This Place is a Place like No Other Place

Old enough to remember ISPs like AOL, Compuserve, MSN were cutting-edge, and young enough to remember that I used said ISPs to develop some semblance of a cyber-social life. A moderately cool afternoon of tackle football with some neighborhood kids that I thought were my friends would conclude with a crying little brother after a hard tackle and me being threatened to be shot with a BB gun. I would flee the scene whilst upon my Flexor bike, arriving home in tears to inform my father of this betrayal, and he would arm himself with his personal .45 as we would both go back to the scene to retrieve my favorite jacket that I had left upon the grass.

The price of me being a child of black parents employed in law enforcement living in a predominantly white neighborhood; we had to do one of those "across the train tracks" kind of moves since my parents would be arresting and booking people they used to roll with as kids on the block and sometimes even family members like my uncles and cousins. To live near the crime like they did when they were kids would have been a conflict of interest. But living in a still-developing (my parents built a new house with my grandfather's inheritance), predominantly white neighborhood in the 90's South still had implications like the above narrative. With the exception of one family around the corner whose only child had palsy, to protect my brother and myself, we became an isolationist family.

So we spent a lot of time indoors, and my parents bought a Sega Genesis. The NES was nice, but the Genesis ironically the beginning of not just my love for video games but also my addiction of them. My dad would take my brother and me to Movie Gallery or Blockbuster every Friday where we would rent a game for the weekend. The three-day rental policy in those days trained me to be proficient in beating and mastering games quickly. Many of my classmates played video games, but back in those days, video games were something that most kids played casually. After all, the price of admission was $300 for a console, then $60+ for a cartridge-based game. Therefore, I could take to neither friends in the neighborhood (my good friend Adam almost exclusively played sports and wrestling games) nor at school for gaming discussion, so I looked toward the internet.

Not a good idea. Too many trolls and egomaniacs. Over the years, from Antagonist. Inc. to GameFaqs and NeoGaf and a few private boards, I could never felt like I could quite fit in.

Maybe that's because I asked Jesus Christ into my life in 2003. I spent some time looking for a form where Christians who are not reactionaries posing as conservatives hang out, and have yet to find any such place. Theologyweb strikes me as just a step above Stormfront, which is pretty bad because Stormfront is so bad it's almost satire while the Civics 101 board on Theology web is forreal. But from my experience, the entire internet seems to fancy itself as a passive-aggressive extension of r/Atheism. lol, "God," "Zombie Jesus," etc. My faith isn't a "just on the weekend" thing, but a daily thing. A lifestyle. We have been very involved with our churches and various ministries. We've been all in.

And by "we" I mean my family, my wife and kids. Indeed, when most people turn 21, they celebrate at a bar. I celebrated at the altar with my bride aged 20. Nine years later, we're still going strong while we have seen other marriages even younger than ours dissolve. Furthermore, the majority of our friends from HS/college are still single as our oldest child is about to turn nine. What this means for me is that I can't call up one of my buddies and ask them for advice when it comes to disagreements with the Mrs., or raising kids. I don't really have peers who understand the responsibilities and pressures of being "the man of the house."

I graduated from a HBCU (Historically Black College/University), Tuskegee University, where I acquired my "ghetto pass" after having attended a predominately white high school. Majoring in English and continuing on to graduate school at MSU for my Ph.D., I specialize in Af Am literature/culture/studies, a specialization that few outside of the field can appreciate, as typical comments such as "Why can't it just be American Studies?" completely miss the point.

Never finished the Ph.D. though. Walked away ABD after finishing a chapter of my dissertation.

I believe in my heart that only being in a literal war zone with my friends/family dying around me could produce more stress than being a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in the humanities.
You go in knowing that more people fail than succeed with that childlike mentality that YOU CAN DO ANYTHING IF YOU TRY or that those people's failures are an indictment upon their character rather than the infrastructure of education. Then you become indoctrinated [trained] to be an like an acolyte [scholar] in a cult [academia] where only 1 out of 200+ people can get into heaven [tenure track position]. Some get to ride on the comet, but most are left to choke on a nasty batch of Kool-Aid.

I am also a fan of comics and anime. I don't go to Comic Con or do Cosplay or any of that. I just enjoy a bit of both every now and then.

Been searching for years for a place to fit in being this much of a statistical anomaly, so I'm starting this blog to provide myself (and anyone stopping by) a place to write in catharsis.