Do You Understand?

Even if you don't buy it, got to Barnes and Nobles and touch it.

It is one of the most beautiful Homages to an artist that I have ever witnessed. And for my friends with a stable income, my burfday is coming up...****clears throat.
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Times did a profile last week on Mike Thomas, a dead body collector.
Peep the article and the video. These are the kinds of stories that THE SOURCE useta tell.

His tax forms officially read “body technician.” Unofficially, Mike Thomas calls himself body snatcher, grim reaper, night stalker, bag man. Whatever you call it, it is one man’s life.

Detroit is an annual competitor for the ignominious title of Murder Capital. Last year there were 359 homicides. Halfway through this year, there were 220. There are about 10,000 unsolved homicides dating back to 1960.

Mr. Thomas, 34, subscribes to a simple theory: Unemployment leads to drugs. Drugs lead to misplaced passion. Misplaced passion leads to death. And that’s where he comes in.

“There’s 360 ways to die, and I done seen them all,” he said, dressed in black, waiting on a hot evening to be summoned to the latest body. “I seen an old lady standing dead at her stove, her purse hanging on her elbow. I done picked up the pieces of a man who stepped in front of a train. I done picked up people just around this corner, here, from my house.”

Then he turned around and got FIRED FOR DOING THE INTERVIEW. Hear him tell it,

“I was just telling my life story,” Mr. Thomas said by telephone. “This is America, right? Don’t we still got freedom of speech?”

He has three children, no car and, now, no job — a bad combination when you live in the poorest big city in America.

The body job paid $14 dollars a corpse, though it did have its drawbacks: picking body parts from Dumpsters, ferrying corpses in an unrefrigerated van.

Mr. Thomas said he hoped his recent notoriety had hatched an entertainment career. Record people have been to his producer’s Web site, he said, and filmmakers are pitching the idea of a reality show based on his life.

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Speaking of dead bodies. Are more mommas killing they babies, OR, is the news doing a better job of reporting it?

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Cat Power is so g*ddamn fresh. She is my new Mary J. Blige. Watching her video, touched me the way early Tupac did. Straight to my soul fam. Like I ain't wanna see it, but the more I read, the more I needed to. Here is an excerpt...

With bizarre stage antics and aborted concerts, her erratic reputation was firmly established. Reviewing a show in The Times in 1999, the critic Ben Ratliff described her set as “staggering for its inversion of standard rock performance ethics,” adding, “Gone was the idea of exultation, or of showing what one can do; in its place was outrageously passive-aggressive behavior and nonmusicianship.

Still, fans flocked, some more than once, to see the singer with the long bangs obscuring her face — and to see a train wreck. Yet despite her condition, and with the help of veteran Memphis soul musicians backing her up, she managed in three days in August 2005 to record her now critically lauded seventh album, “The Greatest.”

About two weeks before its release in January, Ms. Marshall said, she lost her mind: “I was looking at death. I wanted to die.” Holed up in her Miami apartment for seven days, she turned off the phone, played Miles Davis on repeat, stopped eating and sleeping. She drank to oblivion and prayed to die.

Susanna Vapnek, a painter, came over to check on her friend. Ms. Marshall was acting bizarrely, obsessively chasing “bad spirits” around her apartment with a lighter and sage. Ms. Vapnek bathed her and stayed by her side. Eight hours later she took Ms. Marshall to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, where she was admitted.

Confined for psychiatric treatment, Ms. Marshall recalled refusing to bathe, hiding from her reflection and wanting to be drunk. “I asked God, I said, I’m tired, I can’t do this,” she said. “I was asking him to just take me.” She was terrified by the other patients who screamed at night and were comatose during the day.

Who, other than DMX goes through their TRAUMA, REBIRTH and REHAB, so painfully and so publically. I commend her.

In fact her and Fiona need to go on Tour together.

For True.
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This is THE BEST WEATHER OF THE YEAR. I wish I could just bottle it up and put it in my pocket. I didn't have an coffee today. But I have a feeling imma have me some tomorrow. How yall been?

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