That's how it all starts

I'm on some third world country tip right now. The only thing missing is an unregistered six shooter tucked gently at the scrotum and M.I.A. bumping out the jeep while I drive the mean streets of my hood; throat splashed with after-shave and Cool Water.

Kn'amsaying!

I was eating Pho with some friends, using chop sticks and chicken sauce, laughing about life, chillin' in the orange throb of lamp light, air smelling like rain was coming, head feeling like my intoxication was coming down.

So when Jason broke out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one ... I was d'. I sparked that bad boy up, found out it was WAY easier to light and burned infinitely slower ... and while I sipped it and slurped at my soup ... the thought came to my brain lobes like rose petals in the wind:

Why am I even smoking this shiznit? But I already started, and it wasn't bad so why shouldn't I have finished it -- asid from the reasons why I shouldn't have finished it.

But then I smoked another cigarette much later in the night. And you know. I'm not ashamd at having smoked several substances in my life time. I don't consider them mistakes, though they were against the law. But it was an experential thing, I learned a lot of important things: mainly that substances are not intrinsically wrong.

And that is neither here not there. I smoked another cigarette. And it felt good. Now I won't smoke cigarettes for another few years.

But my sister made a great point:
That's how it starts.

"I can see what that turns into."

Edit: Typos make posts feel drunk. I was sober when I wrote this.

Nohomo?

The real nohomo:

"I'm going to say something that might have a chance as being construed as living an alternative lifestyle--that is a lifestyle that is not my own for I am straight--and allow me to further concretize this concept by adding this three syllabled disclaimer at the end, so that we may both acknowledge that perhaps we are breaking the socialized rules for masculinity without actually disrupting the flow of conversation."

The fake nohomo:

"I'm going to add a 'no' in front of any word that begins with homo, including but not limited to: homosapien, homoerectus, homogene, homonym, homophone, et cetera."

Why I don't use the real nohomo:

'cause I'm a grown ass man. What the hell would I look like feeling self-conscious about some young buck imposing his supressed homo-eroticism on my eating a hot dog.

... or standing with my shorts rolled up beneath a flower print bath-robe ...

Taking advantage of a marketing opportunity

Before.

When adding a video bar on a blog, it would link to the videos on whatever youtube channel you told the blog to do it to.

Now it's the same, except the options switch between the youtube channel you specified and random sheeyiznit that pops up.

So I wonder how effective this is. Because if I weren't me, and I were on a person's page and the videos that showed up were linking to youtube.com/matiostv I think that if I saw an afro of a smiling negro, I'd be more inclined to click it.

... or would I?

Nowadays it's hard to know any thing because things keep changing, people keep progressing, and even though some folks like to make it seem like we are on the last legs of our societal degradation ... the reality is ... we as homo sapes have been effed up to each other for a while.

The only difference these days is that we have nuclear bombs. And so ... we can't have big nuts any more as formal organizations, because once you've been identified, you will undoubtedly have a bomb dropped on you.

Imagine. If the ancient folks had nuclear bombs.

There would be no us.

So I commend ye Earthlings for realizing that democracy ... has democratized war ... so we should be a little more considerate. I'm d'.

Potpourri

That's a French ass word.

Sike.

Actually not sike. Shiznit. It is a French word.

College taught me that. Sike. No it didn't because I don't speak French. Or do I?

The truth about me:

I am a Haitian mulatto. My father is from France, my mother from Haiti. They met in the United States of America and had sexual intercourse which then produced them four children.

I speak both my mother's French and father's French, and people of my father's country don't like me to call my mother's country's language French.

But I do it any way. Even though none of this is true. Sacre bleu.

November 21, 1949

Today is my mommy's birthday.

And I Love mom-dukes! Which then makes me wonder about how people use the word "Love".

I may be in the hot-bed of anti-family values and liberal debauchery otherwise known as California, and even RIDE with these pot-smoking, wave surfing, gang culture revolutionizing, methamphetamine producing, ATV dirt dune jumping, South San Diegan drug trafficking, sun set watching, no rain seeing, bad driving homo sapiens.

But I have to cut my pluralism off in some places. Love is one of them.

'Cause when a boyfriend and a girlfriend ... or maybe even a boyfriend and a boyfriend ... or maybe even a girlfriend and a girlfriend ... or a girlfriend and a boyfriend -- which is not the same as a boyfriend and a girlfriend because they are different because kn'amsaying?

... when any one of these variations says they Love each other. I'm like ... kn'amsaying?

Matios' Definition of Love > Yours

But this isn't about me being right again. It's about my mommy.

