entertainment

A Real Conversation About Jamie and Cersei

After Sunday night I was just as disappointed in Game of Thrones as everyone else that watched it. It wasn’t that we weren’t expecting the results of Dany going crazy or Cersei and Jamie dying but it was how they got us to that point. It’s almost like they wrote this amazing novel and then got a text telling them to wrap it up in twenty five pages when they needed 200 pages.

I won’t focus on all the storylines and characters. I choose to focus only on two, Jamie and Cersei Lannister. I wrote on Facebook recently that I wanted a love like Jamie and Cersei and of course most of the comments were, “You want to sleep with your sister, ewwww.” I’m not talking to those people because those people are more than likely Hodor slow. Take the sibling part out of it, free your mind from that thought process. Just look at them as a man and a woman that grew up together.

Jamie is a man that literally did everything right is entire life. He honored his family, served his King and house proudly and had a reputation that most men could only dream of. It was only when he killed the King he was supposed to be protecting that he became “evil.” This is a guy who was never looked at as mean or evil before this. He was handsome, charming, funny and brave. One decision made him a villain.

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When you become a villain you take solace in the people that know the real you. No one knows Jamie Lannister better than the woman he literally came into this world with. Their intimacy wasn’t backwoods incest or passion they couldn’t control. I’m not even sure it was love, I think it was need. The need to be intertwined with the only person that sees the real them.

Jamie’s entire arc on the show was about doing whatever to protect and get back to Cersei. We want him to be this guy that’s changed and a better man but he never changed. He was just humbled and needed to keep his word. He fought for the living out of honor, not a need to be better than he was. His entire life was about loyalty and honor.

Cersei on the other hand, her entire life was about family and power. She hated she wasn’t a man because she knew in her heart that had she been born Jamie she would be a king. Her love for Jamie was the only thing that filled the voids in her life. Not even her children who she loved to death could replace the person she came into this world with.

“I killed my cousin with my bear hands for Cersei. I pushed a boy out of a window crippling him for life for Cersei. I would have killed every man, woman and child in Riverrun for Cersei.” Those words, that passion, that need, that love. That doesn’t die over night because you want to be someone you’re not. Killing Cersei would have been killing his soulmate. They lived in a world where everyone hated them, everyone envied them, everyone desired them. In each other they had calm in the storm. I stand by what I said, there story is the perfect love story. And if you can’t get pass the whole sibling thing, you’re as basic as Hodor.

The Karate Kid, YouTube and Life Lessons

Fun fact about me, I love scripted television, maybe it’s the writer in me or maybe it’s the fact that nothing is quite as rewarding as not having to wait a week for the next episode. This past weekend YouTube Red, which is YouTube’s original content and streaming service, was offering a one week free trial of their Karate Kid reboot. For some reason I thought it might be interesting and I wasn’t wrong.

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Cobra Kai is set thirty years after the Karate Kid but the way they wrote it and tell the stories you don’t feel like it’s a sequel. It actually stands alone and that makes it ten times better. They add the social media bullying and midlife crisis story lines that appeal to both young and older viewers and more than that, almost every one of the main characters is likeable.

This doesn’t happen often by the way. No one feels stale or inserted into the story line for no real reason. I’m not a TV show critic so I won’t give you a breakdown of each episode or what hits or misses but I will tell you I love the life lessons in this series.

Everyone Has A Story

One of the really cool story lines in this show is that they take us back to 1984. They tell the story of both Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence. Anyone familiar with the movie knows Daniel is the poor kid from the single parent household and Johnny Lawrence is the popular rich kid with the pretty girlfriend and likes to bully. The show takes you behind the scenes to where he was coming from. An abusive step father, a mother that died when he was young. Feeling threatened by a kid that was constantly trying to take his girlfriend. You don’t feel sorry for him but you understand him. This applies to sooo many situations in real life where each side has a story and they believe their story 100%.

