h. Play

I am nervous in the morning taking off to my little village to see her. I know what she currently looks like. I know retirement homes, their smell and their lines of inert corpses in wheelchairs in the hallways, put there so that they can enjoy some sunlight and watch people move. That’s better, more human than TV.

It’s summer rain and heavy, warm weather.

I am nervous in the car with my half sister, half cousin who never left the area and who’s been taking care of her the most in the past few years. I know it’s going to be hard. It’s Monday afternoon.

We quietly walk into her room. She’s watching TV. Her kind of hard stare, the one you get once you’re in a retirement home, half mad, half understanding, slowly gets mellower the closer I get to her. She instantly recognizes me, her first and only black kid. Her dry eyes are slowly filling up with liquid as I softly take her hand in mine and give her a couple kisses on the cheeks.

She then proceeds to never shut up for the next hour, which is a sign of very high activity. The last times they had come to see her, she wouldn’t say a word. I brought her a patisserie and she’s eating some and then goes back and forth between saying that she can’t eat it while having spoons of it and putting it on the side for later. She talks about how she was going to her parents’ house (both long gone) last month, she talks about how someone stole her dog (a plush) probably over five times, I stopped counting after that.

At some point, I clearly see her brain trying to make sense of the fact that I’m with her, here in France, which means that I should be with her in her house, but that she herself cannot remember when the last time she was there (almost a year now) was. I can see the darkness in her mind, the clouds making her frown. Trying to understand and explain what is going on and how I can be here while she cannot say where she is. I think she kind of still thinks she’s temporarily in the hospital. It is painful to watch.

Then the very racist diatribe happens. I knew it could, not because she’s mean, but because she has no filters anymore. And she says those things to somehow protect me. Prevent me from becoming a negro except that I am one. Again, I see her brain trying to make sense of the situation, what she said and what she knows. It’s all slowly heartbreaking.

Her voice is as strong as ever. She says things only she says those things that way. It’s about the cadence and humor. She still hears very well, even when we try to whisper. We’re three generations sitting on chairs around her. She would like to walk but her muscles are atrophied because she’s not moving because last times she tried, she fell, again. So nurses put her in a chair almost 24/7, and that’s it. She has a giant scar across the forehead and her arms are all flabby now. Her butt hurts from all that sitting.

After a bit over a hour, we leave. I hold her hand again, give her kisses, tell her to take good care of herself. She replies “sure will, I’m not trying anything else!” I cannot tell how she is actually doing.

I just know it’s getting closer.

Back from a one-week trip to France. Longest trip in 10+ years. It went well and it is emotionally so dense in my head. It’s always intense.

I saw my parents. My sister and her husband. A bunch of cats. Burned France. My foster mom in her retirement home room that probably will be where she leaves us. I passed by her/our house which is not hers anymore and she doesn’t know it and I know it too well and it hurts. I saw rain and violent storms, of course. I saw good old friends, kids and cousins. I went back to my ol’ apartment in Paris suburbs for the second time in a decade. I picked up my bass amp because I don’t want dad to mess up his back getting it down from the 3rd floor without elevator.

Due to jetlag and French culture, I feel like all I was doing was eat delicious food and poop constantly, at random hours. But we also did some heavy yard work. We moved about 4,000 pounds (2 tons) of discarded oak beams from construction that will be repurposed. Oak is like gold for my dad. He highly respects wood. I also unscrewed a billion screws from oak planks that will be sanded and used again, as new. I also slept in a van next to a 2CV. That unique ass car. Sigh.

Sipping on a homemade latte in my LA crib after a week without one, jetlagged as hell. Slurping as much sun (vitamin D) as possible to fight the COVID ting from travelling with all those hoes without masks.

Working relentlessly. This week was a bit hard with this humid heat.

I momentarily gave up on 3D, it’s really insane. But I’m making progress with models. I’m making furniture (not that easy at that small scale), I finished the roof so that I can use a sponge filling to make it as if it was a green roof. More like a yellow roof because grass will probably be yellow most of the time.

I’ll paint some red dots of flowers and it will look like spring in SoCal.

Financing is moving forward as well, and that’s a bit of a relief. I was ready to buy some land early this year but they put it off market so I’ll be back, mfs.

Thankful.

I missed her so much! She is back.

I had predicted that looking at how hard she plays defense, she was going to get hurt. She did. She was out for a while.

I had also talked shit about the fact that she didn’t shoot the 3 well and then she said shhh.

Well, this week she was back, shot twice, made them both. They were threes.

The first one early in the game. Late in the game, she made a defensive move (deflection and steal) that basically sealed the win. And then she made a perfect 3. You know, shot so pure that the ball stays levitating in the air right after hitting the net. Like, you cannot do better. Pure perfection.

