A Glock that don't phase me

Today in my stultifying Biology lecture, I was busy being a thug and playing Megaman on my brick of a cell phone. However, the constant battle of my blue hero towards mechanized bosses through two dimensional landscapes grew tiresome, and I forced myself to take notes on the lecture.

But if you've just recently engaged in mortal combat with Iceman with only your standard Megaman powers and beating his flurry of ice attacks with sheer agility and aplomb, somehow lipids and protein folding is no longer interesting. As a result, and as a result of our pitbull's excessive barking keeping me from having a good night's sleep, I dozed off.

Then something exploded.

Some ruffian had brought in a carbonated beverage which had obviously had enough with being merely refreshing and upon opening, exploded in a sheer outburst of pent up rage, expelling the cap halfway across the room and startling the entire class. Some girls screamed. Some frat guys said "Whoa!" The ruffian sheepishly apologized, and it was several minutes before the class got back on track.

But meanwhile, the sudden, loud, gunshot-like sound barely stirred me from my slumber.

What I'm saying is this: if you get woken up every night by some loud noise, be it glass breaking, or dogs barking, or homeless guys shouting at your recycling bins, wimpy pop bottle explosions don't even come close to stirring you fully awake from your blissful slumber, which you take anywhere and anytime you can.

Thugz Mansion will change you.

-f.w.

Damage Toll #1

This morning I was getting into my car to go to “Cutting Edge” host callbacks (a TV show I work on) when I found my left mirror detached from my car, lying in the gutter eight feet away. The car’s damage is extremely minimal- a small black scratch on the left in front of the mirror (most likely from the mirror itself as in was ripped off). The actual mirror is shattered but the breaking point is very clean so I’m planning on fixing it myself with some plastic epoxy and a new mirror. Here's some photographic art utilizing my misfortune as a symbol for my inner state:

I didn't say it was good photographic art. Just on more real-life project to distract me from my school work. . . joy. Oh, and I’m searching for a parking pass- the permit resale just happened today at noon so I’ve resorted to paying insane amounts to someone who doesn’t need the pass they purchased months ago. . . even more joy. Nobody said it would ever be easy (or cheap) to live in ThugzMansion.
-KAK

Paranoid Nerd!

Here is a brief story about how I came to stand in the hallway of Thugz Mansion, in my underwear, clutching a pool cue for dear life, ready to beat the shit out of a non-existant home invader at about 11:00 PM on Wednesday evening:

I went to bed shortly before 11 in the hopes of getting a good rest and forgetting the troubles of the day behind me, only to be sung to sleep by the melodious barking of the Pitbull & Pug downstairs. These charming creatures, who Jam Master Freddie has already described as face-humpers tend to bark for three reasons:

• Reason the First: It is 8 AM, and therefore, it is inconceivable that any hominid species in the surrounding 4 blocks should be allowed to sleep in.
• Reason the Second: Another canid is barking, and like any good pack-species, P&P feel the need to join in and bark as loud as they fucking can to establish their dominance.
• Reason the Last: A Stranger (and by stranger, I mean new tenant of Thugz Mansion) has approached the house or the recycling bins in the front yard, and P&P feel the need to defend their territory.

Now ordinarily, I wouldn't think anything of their barking, but I hadn't heard the landlord roar up in his unmuffled and COMPLETELY STREET LEGAL Acura, which is what usually prompts the dogs to bark at that godforsaken hour.

And so a tiny paranoid thought flits across my mind: "Someone is trying to break into Thugz Mansion!"

I dismissed the thought as paranoid, trusted the dogs to do their ravenously carnivorous duty in the event of the worst possible scenario, and tried to get some shut eye.

There were fucking ants in my bed, so you can imagine how well that went.

A few minutes later, I heard (or more importantly felt) the loudest slam I thought I had ever heard, the sound of a door being battered down like that one celebrity by his/her abusive spouse. Man, that joke practically writes itself. Anyway, loud fucking noise, sounds as if ramparts of THUGZ MANSE have been breach. I sat bolt upright in bed. I listened for a moment for further sounds of commotion, and hearing none, decide that our intruder has become inexplicably stealthy. Did I ever tell you I was retarded.

