Life Matters Transformation is a natural part of growth. I'm reporting to you, as promised, midway through recovery of the life-altering injury from February. Yep, before the pandemic took hold in the America's, and before the worst of us decided to eek out into the public eye. It's been weird. It's been frustrating. In my previous session, I mentioned that there was more to recovery than healing the physical. There's an entire mental or psychological component that is equally as bad as the break. Sometimes, worse. In my head, there are questions about strength and what if I'm pulled over by one of those renegade cops, or what do I do when one of those Trump maniacs decides to confront me? My goodness, the nights get dark. It's weird out here. And it's weird in here. Let me unpack some of that a bit. This is Oh Snap, episode 2: What Now, What If. What Now Now started years and years before I arrived on Earth. It started when white women would blame black men for looking at them in public in calls to the police. Jailed and beaten and killed for such a nothing thing. It started when I was dragged into the dean's office in middle school for touching some white girl in-between classes. My parents and the police were called. By the time my parents arrived, the police were already there. Waiting for the dean to finally follow up on the very important fact that my being in gifted classes also meant that that lying troublemaker could not ever cross paths with me, as gifted students at that school were never intermingled with standard-ed kids. My parents arrived, handled the situation appropriately, and that girl ended up expelled over it all. Nonetheless, it left a mark. It left a kind of stain on my mind that altered how I dealt with women, girls, and especially white adults. Seeing the constant video and news reports of the harassment Black essential workers faced during the pandemic struck chords in me that I thought I buried. By my 20s, I took matters into my actual hands and tried beating implicit racism up, jaw by jaw, but that kind of response should've landed me in jail. Or worse. In no way can I even consider being that aggressive, bullish, ill-tempered guy now. No way I can channel that beast to the surface and let him win the moment. Being this age and this broken forces me to really, really, really play the long game to defeat what I'm positive is still plaguing Black advancement to equal footing in America. I don't need to prove that with statistics and probability metrics. But others have. Every year since Brown vs The Board of Education, we've seen reporting based on explicit and implicit bias against people of color. We see it at work. We see it in the street. We hear co-workers utter wildness to each other. If you deny it's happening in those places, you're off you're either blind to reality or the actual participant in the activity. That's where we're at. That's where I'm at. And it's scary as f--k. Who do I turn to when I'm the guy people seek answers from? Who do I lean on when I'm others' source of strength? Who's going to help me fight off that maniac, driven by radical politics and psychosis? And who killed morality? What If There are a hundred wonderful quotes that came out of civil rights demonstrations that are easily relevant today. It's wild that it's taken so long for society to begin acknowledgement of the disparities between the groups - male to female, rich to not so rich, majority to minority, and even between the religions. What happened to 'do unto others'? That's in the Christian Bible, in the book of Matthews, 7th chapter, 4th verse. Actually that whole chapter highlights interactions humans should have between each other, beginning with judging no one, unless you yourself were ready to be judged. It's simple math, really. But that ain't how it works. But what if it was? Imagine looking at the entire system folks are absolutely working to dismantle (and I'm one of them), through the lens that priests and pastors run their services through. The Beatitudes defined how society should treat the disabled, the poor, sick, and needy. But we lock up our addicts, we put our disabled in what amounts to prisons, and we imprison or kill our mentally ill and self-medicated. Our Poor claw and scratch for food. Sometimes, they resort to desperate measures since homeless shelters close at higher rates than they're erected. Laws against their very homeless existence ensure they are held inside a box with bars. The Bible says to care for them. The Bible says to shelter the meek, the elderly, and the disenfranchised. Yet, the prisons grow, and is good business for those that run them. Out of the lessons the Christian Bible was intended to teach, parts of that book were removed or re-interpreted depending on the political power structure in place at the time. There was even an unofficial, yet widely used version taught to African Slaves. The slave's first introduction to English was delivered through the demented religious teachings of slavewoners and preachers. It eventually had a stranglehold on Black communities that lasted to this day. Many believed that their reward was in heaven, and that death is the easiest and most fulfilling way to find peace. 'Peace and freedom, right now,' wasn't on their lips but today, there's little tolerance for turning away from it. Over time, as the youth learned more about their past, they refused to accept the current. And with the rise of more spiritual hearts and less religious ones, Black youth and adults alike have found more Peace from within and aren't waiting on death. It shows how powerful religion is and how weaponizing it for whatever gain is the same as stealing life from folks. What if the entirety of the Bible, or any religious principle set, was the root of policy? What if we had a government based on equal treatment of all citizens within it's borders? What if we didn't have a dollar amount earned for each prisoner in private prisons. What if race wasn't asked on job or credit applications? What if my bedroom was none of your business? What if we did unto others as we've been treated? How that equation proves out is up to each of us. Those in power are not just melanin-deficient, septuagenarian, sexist males. They are also deeply hued, deeply greedy, loathesome women and despicable men who have stopped at nothing short of robbing the people - their people of Justice (Breonna). What if the commandments were real to them? What if they believed in the purity they seek in us? What if we have had enough? And while all this is swirling in my head, I check the clock and it reads 3:54am. Another halfway rested night, with hopes that 2020 and this arm, might come back strong. This has been Oh Snap, episode 2. It’s time for you all to honor the sacrifices so many made to allow for the privilege to vote. Create your heaven here. Right now.

