Time may heal wounds — but it doesn’t repair the scars we live with. — There aren’t words to appropriately comfort someone who has just lost a significant loved one. We try, we fumble, we repeat the cliche’s we’ve all heard in such scenarios — but it doesn’t help. …

It may have started with Oxycontin but little did we know that was just the beginning of an epidemic like this world has never seen. — You may have watched a documentary or two, read a few articles, or opinion pieces — or perhaps you or a loved one has gone through the struggles of addiction personally. Regardless, by now you’re probably at least slightly familiarized with the opioid epidemic. However, unless you’ve experienced it personally…

A simple but profoundly wise statement innocuously made, by one of all of television's more captivating and complex characters in Marlo Stanfield — in arguably one of the best shows ever, HBo’s classic hit The Wire. If you’ve never watched HBO’s The Wire and are a crime drama fan, kinda…

Faith is great — fanaticism and confusing the world for a fairy tale, however? Not so much. — I’d say I can’t believe what I just read but, no, that isn’t it. It simply won’t suffice or undue the injustice of what I came across before writing this. After surviving nearly an entire 37 complete spins of the Earth around the sun, you start to learn some things…

(or somewhere else similarly gross but also familiarly close by.) — If I have to go violently before my time, let it be here in the city of so-called brotherly love, is all I ask. Over Something worth actually literally living for or dying over. Kill me on the corner of the street I grew up on, over something I did as a kid. Wait until I least expect it, don’t let me see it coming. Justify it by pointing to my entire past and every mistake I made to date.

You can get a whole helluva’ lot more out of some of today’s generation of entertainers and business moguls who became Billionaires, than just entertainment and the products and/or services their individual companies offer. — “…But I’m trying to give you a million dollars worth of game for $9.99.” -Jay-Z, Shawn Carter, Former Marcy housing project resident, current Billionaire. I’ve said it for years and have known it to be true for even more of them, as was evident to anyone who was paying enough…

Look at it like a mental and spiritual health version of ‘The State of The Union Address’— if I were the Union and the president giving the address, all in one — play along and read on. — Dear Fellow Medium Inhabitants, Readers, Writers, Staff, and Executives… Call it an excuse to write — or a need to write and not know what to call it or what it may be about precisely if anything at all in particular. …

As well as a thank you to our loyal editors, readers, and regulars. — I originally intended this to go out as a “letter” to our followers, writers, editors, and readers. However, I’m not positive I even remember how to do so precisely, which highlights a very pertinent part of why I’m writing this in the first place. …

Reflections from a misguided youth. — At age 36, I observe and take mental note of the kinds of lives my younger family members and loved ones are living and leading, and I can’t help but be beyond grateful theirs looks nothing like mine did at their age. My actual childhood was chaotic but reasonably regular…