some writing

February 4, 2022

I crashed my favorite car last August. 

The actual mistake that I made happened at least 60 seconds (a fucking year in CrashTime*) before I firmly planted the front end of a lovely little 1972 BMW 2002 into a surprisingly sturdy guardrail. It wasn’t a driving mistake. People in the know will nod when I say from a technical perspective I believe I crashed that car perfectly. It was entirely an error in judgment. And that error was the result of a harsh realization that I’d just made a navigation mistake of unknown severity - and that was a realization that I had fully at speed, bombing down a 2-lane mountain road.

So. It was time to recover. In the context of this game, that generally means making up time, so I planted my foot into the firewall as I engaged in a conversation with my rally partner, trying to get a sense of what the earlier mistake was as identification is a step in recovery. This actually happens fairly often in the game, so these moments of adrenaline are kind of part of the fun. As a result of my partner having their head down doing some math (it’s a weird game) they didn’t have a sense of what the mistake was, and I’d been busy keeping the car on the road and, you know, making the mistake, so I also was not a reliable witness. Again, at speed, we mutually agreed to Just Stay Alive. At that moment I saw that we were coming into a hard 90 degree turn to the right, and as I mentioned earlier we were pedal to the metal. I immediately shifted into technically managing the turn, and while we hit it hot, we came out in control, but going fast. Ok, whew, we’re ok. I blinked.  

And then 100 yards in front of us I saw a really severe, downhill 180 degree hairpin turn to the left. Blink. Shit, right back to technical management. 80 yards. Ok, downshift, I can do this, nothing drastic, downshift, micro-inputs, I can see the line through the curve. Ok. Blink. 50 yards. That’s when I noticed that the pavement in the corner was a different, darker color than the rest of the asphalt. I thought, “That’s wet.”

At that moment everything stretched out and contracted and became inevitable. Actively thinking about how much love I have for the person sitting next to me, I picked the spot on the rail and then I picked the part of the car I was going to smash into it. I made eye contact with my man. Just Stay Alive. Boom, done. Everyone intact. All things considered, it was a really good crash. 

And my confidence has been at least slightly shook ever since. Being a kickass driver is actually part of my identity, and it has been since I first got behind the wheel at 15. I love it. Getting into a car, getting a sense of its capabilities, playing along the edges. Where’s its center of gravity? How does the length of the wheelbase affect the way it handles an apex? How far can I push it and still keep it in between the ditches? Learning the car, and feeling your spine relax into the seat. It’s fun. 

It’s fun to be good at things. Growing up a combination of my lack of eye-hand coordination and my tendency to pretty consistently hang out with Cool Kids made it such that I wasn’t quickly good at the things that kids generally get accolades for being good at; video games take time for me to figure out and hitting a baseball is still a touch-and-go proposition. So I got used to putting effort into things I want to be good at, and kind of just letting the rest of it go. The release was surprisingly easy. But that effort, that’s where things get tricky. There’s a narrative that being good at things is cool and there’s real value in putting that effort in, sooo via the reverse transitive property since I am putting in that effort… I am valuable? So far so good. But, for reverse-transitive thoroughness sake, does that mean that I’m only valuable when I’m good at things? I’d never really thought about that until my therapist brought up the idea of toxic capability during a post-crash session. 

When I recall moments of embarrassment, I physically react. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if I wasn’t such a mistake-making motherfucker, but c'est la guerre. When I occasionally blink and see the crash replayed on the inside of my eyelids, I flinch and wince and sometimes even verbalize a distressed “No.” I feel it in my chest. upon recollection, I think I actually feel more in the recollection than I did in the embarrassing moment - again, I’m generally too busy actively making the mistake to feel much in real time. 

I’ve made a conscious lifelong decision to learn this way - making mistakes. It’s my own personal scientific method; imagining hypotheses, then imagining experiments to try to break those hypotheses. It’s learning through experience. Errors of commission over errors of omission. The cool shit happens at the edges. The interesting shit, the shit that sometimes costs you some paint on a guardrail because rubbin’ is racin’, and sometimes it costs you a whole front end. I shake my head as I write this, but the lesson is worth the price. The cool shit happens at the edges because we are nourished by novelty; too much sameness and the world goes gray. 

