Quite a month for me.

A sports fan dream weekend (minus the actual game) and time spent with two legendary fan bases.  An Indian mendhi and a Muslim wedding in Pasadena.  A black church funeral in Inglewood.  Even by my normal standards, I think it’s very possible I touched on every single element of my personal identity the past few weekends.  It’s been a wild stretch.

You can’t be all things to all people (and you really shouldn’t even try.)  But I take a lot of pride in the bonds I’ve made and nurtured over a lifetime, all without crossing over to the point of being phony.  And having said that, I know there are still people who I don’t see enough of.  And there are still relationships I’m actively looking to create.  As my comic book alter ego could be described, I can be ‘comfortably alone but never lonely.’

The end of the ‘Malik Fall Tour 2016’ has been an unplanned but welcome visit from my father.  When he arrived, I asked him what restaurant in L.A. he wanted to go to, and naturally he chose Popeye’s.  As we ate in comfortable silence, ‘Let It Be’ came over the restaurant’s loudspeakers.  It drew an amused smile out of me.

I infamously and truthfully spent years putting other things in front of my health and my personal life.  A job that would ‘change everything’, the next big party, the next object of my lust, the next ‘you only live once’ experience.  And I own all of it.

But it seems even before I course corrected, I was a ‘good enough’ dude to build these meaningful relationships to carry me through my adult life.  I’m reminded often that ‘having people’ is not any kind of a given.  I won’t detail any of it here other than to say I’ve been humbled to the core of my being repeatedly over the past month by those who think the highest of me.  If anything can describe why I push myself the way that I do, it’s because I don’t always feel like I am this person that my loved ones describe me to be, but I’m trying to live up to what they see in me.

(Is that real enough for you?)

Onward and Upward.