The musings of a madman...

True Story©…                 Apparently, it has become a more obvious fact over the past 3.5ish years that I can be a bit of a nihilist.  I mean, like, MORE of a nihilist and somehow I am okay with that, like to the point where I have sharpened my ability to needle someone with the simplest of words without cursing or raising my voice, yet driving them to both. My favorite place to do this – as observed by my brother and cousins – is on the comment threads under a third involved party’s FaceBook post.  That third party usually knows me well enough to know when I am being serious, silly  or just fucking with someone.  The fun part is when they lay back and let it happen.                 Anyway, True Story© time… Scene 1: One day back in the winter, I was in an especially Trolly mood and logged into my favorite place to snare a victm.  I scrolled and happened upon the post of a long-time female friend of mine who happens to have nice mammary glands and pictures prove it.  Fr

True Story©…                 My level of disdain for people who fake wittiness is beyond measure.  Also, sometimes I have a hard time maintaining my temper in response to such things.  With that in mind, I fucking HATE hashtags for the sake of hashtagging.  I understand the use of them for discussions on a topic on social media, like last night’s debate or MLB playoffs games.  But cramming a sentence preceded by a pound sign under a post with no spacing because you thought it was witty is enough to send me into a rage.  Seeing them on an email, text message or even a fucking t-shirt makes it even worse still.                 One day last year, I decided that I’d had enough after a rough morning on The BookFace.  I was off work and home, and several consecutive posts contained the worthless hashtagging scheme and I was pushed into action. First, I spent one hour on Google, Wikipedia and everywhere those sites led me to learn who specifically it was who INVENTED the hashtag, then

True Story©… Last Thursday, I told y’all I quit… Wait, something else first. Now don’t go telling anyone this, but “True Story©” isn’t always true. Dead ass, only one has been 95% true thus far. Anyway, I have spent the last 7+ days frustratedly explaining to people whose old asses should have fucking retired 6-10 years ago how to use a set of pretty simple-to-use softwares in exchange for plenty enough money to have decent credit and a mortgage that doesn’t know what a late fee looks like. Fuck that… I didn’t quit my job, because Ava likes new shit as much as I do. What I DID do, however, was plan. My dude Jamal – a cat owner for most of the 15+ years we’ve been friends – got a dog last week. She is a Beagle from a rescue organization. What he had to shield from them was that he had bigger plans, including becoming the first proprietor of a Beagle fighting ring. They came to his house to make sure there were no signs of animal abuse or none of tha

True Story©… I quit. Yes, you read that right, I quit. No more IT Specialist, no more Forum Administrator, no more Outreach Program, I am shitting on all three jobs to chase my dreams. With a child, automobile maintenance, bills and a $74,000 mortgage balance in front of me, I quit. Starting Monday morning, I am going to be a rapper. I am going to be totally independent and sell to people outside of Wal Mart and various gas stations throughout the region, never mind the SIGNED artists I know who could put me right where I need to be. I want to do this shit organically. Look, there is no need to tell me “… but Phlip, you can’t rap!” because that is a fact that has not bothered to stop basically any member of the XXL Magazine freshman class since that has been a thing. Just know that when I approach you outside of that Wal Mart, be prepared for me to tell you ANYTHING it will take to get that $4 out of you… “yo, you like Nas, Jay-Z? Well I ‘m better than both of them, COMBINED even!” “lo

True story©… For all of my age-37 obsession with all things titties, some might be shocked to learn that I was 19 or 20 before I EVER set foot in a strip club. I tend to forget which it was due to early 1998 through late 2001 being a 3.5-year blur. To be totally honest, the first one wasn’t even an actual real strip club, it was an after-hours kickback that a then-coworker took me to one night after work in a pool hall in High Point that had either just closed for the night or was recently driven out of business. Total fucking disaster now that I look back on it. I ain’t naming who I went with because he is on my friends list and married now. Anyway, we stopped to cash out for some singles on the way there and when we arrive I’m like “dude, this isn’t a strip club” and being older than me, he assures me we were where we intended to be. We get in and a couple of his homies are already there, already drinking, I am like “where the fuck did liquor come from?” and next thing I know there i

