Collecting

5/22/24 - Autobiographical

I think that everyone on my mother's side qualifies as a hoarder, to varying degrees and presentations. My grandmother collects precious things. Souvenirs from her travels, trinkets, unsold merchandise from the store she used to own, art, auction hauls, and every gift she's ever been given.

My mother collects useful things -- reusable containers, sensible cardigains, whatever she can scrounge from a thrift store turned inside-out. She's an eBay fiend with a lucky streak. Over the years, she's found all manner of odds and ends. Her sensible wardrobe is always expanding. She mends what she wears down with heart-shaped patches, felted or sewn. Some time before I was born, my parents counted up the number of identical black sweaters she owned and found the number to be close to thirty.

My aunt had a little trailer outside of her house known only as The Phringe. I'm not sure what will happen to it, since she's moving to Costa Rica, but last time I visited, it smelled so strongly of incense it made me dizzy, and it was packed to the brim with all of her Alice in Wonderland paraphernalia. She and her husband kept a collection of pinball machines huddled up together on the wall adjacent to the cupboard-sized kitchen, with my uncle's welded art pieces taking up the majority of the walkable real estate.

I could go on and on. I have great-aunts and uncles with big houses and small houses and paragraphs worth of habits. They're rich and poor and they all have houses filled with art they've made, art they will make, and art that others have made.

While I'm familiar with my family's precious things, I've gone through phases of denying my association with these traits. I'm sentimental, but I can take or leave most of my material posessions. When I was younger, I used to recite what I'd carry out if there was a fire before bed every night, a ritual I'd turn over in my head to mitigate the potential of freezing up during disaster. I'd take only my stuffed elephant, raggedy old Eli, and I'd jump out of the window in my bedroom with the swollen wood painted white, thirty feet down to the awkward concrete square of negative space between buildings. I'd jump even if it broke both my legs, and I'd only take Eli.

Nowadays, my manifestation of this trait presents as terror towards the transience of my favorite things. I've been online long enough to watch link rot happen in real time. I've visited a bookmarked page of a favorite author or artist, only to find that everything had been deleted when I returned after a few months or years. I have a mutual on Tumblr who remakes every couple of months. She goes through a short life cycle wherein she posts her art, laments at her inability to draw, deletes all of her posts, terminates her account, and then limps back to Tumblr, all in the span of a few months. There's a sort of dread, to finding that something you meant to finish reading has been destroyed without a trace. My stomach swoops like I'm looking down off the edge of some vast precipice -- the feeling that there's nothing where something should be. With that in mind, I collect page IDs and archive everything. Sometimes, something is truly lost, but usually it isn't. I'll spend a few hours trawling through some combination of Reddit, my favorite archives, and mirror sites. I'm very diligent about this preservation. I'm terrified of forgetting (sometimes, I wonder how many harddrives worth of bullshit this dread justifies).

I will state on record that I never repost deleted works or claim these works as my own. I never harass artists or authors. I understand the desire to distance yourself from your work, even if I have staunch rules in place for myself (where fandom is concerned). Among these:

1. I will never orphan my fanfiction. If I don't want it attached to my pseudonym, I won't post it in the first place.
2. I am mindful of my own privacy and the privacy of others. My separate accounts stay separate. I do not post personal, identifying information, of myself or of others.
3. I do not interact with work that upsets me. All fiction has a right to exist, and fiction does not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the author. It's -- at best -- pointless and presumptuous to be hostile or unnecessarily interact with works that upset you. Anything I've archived is work that I personally want to see saved, and I will not create archives for the purpose of harassment.

I think that keeping archives is generally good practice, so long as it is done with good intentions. Once or twice, I've been able to help artists get their work back after it was deleted against their will. I also know that archiving can have negative connotations, particularly where the internet is concerned. Sometimes, you just want to start over, or you say something you don't mean, or you don't want to get dogpiled for something you believed a decade ago. In this fast-moving world, it's easy to get carried away, especially when we have privacy to the extent that we do online. I recognize these concerns, and I think that they're important to discuss. I also recognize that today's web hosts will be tomorrow's archives, and that the intentions behind deletion are just as varied as the intentions behind creation. Web archival is a topic that I've been passionate about for almost as long as I've been passionate about the internet itself.

Recently, I've been saving scrapes of my bookmarks on AO3. I compile the data in Google Sheets, and I analyze my patterns. I find it soothing to organize massive amounts of information. It's the easiest way to put myself in a flow state -- I get carried away filling in information that wasn't scraped perfectly, solving problems that I created, and writing code to help with the organization process. My spreadsheets require enough creativity to be engaging, but not enough to block me creatively. They give me a sense of pride. In this practice, at least, I'm not archiving the works themselves so much as I'm archiving my personal patterns. I love breaking myself down into data points that I can graph. I love numbers with a burning passion. I love understanding my own growth, and health, and preferences. It's the same reason why I journal and take exhaustive notes.

Art is not a vacuum. The moment that a creation is out there in the world, it's given meaning by those who witness it. There are as many perspectives as there are people, and this is the most daunting and beautiful thing in the world to me. You can burn the work itself, but you can't burn its memory. Still, I dread burning the source work, because once those memories are gone, what's left?

Thesis of Me As I Am

1/29/24 - Autobiographical

Sometimes I forget that I'm not an immaculately concieved woman who sprung into this moment fully formed. Understanding that I have a past as a concept as one thing, but seeing concrete, unedited evidence of moments passed is another thing entirely.

