Category: Me Myself&I

Went down a rabbit hole on YT. Watching clips from her playing in Europe in 94/96 at Montreux in Switzerland or North Sea Jazz festival at The Hague in the Netherlands.

I own all of her albums and know, played and learned many of her bass lines. I have always thought that she was one of the dopest woman ever.

But seeing her young, leading a band made of monstrous musicians for her first times in Europe is… I wanted to see that shit so damn much fifteen years ago and trust me, I scavenged like a mad man online to get all the lives possible. Recordings are leaking now. They’re wonderful.

I love you, beautiful human being named Meshell Ndegeocello.

Single story house a block away from my place.

XXL

I have so many things to say about gentrification and development, identity, culture and quality of life.

If I had to describe my life this year: Insecure meets Bojack Horseman.

It’s been a crazy rich year in which I did everything to get back on my feet but in which I became poorer than ever at the same time? Things don’t make sense.

It’s also been the blackest year of my life. That’s what triggered me to write a few pages. Just the other day… I can’t even explain. Definitely have enough to write another book. I still live in the same cool place with two women and a gay dude. Not much drama, pretty much none actually but a lot of “it’s funny how” moments. Race/culture/class/gender dancing around… It’s vivid.

One co-worker thinks I’m a student, it’s hilarious. “no school this week?” she asks. I’m like, “no?” and she nods. I giggle five minutes later. I’ve been asked for which college I was playing basketball for. ‘bout to hit the forties and I feel physically so good and young it’s ridiculous.

I miss my guitars, I miss working on some big ass desktop machines. I miss building them. I could drink some 2002 St Joseph. Family has become the most nebulous word ever.

Alright so it’s been a lot of veggies for the past few years. No seriously, I eat a 99cts salad everyday. Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, Cleared. Ready for the final battle.

Happy New Year to y’all. Love,

Spoilers, duh.

So dialog was super low, was it just me?

It was a cool movie. Kylo makes me laugh I can’t take him seriously. I’m sorry.

Luke was dope, so long lightsaber cowboy.

That opening zoom felt like I was in a computer game so hard.

That salt planet was awesome. I wish the casino part took longer. It’s so great to not watch trailers.

Speaking of trailers what on earth was that Alita Battle Angel disgusting shit? No, no. It’s super wrong. Just thinking about it is ruining my Christmas.

I’m writing my book proposal now that I have my FirstDraft. There’s something called competition analysis in which I have to find books kind of like mine. Well, there aren’t a lot of those.

Looking on Amazon.com I saw and read summaries of a lot of books on adoption, foster families etc. I hadn’t paid attention to those before. Never felt the need to care about that literature. What is going on is:

– Most are about that Christian thing. Most are written by white moms. And most are about the convenient but also kind of dull story where people look back and find their biological parents and relatives. Everyone was reunited weee.

I don’t have none of that. I don’t have biological relatives, at all. None, zero. I don’t have any idea of what my biological parents look(ed) like. No sisters or brothers, old aunties, someone? Nope. I have been spawned on this earth. That’s how it feels. I wasn’t there, and then I was.

I’m not crying about not having what most people have in one way or another, I’m more realizing that if I always feel different, it’s really because of that spawn thing. It wired me differently. It makes me care about everything and at the same time allows me to be ice cold, utterly pragmatic when needed.

For instance I’m not for the death penalty at all, but Dylan Roof needs to go. He can’t be released in the streets –he wouldn’t live for long anyway-, keeping him in jail for life is useless and extremely expensive. Sorry man, you just needed to not murder innocents. People might see conflict here. I don’t. I’m just pragmatic.

That’s why I love playing games like toys, grinding rules to see how strong/interesting they are but I don’t care about finishing a game or having the high score. I don’t need goals (when playing, of course in life I have some). I can admire, have fun, play inside something for a long time. Goals bother me, in a way. They’re artificial.

Being spawned pushed me to overwhelmingly care about *actual* things. It’s hard to explain.

I so want to fix or make things better that I look for simplicity and realness all the time. Anything that makes this more confusing or further away, I avoid. I want to know what’s going on. The as close as possible truth, the most unaltered reality. Then we fix it and enjoy it.

Spawned. That could be a book title.

350+: days riding my bike.

1500+: miles on my bike.

2: flat tires. I didn’t get any flat for two years (world record beaten) and got two in the past two months.

