The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

Archive

You are trying to be precise but everything is a carbon-like surface that scrolls by with pinpricks emitting memory’s wavy threads.

I’ve learned how to ride bikes a few different times.

As a kid, on a faux-BMX, from a combination of parents and that one uncle who was like a parent and was also, as the ex-boyfriend of one of my aunts whose relationship with us far outlasted theirs, not in fact an uncle. We rode down up and down our little hill and very ocassionally beyond those boundaries and a few, rare times in what I would realize later was my first experience of a velodrome. That bike was red.

Then again in New York, as a function of trying not to be killed by taxi drivers and bus drivers and really all drivers or taken out by car-sized potholes or the pedestrians who’d step nonchalantly and confidently into bike lanes when these weren’t otherwise blocked by parked police cars. To work and back across one bridge or another in the depths of winter, hands kept warm by two layers of gloves. I joined a gym so I could shower there before heading to the office. One day I forgot the code for the locker and stood dripping and frantic and exposed while trying to figure out how to signal the receptionist. That bike is grey and teal.

Then again as the slowest member of a collegiate road cycling team in Silicon Valley. I showed up at one of the team rides on a brand new road bike (and my first that I hadn’t yet had fitted to me. The seat was too low, I didn’t know how to use the shifters, I didn’t know anything about so I was on the stock flat pedals, I was hauling the brutally heavy U-lock I used for my commuter bike, my tire pressure was too low, and I’d spent so long getting lost on campus that I hadn’t eaten breakfast. That might well have been my only ride with that team had it not been for the generous and chatty and low-key champion mountain biker who took me under her wing and taught me how to use all those new gears. That bike is mostly white with hints of blue.

June 14, 2021
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The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always / fake.

How To Wash Your Makeup Brushes

1) Assemble supplies at a leisurely pace. Pause to contemplate whether you really need three different but functionally identical precision eyeliner brushes.

2) Wash brushes, meditatively. Or while catching up on your favourite beauty influencers, as you and various platforms’ algorithms prefer.

3) Dry brushes, exultantly and overnight.

June 12, 2021
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I ask that they describe / an object right in front of them, to make / it come alive, and one writes about death,

“He started writing the list in 1984, six years after he first suspected there was something wrong, that patients were suffering symptoms with no explicable cause. He tried to raise the alarm in 1979, two years before anything was reported in the press. He was ignored.”

“On June 5, 1981, a curious report appeared in the Center for Disease Control’s weekly public health digest: Five young, gay men across Los Angeles had been diagnosed with an unusual lung infection known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) – and two of them had died.”

June 7, 2021
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Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

Every week I google “em dash” and then I copy and paste the symbol onto the otherwise empty page.

I have memorized the shortcuts for the acute accent, the grave, the circumflex; I am unfazed by the requirements of the cedilla and the tilde. Be you umlaut or diaeresis, I am ready. I am many years and a graveyard of dead websites past needing to look up routine HTML or markdown.

But not so, the em dash. Every week I must pause to find it. A break in the flow, appropriately.

(In truth it’s rarely the break; it’s the beginning.)

May 31, 2021
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a deputizing of hundreds. a machine gun on standpipe hill. a dropping of bombs from chartered planes.

I thought I would send this on Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then Friday. I say the names of the days, but on Wednesday I thought it was Tuesday and on Friday I thought it was Wednesday and today I thought, ah so it’s not Sunday yet.

On Thursday I spent a lot of time waiting. On Wednesday I spent a lot of time getting ready to be waiting. Doctor’s offices, government offices, any setting in which you are regulated by impatience and dread and whatever the specifics of your relationship to transactional authority; there is a distinctive texture to the act of waiting in those spaces.

What is the feeling of waiting for history, through history2?

On Monday, .

May 30, 2021
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Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war.

Do you ever forget that your friends are dead?

Perhaps in the middle of the movie or the play or the book or the song or the sentence you find yourself thinking, oh I must tell him about this; oh she would love this. A beat, and then the realization, and then the wave.

If eulogy is memory is forgetting why there are no new memories a kind of prayer?

Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd just about a year ago. Already a different kind of forgetting.

May 24, 2021
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Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?

This week I learned that a journalism school declined to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize winner and a MacArthur genius grantee, in the wake of an outrage campaign fomented by people who find talking about the realities of how the US treats Black people to be insufficiently patriotic.

This week I learned that AP fired a just-out-of-college journalist named Emily Wilder in the wake of an outrage campaign led by the Stanford College Republicans about her participation in pro-Palestine campus activities.

