Dopp Juice Archive

Running to the warm night beach before the sky loses all of its pink and the water fades from sapphire to black. 8:52pm

I found magic, and its tide is up. 8:53pm

Standing here alone. I’ve never seen the SF ocean so gorgeous. Want to share it. It smells like sushi. I have no camera. You’re missing it. 8:59pm

Right now, I get it. We’re building all these tools so we can connect everything because connection is the only way anything feels right. 9:02pm

I’m standing feet firm in the sand, dumbstruck that i’m talking to people who have no idea how this air feels, and that I can’t change that. 9:09pm

And at the same time, this conversation puts this experience into my narrative. Because you’re listening, I will remember this. 9:11pm

Our stories are stronger when others interact with them. I can spend entire days alone because I’ve created an audience that isn’t here. 9:17pm

I feel like my reality is changing in a direction I have too much control over. If my experience is so explicitly narrated, my ego owns me. 9:26pm

The sky and the water are both dark grey blue now, both highlighted with specks and streaks of white. But you only know cuz i’m telling you. 9:32pm

If I stand on my tiptoes and sink my feet in deep, the sand is still warm from the heat today. Even tho my head is getting cold from wet air 9:43pm

I’m still here. If you were here, you’d stay, too. But maybe only cuz I’d tell you why you should. I live-narrate meaning in meatspace, too. 10:00pm

Ok, so I don’t have more control. I just have a stronger filter on my perceptions because I have more tools to narrate and frame experience. 10:03pm

And I’ve totally disregarded my self-censoring limits on reasonable twitter frequency and intimacy tonight… making this even more surreal. 10:10pm

Before I walk away, you should know that the waves are moving like that nylon parachute you stood around in gym class and made ripples with. 10:14pm

That’s all. 10:14pm

Age is a silly thing. I work with someone who claims to play with his age the same way I play with my gender, and I think it’s a fair analogy. Age is a biologically-based number with lots of social constructions built up around it. I don’t really get to change my age. But I get to play with it.

Today I turn 25, and I’m not being quiet about it. Thanks to the beauty of social networking websites, hundreds of people are aware that it’s my birthday and are taking the 30 seconds out of their day to congratulate me on it. I’m being ambushed with text messages, emails, direct messages, and facebook wall notes. (Thank god I’m not getting that many phone calls.) I’m over the phase of trying to pretend it’s not my birthday and feeling neglected when people don’t magically remember it. I have no problem telling you. IT’S MY BIRTHDAY TODAY. I don’t want gifts. Just acknowledgment. Just jump up and down with me for a second. Help me make it a little more real. Help me convince my subconscious to make a shift in self-image. Help me close the door on age 24.

What’s the difference between today and yesterday? Not a year, that’s for sure. The difference is a social construction. “25” means something different than “24”. It means a quarter of a century. It means I can rent a car without paying the Irresponsible Driver Penalty. It means I’m in my “mid-twenties” instead of my “early twenties.” It means I’m three years older than the average age of college graduation, which means I could, legitimately, based on mainstream standards, reasonably do the jobs I do now.

At some point in my life, I fell under the impression that I wouldn’t be taken seriously until I turned 25. I called bullshit on that notion a long time ago, but I still noticed the raised eyebrows. Now that I’ve hit the number, I’m done with the eyebrows.

I’m 25 years old with 11 years experience building websites and reading poetry at microphones, and four years of self-employment in the tech industry. I’ve never lied about my age, but I’m done with trying to walk like I’m older than I am. I get to be 25 now. And all of the middle fingers I’ve been giving social constructions for the last handful of years can relax. I made it. So there.

John T. Unger just put up a post called, It’s only life or death. It’s always only life or death. It starts out:

“The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

“Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

This sounds like something straight out of Fight Club, but he’s exactly right. There’s this line between life and death where the crap that doesn’t really matter falls away.

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of my failed suicide attempt. Ten years. It’s a good number. I’ve also been building website for ten years, and performing poetry at microphones for ten years. Guess what I started doing when I realized my life wasn’t going to live itself?

A brief backstory: I had a challenging adolescence. Combine growing up queer in a straight-or-gay world with watching my father slowly die of a terminal illness, and you have the perfect formula for depression and self-loathing. I hit a breaking point, devoured a bottle of sleeping pills, woke up the next day (surprise!), spent a week in a mental health ward, and then decided it was time to get a grip on things. I was fourteen years old.

I subscribe to the philosophy of “No Regrets.” We live, we learn, we move on. I reached a point where I was willing, ready, and determined to end my life, and then I lived beyond it. I’m not going to stand here and advocate suicide attempts, but I will say it was the most dramatic positive turning point in my life to date. I discovered that I’m not trapped in a meaningless and oppressive system. I found out that when life and death are on the line, all of the clutter falls away and we finally see the point: that we matter, that there is love all around us, and that all of those rules are really just suggestions. We get to do whatever we want.

As a sidenote… For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, I highly recommend the book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein. The premise is pretty simple: if you feel like you need to choose between doing [blank] and killing yourself, do [blank]. (And she has some great suggestions for “[blank]” if you’re getting bored with your own ideas.) If you want the book but you can’t bring yourself to purchase it, please email me.

Today my friend Nelz came out today on his professional tech programming blog as a tattooed and pierced, silly-flash-mob-organizing, sex-positive Burning Man fanatic. He invoked my favorite web comic and ended by cheering, “Hooray for transparency!”

I’ll add, Hooray for not taking suggestions that don’t work for us!