tweeting is believing ✨
face card but it’s a library card
drake gonna drop a song called “gyalestine” to really get shit shaking again
COAUNTIEPRO: a not so secret ngo that colludes to destabilize the mental health of any eldest child— i’ve said too much, they have the whatsapp tapped
how many specific anxieties until it’s generalized? what’s the math on this?
bring back the myspace top 8 — some people need to know they not gang
look i enjoy some drake but some of y’all be craving that champagne sloppy and it ain’t coming, beloved. similarly, k-dot ain’t helping you find your g spot, put the tolle away
“ain’t gon hold you — imma make sure these conses quence on ‘em”
the spinning blades that fly people in the metal bubble may not be safe i fear
“hey nigga, i heard you be coveting ya neighbors wife — i’m from harlem, we don’t get down like that”
tim robinson hot dog sketch but it’s judas after jesus said “one of you will betray me”
k-hole daughter or percatory son?
if you hear the “meet the grahams” piano on loop coming from a nigga headphones, run run run run run for yo LIFE
baby reindeer’s internet detective clown show
this shit had me hot in therapy. some of you goofy ass bum ass tiktok pilled fake intellectuals need to get a life (trade school is right there).
first thing y’all goofballs do is accuse anyone that richard gadd worked with who might be a man and accuse him of assault and abuse and, much like any cop (the very thing a lot of y’all claim to hate), you were loud and wrong and propagated this pain to another person — fuck y’all, get a life. loud as fuck with the detective work, quiet as fuck when they wrong. tweet, delete, repeat.
second, y’all find my man’s stalker and pull her out of relative obscurity to get her noticed by piers fucking morgan. now, you’ve given this person a platform. fucking fantastic work, you simple mfs — let’s give the mentally unwell woman who stalked someone a microphone and some more space to be manic
imma leave it at these three points:
some people need to center their morbid curiosity in someone else’s life because they have no life of their own and know that they’ll never have to face accountability for contributing to another’s suffering because “what? is it a crime to be curious?” centering victims, survivors, others’ narratives, etc means decentering ourselves. fuck your curiosity if it serves to retraumatize someone else
too many people have limited abolitionist/radical politics and cosplay as helpers so long as it serves their own personal victimhood narrative — anything to the contrary of these lazy, slacktivist narratives couldn’t possibly be true. if the genders were reversed in this story, number one, the stalker would be outed so I guess that would be the same but number two, getting that man on tv for a primetime interview would be heralded as a failure of survivors and be thinkpieceed to shreds.
no one — read NO ONE — cares about men’s trauma and mental health. Man dug through his pain for your edification and to release his story and first thing people did is be like “oh you like trauma, yeah? here smoke a whole pack of trauma?” men don’t lack emotional intelligence because of primary school nursery rhymes — there’s social programming that it takes work to get out of and you never fully escape it. like i get it, men are absolutely awful in so many regards (for a full list, reach out to your nearest woman or read some books) but dear GOD. the fucking hypocrisy. do we want people (not just men, people in general) to be better or just good enough so we can still feel superior?
clearly biased, based on stuff that happened to me, but…still, you know???
we gotta dead this idea that the consumer has no responsibility in perpetuating abuse because of their own personal convenient logic and enjoyment. r. kelly and diddy didn’t just cook because of all the hollywood politicking — who was listening even though they knew the truth? who was streaming? who knew about aaliyah the sex tapes, the kim porter story, cassie’s abuse, and kept two-stepping? us. we are part of it.
look at britney spears — we, as consumers, had a hand in calling this woman crazy (for reacting to her treatment and pain) and getting her locked up in a conservatorship off the strength of gossip mags and platforming messy mfs who didn’t give a fuck about nothing but clicks. same mfs out here trying to free her from a “prison” we put her in. “oh we didn’t know—” okay, bet; can you learn though? because this is a pattern that repeats.
stop talking about failing victims and stop failing them period.
i find it fascinating how people interpret silence.
silence is violence, its peace, processing, the calm before the storm, anxiety’s hotbed, absence, presence, a blank canvas, an almost imperceptible symphony — you get it. silence is what we make it; emphasis on we.
silence for me has been all of these things but not the same every time. lately, i’ve taken to walking around with headphones in, no music playing to enjoy silence and discover what it has to teach me this time; emphasis on me. taken together, silence can be petrifying — stopping something in its tracks for better or for worse. it used to be worse but now, i enjoy it.
just like anyone else, i came up in the online hot take economy — felt the rush of getting to the bit fastest, funniest, or most flagrant. but what was all that reactivity but a shoot first, ask questions later mentality? in a period of silence, this thought came to me and it wouldn’t leave my brain so i sought out more silence, more responsiveness, more court vision — it feels like we live life play to play everyday, the least we can do try and pretend we’re all on the same team.
we spend so much of our time inundated with noise — sonic, visual, digital, analog, all of it — that we forget that the absence of that noise is often the only time that we can be present. once i stopped letting so much noise in i began to appreciate silence. i took a few minutes at the end of salats to just be there, present, to listen if any prayers would be answered.
one day, i finished a workout and spent a little bit more time stretching to hear the nothing — a voice emerged and it took a long time to realize that the voice was mine. cliche? maybe. but the difference here was that i got accustomed to hearing that voice treating me poorly but this time it felt like i was being pulled into conversation with myself.
we are living in some of the most reactive times in human recorded history; reactive in every sense of the word. everyone is on their last nerve socially. globally, we’re in a sergio leone stand off, waiting for a reason to shoot. social media has cultivated a hot take economy, fueled by reaction, untempered emotions, and a freedom of speech, no matter how destructive the words can be. to me, this reactivity is antithetical to responding — responding requires reflection, time, silence.
in a world of never-ending noise, silence is something i’ve chosen to adopt as my own — a garden of thoughts, of reflections, of readings, epiphanies, whatever chooses to grow. my personal and creative philosophy is to see what others are doing and do something different. don’t get me wrong — i love a good yap session, i’m yaptain phillips in the right situations and comedy can be reactive (it should be in most cases). but that voice in the silence and i agreed that given the goings-on globally, i needed to use my voice better. smarter. more intentionally.
at first, i was like “nah fuck outta here, that ain’t me, lemme get my shit off.” the silence asked me what my voice would be used for.