May 21, 2021
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It doesn’t matter that / there is nowhere to run to.

“I turn often to poetry” feels like such a ridiculous thing to say. Do I mean, instead, pretentious? Perhaps I do, despite the years I’ve spent trying to unlearn the internalized and complicated classism that is the hidden curriculum of every single one of the schools I attended.

However I feel about the fact, the fact remains.

This week I sought out June Jordan and .

May 17, 2021
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Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.

2021 is a constant bifurcation; good things are happening to people, bad things haven’t stopped happening to people.

Sometimes when kids die we wonder whether it is impolitic to mourn their deaths. Outsourcing morality to politicians always ends well.

It can always get worse. How do we get better?

May 13, 2021
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running and running until she reaches / at last the one and only door

I’ve spent a large chunk of this weekend on hold with a bank, long enough that I’ve essentially memorized all the transitions in their automated messages.

I am reminded that time is a luxury. One of the reasons I have time to patiently repeat verification details over and over again is because I am do not currently have a “full-time” job.

My last day “in the office” was April 16. In lieu of being defined as a productive member of society, I’ve been using the weeks since to schedule and go to long overdue doctor’s appointments, cranking through errands, making headway on my personal email, reconnecting with friends and family. Appalled to report that I have not played a single video game yet.

May 10, 2021
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Time is a nice medium, but very little can be made from it. And perhaps one of its finer qualities is its tendency to go on.

Reader, it is Thursday.

Dates are not a strength of mine. For instance: I remember every correction I’ve ever had to issue or have issued on my behalf in the course of being a reporter and editor. Two of them involved dates. What day it is? When is my birthday? How old am I, actually? All questions with which I struggle.

However, it is Thursday (according to multiple sources I checked) which means this newsletter, the first of the additional elements for paid subscribers, is a day late. Sorry about that.

I have wondered for awhile to what extent this date chaos was influenced by having led a professional life largely oriented around intra-day deadlines: the US print edition morning close; the need to get the blog post out with pithy analysis of the earnings top line ASAP; the reality of reporting to C-suite execs for whom five minutes to reply to an email is four minutes and 30 seconds too long.

May 6, 2021
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I learned it’s okay to glance down / into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know / where to look.

I have long believed in the power of group texts-as-proxy, for both strong and weak ties. And never more intensely than over the past 14 or so months.

There’s the siblings group and its consistent and casual shade; the extended family WhatsApp for the maternal aunts and uncles and cousins defined by its birthday shoutouts and embarassing stories about everyone’s childhoods. There’s several groups of former colleagues, replete with layers of media and tech commentary.

And then there’s 🛵💕, as much a space for funny tweets and scheduling coordinated fitness classes and dicsussions about in-progess creative projects as it is for daily vibe checks (“how are you holding up” “what vibes do you need”) and the source of many care packages to and from Texas, New York and the Bay Area. There are different ways to try to survive a pandemic and that group text is one of mine.

May 3, 2021
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we used our words we used what words we had to weld, / what words we had we wielded

Several years back the low-key genius Rachel W Miller raved about the work of Cheryl Mendelson, the author of .

April 26, 2021
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There are politics to death / and here politics performs / its own autopsies

There’s an active shooter in Austin today, still at large at the time of writing this. Three people are dead.

Three people in Kenosha. in Indiannopolis. And everywhere, video of Adam Toledo.

April 19, 2021
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by cowardice or courage / the one who find our way / back to this scene

Thank you for being a ~ premium ~ subscriber.

I do not enjoy being photographed. I never know what to do - with my face, with my body, with my hands.

But there is one picture of me in which I am looking straight at the photographer (I cannot remember who it was, but this was in Trinidad perhaps ten years ago (fact check: very perhaps) and we are at a club and it is clearly late and my left hand is wrapped around a glass of what can only be a scotch and coconut water, because I am nothing if not the person who will be drinking a scotch and coconut water if it is late in Trinidad and I am liming, and that is all to say there’s a narrowish pool of folks who could be on the other end of that lens).

April 12, 2021
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I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination

There is no end to the absolutions those who have wronged you might seek, because there is no end to the stories we will tell ourselves about our goodness.

“There’s so much slippage between “please tell me what I’m doing wrong” and “please tell me that I’ve done nothing wrong”. The suddenness and intensity of the desperation to be seen as being “good” run completely counter to how deeply entrenched, how very old the problems are.”

