Oh hey.
So, as you can see, I’m still here one year later, still falling down this escalator of words. Still waiting for someone to press the emergency button. (I could say that about the planet at large and it would still ring true.)
But one thing that got me through this year—this year of post-COVID economic recession punctuated by totalitarian conquest, tech giants rigging elections, unambiguous ethnic cleansing, and the cosmic background hum of the world’s trees on fire—well that thing is you, dear reader.
If you’ve been following my cryptic, vaguely frightening posts, you’ll see that my attempts at vulnerability are on the rise. Old friends, new friends, and totally random internet strangers with spectacularly transgressive syntax have reached out to tell me they were touched by this or that segment in this string of words called An Ominous Mistake. A generous handful have even helped me cover rent by becoming paid subscribers. It’s hard to express how magical that feels as a 41yo freelancer struggling to make ends meet.
I never used to be the crying type but I’ve cried a lot this year and many of these tears were the result of a cathartic feedback loop triggered when readers let me know via comments or emails or in person that my words helped them get through something difficult. Something intangible. Something real.
That’s the whole point of this operation. The Internet is just one big conversation after all and we’re only just figuring out how to sort the real from the noise. With that in mind, thanks for sticking around.
Warm regards,
Yann
Good writing feels like an extra legal crcmstnce of occasion, what else? To eat and like groom, lofts the burden of asking for who are you brushing your hair? Why would that matter, we love our friends beat up when children, but when they reenact it, asking you why are you so make-upped, Ugh, suiiigenerosa, the poor and their counterproductive preferences are supposed to be cast in poured concrete sculptures somewhere, not expressed even as eloquently as Brecht. Look at the news item we turned up in cafe tongue wagging: One of you will read G Stein's wartime writing, come to find out she does those in exactly the dragonfly lyrics of Kerouac. He might be exactly a popularizer of her sentences, but se la guer' damn it what is se la Love? As in all is fair, Se la guerre? In love? They are building a Los Angeles after Bukowkis apocalyptic designs what does send us to the rest of the world where we live to not fail that explosively if at all possible.