Please Thank and Excuse

After 10 plus years of tracking me down, my state’s court system finally got me to fulfill my civic duty and perform jury duty. I’ve had co-workers and friends share their horror stories about being trapped in room all day with no food or water, ready to snap. I’ve also had a friend tell me how easy it is to meet women there because they’re lonely and bored. I didn’t know whether he was talking about jury duty or a funeral. I have another friend who met a woman there and spent enough time with her that we started calling her “jury duty”. Exaggerations from various people aside, I wasn’t too geeked up about the possibility of being bored to death.

They said to get there by 7:30. Being the anti-CP Time brother that I am I arrived at 7:15, only to find out that I could have arrived at 8:30 and no one would have cared. You owe me an extra hour of sleep State of Maryland! I was given a juror number and told that from now on that number would be my identification. The courthouse workers announced these names and numbers with the enthusiasm of a motor vehicle teller. This didn’t seem like time to ask if I could just go by Allweez. At 9:00 we were rounded up by number and order to march into the courtroom one by one. Once in the courtroom we were seated in order by number and told the nature of the case. Attempted Murder and Sexual Assault was the charge! Uh, I didn’t sign up for this is what I was thinking until I remembered that no one signed up for this, we just simply exercised our right to vote.

Next we were introduced to two opposing attorneys and the defendant himself. One of my favorite words in the dictionary is “crazy” and this n*gga, excuse me this brother looked CRAZY! He made Crazy Inside Out Camouflage man from the Super Bowl post look like Bryant Gumbel. The judge asked if anyone one had a reason why they wouldn’t be able to adhere to the rules of the court and about 10 people stood up to say that they followed the rules of Jehovah. (That damn Jay-Z almost had me write Jay-Hova) I have nothing against Jehovah Witnesses but after the 5th person started saying the laws of Jehovah, I was praying for a simple “ditto”. The judge then asked if anyone had been a victim or had family that had been a victim of a violent crime. Of course 90% of the court room stood up, including me. Since this is a sensitive topic for most people, the judge had people walk up to the bench and tell him, the two attorneys and the crazy looking defendant about their’s or their family member’s violent crime experience. I quickly realized that people were going to use this opportunity to get their 10 seconds of shine on. A couple of the female jurors treated the distance from their seat to the judge as their own personal model runway. The fellas did that slow stroll to the front basically to make sure they don’t trip in front of 75 people. I hit them with the same bop that I perfected in the 7th grade to get girls even though I only weighed 75 lbs and had huge glasses. All of the cool left my body though when I could feel the crazy defendant staring at me with his Samuel Jackson “Lakeview Terrace” eyes. I told the judge that a family member had been the victim of a sexual assault but that wouldn’t influence my ability to be apart of a fair trial. Both the prosecutor and the defense scribbled down notes and I was shown back to my seat. After they got rid of about 30 jurors, it was time to pick the actual 12. Since my juror number was in the 50’s, the 12 jurors were picked before my number was called. But then they started dropping jurors and adding new ones. By this time it was around 1:00 and I was starving and ready to go home and look at the spreads for the NBA games (I have gambling “habit”). Needless to say I was ready to get the hell out of there. When it came time for my number to be called, the prosecutor looked at me and said “please seat” your honor. The defense attorney looked at me and quickly said “please thank and excuse your honor”. WHAT? Who are you telling to thank and excuse!....Then I thought “Oh wait that means I get to go home”. I almost got blinded by the uneasy feeling of rejection. So George Jeffersoned my way out of there! All in all, it wasn’t as bad as advertised. I almost feel bad for earning a full day’s salary for it …….Almost.

Free Beer

I complained last week about going out to watch the Super Bowl, specifically sports bars. So what do I do? Since I’m a glutton for punishment, I go to a sports bar of course. I knew it would be weird night, when my friend Ryan (who’s one of my more militant friends) says he’s rooting for the Cardinals because his boss likes the Steelers. I say “yeah but the Steelers coach is black and he’d be only the 2nd black coach to win the Super Bowl”. He says “So what, I don’t want to hear my boss’s mouth at work”. Mind you, this is the same guy who would have loud arguments with his girlfriend about black history at 2 in the morning when we were roommates. There were plenty of Steelers fans at the bar and many of them had buzz cuts or faux mullets. It’s safe to say they weren’t rooting for the Steelers because of its black coach. I started to feel a little uncomfortable being one of only a few black faces there until about 5 minutes before the game started and that’s when the negroes started to pour in. I've never been more happy that people were on CP time in my life! Some of the brothers strolling in looked a little shady though, especially one dude wearing an inside out camouflage outfit and these brown Timberland’s that looked two sizes too big. And his braids were all over the place. Ryan turns and says “That dude looks crazy as sh*t”. At this point the dry hot wings that I ordered have arrived at the same time as Jennifer Hudson sings the national anthem. The waitress starts telling me how a girl that usually comes to the bar told her she’d be out of town this week because her sister is singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Our conversation went like this:

Waitress: I guess she’s talking about her.

Me: She said Jennifer Hudson is her sister?

Waitress: Yeah I guess.

Me: She’s from Chicago and her family was murder a couple of months ago….

Waitress: Noooooooo really? So I guess that girl was lying huh?

Me: Ummm yeah, there’s a pretty good chance she was…....