I’m pleased with the way I handled the adversity of the pandemic. In lieu of an external structure, I built an entirely arbitrary one that got me back into reading and writing and thinking and when an opportunity came up, I was in good enough shape to take advantage of it. Once I was back in the game, I thought I would inevitably get into game shape. And over the last year of doing contract work, while there have been tons and tons of engaging and energizing moments, I’m less pleased with the way I’m handling prosperity than how I navigated the listless unemployment. I’d really like to be a bit more focused and more efficient, get back up somewhere into my 90% effective range. And at the same time it feels like after this past couple years just staying on my feet and doing things to help my various peoples also stay on their feet might have to be enough. 

I was driving in snow and ice this morning and I was so fucking timid I was disgusted with myself. But my body gave me a message, and I listened. Now, sitting on my cozy couch, my lower back really aches and I certainly didn’t drive my ass off but I can tell you that I did not crash my second favorite car today. So that’s pretty good. 

I also just accepted a life-changing full-time job with an amazing crew. And that’s pretty good too. 

*If you’ve ever been behind the wheel for a car crash, you know exactly what I’m talking about - everything slows down in a horrifying way. It’s like the worst parts of BulletTime in The Matrix.

October 30, 2021

What's the difference between travelling and being a tourist? This morning when I randomly mumbled the question as we were untouseling the sheets and settling in for a quick post-sleep nap, my wise and shiny partner answered quickly and simply: wonder. 

We’ve gotten ourselves into a jam. We’ve been around for about 200,000 years, developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago, and according to various scrolls and whatnot we’ve been actively cooperating for about 5,000 years. Comparatively speaking, for about 99% of human history when you saw another homo sapien that you didn’t grow up with the appropriate response was apprehension, and if you saw an entire group of strangers the appropriate response was to run and hide.

You might think that this is the beginning of an argument for tribalism. Nope. History is context, and this is an argument for evolution. All of this mixing and matching and sharing and exploring is pretty new, and very cool and I’m wondering what we can do to help this process. 

We know appropriation is bad when corporations do it for marketing purposes. (There’s certainly an argument about how unhealthy it is in general to have Marketing as an area of human expertise, but that’s the next TED talk.) 

We know appropriation is bad when people do it for… aw fuck, I have no idea how to end that sentence. This is where the tourist/traveller question comes in, because I respect a [insert any non-colonial racial/ethnic background here] person’s concern about white people perpetuating stereotypes at costume parties, and I am also curious about the amount of empathy that can be created by literally walking in another person’s shoes with radical curiosity. With wonder. With imagination.

From my man Joel Fariss:

The algorithmic fetish and the subsequent dataism that has become the enterprise maxim for value creation has seeped into every crevice of our corporate psyche, shackling our creativity in the bonds of empiricism. This has perpetuated a myopic perspective of the im/possible, constrained by feasibility and expertise. We need liberation. To address the confluence of crises we face as humanity, we need more than new answers, we need the great liberator: new questions – questions that transcend the next big technology product, questions that create space for new paradigms, questions that provoke a reimagination of what it means to be human, to be a part of a larger whole. To evoke this liberation of inquiry, I propose we reintroduce the ancient practice of non objective imagination and speculation, untainted by the colonization of economic ends. Those innate yet deeply buried human gifts that have propelled us through the millennia; those tools of sensing so familiar to artists, poets, prophets, and esoterics. I call this practice Dream Thinking. Dream Thinking is the practice of encountering, exploring, understanding, and communicating stories of possibility. We call these stories Functional Fictions—the narrative scaffolding by which our hopes, dreams, and aspirations are built and shared with others. The stories that catalyze a faith in the possibility of the impossible; a new way of being, together.

