Hello again, good people. Winter is here in the Occupied City of Chicago, and that means cold-ass temperatures, the threat of snow, and, more detrimental to your favorite California expatriate, the lack of sun for days at a time. My mental swings from rage to contentment, but never to defeated.

Thank you for reading! Let’s go.

The Horrors Persist

Shout out to my immigrant people; this political climate is telling me that you are magical, absolutely magical. You score the lowest on standardized tests WHILE ALSO taking all the jobs! And, and at the same time, you take ALL the welfare while buying ALL the homes! You commit all the crimes, but when armed, masked men catch you, we find out that less than 1 in 30 actually have criminal records! Oddly enough, immigrants by definition these days are all brown-ish; everyone else are ex-pats from Europe or refugees from South Africa, escaping a country that has Black leadership. Maybe that was supposed to be a quieter part of this whole thing.

Anyway, just magical beings!

Seriously though, this shit has no signs of unabating, and it’s been found out that foreign actors are on social media, posing as “the majority”, white nationalists openly advocating genocide and expulsion. Terms used in Nazi Germany are appearing in official government communications. Remigration. Replacement theory.

And corporate-owned media reports this with the most ho-hum attitude. “Nazis marched. The President said some racist shit. Kids are dying. Critics say this is bad.”

A couple of days ago, a white mom was shot in the face in Minnesota. The bootlickers came out in force, making it known that the price for not acquiescing to masked, armed agents of the state would be deserved death. Video evidence surfaced, and the online conversation exploded. People came onto this Internet and cheered. The same people who tried their damnednest to get others fired for posting a podcaster’s own words openly wished they could kill people with pronouns and in non-heterosexual relationships.

Only in the aftermath was it reported that, a few days earlier, a Black man was killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Years Eve in LA. The ICE agent hasn’t been charged, arrested, or inconvenienced in any way.

That story apparently didn’t make it to national news; I hadn’t heard it at all. Are we numb to state killings, or aware that this brings up a troublesome question. If a person is killed by an agent of our government, and it isn’t reported on, or recorded, or amplified in some way, does it actually happen?

I could go on for a while about this, but there is a very real demonstration of the fear that is coming to the burbs where it wasn’t before.

The smear machine ramped up quickly to assassinate this woman’s character, pointing out that her existence was reason enough for her to be executed. She was all at once an uncaring mom, a gay activist, a paid chaos actor, and everything else but a child of God. People see now that your character can be killed in a matter of minutes, less time than it took for you to bleed out.

You deserved it, after all. The more painful, the better.

And a lot of people are unnerved at that. To be physically killed, to be maligned in public, and to have your killer walk free with no consequence has been the purview of the melanated people in this country for a while. Now? Well, you can be a regular-degular white person with a 9-5 and a kid and a liking for regular things, and in the space of seconds, you can be talked about on some news show that you were the second coming of Genghis Khan and it is a miracle of fate that you hadn’t been gunned down earlier.

Meanwhile, the “hero” who caused your expiration is promoted and their GoFundMe garners millions of dollars in thanks for “putting a stop to liberal terror”.

American society is broken in a very real way.

Book Report: How to Winter

My good friend Erica hipped me to a book that she was starting and was very near and dear to us here. Titled How to Winter, the author spent some time living above the Arctic Circle and observed how the people who live there manage to live in a mental state that isn’t rife with depression, lethargy, and any of the other symptoms of what I understood Seasonal Affective Disorder to be.

This book changed my life, in a couple of very real ways.

It’s written by a psychologist, and a lot of psychology terms and concepts make sense from a common sense perspective. We as humans want to maximize happy and minimize the sad, and the gray of winter evokes a sense of sad. Thing is, why does it? There’s a natural reaction, but a societal one too. There’s also a mental approach to it, and a ton of science behind its study.

I recommend it highly, but here are a couple of takeaways from the book that I wanna share.

First, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) isn’t the societal scourge that we’ve been led to believe. We’ve started to use that terms for what is really a reaction to cold and gray that is reinforced by Western views of seasons.

So, SAD lights aren’t the answer; in experiments, people report that, after a while, they don’t get the results they’d like. But what works is basically a rewiring about how to FEEL about winter.

We live in a society that sees summer as energetic and busy, and winter as morose and depressing. But the author stayed in a town in Norway where the residents don’t even see the sun for most of the year, and they’re living their lives. Going out to eat, relaxing at home, just..living. What do they know that we don’t? Besides the socialized healthcare and social safety net, that is.

They’ve come to terms with it. Winter is not a time to be morose and depressed any more than summer would be. First, they listen to their bodies; their forebears spent winter eating stores collected in fall and slept a ton in sleeping quarters lit by candles, not uploading a new website at 2am or mining crypto. Your body wants to rest, to sleep, and those countries seem to understand that, instead of trying to guilt trip people into pulling the same work schedule they would if it were 70 degrees out.

They don’t think of winter like we do, where we dread the cold and just want to be at home with our stuff. They meet each other for coffee and take walks, keeping the social connections alive. I was intrigued why they place such an emphasis bout going outside; it’s hard for me to go outside voluntarily when it’s below 50 degrees.

The reason why is psychological. We as humans think of things in extremes. The bad thing is always going to be worse and the good thing is always going to be the best thing we think it will be. So we grumble, putting on coats to go outside and then get outside…and realize it’s not as bad as we think it would be.