10,000+: shots taken on the basketball field at Rodeo/MLK. 50% swishes. I mean, almost.

365+: hours playing bass.

600+: people I helped with their computers at the library. 98% black, 65% black women.

1billion: job emails sent.

5: job interviews (in person, on Skype, sound design test) I got.

1: part time job secured.

1: car bought.

91: sessions of audio design, music production, foley etc.

3.4: gigabytes of 24bit/96kHz recordings I did around.

1: GDC I went to.

3: neighborhood councils I showed up to.

40+: kilos of tuna I have ingested.

48,332: words written for a book.

0: cigarettes smoked. Okay, I did have two puffs on one last weekend but it didn’t even register. It fascinates me how nothing matters once drunk after 2am. Maybe I should do that more than once a year. Maybe not.

Verizon owns Tumblr. Verizon has no chill and probably will kill this service anytime they want, which might be tomorrow. Probably in the next couple years.

I always thought having a slideshow of my likes at my funeral would be the shit. I wish I could save them all in a convenient file with a big ass folder full of gifs and pictures. I found a script that does it but I haven’t tried it yet. SAVE YOUR LIKES AND POSTS TOO, DIGITAL STORAGE IS ULTRA CHEAP.

To users and post makers: I love you. I love y’all (not y’all over there stirring up shit and stealing content, of course). Tumblr has some of the funniest shit I have ever seen online and I’m decently old now. Thank you for all the work, all those perfect gifs. All those inspiring posts. I’m serious. It’s phenomenal.

To women of color of Tumblr: you already know. You know you made that website a million times better. I’m still giggling at shit like Dick Me Down Darius™ and so many more.

To youngsters: if you feel something for someone and this relationship is reasonably doable, just go and fucking give it a try. Embrace the offline world. We’re so incredibly polarized and you will live longer than any previous generation so pace yourself, give some love, get hurt, regroup, give more love, block, give more love. Stay away from the dark forces, I know they’re strong. But I also know they don’t lead anywhere.

To my followers who still can read more than a sentence at a time: heyy thank you for reading.

On my IT gig I’ve been helping this old Asian lady for months. She comes to see me to get help. She’s over 75. She has no family around, she works and needs basic email stuff etc. So I show her how to do stuff on her devices. Once I’m done explaining and showing her, she’s always excited and happy like a child.

She often says "oh I love you so much!" and I’m like "I love you too!". Yesterday she comes by. New phone, new stuff to learn. I show her the process of uploading pictures and she’s super excited and happy as usual. She says "do you like pineapple?" And I’m like "yeah" She comes back 3mn later and gives me a pineapple.

I don’t know if she got rid of it or if it was a true present but it’s all good. “How did it go today?” asked my boss. I raised the fruit, shaking my head laughing, she started wheezing. My bagpack was heavy this morning and I remembered that it had a pineapple in it. A pineapple.

"He was rich in personality and getting pineapple for free" on my tombstone y’all.

The pursuit of popularity in a hyper-connected digital environment accentuates the populist style of communication that already characterized media-driven forms of political communication well before the internet age—a style characterized by dramatization, confrontation, negativity, emotionalization, personalization, visualization, and hyper-simplification.

Important article. Get involved locally, focus, make moves, support what you believe, don’t stop.

I finished editing the first draft. 207 pages.

Writing a memoir is a trip. There’s something mind-bending, thinking back and forth, forth and back over almost four decades.

It’s liberating. I wrote down some stuff that I had in mind for years and I don’t think about them anymore, as if my mind knew that now that it’s out there, there’s no need to keep thinking about it.

It’s exhilarating and weird.

Going through pages, jumping here and there makes me realize how much Design has been and is my life, my soul. I obsess about designing better. For anything and everything. I need to fix this shit. It’s like an emergency, a countdown to me. It’s beyond passion. I know where it comes from.

Now what? I have to hand it over to a few readers I guess. See if I can find a publisher. I’m toying with titles, it’s fun. One that still makes me laugh after months is “I Got Out I Guess”. I haven’t seen the movie yet. You have to read my book/know me well to truly understand why. I also have “Baguette & Burgers” and a dozen others.

The pitch? “from 80s socialist France to post-Obama America follow the fascinating, intersectional life of a different tech worker of color.”

BITCH BUCKLE UP