I know it's long over, but I'm still having to deal with it..

TOMS shoes bugs me. I get that it's a great service, you buy a pair of shoes for someone else when you get your own, but the day without shoes seems a little ridiculous to me.

I get the point of it- to raise awareness and all, but the people who are fans of this erk me a bit. They are willing to shell out $40 to $70 for a pair of shoes (yeah, it's kind of two, but canvas shoes don't cost that much. TOMS are bad quality and are also straight up ugly) and then not wear them? It's pretty pointless, in my opinion.

Not only are people [over]paying for a product they aren't going to use, not wearing shoes is not the best way to raise this kind of awareness. Instead, how about a shoe drive, where people bring in their slightly used shoes, or just donations.

Also, there are many kids in the world without food. So when they all get a pair of shoes, they don't have to starve barefoot. At least if TOMS were leather shoes, people could eat them.

This kind of charity is profiting off of a dumb fad, too many people just buy the shoes just to get the sticker. It's an American attempt at doing something good that is only working out for a few people.

(Picture is kind of unrelated- but she's barefoot)

Things I wish we had blogged about.

Although I plan on keeping this blog for some time- as a portfolio of sorts- there are some things I wish could have been assigned to write about:

• I would have liked to write about accomplishments in my life, although I'm only a freshman in college, I would have liked to have a chance to write out all of the things that I've been proud of doing.
• I would have liked to have interacted more with classmate's blogs. I think part of writing blogs as a class is so we can learn more about each other, and in return, it would help us evolve as writers. 
• I would have liked to have been assigned to write creatively, it's one of my favorite things to do in my own time, and even though I have written a few creative posts, I wish that writing creatively was an assignment at least a few times. 

Mr. Miller did a great job at supplying posts this semester. I will do my best to find his blog for next semester, so I constantly have prompts, which helped me incredibly as a writer.

-DJB

If I could live anywhere in the world, I'd pick Sevilla, Spain.

My favorite place that I've ever visited was Sevilla, Spain. I would love to master the language, live on the river, and make a living as a street musician. I would marry a Spanish woman, and every night we'd relax on one of the many floating bars, drinking Cruzcampo, or Alhambra (the beers of choice there) and just relax all day and night. 

I would make a living as some sort of novelist, and drown myself in inspiration. It would be a great place to live because of the leisurely lifestyle, and the friendly people. Also, it's one of the only places I've been outside of the US where it's cool to be American, which works out nicely for me.

I went outside

I'm at the bar tonight, luckily I have my notebook in my bag. Tiffany, the bartender, loaned me this pen- it's one of those fat, heavy twist on/ off pens that important shit is signed with
I'm out back, on the bench where employees [/me] go to smoke. I'm looking at a concrete flower pot filled to the brim with a tossed salad of cigarette butts and a light dressing of ash. It smells like shit.
It's pretty quiet out- the faint sound of traffic is the mud on my auditory canvas, and it's accented with the kick drum and hum of the bass notes from the band inside.

The band is okay- it's the standard four piece blues band:
    The drummer is a tall, skinny white guy, is is sweating profusely, maybe partly because of the red spotlight that was right on him. Or it may be all the PBRs he's been drinking the whole night.
     This bass player- short, stocky, with really thick short hair and sideburns is playing an upright with cracks all up and down the sides of the finish. he's really hunched over.
     he guitar player is playing this hollow body electric, it sounds so sweet.and he's a sick player. He's got a glass medicine bottle on his ring finger, and really fucking knows how to use it.
    The singer- Sky G- is playing on an acoustic with nylon strings, but they're heavily distorted. He's got a phenomenal voice.

I really should be writing about being outside.

Shit.

Twice, the bus boys have taken out the trash and the back door opened, and the muffled sound of the band got really clear and loud. it's nice.
This girl, Allegrae, came outside just now- she was looking for me. Apparently I didn't tell anyone where I was going, so lots of people were looking for me . She brought me my phone, that I left inside, and it was full of texts asking me where I was. It made me feel a little bad.

But Allegrae-(I just paused to smoke a cigarette with her) I'm going home with her tonight. I've hooked up with her before. I met her at a bar- Uncle Dave's - where I host open mic. Maybe it was only because we both have Kurt Vonnegut tattoos.

Side note: in transferring this from paper to the computer, I'm realizing how drunk I was. I am typing it as it was written, and I'm noticing a hell of a lot of hyphens where they may not belong.


Rumor has it that I was her first time- so her friends say, but no virgin fucks like that.
She's really cool, she reads the same books as me and she's a How I met your mother fan.
She's really hot too- she's blonde, which I try to stay away from, but she has a great body. She's pretty thin and about 5'6". Totally my type. She wears horn-rimmed glasses like Tina fucking Fey, and wears these really short shorts and tube socks that go up past her knees.
Very hot.

I just got a text saying that my ex-girlfriend Taylor found out that I'm here and came.
Fuck.

She's such a buzzkill, and she hates Allegrae- probably only because I like her.

But there's plenty more booze to fix that first part.

Time to go back in and let it be known to Taylor that I'm not interested in her company tonight.

Later,

Davey Jones.

Op-Ed

This article in The Atlantic deals with one of my favorite topics- racism. 

But not the regular- KKK, Black Panther, MS13 racism, it's food racism, and I, myself, believe that I fall into the category of a food racist.

In this delicious article (the photo is from the origonal article), Andrea Scotting talks about when she encounters someone of a different race, she immediately thinks of the food that this person's culture brings to her in a Styrofoam box in about 30-45 minutes. 

This is something I do all to often. Whenever I meet someone new, and I find out what race they are- if it isn't already 100% apparent to me, I immediately think of food from their culture. 

