The Beginning!

It's been a long time coming. Sam Cooke once said. In this situation not so dramatic but true nonetheless.

I've been toying with the idea of starting a blog and website for years now but never pulled the trigger. That is until now.

For the longest time I've been struggling with the thought of what I should start with.

What I aspire to do with my blog is to bring up the type of topics you can relate to. For example, bring up a song because to this day I can't make out the last verse. And that makes you say "You know, I haven't heard that song in a while. And I could never make out what they were saying either." And I talk about it because the artist just revealed in an interview the correct lines. And what I thought they might have been saying was way off.

Or I bring up a group I just saw perform and you think. "I keep hearing about them, I should check them out the next time they're in town.

So I'd dwelled over should I start with this or should I start with that?

Some days I thought I'd start off with discussions about some of my favorite shows, like The Sopranos or The Wire. But I feel like everybody's talked all types of crazy facts and fan theories about the shows. It would just be so redundant.

Not to say I won't ever talk about them cause I speak in movie quotes half the time. But I just don't want to start off with what everybody else has talked about.

That being said. When it comes to creating anything, I feel like it's a Tarantino movie. Nothing 100% original. Everything's been done one way or another. But you can definitely take something and make it your own. Just as he will use the same music, camera angles and lines as the films he came up watching. When you're watching one of his films, you just think that he made a movie like nobody else could. That's what I'm going to strive for.

To bring various topics you've probably heard of and maybe talked about and add something that is all me.

So for my first blog I decided to talk about two of my favorite things. My bulldogs and Hip-Hop.

Now plenty of people talk Hip-Hop, plently people talk about their pets. But I felt like talking about how I conbined the two in a little way that I really enjoyed.

Some years back I had taken some photos of my bulldog "Carter" dressed like a member of Public Enemy.

It was fun to do and I had planned to do more. But then life happens. Work, bills etc. and sometimes your recreational plans get put on the back burner until you forget.

Unfortunately Carter passed away before we could do it again.

When we got our first girl bulldog I couldn't let the opportunity pass again.

Our latest addition "Strawberry" nickname "Betty" became the next victim. And I knew just the photo to do. The Notorious B.E.T. just felt right.

The pic of The Notorious B.IG.'s ionic image taken from the cover of "Rap Page" magazine is what I chose to go with. The crazy thing is I could have sworn it was "The Source". But after some decades somethings become foggy. And I relearned it in recent months.

What I also learned in recent months was that the crown Biggie wore in the photo was sold.

The photographer Baron Claibourne bought it at Gordon's Novelty for $6. And I got the same one at Party City for $5 and change. Not too much difference from 1997 to 2024. So when I found out that the crown Biggie wore was sold at auction at Sotheby's in 2020 only for a mere $595,000 I couldn't beieve it. That's amazing to me. To think that Hip- Hop music has gotten this far that a five dollar item used in one photo shoot would be worth more than a half a million dollars. It is a testament to the genre and what it means to people. It was seen as a fad that would fade away in a year. Now more then fifty years it's the soundtrack to countless people's lives.

At the end of the day this is the type of things I want to do.

Present an array of content that you can relate to, simultaneously relay some backstory or info that you may have not known about. Hell I may have not known about until I started to write it.

Because I intend to challenge myself with this project I am not only going to talk about things I already know about but to present things I have never done.

I intend to talk about somethings I've done a million times. Like making a great steak but also talk about new experiences like my first trip to Turk and Caicos.

I intend to learn just as much about myself as whoever reads this.

So here's to the beginning. And here we go!

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Outtakes