h. Play

Wow, it’s already been a month that I’m here on Adams.

I don’t know how to describe my feelings over this year, I just feel like a runner who’s only been hearing his own breathing after doing a very long run in the sun. Some kind of zone where happiness or pain or anything else doesn’t really matter because they don’t exist.

I’m in the zone!

Somewhere on the West Side, on my bike, smiling to oblivion because I like simple things like a nice-looking street.

Spent the last two days working in Burbank, it was so great. I have so many cool moments with my Uber drivers. 95% of them are Armenian dudes and if you happen to be French, just let the word out that you know Armenian culture a bit through Charles Aznavour and then you’re best buddy forever. Last night we were laughing too much, dude stepped on his brakes like crazy at some point.

Just talking about the usual, work, divorce stuff, immigration, US/EU comparison, kids, how I might not get a car or maybe… It is amazing to share or get a point of view, perspective from people that are like you but also totally not. Soccer Football is making me closer to so many immigrants too. This is where you see how truly universal that game is, except for Americans so that’s kind of fun.

I’m still high on how services here are awesome. The lady at Burbank’s Starbucks know what I want after going there only once. I feel comfortable in no time everywhere and it feels great.

Travelling between different neighborhoods, especially on my bike makes me love the part of the city I’m living in and loving others too. For the first time in my life, I kind of get what’s like to be like “this is my territory”, I had never felt that way in France.

My neighborhood is growing on me. Mostly Mexicans and black people, Blaxicans too. Everyone is super nice, it’s calm. My roommates are still awesome, I’m running this place a bit –taking care of things- and it feels like I’m really at home.

And those sunsets on the roof, oh boy. Last Friday, when the sun was two minutes away from disappearing, when the yellow and orange are super sharp, I was up there. Temperature was absolutely perfect, perfect wind, just enough to wear a light jacket, I was sitting and chilling, reviewing music I’m making in my headphones, watching the sunset while vintage cars –40s Oldsmobile and roadster- were parking across the street, skateboarders doing tricks on the parking lot half a block away, and fireworks were going off around.

It was fantastic.

“I guess we learn not to do it again” is not what most people are guessing.

It boggles my mind that people accept their health to be tracked and visualized with stupid numbers, when it’s to me the most private thing ever that I don’t want to share with mega corporations, at all.

Also, the human body is so complex that we’re still not sure about how everything works, how the fuck your stupid monitor on your arm can help you, I don’t fucking know. Being healthy is not a race against others what is wrong with you people?

Personally, the best way to take care of my meat envelope is to simply listen to it. Closing my eyes. Paying attention to what’s going on inside the beast. Kind of syncing what I feel with what I want and what I want with what I feel if that makes sense.

Through the years I lost that habit. But I’m back on it, I know how to listen I just need to do it. Aerophagia, that can be so strong with me sometimes under stress, eating way too fast while looking at a screen, smoking? Gone if I listen to my meat envelope and take my time. I don’t need pills or activity tracker, I just need to stop acting like eating doesn’t require “thinking”, it does, especially after years of not doing so:

Eat slowly.

Chew fully. Pause.

Drink water whenever you feel like it instead of postponing it to the end of the meal because you’re eating like an animal.

Breathe.

Balance your food, listen to your kidneys, if they feel stiff (your lower back hurts? It might be them), go for vegetables and more water. I have plenty of dumb “body notifications” like that that help me feeling and looking good.

Exercise. Even if it’s just a 15 minutes walk that looks like nothing, it’s good for your body, it helps. We think we’re smarter than our systems with our pocket computers. We don’t know shit. You still don’t know shit with your Fitbit “goals” and if you can’t feel happy without an app telling you “yay!” you need to reconsider some stuff in your life, for real.

You can be happy without reward, I know, crazy talk here.

How the body processes food is still some kind of magic and almost unique to everyone. Which is why the Soylent thing is ridiculous too.

We’re only sure of one thing: our food in the West is way richer than what we need. I’m totally cool with meat but I enjoy eating veggies like a rabbit for a couple of days. If I get physical and that the temperature is low, my body will talk: “duuude, give me some pasta and beef”. If it’s hot and that I don’t do a lot except sitting down “duuude, where’s my big salad??” I guess I trained my meat envelope well and got lucky growing up.

Train it too. Early in your life, as early as you can. Don’t give your kids candy, ever. Make them sweat, it’s good for the mind too.

