Cas One: Hide Your Influences

It would depend. I rap. But I’m also in property management. So I guess you could say that I manage both people’s emotional and physical property. AMIRIGHT?!

I wake up pretty early, usually around 6:00 or 6:30. If I have my son (every other week), I will get him ready for school. If I don’t have my son, I will try to cuddle my girlfriend into submission, all while being concerned my morning breath is making her want to leave me. I get coffee. I go work a day job. I either pick my son up from school, or head home and cook, grill, or get carry out so I don’t have to do either. All the while, I will be either listening to an audiobook or podcast or playlist. I’ll usually jot at least one sentence down in my notepad. Then I’ll do homework with my son or talk with my girlfriend about the day as we hang out on the back porch with our plants. God dammit. I am boring. Uhhh… I open portals and bring out all kinds of otherworldly creatures, and then I just start whipping them with these vines that grow only in my backyard and nowhere else in the world, and they become more and more tame. So once I tame them real good, I start teaching them the words to my songs. If they mess up, I grill them and feed them to my family. If they don’t mess up, then I send them back to their world so that, not only am I a moderately strange famous rapper here but also in their realm. This ONLY works with the ones that can talk. Which is actually a surprisingly good portion of them. So I take the vines and I straighten them out reaaaal good. Then I hang my families laundry on them. Because I am a family man, and it uses less energy and protects our environment.

I’m reading The Big Payback by Dan Charnas and listening to The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz.

More than likely, it was Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. If I wasn’t reading it, then I absolutely looked at the pictures until they were burnt into my brain. Either that or But No Elephants by Jerry Smath.

I’m a page folder. Or a book splitter. Bookmarks are for people that are afraid to live.

I have two older twin brothers. They influenced my taste without a doubt. They have very contrasting taste in music and I pulled from both of them. My brother Carl likes harder rap, and my brother Paul likes some grunge, but mostly melodic stuff.

At age 16, it would absolutely be Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, because it teaches you where to go inside of your brain when you’re angry. I was a very angry teenager. I didn’t understand a lot of the world inside or outside of my head at that time. I’d choose The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman for my 25-year-old self. I could’ve avoided a lot of wasted time on people that I just didn’t work with on a communication level. Sadly, I don’t think I would’ve gone for either book at those ages. Books always have a way of falling into our lives when they should, right?

How about stole? If we are considering Columbia Music Club as stealing. Where you put those stamps of albums on that card and then mail it in… It would’ve been Snoop Doggy Dog’s Doggy Style album.

Chuck Palahniuk, Haruki Marukami, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, and Maurice Sendak. I am a fan of strong-minded debates and not having to start conversations. Mark Twain would start talking, and then I would sit back and just watch what happened. I put Vonnegut in there just to be a rep for Indiana. Can you imagine the humor that would stem from that meeting?

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. I purchased it as a gift for someone I knew that was having a tough time in a good relationship.

I love that it’s pleasurable while being self-improving. It’s a vacation in your comfortable spot. I’ve always liked things that are conflicting in explanation, but straightforward in practice.

Honestly, I would have to go with The Big Payback by Dan Charnas. He recounts hip-hop as if he was in the same room as every single interaction he mentions. It’s wild to read. I mean, we’ve all heard the story of how hip-hop got its start, and it’s redundant at this point, but, here he is making you feel like you’re in New York, sitting in on these meetings, and hearing the gossip around town. It’s pretty fantastic.

This will show the nerd in me. Sojourn by R.A. Salvatore. My brothers and I used to trade the Dark Elf series of books, and I want to see if it all looks the way I would imagine it. The landscapes in those books are a very real place inside of my skull. I want to know if I did them justice.

Hide your influences. No one wants to hear a watered down version of themselves. Save your money and put ALL of it into what you want to do, so you’ll care about it more. Take every penny you make off of it, put it right back in, and you’ll never take it for granted.

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. I have it on audiobook and I listen to it at least once a month. It’s a quick listen/read, and I still pull from it each and every time I read it. It genuinely centers me.

Bon Iver, POS, and Royce the Five Nine. Royce just put out his best work. Normally I don’t listen to him a lot. If we are talking music, I usually listen to playlists and have my reserve stock of good shit artists that I’ll go revisit a full album of. Three songs I’m listening to most are “Crockpot” by Slothrust, “Let Down” by Bored Nothing, and “Sinkies” by Hot Sugar.

Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami and The World According To Mr. Rogers by Fred Rogers.

If I was a better visual artist that is what I would want to do. Or. I really love marketing and package design. I love property Management as well. I kind of get to do all of the things that I love to do in one way, shape or form. So whenever music feels like it’s taking more than it’s giving I look for comfort in those areas.

I have On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’m excited to think that one day I will break the part of my brain that would call myself an insufferable hipster and just read it without judging myself.