It's The First Of The Month

Cash your checks and come sub

This letter is narrated by me:

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First, thank you for being present in this moment, and especially if you are receiving this in your inbox. Second, an announcement: Brownouts, this very Substack newsletter, now has a paid subscription tier for those who would like to support me as I try to manifest some time and money to finish the first draft of my upcoming book, also titled Brownouts (with a subtitle to differentiate, to be determined, possibly crowdsourced). Hopefully what I have written so far is a worthy glimpse of what’s to come.

I’ve weighed the pros and cons of adding a subscription option. I talked with other Substack writers in 280 characters or less, and ultimately decided that there need to be way more cons to scare me off this bag. Fam, I’m doing Doordash deliveries to pay for photo and research (I’ll probably keep doing it — I drive around listening to beats and running errands a third of the week, why not?).

Urgent, sort of: the final batch of photo development and editing, researching and writing, exploring more funding opportunities (grants, fellowships, etc), and perhaps most importantly—a fund to begin shooting photos again regularly. If it rains subs, I may throw a party and invite you all. These things will all happen anyway eventually, regardless, but the cashflow helps speed things up immensely.

There will be no paywall for upcoming posts, but, starting this month, posts older than 90 days will require a subscription to read past a halfway paywall. Also, Monthly, Annual and Founding Member subscribers get some off-Substack extras (tap the link, see the goods).

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This latest playlist, Brownouts 5: To Bremerton and Back, is my way of telling a story without telling the story. The dream of a different kind of 90s lives in Bremerton. You’ll notice the fashion is rather contemporary. Upon further inspection, this is not the result of nostalgia. In this place, the 90s aren’t back—they never left. Every counterpoint to high fashion over the last 40 years: big box store normcore and dadcore, streetwear/skate/hip-hop, working class workwear, rocking house clothes in public exists without existing out here.

With the exception of the first and last songs (which I chose), this 120-ish minute playlist is composed of songs that I have taken note of hearing in open air, in the city of Bremerton, Washington, over the course of my stays and visits in the current year 2023. I started a playlist in January and added a song here and there since. A quarter of these songs came out of my Pops’ bluetooth speaker. Some were at/near the ferry terminal. A few were heard in Wal-Mart and Fred Meyer. Flea markets, gas stations. Fred Meyer, by far, has the best selection, which you wouldn’t know from their annoyingly memorable memorably annoying commercials.

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I’m gardening, watering in the early morning. Somewhere close, folks are talking about a gathering getting shot up. The heat and the violence have both become so normalized that we auto-correlate them. Today’s forecast calls for 99 degrees with a chance of 9mm showers. The sun has never been brighter, the mood and humor never darker. As it’s been since my college days, plants bring me back to center. I’m repaying them my debt.

Belatedly, I’ve begun trimming back the PNW curse/blessing known as the blackberry bush. They hide in the winter and disrespect your boundaries in the summer. As I’m apt to do when suffering a tedious task, I’m listening to a playlist of beats that made it past the first listen to become potential song candidates. I’m writing along in my head, snacking on the ripened fruit during breaks, battling with the thorns. I lose more than I win. I have passing thoughts of the ubiquity of blackberries in my life, like the smoothie I had for lunch, the liqueur from Bainbridge Island on the way to Justo and Tones’s wedding, or the phone that Bambu had all the way up until the iPhone 5.

Mostly, I think of the a phrase that has been passed down like a family artifact to Kendrick Lamar (2010s-), Tupac Shakur (90s), Pam Grier (70s), and many more earlier and uncredited Black Americans. It goes something like “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” The OG was The Blacker the Berry written by Wallace Thurman, published in 1929. The context of the phrase is different in every decade it has surfaced, but meet at the intersection of defying colorism. It is a wonderful phrase to hear and ponder, questionable for me to say out loud out of quotations, and so embedded in my brain that I reach for the blackest blackberry on the vine, expecting a sweetness promised to me in song and book. I bite it, and it’s just as sour as a barely ripened blackberry.