A changing of the seasons.

Wistful is how I feel about autumn, a season I didn’t experience for the first eighteen or so years of my life.

Funny how quickly you get used to things: layers, scarves, falling leaves. Seasons, and not just “rainy” and “even rainier”. Or, in these Anthropocene days, “dry” and “drought”.

Wistful, a melancholy, a longing. Not a longing for the persistence of summer - not and never my favourite season; too humid, too sticky, too full of impossible expectations. No, instead a restrained ruefulness about the coming winter, with its bone-chilling winds and long dark days.

Congratulations to all those on the National Book Awards Longlists, and especially to Charif Shanahan and all the poets.

Attribution:

Specks of toothpaste fleck the mirror.

A fan spins dust in the hall.

I find “this is it” too vulgar to accept

So I wait for a new starting point

As though life will begin there and then.

Do you know what I mean?

Not what I’m saying, what I mean.

Is it possible my function is to hold

All the intricate, interstitial pain

And articulate clarity?

Tie a boat to my wrist, I sprout wings.

Give me a pair of shoes, I grow fins.

Twice an hour I trick myself into focus:

I look into the glass as I look through it.

When the new beginning comes, what then?

Does life suddenly reset like an Atari?

Does meaning emerge

Assertively and without invitation?

The task is to live well enough with you.

But how? How do you know what you want

If you don’t tell you? If you don’t hear you?

— While I Wash My Face I Ask Impossible Questions of Myself and Those Who Love Me by Charif Shanahan

Sometimes, when you are on the nine hour flight that followed the five hour drive that started at 5.30am, and the seat next to yours is occupied by a very active, very unimpressed, and very loud baby and their doing-their-best parent, and you have to decide between getting up (which will hurt, though much less than a week ago) and staying put (which hurts, but slightly less than the action of getting up, maybe), you find yourself reflecting on luck and circumstance.

Not probability, so much. Not the “you did X thing and the odds of Y outcome are Z”, not the generational privilege of things like having been born in the “right” zipcode, but that sense of an unexpected and even whimsical windfall, so celebrated in Hallmark holiday specials, by the Schuyler sisters, and in the occasional animated film.

When was the last time you felt lucky (did your brain autocomplete that lyric? You may be a geriatric millennial.)

For me, the answer is right now, this week. Because I know that a not-to-be-taken-for-granted number of things had to go right for me to have ended up on that plane next to that deeply over it baby. And given the alternative - not having been able to celebrate a very joyous occasion because of injury (unlucky!) or work (typical!) or crisis (2023, unrelenting!) - I’ll take my luck wherever I can get it.

Attribution:

Luck is not chance—
It's Toil—
Fortune's expensive smile
Is earned—
The Father of the Mine
Is that old-fashioned Coin
We spurned—

— Luck is not chance by Emily Dickinson

That ability can be temporary is something you understand deep in the body if you have lived with chronic pain, or just chronic physical dysfunction.

Doing a totally mundane task today - laundry and folding said - and something in my lower back went into spasm, signaled by a sudden, searing, breathtaking, loss of ability.

Several rounds of stretching exercises, multiple ice and heat packs and painkillers and shrieks of pain later and I am managing, just about, to move. But the thoughtless, pain-free mobility of just hours ago is perhaps a couple of days away, at best.

You get to a threshold, with certain conditions, after which the amount of time you have spent “powering through” pain is greater than the amount of time you have spent pain-free.

“In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health: Check its temperature.

That's what a group of researchers did, and they found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the same ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.” - All Things Considered, 2020

“Neighborhoods with a majority of people of color have 33% less tree canopy on average than majority white communities, according to the study.  And neighborhoods with 90% or more of their residents living in poverty have 41% less tree canopy than communities with only 10% or less of the population in poverty.

In Southern Nevada, more than 560,000 trees will need to be planted to reach “tree equity,” or the number of trees needed so that all residents can benefit from shade, cooler temperatures and reductions in carbon.” - Nevada Current, 2021

“households below the poverty line, across all racial and ethnic groups, faced more blistering temperatures than more affluent households. But the average person of color still faced hotter temperatures than their white counterparts, regardless of income. 

That’s evidence that something fishy is going on with regard to race in particular, Hsu says. Other studies have suggested the same thing — Black, Asian, and Latino people are more likely to live in urban heat islands.” - The Verge, 2021

“Solutions to neighborhood-level disparities vary from one place to the next, depending on the local climate and the city’s unique characteristics. In some places, planting more vegetation may help. Installing reflective surfaces on rooftops or roads, which can help beam sunlight away, is another potential tool.

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to urban heat island management,” Hsu said. “You have to consider where you are and what’s feasible.”

But knowing where the disparities lie, and which communities are at the greatest risk, is the first step.” - E&E News via Scientific American, 2020

Fire, floods. What a thing to be living through a climate emergency.