Oh Snap: Episode 3 - The Champ is Here In my lifetime, I’ve watched and observed the act of becoming a winner. We’ve seen Jordan return with the 45 on his back - not in his prime, but as this salty dog, still embarassing 2-guards while building his empire in ownership and sneaker sales. We revel at the utter dominance of Tyson, and shed a single heavy tear when he lost to Holyfield and to the mishappenings with women - we hoped he’d find his way back to Mike from Bed-Stuy. The stories of redemption strike something in us that we desire. They show us that we can indeed take lemons and garnish our Dark and Stormies with them. Recap from Rehab On the afternoon of March 8th of 2020, yours truly was awakened after surgeons worked diligently to twist my wrist, ulna, and radius into stability, bound with sturdy metals and grit. To hear more about what the prelude to the surgery was like, check out the previous episodes. There, I speak on what happened to my whole damn life when I went from contending powerlifter to hoping I’d feel my feet and fingers again in a single moment. So. Rehab. My surgeon told me that it would take a year or more to get my arm and mechanics back to what I’d consider normal. Without having a crystal ball, we’d have no way of knowing what my arm would do while it tried healing. Some days, it was okay. Others, it was as exactly as difficult as being condemned to house arrest in another country, speaking a language I don’t understand, required to work. Meanwhile, everything beyond my arrested state was on fire. COVID-19 had not been the hindrance to me like it was to most of the world. However, it helped reveal inequities that contributed to the fears that kept me up at night. And by “kept me up at night”, I mean, pacing the floors of this house like a ghoul after consistently imagining myself in a box at my funeral. Dread was all I thought of in the earlier stages of recovery. Then, I quit my day job. I quit any form of painkillers. I quit music. I quit every form of social media. The Old Job I’m not sure how many of you listening know about my work. I’m a digital accessibility consultant, which means I work with companies to engineer solutions for making their websites, apps, and documents usable for blind, low vision, elderly, and others with limited use of their hands. It’s work I love beyond music as it has an impact that’s bigger than anything I can create artistically. It creates the opportunity for changes in how a culture can sway how information gets to us all - especially in health care. Unfortunately, one of the main clients I dealt with willfully allowed for inaccessible experiences to be pushed out to the public. Mind you, this was during the height of COVID-19, and the health care facility management found accessibility to be some afterthought item to incorporate, rather than make it a priority. There was a single manager in that group, who was responsible for tearing down the efforts my team put in place, to the detriment of many both within and outside the organization. It’s important to note Accessibility here because it’s a major concern in Black Indigenous People of Color and other communities that are disproportionately affected by bullshit information about disease prevention. Imagine seeing Black men on street corners with bull horns, professing that the most important vaccine against the virus that was taking out Black men by the thousands was actually poison?! What? Imagine the disgust in seeing hospitals release info about how to prevent the spread or reach treatment for COVID-19, with that info being inaccessible or unavailable to folks because the hospital just ‘hadn’t gotten around to it’. It’s absolutely maddening, and I carried that everywhere. I quit painkillers. Prior to the incident, I’d never needed anything stronger than whatever was available over-the-counter. As every lifter knows, there will be days when your arms might not raise fully, or the back might be super tight, or joints might swell - it’s just part of the life. I already had an antipathy towards anything masking hurt parts, but seeing as how I needed to get more than 2 hours of sleep at night, I tried it. Big effin mistake. Here's why: every human metabolizes whatever is taken in through the digestive system differently. Some break down and absorb the compound rather simply, while others have slightly adverse reactions after absorption. An example of those differences might be my drinking coffee or a Red Bull in order to rest, while others would ingest those same things and find themselves climbing the walls. Oxy or Percs, valuable pain blockers and swelling reducers for many had me wanting to end my actual life. I couldn't stop thinking about it. When I finally slept, I had recurring scenes of capture