There is a particular kind of week that doesn’t announce itself. It simply arrives, relentless, layered, and somehow generative despite itself. This was one of those weeks.
Back-to-back meetings dominated the calendar, which is, by any serious measure, a scheduling philosophy that deserves to be retired. And yet, between the agenda items and the action points, something far more interesting was quietly competing for my attention: the Akira-inspired set design of Aus Taylor’s work in the orbit of Ye’s latest creative universe, and the kind of obsessive, refresh-every-ten-minutes vigil reserved for the Artemis II updates that in what can only be described as either cosmic irony or NASA’s most ambitious PR decision to date dropped on April Fools’ Day. Make of that what you will. What matters is that Mona is not making Vanilla 29, and if you know, you know.
Then there was Andre ‘DJ Puffy’ Parris, my brother, who offered something different entirely: an episodic narrative of his own ambition, shared with the kind of candour that makes you sit up straighter. Big scene, always!
Lana ‘FitGirlLanz’ Richards, my friend from when was bound for Miami prepped and ready for her first HYROX competition. We’ll call her Champion from now on! She did her big one! And somewhere quieter, Reverend Shana Maloney, my sister, deep in preparation for her Easter Sunday sermon. Scripture as foundation, yes, but the message underneath it was something far more universal: how we approach fear. Fear of others. Fear of things. Fear of self and the fullness of what that means when you finally stop looking away from it. Arguably very different dispatches from very different corners. And yet, reading them together, they form something of an accidental thesis for the week.
Here’s the thing…
I should say upfront: I made a commitment to myself recently. To create more than I consume. It sounds like the kind of resolution that lives comfortably on a vision board and dies quietly by February. But I meant it. And so I started where most people start when they finally decide to mean something… I started writing.
This is that writing.
There are other parts though…
Made In The Future is not yet a household name. It isn’t supposed to be…at least not yet. The arts and production house currently exists in the shared planning orbit of Tamira Persaud, Jody Forte, and me. We have agreed on this: a festival rooted in creativity, science and technology, slated for November 2026. A month that carries its own symbolism for those paying attention.
The soft launch is imminent. The prep work is constant. And in the middle of that infrastructural grind, the late nights, the logistics, the outreach, the careful architecture of something that doesn’t yet have walls the three of us paused.
We just talked (as we often do) about cool things.
It sounds deceptively simple. It was anything but.
The conversation found its anchor in Aus Taylor’s work, set design that doesn’t merely nod to its references but inhabits them. Anime. The otherworldly. The kind of visual language that treats symbolism as a structural material rather than decoration. For anyone who has spent time inside the machinery of production navigating what one might generously call an unrefined system of bureaucracy encountering work like that lands differently. It doesn’t just inspire. It releases something.
It was the moment to feel seen in the midst of everything else we were juggling in our respective corners.
That is not a small thing. When you have gone all in on a vision that demands you tolerate an unforgiving process, intellectual communion becomes something closer to oxygen than leisure. The conversation became that. A reprieve. A reminder that the dynamism we carry into this work is not incidental.. it is the entire point.
The discovery happened, in part, because we were actively scouting. Combing the internet for creatives to invite to our upcoming meet and greet, our research instincts, let’s call them research instincts, were operating at full capacity this week. Which means the algorithm, on this occasion, was working in service of something worthwhile.
What emerged from the Aus Taylor rabbit hole was a broader conversation about human appetite. Not ambition in the transactional sense, but something more philosophical: the tension between the need for exploration and the need for more. One is rooted in boundless curiosity, the instinct to move toward the unknown for its own sake. The other is a refusal. A refusal to be contained by comfort, by what already exists, by the quiet gravitational pull of enough.
These are not the same thing. But in the right room, with the right people, they become fuel for the same fire.
And perhaps that is what Andre’s narrative and Shana’s sermon were quietly saying too in their own registers, their own languages. Ambition and faith, when stripped back far enough, share the same root: the decision to move toward something despite not being certain it will hold your weight.
The week ended with an added item on the to-do list, a brainstormed idea from that rabbit hole that, by any rational calculation, expands the workload. We added it anyway.
And I ended it here. Writing. Creating something instead of scrolling past someone else’s creation and calling it inspiration.
Made In The Future is a project run by people constitutionally incapable of being at ease with what’s already there. Turns out, so is this column.
Repetition, they say, is God. So the posts will get better. So will the festival. So will the system. So will everything I turn my focus toward but honestly, that’s a post for another day.
We’re not waiting for any of it. I’ll be here in the meantime creating more than I consume, somewhere between soul and strategy.
