Today is the first day of 2019 that I remembered to write the correct year when dating my journal. Shall we call that progress? I don’t mean to suggest that it has been a rough re-entry into normal life. It hasn’t.
I’ve been reading Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, a book whose name I get wrong every time I write it down or speak about it. It’s sometimes Find Free and most often Live Free but always not the correct title. I haven’t decided if there is symbolism in this. Am I seeking to live more free in some way or to find out what it means to find freedom?
I do find constraint in this body. These hips don’t move the way I would like. My blood pressure is elevated. My upper back likes to stiffen when I sleep. This belly should be smaller if only so I might not fear to suffocate in child’s pose. During the first day of Yoga with Adriene‘s 2019 30-day program—Dedicate—she asked us to discern what brought us to the mat. To my surprise, what came to mind:
“I want the best version of my body whatever form that takes.”
I’m as committed to the idea of improving my flesh as I am to not defining what “the best version” means for me. What it has been in practice is over thirty days straight of some form of exercise, eating more of the right things, and believing that doing that which nourishes me is better than doing what’s convenient.
It hasn’t only been the physical. I’ve found discipline in limiting my screen time. I’m scheduling daily practice for improving my Spanish and treating it like class. I’m idling less in front of the television.
Cunanan’s spree-killing over two months across four states occurred just after the OJ Simpson trial and the death of JonBenet Ramsay. Princess Diana—a friend of Gianni Versace’s—would die being chased by paparazzi just a few weeks later. Tabloid television and the 24-hour news cycle are coming into their own. Gay/Queer culture is alien to the mainstream media, treating just the mere mention of the word homosexual as scandal.
What is made even more evident in the book is how all of this led to Cunanan not being found after his first three murders—which would have been difficult to prevent—and allowed for two others to fall in the days and weeks after them.
The police and investigative bureaus didn’t find much compassion for gay victims and seemed unwilling to delve deeper into a community foreign to them to understand their killer. Fear of being embarrassed like the police and district attorneys in Los Angeles after OJ made their choices both overly cautious and bumbling and likely got at least one person not initially in Cunanan’s cross-hairs killed as a result.
Even Orth’s own words show how uncomfortable much of America was with discussing the hidden world of gay men. While her compassion for Cunanan’s victims comes through, her portrayal of his life and the people in it before he becomes a serial killer seeks to shock and titillate. The whole world of male homosexuality is all sex, drugs, pornography, bondage, perversion, vanity, and excess. All of that even though she’s talking continuously to people who seem to have strong ties to each other with love, friendship, affection, and care for each other hiding in plain sight behind their explanations of club culture and how one must live when society taxes you significantly for coming out.
This is what Ryan Murphy’s retelling of this story gets so well. The tragedy of Andrew Cunanan’s story is not just in the lives he snatched but also in the way they were forced to live before he took them. Only Versace was out to everyone who knew him. Three of Cunanan’s other victims (two of whom were gay and another seems likely) lived double lives tortured by the choices they had to make long before Andrew did so physically.
The show conveys the complexities of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” decade in a way that a book published in the year after the murders probably can’t. We didn’t have the language or the hindsight for it.
Vulgar Favors, though, is still a compelling read. It is a grand reminder of how far we’ve come and how far, still, we have to go.
“‘Cause I know you wanna see me come home proper.”
— YG
My love of books starts with my grandmother. She was a librarian and would subscribe me to book-of-the-month clubs (Sweet Pickles and Berenstein Bears when I was first learning words and then the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries, Encyclopedia Brown, and Choose Your Own Adventure later). It was encouraged by my mother who would take me to the library on Saturdays and leave me alone to explore the stacks with little direction. Whatever books I fancied, I could check out. As I got older, my allowances were spent on books: comic books and Stephen King novels and The Babysitter’s Club. My weekends followed common patterns: chores, basketball, books. Once my parents had thought I was missing when, in fact, I had come home from a friend’s house early to read a book I was engrossed in and fell asleep in my room with those words and characters.