We like to pretend that the problems are new, because then we don’t have to reckon with the role we played in creating the conditions that brought us here.

April 5, 2021
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To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life.

Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?

A. It is not for us to cool it.

Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most?

March 29, 2021
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I address you aftermath, you as vengeance.

Bouncing between the ordinary–hello, welcome to The Main Event: No longer hosted on Substack edition–and the ordinariness of despair.

A year of bad days and in none of those did I wake up and engage in a killing spree.

March 22, 2021
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I want to be the woman who sits

Some housekeeping: I’ll be moving this newsletter off of Substack. This isn’t my first platform switch - I’ve been in the game since the early days of tinyletter - and it probably won’t be the last. I’ve been actively looking to switch since at least the privacy fiasco and the commentary (to say nothing of the “”) from the Substack team haven’t changed my mind.

March 15, 2021
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She meant

I traffic in words, but I have run out of ways to explain. Yes, they lifted the mask mandate and all the business restrictions. No, vaccine access here isn’t great. Yes, along the lines you might expect.

Inside I try to keep my plants alive.

.

March 8, 2021
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What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

Feels like it’s been March this whole time.

Disaster anniversaries are a special kind of shock to the system. They mark time. They mark us. And we should mark them, in turn.

March 1, 2021
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When it comes to Asian-American grief, do Americans want to know?

Editor’s note: I wrote a version of on Tuesday (a rare day off!) to revise later and then…did not. Slightly revised and updated as of Sunday 28 at 3.30pm CT. There will be a regularly-scheduled missive tonight as usual. It will be more chill. Probabloy.

I have spent most of this pandemic furious. My default state is unimpressed; furious is an escalation.

Furious because so many people have died and so many more are grieving. Because we keep treating this generational trauma, this mass-casualty event, this unrelenting series of tragedies, as if it mere background. Background to the necessity of the endless meetings. Background to the urgency of the daily task list. Background to the “I don’t know if you saw my email but”. Background to the five seconds of deep breathing to make sure you show up smiling to the Zoom call. As if this is a distraction which does not merit our individual or collective attention and could we all shut up and stop complaining and just Furious because for some people all this death, all this suffering, is just an inconvenience, a blip, a slightly longer time between Caribbean vacations.

February 28, 2021
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The After Party: Dispatch from Fantasy Island

Editor’s note: As promised, once a month I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will be available to everyone.
This week, .
February 22, 2021
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I tire so of hearing people say,

Halfway through February, nearly a year into the pandemic, and I am losing count of the number of people declaring their despair.

Halfway through February, Carnival Sunday, and the fete tabanca is profound.

Halfway through February, nearly half a million deaths in the US.
Halfway through February, no end in sight to the suffering.

February 15, 2021
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Because you still listen, because in times like these

This week I hit a wall. Or perhaps the wall hit me.

I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I felt the bricks come crashing down. Maybe it was when I was trying to order sympathy flowers to commemorate yet another person killed by coronavirus in one browser tab and reply to the “concerned citizen” attempting to bully several of my team by email in another. Maybe it was when I got the WhatsApp message about the family member’s cancer diagnosis and then had to go immediately into a meeting. Maybe it was when the conference organizer asked me to both moderate the panel and “focus on diversity” while the two male co-panelists were each asked to talk about their work. Maybe it was the casualness of the conversations about who is allowed to be a person in media. Maybe it was all of this? Maybe it was everything else?

Why does it matter if someone said the n-word in front of teenagers becomes becomes becomes

February 8, 2021
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This tart sermon

This pandemic steals lives (RIP, Francisco Assis da Conceicao, and may all who loved you find peace) and it steals time and it steals, unapologetically and repeatedly.

I am sorry for your loss, I am sorry for all our losses

To survive we keep pretending: we pretend our way through each hour of grief, through each day of upheaval, through each week of uncertainty, through each month of novel disappointment.

February 1, 2021
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I need to learn

Many, many years ago I wrote another newsletter. Technically I still have that newsletter. Technically alot of things are true.

In that newsletter I would sometimes be able to feature my particular universe of talented friends, who are writers and poets and photographers and musicians and dancers and architects and academics and artists. Some of them are many of those things at once; they are impressively chill about it, considering.

The universe is bigger now, but I still have roughly the same number of friends.

I am committed to supporting my friends’ creative pursuits; I will , support their shows, edit the marketing blurb, make the helpful introduction. And I am committed to supporting creative work in general, and especially when the people making that work come from the kinds of backgrounds that lead people to recommend them, but not to want to pay them.