That’s her face after that shot.

I hope she’s having a good time in Chicago. AT-DB-DC at the Sun was a whole vibe.

Internet comment:

I’m just so frustrated by how quickly and easily people give in to these things. People face relatively small inconveniences and quickly give away their rights. Smart phones and social media (in large part, enabled by always-on, always-present smart phones) have so, so many negatives effects and people won’t even consider moving on. “It’s hard to find parking” or “some restaurants are now inconvenient to eat at” are measured next to “the suicide rate of teen girls is spiking” and “we’ve enabled government tracking and surveillance on a scale never before thought possible.” I don’t know how else to be. People are so obsessed with immediate impulse satisfaction and immediate comfort that they’d give up anything. I think if you offered to remove someone’s right to vote, but told them they would be able to gamble for free once a month you’d lose half the votes in the country.

I think hyper, ultra-convenience short-circuits our brains.

Once on that “I am a god and just talk or tap to get anything I want”, people don’t want to go back.

Self-discipline blown out of the water.

Except that the entire juiciness of life is in the balance and oscillation between joy and pain. Effort and rest. Comfort, and discomfort. Struggle and mastery.

Once on that god shit, your brain doesn’t do anything. And so it atrophies. Or reacts violently against a change from doing nothing.

I’m keeping a line. I stay on the slightly inconvenient side of life to keep the smell, the taste. It feels stupid sometimes. But it always leads somewhere, to something, someone.

Ultra-convenience makes you rot in circle. Self-discipline makes you travel distances.

I realize that I’ve been able to avoid the mobile duopoly thanks to living in California/US. Anywhere else in the world? I would have been fucked years ago.

You can do everything with sms, email and websites here! To this day. Maybe it’s because those companies are all based in CA and know damn well how they’re making the world weaker and more sedated that they haven’t pushed state legislation around that. Or because people have pushed against it. Waymo might be the only service where I need a GoogApple app (I can order an Uber with a phone call). Hopefully they make a call service too.

In any case, I am very thankful for that freedom. I love that local businesses have responsive, simple websites and that I can order with the quickness from my laptop, typing with a nice keyboard that springs back and is felt under my fingers.

This is how it should be. Digital, respectful, and a bit slower.

Two things really stand out with this massive change for me:

• Phones being so personal, friends family and girlfriends having a different smartphone never created issues. Everyone is able to occasionally use a different interface. No big deal.
• Because no one else but me has been on a different wave with how UI/UX can be on mobile, everyone assumes that the iPhone/Android UI/UX is the best we can do.

It is the worst we can do. It has been optimized and A/B tested to oblivion to engage you beyond control. By the brightest minds of a few generations that are even more ruthless than actual Boomers. That’s why people can’t stop.

I wouldn’t be surprised if designing the phone and interface to “force” folks to use both hands all the time increases usage by 3. Apple, Google, phone carriers and everyone making money off that stuff is happy about that.

They’re not making a device to help, they’re making it to suck everything out of you. Absolutely everything.

And now, it is so clear to me. The addiction starts with the interface. Because it doesn’t respect you. It drags you. It hypnotizes you. It nags you. It makes you tap more. And no one escaped that but me?

It is keeping me up at night a bit.

I ordered a “dumb” phone or whatever the term is these days.

• Giant FOR LEASE signs at those gentrificating new buildings.
• Folks still paying cash most of the times at my store. This morning this man used 3 cards, all rejected until he used another one I think, I had stopped paying close attention. He then went on checking some lottery tickets at the machine: nothing, compadre.
• Speaking of store, I’ve never seen mine so understaffed and struggling with lines. In ten years, that’s the worst it’s been.
• I used to get an outstanding latte at a place nearby. $3.94 for a tall, big one in 2015. Today it was $7.48 and barely better than Starbucks. I don’t think I’ll go back.
• People are increasingly betting. It is visible. More machines at the store, I see people checking their parlays constantly. It is fucking everywhere in sports, YouTube, all TV apps.
• I have senior citizens with walkers sleeping outside by the basketball field now. A cute black couple. Not everyday. But man, this is heartbreaking.
• People drive unimaginably bad. The complacency at the wheel is unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s wild. And dangerous.
• I love our California flora’s vitality so damn much. Those plants make me smile.

I recently had to switch to an iPhone 8. After 16 years using a Nokia Windows Phone.

Not only I abhor this interface that looks like a slice of pizza with candy topping, but now I understand clearly why everyone is on their phones that much.

Every single little thing with the modern smartphone is designed to make you use it. Just the fact that you need both hands to navigate smoothly through the interface and that the only thing you can do one-handed with ease, is scroll.

I see it all now. It’s fucking diabolical.