I thought about how parents might nudge us toward or away from reading with small choices yesterday. A young boy was in the books section of Target, impatiently waiting for his mother to see the book he wanted. It was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
“That’s a big book,” his mom said. He was discouraged. He pleaded. She suggested a far less exciting book. His reading skills were clearly beyond it. He tried to explain, but she was uninterested and moved to leave the books section with no books at all. As his dad arrived and distracted his mother, I watched him slide the blue covered book with the boy wizard into their cart.
The experience of reading Little Fires Everywhere reminded me of how I read as a child. I would lose all track of time. I nearly missed my bus stop two days in a row because my mind had departed to Shaker Heights. I took lunches further away from the office to not be interrupted while I hung out with Pearl and Mia and Izzy and Mrs. Richardson. It was that kind of read. You should find some time for it.
It’s a story about mothers and their choices. Today is Mother’s Day, and I’m thinking about my mothers and their choices. I would have never been discouraged in a store aisle about entering a world too grown with words too big, pages too long, and binding too thick. In fact, Phyllis or Pauline would’ve likely put it in my hands before I even knew to look.
“I’m not America’s nightmare. I’m America’s dream.”
— Janelle Monáe
In the movie The Neverending Story, Bastian is so engrossed in the book he’s reading that he feels he’s become part of the story (in fact, he has). What the book’s protagonist, Atreyu, feels, Bastian also feels. This is the connection I felt with Jojo in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. I don’t know the last time I was that engrossed in a novel.
There’s a point where Jojo recalls cutting his foot, the description so vivid it settled into my mind as if it were my memory. When not reading the book that day, I kept coming back to that moment and the sharp pain of the laceration, the blood, the fear, the curiosity of being sliced open. I dreamed about it that night. When I opened the book the next morning, I reached down towards my own foot feeling the phantom of an injury I never personally experienced.
When his stomach hurt, mine twisted in knots. When he was disappointed, I was heartbroken. When he protected his sister, I believed I would do the same. When the terribleness of the world reveals itself to him, and he stands up to meet it, I stood with him as if we were one.
There’s mysticism at the root of this story, and magic in Ward’s words. The perspective shifts between three characters, all damaged by the terrible traditions of race in America. It’s Jojo, though, who is our hero. Somehow his spirit overcomes all that wants to sink him. He’s not indomitable or indefatigable, but his humanity is undeniable. Unburied despite being born in the dirt. Who he is resonating like a song from the pages.
Like Arrival before it, Annihilation is creeping into my thoughts frequently. There’s some kind of through line between the serious science fiction of these two films and the humor and catharsis of watching Hidden Figures, a story about real people doing real science. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but they are all connected in my head, lifting each other up.
I’ve been thinking about how radical it is that we have major mainstream pop culture that doesn’t center the male gaze. That maybe doesn’t even consider it. I haven’t seen Wrinkle in Time yet, but I have noticed that women have seemed to enjoy the flick far more than male critics. When something isn’t made for you, perhaps explicitly ignores you, after everything before it was made for you, is your adverse reaction visceral even if you don’t recognize that is the root?
I haven’t seen it yet, but I wonder.
I finished reading The Tipping Point. It only took me nearly twenty years to get to it. We talk about virality so much these days, and in our digital culture, it is easy to identify the salespeople, and with a little more thought, we could tell who the connectors are (we’ve got the data), but who are the mavens? Have we given that role up to services that aggregate everyone’s thoughts? Is that better than trusting an individual who we know has done the proper legwork, whose opinion we respect, who delights in the knowing?
I wonder.
LA Public Library rules for new releases is that you’ve got seven days to read it, no renewals. I’ve taken the bait on a Walter Mosley novel that I didn’t even know was out. Can I win the battle with my devices and idle TV time to focus and finish a book in a week? Challenge accepted.
“Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race. ”
— Electric Light Orchestra
It just so happened that I finished reading Bored and Brilliant the night before a work trip to San Francisco. I decided to do the challenge anyway despite being away from home and out of routine. Why delay? I was still taking my smart devices with me.
