013 ❖ this f****n' guy

◆ this one old photo of me, which perfectly captures a version of myself that I’ve historically disregarded as the “worst,” or at least the most troubled, who now, year over year, I’ve started to reframe as certainly the most dysregulated but in some ways maybe the rawest and most genuine. every detail herein is something I could, if I were being uncharitable, tie to some obviously poor choice: the black eye from the first/last fistfight I ever determined it worthwhile to throw a punch in, the Burger King Double (Triple?) stacker that I’d like to say was an extravagance and not a 3-4 times a week occurrence as if thousands of people that passed by same BK I passed by on my drive home to the 9th Ward from Henrietta also couldn’t resist stopping, the bedroom wall with decades upon decades of alternating yellowed wallpapers and now that I’m thinking about it probably little baby bits of lead, the camo Miller High Life hat perched on top of the shaved head that was either (not likely) a deliberate choice or (far more likely) a knee-jerk response to the suffocating sensational overwhelm of a helmet of thick hair driving me up a wall as it crept down the back of my neck and completely over my ears and eyes.

of course, then, the things you can’t see, the job at the art supply section of the bookstore, my favorite (and last) hourly job that these days I can’t stop thinking about, being bored out of my mind most of the time except for when I was stocking shelves with t-squares and portfolio cases and could daydream in the unconscious state of singular purpose, the modest discount that led me at times to come home with a linoleum block and a cutter with some interchangeable heads and carve out a block print on the carpeted floor in the vaulted attic room I lived in the house with roommates that was a condemnable mess but also somehow, if I wasn’t actively pissing off my roommates, a weirdly safe space for a bunch of quiet dudes and one dude, this f***ing dude, who did not yet know that I (he) was also screaming inside to be quiet too, sometimes, when I could be one with the dust mites and linoleum shavings on the beer-stained carpet and have a moment with myself, a feeling not unlike how I feel now with a little bit of black washi tape and whiteout on my hands, in the time I take to sit in a cleaner house on a nicer floor, which some version of that f***ing guy ever poking through the surface in a way that is so welcome and so overdue.

◆ the audio cue loop of the pop sound when you open 1Password followed by the pitched-up finger snap sound of the Paste app on Mac OS, sensations that I imagine drive most people nuts but I’ve embraced as part of the dance of outsourcing some bit of my memory to the almighty clipboard.

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