Whether it was some latent vanity or maybe just my own feeble attempts to reconcile the fact that I was not the person who wrote the original posts on this website, I have come to a strange and startling conclusion: I simply can not make up my mind to save my life. Furthermore, where I have landed has not necessarily been a bad time. In fact, I love where I’ve now carved a piece of myself into. It feels almost like Junji Ito’s The Enigma of Arigama Fault. This is my hole, it is meant for me.

It started out when I left Colorado on the ninth of August. I had just spent a couple of days with a friend I made out at Camp. We celebrated her birthday in the mountains, camping every night and shaking dirt out of our clothes as we woke up. The landscape of Colorado is almost prehistoric to me as growing up in the Midwest, I am accustomed more to rolling expanses of farmland, the grey soaked horizon, and the constant noise of the city. However, out in the mountains where my car could barely haul itself, let alone the additional weight of the trailer I rented for storage, the winding ridges told a different story.

When I got back into Omaha, a wave of relief seemed to crest my mind as I shuttled down Dodge. The all-too-familiar traffic was now a welcoming vigil for someone that I thought I lost. It was as though a part of me I put in a box sprang itself out. I hated to admit it, but damn, I did miss this place. So much so, I write this from my new apartment on the street I grew up on from 2003 until 2022. I’m not stuck, in fact, I had a much different idea of where I’d be come September. I told everyone I worked with over summer that I was headed to the Windy City of Chicago after our stay in the canyon. However, when I returned to Omaha, I simply was having a lot of time finding work where I wanted to stay.

I was a bit depressed, having had multiple rejections from jobs. I decided to channel this potential into the art I sat and worked on while making slight tweaks to my CV, Indeed profile, etc. The art itself a creation story, a rebuilding of my own imagination and repairing of a broken and long-dormant dream. It started with a book I read about Norse Mythology.

I imagined a vapid fog, a twisting of extreme temperatures as sweat poured from my furrowed brow, checking email like an addict, losing sleep over the re-enactments, asking myself what more could I have done. I imagined myself on the periphery of life and death, an existence in a strange limen. Here be dragons, twisting, self-sacrificing beasts that rule the place between. They long for something greater, flying ever higher to breach the clouds of the misty lands they were birthed from, but their twisted wings could only carry them so high. A part of themselves was needed to get to the next step. I felt myself spiral and return to a few, unfortunate, habits.

A deal, a promise, made on a full moon and on the crossroads of the canyon. I remembered all too long ago on my lowest point, I told life it could take anything from me. I was no longer in control of my life after this one, as long as this one was worth living. An uncomfortable warmth took place within my bosom as I realized too late what I had done. All at once, I confused a happenstance ignorance for a genuine deal with something I secretly knew would be my undoing. The beguiling chimera of the dead world, amalgams of hungry beasts, what is a meal in exchange for a pittance? My delicious spirit for the promise my one vacation from oblivion is to be a good one. A devilish notion.

Then, everything came together.

I took control, finally, of the creation within myself to not only find the right path for my art, but for my life outside of it. I made some calls, and one day, I found work with some people I had genuinely missed working for. Then, a day later, I found a place to live. Then, another day after that, I went on a surprisingly fun date. Omaha was not a dormant caldera of broken promises and quagmires of lost dreams, this was a crucible. A place where I would temper myself to be the person I wanted to be for others and myself. I was no longer small and infinitesimal, I was a giant. I was a great leviathan whose work would shape this world on fire. Melt away despair and embrace solitude and suffering.

Anyway, I’m back at the usual grind on this repository of poetic waxing and pseudo-para-social life updates.

I will make a more detailed post regarding my time at Camp on Sunday, but for today, here is just some art that I really like that I’ve been working on. Probably won’t finish any of these, but I like them none the less. It is strange the abilities you do not recognize you have until you just try a new thing.

Anyway, it feels good to be back home. I missed this place, and I missed this website.

I hope that everything is going well for you, too. Until next time.