The numbers for May are in and I would be remiss if I didn’t step back and take a minute to say thank you to a lot of special people out there who have helped me in my efforts of making my dream a reality. It’s a different feeling stepping out into that ocean of the internet, walking that plank time and time again to bare your blood, sweat and tears to steadily growing audience. All I gotta tell ya’ll, is to be very careful what you pray for. Because when the Lord starts breaking you off a piece of that blessing, it can be so good to you that you almost feel overwhelmed. My website statitstics track ‘unique visits’ every month. Every computer has it’s own IP Address associated with it, so every time you log on to servinemup, the service can track the address. That’s why after you visit a lot of websites, you end up getting a lot of spam emails after the fact, because they tracked the email address associated with that IP address. Visit one of those XXX sites, and you’ll likely to start getting a lot of those Viagra or Kinky Sex Online emails. (ahem) at least..that’s what some of my friends tell me.
But anyway..I don’t do that. The only emails I send out are to people who have signed up for the newsletter. (Click Here to sign up for the Servinemup Newsletter!!) This is a website that started with an initial email mailout (unsolicited to my family and friends) of about 100 folks. And in less than 2 years time, it’s grown to an audience approaching 2,500 unique IP addresses every month. I know this can be a bit eschewed, since some people in the same house use the same computer, and some people go to the library and log on different computers everytime, so I think it pretty much averages out to being a fairly accurate number when judging audience size.
I first started blogging almost two years ago, but I’m still a moonlighting writer, full time husband and father of two, plying my trade as a technical sales engineer in the manufacturing industry here in George Bush’s America 2005. I don’t talk a lot about my daytime job, because that’s just what it is..a job. My homeboy Yuk from 3rd Ward always says that a job “ain’t nothing but another name for ‘Just-Over-Broke’.” I didn’t realize just how dire my situation was until I was talking to my grandmother one day…
Baby…(in case you didn’t know, it feels GOOD when yo grandma calls you ‘baby’, no matter how old you are)..do you like yo job?
Uhhh..yes ma’am..I like it just fine.
We were sitting on her front porch just watching the cars go by and talking.
What do you like about it?
Well..I get a chance to travel to different places and see different things.
I know! Everytime I talk to yo momma or yo daddy, they telling me about how you gone out of town to Arixona or California and waay on out up there in New Yawk and thangs. You don’t be scared to be flying up in them airplanes?
No ma’am..flying doesn’t bother me too much..I just don’t like being out of town as much now that I’m married with kids. But fortunately I’m not on the road TOO many nights...and our main office is close to my house
Yeah..that is a blessing. But you still didn’t tell me that you like yo job.
Yes I did..it challenges my mind because I still have to use a lot of the engineering principles and training that I learned in college..and it’s close to home…and I get to travel..and I make good enough money where my wife doesn’t have to work.
Well let me ask you this here…when you wake up in the morning..do you look forward to going there?
That one stumped me. I couldn’t lie to my grandmother and it made me realize that I had been lying to myself. Because there are many mornings when I wake up and I almost start getting a headache just because I know I have to go to work and deal with…’those people’. My job affords me the opportunity of delving into society on several different circles of existence.
On one hand I deal with the money men. The money men are the people who have control of the resources and they’re looking to do business via product or service with our company. We’re a privately owned company working in the public sector and we ship our products worldwide. So wherever someone needs to have some water moved and they have the money to make it happen, I’m the guy who examines their needs, designs a high quality product that will meet their needs, I tell them what they’ll need to install it, how much power is required to run it and how much it will cost. These are the guys who are making decisions or directly advising the person who does make the final decisions. You gotta be ready to get out there and ball with other players, no matter what color they are, if you’re going to be a real player in the game.
And on the level that I really enjoy the most, is dealing with the people who actually use and operate the product. That person who has to make sure that water is being delivered to where it’s supposed to go everyday. Usually these are working class type folks who are doing a job to support their family just like the people I grew up with on the Southside, and they come in all colors too.
Product..meet Money..Money meet Product..it’s a business thang mane. And when you deal in an industry that’s centered around the earth’s most valuable resource..potable water, it will open your eyes to a whole different level of the game that’s going on in our world. Everybody is talking about how bad the economy is, but just like there’s a lot of homes being foreclosed on and a lot of retirees that have to go back to work to survive, there’s also a booming population of millionaires around the world. And when you consider what it takes to become one of those aforementioned..’money men’, you can’t help but remember the chorus of Wu Tang’s hip hop classic 'Cream'...