And do not track nothing except your meals in your head, learn to listen. Close your eyes.

Hey girl, ain’t no mystery says the Isley Brothers song but those apartments are still mysterious to me and I so wanted to see them. My picture sucks but I didn’t want to show how gross the parking lot looked like (10 full trash bins, no thanks).

DAT CANTILEVER DAAAAMN

Better, thanks Wikipedia. It’s a student residence so you know them kids, they don’t care about anything. They don’t realize how amazing it is to have a structure built 65 years ago that big, balanced out in the open. It’s beautiful, cocky engineering.

I just love the play with void, it reminds me of sound and playing with silence. So important, seems easy, it’s not.

I’d love to see the layout inside. I saw students going in but I didn’t want to creep them out. It’s in the middle of UCLA with fraternities and sororities all around and here I am parking my bike and looking at that building for 20 minutes from every angle legally possible. People don’t and can’t get it. I have done medieval stuff all my life, that futurism is like a ripe banana and I am the fruit fly. I can’t stop staring at it.

15 miles bike ride through the West Side, needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed it as pretty much all my rides in L.A. Well dear Mr. Lautner I was glad to see your work and concrete expertise. I have more addresses to go to. And please dear students, take care of that building it is unique.

Jesus, I can’t believe how weird my nose looks like. But that’s him right here.

My grandfather passed away after a decade fighting Parkinson’s. Apparently, he woke up as usual and went back to sleep, forever. That’s how we all wanted him to leave. 91? I’m not sure, we all suck at birthdays in my family.

Born in Dunkerque in a modest family, he was enrolled in the Air Force despite the fact that he hated flying, let alone jump from the aforementioned flying plane but he made it through WWII.

That probably changed him forever because he always hated conflict. He’d do anything to fix anything.

He started to fix radios and TVs in the north of France and met my grandmother there -her dad had a coal business and most coal plants were up north- if I recall before they moved to Paris to open a shop on Boulevard St Germain in the heart of Paris.

They started to sell music, music instruments,, music sheets while he was on the road fixing electronics or delivering pianos in the 60s and 70s, probably the most beautiful time to live in Paris ever.

They virtually met all the jazz musicians from that time, French or Americans who were going to play in the neighborhood. I was blown away that they had had freaking Tina Turner and Ike buying stuff, that Manu Dibango was a good friend etc.

When I landed in the family they had just started to retire, the shop was still theirs and my parents attic had TONS of instruments clients didn’t pick up, which made me try sitars and guitars and trombones and turn knobs and press buttons etc.

He was very calm. I loved how he would talk to me like a normal person and not try to baby talk me. He would never judge, always make me feel that it’s too easy to judge and that you should always step back a little bit. He was right. He was the first to make me understand that regardless of what history books say about Europe’s colonization of Africa, it’s messy and he wasn’t proud of what France and Belgium had done.

Self made man, colossal culture, he knew so many things from what year that bitch ass Louis XVII died to who built that Parisian neighborhood to how to repair a TV tube I could ask him anything. That was before the internet and Wikipedia you young assholes and basically that was awesome. He would go to the store and take me with him to buy magazines, I would sniff around and start reading one and he would always ask, “would you like to get this one?” and I would nod and know that videogame knowledge was going to come through those pages. At the same time, he knew that I would sit hours and hours in the living room and not do stupid stuff. Good trade.

He made me laugh so much. He loved dark comedy and English humor. I so wish I had some audio recordings.

Dat ninetiesness. Also I think she’s about to smash my face.

Dude knew how to handle a bottle and a nice meal too. I kind of wish I had known him earlier but in the end, he had a good run and Parkinson’s a bitch.

See you, wise man.

Third week was meh but I moved in a new place last Sunday, at the corner of South LA. Settling down. Damn it feels good.

So this 4th week was all new stuff, new people, new habits, and I think I really found a gem over here. I’m almost like I don’t want to say anything so that no one moves in my new neighborhood. That’s right, I can do that.

It’s funny how Paris or Silver Lake were vertical –buildings or hills- and now it’s totally horizontal at the exception of my Baldwin Hills, that I visited for the first time last year, dreamed to be around ever since and this year well, I’m 5 minutes from them after being chosen as the new roommate.

I love it here.

Did I tell you that I enjoy the most beautiful sunsets on the roof? That my three roommates are awesome and my landlord the coolest and greatest?

