My mans, Maxwell Osborne, posted this last week and it felt like life stopped.
I called him as soon as I saw it, “Bro, are we the fucking oldies station now? Son is asking us for ‘old head bangers’?”
“Yo, I think I gotta pack it up. It’s a wrap. What am I doing out here still? I should just get a lil’ shordy and call it a day.” he said.
For background, Idriys is Maxwell’s partner in Public School, Dao Yi’s son, who a lot of us have collectively watched grow up.
When I cook at The Flower Shop, him and his homies usually show up for drinks as I’m heading home on some Trading Places shit. I try not to bother him cause I never liked when old heads fucked up my vibe, but seeing him there is kinda one of my favorite parts of the night even though I don’t know him like that.
As an Unc that’s left the streets, it’s cool to know they’re in good hands.
I tell people all the time that Idriys’ father, Dao, was the first person to help me truly understand the allure of having children.
We were sitting together at the first ever Knicks v. Brooklyn Nets game in 2012 and he was thinking about leaving the game early, which I thought was insane.
“You bouncing?”
“I want to see my kid.” said Dao.
“Don’t you see your kid every day? This is the first ever Knicks Nets game.”
Dao looked at me like Kung Fu Masters look at their students, took a beat and then put it nicely.
“Having kids is like having a favorite TV Show, except when you miss an episode, you don’t get it back.”
Sitting there with a towel under my hat watching Fat Ass Raymond Felton, I felt like a clown next to Dao who had a full life and family.
11 years later, Natashia and I had Senna.
I miss things all the time, but Dao’s words are always in the back of my head and I can honestly say because of his advice, I haven’t missed anything I regret and I hope to keep that streak alive.
Thank you, bro.
I don’t see Dao much these days but it’s cool how impactful someone can be on your life and probably not even know it.
Now it’s Idriys’ text to Maxwell that I keep thinking about.
Senna is almost 2 and it’ll be a long time before he calls me an old head, but I look forward to the day he asks me what music, movies, or books to read.
So I started to think about what I’d put in a time capsule or vault for him. Back in the day, people would make time capsules and physically store things, but now that there’s Substack I can just write it out and he can use the equivalent of Google in 20 years.
When people do time capsules, they usually put things from that year in them, but what I’m going to do is only shout out things that I was alive for and experienced as it came out.
Without any further ado, the Old Head Time Capsule.