SF is a great place to be intentionally using your phone less. Day two of the challenge is to commute with your phone in your bag or somewhere away from your body. Don’t listen to music or a podcast. Just be in the world and the moment. The half-mile walk from my hotel to the office went from Union Square to SoMa. It’s a bustling trek that, without my noise-canceling headphones, was also noisy. I heard a wide range of accents. There was honking from cars and the beeps of trucks warning that they were moving in reverse. Mostly though, there were people to navigate around who were too fascinated with their phones to notice that they weren’t walking in a straight line or that they might slam into the person—me—in their path.
A man was so engrossed in Twitter that he failed to notice the light had changed or that people were walking all around him. I eavesdropped on many a facetime conversation on the street. One woman was so deep in her spirograph game (I’d never seen that one before) that she nearly stepped into oncoming traffic. It was sobering. I felt like I was on the Axiom in Wall-E, everyone so locked into their virtual worlds that we couldn’t see that life was going on right around us.
I’d done this challenge before. It began just a few weeks after I first came across the Note to Self podcast and this book is the outcome of that project. I think host Manoush Zomorodi is hella cool and whip-smart and if you read my weekly gratitude posts you know managing my digital diet is an ongoing obsession of mine.
On average, I spend about two hours a day looking at my phone. That doesn’t include iPad time which is probably another sixty to ninety minutes, if not more. That’s where I play the Star Wars game I’ve been hooked on since The Force Awakens came to theaters a couple of years ago. I wake my phone thirty to fifty times a day. This is actually better than most which is mind-boggling.
“Kaufman calls dopamine “the mother of invention” and explains that because we have a limited amount of it, we must be judicious about choosing to spend it on “increasing our wonder and excitement for creating meaning and new things like art—or on Twitter.””
— Bored and Brilliant
Twitter is my nemesis. It steals so much time and rarely do I depart it happier than when I arrived. And yet, I have my current job in part because of the connections made on Twitter. Twitter can be a place where casual relationships deepen or become more nuanced. Much can be said about the benefits of the service. But is it worth all of the time it sucks away? Is it worth not being able to sustain attention in an hour-long meeting? Or to be able to read a book? Or, sit quietly? Or think?
I don’t think it is. It’s no longer on my phone or my iPad—one of the challenges is to delete your most used app—and instead, I finished reading another book and gave some excellent television—American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace—my full attention. I spent time with people IRL. I went to the library. I’m writing this.
I’ve been able to ruminate on some issues I’ve wanted to fix with less itchy smartphone fingers.
“Distraction doesn’t come from devices or people or things, they posited. It is an internal problem.”
— Bored and Brilliant
An internal problem. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. When I did this the first time, I felt great and more in control and then, I found some reason why I had to have twitter on my phone again. I stopped checking to see how much time I was spending idling on my devices. And in the weeks before I picked up the book, I was back to wondering where all my evening time was going. Why wasn’t I using that time to get more fluent in Spanish, or better at cooking, or learning new things, or, you know, talking with my wife or reaching out to a friend or loved one because I’d been thinking about them?
And so, here we are again. Will I use my time brilliantly or will I get sucked back into that dopamine high?
I took my bike to the shop the other day. I haven’t ridden in over a year. It has a flat. It’s been locked up outside through rain and ash, and whatever other weather has come our way during that time.
I’m inspired to get back on and start pedaling away again. Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road (2017, Kayoma Press) is the spark. It’s the story of her bike tour from Arizona to Georgia told by the illustrations she made along the way. It’s about perseverance and depression and kindness.
It’s a story about the people in our border states and the complicated realities of those crossing into the US without documents and those paid to stop them.
It’s one woman’s incredible journey, weeks long, by herself with just her bicycle, the open road, and the people—friends, family, and strangers alike—in her corner along the way.
The idea of a long bike tour doesn’t interest me. Especially one through unfamiliar parts of these United States. I don’t have faith those same strangers would treat me with the openness and compassion that she found throughout. I may be wrong about that but I’m not willing to chance it.
I do love getting up to speed on my bike, though, feeling the wind going with me, and just slicing through neighborhoods regardless of my destination. It’s been too long since I’ve done that.