January 25, 2021
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There’s more to MLK than “I Have a Dream”

Last year for MLK Day, I compiled a list of resources for folks who might be interested in deepening their knowledge of Dr. King’s words and works.

Here it is again:

First, (1963), or the one in which MLK is exasperated while incarcerated and in :

January 18, 2021
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I always thought language was / Akin to the body

Unsent Tweets, March 2020-Jan 2021

coping with the pandemic by watching and reading and listening to work created by people so obviously brilliant and good at their jobs it’s almost physically painful

—

January 18, 2021
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Everyone is crying out for peace

Some folks stormed the US Capitol and killed a police officer. They flaunted Nazi paraphernalia and Confederate flags and Q shirts and Proud Boys tattoos. They wore MAGA hats and live-streamed their screams about stolen elections.

Some other folks, politicians and elected officials who’d wink winked dog whistled bull horned in the direction of the folks with the flags and hats and shirts and the tattoos, said we do not condone violence and these are not our supporters and and and .

January 11, 2021
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i am running into a new year

No resolutions.

New intentions. Considered outcomes. Intended effects.

You can only control so much when all about you a pandemic swirls, uncontrolled.

January 4, 2021
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The perfect moment is now.

Six years ago Phil Hutchinson died.

I didn’t know that then; it took a couple of days for the news that the world had changed for the worse to reach me. I still know exactly where I was when it did; I still know exactly how it did. There are pieces of the immediately after that are missing. Perhaps the clocks did stop that day.

I did not attend his memorial. It is more accurate to say that I could not? Because the US government would not let me travel to get there. Or indeed, it would have let me, so long as I accepted that my green card application would start right back at the beginning.

There are many ways to break someone.

December 28, 2020
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you cannot catch / my rhythm

December 2020, and so many people are just about hanging on. It is not clear what they are hanging on to, and how long that grip will last.

I do not want to get used to this. We should not have to get used to this.

Where does the migraine begin and the dread end? Or is it the other way around?

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your waking hours explaining power to the powerful.

December 21, 2020
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what advice do the drowned have for the burned?

Pandemic rituals: at the appointed time on Sunday nights, fire up Twitch and connect my phone to the nearest bluetooth speaker. Start this newsletter while listening to a live reggae broadcast by a friend from high school.

We are the same age; our schools were separated by a wall and the social distancing mechanism of the explicit disapproval of our respective educators at the notion of students fraternizing. We have the same local cultural references, as long as those rely on knowledge that stops roughly around the time I left and he stayed. We still have some of the same friends.

This time last year we were liming in the same bar in the part of the island we both grew up in. This time this year I have no idea when I will see that island again. The bar closed down.

December 14, 2020
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And still a world begins its furious erasure—

Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barbara Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maude Haviernick. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Maryse Laganière. Maryse Leclair. Anne-Marie Lemay. Sonia Pelletier. Michèle Richard. Annie St. Arneault. Annie Turcotte.

Remember the 14.

Attribution:

December 7, 2020
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You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries—

We thought Things were Bad, because people were dying. And then more people died, and more people died, and more people died.

What happens when you combine a highly contagious disease with individual selfishness and collective confusion and instituional dysfunction and political ruthlessness is no longer a rhetorical question.

A thing that money buys you is distance. A thing that distance buys you is safety.
Distance is relative. Safety is relational. Deaths are mere statistics until you know their names.

November 30, 2020
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After that came a sadness so big it made everyone

When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time 
it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

November 23, 2020
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Inhale. So many of us are breathless,

I have no way to process this much pain and this much grief. The quiet desperation is everywhere, in the eyes of masked strangers avoiding you on the sidewalk, in the the bodies of the exhausted and terrified “essential workers” who lack the luxury of staying at home, in the voices of the teachers performing courage in classrooms and on screens.

I have no way to process the callousness, the selfishness. The folks with the work-from-home jobs who refuse to wear masks as they collect their delivered meals from someone making less than minimum wage. The conspiracy theorists harassing doctors and nurses and accusing them of perpetuating a mass fraud. The politicians. The politicians. The politicians.

There is no combination of books or bike rides or yoga classes or long walks or medications that is making any of this better.

And so to the group texts, to the love languages of emojis and memes and Good Tweets and Bad Tweets and videos of adorable creatures doing adorable things. The comfort of small gifts and acts of service. The celebration of each others’ smallest victories and commiseration over the enormity of personal and shared tragedy.