She herniated disks, shat blood, had her brain all aneurized, herniated intestines, fell off ladders, woke up in the mornin' to concoct the most magnificent breakfastases in the world ...

And above all else raised my brethren and sister and myself to be who we are. And considering some conditions ... that's a trip.

My mommy taught me how to Love.

Sister Soldier

I was in the dining room with my dad, talking politics, arguing over a cold brew. My mom was watching t.v. in the living room, laughing at some insightful interview, and my dad and I kept going at it. He'd say I was crazy. I'd say he didn't know what he was talking about.

My cat was sitting on the printer because he weighs eighteen tons and could eat your dog for a noon snack.

Then my sister came running down the stairs with her hair up, earrings on, a little eye liner crisped in, her purse at her elbow and saying "Okay, I'll be right out," to the phone.

She said bye to me, bye to my dad, bye to my mom and my mom gave her a blessing, and as she was walking out my dad asked where she was going. She said where. Then he asked her what time she'd be back.

She said "Gkssaahahssahah, Matios doesn't have a curfew," and smiled and said "Bye Papi," and walked out. And I looked at my dad and he looked at me and we looked at my mom.

And then he said, "Helen, you have to know where your daughter's going, eh?"

And she said "Why? Even if I know where she is if something happens there's nothing I can do."

And I laughed. And he said "Matios, don't laugh. That's not funny."

And my mom said "Bah, shut up the both of you, I'm trying to watch my show."

Dayum. She goes to USC. She's studying brain science 'n shiznit. And she's involved in a Love triangle with a certain someone. Sike. But I if it happens, I called it.

Hard arteries and bubble gum cigarettes. Episode 6.

Alcohol should not be considered a gateway drug.

I say this because I was stealing cigarettes and smoking weed before I ever had enough alcohol to intoxicate my brain-lobes with.

Mommy wasn't dumb, she knew we childs were bad. She didn't want us finding out something else we couldn't already do just to do it, so the first time I asked to taste the drink she was drinking, she leaned the cup towards me and I burnt my mouth, chest and lungs with it.

"What's that," I asked her.
"Alcohol," she said.
"I'm never drinking that stuff again," I vowed.

But I didn't know I would be 11 one day. So 11ness came and we had a 6th grade field trip where Mommy gave me $20 for food and games. I had her make me a sandwich in case they didn't have anything I liked, and once I got there, I didn't touch one game.

I waited 'til school got out, got my stuff to spend the night at Josh's apartment, and convinced Ashley's older brother to buy us one 40 oz each if we bought one for him and his friend. He got us the beer and I didn't get any change.

It didn't matter. Miller Genuine Draft. High Life. You didn't even know they ever had 40's of that. But don't trip, I am generous with my knowledge.

Down goes a 40 into an 11 year old's body, and down a grassy hill he goes. The first thing I learned about drunkeness: if you ever get dizzy, the world won't stop spinning 'til you fall asleep.

I didn't know you could remedy the nausea by washing your face in the toilet yet.

Edit: Hang-overs were the second thing I learned about drinking.

Edit Part Deux: When I confessed to that in high school, my mom said she already knew too. Josh's neighbor saw and told her. We went to church together. What a snitch.

If I were a girl ...

Beyonce's latest single has really got me thinking on the meaning of life.

If she were a boy, she'd be a much better man to her woman than we men are. But that would mean she'd have to be a girl first and have been brainwashed by the feminist agenda.

Sike. Kind of. But. Being a boy ... clearly ... fifty-eight times doper than being a girl. Because if I were a girl there'd be an 80% chance that I'd wake up and be unhappy with a part of myself.

But since I'm a boy in the U.S., I wake up and decide whether or not I'm gonna take a shit before or after I shower. Then I eat two packets of oatmeal so I can make sure I'll have to ask myself the same question the next morning, when I have to go caca again.

So I'm glad I'm a boy, Beyonce Knowles. Or should I say Carter? Who am I to judge on whether or not one is married to another one.

But shit. AND. Erin. I don't know what it is about my brain, but I keep talking about women's self-esteem. I wonder why ...

Maybe it's 'cause I take it into consideration since I have a little sister. And I'm also effing skuurd to know what it might be like to have daughters. So it's just one of those things that floats up ... like "If you have daughters, this is what you're up against," ... and I keep finding reasons to not have kids 'cause there's a chance that 23rd chromosome might come out XX ...

and maybe that kills her chances of developing autism and color blindness but it still scares my body to sleep.

Hard arteries and bubble gum cigarettes. Episode 5.

Cigarettes should not be considered gateway drugs.