"Cash rules everything around me (CREAM!!)..gotta get the money
Dolla Dolla bills ya’ll!!!"
I’m a 70’s child..but I’m on the end that’s right next to the 60’s, so a lot of people my age are very familiar with Michael Douglas’ ‘Greed is Good’ soliloquoy in the movie Wall Street. We’re at a place in our society where that mode of thinking is more the norm, than it is the exception. You see it everyday in the news..high level executive is convicted of pilfering the pension fund or caught with fraud accounting practices. That’s that greed right there ya’ll..’gotta get the money’.
So after my grandma and I had talked, I was thinking that I needed to firm up my professional goals. My job wasn’t perfect, but it was just comfortable enough that I wasn’t ready to get back out there on the track and start looking for another one. I glanced through the want ads a couple of times, but I never saw anything that really grabbed my attention and made me think, “Oooh! I want to do THAT!!”
My problem started in college. You have to declare your major at some point and I started thumbing through the curriculum guide and wondering how the hell was a 17 year old supposed to know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life?? Being a doctor would have been cool, except for the fact that I sometimes get queasy at the sight of blood, especially my own. Perry Mason made being a lawyer look cool, but it looked like they had to read a lot of those biggo books and memorize stuff and my brain doesn’t work like that, I can barely remember what I did the day before, let alone some case back in 1936. I knew I wanted to do something that was math related..physics was a bit too weird..I’m stupid in chemistry..computer science was attractive, but I wanted to have a bigger scope of the real world. So I’m browsing through one of those sheets where they rank the highest paying salaries for various degrees and I come across PetroChemical Engineers #1 starting salary…let’s see..petrochemical..that’s them oil boys..nawww..doing that kind of stuff will make you end up working in a foreign country around a bunch of dudes named Khalib..plus you gotta know chemistry and I’m stupid in chemistry..hmm..Electrical Engineering..that sounds like a good one and it’s towards the top of the list. So I declared my major, earned my degree and so I went.
Not too long after I had the sobering conversation with my grandmother, I went to a business breakfast and seminar with some co-workers, and I got to meet and then hear this dude named Zig Ziegler deliver a motivational presentation. What struck me as odd, was that this guy was in a business environment, around all these money men and he was giving a motivational speech, but yet he was quoting Bible scriptures frequently and wasn’t nobody tripping. Cuz usually when somebody starts talking about the Bible in a public place that’s not a church service, SOMEbody starts tripping..but no one did there that day in Hopheinz Pavilion. Everyone was tuned in to Zig and he was DYNAMIC!! The part that really stuck out to me was when he started talking about quality vs quantity of life.
“You’ll really start focusing on the quality of life, when you stop trying to find the job that will allow you to retire the quickest, because that’s a person that’s wrapped up in quantity. What you really need to focus on, is finding the job that you won’t ever want to retire from. The job that you will want to keep on doing until you can’t do it any more.”
That hit home right there. Engineering? It’s cool and all..but I don’t jump out of bed thinking, ‘Yeaaahhhh!! It’s time to go..engineer.’ How the hell did I get so off course?? Was I even paying attention?? So I’m going through the day really searching WHAT it was that I wanted to do..what was MY thing??? By that time, my wife and I had already been going through, and I had found that a lot of times, whenever I was feeling pent up or needed to vent, when I sat down and started typing my feelings and thoughts out ..it soothed me. After the anger had gone, the writing jones was still there. So I started writing in a journal from time to time, but never anything that I shared with anybody.
But just to show you how the Lord truly works, I got a call at work one day from some white lady in California who had an opening for a technical article in her magazine and she wanted to know if our company had anything we wanted to submit for them to publish. So I wrote an article about water cost-energy savings and they published it. So I started writing technical articles and white papers for various publications throughout the industry. All the while I’m still writing on my own little notepad in my spare time.
I play fantasy football (read Fantasy Football Freaks if you don’t know what it is) and one season our league graduated to an internet based service that allowed us to customize our webpage settings to display stats, schedules, standings, transactions and articles. So just on a whim I started writing articles for our league for the other 11 members to read when they logged on to our fantasy league’s website (wazzup Ultimate Players Club!). Right away them n’gaz started trippin..
"Mane…you the wildest n’ga I know!! That sh’t you wrote cappin on n’gaz AND they squads was HILARIOUS!!! You need to keep writing them articles..cuz they be FRESH!!"