There are mundane adaptations. Office dress codes, for instance. Take it from a person who grew up in the tropics: light, flowy, long-sleeves and trousers are so much better in the heat than short, tight, and sleeveless.

There are more profound adaptations, requiring global, governmental cooperation and enforcement and that have very little to do with individual habits around recycling (which, largely: a scam).

And then there are the courts, which groups of young people are using to assert their rights:

Research by Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii, and others has shown that the scale and frequency of wildfires have been increasing across in Hawaii from the early 1900s to the 2010s. The researchers also identified a major culprit: non-native plants.

“Wildfires were most frequent in developed areas, but most areas burned occurred in dry non-native grasslands and shrublands that currently compose 24 percent of Hawaii’s total land cover,” the researchers wrote. “These grass-dominated landscapes allow wildfires to propagate rapidly.”

The non-native grasses were brought to Hawaii by cattle ranchers in the 19th century, University of California Santa Barbara ecologist Carla D’Antonio told me. “They were selected because they were drought tolerant.”

They are also invasive. — via Heatmap

The death toll from the Maui wildfires in Hawaii reached 93 on Saturday, according to the Maui County website, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, with the total likely to rise as cadaver dogs sift through the ruins of Lahaina.

The scale of the damage came into sharper focus four days after a fast-moving blaze leveled the historic resort town, obliterating buildings and melting cars. — via Reuters

Bob said, if you know your history / then you would know where you're coming from

And so I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. By myself, which is my preferred way to visit museums.

I heard the voices of Rev. Shuttlesworth, of Gov. George "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” Wallace, of Gov. John “Wallace is but an amateur when it comes to segregation” Patterson. I learned the name Constance Baker Motley, daughter of Nevis, first Black woman to argue a case at the US Supreme Court.

I saw one of the buses—a bombed out shell—that the Freedom Riders rode in. I saw one of the stained glass windows that survived the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church. Fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley did not survive.

Exit, July.

Every year since that longest March, the March we thought we’d get through with just a couple of weeks of inconvenience, for some value of ‘we’ and of ‘inconvenience’, every year since that March has felt both infinite and comically short.

Things that affect how we perceive time: culture; music; drugs; age; emotions; hormones; heartbeats; nature. To that list I add: the aftermath of the deaths of millions of people.

Enter, August.

If you listen to Caribbean music long enough, you will encounter fire.

It stretches across genres—soca, dancehall, reggae– and across decades. Deployed as a threat, a promise, an invocation, a reflection. At its heart, Isaiah 47:14, quoted and translated and repeated. Fire will bun them for so many values of them.

Old Testament in origin and targets and violence: _loose women; children who don’t honour their parents; queer people and especially gay men.

Fire will bun them, the songs go, and no one ever really stops to ask who is doing the burning.

I attended what could reasonably be described as a post-colonial girls’ school, one founded by Presbyterian missionaries to the Caribbean who were concerned about the souls of the local Hindu population. It is most well-known beyond its local borders for an excellent cookbook, of which there have been multiple editions.

I spent seven uniformed years there, shaped—perhaps indelibly so—by each of my teachers and many of my classmates.

Seven years is a long time. Eleven to eighteeen, just barely; the very definition of formative years.

When Caribbean people meet for the first time, and especially if they’re people who grew up on the same island, there is first an establishing of geography. Among Trinidadians, the Port of Spain lighthouse is a key marker.

In the Discourse: bathing suits and boundaries; manipulation and meaning.

In the FT: a starchitect, falling. A hedge fund manager, flailing.

Another round of referenda on men and power and men in power, and the myths that surround them. Round and around and around and around we go. Why this keeps happening, everybody knows.

The rewards of deference. The expectation of silence. The punishment of the truth.

There is something ridiculous, perhaps, about crying in a soca party.

But then, it was David Rudder in a slightly incongruous setting - midtown Manhattan - on one of the final legs of a farewell tour. Farewell, because he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, the effects of which were visible in his movements as he negotiated the stage but not in his voice, as powerful and melodious and evocative as ever.

It is a time of endings.

So: David Rudder in Manhattan, performing for a sea of mostly but certainly not exclusively Caribbean people of various ages, many of them at or approaching Rudder’s 70. Trinis freshly off a Caribbean Airlines flight from Piarco, Trinis who’ve lived in Brooklyn and Queens for decades. Swag bragging of recent and not-so-recent Jouvert forays. Reflections on the first or most recent time they’d seen King David live in concert. A high priest and his congregation.

What happened to hundreds of people who drowned off the coast of Greece?

75 years of Windrushers, a "bittersweet" anniversary at best.

