(Sound of a coffee mug being set down too hard, a long sigh, then a nervous, rambling tempo)

Alright. So.

You’re here. I’m here. We’re all just… here. Staring at these little glowing rectangles, trying to shove the weird, messy, chaotic stuff in our heads out into the world. And for what? For the little dopamine hit of a ‘like’? For the fleeting validation from a stranger who probably just scrolled past a picture of a frittata to get to your… your art? Your soul? I don’t know.

I was thinking about this the other day—I was in my studio, which is also the back bedroom, which is also where I panic about life in general—and I looked at my phone. And I had this… this crisis of intent. I’ve been just… blurting stuff into the void for years. Pictures. Ideas. Rants about the specific melancholy of a Tuesday afternoon. Just firing it into the digital ether like a nervous tic. And I realized I have no idea what I’m even doing. I have no plan. I’m just a ghost in the machine, manning a tiny, poorly-lit concession stand in the endless bazaar of human attention.

So I decided to stop. Not stop creating—God, then I’d really be lost—but to stop the mindless blurt. I decided to get forensic on my own digital corpse. To go back and look at all the little breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving and see if they actually form a trail, or if they just lead in a bunch of stupid, frantic circles. It’s gonna be messy. It’s gonna be uncomfortable. I might find out some things I don’t like. Sometimes, you do need to look backwards to move forwards.

But if you’re also feeling like a digital ghost, if you’re tired of the blurting, then… I don’t know. Stick around. Let’s figure this out. Or at least be confused together.

Because we are in confusing times. Just what am I meant to be doing? What am I meant to be doing for myself? For others? For society? Just what? There’s no real guidebook anymore. Many of the books were not written with these times, in mind. Maybe you’ve got to do what you want to do, and as long as you can stare into your own soul, via the bathroom mirror, and be at peace with it, you should be ok. You are your own authority, after all. Should be, ok. There’s no guarantees here, or there, or in these time. All guarantees seem null and void at the moment.

Pictures. All these pictures. I was looking at my Insta feed this morning, and just skimmed a few hundrend of the 3000+ pictures. (Sound of a phone being picked up, thumb scrolling, then a long, weary exhale)

So I’m looking at my Instagram. This… digital shoebox. This curated landfill of my own attention. And I’m trying to figure out what it is, you know? It’s not a portfolio, it’s too messy for that. It’s not a diary, because who the hell is that honest? And then it hits me. It’s an aide-mémoire. But not for the big stuff. It’s not for the weddings and the funerals.

No, it’s this pathetic, desperate little attempt to prove to my future self that I was here. That I felt a certain way about a shadow on a wall at 4 PM on a Tuesday. That I successfully baked a loaf of bread one time. That a specific combination of five colors on a canvas felt like a minor religious experience for exactly ten minutes before the doubt set in. It’s a string of breadcrumbs I’m leaving for a version of me who’s even more lost than I am now, a future me who’s gonna be scrolling through this at 3 AM, whispering, “Oh, right… I did that. I felt that. I was alive then.” It’s a museum of fleeting intentions, run by a curator who’s also the main exhibit and the only person buying a ticket. But the work is being done.

I was reading “Ramblebook” by Adam Buxton. Yeah, I’m a bit late to the party on that on, plus I was never much of a fan of the Adam & Joe Show (no shade, it just wasn’t my thing). Toward the end of the book, Adam observes that whatever is going to kill him is probably already in his body. A free radical or some other type of genetic faux pas. That really got me thinking. The enemy within. No, I’m not talking about your crippling self-doubt or that little voice that tells you to eat an entire pizza at 3 AM. I’m talking about the real, cellular-level fifth column that’s already taken up residence. We’re all walking around, you know, making our little plans, worrying about the big external threats—the climate, the politics, the guy who cuts you off in traffic. We’re looking for the monster in the room.

But the monster… the monster is the room. It’s us. It’s in the goddamn building materials. We’re born with the seeds of our own destruction just baked right into the code. It’s like you buy this beautiful, high-end computer, the second you boot it up, there’s a little pop-up that says, “Hey, just so you know, a critical system failure is scheduled for some point between 50 and 90 years from now. Enjoy your spreadsheets!”

It’s the ultimate betrayal. Your own body, this thing you’re supposedly in charge of, is just a collection of trillions of tiny little idiots, some of which are, right now, at this very moment, photocopying their own blueprints wrong. A typo. A single, microscopic typo in the instruction manual for a cell, and suddenly you’ve got a renegade department that’s decided to stop making liver and start making… more of itself. It’s a hostile takeover from the inside. You’re not being attacked by an alien; you’re being consumed by your own traitorous, over-ambitious flesh. And the real kicker? The very process that keeps us alive, breathing this oxygen, is also slowly rusting us from the inside out with these molecular little vandals—free radicals—just bouncing around, taking a crowbar to the machinery. We are, literally, slowly burning. We’re all just slow-motion fires waiting to put ourselves out. It’s not poetic, it’s a design flaw.

(The clatter of a pen, a long, slow sip of coffee.)

…Yeah. Yeah, okay. Good. That landed. I can feel it. That little… click of grim recognition. It’s not a happy thought, but it’s a true one. And sometimes, that’s all you get.

So, you get it. The enemy’s in the wiring. The subversive little glitch in the matrix. Now what? Do we just sit here and wait for the internal alarm to go off? No. Hell no. You do what you’ve always done. You get forensic with it. You look at the data. You run the diagnostics. You figure out what’s actually happening in the chaotic, beautiful, flawed system. You have to do the work… outer, whilst the inner does its work. Everything just needs to Do The Work. So run and do the outer and inner work, because all the clocks are ticking. All. Of. The. Clocks.

Constantly ticking.