Truth be told, the last newsletter left me with a humdinger of a hangover. Or maybe whiplash is a better way to put it. I went places where my greatest traumas and fondest memories coexist, tip-toeing around each other. I think we all have rooms like these in our minds? My bright college years spent with some characters in search of a country song are bittersweet to revisit, their defining moments nothing close to what I’d imagined they would be. Boarding a train for somewhere new, going for a drive down familiar roads, floor-sitting stoned in a college dorm room — writing about my experiences in these places revealed a pattern of love, loss, grief, revelation, reinvention, and the occasional hard reset that I’ve endured during my brief time as a human.
Sharing the farewell drive with my aunt last issue reminded me that speeding down country roads is one of my all-time favorite activities. As a repressed gay teen, I sometimes romanticized the possibility of a sudden fiery end, wondering if anyone would actually miss me. As an adult, these drives border on the sublime, their mile markers and landmarks surefire reminders of where I come from. I can’t help but be transported back to a simpler time whenever I get behind the wheel of a dead auntie’s Crown Victoria. This East Texas feast for the senses serves up generous helpings of rolling pineywood forest, livestock, lake, gasoline and methane, magnolia and fresh-cut grass, dust and sweat and baled hay, starched denim and worn leather, and smoke from a smoker. Bumpkin is a badge I will always wear with honor. My humanity comes from here. It also comes from being able to pay the rent, so please consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:
Editor’s note: What I meant to say in the intro was that I experienced a brief writer’s block after Issue 010, hence the delay. Luckily, I’ve been immersed in some visual projects that I’ll show-and-tell in Liminal Space and Pretty Thing.
Questionably necessary: film selection, drink detail, and room clearing
On occasion I’ll find myself playing co-host to the host who doesn’t really like to host. It can be fun and feels almost gracious to offer someone a beverage from someone else’s fridge or to try and satisfy someone’s porn preferences (to an extent). But I only have so many hands, which is probably a good thing when it comes to group sex. As a general rule, even numbers are better than odd ones. This goes for appendages (obviously, because symmetry) but more importantly, for the total number of participants you’re planning for your boinkfest. Also breasts, which my uncle says are like martinis—one’s not enough and three’s too many. I’d say “the more the merrier” but beware of the revolving door and late add-ons because invariably someone will turn onto your street at 3am in his white BMW M3 blasting Ace of Base’s “I Saw the Sign” and show up at your door rolling four deep. And no matter how exciting stranger dick sounds, it often comes at a price. It’s all a game of give and take.
I’m not a people pleaser per se, but I like to be helpful (though definitions for what’s helpful can vary widely). There are many pitfalls to being a consummate host. Just ask Julie McCoy, cruise director on Love Boat. I’ve been commanded to round up the group that had just gotten comfortable and make way for what I call a “second seating.” It helps if their belongings are contained, making for easy retrieval and a minimum number of quick laps or spot checks before they can g-o out the d-o. There does come a point when one should feel comfortable fetching their own glass of water or selecting the next film in the queue for themselves. It can grow increasingly hard to meet multiple demands at once, especially when the room is pumped full of pheromones and entitlement.
Working on a piece about kindergarten, where it came from, and why it’s important still. The pandemic robbed many kids of essential skills for learning, socializing, and developing an understanding of their context within the larger universe. Testing shows reading and math scores that are two years behind, and they’re already calling this group of kids “the lost generation.”
Kindergarten was developed in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Froebel, a German reformer and educator. He built upon the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief in the inherent goodness of children. During the 1830s and 1840s, Froebel made a case for the importance of music, nature study, stories, and play as well as symbolic ideas like children sitting together in the kindergarten circle. He advocated the use of “gifts” (or materials, largely geometric) and “occupations” (or crafts), which the teacher taught the children to manipulate.
While I work on finishing this piece, a question for the group: what are your favorite memories of kindergarten? Mine is tasting raw honey from the honeycomb of my classmate Rowdy’s family farm, breaking out in hives and going to the ER. Please share yours in Notes! It’d be greatly appreciated.
