Story

Last night my mom committed the horrifying act of estimating how many more times I’d see her in this life. “You visit twice a year, so if I live for 10 more years then we have 20 more times together.” This wasn’t a statement made to passive-aggressively conjure the guilt of a son. Mom and Dad have been supportive of my decade living in the East Coast in ways that defy the laws of immigrant-parent physics. She showed little resistance when I decided to live out my dream of being a New Yorker in ’09. She mustered bewildered excitement when Lovely and I moved to Beijing during China’s smoggiest winter on record, and finally stopped waiting for me to come home when I began my life in D.C. 

That was almost five years ago, so her matter-of-fact statement about us only having a handful of moments left together came from more of a pragmatic, “let’s pencil these into our calendars” sort of a reflection that has still spiraled me into a morning of existential musings and questions about whether I’m really living the life I’m supposed to be living or if I’m just chasing frivolous adventures, overly-concerned with how people are responding to my internet self while the people who truly love me wait in the wing. Of course, there are the balanced happy mediums that I’ve spent over a decade not fulfilling – calling home more often, being truly present when I do visit, taking advantage of the plethora of technologies that make it much easier to keep in touch than ever before. Sometimes I think about the era of the Pony Express and telegrams, and how terrible I am at even sliding an envelope into the mailbox down the street. Thank the heavens for the telecommunications giants for saving me from a life as a hermit.

For this holiday season, I’ll be trying to practice immaterialism by thinking less about the gift as a product but instead as a process. Ordering something for someone on Amazon has no story. The void of that is patched by gifting something way more extravagant than what’s needed or wanted, to disguise cost as rarity when it was really just a different link on the scroll-through. The gifts I appreciate most aren’t necessarily the most functional or deeply desired. They’re the ones that reflect my relationship with the gifter, that reminds me of them whenever I see it. I think by now I should accept that I no longer need that classic Christmas morning experience, tearing at a big box like Ralphie and squealing with joy when it’s that shiny thing I’ve been longing for from its window display. If I’m actually going to inch toward actual immaterialism, a decent start would be to stop participating in either end of that expectation.

The basement is a sacred place, meant primarily for two things – for storage and for safety. To shield ourselves from tornadoes and nuclear bombs, we humans carved holes in the ground, which we also use to store our old college textbooks and family photos too. I was in a basement last night. While most people here in D.C. have converted theirs into tight, dim rentals to hustle to interns spending their summer on a budget, OTHERFEELS is one in the neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant that was generously converted into a haven for musicians and their kind. The walls and ceilings are packed in with soundproof foam, string lights line the stage area, and everywhere you go someone’s sparking something. In this age of cyberwarfare and rainbow bagels, it’s nice to know that some things don’t change. Being there to catch my sis from the Bay, Hollis, was all the makings of reminiscing. 

Almost exactly 9 years ago, I was also in a basement. Then, it was in Boston, on tour with iLL-Literacy and our backing band The Hi-Lifes, who I too frequently take for granted in my memory’s eye. This jam session is one of the only captures I have of Otis Jackson Jr., the drummer iLL-Literacy toured with back then. He passed away this past week, and as I prepare to head to California to say our adieus to him, I’m reminded of how much life this man gave me. You can tell from my camerawork here how captivated I was (and still am) by his control over rhythm, the juice he put in each strike of the drum. His heartbeat. Truly, basements are sacred places. For storage and safety. Archived in the walls of some pit in the ground in Boston, probably to an unsuspecting tenant, is the radiance of this night of a decade’s past. Rest in power, OJ. 

Sunny, a Diné storyteller that I recently spent the week with in New Mexico, told me that writing one’s own story is the most important thing. That it must be done everyday. She gifted me a pen, which immediately broke in my backpack, and that became my excuse for continuing not to write. But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m without a compass, an anchor, a foundation. Whenever that happens, I think about how long it’s been since I’ve written something besides an email, and the distance from that is usually vast. It’s been almost a year since I started this blog, only to abandon it after a handful of posts. It has been a year of absolute fullness, and actually overwhelming fullness, but one that I also realize won’t be logged without me. So let’s see how this goes. 

This year has been one of establishing and dissolving routines. 