There are days, weeks, months that require reggae. The days, weeks, months when you know you are living through history. When whatever you're doing or not doing is what you would have been doing, or not doing.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Az11r3EKmbg

It is not, I don't think, that when music hits you feel no pain. It is that it makes pain bearable.

Attribution:

And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
— from truth by Gwendolyn Brooks

Let them say you were complicated. That you made mistakes and that you owned up to them. That everyone knew your name. That you were a fierce defender of your friends and your family. That you loved music and books. That you had a quick and generous wit and an easy laugh. That you brought people together. That you could turn anything into a celebration.

Let them say that you lived. And that you brought us together, in your absence, and we celebrated you.

RIP Uncle Azad.

Attribution

In crisis, gather the generations. Figure out how to be in two places at once. Rearrange schedules. Book flights and hotels. Figure it out. Make it happen. You don’t get the time back. You don’t get the people back. Share meals and memories. Take turns at the hospital. Handle errands. Reflect and reminisce. Presence is the priority. Thank the doctors and nurses. Elders whispering prayers across a range of faiths and traditions. Laugh, in an excess of sorry and a demonstration of solidarity. Show up. Be there. Stay here. Know when to leave. Know when to come back. Make it work. Control what you can, because the rest is not up to you.

Attribution

To Unfold into a receptacle for holding joy, entrust your tender heart to another. Look. We are more than our scars. We hold the memory of trauma in our roots. And still, here is a moment of pure joy. See how our chests shake the air with a trust manifested from generations of resilience? Reach for each other. Embrace. Grow flowers with your lungs.

— from Imaginary Photo Album or, When We Die, Our Polaroids Speak to Our Living Descendants by Lisa Jarrett, Lehua M. Taitano and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng

June. Complicated month. Yet another opportunity to litigate whose rights are worth defending despite backlash from folks whose whole personality is hating other people; who gets to exist freely and to take up space; and who gets to be described as a person and not merely a generic collection of identities.

I am struck, almost daily, by how common cowardice is. Vulgar and frequent.

Imagine, if instead of keeping what passes for a peace, one made at the expense of the most vulnerable, you instead chose showing up. I think about the talent agent who showed up to picket alongside writers in LA. “I love conflict,” he said.

“Conflict averse” is never a compliment, and yet its adherents are rewarded far more frequently than the their “direct” counterparts.

Some lovely responses to the question, “what would you say to your 17-year-old self?”

Including:

• “(You haven't started watching Buffy yet, but log onto alta vista and search for "Spike on Buffy.")”

• “they knew that life was too short but they don’t know that — they think there is a scorecard”

• “We try to contain things in order to express them ourselves because we think we have the language for it.”

I have a vivid memory of 17-year-old me, newly moved to France, standing in a store and trying to remember the word for “socks”, because I hadn’t packed the right ones, because I had never experienced autumn before and didn’t know what the right ones would be. Later, thanks to the wisdom and largesse of my cousin Cathy, I’d have the right boots and the right jacket and a hot water bottle and a dressing gown. I’d be ready, not necessarily for everything, but at least for winter.

Growing up, as a student of that very proper school on the hill, the one that provided both a demanding and rigorous curriculum and that policed skirt lengths and hairstyles, I was taught how to work the status quo to my advantage. The how to challenge the status quo part, which became a favourite pastime, that I gleaned from a combination of observing my relatives and from having read too much Wilde too young.

And yet, despite all the ways in which I was determined to be unconventional, when I graduated after seven years at the school I had a lot of unlearning to do.

Small things, like believing that visible tattoos and piercings would bar me from gainful employment (this, despite having worked most holidays in a tattoo parlour / piercing studio that also did a brisk trade in airbrushed copyright infringement). Big things like how I thought about class and race, and about how I felt about (and operated within) the various categories of these that had been bestowed upon me like a birthright. Red, in the Caribbean, is distinct from Black. With a complex post-colonial universe in between.

It helped that I moved around a lot: cities, countries, personal and professional contexts. Novelty provides endless opportunity for unlearning, if you let it. If you can bear it.

a farewell to BuzzFeed News, by SMI and Millie

We wanted to be your smartest, most interesting friend. But first we had to ship a mobile app, for iOS and Android. In six months. And no, there wasn’t a team in place. Or a way for the main (brilliant!) CMS to power a mobile app. Or a business model or plan of any kind. 

And so the original Team News App was born: SMI, Millie, Laura, Aaron, Sam. 

We spun up a CMS that could send push notifications, including from our phones — one that blasted “push it real good” whenever we hit send. That CMS, a sketch that became a prototype that had a picture of a cat built into it - made it to the end of BuzzFeed News. (Minneapolis massive: you all were the best).

“Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” What was in your mind when you wrote that line?
When white men are shooting black people, some of it is malice and some an out-of-control image of blackness in their minds. Darren Wilson told the jury that he shot Michael Brown because he looked “like a demon”. And I don’t disbelieve it. Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people.

