Dear Diary:

Last weekend I went to a party thrown by this guy I don't really like that much. I knew him from school and somehow got invited, going on the basis that there would probably be a lot of drugs and fly honeys there. Plus I really wanted to cut loose after a week of constantly lying to myself and to others. After the first few hours of being there (which I don't remember), I realized I was out of my mind...drunk, stoned, whatever. I'm not even sure if I like drugs. I was feeling pretty good though, sauntering up to people happily, telling them what I thought of them based on their appearance. It's a wonder I didn't get punched in the face. At one point I found myself in the bathroom, barely standing up, wobbling, trying to urinate in the toilet and failing terribly. I leaned my head back and at that moment, a song by the Wu-Tang Clan started playing on the speakers in the living room. The song opened with the following monologue:

"Yeah. Ay yo what's goin on man yo man...anything is anything man...just...just get that cream aight man for real."

I started laughing maniacally, leaning back and nearly falling over. I closed my eyes for a moment, pissing blindly, and for a second, the lyrics almost seemed poetic. I felt as if I had attained some magical understanding within the song, that no one else was meant to find. Certainly not a white piece of yuppie garbage such as myself. The thing is, I misunderstood the words and thought that he was saying "everything is everything." For some reason, this seemed so profound to me, and I opened my eyes and whispered, "everything IS everything!" In my drunken/high state of mind, this made perfect sense to me and even seemed to calm me, like everything was going to be alright after all. Everything in life is everything, and it's all relative and all so insignificant. I can't really put what I felt into words. I stumbled out of the bathroom, urine all over my pants, with this creepy, all-knowing grin on my face. I went to the kitchen, told some girl that she looked like a hispanic pumpkin, got another beer, and then slowly made my way over to the stereo, eager to start the track over so I can hear the Wu-Tang's words of infinite wisdom once more. I stared at the stereo receiver, nodding my head to the beat, trying to figure out what model receiver it was. Sony something. I couldn't make any sense of it. Forget it. I looked at the 100-disc changer below the receiver, trying to figure out which button to press. I started jabbing at the buttons, accidentaly skipping to the next disc, which was Dave Matthews Band or some bullshit. Such an inappropriate change of songs. "Yo what the fuck man? We was listenin to that!" said this black guy sitting on a couch, his arm around a sexy, barely dressed woman. "I'm sorry...I'm sorry Tyrese...I just...I just am trying...I'm trying...chill, chill man it's cool...go back to your prostitute man." Thank god he couldn't hear a drunken word I was saying, as the music drowned out all of my blather. I quickly figured out how to go back to the last disc and the right track, and he seemed satisfied and quickly lost interest in me. I stood there, in my moment of spiritual clarity, eager to hear these brilliant words again. Wait a minute, he said "anything," not "everything." What the fuck does that mean? "Anything is anything?" My buzz of enlightenment quickly turned into a cloud of confusion and disappointment. 'Maybe I can find someone with pills,' I thought. I tried for a while, but failed. So I sat on the couch, trying to make sense of these lyrics which I thought meant so much. I began to take them apart.

'I guess by "anything is anything," he's talking about the urban mentality where money is so difficult to get that you have to be willing to do anything within your power to attain it, even hustle or sell drugs or steal. He's hinting at a major issue, where kids in the ghetto have no viable choices to earn money, where the choice to either make a ton of money selling drugs or make next to nothing working a shitty job at McDonald's is an easy choice to make. To survive in the hood you have to be absolutely ruthless and do what it takes to get that cream. It's a tragedy really, and there's no simple solution...Maybe I should've actually listened to the rest of the lyrics in the song instead of just making its opening words a misunderstood novelty.'

I thought about it for hours, before waking up a couple of hours later to the sight of a floor littered with sleeping bodies and beer bottles, finding myself snuggled up next to the black guy that I called Tyrese, who was passed out next to his whory-looking lady friend. I sighed, and snuggled closer to his leather Fubu jacket, falling back asleep to dream of sugar plums and sports cars.