The musings of a madman...

       I was in Vietnam. No, seriously, I was IN Vietnam!   Read about it here and here , then come back and we will continue…        Welcome back.      The funniest of shit has happened since I have been home during this whole Rona situation… I sit and watch Maury every morning at 11 and then again every afternoon at 5, just to make sure people are still living more shittily than I am.      One day a couple of weeks ago, just as it was going off and my lunch break was beginning, my wife was away at a meeting at her school.   I threw on some shoes and set out to grab some Jamaican food for lunch, a Lyft stops in front of my house and blocks my departure. I hop out of the car prepared to throw hands in the street, and a guy jumps out of the car and yells “FATHER!!!”      Now, a perhaps few of you know that I spent some of my 20s doing some bald-head-hoe shit, so the fact that something like this has not happened by now lands somewhere between being a surprise and of validat

     So when I left you , I was king of a small village, if only because the people who lived there were enamored with my Americanized sense of humor.  It is worth mentioning that Muhammad Ali was dead right when he said “ain’t no Viet Cong ever called me n**ger!”      At home in America, I was a threat.  Too smart and too vocal for “them,” and too weird, too “them” for my own.  And best believe there weren’t enough Viet Congs to not call me that word back home.  Outside of the fact that most--…  fuck it, ALL of these guys had never even seen a black dude in their lives, they basically treated me like another dude.  Until, as I mentioned, they took my weirdness as commendable and made me their leader.      With all of that said, I didn’t wanna fuckin’ LEAVE the place!  They fed me first and best as their king.  As king, I didn’t have it in me to mistreat or even handle them unfairly at all and life inside of the village was never really that difficult.  The rest of the wor

     When I was a younger and slightly more sprightly man--…  Let me stop bullshitting, before I started drinking and fuckin’.  Back before I started drinking and fuckin’, I was drafted to fight for my country in the jungles of Vietnam. Look, I don’t wanna hear NONE of that “Phlip, you’re only 38” shit.  I was drafted to fight in Vietnam and that is the end of it.      Anyway… I was taken through MEPS and given a full once-over and physical, poked and prodded from every angle with no happy ending.  As I was finishing the last part of my evaluation, a loud siren sounded and I was rushed from the office wherein I was conversing with an entrance office and whisked into a van just outside of a door behind the desk we were in front of. Me: “Uhh…” Officer: “SHUT UP!” Me: “But--…” Officer: “But what?” Me: “But where the hell y’all taking me?” Officer: “You’ve been drafted.  You know that right?” Me: “Well yeah, so--…” Officer: “So we’ll take you wherever the fuck