It was kinda a big step for me..because when you’re used to writing behind the scenes in your own world, then you step out into a more public view for others to see..it’s a very vulnerable experience. But by then I was a writing junkie. I started visualizing thoughts of getting published and becoming a professional writer. So all these things started coming together all about the same time…going through..writing..Zig..quality of life..the thing you want to do until you can’t do it anymore..PING!!!! the light bulb went on!! This writing thing was undoubtedly my way to freedom. Maybe I could be the next starving writer turned best selling author to hit the streets? SUPER D!!!!!! Able to write spellbinding novels with a single stroke! Strong enough to push out a book every month!!
So I started researching what it meant to be a published writer. I knew my grammar skills were of the countrified ebonic dialect with a Texas twang, but I’ll be a hood writer..like my boy Donald Goines..keeping it real to the street. Representin! SOUTHSIDE!! Hmph.
Now this is where it REALLY started to get weird..in less than a 2 year time frame, my wife and I had over 10 funerals of family or friends that we attended. I’d been to funerals before, but I have NEVER had the feelings that I felt at my grandfather’s funeral. His was the one that really set it off and lit a fuse in me. Because as I sat on that front row with the other pallbearers at the funeral, a real strange thing started to happen to me. As I was sitting there..looking in that casket..at the empty shell of one of the most strong willed and hard working men that I had ever met in my life..and I thought about all the experiences that I had with him, my Big Daddy, I suddenly had a visual image of myself laying in that casket one day..and it almost felt like the grave pulled me down into it’s depths and I was surrounded in darkness. But just as I started to feel like I was actually fading away..I felt myself being lifted, up to a higher place. It was almost as if God Himself had scooped me up in His arms and carried me into the Light..and by the time I could open my eyes and see what was going on, I found myself crying tears of an unspeakable joy and then it kinda snapped away from the vision, but the tears were still real and I still felt that unspeakable joy. I didn’t see any hands around me, but I did hear my cousin Jamar at the microphone singing a solo a cappalla rendition of ‘My Soul’s Been Anchored In the Lord’ and by the time that I realized that I really was in the land of the living, I looked around and noticed that I wasn’t the only one who must’ve had felt what I just felt..because everyone that I saw in that packed church was crying too. They say that the Spirit moves in mysterious ways, but this time we all knew that He was moving through and we could feel it through Jamar’s voice.
It was that experience that woke me up to realize that this life is but a fleeting memory. And since that final date is already notched on ALL of our calendars…I knew I wanted to leave some kind of mark. I wanted to put in my work on earth so that the Lord would be able to look at me and say, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.’ Ya feel me? It’s kinda like how the rapper Juvenile says, “I need Him in my life, I want Him in my life, I’m go keep Him in my life” except I’m not talking about buying cars or clothes, I’m talking about anchoring my soul in the Lord.
So from there I got on my hustle, cuz I could clearly see the task that lay before me. I had to write things that will help people, I had to write things that would motivate people, I had to write things to encourage people, I had to let them fools know, “Jesus is real mane..ya’ll n’gaz sitting around here caught up in a bunch of trivial sh’t like money, cars and clothes..ain’t NONE of that go do NUTHIN for you on the other side mane!!”
I discovered how hard it is for 1st time authors to get picked up by a big name publisher, so I decided to do my own thang, at least for the first few books and self publish. I ended up taking a writing class and researching how to start my own publishing company. After awhile I realized to hit big in the publishing world, I was gonna need some help. There’s thousands of outstanding writers that the world has never heard of because they didn’t have the right promotion or consistent distribution channels. I could write, but I needed someone to handle the distribution..get it out there..push it on the block. Move that weight and put it in them fools face! I needed another weapon to add to the arsenal.
I happened to start spending more and more time with Curvey, because he’s one of the few men my age I know that is IN the Word through diligent study. We both grew up attending the same church. His path to becoming a man that is in to the Word is a bit different than mine. Instead of attending college for 4 years, he ended up doing over 7 ½ years locked up in prison. That REAL state education.
Some people trip on how crazy it sounds that so many of my fellow church members and homies from the hood are locked up in prison or dead, but unfortunately, it’s a rather common occurrence for young black men from the Southside of Houston, Texas. Just at our modest sized church alone, there is a ridiculously high percentage of young men who have fallen away to a violent death or have felony convictions. So I was gearing toward publishing products that would be good for the hood. My kinfolk.
