The Underground

“Through the ether, my peace is dispelled by the wrath of How Dare You, an invisible cobra that spits venom anytime I remember what I had and through it recognize what was stolen.” –If You’d Known Me When I Was Older

“The ground keeps moving. The snake moves beneath black dunes and I am immobile with my blade across my chest.” –A Foundation of Sand

“Something is changing. My base isn’t sand, it’s… magma.” -A Letter to My Readers

And Mount Etna is covered in snow.

_____

I don’t write what I feel, but what I observe. I don’t just watch what is happening, but also how it implicates everything around it.

I learned the value of this early. Emotional appeals did not prevent the chaos I grew up in, but staying tuned to how a room operated let me parse what was mine and what was not.

Stating things plainly also let other parties know I was not manipulable. The fact that this habit made me the target of displaced blame changed nothing, because I had to choose between being sane and being liked.

_____

Saying the quiet part out loud isn’t necessarily a trait I need anymore, but it is what makes my writing effective. What remains felt but never spoken for many is on auto-dictation for me. Every once in a while, I write something that I think should be obvious while also weighing the chances that it doesn’t make sense to anyone else.

Those essays predictably garner the fewest website reads and are forwarded via email at 3-4x my subscriber count. That is exactly what just happened with We Interrupt This Program.

My social media links get very few likes. My follower count is not climbing. I rarely receive direct feedback to anything I produce, and the almost silence could be mistaken for indifference. Internet culture trains you to take all of this as a hint that, Honey, you ain’t got it.

And then, I zoom out and see that people come back steadily month after month, whether I’m publicizing some big project or not.

In a world consumed with hype and reaction, my material is taken underground.

_____

This is a statement of trajectory.

I am aiming to have the manuscript for Reorganism finished by June. I do not know what to expect from the publishing process, so I can’t estimate a timeline for that yet.

This season, I will step back into criterium racing, then switch engines to target the Mishigami Challenge in July and take another run at the Katy Trail FKT.

The blog will continue to serve as both an ongoing documentation of my pursuits as a cyclist and a backbone to a long-range career as a writer and a speaker. I had planned this as my objective after attending college for the first time, but I was spinning tires with the bureaucratic process of even getting admission. This thing has traction now.

If you want to support my growing body of work, there is a link to my Patreon in the navigation bar. Subscription to the blog is always free through email, and Patreon is where you can help me keep it free of ads as well as access additional spoken content at least once a week.

I turn 31 this week, and I’ll spend that day doubling down on motive. Last season wasn’t what it should have been, and I learned countless words and actions that do not work for me. I’m memorizing the ones that do as we speak.