essay.0.an introduction
When I see folks from home or school, they usually ask what I’ve been writing. I tell them I’m working on a few things. It’s usually a lie.
I’d like to stop lying. I’d like to get some thoughts out. They need a home outside my head—they’re making a mess of the place. I'm afraid if I keep keeping quiet I'll start screaming. So I made something new.
It won’t be as consistent as, say, Animal of the Day, but maybe it will be more refined. Quieter. More purposeful, less hateful. More adult, mature, realistic. Less jaded, more sardonic. Still fun, though. It has to be fun, or it'll suck. It'll be written better, certainly. Hopefully.
Animal of the Day was a fun exercise in unmedicated writing. At the time, I worked at the upper front desk of a playbill publishing company. It was terribly dull, and I needed an outlet. Recently graduated from the College of Humanities, I turned to ranting on Facebook.
Sometimes it was funny. Sometimes it was cute, or scary, or sad, or just a story, or just utter nonsense, or just so, so horrible. Other times it was just offensive in an earnest, if very flawed attempt at humor. It didn't always work, but sometimes it did.
I liked the attention. At 2.1k followers, it felt like a safe amount. Never so much that I'd be harassed online or recognized in public, but enough for me to feel like someone was listening.
Eventually, I left the second front desk, and started working for a mildly big-time, mostly evil CEO. My mania drained, my interests turned elsewhere, I got busy, and ranting about animals every day stopped being fun, so I let it go. I'm still proud of some of my work, and it helped me deal with some heavy stuff, but it was never meant to be forever, and that's okay. I had fun with it while it was fun, and it was fun for a long time. Now it's an anecdote on my resume.
These days, I work a standard management job from home. It's not terribly exciting—I read and edit a lot of user manuals and write LinkedIn posts at a standing desk—but it pays for meals and hobbies, and a second-floor, two-bedroom apartment I quite like. I'm safe, and warm, and alive, and I cook good food some nights, and I don't expect to die most days.
That wasn't true last year. 2023 left me hollow in ways I'll never write about. Counseling and self-introspection brought me out of it. Birds and a camera keep me out of it.
Traditionally, I'm not a bird guy. Frogs and crocodiles are more my speed. (I think it's a texture thing.) But my back porch brushes up against the leaves of a tall magnolia tree, and a choir of creatures live beneath them. Finches, sparrows, woodpeckers. Some thieving squirrels, some screaming jays. A few rats. Normal neighbors. I wanted to see them up close, so I bought a camera.
And...wow. For all the time I spent "researching" animals on Wikipedia, I never realized how easy it is to walk outside and find one:
Black-headed grosbeak, male. A striking knight clad in orange.
They travel in fours and follow the rain.
It's a bird, an ave, a dinosaur. An animal.
A living being: an eater of seeds and exoskeletal meat and bone.
Samus, a cat. My cat. A pet, but I never think of her as a pet. She's a domestic longhair; a tuxedo queen, ancient elder, primordial metroid. She's needy, picky, a blubbery damn little baby that yells and grumbles, shits and pisses on the carpet, and rests on my chest to beg for forgiveness she knows she'll always get. A beast, a mammal, a cat. An animal. I love her, and she is dying.
A bee! A bumblebee, I believe. A bubbly little lesbian-coded bee, loving on a flower. This one is one of trillions to our billions. One person is small, and one bee is very, very small, but I think we are the same in some ways, some days. I think we both toil and sweat for all our lives and the good of the empire, and I think we can both lose a leg and keep chugging, but a bee isn't going to write a blog post about it afterward. Bugs can hurt; they just hurt on a different scale than us.
Birds, beasts, and bugs. It's a great game, seeking them out, seeing them as they are, and snapping photos of their strange little lives. I see the way they sing, and eat, and walk, and talk, and interact with one another, and it feels familiar. After all, we're all operating with the same 24 hours. Some of us just know how to tell the time.
Reading stories in the flesh makes me want to write. So I've been writing again, on and off since January. Loose papers, random essays, little thoughts and tidbits, the odd mad raving. Less rage, more rambling. Nothing structured, not completely. It's a mess. If I put it all in a book, and you bought the book, you might read it and refund it. That's how messy this is. It's just thought put to paper, and I've added some photos I took. It's in progress and it always will be.
But it's real, and it's what I need right now, and I'll share it with you, if you'd like. I write better when I have someone to impress.
This won't be easy—for all the talking I do, writing has never been easy—but it will be real.
If Animal of the Day was a caterpillar, this will be the moth.