Why is it so hard to call out racism?
Because making other people uncomfortable is thought worse than racism. It has taken me a while to train myself to speak out.

…

In a New Yorker article you wrote: “There really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed simply for being black.” What is needed if empathy is useless?
I’m not saying that anything can be enough. Empathy is not a cure.

— from an interview with Claudia Rankine in The Guardian, Dec 2015

New York has been churlishly soggy and cold and dark the whole weekend. Leading, to quote a witty friend, to "an excess of lassitude".

April ends in showers.

Onward to May. May it be everything you need it to be.

Attribution

This rain.

The blues gone gray

and yellow

a terrible amber.

In the cold streets

your warm body.

In whatever room

your warm body.

Among all the people

your absence.

The people who are always

not you.
— from Rain by Jack Gilbert

Live long enough in media to see multiple of the places you worked just cease to exist. Live long enough in media to have a nemesis list related to the disappearance of those places. Live long enough in media to know you are on someone's nemesis list. To know you are someone's nemesis list.

Chronic pain is, above all, tiresome. There is the literal exhaustion that comes from both the performance of wellness and the adaptations required to do so. There is the mental exhaustion that accompanies the necessity of trying to break out of the cycle - the hours spent filling in the same forms over and over for doctors and specialists; the insurance follow-ups; the repeated, tedious questions; the time spent on hold or in waiting rooms. The frustration of not being able to do the things you want and need to do - of being dis-abled. Of wondering when you should tick the box. Dis-ability. Feels big. Feels permanent. Feels like it's something that comes for us all eventually. It is wellness that is temporary.

Live long enough that it takes more than one hand to count the friends who've died, suddenly. And the parents of friends who have died. Be grateful for the friends from a very specific time were committed photographers and that they, despite time and distance and technology, held on to those photos. Photographers are public memoirists.

Rest in peace CB.

Attribution

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
— from The Trees by Philip Larkin

The algorithms always know when I'm having a back flare-up, because I tell them. Lots of searches for "psoas" and "sacroiliac" and "piriformis" followed by "release" and "relax" and "pain-relief". Pick a feed - IG, the clock app, YT - and it will be serving me up physiotherapists and mobility specialists and occupational therapists of every stripe and discipline. And I will reinforce those suggestions and results by interacting with them (and a dismissal is an interaction, always).

Search engines, algorithmic recommendation engines, advertisers - they are able to serve up "relevant" things about us because their designers and engineers built them to (or in same cases, failed to build them not to) deliver certain outputs in response to certain kinds of prompts and signals, explicit and implicit.

It is de rigeur at the moment to have An Opinion on AI.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, because I've been doing the reading here for a long time, first as an amateur, then as a student, and now as a professional whose job could be defined as "always needing to be up to speed on the biggest things moving markets right now and having a plan for what to do in response, journalistically".

My number one thought has been, practically from the beginning, about what is presented an inevitable tradeoff between utility and privacy. This is not a new presentational dichotomy, and it is certainly not one specific to AI.

The Disney+ app wants me to tell it a date of birth and a gender with which it should associate my account so it can better deliver targeted advertising. The utility argument here starts at "user experience" and ends at "use of the service itself" since you cannot opt-out of providing a date of birth, though you can "prefer not to say" for gender.

A majority of the cars available for hailing on ride services like Uber and Lyft are using in-vehicle surveillance cameras, and in some cases audio-recording devices - and there is no way to know whether that will be true for your ride until the car shows up. The utility argument here is "safety".

To sign up for an OpenAI account, you have to provide a phone number "for security reasons". Further, OpenAI does not support "use of landlines, VoIP providers, or Google Voice at this time." Do you know how much information your phone number reveals about you to advertisers and people in search of a business number? It is the reason every retailer on the planet will offer you some nominal incentive if you "sign up for texts". Both Facebook and Twitter used the phone numbers people provided for multi-factor authentication to serve them advertising. "An error", Twitter said.

These considerations - do you want privacy or security? A "better advertising experience" or irrelevant spam? Access to the buzziest consumer-facing AI front-end of the moment or not? - are presented as either/or, if they are presented as choices at all.

Our job, as people, is to first be aware that someone, usually a very large or very well-funded corporation, is benefiting enormously from the "opt-in" defaults. And second, to ask ourselves why and whether these are the only current options.

Attribution:

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge. To understand each desire has an edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.

There are no curses, only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
— from Demeter's Prayer to Hades by Rita Dove

If you punched* Nazis and stole their memorabilia, I suppose you could keep them. Much less convinced than if you acquired them by other means, though.

