a kiss from above

my heart cracked!

it's rare to meet someone who's ready to fully listen to your dreams. thanks for listening to one of mine.

i wanted to write a bit about what "a kiss from above" and its music video means to me— it's a song about a pattern in my life.. someone left behind and someone moving on.

too often, i get lost in work— drawn in by the gravity of what i've been told to chase. the people that it hurts tell me to go along with it, but i know it's not for me..

my head in between both your thighs, my heart in the palm of your hand. i know i left, but why was it you who told me to?

i'm a digital boy, born into an age where your life can be represented by just numbers! i am on a computer more than i'd like to admit. days, weeks and months are spent in the cloud—my code stored across the world and the things i view tracked in some table,, people's personalities are increasingly easy to datafy: your preferences become weights to some algorithm and it knows you too well.. maybe one day we'll just be bytes in the cloud. today, we live on this earth

in the video, i stitched in the movie Pi (1998). it's a story of a mathematician on his computer—but it slowly kills him. pacing around and waiting for tests to run, getting nervous and pushing people away. i feel this way all too often. he tries to read into the meaning of it, but there is none to be found. the logic and numbers of the markets change too rapidly to follow, meanwhile the real world and potential lovers pass him by. he gets lost in the code

i don't have an attachment to my work as a software engineer. that's normal. but i see it colliding with society, leaving the ruins of a people— of us. today, industry is a truck barreling through a crowd. it collects and aggregates and absorbs the earth and its people like bugs on its windshield.

i chose to shoot the video on Angel Island, a vestige of an empire that's gotten better about hiding away its evil. it was a deliberate choice to shoot at a site that made Chinese immigrants prisoners. I hope, I hope that one day the border looks like Angel Island. just a vestige,, just a ruin.. that pain and sadness are only memories that the land holds. I hope, I hope that the empire we live within can no longer deplete the land. that the data centers being built by workers no longer need to slowly kill those same workers.

on my knees, i start to pray.. but now it's far too late.

but the world continues to rely on "tech." an industry that lost its meaning but gained unfettered access. the industry is not logical, but it keeps squeezing on people to wring our their pocket change. the calculus of tech's brand of capitalism is written on walls in blood.

i hate the clouds. specifically the Big Tech clouds. the wake of polluted air and water they bring to communities. the bombs they guide to kid's beds & mother's dreams. it's no secret. in fact, it's how they make most of their money. by cutting corners, by extracting resources and killing people— both slowly and instantly. use duckduckgo and do a few searchs on "ai weapons" or "data center pollution" or "mining human rights abuses". a few key more words to search up: "palantir idf", "palantir surveillance", "project nimbus", "cobalt red", "data brokers". there's so much more, but my brain hurts and i have other plans to dissect this.

i'm looking around.. falling in the cloud! all i'm left with is those photos on that .zip

one day, a kid will go exploring through a ruined data center wondering, "what purpose did this building hold?" today, we say it's progress and enlightenment. today, much of my life revolves around the cloud. tomorrow could be different. so it's up to us to make it different. i have taken most of my data and photos off the cloud, with the majority still on some .zip on some computer that i own.

the second movie i wove into the music video is Sleep Dealer (2008). it's a movie about a family in Oaxaca, living in a world too similar to ours today. people directly plug their consciousness into computers to work physical labor but remotely. Memo goes to chase the dream of money, and no one stops him. although we come from different places and backgrounds, i've seen parts of his story through my eyes. i hope that i can have his ending one day. for now, i am in the portion of the movie where he's plugged in. give it a watch

but in my mind, you'll be safe: staring at the crying moon. but in my heart, i know what's wrong. I KNOW WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND!

the two women in mind when i wrote this song taught me how to care for this world. there's a lot of things unsaid between us, but i think i know what they want: they long to exist free of pain caused by others, and for a peace only known in community and care. although things aren't what they used to be, i will forever carry their memories in my mind and my heart: the patient tenderness they offer people and the angry tears they turn into energy for others. they were a kiss from above, my heart cracked.

the sand on your feet, the people we'd be— I KNOW U WANTED MORE FROM ME!

maybe one day i'll feel like i'm enough for this world and the people they are. today, i don't.

ty again for listening. if you'd like this story continued, check out "i know it broke your heart" by San Ale