I have always found it weird - always. The last girl who broke my heart, Jenny O (man she was hot) was an Instagr*m early adopter and I vaguely remember googling her name and trying to find IG pictures of her and the girl she dumped me for (on my birthday - happens to the best of us), coming up disappointed to see, not photos of her mugging the girl with whom she broke my heart, but photos of the dog they had apparently adopted together. Heartbroken there was nothing quite like the taste of searching for her over and over on the internet - coming up empty handed every time - and doing it over again the next day. It was like being possessed with the desire for repeated blows of emotional pain.
Before I go on, I have to admit here that I am a child of the 90’s - that means the requisite Pearl Jam and Nirvana soundtrack (yes I wore plaid but I did before it was a thing and still do, for what that’s worth) and my claim to grunge fame is maybe the opening chapter to my book GODSPEED that I wrote twenty years later that describes what is was like hearing those eerie four notes of Nevermind over and over again for the first time and watching the music video on MTv on a training trip in Stockholm.
The nineties were not only the first time I used a computer - I still remember going down to the computer lab my first year in college to write papers and the smell of wet socks almost every computer lab those early years seemed to have - and the advent of the internet, but also a time of a conscious awakening. By 1998, I was not alone in being majorly concerned at what I saw as an extraordinary aptitude for younger Americans to multi-task: on their cell phones, while on-line “surfing” (that’s what we called it – little did we know how those seemingly innocuous words of friendly “surfing” would become the bane of our existence and the subject of many a how-to quit op-ed in the NYT) and playing video games. It was like the attention span of America’s youth was the hottest commodity and everyone was vying to get it hooked. Underneath all of that was a growing (and very unpopular) social justice movement concerned at the centralization of knowledge and a growing alarm at the environment and the social injustice brought on by what a lot of us understood as rampant capitalism. Fast forward, by the time I’m arrested at a protest for the first time in 2001, I looked to the Battle of Seattle with awe, respect, and a good example of a how-to use the internet to fuck shit up. And so with it, a commitment to not letting the world go down in digital flames with the poorest bearing the blow of the pointiest end of the proverbial stick.
In 2004 I went back to college and got my bachelors (after dropping out three times as a young drug addict), got my first jobs - grocery bagger at what was then known as Fresh Fields and would eventually become Whole Foods Market and is now Am*zon - I fell in love, I fell out of love, moved to NYC, got my heart hammered and then proceeded to enact what probably seemed to any sane bystander nothing short of revenge on any woman who came within a few city blocks of me. I broke hearts, I exploded onto the fashion scene, had to go back to waiting tables, had my first solo NYC art show, published my first book… basically life happened and shit got really, really shiny-sparkly.
And then maybe I got lazy, maybe I got scared (anyone hogtied by the local PD for over 48 hours can attest that its a pretty unpleasant/terrifying experience), maybe I just didn’t have the fight in me anymore. Its hard to fight.
I was never on faceb**k having mentored way too many young girls in its early days who would come to me in tears saying: I have no “friends” - which to me, even way back then, felt like a complete misuse of the word “friend” or “like” as it was being used and relegated to a simple click. Friendship is harder than that – harder than a click, I mean. But despite that I finally “joined” instagr*m in 2013 – first with a private account and then public, navigating between both, and conveniently ignored my discomfort when it was bought by faceb**k (by then the nefarious content, misuse of information, and use of disinformation – even before DT – was a known known) and I’ve used it since.
Maybe it’s the pandemic that gave me courage again, or at least a sense of perspective, or maybe its just having had the chance to read books again, but two weeks ago shit got weird. Too weird for me. Anyone who has read 1984 as many times as I have understands and recent developments alarmed my younger self in a familiar way and I realized I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. Its okay that I got a little lazy and wanted some regular pick me ups (everyone likes a good dopamine hit every once in a while) and jumped on the social media platforms – its for work I would say – but its also okay for me to say that I was wrong.
So, I’m going to take a cue from my younger self and slip into obscurity from this space. It freaks me out, it always has, and for me, I just can’t be on the platforms anymore in good conscience. So, if you want to, you can find me on my blog STEADFAST where I talk about things that interest me, you can expect letters like these, photos and ephemera. If you want to, you can sign up to get STEADFAST in your inbox here, and you can also get me in your MAILBOX old school like via US Mail, by signing up to be a Patreon member. Otherwise, you can almost always find me, in real life, somewhere between Housten and Avenue A in New York City.
I’m gonna go be like Jenny O and be a little harder to find.