So much of living in the US is watching people deeply invested in power-as-righteousness, and then watching those same people be deeply uncomfortable with any suggestion that there's no reason to treat power as if it endows either infallibility or immunity.

It's not conflict aversion when you're delegating consequences. It's cowardice.

Attribution:

A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know.

But not so much that you won’t need more muscle:

the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom.

Inhale. So many of us are breathless,

you know, like me

— from Respiration by Jamaal May

Eight years ago Alana Massey published an essay titled "Against Chill". It was a different time on the internet, in media, and in culture.

It is always a different time, except for how often the now is just a repetition of the then.

And so this is an essay that I re-read at least once a year, because it holds up, righteously:

"But Chill is not the opposite of uptight. It is the opposite of demanding accountability. Chill is a sinister refashioning of “Calm down!” from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude. Chill suggests that young love is best expressed as competitive ambivalence. Chill demands that you see a Read receipt followed by a “Hey, was asleep” text three hours later and not proceed to throw your phone into the nearest volcano. Chill asks you to be like, “LOL, what volcano?” Chill presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations. Chill takes and never gives. Chill is pathologically unfeeling but not even interesting enough to kill anyone. Chill is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species. Fuck Chill."

There are people who conflate being calm under pressure with being chill. These people are wrong.

Whether you survive an emergency is not only a question of preparation. It is also a question of recognition. And of who you're with at the time.

Attribution:

There is something about rain in Trinidad, sharp and sudden and sometimes fleeting.

Of course there is the smell, the petrichor of the collision of hot pitch and concrete with raindrops. Then there are the sounds - people scrambling when caught unawares; the inevitable declaration, if it is an otherwise sunny day, that “the devil and he wife mus be fighting”; the echo of rain drops on a galvanized roof; the low distant rumbling of thunder; the crash of lightning followed, not always but not infrequently, by the explosion of a power transformer and the hiss of electricity going out.

Or perhaps you are at a beach house in Mayaro, one close enough to the ocean that you can hear the waves and taste the sea salt. When the rain comes, if the water is warm enough or you’re ocean-deprived enough, you run into the sea and dive underwater and hold your breath as long as you can, feeling the sounds of the raindrops and the waves deep in your chest. And if it is not warm, or you have already spent the whole day in the water or on the sand, then you bundle up in a blanket knowing that the rain and the waves and the growling thunder will be the soundscape to your dreams.

Attribution:

Been a long minute since I did one of these, so:

Read: Babel

Watch: Grand Crew, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Paddington

Eat: Mamak’s Corner

I spent many a Friday night, fifteen years ago, writing about banks that failed.

Another bank failed on Friday, as financial institutions sometimes do, and there I was again. Plus ça change, etc and indeed.

News repeats, because people make the same kinds of decisions over and over again.

‘People like to be told what they already know.  Remember that.  They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.  New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect.  They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man.  That is what dogs do.  They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that.  In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’ — Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)

March, the longest year. Everything since, marked. Folks talked about a before when there was a sense that there would be an after. Yet it is still, somehow, the during.

I watched - experienced, really - a play about The Jungle, about the place that was once referred to as The Jungle. (If you are in DC, it will be playing there from March 16 - April 28). It is not a hopeful play, but it is a play about hope.

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers” - Rankine, in Citizen, quoting Baldwin.

Attribution:

Empty jar: I think to grow beansprouts and look into ordering seeds. Back ordered until May 1.

Egg shells: should I start a mulch pile? Mother had a large empty milk carton by the sink where she'd add stuff to mulch. And now T reports that because they are making every meal, Our mulch pile is so alive.

Sleeping Beauty, yes, that cocoon—

Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, Anna Karenina—I left Emily Dickinson - Selected Poems edited by Helen Vendler in my office

Notebook: March 20, 2020
A student in Elmhurst cannot sleep for the constant ambulance sirens. She keeps her blinds drawn but sees on tv what is taking place a block away—bodies in body bags loaded onto an enormous truck. The governor calls this The Apex. And late last night, R called—"helicopters are hovering over the building!" She remembers the thrumming over our brownstone in Park Slope on 9/11. And just now I learn that religious people just blocks from her were amassing by the hundreds, refusing social distance. And I am full of rage. Some communities have begun to use drones to disperse people. The president states he has "complete power." And I am filled with rage.
— from Things That Are Changed—March, 2020 by Kimiko Hahn

There is a song that I have seen performed live probably a dozen or more times, though not in the last two decades. It's called Miracle, and it's by a Trinidadian roots rock band called (The) Orange Sky. This song is not available on any streaming service. You cannot find its lyrics anywhere on the internet, whether you search via Google or ChatGPT. There are no references to it on any major social media platform. This song, as far as the 2023 prompt-based digital economy is concerned, does not exist and has never existed.