Each morning I:

• Drink a big thing of water that I boiled the night before. It’s a habit my mom got me on a year ago, and she made me do it with a specific thermos that her friends plugged her on. She says that the fancy, higher-quality canteens that you see everyone with these days are too good at trapping heat, so you’ll still burn your tongue the next morning. The cheap one leaks out just enough to flush out all the nasty. Later, I also found out that Nelson Mandela did it too (I can’t remember where I learned that and when I tried to search all I found was this, so…)
• Meditate. Okay, this is something that I’ve picked up several times in my life and dropped time and again, just like writing. But this time my streak has been for almost two years, which is amazinggggg. Each period I’ve meditated has been completely different. The time I miss the most is after my friend Sun (not to be mistaken for Sunny) held my hands in a hotel room in Minneapolis and told me that she saw all my past lives lined up behind me. After that, each night I sat in the dark in front of a candle, I’d imagine roots sprouting from the pads of my feet and light beaming from the top of my head, and within minutes I’d open my eyes to the world vibrating. That was back in 2011. Nowadays, I can’t even close my eyes for 3 minutes without thinking about whether I need to get a new to-do list app to replace my current to-do list app. But still, I try for 20 minutes a day, in the morning. My friend Nai`a recently launched a series of guided meditations which have been an awesome balance to my brain’s increasing similarity to a rabid chihuahua trapped in a small dumpster.
• Do OG Chinese ppl stretches. Like meditation, my stretches is a reminder that whenever I think I’m onto some new elevated shit, it’s something that I was actually feeling new and elevated about years ago. When I was living in New York, I biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan Chinatown every morning to do tai chi with the elders in Hester St. Playground. I was taking it hella seriously, even spending my Sunday mornings in an old ballroom studio training with a master. They’d tell me that the young guys would always come around and stay for just a few months before disappearing, and I swore that I was way more on point than those losers. Then I disappeared.  Now I’m back on it, more out of physically necessity than chasing some elevated image of myself like I was in my 20’s. Here’s how I got restarted.

• Hand pour my coffee. This is some hipster shit that I’m sure when I have kids and actual responsibilities I’ll reflect on and wonder why I spent so many precious hours of my life pouring water in slow swirls. Or maybe not. I like the idea of beginning my day with something mundane and inconvenient, but that comes out better than if it was just automated. My friend Nafisa, who doesn’t drink coffee, mentioned that alternating the direction you pour into the grinds helps stir better, so I worked that in too. On a day like this when I’m not feeling like I have a billion things to do, it feels like I’m tending to a zen garden. A pretentious, drinkable zen garden. 
• Morning poop. It’s hella necessary. Just know that if you make me be somewhere before 10am you’re disrupting my entire biology. 

Time management continues to be a struggle. In the best of mornings, included in my routine are also writing my declarations and intentions for the day, journaling, making a beat on my drum machine, and getting all this done while being an attentive husband. I’m still coming to terms with how I can anchor myself but remain flexible and not a diva when my mornings can’t be what I wish them to be. I’m also learning that these routines can’t be done as a means to an end. I lose my track whenever I do this expecting some kind of return like increased productivity or establishing the beginning of a good day. The best excuse I’ve found for following this regimen is that it’s a very noble alternative to waking up and immediately zapping my brain with the internet. For me to have agency at least in the first hour of my day and before I step into the chaos.  

I’m so excited that the genius and love of my life Lovely Umayam has been working to revive Bombshelltoe, a platform that connects nuclear issues with pop culture. It’s here that I’ve been able to live dat dream of being a wannabe illustrator for NYTimes Op-Eds.

The above is my illustration for Bombshelltoe’s latest article:

John Glenn, Protector of Tomorrowland: How an Astronaut Shaped Nuclear Policy

Somewhere in West Oakland, in a decaying loft where we got no heat, we used to sweat.

It was 2007, and every month, hundreds of people from throughout the Bay streamed into 33 Degrees of Love and Sound, a pop-up soundsystem adorned with art exhibits, singers and libations that only tasted so good because they didn’t wait for a liquor license. Upstairs, overlooking the dancefloor, was a DJ platform that certainly had no railing –where Mai-Lei and a rotating roster of selectors shared space with milkcrates and potted plants, keeping alive the only party in Oakland that stayed open until 5am. Next door, at Khalil’s place, Los Rakas might appear and throw an impromptu concert on the stairway. It was somewhere between a Maxwell video and that Zion scene in Matrix Reloaded. Vividly in my mind is Chinaka scooting her feet and swaying her hips while Phatrick up top played Dwele’s “A Pimp’s Dream” while the sun rose. Everyone had their hands up. There were no cameraphones yet. It was amazinggggggggggg.

Also, all of this took place at home. Like, actually at my crib.

