SONG OF THE DAY: African Hustle

Right now can feel overwhelming because it’s a pretty thick barrage of images and videos of police state brutality, as well as a lot of radical information to digest. You don’t have to digest it all this weekend. 500 years is not undone by the 4th of July. But don’t do the consumer-based thing we’re all trained to do, to put it all in a box, or closet, or desktop folder, and promise to go back to later only to forget it all until we dump it out or drop it off at a thrift store. A long term hope of mine is we lose track of time too. Time fucking sucks, forcing industriousness on me, guilt as well. Much like money, it was a unit for comparing and organizing that’s been just brutally overused in all the wrong ways. I’m afraid of time. I hate time. Fuck, it’s only Saturday and I’m already fearing a specific time on Monday. Of course, I’ll be fifteen minutes late, like always.

If you’ve ever known immigrants from Africa, you might’ve heard African time, which is an even stronger version of what we know in America as black time (which like many things considered black, has a lot of crossover with southern traditions due to the heavy cultural influence on the south), where specific times can be a goal you shoot for, but not necessarily met. This challenges a lot of the shit built here around order and productivity. “Well what would people do?” You’d wait. Read a book or something if somebody hadn’t shown up yet. “Oh, so you’re time is more important than mine?” No, not at all. I’m just not there yet, so you can do something else. Or maybe I’m already there, and you’re not. No worries. I always keep notebooks and books and magazines laying around or at least one or two of these things in a backpack on me while on foot. Just sit there, and do “nothing”. This is the only doing of nothing that should be tolerated. Then get back to the barrage of radical information. In fact, you can even combine the two. YOU COULD ACTUALLY BE DOING AMAZING WORK TO CHANGE THE ENTIRE WAY OUR SOCIETY IS BUILT, all by doing “nothing” in those moments. So I think in a roundabout way I’ve somehow talked myself into doing nothing as a revolutionary act, so long as the nothing I’m doing is a conscious act of nothing, rather than the fake nothing of avoiding actually addressing things in my own life.