This shit is hard as fuck.
I'm trying to run complex modern technology development, research and strategy consulting. I'm using the systems we're building to figure out how I'm going to build an advocacy division. Dogfooding. These things live inside DRKNYT. It's not fictional, exactly. There's a real place you can go and read about what we're doing. You can hire us to help you now.
We don't have any customers yet. We're still trying to make sure people want what we do, the way we do it. Learning what we need to learn, learning how to do it, proving it's good enough to deliver excellence to the people who might want it. We don't yet know exactly who those people are. It's complicated and it's simple.
Popsicle sticks and glue. I borrowed the phrase from a movie and took it to mean barely holding it together. Makeshifting. Shortcutting. Workarounding. Doing what we have to do, and maybe still accomplishing it. That has been the journey for a while now. We're getting ready to launch, and I'm wondering what I might lose if things start getting easier.
We'd written a research and strategy brief, and it was good. Really good. Consequential work, sensitive material, something we needed to share carefully. I wasn't just going to Gmail it. We needed a portal with control over who could get to what. So we're building ATLAS, a shared workspace. Then the sign-in needs to be right too. Sign in with DRKNYT becomes a project inside the project. The research needs a front door. Now we're building the front door.
Meanwhile, the computer keeps running out of room. Eight-gigabyte M1 MacBook Pro, broken screen, hooked through an old dock to a sixty-five-inch television. When memory fills up, it borrows room on the drive—swap—and the drive is filling up too. Very large view of a very cramped situation.
We track the disk space and swap because I want to find ways to automate fixing the problem. I designed a chain of events for after a restart: wake the interrupted turns and let them continue. I know what got interrupted. I want the work to pick back up. How do I know and possess all this information? Because I need to.
I took a nap. A good one. I am different now.
Before the nap I was getting things done. Steady, methodical, one thing after another. Occasionally my eyes would start closing. Afterward my mind was running fast again. Connections everywhere. One idea led to another before I'd worked out whether the first one was any good. I have to notice that before I go chasing every shiny thing. I'm writing this afterward, trying to catch how it went together. Now, apparently, I need an outline.
Autumn called me on FaceTime. My phone kept shutting down, and at the computer I could answer without the caller being able to see or hear me. So I went upstairs to see her in person.
She was finishing something on her phone. I waited. Count to twenty. In Greek. While I was waiting, I noticed I was out of breath from the flights of stairs. I think that's why I decided to lie down. Better than standing there.
Autumn wanted to talk about building her studio. She wasn't asking me to solve it for her. She wanted to talk. Books, fashion, style, curation, her perspective and her voice. Calling it a new venture misses how much was already there before the venture. She wants to make videos. Book reviews, looks, reels, streams. A command center, backdrop, closet, artifacts, cameras, cables, bitrates, microphones—wait...am I saying this or did she?
She's a realtor. Probably the best I've known. We worked together as lender and realtor for a decade. She's my partner. But the biggest reason I say it is that she cares about people more than profits. She cares about money because she needs money. I've watched the weight get heavier for her. She doesn't want to look away from suffering. I worry about what it costs her. It's her choice. There are parts of her experience I don't understand, even being her partner in all these ways.
She was talking about shelves and doing it cheaply at Home Depot. I asked permission to suggest a rule: what if the studio had to be built from things we already had in the garage? That would be sick. It would fit our values and give us something to talk about. It would help financially too, but I swear that wasn't why I suggested it. I could help make it.
How much am I prewired to fix something when she wants to connect by talking about it? She says something and I hear a problem that needs my expertise. Does it? She can change brakes. Paint a whole house. Plenty of things better than I can. I choose to remember that. Something older, origin unknown, wants me to think otherwise.
I can do things too. Sometimes I'm better suited to a part. We're trying to learn how to let that be good for both of us without turning it into which one of us is better. Better at what? I have research and strategy to offer. Technical help. Garage scraps. THIS artist has DRKNYT's lab in her basement. HEHE.
She described the setup as soothing. Creative. I get it. This needs that, which needs another thing, and before you try the thing there's a whole world to build. I know that move. I'm trying to get better at making one small version we can actually use and learn from. When I manage to ship that small slice, it's because I've been working at it. Plenty of my worlds have got big without making it outside.
I was also trying to explain what was going on with me. I started with unemployment, paused to work out the list. Autumn asked what happened. Hold on, I am trying to outline here. I started again. Unemployment, DMI, AT&T—
A small spider lowered itself into the air between us.
I grabbed the line and got up to let it outside. Couldn't move fast enough. It climbed onto my hand. I gave a running explanation of my limited panic. No need to be a tough guy, but let's get you outside, please. I let it go.
Then a woman crossing the road toward the house made eye contact with me. I'm upstairs releasing a spider. Autumn wants to know what I'm staring at. I wonder if the woman is here to serve me papers, or maybe she's just walking. The Kindness of Strangers comes into my head. She was just doing her thing. Not there for me.
The window has to be slammed far enough into the frame to turn the rusty lock. Once it's in, the difference in sound is huge. Okay. Window shut. Back to the bed.
