electro-synthe-magnetic

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Once in a Blue Moon l AJ Smadi

Happy Black Fae Day!

I did this as part of a collaboration post with many other wonderful black creatives over on IG. My theme was Warrior Fairy.

Creative Direction and editing by me

I finished this brushbuddy art doll earlier this week and he is very cute. It's got a wire armature inside and is fully posable, including the leather fingers and toes. (There are also magnets in the feet to potentially stick it to things later.)

Pickleball — sport's continued explosive growth, October 2025

So like, the thing about pickleball that nobody who writes about pickleball actually wants to engage with is that it's a real estate story before it's a sport story — the whole reason you've heard of it, the whole reason it has the cultural footprint it has rather than being one more retiree hobby alongside mahjong and pinochle, is that it solved a specific problem for a specific class of property owner at a specific moment, namely: what do you do with all this fucking tennis infrastructure.

Because here's what happened. Tennis participation in America peaked in the late 70s/early 80s (the Borg/McEnroe moment, the wooden-racket-to-graphite transition, all of it) and then declined more or less continuously for thirty-plus years, but the courts didn't go anywhere. The courts are capital improvements, they're on the books, they're part of the amenity package the HOA sold the units on, the country club's dues structure assumes them, the municipal parks budget allocated for them in 1978 and the line item never got removed. So you've got this enormous installed base of tennis courts in America — public, private, semi-private, the whole spectrum — built for a participation level that no longer exists, sitting there racking up maintenance costs and producing no revenue, and the sport that was supposed to use them has been bleeding players to golf and (briefly) to running and (more durably) to literally just sitting indoors.

And then somebody figures out — and this part is genuinely beautiful, in a depressing way — that you can stripe four pickleball courts inside the footprint of one tennis court. Four. The conversion costs almost nothing (paint and a portable net), the new sport is dramatically easier to pick up (the underhand serve, the small court, the fact that anyone with intact knees can play passable pickleball within an hour where tennis takes years to be non-humiliating), and crucially the demographic that already owns property adjacent to tennis courts — suburban, aging, time-rich, looking for low-impact social exercise — is precisely the demographic for whom pickleball was designed. The sport is a key cut to fit a lock that was already there.

So the explosion you've been reading about for five years now isn't an organic cultural movement so much as the resolution of a long-deferred capital allocation problem — what do we do with the tennis courts — meeting a long-deferred social problem — what do retired Boomers do with their afternoons now that the kids are gone and the golf course is six hours and seventy bucks. The HOAs were going to do something with the tennis infrastructure regardless. Pickleball was the path of least resistance.

Which is why, by the way, the lawsuits — and there are a lot of them now, this is a real legal subgenre — are mostly about noise. Pickleball makes a distinctive percussive pock sound that the suburban built environment was not engineered to absorb (tennis is much quieter, the felt ball, the longer rallies), and the courts get built right up against the property lines because they were already there as tennis courts and nobody thought about the acoustic profile when they restriped. People are losing their minds in Naples and Scottsdale and the inner-ring suburbs of basically every metro because the amenity that was sold to them as "courts, beautifully maintained" has become "courts, beautifully maintained, in continuous use from 7 AM to dusk by people who could not possibly care less about your home office's Zoom calls."