Functional fictions? Nice. Theatre people get to do this all the time. Having it be your job to climb inside a character and merge those pre-written intentions with your own spontaneous hopes and dreams and fears requires a special kind of imagination and empathy, and there are lessons to be learned from this community. In my experience the most compelling art is designed to express something or to explore something, and in the right hands both/either of those things is an act of sharing. 

I’m really interested in how imagination can inspire a posture of curiosity that helps identify and solve problems and drive positive outcomes. Sometimes those problems are tangible and the benefits that imagination can provide are tangible… and sometimes neither of those things are true. And still, we know that there are many non-measurable things we consistently feel the benefits of: basic human communication, for example. We know that people feel healthier and have greater senses of wellness when they’re consistently reminded that they’re not alone, and we understand that comfort comes from affection being shared. How is that wellness really measured? There are certain KPIs that if we organize correctly and squint at just right might tell us productivity benefits or spending habits changes associated with dynamic states of wellness, but do we really need to do that to feel the benefits of functioning in a happy community?  

The world we’re working in and the challenges we’re facing are only increasing in their complexity. That complexity makes it so that we have to be increasingly comfortable with ambiguity.  Imagination, functional fictions, radical empathy. These things help create that comfort.

It’s time to let go of 99% of our experiences as a species. It’s time to move on. That’s a crazy fucking task. There’s got to be some mourning. Again, we know that grief has always been communal and that we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. 

Imagination will create those new rituals. 

Imagination will identify the most important new questions about what it means to be human.

Imagination will spark wonder.

It’s our only chance. 

November 15, 2020

I derive my identity from my whole life, not where I earn money. Over the years I’ve cashed checks from grocery stores and youth service agencies and bookstores and synagogues and gas stations and not-for-profit arts orgs and world-class exhibit builders and Big 5 Consulting companies and I can easily say that all that money spends the same. And when people ask me what I do, I generally start by describing the most interesting recent thing I’ve got going on whether it's a classic car rally, a personal fabrication project or a cool design initiative.

When I was just starting out in my theatre career in the storefront scene in Chicago, I knew that I wanted to direct. I figured the best path to those opportunities was to find a small company that needed something I had and giving it to them. By that point I had a good 5 years of building experience including a year doing props at a regional theatre in New Jersey, and my day job was at Steppenwolf Theatre, which has a nice reputation. So, laden with hubris, I cold-called the Artistic Director of a cool little company with a funky 2nd-floor space with 10’ ceilings and I breathlessly said that I’d never designed anything before and suggested that in these intimate spaces that construction quality mattered even more than it did in the big spots because in the storefronts the farthest person was generally 20’ from the actors and on the spot I offered to design and build a set for them. The offer was accepted, and all of a sudden I was a Set Designer. No training, mind you, but over the next couple years I actually earned a small reputation (and even smaller money) designing sets in some amazing and some awful, awful spaces. 

After starting my career in theatres and scene shops in the late 90’s I was randomly offered a chance to join a startup (post acquisition, dammit) that built web-based simulations for corporate training. I was effectively pulled out of shop life and pushed into the World of American Business which was… new. I’d been focused on Pinter and Shakespeare not stocks or industry verticals. This new world and it’s accompanying vocabulary seemed at best vaguely fraudulent and at worst designed to actively exclude lots of people and create an impression of intelligence by way of flexing education. Whenever people used the word “utilize” my judgy eyebrow went up a little. I grew up thinking that if you were actually smart it would come out in the quality of your ideas and how simply and directly you were able to communicate them. But of course eventually I learned to relax into the jargon, and soon I could talk that shit with the best of ‘em. 

It helped that Learning Design genuinely piqued my curiosity. In several ways it seemed to mimic some of the structures that I’d used when directing and producing plays: start with sharing relevant foundational knowledge, then create a safe playground for people to practice applying that knowledge, and finally present an end product that allows everyone to collectively show their stuff while still moving forward in their own personal trajectories. It was also pretty natural for me to imagine stories that could link the knowledge to the playground to the product, and I really enjoyed building simulations. I remember that there were different kinds of modules that we could include in our Learning Paths; Conversation, Analyze and Manage, I think. (Any old Learning Productions people who happen to read this please feel free to chime in.) Essentially these things were Corporate Training Choose Your Own Adventure Books, and it was fun putting myself in other people’s shoes and getting an understanding of the things that stressed them out at work and imagining ways to reduce those stresses. I evolved into enjoying different kinds of Performance Support, imagining and building simple little tools to help people do their jobs better and faster. 