What led me down this rabbit hole was a voice memo from a relative, a cousin with whom I shared many of those music-intensive evenings and experiences back home all those years ago. Most of our messages back and forth include or are links to songs or playlists. We have years of letters that feature an extended in-joke about making as many references as possible to certain reggae lyrics. Though neither of us is a musician - whereas many of our friends are - music has been a consistent throughline of our relationship. The voice memo: them singing the refrain from the song, and asking - hey, what's the name of this again?

If he'd asked me this in 1998 or 2006, I'd have fired up iTunes and run through my painstakingly curated playlists, playlists that represented hundreds of hours of spent cataloging songs by year and genre and rating and BPM and that lived in carefully organized folders across multiple hard drives. I'd have flipped through the albums of CDs, carefully preserved with their liner notes and track listings.

But because it is 2023, and those albums of CDs are under a bed in room in Trinidad, and those hard drives are in a box that I have been meaning to get to pending buying a new desktop computer and having the luxury of several uninterrupted days off, I did the other thing I know how to do: search through digital ephemera. I am very good at finding things on the internet, but the internet is very good at decay.

There used to be a website dedicated to the local Trinidad bands I grew up listening to and following around the island. It included, for some of them, track listings and even audio files. That website is lost to time and 404s and probably takedown notices, and not even the Internet Archive could help retrieve it.

But there was another thing I could do, and that was text one of the several friends with whom I had shared these particular musical experiences, and who I knew also had carefully cultivated libraries of music and efficient systems for retrieval. "Pop quiz," I texted, to a friend who also happens to be both musician and excellent record-keeper. Four minutes later, "Think it's called miracle". Three hours later, another reply: an MP3 of the song. "Dug up some old hard drives to find that one", he said. An understatement.

How so much of what we have access to is subscription-based and prone to revocation. I think about whether anyone gets to experience art and animation and music and movies depends on whether tech and media behemoths are willing to pay royalties.

Access is not ownership. Digital ownership is precarious, because hard drives might fail or your phone gets stolen and Apple and Google decide you no longer have access to your files and there's no way to appeal, or because Amazon can change the terms that govern that Kindle book you bought from them.

This is less about the fetishization of any particularly analog medium (if you have ever tried to repair a cassette tape then you know physical storage formats have their challenges too) and more about the fragility of rights in a digital ecosystem. It is about the importance of systems of distributed memory and collective memory; of shared experiences and the shared recollection of those experiences. So many of our experiences now are designed to be uploaded, surveilled, licensed, streamed, and mediated; monetized by platforms that decide whether something is "appropriate" based on how advertisers are likely to want to spend their budgets against it.

I think about how having friends who were there too, and who want to hold on to the same things as you, make it possible to remember who were then, and why those things matter still. A miracle.

Attribution

– and suppose

we could scroll through its pages every day
to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –
we would stumble through the streets with open books,

eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak
in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still
we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let
— from Book of Genesis by Kei Miller

It seems I am always thinking about James Baldwin, at least since I first knew to be.

I bought, on a whim — because that is what good bookstores are designed to facilitate — a copy of The Devil Finds Work, a collection of his essays about movies. I also bought, more intentionally, a pair of gifts for my nephew - because that is what you do when you’re trying to be World’s Best Aunt.

And because I am always thinking about James Baldwin, I am often thinking about Toni Morrison, and about her eulogy for him: “In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.”

“How are you doing?” A question when, sincerely presented, demands and merits a sincere response.

“What are you willing to stop doing?” A provocation deployed insufficiently frequently.

“Be specific.” A powerful phrase, made even more so when preceded by a directive to identify and articulate what it is you need.

The task is to live well enough with you. / But how?

Dates and times: not my fave. What day is it: hold on, let me check. What time is it: hold on, let me check. Where am I supposed to be now: hold on, let me check. That thing that happened all those years ago that no one remembers but me? Seared into my brain, down to the millisecond.

Time is an illusion until you run out of it.

I have talked about the unadulterated bliss that, for me, is unstructured free time. I am, typically, scheduled up to my eyeballs. Waking up at the crack of dawn and going to sleep whenever to try to do all the tasks that have my name attached, implicitly or explicitly, to their checkboxes. (it gives a lovely light)

I run my day on alarms and timers. Who needs pomodoro when anxiety is right there.

The absence of alarms, reminders, calendar events means I get to decide how I want to spend my time.

"Doing nothing" is less interesting to me than "doing whatever I want in a given 24-hour window without the looming threat of a deadline or major breaking news or an obligation to someone who wants to ~ pick my brain ~"

I can count the number of times I have had those kinds of days in the last x number of years. Low double digits. Time to mind that gap.

