning at the beach or getting beaten at the beach. Or at the very least, I’ll say I will.

Fat Man's Burden

Fat Man’s Burden


What does it take to turn a well-adjusted, extremely handsome, rugged, 28 year old guy like me into a bulimic 17-year-old girl? Two words: malicious ex. I haven’t eaten for 16 days. Needles to say I’m starving and it’s all because of this bitch.
It all started at one of my ultra-hip friends’ birthday party. It’s at functions like these that
I feel that, in the spectrum of NYC nightlife, I just might matter. Great music, beautiful women everywhere, an abundance of party favors, the right amount of celebrity sightings. There was even food, what more could I ask for? Just then who should hove into view but a long-time ex. Worse, an ex who I knew bore a grudge. It started innocently enough, the usual bullshit exchanges, “Hey, how are you? I’m doing really well, great…great…” Just as I thought the worse was over, it happened. She got me. “Wow, you got big!” she said. That’s what she said. What I heard was, “Holy shit, you’re fat!” Time stopped. My jaw fell to the ground. My rapier wit failed me. I felt like a naked man in a church, an obese naked man in a church filled with super models.
Now anyone who has known me longer than 15 minutes knows that I am possibly the most vain person in all five boroughs. With just four words, this chick had rocked my world to its core. Sure I was a dirty rotten scoundrel for the brief period that we dated, but to hit me in the vanity like that was just cruel. Cruel and unreasonable. Doesn’t she understand the pressures we men face to conform physically?
The phrase “Adonis Complex” was coined by a group of Harvard and Brown researchers, who maintain that the ideal male physique is so sculpted and muscled and toned and lean that it’s nearly impossible for any guy to achieve. Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt have made us all feel like under developed schleps. Our fathers and their fathers before them certainly didn’t deal with these types of issues. I can’t, for the life of me imagine Sean Connery or Richard Roundtree ever sweating it out in a spin class. And since I consider myself to be a modern blend of those heroes, I don’t think I should have to sign up for any stupid aerobics classes. But the comfort foods that made me feel so at home in the months that followed September 11th now made me feel totally uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, unattractive and insecure.
My friends noticed. They said it looks as though someone had just walked over my grave. I told them I felt as if the whole party was whispering, “Damn! Brent packed on the pounds!” and “Shit! Eat a carrot, lard-ass! and “Stay the hell out of the kitchen, porky!” My friends dismissed it as just my imagination. They said I had misinterpreted her and what she really was saying was that I looked as though I had been pumping iron. You know, big! Bullshit! They were just being nice and I told them all to go to hell. How could they let this happen to me? The way I see it they should have been my first line of defense against packing on the pounds. Now I didn’t just feel not sexy, I felt totally betrayed and totally not sexy. If the shoe had been on the other foot and Sandra had gotten butchered at the hair salon, I would’ve done the right thing and something along the lines of, “ I hope you didn’t pay for that hair cut” or if Samantha was wearing a particularly heinous outfit, I would have said something like, “What, did you get dressed in the dark?” I would’ve been a true friend, unlike the bunch of Judas Iscariots that I associate with.
I admit that I do have some unresolved body and weight issues. Growing up and extremely overweight wise-ass I was used to being the (lard) butt of a lot of jokes. Since college, I’ve tried to turn myself into a lean mean fighting machine, so to find out the machine wasn’t as lean or as ready to fight, as I fondly imagined, was a total ass-burner. The closest thing I can equate it to is the pauper who suddenly becomes wealthy, dreads poverty much more so than the rich person who doesn’t know what it’s like to have been poor in the first place. I don’t want to go back. God, I don’t want to go back.
So I renewed my long-lapsed membership at my local health club. The genetically superior staff at the gym didn’t even have to hard sell me to re-up. I dropped that $1,000. on the counter like it was on fire. I’m actually going, as well. I’m on a strict diet of water, iceberg lettuce, and apples. By my estimates I’ll be back down to a svelte 170lbs., just in time for beach season and everything in the world will be as it should be.
Hopefully I won’t be running into any of my other disgruntled exes before then. I can’t take anymore of the emotional battering. And if, just if, I should be waylaid by one of them in some hip spot somewhere, I just pray she doesn’t bring up the money I liberated from her purse. Oh, did I mention the issues I have with my latent kleptomania?

