Hiya Marcus from Oakland bringing more of the real world into the digital

Hi Steemsters (yeah I’m going there)

My name is Marcus, it’s a pretty fabulous name in my opinion, like “the true Emperor Marcus Aurelius””, and I like to say that I named myself while still in utero. My own storytelling aside, I got the name because my father, George Allen, just had to have a son named “Marcus”. It was the late 70’s my fam and I were in Los Angeles and the L.A. Raiders with a certain quarterback named “Marcus Allen” were on top of the world. Yep... you see where this is going. So it was that the name “Marcus Allen” got stamped on my birth certificate.

 

Here’s one of the youngest pics I could find of me - childhood pics are very rare as I hated getting snapped by those soul sucking devices. That said, guess you can guess who I am amongst my Mom and Bro. I’m looking at those t-shirts and remembering I looooved that shirt. Check out my mom’s 80’s make-up, LOL!

So Steemsters, here I am. It’s the beginning of August and I’m sitting up at 2 in the morning writing out an intro bio cuz a dude named @jaredwood just introduced me to this site. He says he’s showing me this site because apparently I’ve been having a problem getting perhaps a little too personal and intimate in my writings on Facebook (ohhhh no, the NSA’s human psychology algorithm). How can you Marcus, oh the humanity!

At one point in Jared’s presentation of this site to me using his friend’s @itchykitten’s page, he responded to my reaction that I’d be writing something up so soon with... “really, you’re gonna join?”... “Join!!” I was thinking, “I’m trying to figure out controls so that I’m not on the site 24/7 becoming some hermit like Mr Burns in that one episode he had super long nails and hair”.

Here we go, my current Facebook profile pic (I’ve grown to looove the camera, tehe)

Well as you can tell from the pic, I’m a brown skinned dude. Yes, I sound a little weird, but I’ll say I’m brown any day but if you ever happen to hear me say “black”, you’ll know something’s wrong. Because “Black” or “Blackness” is a social construct to me, which has no basis in use for defining a person’s physical standing or even in my social definition of myself. The problem I have with the term “Black” mostly has to do with people associating a social construct (something made in the mind, which is a matter of choice) to a physical standing (something you’re born with, which most of us do not have a choice).
I just wanted to clarify because I rarely define myself by social constructs… or, wait a minute, didn’t I just call myself and all of you a “Steemster”? My bad, let me clarify, I try to avoid defining myself by constructs cuz I find myself not liking what so many of them stand for. That said though, I guess you can assume that this new dude named Marcus to the Steemit community is liking what it’s standing for. And you know what, from what I’ve seen thus far I am liking Steemit.

I was born with this genetic disease called Sickle Cell Anemia. It’s really sucks, it basically causes my red blood cells to periodically changed shape from the typical round and smooth shape to long, spiked and jagged, like this....

Once they’re no longer round and smooth they can very easily get clogged in the veins and reduce or stop blood flow. The most common effect of this reduction in blood flow is severe pain and it seems I get a “pain crisis“ every 6 to 12 months or so.

Blockage is like this...

The easiest association I would say about how the blockage causes pain is asking you if you’ve ever tightly wrapped a rubber band around your finger and left it there for some time.
After a while your finger starts to hurt real bad and this is virtually identical to a Sickle Cell Crisis.
In fact, I’m thinking I might wanna pose a challenge to all you readers to go ahead grab a rubber band, wrap it tightly around your finger and see if you can leave it there for the duration that you’re reading my intro. Think you can make it?

Post the results in the comments. Ready… Go...

So some people with Sickle Cell Anemia virtually never have a crisis, while it can be so active with others that they’re having intense pain every couple weeks or so.

I was born into the western medical system and it’s way of treating ailments. Which is to treat symptoms rather than address causes, and as thus I have ended up in the hospital hundreds if not thousands of times over the course of my life.
What’s the treatment?
DRUGS!!!!! Drugs, drugs, drugs, narcotic drugs pump em up with addictive mind altering drugs.

(Yeah, this guy, Demerol, I was getting it virtually since birth - ok, since two).
And to top things off, even though the docs and nurses were the folks giving me these drugs they were always either alluding or stating directly to my mom and I that I was faking the pain just so that I could get the drugs (as an addict).

This assertion that I was faking has had a tremendous long-term psychological impact on my life. Because it’s caused me to distrust myself and choose to ignore when pain is starting by asserting to myself that I’m probably just subconsciously manifesting pain just so that I can get, you guessed it... DRUGS! I will often sit in pain for hours or days doing nothing as it grows worse and worse. So instead of responding immediately and properly to my changing physical condition, I’ll lie to myself and pretend it doesn’t exist until the pain is so bad that I just check out and am screaming in pain.

