For this 28 day writing challenge with Wes, as always, I post during my days instead of calendar days. My days operate at very different hours than calendar days. Last time I posted this late in my day, it was because I’d spent the whole night working. Tonight it was for the opposite reason. I’ve spent my day picking out the first pair of glasses I will ever wear, getting a haircut, running 8k, cooking dinner, drinking good rum, taking Wes’s advice to watch John Wick, eating too many chocolate chip cookies, and hoping that with Marvel in charge they get it right this time and cast Donald Glover as Spider-Man (can you imagine?!?). All in all, that’s a hell of a good day. I try never to let the good days pass without being grateful for them. To quote Kenneth Parcell, “We’ve eaten our share of rock soup and squirrel tail, but we’ve also known lean times.”
You have to enjoy the good days because there’s no guarantee you’ll ever have another.
Kanye note: I don’t closely read people’s opinions about Kanye West, aside from scrolling past them when they pop up on my Facebook feed. Mostly because I’m a supporter and no one is ever saying anything new about him, yet still they act like they are handing out gold nuggets of wisdom by pointing out his readily observable flaws. He is clearly an insecure, self-conscious man who has a pretty huge immature streak and some impulse control issues. The fact that people still write entire stories about him being nuts seems like digging up the dead horse you’ve already beaten, blending it into a smoothie, and force feeding it to your loved ones. We get it, he’s crazy and unpredictable, call me when he actually harms someone or does any real damage of any kind.
But what confuses me most is that no one ever seems to point out that his insane rants, his stage storming, his bizarre interjections on VH1 telethons are almost always on behalf of someone else. Now, for transparency’s sake, I still wouldn’t give a shit and would still think he was a brilliant force in music if he was just jumping up and down on stage because he lost an award, but he wasn’t. He was angry at what he perceived as unfairness toward others. In his mind, he was standing up for people he cared about. He wasn’t doing it well, or in a way that was helpful in those situations, but his most talked about insane moments were on behalf of Beyonce (twice), Pusha-T, and more importantly, the predominantly black city of American citizens who were without housing, food, or clean water after Katrina. I’m certainly not saying he’s entirely sane, but if I ever lose the rest of my mind, I sure hope that’s the kind of crazy I become.
