h. Play

I bought a head lettuce for $6 this morning. It’s supposed to be 79cts.

I have no idea what’s going on with those crypto crashes. I mean, I understand that it was all smoke and mirror, and that’s all there was, as many people knew.

I  also understand, watching this, that we could easily solve our problems if money was the missing ingredient. But money is abundant, we create it out of thin air whenever we want. And then it disappears in ultra complex techno-finance schemes led by one dude who’s like, “oops”.

What a strange system.

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.