The beautiful black woman that you see pictured is my older sister, or should I say, my ‘suddah’. She encouraged me to just ‘Do the damn thang!’ when I first presented her with my idea of being a writer. All the worries I’ve had of writing being a novelty or just a ‘fad’ for me have long sinced passed away. I’m in it to win it, it doesn’t matter if I only sell 3 books and have only 2 visitors to my website, I’m committed to roll with the punches that fall. I used to worry about public opinion and how I would be accepted by the general audience reader. Would I be too ‘black’? Too Christian? Too freaky? Too crazy? Whatever doubts I had were completely erased after I read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life.
My sister gave me this book for my birthday this past year and it has really helped me focus
on the goals that I have before me. Just like she always has done, she is constantly looking out for my well being. Much like everyone else, I have had my times of self-doubt and confusion, ‘Why the hell am I here on this earth??’ The question that we ALL ask ourselves at some point in our life. When my time came to take this soul searching journey, it all started with a reflection of my life.
This wasn’t one moment or one night of introspection, this was a voyage that took several weeks of mulling over in my mind, praying to God fervently and just trying to figure out where I fit in in life. I was still going over all the possibilities of God’s purpose for me one day when I was driving home from work. I happened to take a route that I don’t normally take, just on a whim. Instead of taking the quicker 288 Highway route, I decided to turn off 610 on Scott and roll through the hood. As I was crossing the railroad tracks on Holmes Road, I noticed a man walking along the road with a full plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder. This particular figure stood out to me, because even at a distance, I recognized who this person was just by his gait. There are some people that you are so close too, that you can recognize them from the sound of their voice amongst a crowd, you can distinguish their laughter, the way they run and in this case, the way he walked.
I recognized this figure to be a close childhood friend of mine. A man who was 5 days younger than I was, a person who’s grandmother used to keep me and him everyday while our parents were at work. When all those other kids were eating Gerber baby food, my podna and I were being fed hot water cornbread with pot liquor poured on top. This same podna used to be one of my daily playmates in the hood that I grew up in on the Southside of Houston, Texas. When I walked out of my front door, all I had to do was look a few houses down the street and I could see the front of his house. We wrestled together, we boxed together, we played football, baseball, hotball, curb ball, strikeout, basketball, and a slew of other games, mischief and adventures that hard headed boys seem to get into. He was one of the defenders who gang tackled me the time I ended up on crutches with ligament damage. I was one of the first people to visit him after he got shot in the leg in high school. We go waaay back, farther than Similac.
When I stopped to pick him up, I had a smile on my face as I pulled up next to him. We hadn’t seen each other in several years, but ours is the kind of friendship that it wouldn’t matter if we hadn’t seen each other in 50 years, we’d still be glad to see each other. I was dismayed to hear that he had recently been released from prison.
“I got caught with some work D.”
I gave him a ride to where he needed to go and I slipped him a few dollars to help him along his way when I dropped him off. Prison is not a new thing to my reality. I have relatives that we used to visit in prison, I have a lot of homies that have been in there, are in there now or they’re soon to be headed back. Some are in for doing something stupid and getting caught, some are in because they’re committed life time criminals and they refuse to break out of their jailhouse mentality. The thing that bothered me the most about my podna going that direction, was because I realized how easily it could have been ME just released from Harris county , toting a plastic bag down Holmes Rd. There go I, but for the grace of God.
I wanted to save him, I wanted to grab him and help him climb out of the bucket of oppression that so many have fallen into. Low paying jobs are a consistent catalyst for all them soldiers out there trying to get into the game. Everybody wants to ball right now, but nobody wants to save and sacrifice to pay that price for freedom. And once you find yourself in that bucket of oppression, the first instinct is to do whateva it is you gotta do to get paid. Getting caught with ‘work’ on the Southside means that you were caught with felony possession of a controlled substance. The way the laws are written, you’re better off being caught with a full bird (kilo) of powder cocaine, rather than a couple of grams of crack rock. I didn’t even bother to ask about the specifics of his case, I was just glad to see him alive and healthy.
After I dropped him off and I was headed back home, I had a moment of clarity. I had the vivid image of Donald Goines hero in Black Gangsta being released from jail. I really admire the way brother Goines gets down for his on paper. For those that have never read any of Donald Goines works, you should check him out, the popular rapper Ludacris even makes mention of Goines work on his latest CD..
“So I picked up a book, by Donald Goines, on how to make it in this business, how to flip a few coins..’
I don’t think a writer can have a greater compliment, than having their words being the impetus of success for others. The key is being able to offer a voice that is informative, interesting and above all else, real.
I knew my experience in life had given me a diversity and richness of colorful people that I could speak the language of a lot of different folks. From those like my grandparents who still have a direct connection to those days of share cropping and working out in the fields from sunup to sundown, to those educated at the most prestigious universities in the world, I can communicate with just about anybody. There’s a lot of my family that were not able to finish grade school, because they had to work to help their family survive. It is this large family of uneducated folk that I use as a frequent voice, because in the end I know it has nothing to do with how flowery and elegant my words flow, it all comes down to making sure people can feel me.