At some point in time I realized that I was designing and building custom software. Again, zero formal design training, and over the next couple years I actually earned a small reputation (and some good money) designing random eLearning and websites and applications for some amazing and some boring, boring companies. 

I recently came across the term Accidental Designer and for reasons detailed in the previous 700 words, I quite like it. I’ve also recently come across the term Relationship Design, and I like that a lot too. When I immediately like something like that, I get suspicious of my motivations and I try to figure out where the attraction comes from and what it means. And this reflection forced me to come face-to-face with The Big Question about Design as a simultaneous philosophy and practice: So what?

Given the scale of the problems facing the world, so what? Predatory capitalism is gunning for all of us, how does fancy thinking help regular people in their everyday lives. 

One of my great friends has been poking me to study up on Data Visualization for awhile, and he recently started mentioning Foresight as a practice. When I pressed him “Why, what are the benefits? Where are the righteous frontiers?” he replied:

Data visualization, like foresight (and science fiction and some art), is ‘just’ another tool to give us perspective… often from an altitude we’re not accustomed to, and it helps us get a different sense of scale and impact.

Two examples (sometimes I think links/examples in your writing would be helpful, and over time, links to others’ work) would be: 

1. The one I sent you about Bezos wealth I think it was that just had one scrolling to the left (or down, I forget) almost endlessly while occasionally passing some other measure - various countries GDP or companies market caps, etc.  

2. I just searched for 20 min and came up short...  an artist who had stacked orange jumpsuits, one for every 1000 people in jail, across some large warehouse…

Data viz primarily uses our eyes. Foresight is a way to expand the zone of potential narratives, to open the aperture into ‘larger’/different acts of imagination… it uses words and experiences to affect our minds and hearts. These two, used together at the intersections of design and equality/sustainability/ethics are where the interesting ‘frontiers’ lie, I think. This can move us towards liberation/decolonization?  I really don’t have words… 

(First off, did you catch my man slip in the footnote suggestion? And then not be able to locate his second reference?!? That’s what friends are for. In the interests of full transparency last week I did say to him with a 100% straight face “I think you read too much” so I guess that’s where all of that shit’s at.) 

The word that caught my eye was imagination. For a hot minute now I’ve been convinced that if there is indeed a way out of #ThisMessWeAreIn it will come not from simple hard, grinding work, but from imagination. Designing a better normal starts with giving ourselves permission to imagine that better normal first, right? More tools for larger and different imaginings = more swings at the pinata. Ok. Ok. 

This past week I edited a piece of text that will be posted on the Official Learning Platform of a megamultinational technology company that advanced a serious-minded discussion of the pros and cons of stakeholder capitalism vs shareholder capitalism. It is entirely a conversation about imagination, and if that’s one of the benefits of all this fancy thinking I believe this is time and energy spent righteously. 

And that’s a part of my identity I can be pleased with.  

T’s Suggested Bibliography 

On the Data Viz, see Stamen or SYPartners

On the Forecasting, see Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan’s work for best future experience designers

Oh, one more… Design to Divest

June 16, 2020

Black lives matter. 

It seems crazy to have to say it, and I understand at this moment it’s particularly important to announce your side with your chest. I’m eager to live in a world where police are obsolete and at the same moment I don’t believe that All Cops Are Bastards because I was raised to believe that Not All Anything Is Anything. That’s too reductive, too convenient. Wait, shit, we’ll get to some of the problems with how I was raised in just a sec, I totally jumped the gun... 