Yesterday I rode my bike to Burbank (53 kilometers trip) to help a friend with his 55” TV and back having fun in my neighborhood, that day was fantastic and crazy and today was too, seeing so many smiles and faces and wow. So many things in less than a month, it’s overwhelmingly ridiculous.

Now,

Tons of stuff to do. Some financial pressure with all that moving and setting things up going on but ITS ON OH GOD ITS ON SHIT IS REAL

Sorry, I got some racial stuff to put out.

Ta-nehisi’s article is amazing and good and powerful and real. But,

An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color.

I don’t believe this would happen. In some ways, segregation is the only way for communities to live together without ending up killing or ignoring each other. If racism exists and has made a community stronger than the other, which is the case across all multiracial societies and nations, the absence of segregation will not change anything. Segregation is one solution.

There is no segregation à la Chicago (you can replace that city with any multicultural US city; people try to make it like it’s just a local problem) in France. But racism is alive and the same terrible abuses happen, just at an atomic, individual level.

Which is very nasty. No one knows anything. Black people get robbed of rights thinking they’re lucky. There is no black community, black people in France are just fishes getting caught in nets they don’t understand. The only way to make it for a black man in Europe is to forget about yourself, your feelings, and coon and coon and coon. It’s one solution.

I don’t think anything will change at this point. White people, even the most against racism profit from racism, it is just a fact of living in a society all together. So you guys will never step up on this issue, you’d rather step up for animal rights. Those will not make you lose or pay anything.

Add the fact that global capitalism makes it really hard to anyone, if you try to tell struggling white people that they need to share because of centuries of abuse on black people, they will certainly not give a single fuck and will get mad (although they should get mad at questionable billionaires more me think), which is what is happening a bit everywhere.

Guilt is the least-efficient societal engine.

Re tech companies diversity and "meritocracy". Guys, it’s all about culture and ethnocentrism.

At equal skills set and experience if the team hiring loves indie rock, between a candidate that listens to Radiohead and another one that listens to The Whispers, the former has way more chances to get hired. It’s called affinities. You heard about bromance right?

There are black people in tech, they just move on to other careers once they see that they will be in a corner all their lives at best, barely surviving and taking so much shit at worst. Fourteen years in a 1.5% black field, I know. It is hard. And I only survive because I’ve been living with white people all my life, otherwise I would have quit, unable to fit in.

Every time I hear a white person being like, “dude, I was the only white person for like an hour!” I smile and feel insanely strong before realizing that my resilience just doesn’t matter and is not valued at all. How come? It means I have integrated many cultural codes and experienced which ones are universal, isn’t that valuable? It is, not for most white people in power unfortunately.

White tech guys never see diversity as an opportunity to grow they see that as an annoying deal breaker, unless you’re Asian or have tits or both. White guys are down with Asians and breasts, that’s about the only diversity they genuinely embrace. And that’s the problem.

It’s about being threatened, I think. For some reason, sharing power and money with black and brown people makes so many white people and especially white guys super sweaty and uneasy. I don’t know if it’s because of guilt, because for instance most drugs are used by white people but black people go to jail way more for that than any other ethnicity. Maybe it’s because of the prison system that put hundreds of thousands of black men behind heavy walls or maybe because some tech companies owe much to black people (EA and sports games, Google and its cheap ass Android tablets), I don’t know.

Maybe that too.

It is annoying though. Especially with all that BS about “think different”, “think out of the box” ‘”yay generalists” mantras, how are you supposed to think out of that white box when you all are the same? You can’t and I think it’s one of the main reason why tech is stagnating. Also, we’re supposed to be smart by now, as a species. Why do I have to explain this? Because of comments. Which make me think of that:

White people searching for a job: “but I’m more than just ticking all the boxes on a job listing!”

White people on lack of diversity at Google: “they should tick all the boxes, period.”

Yeah, already in the middle of the third but a lot happened. That second week was a lot of stress and pain, even though I was living mostly alone in an awesome 550 meter square loft downtown LA, right by the LA Game Space. So many things done and cancelled and postponed. Hustle. Humiliation. Charm. Friends and family backing me up, damn it feels good.

I just love this city, that hot concrete slabs kingdom filled with delicious things and people. You have to search for them, to know them. I have found and met great people and it’s only the beginning. Thankful.

Hitting the 10 West for new adventures. Thanks for your kindness, DTLA.