I Feel Sorry For People That Peeked In High School

There’s a theme in this entire show that revolves around individuals that had the biggest moments of their lives in high school. Daniel has built a successful business using his karate championship. Johnny is a drunk and has no ambition but constantly has dreams and flashbacks of his glory days in high school. He even drives the same car that he had in high school. Both men have a scene where they’re sitting in a bar looking at the Facebook page of the woman they were desperately in love with in high school. Both wondering where she is and is she happy in their own way.

Be Careful Of the Energy You Feed Children

The secondary story line of the show revolves around high school kids. The rich kids that are bullies and the poor kids that are getting picked on. Through karate the kids love to defend themselves but the part that’s scary is what they become. With miscommunication and constant training that teaches them to have no mercy and strike first the kids become mirror images of what Johnny was in high school. He doesn’t see it until it’s too late and by then the train is off the tracks. Even his own son gets caught up when he realizes his father is teaching these other children but hasn’t been there for him.

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Overall it’s a great show with tons of life lessons and if YouTube continues to put out content of this quality, they’ll become a force to be reckoned with in these streaming streets.

Dreams Are Just Reality Waiting to Happen

My actual writing career started with Facebook notes. I would write them every morning before work. I literally mean every morning. I had this whole routine where I couldn’t sleep so I would just lie in bed and look at the TV on mute; then I would get up, go to my computer and write a story.

The first six or seven months no one really read them and I would tag people and talk about it but nothing and then something really cool happened. I was at work and my phone started to blow up and one of the stories I’d written was getting shared. Now I would wake up and write and people would look forward to my words.

I could literally see them sitting in traffic or at their desk, drinking their coffee or orange juice and reading my words, my words. I would live and die with every like, share and comment.

Those Facebook notes at the crack of dawn got me a book deal, a blog that does good numbers and changed my life. If I’m being honest I have no idea if I would be writing on the level I am if it wasn’t for that.

I didn’t take any literature or English classes. I still confuse sentence structure and tenses to this day. I never loved writing because I thought it would be cool to have my name on a book or it might get me cute shy girls. I loved writing because it always came so easy to me and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. Don’t ever give up on your dreams.

Belize: A Beautifully Lazy Place

Being a writer can be exhausting at times because I tend to overanalyze everything. From service being a tad bit too slow to the water being not quite fresh enough. So I made a promise to myself that this weekend I would do a better job of living in the moment. Instead of worrying about what’s not going right, I’m going to worry about what makes me smile.

Feeling my toes in the sand, the breeze on my face, all the things you feel when you’re not trying to feel.

Day one in Belize was all about getting settled in. It started at 4:30am in Houston with a plane to Miami, then a plane to Belize. When I arrived I was in relative shock at how small and intimate the airport was. The runway scenery was barns, livestock and grass. There was no air walkway, they pulled up steps to the plane. We walked off a 757 onto a runway that looked as if it was just built the day before.

Just to clarify, none of this felt like a bad thing. It all felt organic, everyone was laid back and happy to arrive. It didn’t have the normal anxiety and hustle of a regular airport.

The information I received told me that the resort would be about a 15-20 minute ride from Belize City but that doesn’t really prepare you for what’s about to come. From the airport you board a single engine plane that holds around 12 people. The seats are small and every ounce of the plane is accounted for, even the co-pilots seat.

After the plane ride, which will feel as though you’re literally flying on the wing of a commercial airplane, you’re transported to a boat. The first thing I noticed was how amazingly beautiful the water was and the smell. The scent smells like what you think the ocean should smell like. The boat ride feels as though you’re going somewhere that’s a secret, somewhere undiscovered by chains and corporations.

The moment I arrived there was hotel staff waiting on me with a drink and outstretched hands. There are no cars out here, no loud music, no yachts with partying college kids. This isn’t that type of place. This island, this resort, this vibe, it’s for couples and families that want to get away from the noise. I was on the plane with a family of six from Wilmington, North Carolina that was here for a week of fishing and deep see diving. A couple I met at the pool was here to go cave hoping in the Mayan Ruins. You won’t find luxury shops and town cars, most people get around on golf carts and bicycles. There’s only three streets in the entire city.