Attribution

old anxieties back into the night,
insomnia and nightmares into play;
when things in need of doing go undone
and things that can't be undone come to call,
muttering recriminations at the door,
and buried ambitions rise up through the floor
and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;
— from February by Bill Christophersen

I am always thinking about stories. I am always trying to change the rules about who gets to set them, tell them, define them. I am always trying to complicate The Narrative.

I know more about how Tyre Nichols died than about who he was alive.

“Here’s what we know about what happened in the approximately 54 minutes when Tyre Nichols was pulled over and brutally beaten by officers” is a sentence that reflects a series of choices about The Narrative.

I know more about the ostensible motivations of the farm worker who killed seven of his colleagues than I know about why people in their 60s and 70s are still toiling on farms.

If you have had friends for a long time, if you have been friends for a long time, then being with and around them, the people who knew you then is like being a version of yourself that you are not anymore.

That was then, this is now, there are intervening years, there is intervening grief.

Then is when he was alive, and you forget, even though it is now, that he is not alive anymore because you are in the presence of another person from the time when he was. And you find yourself, back in the country where he lived (though not the country where he died), almost asking - and more than once - you find yourself wanting to ask, how is he doing?

You do not ask, because you know better, you know better, and you have been worse.

A reiteration of Dr. King’s words and works. First published in 2020.

First, Letter from a Birmingham Jail(1963), or the one in which MLK is exasperated while incarcerated and in solitary confinement:

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom…Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. 

Staring down a couple weeks of travel for work, mentally steeling myself for the planes and the trains and the hotels and the working every time zone. Making the packing lists early even though I know won’t really pack until roughly 10 minutes before I have to leave for the airport.

The lists do help, as do legit decades of practice, but there’s magic in packing cubes and the discipline of never checking a bag

Other things I’ve learned about packing for work travel over the years:

1) only take pieces that work for multiple outfits

It took about 18 months, a cannot-be-taken for granted confluence of events, and a fairy godmother, but I finally, successfully took two consecutive days off (and yeah, that includes weekends). And then I managed five more.

In a word: bliss.

I have (long had) complicated feelings about Decembers. It is a month I associate with friends who died young and who I am always grieving; with guilt about never being “home for Christmas” and bemusement over where and what home even is; with deadlines self-imposed and external; with stories unfinished; with books unread; tasks undone. It is not, in short, a month I ever particularly enjoy.

But I am always grateful to have made it through what is heralded by Old Year’s Night, and for the optimism of New Year’s Day.

Self-absorption, cruelty, pettiness. These are traits, these are behaviours, that get to me — especially when they show up in people with disproportionate amounts of power and unearned privilege.

Big, dramatic crises? Not even novel anymore. Unrelenting breaking news? A couple decades of practice behind me. But my capacity to put up with stupidity—a word I use to encompass that particular trifecta—has eroded over time.

This happened, in part, from realizing that all the stories were myths. From getting to be be in the rooms where the decisions get made. From getting to see, in real time, how history gets written. From getting to be one of the ones who decides, in those rooms. From getting to edit what becomes a draft of history. From fighting, first to get into those rooms, and then to transform them. From losing, over and over. From winning, sometimes, enough to keep going a while.

From seeing how often people choose the past of least resistance for them, even and especially when that path means so much harm for others. From hearing the stories people who chose that path tell about themselves to the people they allowed to be run over. From being run over. From telling the stories.

Chronic pain is boring. It is waking up fine on a Saturday and by Sunday afternoon not being entirely able to sit, stand, or walk. In between it is ok, I suppose. Liminal.

It is familiar, too - this particular variant having been a fact of life since I was an undergraduate, at the very least.

Or perhaps you could say it is predictable, with a tendency to strike when least convenient. Though pain is never convenient.

And it is always a reminder - of frailty, of fragility, of the ephemerality of ability. That “well” is inevitably temporary.

There was a time when I lived in London and I could get home - home being Trinidad, home still being Trinidad - relatively easily and cheaply because there were so many tourist flights to both islands. Then multiple of these airlines filed for bankruptcy or decided the route was unprofitable or unfashionable or whatever it is that stops planes from landing at airports. And I remember thinking, watching prices tick up over time, that my ability to get home was a function of other people’s desire to be entertained.

There was a time when oxtail and ghee and coconut oil weren’t things you’d find in Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, when finding the good stuff meant a bus trip or two. Have you truly lived, as a person from another place, if someone hasn’t first been repelled by the foods that most remind you of home and then later asked if you’ve ever eaten them, because they know this really good place in Manhattan that does the best

At some point “going back” becomes “going to”.

It has been a long time since I lived in London, and yet the question but where are you really from asked by a certain kind of British person and defended by a certain kind of British press with that person attends a church that Black people also attend! how dare you suggest! comes with it a visceral sense memory. A remembering, in the body, of what it was like, not being from there, having been discovered as someone who dared, nonetheless, to be there. Remembering the first time I realized what it was like for the people who were from there but were perceived, nevertheless, as interlopers. When it is was the long arm of empire that dared, first.