The book recommends thinking about winter differently. Not as a time to be depressed and sullen, but a unique chance to listen to your body and sleep more. To take walks with purpose and look at things. breathe cold air and remark how clean it is. To savor the feel of hot tea or the relief of coming into a heated space.

For my people who hate summer, I am consistently an annoyance as I proclaim my love of the temperatures about 80. Turns out that some of the things I enjoy about summer can be enjoyed about winter. I have always held that you appreciate the A/C more when you’ve been hot. A ice cold glass of water or lemonade hits a lot different and tastes more delicious and refreshing when you’re hot. Why not apply that thinking to winter?

Another thing was understanding what makes me happy. Is it experiences that are exciting and heart-pumping, or those that make me feel calm and peaceful?

Apparently, Western folk prefer the excitement, while those in Eastern cultures do the calm. “Affective scientists categorize emotions as positive or negative…and by how “arousing” they are. Arousal is a psychological state, and it’s not always sexual; it includes your heart beating faster, butterflies in your stomach, and feeling highly alert. High-arousal positive emotions, like excitement and joy, are stimulating and energetic. In contrast, low-arousal positive emotions, like contentment and serenity, are calming and tranquil.”

I’m a low-arousal person, and, by that measure, I should enjoy winter more. I can analyze why I dislike winter; surely growing up in a place where winter wasn’t much of a change from any other day and 60 degrees was “cold” has something to do with it, but to move to a place that has embraced its season with grumpiness surely rubbed off. The language used to describe this time is mostly negative, but what if you spoke with hope about what the season could bring? What if you responded to someone’s complaint about gray skies with “well, I sleep better these days”? What kind of change could you affect with just speaking more positively, or, at least to as negatively?

So yeah, cop that and read it, my fellow winter-haters. Because winter ain’t going nowhere and it’s possible we can thrive in this time just as we do when the temperature gets warmer.

Of Music Algorithms and the Sound Influencer

In my Black Nerd Slack, we have a channel to talk about music. Anything that could be broadly related to music goes there; shows, album talk, the hijinks of a rapper we’ve never listened to or the random quotes by a songstress unaware the microphone was on.

This particular conversation started when my mans E noted that he started to get into the work of a young singer who was being pushed to him on TikTok. It’s entirely possible that he would have come across the artist at some point, since they’ll be jumping on a tour with a big-name artist, but because the music was being featured on these promotions, he got into it and eventually found it good enough to tell us about it.

With so much art out here, how do you become aware of it? What part does the algorithm play in it? Are you finding music you like, or is finding you?

Nowadays, the Internet is definitely a resource, but is it necessary? Can you go to a record store, a friend’s house, put something on and use that experience to expand your horizons? Is the Internet necessary? And why look for new music anyway? Some of y’all are still listening to the same stuff you listened to in high school. No hate here; Doggystyle and Ready to Die and Death Certificate and What’s the 411? and II and Brown Sugar will forever be on my life playlist, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Certainly, you can look at people who’ve guested on things you like. Side players, guest vocalists and instrumentalists, even interviews where people’s names are mentioned are good intros to people outside of your sphere.

But he said something that I think it’s a bigger issue, a treatise on us as human beings, with our lives and deaths, our experiences as individuals and in this collective of human beings.

“I feel like there a ton of stuff out there I would love if I knew it existed.”

How interested are you in finding that new stuff? How motivated are you in finding things that could possibly enrich your brief stint on this mud ball? Is even finding bad music, or music that you don’t like, a waste of time? And, piggybacking on that,. how far are you willing to go? How much energy and time are you willing to put towards this effort?

Also, this goes for all creativity. A lot of you are avid readers; how do you find more books to put into your To Read pile? (Shots fired, I know.) You have your favorite authors, but do you trust anyone else’s word? A book review, a YouTube video, a post on BlueSky or Twitter? How do you find visual artists? Instagram posts, guided by an algorithm or in the follow list of someone whose work you already like?

How do you develop your taste? Is your taste static, or can you find new things that you may have never thought you would like and add them into your unique cauldron of lived experience?

I gave up Spotify a while ago for a plethora of reasons. Sneezy CEO and minuscule payments to artists, to start with. As a perpetually-on Internet denizen, I was comfortable using Bandcamp to explore my taste and benefit artists more tangibly. I use iTunes, mainly because I run an Apple household, for better or worse. The Facebook groups I’m in focus on music and art, and are run and populated by a ton of great people who like music and art as much as I do.

The community aspect of this can’t be overstated. It’s one thing to share something you like with someone, but it is especially great for someone to share something with you that is so on-time, so perfect, that you can’t imagine your life without it.

Years ago, I would have said that my interests were pretty static, but I was lucky enough to be around people who put me onto so much stuff that fit right in with my taste and vibe.

Words from an Elder

Theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.

-Chairman Fred Hampton (Apr 27, 1969)

As usual, thank you so much for reading and rocking with me. My Linktree is still up; still writing on my personal site and trying not to lose my shit on BlueSky. Still trying to create on IG. Still living.

In the event of my death by agents of the state, know that I’m not as bad as they said I was. You’d know the truth, at least. There’s something to that, I think. To be able to know the truth while others believe what they want.

Won’t be the last time.

Y’all take care of yourselves, and each other. We all we got.

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