Category: Blog

Sometimes I will put a track on repeat—listen to it over and over and over—as I write. Something about the music will hold me in a moment I need to be in to get the words out. Once I am there I will stay there until the words are done. Write. Repeat. Write.

Today I am writing and have a track on repeat, and today I am writing about loss, the deepest loss I have experienced—the loss of self.

In the face of the many homes and friends and families I have lost to all the many wars fought between homes and friends and families I have watched myself insulate and absorb, change and adapt, rebound and recover, and have it happen all over again. I become so accustomed to it I become it. I know I’m a warrior. But I also know I’m a warrior who does not believe in war—I’m often lonely.

A few years ago I needed a friend, but what I got instead was a commercial, a piece of targeted advertising promoting ideas which sounded good to the ear but never materialized in action—your classic snake oil sales rat. Why did I buy? Because I wanted to believe I’d found someone else who believed what I did. I thought I’d found another me, an ami as the French say. But that was the goal—to make me think I had. We all trust ourselves, right?

Make friends with the forest so it doesn’t notice you cut it down. Make friends with the river so you can change its course, pollute it, then bury it. Make friends with the wolf so he doesn’t see all the hot dogs you eat. Flatter the Earth and make it look like you…

What I lost of myself I know is returning. I feel it with each passing day. I claw back what I remember was mine to start with, but until now I hadn’t seen how much I’d forgotten of myself. This is the loss I mourn—a me I liked to be.

I know I will be me again.

I’ve added some pictures to the About Me section. It needed some sprucing up—and self-promotion has never really been my strong suit. It’s actually something I wrote sitting in a bath.

Today is raw, unfiltered, and unrehearsed. It’s just words. There’s no plot, no plan—nothing.

In addition to designing the future, I’m also writing the past. My past. It’s my backstory. We all have one, and much like the past in general, my backstory, much like yours and your past, exerts itself on the present in varying degrees through us. We are the media our past plays out. We are the story. And if we want to be stronger than it, to tell the better stories we need to tell in order to get anywhere new, we need to be stronger than our past. I need to be stronger than who I was then if I want to be me now.

I don’t know what it is I’m writing—I’m calling it a book for now. And I didn’t know how I was writing it when I started—I’m figuring it out as I go. But I know I’m writing about a sort of addiction, as if addiction were a person and it could do things like tell you everything was fine when it wasn’t or slowly move itself into your house and pretend to be you so you wouldn’t notice it taking over your choices.

And I also know I’m writing about seeing through addiction, to see addiction’s darkest truth—its supporters. For all its destruction and misery, addiction makes billions to trillions of dollars, euros, pesos, pounds, rubles, rupee, won, yen, and yuan—year in, year out—to name just a few players. Addiction employs. Addiction recruits. And addiction is a well-versed apologetic.

I’ve been afraid to tell this story, but I’m not afraid anymore. I need to tell it. I’ve been afraid of what people might think forgetting the reason I write is to get people to think. This is not an autobiography, but I am in this story. It’s what I saw. It’s what I saw someone do to someone else.

What follows are prologues to Rabbit—a working title to a project I started years ago without realizing I had—the story I’m writing now. It’s raw, unfiltered, and unrehearsed. It’s just words. There’s no plot, no plan—nothing.

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And thirdly, none of what's here, is. Or isn't. It's a project of mine: A book. You've already started reading it--and you're in it. Enjoy.
10:55 PM - 27 May 2014

This might be where the trouble starts.

See—people don’t like to be observed. People also don’t like to be specific. People don’t like to reveal themselves. But people do like to know about other people. And other people like to know secrets. And people do like to talk about knowing other people’s secrets. Some people like to talk about revealing other people’s secrets, but all people who talk more about other people are usually almost always only talking about themselves.

See—people hide in other people.

Yes. This is where the trouble starts.

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"Fuck you! I can have three long swallows and put you back here behind the basement stairs, Mr. Belvedere. And good night!"
7:53 AM - 31 Dec 2012

Quotes mean it’s not me directly. I’m speaking through someone else’s words when I quote. It’s referential metaphor. Or as I like to call it: metaphor.

This time I’m referencing Clancy Martin’s Vice essay—The Secret Drinker’s Handbook—about being an alcoholic:

“Every secret drink guzzled is, in essence, an act of defiance against the tyranny of others, or the tyranny of a partner, the tyranny of society, or even the tyranny of one’s own addiction: ‘Fuck you! I can have three long swallows and put you back down here behind the basement stairs, Mr. Belvedere. And good night!’ Or a better, more realistic idea, even if it’s a more modest statement: Buy the half-pint and just drain the whole damn thing.”

