Still Ain't had Enough?

A lot of people have spent a major part of this year just looking for "fun" and excitement. And now that the year is about over, they are more ready than ever to jump at the chance to go to the big Christmas party, or New Year's Eve celebration. And what will they do there? Get drunk?Stay high the whole night? Kiss every pretty girl or boy in sight? Bust a few shots in the air to declare they are strong for another year? What? What is the point of all this. When is it enough?

I think it is sad that young people especially, throw their life away for a few moments of pleasure. How many youth are killed each year drunk driving? How many overdose? How many get killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Now, what I would really like to know is; do you think that the party scenes that will be full to the brim during these holidays are the right place to be or the wrong place to be? What will be the outcome or all the "excitement". NOTHING! Absolutely nothing! Or worst of all, the outcome could be fatal. Literally.

When is enough, enough? I think the young people of today need to wake up. It is actually sickening to see how silly most are. They think everything that MTV or Hot blah bla blah says is cool. They want to be the person with the title of the craziest, or the one who doesn't care. But how stupid is that? I don't want to be the one who doesn't care. I DO care about my life. And in fact, if you don't care about your life, no one else will care about it either. You will end up doing something dumb enough to destroy your life.

So what is the point.

You who are wise will show some self control during these last few weeks of the year. You will not be thinking about the party seen. But instead you will be setting goals for yourself. You will be planning what you can do to make the next year a great one. Don't follow the celebraties, or the media, or your school or work mates. Use your head! Think! And make good decisions. So what if they laugh at you for not doing what they do.

A wise person once told me, "he who laughs last, laughs the loudest". And in the near future those who want the glamor and excitement of the world outside will not be laughing at all, but you with your happy successful life, will be laughing very loud.

Sneak Peak of Shoulda Been Dead Book

Chapter 1

God help me, I’m fallin’,

Helpless, I’m callin’,

Restless! Hell of a hand,

But I was dealt it.

Now what’s a brotha to do?

I flipped the butt of the smoked-out blunt toward the storm drain. “Hey, Chachi, you believe in God?”

He looked my way with a smirk. “Only god I know is ‘Mr. God Damn,’ but why would I ever believe in him? What’s he ever done for me?”

“That ain’t right, man,” my brother Derrick chimed in. All three of us were sitting on a bench in front of Temptations pool hall and strip club, which along with the Circle-K convenience store and gas station anchored the little strip mall where we ran our business. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” Derrick added. “That’s like blasphemin’. Something bad’ll happen to you.”

Chachi stood up and stepped out into the parking lot, raised his hands, looked up, and spun slowly around as if he were a radar screen. “Well, if he don’t like it, he can strike me right here, right now. Bring it on!”

I shook my head. “You just stay away from me, man. I don’t want none of that. How come you don’t believe in God?”

He came back to the bench … guess I wasn’t too worried about him being close. “Look,” said Chachi, “any God who would let my best friend get murdered when we were only nine years old ain’t one I’d even want to believe in, even if he did exist.”

There wasn’t anything either Derrick or I could say to that, so we all sat there in silence, passing the forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor back and forth, thinking about who was going to have to go back into the Circle-K and steal another when that one was gone. It was a slow day for drug dealers, and I was feeling depressed. Guess that’s why I’d started thinking about God. Maybe everything was going wrong because we’d been doing so many wrong things and he was punishing us.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, chin in my hands. “You guys realize we’re everything they taught us in school not to be?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“You know, those classes where they tell you not to steal or lie or sell drugs or rob people? Well, we’re all that and more. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Chachi slapped me on the back. “Yeah, so we bad! So what? Everybody does that stuff these days. It’s the only way to get ahead. You know if we like let up for even a hot minute, there’ll be Crips and GDs and Vice Lords and the Mexicans and the Cambodians all up in here tryin’ to take over our block.”

“Yeah,” said Derrick, “like most of them already think they runnin’ this trap.”

“I know, and that’s the problem,” I said. “There ain’t no getting’ ahead. This was our real estate, but now all Atlanta wants in on it.” I was talking about the thirty or more other dealers who worked our trap night and day, week in and week out. Everyone was doing the extortion thing, robbing one another, beating up the crackheads and addicts who came there to get their dope. One guy got shot in the head, blew his brains all over the garbage he was sitting beside. He stayed there all night, moaning and sobbing, calling for help until morning when he finally died. None of us helped him or even moved his body. Guess the Circle-K people finally found him and called the police. After that the cops cranked up the pressure, raids several times a week. It was crazy, crazy, crazy, like an insane scene out of a movie.

There was no peace!

I might have put up with all that considered it came with the territory but what really twisted my ulcer, was how cold and heartless I’d become. I still ran into Celia from time to time. We’d been schoolmates a while back, and I always liked her. Just that morning I’d seen her again, this time at Target when I’d dropped by for a pair of socks. Target always had a sale on ’em. You know, all you could fit in our pocket for “lifty cents”? Anyway, Celia was working the checkout and called to me as I was heading toward the door. I went over, hoping she hadn’t caught me. But she hadn’t. “Hold on, Damien,” she said. “I’m going on break as soon as I finish with this customer.”

We went outside where she could grab a smoke. I could see something was troubling her. “So, wassup? How you doin’?”

Her gaze at me turned into a squint as she took a deep drag and a tendril of smoke snaked up to burn her eyes. Or was that a tear? “It’s my dad,” she murmured, turning away to exhaled.

“So … how’s he doin’?” Though I already knew how he was doing, and I knew she probably knew I knew, so I also looked away, staring hard across the parking lot like I’d seen someone I knew walking by on the street.