When I wrote Dr. Chickenhead, that whole experience of mentoring those young black boys opened my eyes to the game. I didn’t fault the kids for their materialistic value system, instead I think the point of correction should start with their parents. So I knew I needed to write for a young adult audience, those young parents and parents to be. I knew that there is nothing more fulfilling, motivating and strengthening for someone to read than the Bible, but the problem was, most folks don’t read and study their Bible
It’s too boring! Reading the Bible makes me sleepy!!
Even most of the folks who go to church only read the Bible IN church, they don’t study it at home. So if my words could entertain this attention deficit, video game generation of young parents and get them to put all that bullsh’t to the side and focus on what’s real. If I could write words that would prick their heart to spend more time with their kids, and to get them into that Word so that they could train their children up in the way that they should go..I’d fulfill my mission.
Me and Curvey started talking about a lot of different things..’chopping it up’ like we say on the Southside. And after I told him what my vision was and the plan of attack that the Lord had placed on my heart, his eyes lit up..
You know what D? You hood enough that the street n’gaz go feel ya and respect ya and you smart enough to make even them college educated n’gaz start tripping. This book thang you talking about can hit a lick FO-REAL. Even if we could start selling books to penitientiary libraries we’ll make a biggo lick..especially when they see it’s some Christian motivational type material at the core.
Yeah..but I don’t want to be confined to the ‘Christian’ section of the bookstore, cuz then most regular n’gaz who need to learn about the Lord would never read it.
That’s true. Well, just keep uplifting His name, but just write it in the tongue of the street…hood n’gaz gotta hear the Word too mane. (laughing) You go have them church folks trippin and all mad and stuff..but as long as you keep it real to the Word, they won’t be able to fade you.
I need your help Curvey.
What do you need me to do?
I need you to distribute the goods. I’m not trying to run down there with one book and get one soul, my goal is to fill bookshelves before it’s my time to go.
You ain’t go do that with ONE book..but if you keep banging them n’gaz upside their head with a new look but the same foundation in the Lord every time you drop? You can throw a big net then.
You down to get these packs out on the block?
(laughing) Am I down? N’ga..we can put a product in the hood that will help our folks and spread the Word AND make money?? N’ga I’m IN!!! And I ain’t even gotta worry about the laws taking me to jail if they catch me moving THIS weight!!
So I’d like to introduce everybody to the distribution manager for Servinemup Ink, Tommy Curvey. Anybody who is interested in being setup as a local distributor in your city, town or hood? Holla at Curvey. Who knows, it could be your chance to help serve.
tcurvey@servinemup.com
(713) 731-4737 (shop)
In the meantime..you’ll still see me out on the block pushing my blog. But if you ever wonder why I don’t post as much as I used to, then Lil Keke’s song “Pyrex Shaking” can tell you why..
I’m in the kitchen with the pyrex shakin’
I’m bout my game, ain’t got time for no fakin’
I might be rapping, but I’m still brick breakin’ (Fa-Sho!)
Cuz ain’t no limit to this money I be makin’.
I got to say wazzup to all my classmates, all the way from Pickwickian in South Park on MLK, to Poe Elementary, Lanier Middle School (Weeee are the Pups!!!), thanks Dr. Erika Gentry, your support means a lot to me, big thanks to my boy Joe Touriac the 3rd Ward Thriller for hooking me up, the Fellaz and all the other alumni of Booker T. Washington (I’m soooo glad!!)..thanks for helping me push my work. I gotta say what’s up to the Stanford University alumni family and especially all my Bruh’s who made me realize that I’m not the only crazy n’ga that knows how to perform well on standardized test. National Society of Black Engineers, Praire View A&M University, Texas Southern University and all the other college crews that are getting on and checking out servinemup.com on their internet browsers, I gotta say what’s up to my golf crew, T. Coop, my boy Carter, Hawk (thanks for putting me down with Pastor Rudy and the rest of St. John’s downtown), Big Lou, DC, B. Douglas and all of Abbeville, Louisiana..I gotta say what’s up to Mob-town and my dog HAWKEYE and all of those real players down there in Mobile, Alabama…you know, I’m kinda feeling like Stevie Wonder at an awards show..but I’m just thankful for ya’ll showing up and supporting a brother. I appreciate ALL of ya’ll kinfolk..FO-REAL.Please continue to share the link with others in your email groups, please continue to support this sincere effort of a brother getting down for his purpose and above all, please remember to pray for D. Washington and Servinemup Ink. This ain’t the finish line, the battle has just begun and ya’ll already know what set I’m throwing up. Southside keep they mouth wide mane...we servin' down here.
