Category: Me Myself&I

There’s a lot of pretending in blackness. It is the result of our circumstances.

Everywhere we exist, we pretend that it’s fine. Sometimes it actually is, when we’re entrenched in our black communities in the Black metaverse.

But when we’re next to each other, next to non-black people, we know we’re not equal. And so the pretending begins.

I’m making as much money as you, I’m going to pretend, while knowing that the statistics say that white wealth is ten to hundred times, on average, bigger.

I’m as free as you are, I’m going to pretend, while knowing that the statistics say the reality is that I have five more times chances to get arrested for any reason.

Pretending allows us to live, while it poisons our souls. It poisons our existences.

So people pretend to be disrespected. On a Sunday night around a dice game in a nice neighborhood, someone pulled the trigger, probably faking outrage under the blanket of alcohol intoxication. And so a 28 year old black man died for the most absurd reason: none.

It was unnecessary, it was probably an accident. He is gone and we’re back pretending that it is just how things are.

There’s a name for this: “hybridity”. The living in-between. It’s a central concept to postcolonial studies, one developed by scholars like Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Hybridity creates something entirely new—neither colonizer nor colonized, but eternally suspended, living in the liminal.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud in Son of Elsewhere, A Memoir in Pieces.

I really enjoyed your book, Stan.

It made me long for what I’ve never had in depth, community, but it also made me wildly aware of the luck of not having to feel the weight of it, of them all, on my shoulders, ever.

That’s actually really heavy. Highways to build all by myself.

No religion. A very secular culture. Fragmented families. Zero blood-related family, no one looking like me. An English first name in the French countryside! Finding myself on the West coast of America. Life always has been hybrid as fuck to me.

And so of course, I needed extremely solid foundations. Science, knowledge and music stabilized me and allowed me to move in this world the way I wanted, respectfully.

And just like you Elamin, and migrants all over the world, I’m a little obsessed with routes and spaces. I think this is why I am in love with horizontality; the endless possibilities, for everyone.

I know!! Completely unreal. This week, I burned two CDs for my car. The pack of 10 CD-R was $2.99.

So weird to touch those again. Weird memories of Plextor and 4X and Yamaha emerging.

I’m also going to buy more music CDs to rip so I needed a CD/DVD player, which was like $25. It’s so cheap, works well, and no one can’t take that music from me, ever.

And yes, I will copy those files on a $15, 128GB flash drive as well.

There are some good things about tech, these days.

It’s interesting to watch folks look for a platform when one is dead.

If you ask them why they don’t write on a personal web page, people immediately go for the “I’ll be embarrassed if my friends/family see that”.

But it’s ok to be cringe AF on a platform because hey, it’s the platform’s fault right? It’s because of IG that you post fake deep sentences with a sad picture in the background, right?

The internet is the platform. Get your own space, and grow there, at your own pace.

It’s pretty great.

So, the NBA? Yikes.

The rookie I had so much love for is a mess, and the Spurs organization is going to have to answer a lawsuit.

Between the feeling that the start of a season after all the trades is a “Who is Playing Where again?” game, that the Lakers franchise is down bad, that the Clippers are kinda weird, the constant injuries/load management, the amount of absolutely embarrassing stuff –from antivax stuff to adultery and Kyrie, the insanity of logistics to buy tickets online and their prices I mean, it is trash.

And those salaries. $47M/year off the bench, peak indecency I hope. NBA players needed 2 jobs 40 years ago.

In this *waves at sky* infla-thing that we’re living in? The NBA has lost its mind, really.

55 years of building state of the art prefab, system-built homes in Japan.

• 60% or more of those homes are made of recycled material.
• Lumber is acquired from Finland because of their top forest-management policies.
• Every single tree is used in its totality.
• Ceramics are heavily used (sand and limestone).
• All the details of a house design from bathroom fixtures to roofing material to door-knobs is determined before building.
• Everything that needs to be fabricated, wall panels, flooring sections, windows, is a CAD file sent to a factory.
• Basic structure is erected in a day.
• Completion of the house including landscaping is done in a month.

It is very hard to gather any information on Misawa, Sekisui and so on (Japanese websites being stuck in 1994).

It absolutely blows my mind that sustainable, healthy system-built homes exist for almost 60 years in a country, and are completely inexistent in countries in desperate need of exactly that!

I’d rather have Misawa homes than Sony PlayStations, 10,000%.

But we live in a world where a billionaire thinks he’s on top of challenges by buying a rotten network of mind farts.

Goddamn it’s frustrating.

(the book is called The Japanese Dream House by Azby Brown)

This is from Kodak’s Ergonomic Design for People at Work book.

It describes what’s the best design for a push button, using compiled data from 1998, 1965 and 1975, which combs through what a push button should be for men and women, small or tall, young and old.

It’s insanely detailed and yet, we rarely apply those designs that are meant to make our lives much better and easier.

What it tells me, which I really realize more and more, is that it’s not that we don’t have knowledge; it’s that we don’t do shit with it.

Even worse: we (and by we I mean you) believe in stuff! In this book I learned that screen glare is the absolute worst. Your eyes are going to work extra hard and you will end up with eye strain, headache, blurry vision, dry eyes and neck and shoulder pain.

That’s why all the most expensive laptops out there have mirrors instead of matte screens. Exactly. The company known as Apple is believed to be a design master by railing your eyes to the ground, starting at $999.

You don’t have to do it, though. Change. Seek good design.

I need to visit it again. It is pretty fabulous. Neutra VDL Research House II.

Dear future,

This is a picture of free, clean, public, crisp and fresh water in Los Angeles in 2022.

Pressing the physical button where my hand is, the water comes out from the tiny hose behind the fountain head, and I am about to drink this exquisite beverage for about 30 or 40 seconds straight from it.

Then I’ll inhale some air, and press the button again, feeling water’s power going through my limbs.

And then I’ll do it all over again.

I hope that you’ll have the same privilege, dear future.