I honor the fact that Black Americans have been and are Directly In The Shit and thus I say this with self awareness; this moment is heartbreaking for me because I allowed myself to be mistaught. I knew better and I didn’t do better. I could see that the pieces didn’t fit from jump, and I didn’t chase down those leads. There’s real shame in that. I wanted to believe all that flowery language, I wanted to be living in a merit-based society, I earnestly grew up wanting that to be true. Shit, I keep jumping that “how I grew up” gun... 

Being a white man is only one of my millionish privileges. This is me sharing my perhaps more significant, more insidious one. 

The last couple weeks I’ve been building a deck for some childhood friends down in the South Suburbs (hell yes that shit gets Initial Capped) and as I cruise around down there I’m reminded that we grew up in Park Forest at a magic moment. (PF is a genuine post-WW2 social experiment that’s had an exhibition at The Smithsonian. Look it up.) And as it happened we grew up in the Co-Ops during a moment when the experiment was “succeeding.” At the time it felt like we weren’t focusing on the things that were different about us because we were all the same kind of aspirationally broke. This is the insidious privilege. I didn’t understand it at the time but the Co-Ops were kindof a hippie projects in that they were designed to be affordable housing that required a relatively small up-front $ investment, and then a reasonable monthly assessment. These parameters created a whole series of working class neighborhoods centered around “courts” where a couple dozen townhouses surrounded... parking lots, what else? The up-front $ requirement successfully created a sense of community investment and I can tell you most of those neighborhoods were really lovely and well cared for. Did I mention the ultra-convenient Metra (it certainly wasn’t called that back in the day) Station? Downtown in 47 minutes! Surprisingly good public schools! Whoo hoo! It was almost idyllic. Well, as idyllic as you can get at 226th Street. Ah right. 226th Street. 226th Street is where things get interesting. And by interesting I mean a particularly kind of openeyed shame.

From fourth through sixth grades I went to Algonquin School which was right across 226th, and it was perhaps the worst time of my life. (OK, junior high at Forest Trail was also a super drag and it seems right to mainly attribute that to puberty and angst and horny boy-related-stupidity, oh shit that’s all super redundant.) Ahem, Algonquin School. When I look at it in satellite view on GMaps, I’m struck by two things: one, the train tracks just north of the school’s playground. And the name of the first street just north of the tracks; Beacon Blvd. Those train tracks that every student looked across from the swingsets were the proverbial set of tracks that there was a Wrong Side of. We were swinging just on the other side of the tracks from Beacon Hill, a very much failed public-and-affordable-housing community, and of course Algonquin School included students from both sides. This playground, this swingset is where I first met real anger. 

I’m Jewish. I know, it’s pretty cool, being one of The Chosen People and all. Pret-ty cool. We have some cool symbols, the menorah is nice, and the Star of David also represents visually pleasing design. It also happens to be a big symbol of a powerful American street gang, and this is where things got sketchy at Algonquin. Early on my super fresh gold chain resplendent with a dope Star o’ David caught some unwanted attention from some fellow students who were being raised in a different culture than I was enjoying in Area B, Court B-5. The Beacon Hill culture was steeped in systemic economic and police oppression. A culture that created resentment and anger. Real resentment and anger. 

Scene: End of 1st Week of 4th Grade

Mark Price: “Ayo, what’s that shit on your neck?” 

Nic Dimond: [Looks at Mark and his couple/three pals, sees his desperation for a fight he can win, and quickly turns and sprints all the way home.]

Repeat Scene Virtually Every School Day For Three Years

Mark was my classmate. And he was mad. And while I didn’t all-the-way understand why, I could feel that there were clues. Mark was a decent, sharp kid. And I didn’t know why he was picking on me, but it felt like my Star was only an excuse. There were clues. The other scruffy kids. The Other Kids who were clearly in hand-me-downs. The Other Kids that received and used those shameful free-lunch tokens. The Other Kids that came from single parent homes. 

We’re talking about The Other Black Kids.

The Black Kids that lived on the Wrong Side of The Tracks. 

The Black Kids that never had visibility to the benefits of citizenship. 

The Black Kids that were righteously angry, even if they didn’t know why. 