November 16, 2020
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Peace.

It is a powerful thing to affirm to the eyes of a watching world that though you might be the first, you will not be the last.

It is a powerful thing to believe, to be in a position to enable, to decide is worth fighting for.

Every headline about firsts - first woman, the first Black person, the first LGBT person - is an implicit acknowledgement that we have collectively enabled a broken system for tens and hundreds of years. Because the first of the headline is never the first to have been good enough, talented enough, brave enough, enough enough. What they are is the first to have found a way through a system that broke and bent and ignored and worked to erase all who dared before.

November 9, 2020
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is not protecting

What is happening in Texas but really they’re asking is my guy going to win, please tell me my guy is going to win. It’s not always a guy, just usually.

There are people for whom politics has always been a question of life and making a living, a question of fundamental rights, a question of who gets to be a whole person and who’s only 3/5ths.

November 2, 2020
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Many of them remain unaware of . . .

Existence right now feels like a series of unfinished sentences.

A series of lives ended abruptly.

Of livelihoods upended.

Of families fractured.

October 26, 2020
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Guilt is not a response to anger;

My current favourite videogame is about a dysfunctional family.

When last did a single phrase—“good morning, my beautiful son”— reveal so much about so many?

If mere survival requires endless, exhausting performance, where does the energy to thrive come from?

October 19, 2020
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I write about you all the time, I said aloud.

Video game writer (writer for video games) was not on the list of acceptable professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer, extremely educated housewife) at my all-girl high school.

How does one avoid turning every hobby into a hustle?

Life is not like video games, because you stay dead at the end.

October 12, 2020
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How am I to understand the fluidity with which we continue in our days?

It’s still a conspiracy theory when you believe in it.

Everyone is tired. Some of us have been tired.

Do you remember a place differently when you know you can return?

October 5, 2020
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I must write the same poem over and over,

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but notenough. I wasin my bed, around my bed Americawas falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.I took a chair outside and watched the sun.In the sixth monthof a disastrous reign in the house of moneyin the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,our great country of money, we (forgive us)

September 28, 2020
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i / haven't enough room to both rage and weep.

Sometimes, in a migraine season, you get to a point where what you notice is the absence of pain. You realize, all at once, that you do not feel terrible. You don’t think on this too long, because you know the pain will come back, but you rush to do whatever tasks you can within the parameters of that fleeting relief.

Why do we demand heroism from individuals and not accountability from the systems that ground them down?

There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not cure. It’s the tiredness of grinding uncertainty. Of the certainty of unsettledness. Of the restlessness of the targeted. It is the exhaustion of dread.

How many lives are changed by 200,000 deaths?

September 21, 2020
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You do own to hear me faintly /

Less a realization, and more a remembrance: I am rarely angrier than when someone is wasting my time.

It is possible to feel like entire industries are wasting your time. Entire institutions. Entire classes of people.

We’ve already told you why you’re failing to diversify your teams. We’ve already told you why have taken such entrenched hold on platforms. We’ve already told you why people who benefit from status quo norms and practices decline to consider extending that grace to others. We’ve already told you that people will keep dying and that you will keep believing that those people must have done something, anything to deserve it. We’ve already told you that no one is coming to save us.

September 14, 2020
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tired i count the ways in which it determines my life

People who survived HIV and AIDS in the 80s and the early 90s were bemused when we said the closest antecendent to coronavirus and COVID-19 happened more than 100 years ago.

This was March, then April, then May, as we argued about masks and personal responsibility. Then , and July, and and the bodies piled up, mostly black and brown bodies, as we argued about whether government and local officials were letting people die.

September 7, 2020
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Everything was not all right.

Chadwick Boseman died, and we grieved.

And then there was another scar from another wound, another mark from another lash. Another collective keening.

Another reminder that suffering is unevenly distributed.

August 31, 2020
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Between the idea / and the reality

One problem with loving words, and with doing some version of words “for a living” is that every day you are confronted with whether you read or you write or you listen.

There are so many books to read, and so many lectures to which I’d like to listen, and so many things I will forget or leave unprocessed if I do not write them down.

I cannot effectively do any two of those at a time. And it feels increasingly difficult to do even one of them, finding the energy to hold the space despite the barrage of doom-filled notifications or the distractions of ecommerce or the mundane emotional reality of trying to survive a pandemic.

August 24, 2020
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