May | 2016 | The Schottky Monkey

While it doesn’t happen as often as I would like. Oakland can still put on a gathering which reminds me while I have been living here virtually non-stop since 1992.

Last weekend’s Oakland Book Festival held downtown was a true local pleasure. It isn’t the largest book festival. It didn’t attract all of the A-list literati, and there were scheduling conflicts. I suppose the latter is a good thing because it means there lots of interesting topics.

My only misgiving regarding the festival was the lack of us. Where “us” means my black community. That’s not to say there weren’t any black folk in the house. I just wish more of us would show up at these things. These sorts of events take their programming cues from the communities which attend them. Know what I mean ?

Given the current climate around race.We can’t always stand aside aloof legitimately criticizing the oppressive racial climate which exists.If a genuine, grass-roots opportunity to be in community with a broad spectrum of the Oakland racial landscape makes itself available. It’s worth our while to take advantage of it. Most of the countries’ issues around race are BECAUSE we don’t spend time together. Not to mention that a day in community around books and interesting ideas is good day. No matter who you are.

Finally, unlike our neighbor who shares a northern border with us. We are the Oakland Book Festival, and being about Oakland is way more valuable to me than being about the Bay area sometimes.

Note: This was a originally a fairly different post about Millenials and hyper self documentation.I had started it way back in 2015 and just saw the draft slowly drowning in my blog drafts queue.Then I heard a song whch changed my life. At least it changed the life I was living today. Who knows what fuck I’ll be living tomorrow.

I was in the office today banging out some code (yes hw engineers can code, they can even develop software if need be) for performance testing I had taken on. It was pretty low intensity think-work so I decided to put some music on. As luck would have it, Lisa Shaw’s tune All Night High came on. After the first listen I put it on repeat, that was at 4:00pm, its been on repeat ever since and it is now 6:26pm-There is something about the combination of her voice and Migs’ production- and during that period of time the part of me that used to know how to live managed to swim ashore and dust off memories of parties and clubs I had been to. Where there was an abundance of people just dancing their asses off. Places like Nikes in SF, a place in NYC Don-Els (I hope that’s the right name), a particularly epic rooftop party in Brooklyn, some Chocolate City joints at MIT, some amazing sets in Barcelona, and even a get-down in Tel-Aviv. And then there were the people, the thinking I used to do for no other reason than just to think.

I had convinced myself that those sorts of times and experiences were occurring less and less because of age. That’s a lie. At least for me. The truth of the matter is that I gave up. I guess I finally ran myself into a state of being caught up.

My life in tech has been pretty good in a lot of ways over the last 33 years, though the last 10 or so I have watched the lustre of my passion and experiences ooze off into some hole where I can’t see much less try to retrieve them from kind of like this . Well at least the ooze part. Some of it is the industry itself, and some of it is me changing.Tech or at least tech as I understand it is not a bad place. It’s just not a place I want to be.

I started writing this blog at a time when I believed my next move was to become an analyst for one of those shops which builds opinions and then key-influencerizes a market into existence based on those opinions. It’s a good thing no one hired me as it would have been hard for me to sing a lot of the songs that career path would have required from me. I am going to write about the industry sometimes. However I am going to write about the things in the industry I want to write about. I am also back in school and you know how dangerous that can be for someone who is ready to revisit their education. Did I foget to mention I just watched The Spookl Who Sat by the Door again today ? Hmmm, I wonder what that’s about… Not feeling the Bern but I guess I have freed my ass, I hope my mind will follow….

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