When Reality Got Really Real

Despite my criminal neglect of this blog I still love it.  It really is what I thought it was [that's for you sports heads].  The Darkest Berry became my outlet for things that I found funny, irritating, outrageous, slimy, sneaky, dangerous, topical, interesting or some combination of all those things.  As you get older you don’t spend much time sitting around with your folks laying out all the ways you would improve the world or calling folks on their b*llsh*t.  Ahh, the good ole days… now I actually have sh*t I have to do… doesn’t leave a lot of idle time.  Enter the blog.  The perfect way to get stuff off your mind and chest… don’t have to sync schedules, my keyboard is always ready.  I know what you’re thinking, “If you are waxing all rhapsodic about the DB why don’t you ever write in this joint anymore!”  Well, that is a little complicated.

Actually, it’s not that complicated… over the last several months, I just didn’t feel like writing.  I started out posting  2 – 3 times a week.  Than I struggled to post once a week… this month, well, this is my only post.  I wondered what it was about for a minute.  I still love to write… throughout my life, in one form or another, I have put it on paper… short stories… newsletters… poetry… something… I’m a word dude… always have something to say and an opinion to offer.  This comes as news to no one who knows me.  I received a couple of thinly veiled questions about my lack of output, nothing really direct… “loved that joint you posted 2 months ago”… “I know you will have something to say about that in the blog”… “can’t wait for your next post!”  It’s kind of like in sports when someone is in a slump you don’t just go up and say, “What the hell is wrong with you?  Snap out of it!  You’re fallin’ off!”  Generally, you wait for the person to turn things around while letting them know you are there for support… so thank you to my not-so-subtle friends and family for your attempts.   

It’s not like there is a shortage of things to write about.  Between the Shoe Ninja Iraqi reporter [aka Sole Man aka Shoe Tang Clan], the post-election Repub pile-on of Palin, the socialist banking welfare plan, the improbable hip-hop cred of M.I.A. and Kanye convincing himself [us, not so much] that he can actually sing and write songs [I knew bad things would come of Sensual Seduction... damn you Snoop!!] -  oh, there was stuff to write about.  It finally hit me… it’s hard to muster the pithy, clever gene when you are grinding… even the sarcastic humor gene takes a holiday when you are trying to keep it together. 

I didn’t need CNN to tell me it is real in the field… MSNBC didn’t pull my coat that it’s hard on the boulevard… didn’t need The Star-Ledger to break the news that it ain’t a game right now… I peeped it on my own… in my bank account.  While I know the rest of the country is right there with me, there is no strength or comfort in these numbers.  A bruh is scuffling.  It’s not quite like being a real estate agent or bank executive right now, but it’s not the greatest time to be a marketer.  My big clients aren’t marketing anything and advertising even less, my medium-sized clients are treading water and my small clients aren’t remaining in business… it’s straight nasty out there.  With that as a backdrop I really didn’t feel like expounding on how AIG paid retention bonuses to cats who ran the company into the ground.  When you are full time paper chasin’ who cares about the fact that the Madoff scheme shows some of the richest people in the country are just richer not smarter than us [of course, if ol' Bernie was Black and everything else was the same he wouldn't have copped two nickels - can you say due diligence?]  I’m mean I was tempted to scream on the hypocrisy of Little Miss Funshine, Bristol Palin, being held up as the all-American [psuedo-conservative] vision of family life in the 2000’s… two unmarried chillbilly high school dropouts as parents - that’s a good thing now!… but not for you DaQuan and Temeka – you’re still a disgrace… can you tell I have still have some stuff pent up? 

But I head into ‘09 hopeful.  Gonna regroup and figure some new ways to skin this particular financial cat.  Got my 1oo-day plan filled with an economic stimulus plans to jumpstart my own little GDP.  On the other side of this recovery plan I expect to clear my head long enough to get back to something I enjoy in my leisure time [hell, I expect to get back to having leisure time] which is writing for the DB.  I feel good about the quality of posts in this blog and decided some time ago I wouldn’t write just for the sake of posting something [see Uhh... Yeah... Um...]. 

So me and my people are on the comeback in ‘09… it won’t happen overnight but it’s coming.   I gotta get off the grind long enough to get back to givin’ ’em hell… so stay tuned.