In August, my mom stated that she wanted to take a family trip this year. We were actively considering Puerto Rico, but then there was Maria and my mother’s broken leg (now healed), and so contiguous options seemed the best choice. Tiffany and I had visited NOLA over the holidays before and enjoyed what had, at the time, been a relatively sleepy week in the city.
Sleepy is not the way I would describe Crescent City this time. There was Christmas Fest and the Sugar Bowl. The Pelicans and Xscape. And a more substantial international tourist body than in 2009. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, we went to Greensboro, North Carolina to visit with and my mother-in-law.
Birds love it here
Greensboro has a very fancy Whole Foods with an excellent hot bar. We went there the first night. A couple of days later, I made biscuits from scratch to my MIL’s delight. Mostly, though, I sat in her sunroom and caught up on my media consumption. Hulu has all the non-Netflix Marvel shows so I binged Legion and caught up on Runaways and continued to sample The Gifted. I feel a kind of way about Bryan Singer‘s attachment to two of the three but Legion, in particular, was worth the time.
I read Goldie Vance, Volume 1 (very fun!) and A Wrinkle in Time. I stopped reading Wrinkle just before the final action occurs. I didn’t love it. Many elements feel very of the 50s, and I’m curious to see how Ava Duvernay will translate them in her film. I like the bones of the story, though, and think it will likely make a much better movie.
I went through the best end-of-year music lists I could find to see what I was missing. Complex. NPR. NY Times. Pitchfork. KCRW.
KCRW’s DJ lists were the plug in this excursion. Jeremy Sole had the most similar chart to my best-of, and several of the albums from his list fit right in with my sensibilities.
We did leave the house to take in a G-League basketball game. The game was mostly trash until late in the fourth quarter, as were the concessions, but we had great seats.
Then, on Christmas Day, we got on a plane and headed to N’awlins, baby.
“There’s no righteousness in your darkest moment.” — Sleater-Kinney, Sympathy
Thank you, 2015, for pushing me to go beyond what’s comfortable. For giving Tiffany great work opportunities and a shake up to her routine (and mine). For London. For meaningful conversations with loved ones. For Dominique Toney on my tv. For Omaha. For 80 years of Pauline. For successful knee surgeries. For xoxo. For the creative work I was able to do around the GRAMMYs and elsewhere. For getting to highlight my mom in some of those ventures. For DC. For reconnections with old friends and acquaintances. For new friends. For Kendrick, Kamasi, and Kaiyote. For the Force and Furiosa. And Creed. For Coates and Woodson and James and G. Willow. For being able to see myself and people who look like my friends in the pop culture narrative. For Hamilton. For biscuits. For basketball. For acknowledging the passage of time and being okay with who I am and who I’m not in this moment.
Tiffany is off to Washington DC for a few months doing good works. She’s been doing cool shit all year (ed. note: Have you bought CSS Master yet? Stop reading right now and improve your code life) but this is the first time she’s left for an extended period since our union.
It’s only been like three days but dang. The house is too quiet. Time has slowed down. And, I need projects.
Yesvember
Kid President tweeted this just this morning, and I’m on board.
I’m focusing on my fitness y’all. The eight or so people that actually watch my snaps with any regularity know I’ve been toying with a fitness challenge. I tried one at the beginning of October: a 30 day commitment that died on day 14 when my legs gave out. This month, I’m going to give it another go.
21 Days of running or biking. At least 20 minutes. Preferably 30. No Days Off.
I’ve also been wanting to try a meal service. I have proven over 40 years that I don’t really have the personal discipline to manage my own eating in a healthy manner and with Tiffany not here cooking regularly, the risk of lots of Chipotle and Popeye’s runs is high so…
I just had some breakfast tacos. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Netflix and Clones
Derrick peeped me to this chronological list for viewing the animated series Star Wars:The Clone Wars which I’ve watched in bits & pieces over the years but never consistently. It’s been much more enjoyable this way.
There are projects around the house that need tending. I’m going to make a list of them and…probably send them to our landlord. I’m not Fix-It Felix. I may do some re-organizing, though. Sorry, Tiffany.
Reading List
Books and everything in my Pocket. I cleared so much out of my backlog yesterday afternoon. I felt smarter and unburdened.
