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Honey, I’m home!

These

three words have filled the hearts of wives and kids

with joy for years; excluding those times, of course, when Daddy is

coming home intoxicated, and fresh off a “Bitch, I’m going to kill you”

text message. I’m curious though; if an drunken baby daddy comes through

while no one is home, does the ra-ta-tat-tat of the gun and splintering

of the kicked in front door really make a sound?

It does if the neighbors hear it.

Now

I don’t know Smyrna, GA all that well and I’m not going to hazard a

guess at how long it took the po po to show up when folks called this

melee of one in to 911, but I’m really confused as to why Mr.

Jennings was still in the area.  Was he going to get all Nino Brown on that ass and hold this apartment complex hostage until she came back?  Or did the flashing lights and sirens wake him from that Robert Blake fantasy he was having?

I guess his baby momma didn’t understand the lyfe he lived.  I guess she was fast to take and slow to give. At least he didn’t burn the complex down.

I kid, but I’m sure the irony of this situation isn’t lost on anyone. Do you recall the intro to the video for “Must Be Nice?”

CO One:  Nice guitar.  What you going to do now that you’re out?

268-192:  I’m going to do the Apollo in New York

CO Two: Heh.  You’ll be back.

I know we tend to think of fame and the couple of dollars that follow it as some sort of force field from lyfe’s ills.  We see these celebrated cats doing some real criminal ish and believe it beneath them.  We wonder how someone in that position could sink so low; not leave the past and the demons behind.  Looks to me like it aint that easy.

I mean Lyfe Jennings isn’t Akon.  He

didn’t build a crime riddled back story around a jay-walking ticket (or

whatever minimal infraction that got Akon those 6 ½ minutes behind

bars).  He had some serious issues; enough to

require over a decade in the pokey for arson. I can’t imagine the toll

that takes on an already broken psyche.  I also don’t know how one fixes that broken psyche.  It’s

very romantic to think the music can soothe a soul interrupted, but we

see time and time again that no matter the accolades, no matter the

amount of the contract, no matter the size of the house or the wheels

on the car, there are some of our folks who can’t get past the pain.

Mr. Jennings is looking at some severe charges.  Not

only did he break into this house; he discharged a firearm, eluded the

coppers, crashed his car, refused the sobriety test and has had a

really sad statement in the form of a restraining order filed against

him by the target of his meltdown.

That’s not nice.

So the future is looking a little bleak for Mr. Jennings.  The

dude we were all rooting for, the guy who we just knew had gotten it

together; didn’t. It appears CO #2 foreshadowed the downfall of

R&B’s favorite Phoenix. This of course leads me to believe that Mr.

Jennings was doing some foretelling of his own when he went with that

idea for the title of his 2nd album.

The mythical phoenix is known as a symbol of the comeback.  However, as plenty of folks stop the creation of the 2nd chance, many don’t know the full tragic cycle.  The

phoenix as it is reborn is already doomed to its fiery death. The bird

goes down in this blaze of glory by its own hand over and over and over

again.  This cycle for the fire bird lasts hundreds of years, though.  I guess Mr. Jennings’ sequence is just a bit shorter.

Only time will tell what’s going to happen with this case.  The

firearm in itself is enough to put him back behind bars for a while. I

guess the music wasn’t enough to dismiss the darkness and it would be

nice if he learned from this mistake because it doesn’t look like he

learned much from his first.