The distinction between protecting the addiction from the truth or the life from the lie is meaningless because it all starts to look the same. The entirety of your existence becomes isolating everything that’s not the addiction from everything that is—including you. Once you can lie to yourself, once you can believe it, the rest is easy: you go away. The addiction is all that’s left.

Happy New Year.

Act I

Hello—I’m pup. That’s what they started calling me. I didn’t correct them, except when they started spelling it Pup. It’s pup. Not Pup. I’m case-sensitive. There is a difference to me. And as Data said, “One is my name. The other is not.”

I’m pretty sure I’m a sled dog pup. At least I have thought this for some time. I get praise when I’m good, food when I work, and scowled at when I don’t know what to do. That’s a sled dog pup’s life, right?

I live at the edge of the city beside a ravine with many animals. I don’t know this yet, but I’m going to go on an adventure, and then I’m going to get lost. And you don’t know this yet, but you’re going to come with me while I do.

See—when bad stuff happens you’re supposed to write it down. I didn’t know this, but a part of me did. A part of me documented the entire thing. Think of it as a message in a bottle only it’s actually several years of tweets with pictures all floating around on the internet. A part of me knew I’d become ever increasingly lost on my adventure. A part of me was calling out for help in the only way it could without being detected. I had to be subtle. I had to avoid drawing too much attention to myself. The part of me who know I was lost also knew I was being watched. Yes. They were watching.

Who would watch a sled dog pup? From what I understand about English, a pup can be the offspring of, in no particular order, a fox, a coyote, a hyena, a dog, a wolf, an otter, a shark, or a tiger. I think they wanted to see what I’d be when I grew up.

Remember the part where I said you’re coming with me? It’s time to go now. It’s okay. All of this has already happened. We’ll come back together, you and I. And then I’ll get to go home, and you, as you’ve always thought, are free to do what you’d like.

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…and so I will continue to write.

And I’ve got great news—I’ve been accepted into the art & design foundation program I will be using as a basis for continuing into graphic design. My own limits prevented me from accepting the first offer of admission I received for graphic design fifteen years ago. I instead a chose a path of increasing resistance. I went against myself. A house divided fell under the accumulated strain of wasted potential. From the wreckage, an opportunity for healing, growth, and rediscovery. I am so happy.

The featured image in this post is a set of lights at city hall illuminating an art installation called There Is No Away, 2015, an extended exhibit first shown at Nuit Blanche in the same year, and pictured below.

It’s literally (and I mean actually, not figuratively, since apparently now literally can mean either…) a pile of garbage. Several piles of garbage. I walked around skid after skid of compressed, bound garbage—there’s no escaping it. To throw something “away” is a misnomer. Everything has to go somewhere. Away is an illusion created by the places we cannot—or will not—see.

The featured image in the post is also me. I knew it as soon as I saw the shot in the camera. I see in the dark, casting light into the places we try to hide our garbage. I see the excess and waste bound before us in tight packages, stacked in front of us in a growing challenge to do better. And I know we can. Because we must.

I looked at this metal and wire structure with head and hands made of light and saw myself looking at the world the same way I looked out into the sky and saw myself looking back at me.

An entire planet to call home. An entire sky to explore. An entire universe to discover.

Welcome back.

The thing with scale is its limitless. You can always go smaller, bigger, longer, narrower, wider, taller—the sky is the limit, so we’re told, but it’s actually not. It’s as close to limitless as we can get, and even that’s wrong, since you can always get a little closer to closer without ever reaching it.

Welcome to the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.

This is no joke.

The image above is a slight zoom of the previous Ultra-Deep Field image representing 80% of the area previously imaged. Total exposure time has been doubled to two million seconds, roughly twenty-three days. Represented here are ten years of combined images. And the numbers just keep climbing…

With the exception of a very few clearly defined stars—the only objects with visible diffraction spikes—every single point of light is an entire galaxy. There are an estimated 5,500 additional galaxies in the eXtreme Deep Field than in the previous Ultra-Deep Field. The faintest galaxies represent one ten-billionth of the brightness of what the human eye perceives. These galaxies are 13.2 billion years old. The universe itself is an estimated 13.8 billion years old. This, right now, is the deepest optical view into space we’ve ever had. This is what our world looked like moments after it was created—an ever-expanding, ever-limitless world.

We can look into the sky for an eternity, but it always shows us back the same thing: endlessness. There are no limits. And if our world out there has no limits, and our world here is a part of that world, there are no limits here, either. All we must do is realize this. We are beings borne by potential.

Our limits come from within.