h. Play

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It’s cold outside. The gateway is supposed to be placed next to a window, the coldest part of any interior. It’s an electronic device that is warm when I touch it. It’s literally called a hotspot.

It’s also working just fine.

“Sixty dollars? I got sixty cents!”

Lil homie at the skate park asking how much a skateboard costs. I’ll try to get him mine next time.

It’s funny how kids say the same stuff at the same age, across different decades, different locations and cultures.

Very simple. Two reasons:

• To fight nudity. Y’all outside this country might know this, in America nudity is still seen as something dangerous. People need to defend themselves against it. Nudity is everywhere! You need an automatic weapon to survive it.

• To fight buses and trucks. Americans are dead scared of buses and trucks. They won’t pass them. If they do, they accelerate as if those big machines were going to change their minds, and jump on them for no other reason than being predators! Enters the AR-15. Every car probably has one in the trunk, just to be able to make it home safely through 18-wheelers and bus lanes.

Naked bodies and large vehicles! It’s hostile out there y’all.

Katt has me dying since last night.

I wrote about him before.

Since wheeeeen? tsksksktsktsktsktsktskts

Dave’s delivery will always be one of the best. I can listen to that nigga telling stories all day. It’s the flow, the pitch changes, the pauses, the looks. This mf cracks me up.

Not making a raucous noise about LGBTQ jokes but just let the online and offline crowd whisper how not funny those were, would have stabbed him in the heart a thousand times. Instead folks went super loud, all the way to boycotts and physical assault on stage and forgot that a standup comedian is like a boxer: they’re meant for confrontation. That’s their jobs.

So unsurprisingly, Dave went down again with his latest. He will never give a fuck, that’s his job, again.

Incentives shape behaviors. Comedians are here to explore controversy and scandalous things, thoughts and feelings. The incentive is a bit to shock, to make folks uncomfortable in a live, experimental way, yes. That’s standup comedy. So if you shock folks and that it triggers massive publicity and sold out shows, then you do it again.

There’s no need for personal vendetta or anything like this. Just business.

Now of course I really, really, really would love to see Dave explore other fields like, what the fuck is marriage? What’s going on with many men online talking about colored pills? The wild shit that people do while not sober that they would otherwise, not do? How a black Elon Musk would have been doing in Silicon Valley? Not well, bitch! And so many observations that are not being distilled because y’all gave Dave so much attention about jokes that are not so good. Waste.

It’s frustrating sometimes.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abandoned-baby-birth-story-adopted-korea_n_6553d968e4b05cf51a16a5c2

It’s always the same pattern with women adoptees: adopted, wondering about their past, a husband scoops them up, they have a baby and the story arc ends. “You were alone in your life but now you have re-created a family that is YOURS.” Everyone smiles. It’s adorable. And scene.

It’s a lot different for a black man adoptee. There are logistics issues; I couldn’t just simply become a wife, I’m a boring straight so that doesn’t work. I’ve had to find my place in this world within a system that is quite actively not helping black men (or if it does help, it is bound to be shut down at all costs), and more likely trying to kill us all or make us as impotent as possible.

That’s a pretty big difference!

Childhood trauma or not, difficulty of connecting with people or not, I’ve had to make moves because there was and is just no other way. I’ve had to forget that things are a bit different for me. I never used my energy to make things up about my past. I used it to funnel myself into a sense of normalcy. We here. It’s 100% OK to be here. Grafted or not, it doesn’t really matter. Relationships are built. Literally and figuratively, a big heart is built too. All of that is something you do, not something that is.

My birth family and blood relatives never existed for me and likely never will. It’s fine! It’s easy to have a kid by mistake. Very easy. Birth happened, I was the result. The adults who created me bounced. Some others showed up and said “he’s cute, let’s grow him well” and it went on. There’s no narrative thread, really. That’s something I see a lot: adoptees who become writers because they think a lot about stories. I think a lot about systems. And fixing them.

I’m more design-minded. Systems create stuff. Stuff moves on and creates other stuff and systems. It is endless.