Constantly changing, reliant upon and defined by human input, and anything you want it to be, online shows us the best and worst of the creator/consumer relationship and the many challenges we face toggling between digital, analog, or some mix of the two. I think of how many parked domains I’ve had over the years and how many hundreds of dollars I’ve spent to renew URLs like crispywafer.com and whitecourtesy.com, ideas I kept around for way too long like stacks of unread New Yorker magazines gathering dust — until I finally had to let them go. Needless to say, I’ve been working through quite a few web projects concurrently, and living in that kind of flow makes everything feel liminal.
Old, but new to brilliantcrap.com, is the Art section on my portfolio site. Back in the mid-aughts, I co-founded a gallery space and creative studio called Wolfgang. We made more money on our after-parties than we did selling art, but it was ton of fun and a period of creative growth for me. Since, I’ve curated a handful of shows and try to live artfully each and every day. Read about the experience here.
I’m enjoying busy-ness on a couple of projects I’ve worked on in fits and starts but that are finally taking decent shape. I was planning on sharing two web prototypes in this newsletter, but changed my mind about announcing one of them formally. Probably because it’s the million-dollar idea. I will, however, share the capsule collection I designed, which is super-fun and called Única Lágrima, which means “a single teardrop.” Workout apparel with “Time to Cry” as its motto, a gold name chain that reads “Llora” (or “Cry”), lots of teardrop and eye-themed pieces, and more — so stay tuned for the formal launch.
Then I think back to all of my personal projects that no one will ever see. Two that I think have/had potential were the End of Days Bulletin, a Doomsday-lite guide to helping people get ready for the inevitable; and All of the Above Club, which is a platform for connecting artists and brands. I am still sad that my beloved Omegazeta project from 2021–22 never grew legs despite the many hours poured into it. But I learned so much in the process, which I apply in my work now.
This newsletter was founded on the premise that the pandemic created this new class of citizen/non-citizen, relegating these “outlaw” type folks to the fringe of a very broken society.
My dad always liked to say I was named after two outlaws: Jesse James and Cole Younger. There’s even a photo of me in a self-propelled baby buggy wearing a sombrero with an empty bottle of Cuervo in tow. My aunt hand-painted a sign that read: COLE’S FIRST GETAWAY CAR. Indeed I spent the greater part of my twenties moving from place to place, hungry (and thirsty) for new experiences wherever they might’ve presented themselves. My dad also was fond of saying, “No matter where you go, there you are.” Which I always hated, but I realize now what a profound universal truth this actually was and is.
I’ve never considered myself to be much of a rebel or outlaw, operating mostly within society’s agreed upon rulebook and usually very quietly in general. As an only child, my world was void of much hubbub or noise, allowing for focus on my studies and my personal interests, which as a child were riding my bike and living in my own little world. My mother always advocated for those who didn’t have voices and for people less fortunate than we were. In a way, her actions and her countenance were rebellious, especially in a town where everyone was expected to look and behave a certain way. There have been times when I’ve acted in defiance to authority figures, and it’s not always ended well. As an archetype, The Outlaw can be headstrong to a fault, creating difficulties for people in power by being unrelenting and loud.
One might think of Norma Rae as an example, standing up to an oppressive power structure and organizing people around a central cause: rightly owed justice. I felt a bit like Norma at my last place of business, speaking out against unfair treatment and calling out the implicitness of colleagues who repeatedly said “that’s just how [the partners] are.” I was appalled by the rampant battered spouse syndrome coursing through the place like a toxic lifeblood. I was perhaps too vocal, with COVID being the necessary push they needed to have me bidding adieu (to my entire existence). To the feral fringe I was flung, and this newsletter has been therapeutic in processing the experience and given me reason to look at rebellion and what that means for the potential of a new society. Instead of embracing a “new normal” that smacks of the old thing that needed an overhaul to begin with, what might actual revolution look and feel like? What would a rebel yell sound like today?
Sometimes it can be as simple as a goose in a graveyard.
For more of my photos, now available for purchase as high-quality framed and unframed prints, check out brilliantcrop.com.