follow me down the crudhole

 hello everybody,

it's january 24th, 2025. i arrived here in my frantic and desperate search for a new platform to exist on. the apps we've all come to depend on are becoming increasingly toxic. it's lonely out here, in the parts of the internet nobody is looking. i want to be where all my friends are at. i want to send funny videos to my brother reminding us of some shared nostalgia, some movie only we remember, etc. i want to send memes to my wife with the additional message of "literally us". i want to post what music i'm listening to, what i think is funny or poignant, pics and vids of my son growing up, my drawings and poems. in short, my life. i want to share my life with people that i might not get the opportunity to see every week, month, or even year. some people i feel connected to through these channels despite never meeting in real life. never seeing the texture of their skin. whole phases of hair and style that they tried out, found perhaps some success with, and abandoned for something new whilst i was several states away doing the same (looking at you buzzed head and handlebar mustache Tom). 

i don't know. it's all just feeling very bleak and dire. like this is the time for grand gestures and bold statements, but i'm paralyzed. like these billionaires have been playing the long game and now they've got our brains in a noose and our balls in a vice. they control how we communicate. how we gather information, form opinions, regurgitate our own ideas from those opinions. they have such vast influence over the creative processes and interpersonal dynamics of billions of users. i remember taking a big break from social media right around the time i was graduating college. that was for very different reasons than i now contemplate doing the same, but it was an interesting time. no facebook, no instagram, no anything. i wanted to be a filmmaker, a cartoonist, a poet. i wanted to be famous for my art. i wanted people to hear about me through the grapevine, through a "Directed By", through an article about up and coming writers that are really nailing it. i wanted them to go "damn, i remember Tom!". well, even just writing that, it reeks of my early 20's and makes me cringe. it was a self-imposed exile that almost immediately began with a look back over my shoulder. "do they miss me yet?"

after a year or two of that, i just felt lonely and isolated and completely unmotivated. what do i care what a bunch of strangers think about my art? how do you even make and share art in the real world? i missed having a space to engage with friends, discover new artists and acquaintances, and take part in some kind of social discourse, however memefied. i got back on instagram and honestly, for a time, it was a good move. sharing my poetry with people i had to look in the eye on a regular basis made it more real than scribbling away in secret. i kept telling myself this was just temporary. i'm just gonna post poetry on here while i work on the BIG stuff on the side. well i never worked on the big stuff on the side. i just kept writing poetry and drawing stuff and posting it on instagram and wondering why i could never get the thousands of followers that seemed to flood artists' accounts. to my credit (this is my blog, i can say to my credit any time i want), i never changed my art to mimic these more popular accounts. i would use different hash tags or post at different times of the day, but the content remained true. still, it wasn't quite real. it was still a digital identity that i was making up. it's the storefront and i wanted so badly to have a line out the door. i went through so many different versions of that fabricated self until, embarrassingly recently, arriving at something close to authentic. i have become the artist and man i believed myself destined to become. no fame or riches followed. i'm okay with that. even prefer it. but now i'm at the precipice of a new chapter and i know i cannot write it under the shadow of oligarchs. 

my ideas of art and love have gone through so many mutations, it's hard to track. i just know i took more than i gave a lot of the time. i suffered, and continue to suffer, from rampant selfishness. i oscillate between feeling i am a great unrecognized gift to humanity and tremendous burden to those unfortunate enough to be stuck in my orbit. now that i think about it though, most days it's probably somewhere in the middle, like everyone, just getting by. i'm going to work and paying my bills and trying to be present for my two year old son, who is everything to me. i still make art, which is something i'm grateful to say. i always cherished my imagination and creative spirit, and i see how the daily grind can pummel it out of you. we are conditioned to expect results from our efforts. we tie monetary value to endeavors of the heart. i should stop saying we. i do these things. i place ungodly pressure on myself to be something that isn't even up to me. for so long, my hopes were dependent on the response of others. i wanted people to like and admire and respect me for my art. well, i'm even luckier than that because i have people who like and admire and respect me, but it's for my words and my actions. me helping them move a couch. my friendship. they might buy a zine or like a post, but that's not why they stick around. that's love. 

art is just breathing for me now. it's an act of love. making my son laugh is art. bringing my wife her water bottle when she forgot it in the other room is art. i don't do it because of my hope for a response, or return on investment. i do it because i can't not do it. i do it because it sustains and energizes me. i write bullshit like this because sometimes after twenty minutes, or two hours, and several paragraphs that i don't bother to reread because i know i'll just lose my nerve and delete it, i arrive at something that means something. to me. if it means something to you, great. that's the cherry on top. but i can take or leave the cherry, Red #40 and all. 

love,

tom