Category: Me Myself&I

It was a beautiful Christmas, probably the best looking one I had ever been part of.

My grandmother had everything set up and out: fancy food, fancy cutlery, fancy everything. We’re all dressed up. We arrive on the Eve and everything is peaceful.

I get a RC car on the 25th. And it says on the box “use turbo to go up to 21mph!’’

I ask dad “that’s pretty fast, right?” and he answers, super matter of factly “yes, that speed would allow you to go through a wall” and I’m like “not with this car, right?” and he says, drinking his wine, “uh with this car yes”.

I ponder. I visualize. I run simulations in my head and of course when no one is looking, I run my RC car into the wall to see. Nothing. It just bumps out and loses momentum. At some point my dad sees me persevere and says something like “don’t do that please tf?” and I’m thinking “I’m running serious EXPERIMENTS HERE help me out instead of shutting down the lab.”

It made me realize that walls are pretty strong. One does not simply go through a wall. That 21mph is not really fast and that if you want to go through a wall at that speed, you need some serious weight. Something a RC car doesn’t have.

I don’t know how long it took me to realize that but probably a few weeks or so and the conversation about going through a wall at 21mph rose up again. Dad was like “oh yeah, I meant with a real car”.

This was the first time that this meme –even though I didn’t know it at that time, showed up in my mind:

Don’t forget that things are weird.

I know people who have what I’ve been at work for. People from family to friends, through two different countries and pretty different cultures.

They’re depressed or really close to. Which is always a shock to me, when I believe that in their situation I would wake up jumping off bed, yelling GOOD MORNIN’ HOT DAMN LET’S GO and do dope stuff all day long.

The point is, things are strange. We have things others don’t and vice versa. You’re great. Don’t stress. Focus and rest. Keep going. Falcon punch life in the dick.

This is what a pine cone under attack does. Listen, and you will understand why you shouldn’t mess with them.

(Sound Design: Harold P, Visuals: The Internet)

I reskinned my corporate site real quick by the way. Check it out.

I’ve enjoyed this street so much this year. My man Anthony is bouncing some light in my face and things are great, I’m jamming and people stop by, nodding in their cars. Except that I’m playing on a wireless system and this bitch introduced a ton of random delay in the audio. It’s a mess to synchronize in post like, it’s so infuriating. I should probably shoot again but the moral, you know. It looks good though.

Yeah that’s the house cat and yes, he moves just like a NPC or lasagna. That left thumb has been thumping for quite a while.

That day after playing for a few hours, and before eating, I helped my neighbor to move a fridge down the stairs. I was kind of fried after that. Content, though.

There’s just so much.

I wrote my memoir in 2017 and it covered my life up to that point. 50K-ish words.

Since then 3 years went by and I could write another 50K just for those. So much happened. So much was felt.

We’re wrapping 2020 with the biggest infection and death rates we’ve seen so far. It’s beautiful out there in Cali, as usual. I’m up for sunrise and sunset, trying to catch that light, that softness. Christmas songs on the radio on my way to the playground where the rims are now locked (while tennis players are chatting with no masks on next to it, just normal things at this point). I keep shooting. Made a few threes through a rim reduced by a third, not bad.

Gentrification is in full bloom and killing me, displacing people and transforming neighborhoods in searing ways. I wish I could CTRL+Z that shit every single day. I’ve witnessed heart wrenching situations this year. I so want to protect things, mostly peace and black joy, and I cannot.

The way Google did Timnit is so hurtful. Juxtapose this to the millions of people in the streets protesting racial injustice for months earlier this year, how social media is nothing without black folks,  and gentrification. Implications are pretty clear. I came to the same conclusion in my book.

Clarity bitch-slapping me and it’s not really that I don’t like it, it’s more like I need a 48-hour long hug.

The US numbers (and that’s before all the Thanksgiving traveling and all the positive cases that will spawn in the next couple weeks from it):

There’s only one reaction allowed for this:

Who was talking about “raw dogging reality” first? @jaboukie right?

(2 years ago almost, dang).

Man, I have indeed been partaking in this grinding activity. The only things keeping me up are the sun, water, some herbs and coffee. Barely any entertainment. Just daydreaming with music on. I’m Goku on Namec strong at this. And a bad consumer.

The great thing though, is that the next time I’ll have my crib and my girl we’ll be able to “re” watch everything and everything to me will be like “oh I heard about that!”. So I’ll be laughing my ass off or get into the show for real and she’ll be even more into me, watching my reactions to iconic moments.

Like, people talk about Ted Lasso a lot these days. I know Jason Sudeikis, I know he’s hilarious and I don’t know anything about Ted, but I’m sure I’ll love it in 2024. Hopefully earlier than that now it’s for sure because I just said it.

Meanwhile things are exhausting out there try to hibernate, friends.

I

I could write 2 or 4,000 words about the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and its impact on me in a heartbeat. Just seeing that gif is killing me, I can barely watch it, I can’t explain. I can’t control it. I remember all of it. The first time. The last time. I was thankful to have the Banks family. Sometimes fiction is very important I guess.

The show itself holds up so well. I was watching reruns last year and I was amazed at how it’s still funny, quite unpredictable, smart and wholesome. Just great entertainment.

There’s Will and the Will phenomenon, which led me to think that the world was looking for confident black men to lead on many fronts. Ha! That was fun.

The Janet Hubert beef and James Avery passing were hard blows to memories so seeing them reconcile and pay homage to Uncle Phil I mean, I haven’t seen anything but people talking about it on social media and there I am, tearing up again. It’s really beautiful.

Thank you to all the staff and crews for making one of the coolest, chillest sitcom ever produced. I needed that then.

Month 10 of a global pandemic.

I saw the South Dakotan nurse telling the world that even in the midst of dying of COVID-19, people don’t believe they’re dying from it.

I saw a 300-person party in Paris suburbs last weekend, in the middle of a national lockdown.

I overhear my roommate talking about traveling during the holidays.

Mood:

I want to believe. I need to believe that the three of us out there who’ve never, NEVA lowered our defense against dying from this shit, are okay.

We should totally link up.

Dude, get on the open web asap.

Because of the pandemic I see talk about social media’s saturation more than ever. People absolutely hating Insta yet “having to” be there. The UI/UX redesign bull’ every now and then. Twitter Facebook and YouTube being instruments of mass “rewiring”. The conspiracies, documentaries about social media showing how gross this entire social media thing is, the censorship, etc.

We need a solution.

I see a lot of laughs about the idea of going back to the open web, where I post this. “No one will be back, good luck!”

Well there’s this thing that I thought would absolutely never come back and totally did: vinyl records.

What would prevent people to have url links on their phone homescreens? Go check that blog that provides some perspective, once a week. This other one every two days. Do you, break from the algo.

What would prevent people to subscribe to blogs (here’s mine) with their feed readers like it’s 2010? Nothing. Nothing at all. Everything works just as before if not better, considering how much more powerful our devices are today.

Newsletters? I don’t think email is great to receive periodic content. It’s a communication tool, after all. But there’s this option too.

Anyway, do you know why you’re supposed to be on the open web instead of billionaires’ soul-sucking, greedy ass networks?