Articles and essays on design, technology, and my POV of the world. For shorter bursts find me on Mastodon.
Not all of us are okay. Nor are we prepared to answer the question genuinely. The world is overwhelming in myriad ways. It feels like a betrayal to the pain and suffering felt deep in the soul to reply with “okay, thanks.”
In high school I was often found listening to records in my living room, air drumming, trying to reverse engineer what I was hearing on my favorite records. Mostly I was trying to learn records by Death, Metallica, Slayer, and Rush.
I think I was six, which would have made my brother four. We were avid fans of The Hulk TV series, starring Lou Ferrigno. My dad, like most 70s dads I suspect, had a crush on Lou because he was manly and buff. For my brother and me, though, we just loved that he was green, wore purple pants, and beat the shit out of bad guys for doing bad things.
Every once in a while this story resurfaces in conversation. It’s pretty cool, so I thought I would go ahead and write it down for posterity.
This is “Mrs. Smith.” She no longer goes by that name, but that’s what I called her when she was my World Literature teacher during my senior year of high school. I enjoyed coffee and conversation with her on the morning this photo was taken, after a series of interesting events. I want to share this story as a way to help us paint a picture of teachers that doesn’t include arming them for battle in schools. Because gun control isn’t just about the people pulling the triggers.
My entire being has been rife with emotion today. From the moment I witnessed the institutional murder of Alton Sterling, my lens of the day was dramatically altered. I waded through an endless stream of tweets and posts about bullshit that seems meaningless in the wake of yet another murder which is, really, a slow leak in the sea of American genocide.
Tonight I fired up a record I haven’t played in years. While listening, I quietly uttered the words “man, this is my favorite record,” which reminded me of the time when I realized the magnitude mindfulness has had on my life.
I have been wanting to write this article for many days, but haven’t been able to properly formulate my thoughts. It’s emotionally and psychologically challenging as a fellow human being, but it’s concerning to me on a personal level as well. You see, I’m a white man with five children — and three of them are black.
Paper for the W3C HTML Mail Workshop, 24 May 2007, Paris, France. Originally published on the W3C website for the workshop.