Postroll

If I've learned anything from searching through old personal websites and blogs, especially on my blackwork journey, it's that these windows into people's lives, their interests, and their art, are precious. They document triumphs and loss, creative journeys and mentorship, and mundane, everyday life. They exist long past the point they are abandoned, time capsules in 0s and 1s, and with the help of the Internet Archive they can even outlive their creator

So, dear reader, approach each game, practice, or project with a carefree spirit, a willingness to try new things without fear of failure, and, most of all, just enjoy the ride.

I could conclude with some paltry plea to not make jokes about schizos, because we are real people and you don't know shit about us, but the truth is I don't give a shit about your ignorance. The bigger enemy than bad jokes is the goddamn colonizer, and once we decolonize our relations and abolish profiteering as a mode of social organization, then suppression of people like me, like the suppression of billions of people, may finally fade away and be healed over. If you don't have your eyes on the big demon, you'll get crushed thinking the enemy is the muck between its toes.

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called Field Notes on Science & Nature, a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept — a book of essays about notes? — but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world.

You don't need a grand life to write. You need presence. Attention. An utter willingness to discern the details of your own life: questions you ask yourself in the quiet moments, conversations that make you ponder, complex feelings you want to untangle.

the best form of relaxation isn't consumption, it's creation.

You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you want!) You don’t really need to have an idea.