Day one in Belize was quiet, nothing overwhelmed me but nothing underwhelmed me. For a man that takes solace in that, I can’t complain.

Confident Black Men and Women Scare America

I have written about LaVar Ball since he popped on the scene because in the beginning I felt like it was a click bait story. You want to get a couple shares, a couple retweets, write about LaVar Ball. So I stayed away from it but then something happened. I started to see the hypocrisy in the way we society views black men and independence. Let me give you a couple of examples.

  1. Nike exec George Raveling on LaVar Ball: “The worst thing to happen to basketball in the last hundred years.”
  2. Unnamed NFL Coaches, “Colin Kaepernick is a traitor and I would never want him on my team.”
  3. Republican Congressman, “Obama took 400,000 for a speech; we need to take his pension.”

What do all three of these things have in common?  The black men involved weren’t docile enough.

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Why is that whenever I hear about Lavar Ball I never hear that he’s been convicted of any crimes? Why is it that I’ve never heard of his sons getting in trouble or of him hitting his wife? Why is it that I haven’t seen one piece on him being a good father and mentor while I’ve seen two hundred stories on black boys and them surviving without fathers? That’s not the story they want to put out there, they’d rather focus on how bad of a guy he is because he doesn’t want to take their handouts.

Now let’s talk about Kaepernick, teams were saying he’s asking for too much money and most people were happy to accept that was the truth. Meanwhile he comes out and says, “No one has talked to me or returned my calls so how would they know what I’m asking?” Guys have beat their wives, killed people drunk driving, fixed games and the worst person in the league is a guy that took a knee to bring awareness to cops killing black men and women?

Lastly, President Obama was criticized and attacked more than any President in history when there was no basis for it. The worst thing he probably did was wear that tan suit that time. After eight years of this Republicans lost their minds seeing him on vacations and smiling. They lost their minds that he and his wife got this huge book deal and they lost their minds even more when it came out that he was getting 400k for a speech. I live in Texas, ex-politicians and athletes have been getting paid for years to give speeches but now it’s a problem?

Confident Black Men scare America because they hate our strength. When Tiger Woods was winning Majors he was “Blasian,” I’d honestly never heard that term in my life. When he got caught cheating, he was a black man. When Kanye West said, “Yeezy’s will jump over Jordan’s,” we laughed and said no one buys Adidas. Now you can’t find a pair of Yeezy’s anywhere, they stay sold out.

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Lavar Ball says, “If the Lakers draft my son, they’ll make the playoffs next year.” He didn’t say they’ll win a Championship or that his son will be the best Laker of all time. He said a team full of young talent with a pass first point guard could make the playoffs. People are literally hostile at that. He has confidence in his son and that makes you uncomfortable? Just because Archie Manning wasn’t on TV every day doesn’t mean he wasn’t behind the scenes making sure his sons were taken care of.

5:01am In Paris; Met Langston Hughes 

It’s 5:01am here in the City of Love and so far I’m not sure how Paris, France got that name. It would be like calling the United States the City of Tolerance. Thursday was filled with flight cancellations, sick guys on planes and an upset stomach. 

Friday wasn’t turning out much better. We arrived at around 9:00am and since then we’ve walked a dozen miles and had to change hotels. I was this close to hoping on a plane and taking my privileged American ass home but then Paris reminded me it was Paris. 

Wine in a cafe at midnight while I bored my date with details of Langston Hughes and the Paris Transfer written by Arnold Ramperstad. Walking back to the hotel and getting lost, turning a corner and seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time. Ordering steak tar tar and not realizing it was raw meat, being too prideful to admit my mistake but the waisteess realizing no one orders raw meat. This has been my first day in Paris. 

I miss Whataburger, regular sized restrooms and AC but for someone as serious as I am. Sometimes it’s okay to not have a plan. 

I wonder what day two holds in store.