All this to say that I was looking through my camera roll for my napkin art today, and I was confronted with a lot of pictures that are very far from the abstract abyss that comes to mind when I think about what I was like a year ago, or two years ago, etc. Maybe the problem is that I don't picture things?

I'm thinking about what I used to find funny, and what I used to look like, and how many times I dyed and cut my hair in some new way to reinvent myself. I used to smolder in pictures and wear an oversized leather jacket handed down to me by my mom's friend. It makes me laugh now, and wonder, would it kill her to smile at the camera? Or, why did she feel like she shouldn't? Sometimes I read my old journals and feel the same way -- it's like looking at something familiar under a glass bowl and seeing it distorted -- it's familiar, but not always in the same ways. I see a dozen atrophied thought patterns and coded phrases that I forgot the meaning of somewhere along the line, I see the little details I'd never think to pick at in the moment in high-res, magnified by the fact that I'm not like that anymore, and that that girl is gone, and that I'm never going to get to hug her and tell her exactly what she needs to hear, but also that I'm never going to get to punch her and tell her to get out of her head so she can stop haunting mine. I'll never have the same habits. The first thing I'd draw now isn't the first thing she'd draw then. I feel like her older sister, and I pity her so, so much, and I'll never reach her.

(Though nothing is there, I smell my apricot deodorant from when I was thirteen and I get viscerally nauseous.)

What I'm saying is, on July 23rd, 2023, I jotted down that "I used to write letters to my future self in my head. Sometimes that's what my journals feel like. I have a cannibalistic relationship with my past and future. Future tears me apart, and past longs for her approval."

Autumn and winter always make me reflective, and I'm not really one for journaling anymore, at least not the same way -- the way that I did it feels masturbatory, actually. I never thought to write, "I am sad", I had to write all the ways that I felt sad, ticking items off of some sort of self-sustained list in my head so I could hold my feelings up against the ideal, like a paint swatch. "Am I feeling this correctly?"

I'd to write down everything so that I could conjure my current moment perfectly. I wanted the full surround-sound experience. I'd pause to tap at the tears on my cheeks so I could accurately immortalize them in prose. I'd capture the colors of pain -- red, yellow, orange, and the way salt stuck to the back of my throat, and it'd keeps me wallowing, and the whole time I'd be asking myself, "is this pain? Am I doing it right?" I couldn't help it. Years later, I find the places that I spilled my heart to, and the ways I chose to express myself feel stale and uncomfortable. I think, "did I read that in a book?"

I've learned some self-restraint. I write down happy things now, or write a sentence or two about what's bugging me. The moment I make a metaphor, I know I've fucked myself over. It's a fine line to tread.

Sometimes, I think about writing a memoir and scraping together every journal and post-it and index card and the thousands and thousands of drawings I made in the margins of my homework when I was in school, but I think that I like living in the present too much for that, because I'm happy in the present. I have friends and I'm making art. I'm stable. I nurture myself with the things that I like -- good music and daily walks. I don't need to leave a legacy behind. I'm not a philosopher or a poet, I just like the fact that I can press my palms together, and feel the wind when it blows. That's enough.

(I think that the girl in the photos would hate me for refusing to tolerate her self-indulgent misery. I'm learning not to care.)

Swallows

6/28/23 - Original Poetry

Embryonic rot and the correlating knot to the trees you follow down the aching road
The places we abide will always be beside the luscious nooks and crannies of the moor
Forgive but not forget, forgetness bids beget for the oscillating ash rescinding f'wards
Swallows with their throats and the way the river gloats as it spills over forever swelling tide
Do you miss the heart of life?
Do you kiss the world goodbye?
Do your sockets dance a hundred billion eyes?
Do you miss the heart of life?
Do you kiss the world goodbye?
Dancing dipping diving ever driving flight

Idealia

1/16/23 - Original Poetry

When you’re coasting downhill
Your joy is absorbed by the mountains
You want your voice just like his
You want to be ripped-up-angry-raw
Your voice is sugar-sweet and
Your body is soft as dough
You hate biking even when no one is there

January Drive

8/19/22 - Original Prose

Maybe if I drive as far as I can, I'll be free. And yeah, it's lawlessness. It's petty theft, more like. I thought I'd forget. Damaged brain and body. If you fell upon a fortune, it'd end like this. Anything else is a lie sold by Hollywood, glamor, fashion, grit, but better grit than yours. Stained grout, but better grout than yours. And fuck, when your arms fall asleep you rub them to wake them up, you can't move your fingers. Sluggish, the signals don't connect. Stagnant, tingling blood reminding you you're alive, painfully alive.

Sunflowers straining towards a sun a few lifetimes away. We will never see it, and it's better that way. I think you'd melt, I wouldn't. Maybe if I forget I'm mortal, my body will too. You think you can get it out. Leave the ugly parts behind, but skin is a living memory, and even if you forget, your skin won't. Their skin won't. The million billion eyes watching you won't. The words won't, until they're sucked away into the pulling drain of entropic oblivion with you, and everyone you know, and everyone else.

I bet God's stained, unspeakably ancient, liver-spotted hands and cholesterol meds lined up on the dresser. The same diner on the corner, the same ham and eggs, fried potatoes, "this-will-kill-me-someday", filling out the crossword in chicken scratch on Sundays. I bet he doesn't want to watch it all, up there in the clouds. I bet his angels have gotten old, I bet his clique is boring. You can't have the good without the bad. Maybe the fallen angels can still be angels too.

And someday I'll drive far enough for none of it to matter.