The American hospital system is one of the worst systems ever devised by people in my opinion, try never to go there. I would honestly say that I think I’ve probably spent half my life in the hospital.

(Peek-A-Boo)

Anyway, enough of the shitty stuff, let’s talk about cooler stuff. (I’ll be making more posts on my condition in the future)

Drawing was a huge part of my life throughout my childhood, and I’d have to say upon reflection that it was probably how I got through the trauma and torment of my childhood in the hospital system.

(This isn’t from my childhood, it’s from 2002. For a childhood drawn image we’d probably have to go to my mom or grandma to find a drawing I made from my early years.)

These days I don’t draw as much, but I am looking to re-hash the art. I’m one of those people, those cursed folk I encountered in my childhood drawing days who had stopped drawing that I thought were just so pathetic.
Now in my case I didn’t so much stop drawing as I began drafting in my teens in High School, and the drafting kinda just took over. I’m not doing AutoCAD anymore these days, but the drawing is coming back.
Around this same time my mom decided to legally change our last name so that we'd all have the same last name of Zamani. I was 14 and very distraught by the idea of having this very unusual sounding last name. But I have come to absolutely love this last name and the name "Marcus Zamani" sounds so rad and artistic to me. I’ll be making more posts on art and the creative mind in the future too.

I also like to cook, I try food I like and then I’ll try to replicate the recipe and then improve on it. Check me out over here cooking up some Thai Green Curry.

(if this link doesn’t generate a screenshot image I’m gonna be pretty bummed)

I’m trying these days to change my diet and become one with my body. Yeah, all Zen like. Though I may be half joking by saying "zen-like", in reality I really do need to live a balanced diet in tune to the needs of my body. And I don’t just mean “balanced diet” the way my Grandma does, which is the five food groups per meal three meals a day with a snack or two. That’s so fake to me, I think it’s totally a marketing ploy by giant corporations intent on dominating everyone and everything.
To me, a balanced diet is in no way universal and is totally dependent person to person. Some people’s bodies process proteins quickly while other people can barely move or get anything from protein. And this statement doesn’t even take into account the different types of proteins there are.

(Here’s some Broccoli Beef I made the other day.)

I’m striving for a day when I’m so in tune with my body where I could tell at any given moment exactly what my body needed to stop feeling hungry. Like I'd just be sitting talking with someone and then all the sudden be like "oops, my body is stating I must eat 3 ounces of Kohlrabi right now". This is still theoretical to me but I feel there’s ground in the theory. I’ve eaten giant meals many times before and still felt hungry and I’ve also had tiny handfuls of stuff and not even notice for hours that I wasn’t feeling hungry. That’s like the prime indicator to me that that tiny morsel that I ate was EXACTLY what my body needed in that exact moment.

You guessed it, future FOOOOOOD posts coming soon to a screen near you!

Here’s a few more pics of me:

(I was shooting for the P.I.M.P. look)


(do you recognize me as Edward Scissorhands)

So I said I was born in Los Angeles, guess where I’m at now… still Los Angeles!

Psyche, no, now I’m a couple hundred miles north in California’s Bay Area in Oakland. It’s pretty dope, and in fact I think I like it more than LA. There’s a lot of diversity of cultures and mindsets here in the Bay, AND even more important they all relatively interact with each other.
I love the Bay Area a lot and I’ll be here until the planet states it’s time to go.

I’ve lived many places in the bay, but one place that sticks out a lot in my mind is the place I lived at in 2005 where/when I had what I call a Spiritual Rebirth.

Early in the morning of April 9th I felt “called” to my bathroom. This was a spiritual or mental call (whatever you choose to believe in), not necessarily the typical physical call to the "John". Once I got in and shut the door BAM I fell to the ground, forehead on the tile, butt in the air, I looked like the typical Muslim praying pose. That’s when it was like my mind was separated from my body and I was then shown various moments throughout my life from the past, in the present and from the future. There was no chronological order to the moments I saw because I was being shown them in relation to each other and how they fit together with overall purpose.

Anyway, somewhere between 30 - 40 minutes later my consciousness arrived back in my body back in that moment, I stood back up and left the bathroom with purpose and sense of self.

Things haven’t been the same since that day.

Lastly, I just gotta say I am really fascinated by the concept of putting people’s personal information into a blockchain and then using the value of that info to us common folk as a form of currency. The more you are seen, the more chances you have of reaching others who can upvote you as having value or influencing their life.
I’m planning on using Steem as a diary of transition. What I want to give the community that’s of value is knowledge of self. I’m not going to look at or analyze anyone else but myself and be very real and raw about it.
Some posts will be bright and colorful full of pictures, vids and other things, while others (like my dream posts) will just be text.

I’ll talk more about these kind of things as well in future post but I just realized I’m getting tired.

Cya folks, cya!!

Here’s more pics: