I AM AN EMOTIONAL WRECK TODAY

Lately I have not been in the best of moods. “No shyt Sherlock?!?”, you might say but this is different. Normally I am frustrated at the lack of common sense in the world or the blindness people go about their lives without questioning or even examining the “why” they do and or think about things. I haven’t been frustrated lately; I’ve just been in a mood of absolute “surrender”. I don’t like that feeling because I am a fighter. I am also cursed with having near-infinite patience with people. Where others would throw in the towel and write a person off, I think about an old sign I had in my cubical back when I started out in my first job. It was a picture of a little Black boy looking angry and it read, “I know GOD loves me because he don’t make no Junk.” That picture got me though a lot of (at that point in my life) tough times. So when I get to a point where I look at a situation and I say, “This is JUNK”, its over. I’m done. This is the end. FUQ IT!

I have been fighting through these feelings and it is beginning to give me those “stress feelings”. You know what those are, the sleeping, the eating, the headaches, the muscle cramps, the idle thoughts of ….., well you get the picture by now. So I decided to take a day off hoping that by doing that, I can re-align my thoughts with my feelings and salvage what I feel is a build up of JUNK.

Today was to be my total BLACKOUT of media and technology. No television, news, cell phone, Internet, ATM cards, just me and my mind. It didn’t last long. From the time I left the house I got hit with train delays, loud kids screaming and cursing at each other and people with Ipods blasting music, kids with their portable video games and homeless beggars. I finally thought I found a quite place so I sat in a café for some tea and then this French guy sat next to me and started talking like he was at the center of a concert, was using his Skype and surfing YouTube with his brown tooth girlfriend. On the other side of me, a Brokeback Asian Diva was making out with this String bean of a White kid who looked every bit of an “ecstasy” burnout, then these pre-op YOUNG Black kids come in and stand in the middle of the room just staring and laughing and giggling and pointing and I said, "that's it …. NO MORE"! All this was within the first hour of me leaving the house. SO I do the next best thing, I go to the movies.

I pack up my book, THEM, by Nathan McCall and note pad (for my creative juices) and head to the local theater and decide that this should be close enough to a ME time without too much of an interruption. Once I get to the theater I had a choice; The Bucket List (too Baby-boomy), 27 Dresses (can’t stand Katherine Heigl, even before she sabotage’s Isaiah Washington’s career on Grey’s Anatomy), Rambo (Stallone, give it a break you are OLD AS HAIL), First Sunday (too Ghetto and it sound too much like a Friday’s sequel), Mad Money (if it ain’t SET IT OFF, women robbing banks is corny) Untraceable (I was swearing off technology today) and Coverfield. Cloverfield it was.

So I sat down in the theater and chilled. I won’t go into details as to what is was about since some of you reading this may not have seen it yet BUT I came out feeling even worst then when I had gone in.

So you know I am already in a FUQ IT mood, well now you have a bunch of White Folk (and an East Indian who by the way is guilty by association) go through the whole film being MOVIE STUPID. You know what I mean, Danger is on the left and Freedom and Salvation is on the right .. What do they do? They go LEFT. Not only do they do it once but they do it throughout the WHOLE FREAKIN’ MOVIE! Not at one time did any of the Mofo’s make a good decision. Even when they were getting chased by (and you should know this by now even if you haven’t seen the movie) a GODZILLA MONSTER taller than skyscrapers, and you still go toward the DANGER. I am FRUSTRATED more!

What got me through the movie wasn’t the acting, or the special effects (which by the way were EXCELLENT), it was the fact that it brought back my personal experience with 9/11 in such a vivid way. So vivid that it opened up serious wounds that I thought I had closed or at least come to terms with.

For my friends and fans who don’t know, I worked in the Wall St district as well as the Worlds Trade Center. It was, back then, my responsibility to work with clients who had offices at the Worlds Trade Center and many of the trading groups what were located in the area. On that day, I was to be in the towers on the very floor that got hit by the first plane. The very fact that I had decided to call in late so I could “vote” in the New York State primaries that day and take my time going in that morning was ground level just as the events began. Instead of going in to work at my usual 6 AM, I am blessed to be here blogging with you today. Not only did I witness the destruction and the chaos of the day BUT I had to go back down to Ground Zero on 9/12 and had been there working in a Disaster Recover role for months there after. In Cloverfield, and I know the people involved in making this film, had to have used Ground Zero photos, peoples' accounts and stills because it was TOO REAL. It was so real that I felt a sense of emptiness. Not because I didn’t care but because over the past 7 years I have been drained of all emotions pertaining to that day. Much like the last tear shear for a loved one that had passed and you finally begin to realize that at some point you have to begin living again, even with a hole in your heart. I sat there, in the dark with my mind being pulled in so many directions. Watching the people in the film screaming and running confused and dazed, walking in shock. There was a scene where people were leaving the city over the Brooklyn Bridge in a mass exodus wondering “WHY” was this happening to them? That too was me on 9/11. I marched from lower Manhattan over 200 blocks uptown to Harlem, over dust and dirt, fires, crushed cars and trucks, helicopters and jets over head, parametics and fire engines, military guard and Red Cross workers. Many people watched from the safety of thier homes or work, few lived it and are still trying to get through each day. Then there are people who were so disconnected from the event that they pretend to have Patriotic emotions waving flags and posturing buttons. Sitting there in the movie theater, I wasn’t quite as ready for Cloverfield as I had thought.

I didn’t like the ending much. Not that I live for happy endings, LORD knows I pray for a few of those every now and then, what bothered me was my personal test of LOVE and what I would do in a similar situation as a Cloverfield. Prior to 9/11 I would have told you I would “run into a burning building to save the love of my life”. Today, life has given me pause. I know it sounds COLD but I am a different person now. Try standing at ground level and watching a building over 100 floors crumble and fall and you watching as people you know either trapped or jumping out of windows to their death come down with it. Imagine the people charged with saving those lives knowing that from ground level, the building IS going to come down BUT you go in hoping that your Guardian Angle is at your back protecting you. I knew standing ground level that the Worlds Trade Center buildings were coming down, and in my personal wisdom I moved away before they did. As I moved blocks away, they eventually came down and I became numb. I was numb for a long while. I found out today, I still am. Cloverfield reminded me of those feelings again.

That day a few things were confirmed for me. Some things changed but I do know that I am not Movie Stupid. I also know that I will not DIE for love. In my HEART I think I am suppose to LIVE for love, and if I had to die for love it should only be for GOD or in the name of GOD for MANKIND. In 9/11 or in Cloverfield, that did not happen and I ended up more wounded by my past and real horror than cured of my initial emotions of stating to the world, "FUQ IT!"

So what did I do after Cloverfield? I did what any respectable, po’ Black man would do. I snuck in to another movie. (Yeah I know that was real Ghetto but a Brotha paid $11.25) I walked into the Suspense film, UNTRACEABLE. It was cute. It was about a Crazy White boy killing White folk he didn’t like and having people on the Internet assisting him in doing the killing. NOW YOU KNOW, THIS IS WHAT I NEEDED FROM THE START.