I say this because I was 8 when I was smoking them, and 8 alone. As soon as 4th grade was around the bend, I knew I needed a little conviction in my life, to find a passion somewhere, to leave my addictions behind me.

So I did. And then 5th grade happened. Some folks might expect that we kids didn't have strong wills, but nay ... they are mistaken I say. I never touched another cigarette until high school. And that was just 'cause I was drunk. It was an accident.

Sike. It was an excuse to talk to Her.

But I did smoke weed for the first time in fifth grade, which was a magical experience. 3 joints between Josh and I alone, and I don't know how many dub sacks brought into the mix by the people we were with.

We dove into the shrubbery at the river bottom where an abandoned couch sat right beneath a tree, the sun was setting in the West, sky-edges all sun-singed and colorful ... there was a little breeze ... and I remember seeing purple clouds for the first time.

Then I was high out of my mind. My atoms felt like they were ice-skating. But while my self-image was smeared and combobulating, I realized that the trees were shaved into rough shapes of dinosaurs.

Weed makes the brain wobbly, I knew that even then, so I wasn't sure if I was hallucinating. I just sat quietly, in a grey cloud of paranoia, feeling like Reptar was gonna bite the back of my head off.

Then every one else noticed dinosaur shapes too. It wasn't my mind playing tricks on me. The gardeners were just mean. No one ever saw those trees, we didn't know they were designed. So instead of sitting in their shade we ran for our lives.

Terrorize you with a toddler's imagination. That's what weed can do.

Hard arteries and bubble gum cigarettes. Episode 4.

Learning how to cuss properly was like learning that pornography was readily available for free on the inter-web. There was just ... excessive ... amounts of time ... dedicated to learning ... all its possible ... combinations.

Stop thinking.

Because it wasn't just one four-letter word here and another four letter word there. Profanity served as nouns and verbs and gerunds and transitional parts of speech ... it was like learning a way of expression that meant I'd have my ass kicked inside out if I got caught doing it. The challenge was part of the fun.

Like when your girlfriend texts you with an important question and you don't answer 'til right before you know she'll call.

The way to play this game--and more importantly, survive it--was to figure out the rules, which basically boiled down to: DON'T GET CAUGHT. And the way you didn't get caught was to know when and where to cuss.

After the first few times my lip was busted faster than I could know what happened, I came up with with a list to keep my face in tact at all hours.

Times and places to do it:
Playground at recess
On the way to or from school
When lighting a bottle on fire
When describing a woman's breasts


Times and places NOT to do it:
In class or around any adult.
On the way to, at, or on the way home from church.
Within a 10 mile radius of my mom or any one she knew.

Hard arteries and bubble gum cigarettes. Episode 3.

When most people think of third grade, they might think about learning cursive if someone didn't already teach them, or learning how to pronounce Canada, or hearing about the end of the world within the next four years.

But I, between the years of 1996 and 1997, could not have lived a life as these normal children ... for nay ... I was never meant to think on my childhood and pick a time I could say I was innocent.

I was stealing cigarettes from my dad.

And not 1 or 2 or 12, but 20. At a time. If it was only one box I stole. Because there were times where there'd be more of us, so we needed to smoke more, just to be bad. And as a result of habitually lighting things on fire, we'd already learned how to operate lighters.

So I never got caught snatching cancer sticks out of dad's carton on the top shelf of the closet ... or so I thought ... because when I confessed to my mommy that I used to steal them, she laughed and said "I know." And I thought ... what else does she know?

I haven't had a girlfriend since.

My dad, on the other hand ... when I told before leaving for college he chuckled and said "I always thought it was Adrian." That's my brother. I Love him to.

We're getting too sensitive I think

Hambre. Écouter. I couldn't find other translations so the point is not as dramatic. All words for hunger. But what exactly are we describing?

Most of us don't even know the biology of what goes on during hunger--and we don't have to--but we know we have it. Hambre and hunger and ecouter are words, symbols in our heads to describe this thing.

The same goes for birds, for flowers, for trees. You can know their names, you still won't know sheeyiznit about them. Some trees have roots you can mix with adobe to hold bricks together, some bark you can grind into a tea for nausea, some leaves you can use for dye.

Even if you didn't know the name of the tree, you'd know what it's good for.

So, honey, if I forget your name or accidentally call you by your best friend's ... isn't the fact that I know your favorite color is turquiose, and how you wanted to be the Black Power Ranger as a child, or how you and your mom call Sunflowers "Moonlight" because when you were four, you decided they reminded you more of night time?

Matios Emmanuel Berhe, February 24, 1444.
Letter to his you know who.

