Last night I had to go for a little ride and left the Sirius radio receiver in the apartment. Instead of going back in for it, I decided to dig through the collection of scratched up CDs in my car to find one that’ll play for me. I ended up pulling out ODB’s THE RETURN TO THE 36 CHAMBERS – an album I haven’t listened to in years.

I get to the sixth track – RAWHIDE – and ODB drops out some wisdom that I’ll be using as my motto for the road ahead. He says:

Tired of sitting on my fucking ass, niggas I know you run around with mad fuckin’ cash.
Who the fuck wanna be an MC if you can’t get paid to be a fuckin’ MC?

Replace “MC” with “publisher” and you got some words to live by. Albeit words that really don’t flow well with a beat behind them. Of course, ODB goes on to say:

I came out my momma’s pussy, I’m on welfare 26 years old and still on welfare
So I gotta get paid fully, whether it’s tru-fully or un-tru-fully

So, much like I do with the bible, I’ll pick and choose what ODB wisdom I take with me while publishing POSTCARDS.

_________

Thursday’s post about my new food shopping habits inspired Mark Fossen to write this in the comments section:

Once/If you have kids of your own, all those lovely organic goods in your grocery sack get replaced by hot dogs, mac 'n' cheese, and chicken nuggets. It'll go full cycle ...

I realized that I never disclosed mine and Robin’s horribly racist plan for our future. Now, whenever I tell this plan to anyone they think I’m joking. Please, make no mistake, this is the plan – this is what we’re going to do. This isn’t a joke.

Ok, we may or may not get married. I was kind of prepared to, she wants to finish grad school first and now I don’t want to anymore and she seems to agree. I’m sure that’ll change once we hit thirty but, for now, no marriage.

But we’ll still have kids. Three, actually – two adopted kids and one “real” child (what’s the PC term for the non-adopted kid?).

For the first kid – well, Robin and I love baseball. We fucking live baseball. Every season I order up the baseball season pass on cable and we just watch games all the time – doesn’t matter who is playing. Last year alone we went to eight different pro-stadiums. There is nothing that would make us more proud than having a kid who plays baseball professionally – so we’re adopting a Dominican.

Now, that may sound horrible but I’m allowed to make that stereotype because I’m Puerto Rican. And, as some of you may know, Puerto Ricans HATE Dominicans. Can’t stand them. We think they all smell and run through caves barefoot (whether or not there are caves in the Dominican Republic is irrelevant). I am genetically predisposed to hating Dominicans – my family reunion consists of a hundred Puerto Ricans making fun of the darkest family member by calling him Dominican. As kids, when we played tag, you weren’t “It”, you were “Dominican”.

Adopting a Dominican kid, even if we don’t enroll him in school but instead force him to play baseball twelve hours a day, would be considered an act of charity in my family. When he starts making that baseball paper we may even let him eat some pernil.

Now, if the Dominican kid doesn’t quite become the next David Ortiz, we really don’t want to support his ass – especially since we won’t be sending him to school. Last thing we want is some uneducated Dominican sitting around, stinking up the sofa and whistling at girls that walk by our window. Wearing some denim, Dominican flag shirt. So we’re going to adopt an Asian kid and make sure he’s real good at math – make sure he gets some cushy government job crunching numbers for the rest of his life. This way he can support his Dominican brother and Robin and I can focus our love and attention on our real kid.

Our real kid is going to be a healthy male because we already have the name picked out and because we don’t have the time to deal with a sickly kid – a kid is a novelty, not a job. Ty Rex Rodriguez – T. Rex for short. We’ll use our adopted kids as teaching tools to help shape T. Rex into a man – teach him valuable lessons like, “You’re lucky you’re not Dominican” and “The Asian kid’ll do your math homework for you if you twist his nipple.”

Best case scenario - one son’s a famous baseball players, one son’s a noble prize winning scientist, the other son has a hot wife I can hook-up with since I won’t be married. Worst case scenario has me going out for cigarettes and never coming back – admitting that the plan has failed – and never having to file for a divorce.

It’s a good plan.