I returned to the island on Sunday night only to get a phone call from a friend of mine that Mavado ah pree me. According to my friend, Mavado went to a stage show in Old Harbour where he went onstage and told the audience, anywhere mi see Claude Mills, mi a go box him down cause him ah mek man name ah call up inna suss on the Internet.

I dismissed Mavados rant as a case of bad judgment and misdirected anger, however, on Monday morning, I began to get a lot of phone calls from my peers in the industry who suggested I take the matter seriously. So in the afternoon, I called Julian Jones-Griffith, Mavados manager, who told me that he had not personally heard Mavados vow to page me, but that it was possible, given the controversial content of my website, One876Entertainment.com. He went on to say that he was not telling me how to write but he actually suggested that it would be conducive to my health to change the slant of what he called my biased writing. The jist of his argument was that: if you can write it, you have to stand up to the consequences because these modern day yutes no tek no check and so on and so on ad nauseum. They tend to not realize that One876Entertainment.com is made up of at least six experienced writers and I do not write all the articles.

I had a (thankfully) brief urge to utter a few choice expletives and dangling modifiers, but then figured whats the use, Julian obviously had not got the memo:  I cannot be intimidated. I refuse to be. I breathe after my own fashion. I write to amuse myself, if you dont like it, flip the page, close the browser, do whatever the £$% you want. I know I am. Nobody can tell me what to do. Just ask my former employers. In the words of the Gangsta Ras, mi do mi own ting.

I am not even going to get into the whole freedom of the press thing and blah-de-blah-blah but I will say this, when I was employed to The Gleaner, I wrote a lot of stories that ticked off an exciting and colourful hodge podge of characters during my wild ten years there. I have been threatened before by common thugs, organised crime figures, deejays, lesbians, bleached-face skettels, political activists, producers, and even publicists, even when I tried to follow the same journalistic standards of accuracy, objectivity, and balance as expected of all journalists.

Mavado is no different from any one of them. He may have a Billboard hit under his belt, loads of money and a large entourage of yes men at his disposal. And he may not like my curious mish-mash of shoot-from-the-hip, blurred-lines-between-news-and-gossip meta-journalism, but he can always just choose to do what most people, (especially hot girls) choose to do, ignore me. Mavado and I dont buy weed from the same supplier so it is unlikely that we will cross paths in the foreseeable future. But if we do, he needs to know that I fear no man. No harm no foul. No blood no spill. No nutten. I (along with the rest of the One876Entertainment.com staff) still like his music, especially that Gully Side song on the Airwave riddim, but if he wants to still page me, mi no gone noweh, Jamaica is a small place.

Peace.