Experts on beauty

We're all pretty aware that one of the largest contributors to women's low self-esteem is the media. There's a certain model for beauty, and all things that don't fit into the tall, skinny, blue eyed, light skin sort of mold aren't pushed up as much.

So ... without really saying explicitly ... the message is that if you're not what they are then you're not attractive. And that would be okay if we didn't pay attention to it. But when statistics like 80% of women in the U.S., regardless of race, class, or age, wake up in the morning feel dissatisfied with a part of themselves ... it sort of feels like we are believing it.

And even that could be tolerable if we didn't have entire "systems" of beauty built around this false base. Suddenly you have experts on highlighting, on splashing on blush, on lightening, on darkening, how to pull off those colored contacts ... whatever else they talk about. Kn'amsaying. Effing. Modern day sorcerers casting evil spells on our sisters, mothers and exes.

They call themselves experts. But what do they know? To be an expert on beauty you have to know what beautiful things are in the first place. And clearly ... women are not.

Sike.

But some folks aren't experts at all.
Ask a cardiologist about a heart.
Ask Matios about Love.
We're experts at it.

Hard arteries and bubble gum cigarettes. Episode 2.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression and imply that blowing s*#! up in true American fashion was where our badness ended.

We didn't have much to over react to.

But we had the world around us, and all we really wanted was to fit in. So, being 8, and most of our older siblings ditching classes in high school to stay on campus and get caught, we caught wind of what is was like to be a few years older.

We didn't have the extra hormones or the menu of sensations to snap our spines out of alignment. Breasts, to us, were nothing too crazy. We just knew we didn't have them and had a vague idea of what they were for.

They kept babies quiet and made older men talk more.

Behold the inverse relationship between a male's age and his ability to keep his mouth shut in front of tetas. - Negrulous Cucurumbous, November 6th, 2008.

But we the children of South San Diego, eager to toss Old Spice Cocktails at big breasted women underhand, shattered this obvervation. Easily.

I'd meet my brothers' friends and say "Wow. You got some big ass titties. Nice to meet you."

Who knew we were before our time, getting trained in how to interact with women when we got to college. If we got to college.

Hard arteries and bubble-gum cigarettes. Episode 1.

The fact that I'm still alive is dope to me, because before we even graduated high school, my friends and I drove our bodies to the limit with substance abuse and practicing with the sprinters.

But to get a better understanding of the badness us Bebe's Kids were destroying the world with, I offer this anecdote humbly.

In the third grade, my peers and I used to take the bottles of Old Spice Aftershave from my bathroom, douse handfuls of toilet paper in it and light it on fire.

When that got old, we had a basic understanding of this fluid working like a fuel, and figured if there was a concentrated amount of it ... in a bottle, for instance, instead of on a handful of toilet paper ... it might explode.

So we took a handful of two-ply booty-wipers, twisted it into a fuse, doused it in after shave then fit it into the hole, lit it in the middle of the apartment parking lot and ran as fast as we could, as far away as we could.

Then, a hands on experiment on what happens when combustion goes wrong. An uncontrolled explosion.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

But we weren't dumb. People came stumbling out of their apartments, hopping over porch fences, fathers with cigarettes in one hand, the other hand holding back their child from running over.

To keep running would be to announce guilt. So we started walking towards the little crater in the tar asking people "What happened?" and "Why does it smell so good?"

Why men lie.

Sike. Men don't lie. I have never lied in my life. And I think it's dope how when a statement like "Men always lie," is made, we automatically assume that the statement--in fact--is not finished, and ACTUALLY ends in "... to women when in or about to get into relationships."

I care and I don't care about this. As a human being, to know that another human being was hurt emotionally/mentally/physically in any way is like ... kn'amsaying ... aching to the heart. Generally, we want every one to be happy.

But as a man who didn't lie the particular lie that the woman believed, I mean ... I have to ask myself what exactly that has to do with me. So in my mind while I'm thinking "Well, nothing ... 'cause I didn't do feces," the reality is:

Matios. Because you have a penis, you are automatically at least a little bit responsible for pain inflicted by other penis baring homosapiens.

And that's a trip, but as a man, I don't care--how could I? I'm at the intersection between a person's experience and their opinions about that experience. If in a woman's head she has decided that all men, including the gentlemanly Matios, is automatically guilty ... then ... what could or should I do about it?

I almost want to say prove her wrong. But for what? So I can get "caught" lying later?

"... well ... your sister and I were meeting to get your surprise birthday party together ... not have sexual intercourse." - Matios. Telling the truth for once.