I Used To Sell Mixtapes...Part 2

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who celebrate it. I just woke up out of a turkey/wine induced slumber and thought I'd crank out a post while I had the chance. I'm not going to get into the ethics of whether Thanksgiving is a holiday worth celebrating, to me though, it's a great time to get together with family and friends and thats a good enough reason to have a holiday.

I am back home in the van glorious Pacific Northwest with my parents and friends that I grew up with. As some of you know, I live in Denver and don't get the opprutunity to get home as much I'd like, but everytime I come home I realize just how much I miss it and just how much having good friends around means something.

Thats what I'm thankful for, good friends. Since being burned pretty bad by so-called friends about 10 years ago, I am picky about who I hang out with and I can put myself out to. As the old saying goes "you are who you roll with". Don't get me wrong, I have a core of pretty good friends in Denver, but nothing can replace the crew I have here at home. Since I rolled into town yesterday everyone has taken the time to call me and we all have big plans for tomorrow night. Yours truly is dirt ass poor but they all tell me that they are taking care of me. And they have before.

My best friend here in town is someone I'd do anything for. We met about 10 years ago working at Hewlett Packard on the weekends. I was in my second year of college and he had just graduated high school. I had just started the new job and sat down next to this skinny black kid with coke bottle glasses. I tried to talk to him about hip hop and he just kind of give me that look like "what the fuck do you know about hip hop, white boy". Later he'd see me reading "The Source" and made some sort of comment like "where to fuck you find that magazine", since he'd never seen one before. Later he'd walk by my car out in the parking lot while I was blasting some sort of hip hop, I don't remember what, and he knocked on my window, I unlocked the door and he climbed in. A friendship was born.

Over the past 10 years, I've moved several times, yet we always keep in touch. We've both been through "baby mama drama", we've bailed each other out of jail for various offenses, he's picked me up from downtown drunk off my ass numerous times in the past and he even saved me once from sure time downtown in the county jail after I threw some cat through a hot dog stand on a Friday night by grabbing me and weaving me through the crowd while Jake was on his way.

We call each other weekly to discuss the state of hip hop. He is not internet savy, doesn't burn anything and only checked this blog out once or twice before, so we are in two completely different aspects in hip hop. This brings up some interesting conversations. Just this week he called to tell me I was an idiot for saying the "Black Republican" beat sucked balls. That made for an interesting conversation. He calls me a "backpacking" nerd while I tell him to keep listening to his Rick Ross. One of my greatest memories in hip hop though came with him. We got off of work one Saturday afternoon and went to do our weekly Hip hop shopping at the store. We'd go through all the used CD's buying everything we could. Well this particular saturday we picked up the new Mobb Deep, "The Infamous". We went out to my GMC Jimmy and threw it in my system. I had two 12"s and a Fosgate Punch 150, so needless to say I was pushing some bass. We listened to the entire album without leaving the park lot. We were that memorized. It's something I'll never forget.

Friday night promises to be one of those nights that go down in infamy. Some of my friends are back from Iraq and I haven't seen in 2-3 years. Others are just a blast to hang out with. As I said, I have a good core of dudes in Denver I hang with, but something special about your hometown homies. The thing is though, good friends are hard to find and for that I'm thankful this Thanksgiving.

Alright, enough getting all emotional, must be the wine and 2 coronas talking, it's time for a mixtape. Today we are coming with something that I bought out of "The Source" back in the days, DJ Double R.

I know next to nothing about this cat, but since it was one of my first New York mixtapes I ever bought, it holds extra meaning to me. It has a nice little mix of R&B and hip hop, I used to listen to it alot back in the day.

I'm not going to get into the track listing, you'll have to find it out yourself because that's about all I'm going to write.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KOJR343V

No requests this week. Since I'm away from my collection, I wouldn't do much good. Go ahead and try to help each other out if you want. Sorry for any corrupt tracks (I'm going to stop working on that computer, it's pretty much bullshit), but I'll try to fix anything wrong when I get back. I'll post a few more times over the weekend....peace out

Trav