So I'm dealing with a spider, guessing why a woman is crossing the road, and fighting a window while trying to explain the unemployment agency, AT&T, Verizon, Chime, Public Storage, Mr. Cooper. Major corporations and agencies, and here I am with this assortment of tools and agents, taking them on. Outmaneuvering them, I hope. Partly because I'm so small. I'm fascinated by how much of this we can turn into work with the tools and experience we have.
The cleats came up somewhere here, after the spider. I can't place it exactly now. Jackson had been walking through the house in cleats. There is a rule. He'd cleaned them completely and felt that was sufficient. I talked about the step he'd skipped: checking back with the person who made the rule. Consent. Disclosure. Challenging authority.
If the answer is no, back to the drawing board. Do you want to know what that means? Would you? Would you? I really wanted to explain this one. I knew I was eager and told him so. Back to the drawing board means use the answer to find a better way. You don't give up.
Then there he is in four pairs of different socks over his shoes, walking around silently. The ultimate soccer sole. An outdoor cleat that clicks into an indoor shoe. We haven't made that, but look at the prototype. I ask if they're slippery, knowing they are. Sometimes I try to warn him with a question. We laugh about the number of socks and how it looks. I look at him and smile. Smile inside too. I love this kid.
The kids come down. Voices from videos on their phones. Movement at the edge of my vision. Georgina is jumping on the couch like a trampoline while I write. Haha. Swap spike. I have headphones on. The beats and repeating patterns in DRKNYT VYB feel aligning, soothing. They help me work.
I had a little money and a computer running out of memory. An open-box Mac mini at Best Buy looked like a way to do something about that. I thought it was a good buy. I also questioned whether buying it right then was a good decision. I still wanted to. Then I couldn't get access to my own money. Card, tap, transfer. Nothing.
Venmo was big enough that I couldn't seem to reach a person who could see the problem I was trying to solve. Support told me to wait a couple of hours and try again. No explanation I could use. I assumed fraud protection; I didn't know. I needed my money. That turned into CFPB and DIFS complaints, and I moved the money to Mercury. Donezo, Venmo.
The cooling-off time gave me room to research the decision. A Mac mini for around $500 was a good buy, as I'd thought. Probably still not enough machine for the work we wanted to do—the work we hadn't started because we couldn't yet. The longer-term lab was another question: what would we need, what could we ask for when ready? The rough estimate for that lab got to something like $96,000. Useful research. An immediate decision and a bigger future to work toward.
How do I know and possess all this information? Because I need to. Necessity is the mother of invention.
We've worked our asses off for money and things. Chased success. Ground, hustled. We lived it, learned from it. It was practical and useful, and it burned us and buried us and made us forget that we love each other. It wasn't only that. There were other things. Some might be too hard for me to write about today.
We got where we planned to go, and when we arrived, it was empty. That's how I can describe it now. We didn't stand there looking around and realize something. We were in it. We'd built on ideals we might have arrived with. Origin unknown. The foundation wasn't strong enough to sustain what we'd built, or make us WANT to keep going.
We didn't consciously know that then. I suspect some part of us did. Maybe we weren't ready to accept it. Maybe we were afraid of what it would mean, what it might destroy, because what we'd become was also where we found safety and security. I'm trying to understand that now. So. Some stuff happened. It fell apart. I'll spare you the heartbreak today. There's more to write.
We can go get jobs. We're privileged that way, and in other ways. That's the awareness we want. We choose our pursuits. We're willing to wait, willing to struggle. Part of the beauty is learning how to love each other inside of the struggle. We still want to do excellent work. We're trying to understand what we're pursuing, why we want it, and how to keep loving each other while we do it.
I'm asking questions about Black love, Exterminate All the Brutes, the love people hold inside oppression, and how much they come to know about the people who hold power over them. Those questions are still open for me.
The car parts falling off the car. Broken screens. Chinks in the armor, scratches on the paint, scars on our skin, bruises on the parts you can't see just by looking. These all build character. Someone once said just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character. I keep thinking about that.
I want to share this to help other people. I also know I need to write it for me. For future me. Future Jackson, Georgina, Aria, Lucy. Maybe Apollo, Sutton, Penelope, Ava—I couldn't remember my little cousin's name while trying to explain why this writing matters to me. Liam. Liam is his name.
Writing this is making me notice things I didn't consciously know when I started. Maybe I need to reconnect with the people I love. I'm feeling like I'm recovering from my heartbreak. Maybe I have room to carry more again. Maybe I can hold the responsibility of protecting others.
If this works, if I find myself with money and access and room to move, what will I forget? Maybe I can tap my phone and the payment just works. Maybe I can finance a $100,000 studio setup without batting an eye. What will stop looking like a problem once it stops happening to me?
Remember SUPERBINARY. DOGFOOD. DETAIL ON DEMAND. POPSICLE STICKS AND GLUE. FINITE COMPASSION. TEMPO and aSync. Those are places I want to be able to go back into. Remember what mattered enough to make me keep going. Remember the people who didn't give up on me. If things get easy for me, remember the people they're still hard for.
We can know we're incomplete and be happy. We can work and be practical without having the perfect studio. Celebrate invention while learning how to assess the ideas. Respect each other and be aware of the places that still need work.
We're coming. We're coming to help. And if you're a bully and you're reading this—we're coming for you too.