Celia didn’t make a scene, but her voice was heavy with disappointed. “He’s destroying our family with the crack. It’s gonna kill him, too, if he doesn’t quit. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“Oh yeah, that’s bad stuff, bad stuff.” I knew exactly how bad it was for her dad, too, because I was his supplier. I’d seen him go from a strong, confident man with a good job when Celia and I had been schoolmates to an out-of-work junkie who’d lost his health and all his dignity. Just the week before he’d come to me begging me to extend him a little more credit because he didn’t have any money. He was desperate, but I turned him down, so he went to one of the other dealers. When he couldn’t pay, that dealer beat him up and left him face down in the middle of the parking lot. When I left the trap at 4:30 that morning, I walked right by his body and didn’t even flinch.

It was gone the next day, and the police weren’t crawling all over the place, so I figured he must have made it on his own and forgot all about him … until I saw Celia.

“If you get a chance,” she sighed, “would you say something to him, Damien? Encourage him, maybe? You know he used to like you.”

“Oh, sure. I’ll do what I can.”

Now, I sat on the bench outside Temptations with my two homies feeling as low as something I’d scrape off the bottom of my shoes. I couldn’t even tell the other guys about it because it wasn’t just the pressures of gangbanging and drug dealing that was getting to me. I could excuse all the robbing, stealing, cheating, fighting, even the people who had been killed. But how could I excuse myself? How had I become so cold and heartless?...

Book release Black Friday at 2pm. You can pre-order at ShouldaBeenDead.com.

Will "tomorrow" ever come???

This week the big story in the news was the miners in Chile who were trapped for weeks and weeks but survived and were successfully rescued. The story really is amazing, but it also made me think...

How many people are in a dark place just like those miners, except not physically, but emotionally, or spiritually. And sometimes even physically, just not in a mine.

There is a common saying that goes something like this, "there is always tomorrow", and another that says "things will work out fine tomorrow". But what do you do when it seems that "tomorrow" never comes?

I know that many people feel trapped and alone at this point in life. It's like you are 700 meters below the earth and no one can hear you. This 700 meters can be the problem in your home. Maybe you keep asking yourself when will things get better? Why do my parents always fight? Why can't I stop this bad habit? Why was I born into such a poor family? Why does no one love my? I can't even get a girlfriend/boyfriend! And so forth and so on.

It is very easy at that point to feel like, NO ONE in the world could possibly understand how you feel. Maybe you feel trapped, with no way to escape. Life is just too much and "tomorrow" isn't coming.

You are right, life is hard. And this tomorrow that people often talk about does seem to take too long to come. But what should you do? Learn a lesson from those miners. HOLD ON! Don't give up. As hard as it may seem to believe, you are not the only one going through this problem, and there actually are people who could understand you. And even if no one else can, God can understand everything you are going through. And even though sometimes it seems the rescue is taking too long, "tomorrow" will come if you just stretch out your hand toward Jesus and cry to Him for help. He is the capsule that will drop in the mine and lift you back up.

Faith is to keep believing things will change when there is absolutly no sign of change.

Hold on tight, your rescue capsule may just be on it's way!

Who's this book for anyway?

Excuses! Excuses! Excuses!

For the life of me I don't understand how people make so many excuses for the way they are. Especially young people. They love to blame the parents for the mistakes that they made. Or the father for leaving them when they were young. The fact that they grew up poor or had less than they wanted. Sometimes the excuse is that they were picked on as a child or else there is the classic "this world doesn't care nothing about me!" Whatever the excuse, whether color, culture, race, education level, or whatever, an excuse is an excuse. You can not blame the world or anyone in it for the way that you are.



Sure some people had it rougher than others money wise or in some way or another. But that does not give those who have it hard an excuse to act like animals. Some young people start selling drugs in the name of "nobody is gonna give a person like me a job" or "nobody wants to help the black man or the asian or latino, etc" But this is a load of garbage! Look around you, there are many people from "minority" groups, from broken homes, who have physical defects, and many other problems who are doing well. And there are also people from good homes, who had both parents around and everything going for them, who do stupid things and destroy their life. So circumstances do not make us. Our decisions make us. We can decide to do good or do wrong. It is in our hand. Stop looking for a scapegoat to blame for your life. It's not your parents fault, it's not the police or the government or the teachers fault or your ex-girlfriend or anyone elses fault that you are who you are or that you have done what you have done. If you are in a bad situation today, don't blame anyone but youself. It's your fault.



You have to decide to change. You have to decide to live. Decide to have better and do better. Your life is in your hands. No more excuses!!!

Don't Throw it all Away!

I read an article a few weeks back that spoke about a young basketball player that had been murdered close to his home. The thing that bothered me the most was not the fact that another youth had been murdered, but the fact that another youth didn't listen.

This young guy had a very promising future in basketball. But there was one problem, he would not stay out of the streets. He liked hanging with the drug dealers and gang members. But he had a chance to change. He had actually been warned many times to stay out of the streets before he ended up dead or in jail. But he would not listen. In the end he threw his career, and more importantly, his life away for the excitement of street life.

The sad thing is, that many other youth will make that exact same decision today, tomorrow and the next day as well. But why? Because young people like to live for the moment and not think about consequences. They don't like to listen to advice or the wisdon of others who have been through more than they have. But is that the best choice to make? Of course not. Why throw your life away for a little fun, for a little rush. Life is fragile and must be cared for. Meaning you need to think before you act. There are many things that are very exciting, but are just not good for us. There are many places that are very cool, but are just not good to hang out at.

You have to be the one to decide for yourself. But this young guy decided to choose the streets and look at what it cost him. HIS LIFE! Now what about you, are you willing to throw it all away for the sake of some excitement right now. Or do you want to be a little more careful, and maybe even be called boring, but have a good future.

You decide...