After making a mental inventory of possible weapons in my room, I crept over to the closet and got out the end of my pool cue. The heavy end. The end wot gets used for bashing things wiff. Convinced that this is a sufficiently classy club for a thug to wield, I open the "office" door and ask Freddie if he has heard anything. The lad, bless his thuggish heart, has been composing hella tunes with his headphones on, and did not hear any slam. Cautiously, I proceeded into the hall, and knock on Kevin's door to repeat my inquiry

"Pssssst! KEVIN! I think there's someone in the house! I heard the door slam!"

Kevin cracks his door, and then relates, rather sheepishly, that after studying in a manner that can only be described as hard-core at his well lit desk, he got up to find out what Freddie was up to in the office. Upon exiting his room, he was blinded by the comparative darkness of the hallway, and thinking nothing of it, proceeded to lean his head into our doorway. Lean into our shut doorway, and lean into it hard. Thus creating the world's loudest slamming noise ever, and thus leading to me freaking out and readying a defence that can be described as "in no way adequate whatsoever."

I slept with my pool cue that night.

Legit!

"If I die because of living in this stupid house, I will be so fucking pissed off."

I have had the above thought more times than I can count walking to and from school, and fearing the whole while that I would be mugged on that particular journey most perilous. Also, that is the super-intelligent way I talk to myself all the time.

Yes, living in el Castile del Cabrones has been quite an experience for the first few days. From the first week spent on home improvement projects and moving in, to discovering the well maintained and near palatial places other putas are living in for $50 less a month, there have been times I have wanted to break down into open weeping. But a thug does not cry. It is not the thug way.

Aside from being miserably tired, woefully out of the DPS saftey radius, and discovering the joys of feeding oneself in a half-stocked kitchen, things have been pretty good. Until the Ants showed up.

Now the previous residents of Thugz Mansion were far from true thugs. With no respect for their hood or their crib, those fuckers left hella pr0n DVDs out and had their counters covered 4 rows deep with bum wines and 40oz bottles. This is not the thug way.

Yet surprisingly, for all their open offerings to Bacchus, they avoided an ant infestation. Ants are smart enough to avoid diet soda (they know it holds no nutritive value), but I did not count on ants being smart enough to avoid cheap booze. As an experiment one day, I would like to feed some larvae a few drops of Cisco or Night Train rather than royal jelly. If my hypothesis is correct, instead of queens, I'll create a new caste of pimp-ant, capable of subjugating the other ants via a four-legged backhand. But I digress.

That said, we are now fighting the second battle of Thugz Manse against the ants in our bathroom. We've deployed poison bait traps again, which worked well in the first round and killed the adult population of the hive. However, we seem to have missed the queen, as a new legion of fresh, slightly younger ants has taken the place of the previous horde.

Freddie took pictures on his cellphone, and I shit you not, our floor has run black with ants.

Someday, the ants will send an envoy, to ask why we poisoned them.

We will be forced to reply, "Because your people made the floor black"

ALSO:
WE ARE CUTTING A RAP SINGLE ABOUT THA 2^nd BATTLE OF THA ANTZZZ.

Kevin's Trip

11:37 PM- I leave my parents’ house in San Diego, hesitant, yet fully aware of the two hour commitment ahead of me that is driving back home, returning to South Central Los Angeles, my personal trek into the heart of the ghetto. The trip commences splendidly- not a car on the road, some good tunes, a thermos of lukewarm coffee gently rocking to occasional grooves and bumps on the interstate 5 freeway. Time passes. I merge onto the 405 North, fully unaware of the vast misfortune that lay in my near future.

12:16 AM– “LEFT LANE CLOSED AHEAD” the dayglow orange sign screams. Less than a quarter of a mile, another sign informs “LEFT 3 LANES CLOSED AHEAD.” Now catching on to the oddity of four lanes being closed on the 405, a knot tightens within my gut. “ALL LANES CLOSED AHEAD,” the last and final sign on the 405 North bleats, damning truck drivers, late-working businessmen, and Lotharios everywhere. “Fuck,” I mutter to myself.

12:47 AM– After sitting in traffic on the 5 North at 12:45 PM, I begin to wonder what Hell must be like. Tonight, dear readers, was not my night to say the least.

1:04 AM - I do not know Los Angeles freeways. Yes, even after “living” in LA (and by “living” I mean being confined within the safety-net, the sterilized bubble, the oasis that is USC on-campus housing) I have not yet deciphered the seemingly endless ball-of-yarn freeways and street configurations of Los Angeles, most likely designed by drug-infested CalArts students after a long night of heavy Brecht, Pollak, and Cocaine. There, that being said, I had never taken the 5 North to USC, nor had any clue as to what lane changing, freeway hopping, or side-street cutting was necessary to undergo such a task. In short, I was lost. The obscenities grew worse.