If the waitress hadn’t forgot napkins for my wings. I wouldn’t have believed that she didn’t know who Jennifer Hudson was. Because really, who forgets to bring napkins when a person is eating hot wings? I thought the first half of the game was semi entertaining and it looked like the Cardinals were going to take the lead until the Steelers returned an interception all the way back for a touchdown to end the half. That was the Kurt Warner I knew and hated when he was the quarterback for the Giants. He always found a way to cost us the game with a fumble or interception with his big stupid gloves that he wears on both hands. At this point I had a nice buzz going from my multiple Coronas so I didn’t mind Bruce Springsteen’s screaming too much. Plus he has a new found cool since performing for Obama at the inauguration. The rest of halftime was filled by me and Ryan discussing the highs and LOWS of married life. Fun times.

After a pretty boring 3rd quarter with only 3 points the whole quarter, the game heated back up in the 4th after the Cardinals stopped the Steelers on the goal line and then drove all the way down the field for a touchdown. Then Ryan decides he wants to act goofy and makes the fatal mistake of jumping up from the table and screaming yeaaahhhhh! Crazy Inside Out Camouflage man see’s him and says “Yeah son, that’s what I’m talking about. Who yall for, Who yall for?” He then proceeds to philosophize in a “I just got out of prison way” about the NFL and how they don’t like signing black players even though the league is 90% black. Meanwhile Ryan is on one side of me laughing and texting on his phone while I’m sitting right next to this guy listening to him talk nonsense for 15 straight minutes without me saying a word. Finally I notice a woman in a skimpy outfit walking around with Heinekens bottles on a tray and say “Yo they’re giving out free beer!” Crazy Inside Out Camouflage guy sprints after her and almost tackles her, which gave me time to switch my chair around so that there was another chair between me and crazy guy. By this time the Steelers were driving down the field for what would be there game winning score and place was going crazy. After downing a fee Heinekens myself and watching the last seconds tick off the game clock, we were ready to bounce. Leaving the bar we walked past C.I.O.C. guy while he was talking to a man who looked borderline homeless saying “Man they got free beer and hotdogs?”. We then made a mad dash for the parking lot.

Who Works on MLK Day?

Me that’s who! Instead of enjoying the NFL games that were on yesterday, I spent most the game thinking about coming in to work today. I watched the game at a local sports bar and at least 5 people said “what, you have to go to work tomorrow?” Even my friend that I was there with kept giving me a hard time saying “we can leave, I know you have to get up and go to work in the morning”. None of that was bad as when I first told my mother I had to work on Martin Luther King Day. She works in Human Resources so benefits and paid holidays are very important to her. Her initial reaction was “WHAT????????” Pretty much the same reaction as when I said my company only gives us 6 paid holidays, except this time she added a “Oh Hell No” for good measure. All of this feedback got me to thinking if I should be going in to work at all. Any way you look at it, my company is sending a message to its employees, specifically its minority employees that they’re not going to recognize a federal holiday honoring a man who has been credited with leading the civil rights movement in America and the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And its not like I work at McDonald’s or even with the metro transit system where I would need to be there to help other people get to work. No I work for a large corporation that contracts out to the federal government, meaning we’re working for people who are off today. So how can I show my dissatisfaction with this situation? I can just take the day off but with a 2 year old that goes to daycare I need all the vacation hours I can save. I can tell my company that they should pay me for the day because it is a federal holiday but I’m sure that conversation would end badly and with a 2 year old that goes to daycare I need all of the money I can earn. So I decided on going to work but not actually working, regardless if it’s something that I do everyday anyway. I know being here today is my fault for not taking the necessary steps in my career to ensure that I would be fully in charge of whether or not I had to work today, so I’ll take the “L” this year and celebrate in style next year…….sleeping.

Bed Wars with Junior

A serious point of contention between my wife and I recently has revolved around my son sleeping in our bed. At two years old he takes up his fair share of our queen sized mattress. His constant moving can be felt through out the night. “He’s just trying to get comfortable”, my wife says. I don’t think he’s trying to get comfortable, I think he’s trying to find new angles to kick me in my nuts! And that’s just on normal sleeping nights, this isn’t counting the nights when he’s having his ninja-fighting dreams, then he’s kicking me in the face like Adam Sandler in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan”. There have also been times when he starts running in place in the middle of the night, where he’s going I have no idea. Maybe he’s dreaming about picking up his toys that I scrape my feet on when I’m walking in the dark at night. Maybe not. I love how he finds a way to end up laying horizontal each night, no matter how many times I lay him back vertical. When he’s horizontal his favorite thing to do is put his feet on my back like it’s a coffee table. I move his feet off; he puts them back on, challenging my Daddy status. One day last week I decided to pull out my secret weapon: A heat seeking funk fart! He quickly pulled his little pajammied feet off me. Score one for the Daddy-Man! For my safety (and his), I can’t keep up the funk farting so I’m going to have to think of something else. I was thinking about putting on a giant Elmo mascot head and waking him up in the middle of the night so he would be too scared to sleep in our bedroom but that would just lead to more bad dreams and more running in place and more nut kicking. I was extremely tired last night and seconds from picking him up and placing him in his own bed in his room, when he put his arm around my neck and said “daddy” softly and went back to sleep. In my head I was thinking “You’re all right little man, you’re alright” (Like a bad 70’s black movie actor) That may have earned him another week or two in our bed but after that he’s going to his own damn bed!.............Sure