So let me back up to that part where I said we had no heat. Only three blocks away from Pixar Studios, in the city that has now been ranked as the 4th most expensive place to rent in, Mai-Lei, M’kai and I spent our winters in an 1,800 square-foot loft, stuffing the walls with fiberglass, mashing insulator plastic against the windows, and despite all that, still using an open oven as a spaceheater. When it was still so cold that we could see our breath and couldn’t feel our fingers, we whipped out a robotic jet engine-looking heater connected to a giant propane tank, which would spit an inferno in a cage for ten minutes, just so that we could enjoy a half hour of coziness before having to slip back into our sweats and covers. These flames and open ovens were just inches from the sea of fabric and Zap Mama posters that draped and hung at every turn of the head.

The entire place was a fire hazard. A gorgeous, sexy fire hazard.

I moved into this wonderland on 33rd and Hollis right after college. The way Mai-Lei decorated it, you wouldn’t have guessed that it was across the street from a literal crack house. I don’t often use clichés like “diamond in the rough,” but there you have it. Soon, the landlord’s contract with the building owner ended, and they didn’t send us an eviction notice on time to legally ask us to leave. That’s my Google-lawyer translation for, “we found a loophole and didn’t have to pay rent for 2 years under the condition that we didn’t complain that we were living in a building that was falling apart.” When our oven/heater broke down, we stopped baking. When we discovered that a wall of mold had grown along our bathtub, we learned to carve and mount stone tiles. We were makers, and we were simply making due.

I loved that home maybe more than any other I’ve lived in since – the maroon walls, the golden curtains, the concrete floor that fried the palms of my feet in the summer, and turned them numb in the winter. Drinking 2 Buck Chuck from champagne glasses with Tupac Resurrection projected on our massive living room wall. Lightsaber fencing with M’kai, then barely tall enough to reach my hip, who had his room under the stairs like a brown Harry Potter. But none of my memories paint my time in Oakland as vividly as those 33 Degrees parties.

33 Degrees is where I witnessed the melding of art and revolution, bliss through bodily movement, the unsurmountable joy of creating space and hosting. 33 Degrees is where I learned to be lullabied to sleep with house music.

If you’ve ever been to any of my exhibitions or culture labs at the Smithsonian, you’re getting a glimpse of my very longwinded way of continuing the vibration that was conjured by our tiny crew, on an even tinier budget.  It was here that I first learned how to curate, from those who never thought to identify as curators. We just wanted to be around amazing art, soundtracked by amazing music, with amazing people.

I have so few photos of those days, thanks to a decade of broken hard drives and the demise of Myspace. But it’s always been the familiar places I’ve encountered that take me back. From the time that Ruby led me to Le Comptoir Général in Paris, to Seiji and Steve’s ex-Ukrainian dance hall where I spend my evenings in Brooklyn, to my frequent visits to Desirée’s Nomad Yard in D.C.

And indeed in the images of Ghost Ship that Oakland so tragically lost this week.

I had never been to Ghost Ship. It was a neighbor, a kindred spirit, even. I read the reports that describe the setting as “a labyrinth of fire hazards,” and read comments by people who are perplexed as to why on earth someone would attend a crumbling warehouse stuffed with sweaty people dancing and painting and DJing and doing nails and giving massages and serving drinks and letting go of everything except for that very moment because everything else is going absolutely insane. But those of us who belong to these spaces flock to them because the safety in here protects us from the danger out there. We risk everything to be together, because our space might be hazardous, but so is the rest of the world.

Why the fuck do marginalized woke brown people have to absorb the collective “we” only during moments like this? When I see the statements “What have we done?” or “We didn’t do enough” all I can think about are the times I’ve pulled all-nighters on projects that I truly believed would do good in this universe. I see organizers around me who wear out their bodies while fighting for causes that might not even immediately affect them. I see artists who have done free work even though they were already broke, because it would get the right message to the right audience.

I’ve grown up around people who have BEEN doing the work, at the expense of their health, relationships, finances and personal ambitions. We endure microaggressions at work, we mourn the regular killings of our people, and we lose sleep trying to navigate a system designed to suppress us. And now because white male hetero supremacy continues to exist, we have to blame ourselves for not doing enough? We have to sigh and say that we failed?

Fuck that. WE did everything we could in a horrible situation that we were born into and that our ancestors resisted. WE do not have to blame ourselves for the outcome of this election being a reflection of the endurance of white fear and white greed. WE deserve to celebrate ourselves and to allocate energy to self-love.

We at least get to have that.