As broke as me and Moms were, I wasn’t one of The Black Kids. I knew them. And I sensed that what they were fighting against made sense. I knew it wasn’t me directly and I knew it was me directly and I defended myself as best I knew how at the time. I stopped wearing the Star of David. I ran. Shame. 

They caught me a couple times and those were some righteous 10-year-old ass-whuppins and I’m absolutely certain that I’m on the “winning” end of this equation. And that is genuinely heartbreaking. And I understand that the only bit of any of this current conversation that has anything to do with me centers around what am I willing to do, what I’m willing to sacrifice, to try to better balance that equation. 

No more running. Listening. Learning. Working. I will do better. 

April 21, 2020 

Over the last couple of days of June 2019 I came to a decision. I was going to vote for Elizabeth Warren. I agreed with her vision and I’d been impressed by her clarity. The absolute shit-ton of policy papers she’d dropped over the previous 6 months suggested that she already had an actual plan to use her economic and public policy expertise to start thoughtfully dismantling some of the most oppressive aspects of Predatory Capitalism. I liked that. Though truth be told my gut approach is closer to how I perceive my man Bernie’s “Aw Shit Let’s Just Take A Flamethrower To The Whole Goddamn Thing” vibe because one of my many facets/personalities is a 14 year-old boy who loves fire. And at the same time my life experience suggests that if you want to be able to re-use any of the pieces you’re dismantling there are more reasonable (if way less fun) tools to use than a flamethrower.

(Side note, this is always something that drives me fucking bonkers about HGTV shows, that at the start of Act II after we’ve either selected the property or learned about its family history and how that-one-uncle-just-kind-of-let-it-go-after-his-surgery and it’s time to start demo there’s always a shot of some fresh-faced and enthusiastic amateur grabbing a sledgehammer and yelling “Cowabunga!” and just starting to whale away at some wall. I cringe every time. I know about TV magic and I also know that first you’ve got to surgically disconnect any mechanicals in that wall and then use a utility knife to score a seam so you don’t pull off any more material than you want to and then use a prybar to get any trim removed and and and... before you ever get to the sledgehammer part. Oh, also the sledgehammer part only lasts 3 minutes before you just have to start hauling trash out to a dumpster. Why do people love sledgehammers?!!?!?)

So back in 2019 I liked Senator Warren’s plan and her demeanor. I’ve recently heard Democratic strategists suggest an effective campaign angle for the general election might be to frame it like sports: “Hey America, we already have a great team, right? What we need is The Right Coach.” I have no idea how effective such a message would be, but I do know that it made me think of Senator Warren and it made me realize that she didn’t remind me of a coach at all. She reminded me of a referee. 

Here’s where things might get sticky but I’m going to say it with my chest and speak in some broad generalities. I was raised as an only child by a single mother in Area B of the Co-Ops in Park Forest, Illinois in the 70s and 80s. I grew up in a Jewish family, and my best friend’s family where I spent approximately ½ of my time from 1976-1987 is black. All of the families I grew up near seemed really matriarchal to my young eyes, and I was entirely comfortable in that reality. After high school when I moved out of PF and was starting to function as an adult in the world and I realized that women didn’t run everything, I kind of freaked out. There’s a kind of matriarchal authority that I’ll always respond to. This is one of the reasons that whenever anyone calls me by my full first name I kind of stand a little straighter and feel a quick flash of nervousness, because my moms and grandmother both used “Nicolas” to let me know when my judgement was straying too far. I’m not smart enough to know how healthy this is but I am smart enough to know that I’ve made intellectual space for FAR unhealthier impulses, and I’ve never considered fighting it. So there it is. I feel safe when smart, kind people are in charge and I feel more comfortable when that person is a woman.

