It's five in the morning right now. I am beyond burning the midnight oil. I am trying, for the millionth time, to make a fun blog. Why is it so difficult? Probably because of fear. Fear of being known, of unmasking, of expressing myself exactly as I am.

I write. I think I write a lot, but it is either private or well-polished and calculated for an audience. I have been slowly getting better at showing my work, at just letting the barn door open and stay that way.

I've wanted a fun, silly no-stakes blog for so long, more than a decade. I'm really happy that I've finally been able to get a really good writing consistency on Medium that's actually making me a living wage (around 2,500-word essays written near daily since late October). But it runs the risk of gnawing fatigue. Cookie-cutter safe suburbia status quo, ya'know?

My mantra for the new year is to start ugly. Just do it ugly. The ugliness is irrelevant. It doesn't matter how good something is, it's about the act, the intention of getting it done. Of not trying to modify it for the sake of others and their thoughts.

I will never be able to control what people think of people, no matter how hard I try to present myself a certain way. It's ridiculous, isn't it? The never-ending performance. Optics. Night-vision when the light is turned on.

So, this will be a marrow-filled bedrock for myself. I want to learn how to just be me and stop hiding the spit and foam constantly. I want to just write the words and have them appear for everyone.

A large part of this is design, or maybe lack thereof. I have been researching brutalist web design principles. I am trying my best to get out of my own way, but still be feature-rich. I love the idea of being useful, and by that I mean having the best possible experience for the person reading for their own sake. To present the raw ideas I have clearly, as opposed to trying to muddy the waters on the interiority of my walking wall of words.

I don't really know if that makes sense, but it doesn't really matter. I'm excited to start writing for ghosts. Actually, that's something I wanted to write about: the ghost profiles.

I think that's a phenomenon that has caused me a lot of anxiety and paralysis in the past. There's nothing more disappointing than when you find a really promising start only for the start to be the only thing that exists. A couple posts, a few drawings, a handful of poems. And then nothing. Dormant. Permanent hiatus.

These ghost profiles are everywhere, and I feel an overwhelming shame to ever have them. And I'm proud of the fact that I've gotten really good at finishing projects (or, at least having the projects be finished-enough). I have dozens of little web dev projects on GitHub, I have several books independently published, I finished my undergraduate degree. I can at least look myself in the mirror's eye and know I am not an arrested developer. I am not a vague nebulous creative with a nothingness void of output.

They will have things to write in my obituary, and maybe I think about my obituary far too often for someone that's turning thirty. But I think far too many people, my age and older, don't think about death enough. I'm so sick and tired of the taboo of death in Western culture in general. There is no greater motivator for me than death. I am making sandcastles, I always remind myself of this. The tide will always come in.

No matter how much I plan, no matter how much I futureproof my projects like this little static site, it will probably not be here in a few decades. Maybe if I'm lucky, my words will be preserved for a bit longer than that. But the horizon always returns to a nullified tenderness.

As I grow older, I find myself subscribing less and less to materialism. I do not think we will ever understand everything. I wake up each morning with utter confusion as to why my qualia is bound to this particular mammal. But my body shows up when I wake up, so I ought to show up to. Time to fun blog.