Moving to Atlanta, one of my roommates is Indian (let it be said that when this happens in real life social situations, alcohol helps these seemingly rude questions go over a lot better) and I asked him if he knew how to cook curry. He does all the time now. It's great curry too, and he said that if I never had asked him, he would feel embarrassed to be stereotypical like that. He might have actually made it later, but we're great friends now.

This also works in bad ways- I don't like certain kinds of food, and it will sometimes be reflected in my attitude when I meet someone from that nasty food producing region. But the thing is, I am not someone who makes lots of long term friends, and I will be eating food longer than I will know some people, so it all works out.

-Davey Jones.

Quaint throwback to humble beginnings.

Who broke some rules.

This man (pictured left) was convicted of some crimes, some of which were indeed legitimate reasons for needing to be arrested, like owning a firearm as a felon, but the moonshining charges (yeah, it's illegal, but that's beside the point of my argument.

Making moonshine is something that people have done for generations, all of the ingredients are legal, all of the products are legal, the only illegal thing that is in question here is the fact that Uncle Sam doesn't get his cut.

Like marijuana, when the government realizes that they can make money off of something illegal, they might decide to legalize it, if they can make a profit.

The question here is that part of the reason that moonshine is so novel is the level of alcohol (which the government will eventually regulate) and the cheap price (which the government will fuck up as well).

In my opinion, all this boils down to is that there ain't no rest for the moonshiners, and that part of the process of making moonshine will still have to be the fact that it's so illegal.

You feel the cold in your teeth...

... in a way that makes you want to chew out your own teeth. Like, that itch in the parts of your skin that is only touching other skin, and it burns like hell. And the headache, fuck- the headache when your brain is on ice, and you get the sensation of black in the center of your head, and the blood rush makes your teeth want to fall out, or for you to rip them out yourself.

It's all the same, maybe because it all happens at the same time. And it lasts for hours, or even days, and there's no way to get rid of this itch, except to scratch, and when you're done, it starts all over again.

I had to take a break from writing this, that girl- the one i used to go around with- the one that lived with me in that shithole of a house for three months- paid me a 'surprise visit.' She's a drunken slob- she drinks cheap malt liquor [not because she has to- she's a delta trust fund baby (which makes me wonder even more why she lived in that shithole of a house for three months) she tried to hide her riches under her American-Apparel rush-overnight- delivery catalog] and it pours out through her skin, a despicable odor reserved for bums and  Appalachian-raised fathers who beat their children, wives, and dogs after a day of working in a coal mine, returning home to a dinner of fast-food fried chicken.

That smell blends in with her perfume- a scent I used to treasure- on the nights that she went home to her parents for money- I would smell it in my sheets and pillows, or in my old baseball t-shirts that she used to wear- and I would cherish it. It used to give me a sense of home- in that shithole of a house [that we lived in with sixteen other people] for three [fucking] months- it made me feel happy- ecstatic almost, with a warm feeling inside that would displace any feeling of misplacement in my life.

But not tonight- tonight when the perfume permeated the air around us, I felt sick- like a sick, stale yellow. The color of piss on old Bible pages, that sits in the sun for days, gathering pollen and animal excrement- only to ferment even further into an odor that stained your tastebuds- and wouldn't go away until something invaded your senses to drive it away.

Now all I smell is bourbon and cigarettes.

Op-Ed

This isn't like the typical Friday Op-Ed pieces I do, but then again it's not Friday and class was cancelled on Friday and Miller never asked us to do one.

(Click the image above to stream the mixtape)

In today's circulation of hip-hop artists, there are a handful who are coming out with new mixtapes all the time, but in my opinion, there is not a more true hip hop artist than the Roots, who put out one of the best mixtapes I've heard since the time that mixtapes were actual cassette tapes.

In "The Roots- Dilla Joints" the Roots pay tribute the late great producer J Dilla, in a way that only the Roots can, through true, smooth hip hop.

Being just about the only good thing to come out of Detroit, J Dilla kept it real to the masses with his sublime beats, and the Roots do an excellent job of immortalizing him.

In their album "Game Theory" the Roots also pay tribute to Dilla by covering his song "Can't Stop This," and they proved that they can't be stopped by releasing this mixtape of epic hip hop proportions. 

Till next time,

-DJ

Bail bonding- and why it doesn't really hurt anyone.

In the NPR article about bail bonding, they address the struggles that people face when being held in jail.

The reason that people are arrested is because they are breaking a law, and I am a  firm believer that breakers of laws should have to pay for whatever laws they break, but when courts get picky about where the money for the fines come from is when I start to find the system ridiculous.

When someone is is jail, they are often given the choice of to pay bail and not have to wait in a jail cell until their court date, which, in today's high- crime society, can be up to a year in major situations.  Bondsmen are there to quickly get the money for the fine that some people can't pay right away.

Some argue that the practice of bondsmen should be outlawed- but in the end, it's pretty much a win win situation for all parties involved. The court gets their money, the person convicted of a crime gets to not have to sit in a jail cell for what can be months at a time, and bondsmen make money. it's all that simple.

The situation that some fall into that gets to me the most is when homeless people get arrested for a minor crime- like being drunk in public, loitering, or things that lots of people do and don't get arrested for- and they have no money to pay the bail, so they wait in jail for months at a time, only to find out that there is a fine to pay- which they can't pay- and have to go back to jail. In my opinion, the community service system needs more play- if people are given the choice to do community service (and in some cases, it's their only choice) it helps the community around them, as well as paying the consequences for peeing in that one alley or drinking their forty in a park.

Just sayin'.