Professional writers advised me to keep my day job, first time authors are up against extreme odds against success. The best route is to keep writing no matter what, keep loading ‘clips’ into my gat and be ready to release them when the opportunity arose. I knew God had blessed me to see a world that most of my homies from the hood know nothing about. All those hours I spent in my room unable to watch TV or go outside because I was on punishment, I usually spent reading. From Superfudge, Henry Huggins and Beezus and Ramona, to Then Again, Maybe I Won’t and Are you there God? It’s me Margaret, I was always enthralled to visit new and different worlds that reading afforded. I was more than ready to go through the back of that closet in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe that C.S. Lewis laid out in his Chronicles of Narnia. S.E. Hinton showed me that we all have to deal with being Outsiders of some sort. Twain left me rolling on the floor laughing with the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I was introduced to mysteries via Encyclopedia Brown and his short story mysteries with the answers in the back. Next came Fitzgerald and his entire Great Brain series. And just when I thought I had the skills to figure it all out, I was completely blown away by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. From his treatise on Deductive Reasoning, to all of the short story adventures and even the full length Hound of the Baskervilles, I was addicted to this drug of reading. It enriched me, it enlightened me, it allowed a hard headed boy from Sugarvalley to visit places around the world, throughout history past and future that released my mind and made me lower the blinders of personal experience that are so easy to shroud our thinking.
So great..I have a purpose in life, I’m going to write! But wait..uhh, Imean..what am I gonna write about? The biggest void I see in our society is the lost art of good parenting. Of all the things that are going wrong today, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, domestic violence all of these things can be traced back to how children are raised. Those kids who were never held accountable for their actions are the ones the most likely to be snatched up by the system. From personal hygiene, to well balanced diets, to solid work ethics, to value systems, so many of the kids today are completely lost. They focus on nice clothes, shoes, looking cool, being fly and they pay no heed to those REAL things that life requires for those who aspire to live a purpose driven life. There are some who DO have a purpose, but it so superficially laced by selfishness and greed that this drive and energy is not doing anything to help the community, only taking away.
When I first started posting, I had no idea if people would keep coming back to check me out, or if they would just think I was just some rambling lunatic. I set out to put out a product that was solid, yet light enough to keep the mood encouraging. The Recent Articles portion of this site has posts since December, but there are a lot more clips in the servinemup vault:
Happy Plates 7/7
The Game for a Lifetime 7/9
Closeness to Death 7/13
Save the Children 7/15
Moving Weight 7/17
Kobe 7/20
Liberation? 7/22
Fingerwaves 7/24
Dear Reader 7/26
Driving Ignant 7/29
Hard Heads 7/31
In God We Trust 8/2
Hittin Licks 8/5
Oiler Texan Connection 8/7
Adam&Eve Were Iraqis 8/9
Day to Day Grinding 8/12
The Last Major 8/14
Power 8/16
Candy Red Turns Heads 8/19
Deadbeats 8/21
Free Will 8/23
Prices @ the Pump 8/26
Please Leave a Message 8/28
Skillz 8/31
Dirty Pretty Things 9/2
Them Laws 9/4
Problems 9/6
Undercover Brothers 9/9
Fantasy Football Freaks 9/11
Soldiers In the Hood 9/14
Emergency Procedures 9/16
The Rules of Flirting 9/18
Vision 9/21
Screamers 9/23
TMI 9/25
Spicy 9/28
Keep Your Head Up 9/30
Looking Back on Doritos 10/2
Woo! Woo! 10/5
Yom Kippur 10/7
The Servinemup Family 10/9
The Good Fight 10/12
Superstars 10/14
Talents 10/16
Southside Math 10/19
Black Entertainers 10/21
Like Asa 10/23
Live Music 10/26
Good Citizens 10/28
Crazy is Relative 10/30
What it Do 11/2
Born With A Grip 11/4
Superfreaks 11/6
What do you want to Be 11/9
The Klumps 11/11
Janky 11/14
Real 11/17
Off the Wall 11/20
Baggage Check 11/23
Publicly Speaking 11/25
Thanksliving 11/29
Ramadan 11/30
From religion, to parenting, to diabetes, relationships, I’ve tried to keep offering an array of material in hopes of casting a larger net every time I dropped. If you don’t like what you see, just hold tight, it won’t be long until you see something you like! Servinemup only compromises a small portion of my weekly writing regimen. I’m still pushing clips to magazines, I’m still grinding daily on my novel, I’m still getting my marketing plan together, there’s always work to do. Whenever I get emails from new readers, or old friends who visit the site for the first time, I get that special feeling of connecting. Knowing that someone took the time out of their schedule to peep out my ‘work’ makes me feel very proud and appreciative.
I never intend to antagonize or alienate anyone, I welcome everybody to servinemup. If you see an error in my words or facts? Feel free to let me know, I’m not tripping. I’d rather be corrected than to spread false information. I’m a writer now and I live by my word, it’s all I have. So now you see my purpose and you can read how I get down for mine. Sign the guest book, send a topic request, pass the website along to someone you know who needs to read what I’m pushing. The one thing that other writers who have been in this game have taught me, is that it’s one thing to WRITE, but to be successful, you have to write and then push your product like a drug lord. I guess it’s a good thing I’m from the Southside of Houston, we know how to push work down here. Watch out for them pushers that’s pimpin pens with a purpose ya’ll…we’re dangerous.