“tweeting? posting? fighting strangers online? circlejerking with people you already agree with? peacocking with information? moralizing through clapter? who is it for? how has that worked for you in the past? how has it hurt you?”
safe to say the silence read me to filth but it was right. what was i contributing to the cacophony online? and more importantly, what was i losing because i was bound to this digital pulpit, doomed to preach and teach when all i wanted was to reach…people… i needed to reach people.
the brain loves a shortcut — a little file folder to put someone, something, or some event into. a label to be a shortcut on the desktop of our lives. but as we grow, change, and age, we outgrow the labels. time allows us to outgrow who we were and also turns reactions into responses. i used to bang on my chest online for every social justice fire and just as i hit breaking point, something else happens and i gotta get in the fire truck with all the other online volunteer firefighters but…i’m done.
i think i was done when i started but i kept going because it was “using my voice for change” or whatever unwritten goofy neoliberal dogma we all adopted when trump won. i never want to sound sanctimonious but i also don’t want our collective pains to remain invisible — i wanted to be heard and to help others be heard too. i feel like i’m not alone in that.
i do not need to post anymore. because i talk to my people, take care of my people, i hear my people, i cry with my people, i break bread with my people. but some people don’t have people. so they have to live through this spectrum of complexes, fueled by the desire to look good, be on the “right side of history,” to “win,” to get followers, to be a thought leader, whatever. they need others’ opinions and experiences to build their social, professional, and/or digital empires off of. this transcends race, gender, sexuality, age, etc — it’s about personal power and it’s couched in a false defense of the powerless.
others might need to see a dead baby pulled out of the rubble in gaza. others might need to see a bullet-riddled corpse or a hospital in ruins. they might need to see a video of a woman violently attacked in a hotel by a powerful man. they might need to see a man knelt by a cop on until he expires. they might need to see a grandmother collecting the next two generations of her family tree in a grocery bag. they might need to see to believe. but we, real believers, always knew, always believed.
people ask me “can you believe-?” and i can genuinely believe almost anything. i could always believe in the heights of humanity’s accomplishments, it’s middling monotonies, and the depths of our depravity. i’ve lived it.
so many of us have lived it. people i love have been through so much and when they told me, i believed them — it’s not hard to if we open our minds up to more than one reality, one truth, and decenter ourselves from another’s narrative. please, ask yourself why you needed to see something that has never been invisible to another, hear something that has been ringing in another’s ears for decades, feel something that i felt, saw, heard before you ask me why i choose not to speak the same way anymore.
we’ve abandoned the geocentric universe model and adopted a heliocentric one but these days everyone believes they are the center of not only their universe but others as well.
i do not mean to shame. but then again, what was your purpose in coming to me to ask me about my silence without considering that you never ever heard me screaming at the top of my lungs in the past to begin with? your consumption of me is not where i begin or end.
i’m not numb, i feel everything and there’s more to feel.
i’m not blind, i’ve seen too much and still, there’s more to see.
i’m not deaf, everything is just very loud, and in that cacophony, music still exists.
i’m not silent, i’m just not talking to you; that may or may not change.
my close friends, confidants, collaborators, and co-conspirators are curated in a way where we center each other’s humanity, through joy, grief, being known and understood, and i’m done wasting time trying to convince people of who i am. don’t worry about my garden. go prune yours.
sitting in silence, letting some things grow and some things go. finding healthier ways to process. letting words find me rather than desperately seeking them out.
i’ll always write. it saved my life and it could save someone else’s. i’ll hang onto that glimmer of hope and add it to others’ glimmers until we flood dark and grey areas with the light that escaped us in the past.
i invite anyone reading to find any slice of silence in the chaos of our collective pasts, presents, and futures and sit with it, savor it, really listen to it. don’t turn it into anything, accept the gifts of the void — in a world growing into a liberatory politic, it feels like the only thing left that’s truly free.
let some silence set you free as well.
proud of woodbine fc for putting on a tournament this weekend (alongside mauritanian migrants) that aligned it’s vision with stopping cop city and a focus on the connection between the idf, palestine, and american cops, keep going ⚽️🍉
just tapped into victory light’s podcast — big ups to mero for the clean bounce back(s), shout out to lizbel my new favorite voice to hear, rainey never beating the freaky allegations after hitting japan, and victor get the bag, king 🤝
go gatos fc— crush the tournament⚽️
carmen and ashley don’t MISS when it comes to haza, thanks for letting me spin for y’all at elsewhere ❤️
kaheim bodied his set at umbra, super smooth, very fun 🎶
big ups camryn, so proud of you for graduating and getting back in the creative process ✨
knicks finished the season no. 2 in the east and had everyone injured, i’m proud of the boys (still tight but not at them — they left it all on the court) 🏀
jordan and amelia finally got into the house!!! first house party finna go up 👀
finally, the self-glaze: shout out to ME!! I’m starting as an adjunct professor of screenwriting at NYU the day of this posting — i’m deadass becoming my father lmao 🌱
it’s still a summer of love (and hate) so stay tuned. dropping to once a week for the longer pieces, still making some shorter content too. love y’all 💕