Two parts to the word, in historic darkness coined.

Two weeks ago I was supposed to be on holiday for a week; instead I had this weekend. Measure time off by the relative sparseness of emails sent, by the relative lag between receipt and reply; by the ability to turn all notifications off*; by bosses beaten (and bosses unbeaten) in a game designed for masochists.

Gratitude for the small moments in quiet places; a way to recharge to have the energy to make the spaces we inhabit better.

*“to switch to a slightly different focus mode with fewer exceptions” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

On Trans Day of Remembrance, mourning more murdered queer people.

Over and over again.

Attribution:

what is that about, going out
and not having to explain
you aren't that her
or that thing?

in this, our language,
there exists no plural that doesn't deny me.
— from They by Raquel Salas Rivera

Seek to be useful in a crisis.

Care about outcomes and consequences. Understand they are never evenly distributed. Let go of the conviction of intent. Do the reading. Cite the authors who enabled your comprehension. Ask who gets left out of the footnotes of history. Consider who you’re writing out of the story.

Villains require heroes. Sometimes they look the same. And then the angles change.

It’s hard to ask different questions if your perspective hasn’t changed.

If you work in / around media and technology and/or care about electoral integrity but not in a “Stop the steal” way, you’re likely dealing with variations on grim.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but when I did I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s a class of people (often but not always already independently wealthy) who define their work as “mission-driven” but what they do not mean by that is “challenging to them, personally.” Sure they will work through a weekend to hit a deadline, or tolerate being yelled at by some executive or answer emails and text messages 24/7. But what they will not do is brook any conversation that suggests their work is not, in fact, changing the world for the better or that the world is changing (needs to change) in ways that they aren’t contributing to or that they, in fact, are the problem.

It is not ~fun~ to hear that whole those weekends at the office didn’t matter, or that your “public commitment to diversity” doesn’t mean anything if your primary criteria for hiring is “the CEO thinks they can have a beer with them” or that actually the most useful thing you could do in this moment is funnel money to people who’ve got domain expertise and years of relationships and an actual track record of executing under demanding circumstances.

Anyway a lot of tech and media people are losing their jobs, or will be losing their jobs, or are being confronted by the relative futility of whatever we thought our roles were in ~ making the world a better place ~ and it is very easy under those circumstances to take other people down with us, to take up a lot of time and space and energy bemoaning our own circumstances. We can work through this in the intimate spaces that are hopefully also spaces for truth and introspection and calling-in.

A list (of services that if you run a company or provide grants you should fund for your employees, especially if those employees work in media, and of best practices you should not just encourage but enforce).

No reason.

• TweetDelete.net

• BlockParty

• DeleteMe

• Tall Poppy

• Signal (because)

• 1Password (free subscription for journalists)

• Two Factor Authentication

  • Twitter

  • Google Drive and Gmail

  • Apple iCloud

  • Tumblr

  • Instagram

  • WhatsApp

  • Facebook

  • Your Mobile Phone Provider

Attribution

Many believe
whatever happens
is the other half
of a conversation.

Many whisper
white lies
to the dead.

"The boys are doing really well."

Some think
nothing is so
until it has been witnessed.
— from Djinn by Rae Armantrout

If I were asked to choose a favourite festival, and that festival could belong to a religion that is not mine, then I would immediately volunteer Divali.

A celebration of the triumph of light over the darkness, of good over evil.

Tomorrow I will light a diya or three, and I will remember all the evenings spent with friends and food and sweets, I will remember the smell of oil and smoke and the crackling sound of sparklers and fun snaps and bursting bamboo and music and laughter. I will remember Chris, I will remember long illuminated evenings in Marabella, I will remember that we can be the lamps in the dark.

Shubh Divali.

Somewhere, in the Discourse about Ye and Elon, is a forgetting.

Subject / object collision and conflict, media mediated.

We (that media we) show ourselves ill-equipped to learn and lacking in both sensitivity and sensibility when confronted with everything from how auditory processing works to turning vulnerable people’s lives into political theatre.

We (that media we) love an appeal to precedent, rarely reflect on who set those norms and who benefited from the enforcement thereof.

We can look everywhere, even if we don’t want to, and everywhere we can look there is despair.

And every where, every day, people keep going. The fight goes on. Their fight goes on. They fight on. The going gets no less tough, the terrain no less difficult. The stakes rise inexorably.

People keep going, and not because they’ve zoned out or because they’re not paying attention. People keep going because they’re tuned in, despite the overwhelming consequences.

Some folks have spent years practicing being mad about multiple things at once. Some folks have spent years honing a refusal to be chill. They keep going.