1:57 AM – Eleven freeway merges later, after backtracking for over twenty miles through areas a sane person wouldn’t even dare stop for gas, I finally found the place I call home, reservedly. As I pull up to my street, my nearly dead ears perk up to the sound of shattering glass. Being in South Central, being two o’clock in the morning, this was not the sound of a child’s astray baseball throw tragically shattering his neighbor’s window. Surely not, this sound was the sound of a man less than two hundred feet away breaking into cars with a crowbar, pillaging whatever his grubby hands could find. Now fully awakened, I sit in the cab of my car wondering exactly what to do- to run into my house now, wait until he leaves, do something else. . . Eventually, I decide that the wisest choice is to get out of there as fast as possible, and I did. I ran to the porch of my duplex and fumbled with the keys, always seeming to stick at the most inopportune times in life. Once in the house, exhausted, without sheets for my bed or a toothbrush (both still in the car), I curled up on my bare mattress and slipped into a restless sleep. “Welcome to Thugz Mansion,” I tragicomically laugh to myself, still crying inside.

I cry at times

Thugs Mansion is not a place – it is an idea. It is beyond physicality. As the tragically immortal 2Pac once penned, it is “the only place where thugz get in free / and you gotta be a G.”

Max, Kevin, and I have moved into to this residence several blocks north of the USC campus, escewing the traditional safe, sane, on-campus or close-to-campus approaches, and instead favoring the potential glory of having ourselves identified as “three USC males” who are assaulted and burglarized in a variety of ways in a soon to come USC Department of Public Safety school-wide email report of crimes in the area.

These reports, known as the DPS Reports, are both unintentionally hilarious and slightly disturbing for those who live only a few blocks away from a street where a fellow Trojan gets mugged by a gun-toting “African-American male, 13-14 years of age.” The Daily Trojan publishes a weekly “DPS Roundup” of the incidents that DPS has responded to, ranging everywhere from “The burglary of all of some frat dude’s X-Box games and ‘Girls Gone Wild’ DVDs,” to the inexplicable and humorously bizarre “USC Male gets punched in the back of the head without apparent provocation in broad daylight.” We’ve talked to our bookies, and they are giving good odds that one of these days, we’ll be the USC males that slightly nervous but completely safe freshman laugh at, thumbing through the Daily Trojan at breakfast.

Thugz Mansion is the top floor of a canary yellow duplex on a slightly shady street. When I say “slightly shady,” not only do I refer to the fact that the solitary street light puts out approximately the light of an eight-year old cell phone display, but also to the fact that this part of town, “home security” means more than a warped, peeling “Brinks Security” sticker tacked onto a window.

Many houses have wrought-iron gates. Still more have those iron bars placed squarely over windows and breakable entrances. And every second house has a large “Beware of Dog” sign. And the dogs they refer to aren’t your wimpy Chihuahuas or Daschunds. These dogs are 100% legit – Pitbulls and Rottweilers. These dogs will legit-ly tear you apart limb from limb and not blink an eye as your blood splatters across the dirty streets of L.A. No wonder they’re the South Central dog of choice.

Our landlord in fact has provided this particular home with two pitbulls, both of whom still retain their male dignity, and along with it, killer instinct. When we moved in and I gazed on their doghouse from our top story window to see the larger, more dominant pitbull furiously humping the other’s face, I knew I was in good hands. Like clockwork every morning at 8 AM, we’re awakened to the dogs furiously barking. The sound of a cell phone buzzing is enough to spur them into a wild barking frenzy, and the fact that they still have their cock ‘n balls intact means they’re ready to kill basically anything that makes a noise.

Max suggested we approach slowly and introduce our scents so they will learn to trust us. I figured that the mere smell of warm flesh would drive the dogs into a feeding frenzy, lustily tearing apart the iron gate that holds them from what basically amounts to an entire world full of delicious meat. So until evidence suggests otherwise, I’m keeping my distance.

Anyway, there’s tons of stuff always going down at a place titled Thugz Mansion, and I’ve got tons of stuff to say, so stay tuned. Plus since hopefully Max and Kevin will be updating this, it means there will be content! Wicked!

-f.w.