Month: March 2018

When I was a senior in high school, my cousin Curtis loaned me a pair of Geminis to help me follow my new interest in DJing. But all the other DJs I knew at the time had started when they were sophomores and juniors and were already juggling and scratching in ways I couldn’t imagine, so I gave up.

When I moved to Oakland after college, my roommate was Mai-Lei, one of the best DJs in the Bay. She had a set of turntables sitting in our living room and we threw parties every month. PLUS one of my best friends in town was DJ Phatrick, yet another incredible selector. I never asked either of them to give me a basic training.

So fuck it. Introducing DJ WITH A EGG ON TOP, the new moniker I’m taking as I take amateur nights in DC by storm!!!! I’ll be posting my gigs and playlists here. Watch it.

Often, during moments of frustration, Lovely expresses that her mind moves too fast for reality. Every brain is different, so I can only interpret this from my own experience, and it manifests in the way I’m unable to pay attention to any one thing for that long. It’s not attention deficit, if anything it’s attention surplus. I’ve long accepted that my favorite experiences as an audience member – at concerts, museums, and films – are those that are so inspirational that my mind goes off into its own daydream trip, even as my body stays put in the seat. It doesn’t matter how captivating the work is, and sometimes something I witness can be of incredible quality, but it dissipates with my short-term memory if I’m unable to seed ideas of my own out of it.

It happens in conversations too, and it’s not a rare situation for someone to get upset at me when they notice my eyes start to wander while they talk. “Tell me what I just said,” is one of the worst things you could say to me, if you were inspirational enough there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be able to repeat it verbatim.

One of the reasons I stopped my daily writing years ago was because I felt like I had wired my brain to think in journal form. I started chasing down experiences just so I could write about them later, only to get there and piece the words together as I experienced them. I was never in the moment. Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai says, “stop writing about the snow and be in the snow.” But now we’re living in an era where everyone “does it for the Gram,” where anyone at any given moment may be motivated by the ulterior motive of making a post out of it. Or getting a CV line. Or something else that, as I write, I realize might not be so bad after all. Unless you sit at home and philosophize all day, life is a series of transactions, either with others or with yourself. I’ve been in my head lately (as I tend to do during these crummy months of winter), negotiating my time and energy and I’m not quite confident I’ve been getting the best bang for my buck. I end up exhausting myself with buyer’s remorse for my own time, and then feeling shitty when it seems like everyone on my timeline is just living their best selves in the moment. I need to remind myself of how our experiences are manicured these days, that it truly takes great effort to convey oneself as care-free.

My morning began today with a call from Sunny Dooley, one of the most influential people to enter my life in 2017. Sunny is a storyteller, in that it’s literally what she does. It’s her calling, her livelihood, and what she does best. Whenever we talk, narrative spills from her tongue – whether it be a creation story that has been passed down for generations, or a grand account of a sandwich she ate last week, when Sunny speaks, you can’t not listen.

Sunny is a refreshing reminder that storytelling is a real thing, and storytellers are real people. In this day and age, I’ve heard so many institutions and companies call themselves storytellers, but how many of them actually have stories to tell? Where are the characters and plots, the meanings and morals? Or is the word story the latest to be hijacked as a more colorful way to name advertising schemes? I too have been guilty of describing the need for stories without actually telling them, and my friendship with Sunny reminds me of this often.

I told her about how I recently met the filmmaker Angelo Baca, who has been telling his own stories to defend his home at Bears Ears. Sunny responded with the ultimate “did you know,” describing how the mountains in Utah are actually the ears of a larger bear that lies throughout Navajo Nation, including its spine which runs along Mt. Taylor which I visited with Lovely and the Bombshelltoe crew last fall. She spoke about the lava beds that are also part of the bear, and how this blood is what connects the land to other sacred spaces like the Mauna Kea volcano that is going through its own protection campaign in Hawaiʻi.

I’m reminded of what I was reflecting on yesterday, about how far the Word has brought me in life, and the fact that the truths we speak are sacred. It’s Monday, so I’m bout to dive into a sea of emails and memos, trying to keep perspective of the stories that truly matter.

I’ve been waking up each morning to a battle between reason and purpose. The fact that I haven’t written here for the past month is evidence that the former has been winning out.

Approaching each day with reason is a pathway toward productivity. To complete each of these days means to cross off everything on my to-do list, to complete all social and professional transactions with a sense of accomplishment, maybe even make some headway toward my long-term projects. A day of reason is a day well spent.

There’s nothing wrong with a day with reason, but even still, I prefer a day of purpose. You know those days. They’re the ones when, regardless of what you had scheduled for the hours ahead, everything that was seemingly important gets brushed aside so that you can zero in on what truly matters. Sometimes, purpose arises in a time of crisis – a loved one you have to drop everything for, a fire you need to put out for the greater good, sometimes when you’ve been on such a roll with reason-filled days that you’ve neglected everything else and your body shuts down and forces you to get some fucking sleep. But in the best of cases, it’s when the muse shouts so loudly at you that the ideas can’t just sit in your mind and rot anymore. It’s when the spigot of purpose ruptures, it’s what some people call going back to the source.

Ideally, each day would be driven by purpose, but reason would still be sitting shotgun, maybe even take the wheel for short stints. In the best of circumstances, each task of my day is a stone to grasp as I climb toward my destination. When any task that’s a detour is, at the very least, treated as a garnish to allow space for surprise, as opposed to a distraction that leads me down an endless detour.

This year, I’m doing my very best to get back to my source as a writer. With the whirlwind of projects and passions I’ve picked up, sometimes it’s easy to forget that, without the word, I wouldn’t have had any of this. I heard recently that, when you write regularly, your brain gets rewired. My experience is a bit different. In the moments when I blow past all the distractions of reason, when I put value on the time spent toward piecing thoughts together simply to engage in the practice of piecing thoughts together, my brain doesn’t get rewired – it gets unplugged. My mind gets tuned in. I get free.