True story®… Backstory: I was born in 1979, which lined up my attendance of elementary school directly with the second half of the 80s. For those of us who attended gradeschool in the 80s, we were faced with a program called D.A.R.E. from 4th-8th grades, aimed at preventing kids from placing themselves in compromising situations as it related to narcotics. Dead ass in the middle of the War On Drugs at the time, they spent more time where I lived on street drugs that people who looked like us might develop an appetite for: heroin and crack. One fatal flaw of the program – at least where I lived – is that the cops they sent to our schools were somewhere between being poorly trained and being insultingly dishonest. One of my favorite lies they told us is that drug dealers were terrible people and that they actually SOUGHT kids out to give – yes, GIVE – drugs to in order to get them to try them and get them hooked on drugs. Before I continue my story, let me explain how deeply flawed this

True story©… She has a bathroom full of natural hair care products. All kinds of olive oil and shea butter and other things that look like she pays a lot for them to be shipped to the house and aren’t available in stores. Well one night my stomach was misbehaving and my phone was dead, so the only thing I could do to pass the time was to look at and smell the various things on the little shelf in front of the throne (yes, boredom is THAT bad in the mind of a supervillain). Moisturizers, double moisturizers, super triple moisturizers, coil activators, curl activators, shampoos, conditioners, comb-through conditioners, leave in conditioners, EVERY damn thing you could imagine. My mind immediately went back to the ‘curl activator’ thing. Without tipping anyone to what I was up to, I decided to see if it would be ANYTHING like I imagined it would be so I waited until I got to work to test the theory that it would give me the LOOK of a late 80s/early 90s Los Angeles rapper with none of the

True story ... I'm walking to my car from Wal Mart and a dude jumps out of a maroon GMC Safari and puts a 12gauge to my head... "Where the f*ck you think you going, n**ga?!!?" "c'mon, man, I am just trying to get home to my little girl" "Daughter? So I guess you got a woman somewhere around too, huh?" "What?" "BITCH n***ga, I axed [sic] you a question!" "Yeah!" "you love her?" "of course!" "call her on the phone right now and say 'I love you bae' right now!" "dude" *cocks shotgun* "d-d-did I stutter, motherf*cker?!" "but 'bae' seriously my dude?" "you heard me, unless you wanna die out here in front of all of these people!" ... forced with the prospect of my funeral and using the word "bae," I am here to inform you all that my funeral will be on Monday. My mom has been left with instructions to pay off the ho

True story time... What some of you might know of me is that I have a sometimes obsessive-to-addictive personality. When I get into shit, I get ALL the way into it. What you may not know is that my first job was at a Winn Dixie on the way up to 11th grade in 1995 (more on why that matters in a minute). So I was in the 10th grade before I ever saw the movie Scarface, and I was immediately hooked. Talking like the characters, remembering whole lines and dialogs, copying mannerisms, etc... now that I think back on it, it was probably pretty damned annoying. One Tuesday after school early in the year, my sister took me to the store to pick up my check before going off to work herself. Lord knows WHERE my brother was and mama was at her second job until later in the evening. I walked to the Conoco on MLK and bought all the Goodies and BC powders they had (brand didn't even matter for what I was doing with it). I pulled the big chair from the living room to the kitchen table and opened A

(image mercilessly curbed from Wikipedia) Lego Dimensions: the most brilliant video game/toy idea in YEARS.  (AKA "shut up and take my money!") Imagine you had the ability to play a video game tying a bespoke story involving characters from The Simpsons, DC Universe, Ghostbusters, The Lego Movie, Scooby Doo and 8 other franchises that Lego has licensing for currently ALL AT ONCE.  Imagine further that this particular game would be expandable by purchasing Lego toys.  Well stop imagining, because that is PRECISELY what this is. It is a concept they have referred to as "toys-to-life," wherein you buy the game in a "Starter Pack" which contains a ton of toys already, and then you add onto the game with subsequent toys, which you can immediately add to the game. You buy a "Fun Pack" and you get the physical toy set and the pieces in that set are added to the game, characters and vehicles.  Buy a "Team Pack" and it adds characte