Snow Sisters

She said she was in the Army reserves. Smoky bar. Low expectations, but it was definitely on. My friend confirmed that the petite one with the long brown hair had been giving me the eye for the better part of an hour. She nabbed me on my way to the bathroom and ended up buy me a drink. As I pulled on my comp Heineken, the getting to-know-you conversation drifted to into her reasons for joining the Army reserves.
"It's all about that loot, kid. Dollah-dollah bill y'all," she spilled out ebonically.
Foiled again, I thought as I began the longest round of bobbing and weaving in the history of pub pugilism. Though I wasn't looking for a soul mate, I had been caught-off guard by snow sister, a white girl trying to connect with me by dropping street slang into her otherwise suburban speech patterns. After finishing my drink, I excused myself to relieve an imaginary bladder condition. The crowd mercifully covered my dash for the door.
People are always talking about brothers going buck wild to score the white girl, but, in my recent experience, "Where the white women at?" has gotten a facelift. Caucasian concubines are turning the tables, a bunch of daddy's girls looking for a roll in the hay with a black guy to find out first hand if the myths are true, while fulfilling their parents' worst nightmare. The snow sister doesn't just have a case of jungle fever; she works hard to emulate the ghetto lifestyles depicted in hip-hop videos. What makes these projections even more tragi-comic is their charades-type quality where these women only adopt this behavior when talking to me.
Shari loved dancing with black guys. "You people have soooo much rhythm," she told me while her Star of David reflected the strobe light. Oyster Bay, born Cynthia received my compliment on her shoes by pointing out that not only were they Prada, but that they were, "straight buttah." Tatiana, who's family name has been in the social register for a century asked me for the 411 until I went Audi 5000, but not until the morning after. With the right combination of Maker's Mark and planetary alignment, I'll let the chips and G-strings fall where they may. I'm only human, and a man at that. Disposable relationships flourish regardless of race or their mixture, but when someone goes over the top in an effort to speak what they view as, "my language," it's hard to handle, much less take seriously. It's possible I expect too much, or maybe I'm just sensitive.
Juliet and I met in the small hours on a NYC holiday weekend, and the city had that empty feeling. Her Tommy Hilfiger jeans riding electrician style carefully displayed the waistband of her men’s boxer shorts. Her Fila sneakers suggested fat laces. Great mouth. The kind of pale skin that only French women have, she was 178th st via Paris. She ended her sentences in the ghetto suffix, "kid," as in "Yo, what up, kid?" or "pass the brie, kid." This would have been annoying if it weren't for the way she wrapped her Parisian accent around these words. We bonded in no particular way and ended up in the midst of the mandatory taxi grope on the way out to her Brooklyn Brownstone.
When you're in the shower anticipating the night ahead, this is the way you see it, and the way it so rarely plays out. This is the way it should be, I was thinking as I crossed the threshold to her apartment. It was all-great until she opened her bedroom door to reveal a shrine to the black male, with black, bald heads punctuating the room like periods. At least five magazine cut outs of Tyson Beckford. Seven more of Tupac Shakur. A whole wall dedicated to Taye Diggs, with a half a dozen of Tyrese Gibson thrown in for good measure. The repetition gave me vertigo. I felt like I had stepped into a cloning experiment.
I went through with the deed - I did pay for a cab, way out, in Brooklyn, after all - but I never felt like a bigger tool, I never felt so deeply that I didn't matter, especially when she wouldn't tell me her last name or give me her number. Not like I was even planning on calling, I was just being polite. I learned the hard way the difference between being a fantasy and a fetish object. Leaving her apt the next morning I imagined I saw a sign that read, " All Exits Are Final."
Don't misunderstand my meaning, ladies, if you are a product of that so-called environment, do yourself and me a huge favor and don't ever change. Everyone appreciates a person who is genuine. I'm not denigrating a style of speech, or saying something as facile as, "It's a black thing, and no one from Westchester has my permission to talk that way." People don't want to be thought of as simply an ethnic curiosity to round out a sexual check off list. All I'm asking is that you find out who I am before you start talking to your idea of me. Who knows, if you stick around long enough, you'll find out what a crass, sarcastic bastard I really am. Ya heard?