Slowed Down Over the Weekend

So much of my energy is dedicated towards additive work. Taking on new projects, diving into older projects, completing tasks, scheduling more time with friends, filling up the schedule. As it became clear that this past weekend was going to be a bit slower I didn’t do anything to counteract that. I didn’t reach out to friends I hadn’t seen to add a visit, I didn’t scramble to find shows to go to. I missed seeing my wife, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time in the heat, and I didn’t feel ambitious. Next weekend is Twin Cities Jazz Fest. I’ll be working a ton, both on-site and at the station. I’m looking forward to that, but that gave me the inspiration to breath a little bit.

I had time to chip away at things, my turntables really need to be in better shape before I do a wedding in early July. I reset my PA so I could actually practice on the turntables. I went through a couple records, I balanced a tone arm. That’s like 22 minutes total, but it feels great and I’m more excited to work down there in the future. I’ll give it time, and I’ll work it out, but just putting in that little chunk was such a treat. I also watched the 2004 double murder thriller Sideways. Okay, it’s not actually a double murder thriller. But I do believe the movie is mainly focused on characters about my age doing things that are familiar to me. If you think I haven’t been around a lot of soul searching and confused affianced or freshly divorcified people you are wrong. I am 41. I am surrounded. This reflection on intimacy, and love, and right and wrong. It was a really enjoyable watch. I also just don’t watch movies enough, so taking something in across two nights with Rachel was really great.

And Father’s Day was excellent. We went to a brunch in the morning at Jax Cafe and it was spectacular. There was a time when buffets were my favorite shit on planet earth. That had everything to do with eating too much and feeling empowered to do so because of the environment. I still have some struggles with eating, but going literally HAM at a buffet is not one of them. I was able to really enjoy a great bounty of food, treat the food and myself with respect and walk away with a full stomach, but nothing remotely painful.

Today I feel unclear about how to approach Juneteenth. Juneteenth is a day that should be marked, it’s a day that should be studied, and I believe some celebrations are in order. In fact, at my job at Jazz88, I’ve been working hard to do our part to celebrate the new Sounds of Blackness tune “Juneteenth Celebration”. But for what I won’t assume are obvious reasons, this holiday can’t be hastily added to a list of days off and leave it at that. Summer holidays scream for gatherings, for barbecue, for friendship. We don’t get enough days off in this life, we should cherish them.

But our holidays are riddled with problems. I believe the problems they are riddled with are not largely the problems of history, they are the problems of present. I celebrate Juneteenth with the feeling that a handful of decades from now Americans will say “I can’t believe they celebrated Juneteenth in the same breath they disenfranchised voters. I can’t believe they celebrated Juneteenth while not passing the John Lewis voting acts. I can’t believe they celebrated Juneteenth while the Senate hasn’t voted in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021”. The era I will spend my adulthood in I believe is largely going to have the stain on it that the 1880s should. We are living through (and enabling) the reaction to Black agency. Not just of Obama, but of the promise of the 1960s and 1970s. In many measurable ways, things have gotten worse for Black America in the last 25 years. I’m thinking about home ownership, wage gap and more. There are many metrics that document Black America thriving in the same time period, but it isn’t the slam dunk it needs to be. It is not the corrective we need to see. The period after Radical Reconstruction was violent, it was intimidating and it set the tone for the early 1900s. And what I see in the post Obama period is an era that is so raw and regressive in regards to the race that is the wildest time imaginable for Juneteenth to become a Federal Holiday. Not every holiday is meant to mark progress, but in this case, the introduction of Juneteenth as a federal holiday (which was introduced by the Black Caucus I believe in the 1990s) marks progress backwards. We were unwilling to recognize Juneteenth as a federal holiday until something as terrible as George Floyd being lynched on camera came out. We have the day off because of how bad we have fucked up. I’m not saying Wells-Fargo needs to be open, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a barbecue, but I’m saying that if you celebrate with no reflection on the dynamics at play, I’m impressed, you’ve got silos higher than I care to build.