So in June 2019 instead of whining about the DNC and bemoaning the eleventy-hundred-some-odd candidates that were in that first 2 night debate, I opted for a positive choice and quickly joined Team Warren. I now look upon the ensuing 8 months as my personal Salad Days of the 2020 Presidential Election. In early March 2020 she suspended her campaign and my last pre-Quar act out in the world was to cast a vote for Bernie Sanders. And now we’ve got Joe Biden. I’m not thrilled and I also recognize that if elected he will be carrying The Most Progressive Agenda Ever BY FAR into the White House. In order to get there, Coach Joe has a big decision on his hands; and if his answer doesn’t rhyme with “Blacey Blabrams” or “Blalexandria Blocasio-Blortez” I will be very discouraged and will certainly want to have a word with the damn ref. 

April 4, 2020

I love a good battle. Not in the medieval kind of way, in the hip-hop kind of way. I’ve often joked that all conflicts should be resolved using dance-offs. Honestly, I think this started watching a Betamax videotape of West Side Story at my best friend’s house sometime around 1980. I remember thinking “That is a CRAZY way to fight!” and then me and Todd would jump all around the paneled basement of his parents co-op singing “From your first cigarette to your last dying day!” - but super macho style. Just a couple years later I also remember me and Todd kung-fu breakdancing across the Western Heights movie theatre parking lot after watching Barry Gordy’s The Last Dragon - his dad Herbert (who is an amazing and whip-smart and charming man who was generally Not Here For The Dumb Shit) was waiting for us in the old brown Ford Fairmont, and as we bopped into the back seat talking about Feeling The Rhythm of the Night I remember him glancing at us in the rear-view mirror... and cracking a grin. I think he felt it. The Rhythm of The Night, I mean.

I believe human beings require conflict. Not quite at the same level as air and water, but really not too too many steps removed. We thrive in it. We manufacture it all the time. It helps us test our thoughts and beliefs. And most of the time it gets away from us. 

I’ve had my share of fights, of all sorts. I’m not proud of it, and I’m not not proud of it. I really don’t mind conflict; as a matter of fact many of my closest lifelong relationships started over a moment of static. For instance, with my boy Todd that I mentioned earlier, it all started with a neighborhood water balloon fight gone wrong. We were around 5, there were a dozen of us running around 1976-style, and I totally sandbagged Todd and immediately turned and ran back into my house where he threw a water balloon through our screen door. This necessitated a peace summit involving the parents, who promptly made us each a handful of more balloons, sent us back into the battle and then I’m pretty sure smoked a joint and became best friends. I have at least a half-dozen more stories like that. I’m not proud of it, and I’m not not proud of it. 

Most people don’t seem to share my relationship with conflict, and I get it. It seems like pursuit of happiness really means pursuit of comfort, and I get it, I like to be comfortable. It’s that pesky human requirement for conflict that I’m simultaneously trying to accomodate. I think this is one of my big connections to hip-hop. Not only are the origins of the music inherently revolutionary, battles have been part of hip-hop culture since 70’s block parties in the Bronx. Show skills, how you flow skills, rock a party. Channeling aggression into braggadocio, channeling that braggadocio through craftsmanship and imagination, and boom someone is inventing the Moonwalk. How cool is that?!!?!?! 

Anytime any group spontaneously breaks into dance it fills my heart with joy at our human potential. I think I’m just a sucker for choreography. To me the subtext is always some kind of ”me and my crew invented this and can do it better than you and your crew can do whatever wackness you put together.” It’s like, bear with me here, the 1998 Bulls on defense, “releasing the Dobermen” in every 3rd quarter; improvisation within structure, perfect synchronicity, one single tear falling down my cheek at the pure beauty of it all. Look what we can do when we channel our aggression and pull in the same direction.

I’ve been doing pretty well in The Quarantine, keeping pretty level. I put energy into being calm and pleasant, and it feels good. The stillness is really lovely in moments. And the anxiety is always there. Always. And as Open America is gaining traction, I’m losing patience with our collective loss of patience. I was FURIOUS last Friday, full on soapbox, shouting into the void (which actually meant virtually hollering at my friends) and evangelizing a thoughtful reconsideration of the Civil War. I’m still angry and disappointed. I’m still itching for a battle. And in the interest of a more constructive, more mature application of that anger, I will make this offer on behalf of America: I know for a fact I can out-Moonwalk anyone in this damn administration.