and arrest due to bogus calls to the police from petty racists. Quick sidenote, it was a prevailing cause of civil disruption in my suburb at the time. Somehow, it became common for white folks to unnecessarily call the police for nothingness, and end up getting cited for false claims. It was always funny, but fukn terrifying at the same time. Just by the law of averages, there was bound to be that one cop would arrive ready to instigate - and my drug-exacerbated fear of one of those cops arriving stayed with me. On the outside, I was hanging out, enjoying my kids, playing like nothing was wrong. But on the inside, I had an inescapable dread that made my fight response key up for hours on end. I quit music. Well, that's kind of nothing important. As a musician, I find my way in front of the keyboard on a daily basis. However, performing 2-handed chord progressions was just not possible. Enter depression. Enter anger. Enter fight response. Enter solution. Enter the decision to kill off Rebel One as the character and figure out something else to become. Creative outlets are beyond important. Without them, who are we, really? Just bots in an office, taking orders, following operands, executing commands regardless of their futility to achieve success. A solid month passed, my stitches stopped weeping, and I might have also. It's hard to say. But I did have a lot to say, and so I did on a probably life-saving track called "Tried By Fire". In it, I aired out the death of Rebel. A sort of practice run on my real life funeral, and found myself exercising the demon I was tussling with. I quit Social Media. Instagram changed it's algorithm,.updated it's UI to better incorporate Facebook functionality, and I hated it. Twitter is and will forever be the hairy nipple on Satan's teat. It's useless, detached thought (and I use the word thought, kindly) that's posted at the spur of the moment, yet generates banter, spite, vitriol, fake adoration, and hate faster than any in-person experience ever has. At places I used to frequent, I decided that my actual friends knew to text or call me directly, and that social media platforms connected me to people and things I couldn't find a way to care about. I would've needed to contact a realtor to find me some land to till, fertilize, seed, grow, and harvest damns for me to give one for about 99% of what I saw posted. All that's just noise. Goals for Goals Now that you're caught up, let's talk about The Big Payback. As I mentioned in previous episodes of Oh Snap, there’s a giant mental aspect of recovery that has to happen before anything physical recuperates. You ever heard of the mind-muscle connection? Well what happens with the bridge for that synaptic function is clouded with hate, rage, and anxiety, and fear? Does the muscle respond as if it’s being worked or exercised? Or does it respond like it’s part of that fight complex? Lifting angry got me only so far. I found myself yurking things loose that were previously okay. I picked up relatively large things with what I’m sure was crap form, developing bad habits.I lifted with my heart, not with my head. And once I got out of my head, lyrics returned. Beat making returned. Joy started creeping back in. That was the turning point. The three main aspects of my life - beats, rhymes, lifting - came in and the trend upward pointed me at the calendar. In February of this year, I celebrated the day of “the incident” with pushups. Granted, I’d already been back in the area of about 80% of my previous max, but those were grinders. Where I’m from, if you ain’t pushing that weight for 10, that’s not a weight you own. 315 came and went. I was looking at 335 for 5 by the end of the month. That came just a few days later. Valentines Day came, I tossed 325 for 3 to 5 sets of 5 easily. March 8th was circled on that board. 365 for just 2 was all I thought I could do that day. I felt like I was rushing it. But the day came, after 3 days rest. First set of 365 went up and down so easily, I was halfway mad about not going for more. I couldn’t, though. The emotion of the moment was too much. All the excess, the remnants of so much negative poured out in salty liquid from my eye sockets. I didn’t know what to do after that, except for going in for more. So I did, and found myself to be stronger than I was from the year prior...in more ways than one. Conclusion Don’t you ever. Never ever allow the darkness of man enter your circle, your light, your space, your mind. I dont care if it hides behind a badge, a cross, a party, or a last name. You cut it out and you salt the earth it grew from. Once you free yourself from that anchor...you’ll be free to assume that crown you’ve fought hard to contend for. This concludes “Oh Snap”, episode 3 - The Champ is Here.