An absolute overview of everything I think right now

Just pure flow state, baby

Everything is dripping outside. Drip, drip, drip.

My apartment leans in along a seam, so everything in my place rolls toward the door, and everything outside leans in. I constantly feel like I’m being pulled to the window or the door, and I like to pretend that maybe that’s just an invisible force telling me to be more ‘out there’.

It’s not. It’s just fucking bad grading and a wonky ass place built where a house should never have been built.

My apartment has flooded three times this month. Nothing bad, but enough to be annoying.

My landlord says “spring problem”. Yes. And? I had to encourage him to buy sandbags after the three months of snow, and the broken drain pipe overloaded my makeshit dam I made. I spent hours outside slaming slush into this crevice. Sexual AF (if it wasn’t also the thing I shouldn’t have to be doing, but was, as an excuse for writing).

This was before I came to Substack, a few weeks ago.

Now, I wake up and get a boner just opening the app. I’m addicted, totally. But my thing is, what’s the harm, really?

I’m talking to lovely people, I’m reading again, and I’m writing. Finally.

My grade 1 teacher told my mom I’d be a writer one day. Thanks, Mrs. Gawer, Gauer? I don’t know— your flame-red hair and always-perfect eye makeup are forever burned into my retina with gratitude. I was lucky for you. Thanks for loving my stories enough to believe in me.

I didn’t go to school for writing. I went to school for art, but not like… art art. I went to school for art that could sell. I went to school for concept art for video games and animation.

I dropped out after my third year. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to. I had spent ages 18-21 going to school 6 days a week, 9 hours a day, plus homework. I was fried.

I’d moved to Toronto from a small country town, and I didn’t even LIVE IN THE TOWN. I lived in the forest outside it. Literally. I’m a fucking woodland elf.

No wonder I picked an apartment at the bottom of a ravine that looks out at the woods, with a fireplace that scares the fuck out of me every day because it’s gas, not wood. And a poorly graded patio I have to shovel water out of when the temperature peeks above 2 degrees celscius.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, writing, oh yes, the drips. Oh yes.

There’s something weird about writing in limbo. Like, I have no clue what I’m doing, not really. I do. But I don’t.

I don’t have a job outside of this. And I’m steadfastly stubborn about it.

I watch people with money move through the world, and I recognize the amount of money I left on the table trying to be kind and generous to people who had money. That is so bananas. It is so bananas, in fact, that I would work for free on someone else’s projects to make them money. And then they’d make money, and complain about me charging for 50% of the time I’d spent, or dick off on contracts.

It’s also bananas AF that my most loyal clients were often the ones who were most in need of money themselves.

The people who need(ed) me were the ones who also struggled in similar areas. In receiving, in accepting, in acknowledging their own fucking radiance (Yes, David).

I love people.

I love people, especially those who say they do not love people, and yet show up online as the most generous.

I love people who write with passion, because you know what passion translates into? Connection, care, presence. Hot.

I love people who are unafraid to be wrong for the right reasons.

And it’s why I’m addicted to Substack. Because I want to pick through the junk (you know what I mean), and find the little tasty treasures floating around, who don’t understand how beautiful they are. Who might understand they have an impact, that their writing works, that it is good enough to post, but they don’t share who they are underneath that.

I piece together images based on the words they write. I collage together the snippets of details they reveal. A place, a name, a texture.

I love the texture of people, and I love people who HAVE texture. Know how rare that is?

Know how rare it is for someone to have texture and not be sanded down by fame (real or imagined)?

This is why I shared my post yesterday about some of my favourite creatures. Each of them has texture, each uniquely its own. God. You fucking texturous bastards, I love you.

I often argue with orange checkmarks, not because they’re inherently evil, but because they live inside a bubble they are (often, and proven by my data) unwilling to step outside of. They mostly ignore me, or they might respond from a place of haughty indignity (most often), because the idea of their viewpoints not being lauded over seems morally unsanctified to them. Luckily for them, I’m not here to argue. I’m here to point out what they’re misunderstanding, but that’s usually the thing most people are most afraid of hearing when you’re “at the top”. Imagine? Moi? With my 100 subs (hey, guys, fucking, wow. Thank you.) daring to voice an opinion that doesn’t suck their toes?

I refuse.

I refuse to acknowledge any half-thought, one-sided, dead-inside opinion as if it’s biblical because someone has spent more time on the platform, or had money and influence and chose writing as a hobby, or went to writing school instead of into concept art and burnt out.

But I’m also kind of glad I did.

Because the me here isn’t the me who went to writing school. And, I probably would’ve become a bit of a prick.

lol.

Imagine?

I already toe the line sometimes with these people. I told this woman yesterday that she was misunderstanding what her “literary agent” was saying to her about her book being boring af.

I said, they’re not saying PACE, they’re saying TENSION. Think of it like sex. dropped a perfect metaphor. Duh.

Which she took far too literally.

It’s funny, too, because somewhere else earlier, a Potato was saying that intellectuals take themselves too seriously. I said, "That’s pseudo-intellectualism”. Intellectuals do not take themselves too seriously. You can be smart and hilarious. It’s allowed. I promise.

I really wish Substack had a way to view your comments like on Threads. Because my responses are always better than my rehashing of them. I’m a terrible rehasher. It’s why I post in bursts, or randomly, with zero tact.

I refuse to schedule. I don’t want stale. I don’t want you to ingest my stinky, stale, old, mouldy thoughts.

Only the freshest, ripest, juiciest, wettest ones. Duh.

So, all of this is to say. It is raining. It is melting. Spring is coming. My apartment is flooding. I love you all.

And if you enjoy this:

Meanwhile, I’ll just continue soft-domming Orange Checkmarks.

But full credit where it’s due, at least this guy played back:

xoxo.