they / them
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oh hello. you magically somehow found my website. nice .01ho
30. former grocery stooge turned accidental college admin. trying to figure my Redacted out. not here to sell anything, just here to share what i make after work. rabid WFMU fan. card-carrying member of the gay agenda. go O's.
2026. jan 05.
I'm putting a note here that I want to reorganize the pages here to be like "solo work" vs "collaborations" which might make more sense. And then also perhaps add a personal page that's just for nonsense stuff?
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I printed out photos at Walgreens today which I hadn't done in a while. My folks gave me a little digital camera last year for my birthday which I used sparsely through 2025 (which is what the pics I just got back were from) but should really take advantage of this year. I might be getting close to hitting my media limit for the free version of this website though.....alas....
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There are other projects that need to be tackled first though, like setting up the stereo/record player my dad passed on to me since he's clearing out their basement. As much as I would like to spend time tonight sitting in this leopard-print office chair (it's my landlord's OK!!!!!!) doing fuck-all on this website, I need to go watch some Youtube videos about stripping speaker wire. I should sue Jennifer Garner for making me think that at 30 years old I'd be "thirty, flirty, and thriving." She made it sound sexy!!!
2025. dec 31.
So 2025 comes to a close and i still have not learned enough HTML to get off of this website, so we'll put the wrap-up here. I did some cool things that are worth mentioning despite the fact that everything feels like it's on fire, so I'm grateful for that. I did a bunch of new shit and hardly some of others, but that just means that I get to reset my goals for the next year. I will also read my tarot (badly) today to see if anything cool comes up. I don't really believe in it, but American culture is so wholly devoid of meaningful ritual that I feel like I need to do something, you know?
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*** MUSIC ***
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This was quite a year for live music. I sang in several gigs with the Generations Band Together, a group of high school and professional musicians. I'll be in 2026's season as well. It was cool to see the students come into their own as musicians. ​
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I also started playing music with Dale and Chad (with Kayti as our honorary fourth member) which has been really wonderful. Dale and I played a few open mics throughout the year, we played for the Dickens House Tour, we played a garage show for Kayti's Birthday, and more than anything, we've had a good time playing on Sundays with friends hanging out.
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The Pub Nite with Philip Dutton was pretty great, as deathly nervous as I was. I've emailed Mark about doing another one (and actually need to respond to him...) so maybe that will pan out next summer.
Home recording took a back seat this year, meaning I did absolutely none of it, but I think it was for the best so live music could become the focus. Probably better in the long run that I don't turn into a hermit and only fiddle with knobs and cables in my house. I have tentative plans for other albums: "Someone's Girlfriend Is Eating My Brain" (some really fuzzy, distorted shit) and "The Farther I Am From the Last Time I Saw You, The Closer I Am To The Next Time We'll Meet" (more intricate arrangements and probably a bit more sincere). I still have to write the songs for these though, so stay tuned. Currently, I'm writing a song in 5/8 that I think will go on the latter, but it all depends on whether or not I can actually walk and chew gum at the same time. 5/8 is fucking hard.
*** ILLUSTRATION ***
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2025 is the year that I actually sent out an illustration for people outside of my immediate family and/or friends circle to see. It's not even in print yet, and to be quite honest, I don't really care if it makes it because the exercise of reaching out, asking to do something, hearing a "yes," working hard on it, caring, sweating, stressing, and giving a shit was exhilarating. It makes me want to try again, or at least devote more time to it. Here are a couple of reference photos that I used to do it: ​​​
This is apparently a church in Helsinki, Finland. I came across it on the stock photo website, Alamy, which I like a lot. Their stuff isn't watermarked to fuck like Adobe or Flickr, and as far as I can tell, it hasn't been completely poisoned with AI slop like Pinterest (RIP). This had the exact kind of ceiling beams that I was going for, but I didn't like the chandeliers, so I wound up using a different photo for those.
This was a photo I took in 2018 of what was affectionately referred to as "Graffiti Barn," tucked away in an overgrown part of the Tivoli Bays. When you looked out the windows, you'd see the foundation of the ground floor melting in the swampy underbrush. I used to walk out there and sit in the ruins on days when nothing felt quiet. It's since been torn down, and I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a profound sadness knowing it's no longer there. Was it a safety hazard? Absolutely. The floor was caving in, and the ladder to the ground floor appeared out of nowhere. You could easily fall down the hole. There was trash and natural debris all over the place. I drank here before I turned 21. I walked out with friends at night. I sang and cried and screamed at God under the old mill's exposed metal ribcage. Teenagers should have a beautiful fucked up place to go when they need to remind themselves that life is worth living.
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*** LANGUAGE-LEARNING ***
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I set the bar a little too high this year and thought I'd make it through THREE books in a language other than English. The reality is that I didn't even finish one. However, I am committed to getting through this Japanese reader little by little every night. It's slightly outdated, so I'm learning words like "switchboard operator" and "telegram" but hey, it's a fun party trick I guess. I'd like to work up to the couple of novels I have sitting on the shelf. When you decide to learn a language like Japanese and you're the type to forget that you can order things online, you're sort of at the mercy of whatever refuse you can pick up in junk stores with a book section. There's only ever usually one book in Japanese in those places and it's something fucking dumb like a technical manual, but I've amassed a good collection of nonfiction and little novels. My translation project also stopped because I felt hindered by my shit vocabulary knowledge, so onward we go.
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Spanish is......complicated. I am using a textbook series from 1968 to improve my reading. I took Spanish 1 THREE times in school (thanks a lot, KCBOE) so I am very good at conjugating the present tense. In every language, it's adverbs that kick my ass. I'm still determined though. I'd like to read Cesar Aira in the original before I die. "Dinner" rules.
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Portugese is still on back-burner, as are Bengali, ASL, and Russian, but perhaps one day I'll get to those books. There is not enough time in the day.
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*** EMBROIDERY ***
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OK, this year I embroidered one sweatshirt (the cannibalized "Mineshaft Canary Cult" one) but I'd like to make something actually nice for someone else in 2026. This would require actually following the correct steps to transfer the design and iron it etc. etc. etc. and we all know how good I am at that, so we'll see.
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*** WRITING ***
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I did no writing aside from self-indulgent diary entries such as this. Despite having gone to school for writing and making a lot of lyric-heavy music, I am still so worried about telling a good story and letting people read anything I put on paper. We'll see if I get better at this in the new year. There's already a lot on the docket but some day, I'd like to finish the novel I keep threatening to write.
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*** READING ***
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The goal this year was 10 English books. I barely made it, but we did it. Here they are:
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1. "Native american gardening: buffalobird woman's guide to traditional methods" by gilbert l. wilson
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2. "camp damascus" by chuck tingle​
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3. "the long ships" by frans t. bengtsson
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4. "Just kids" by patti smith
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5. "the reluctant queen" by tia m. glomb
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6. "the spirited princess" by tia m. glomb
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7. "pyongyang: journey in north korea" by guy delisle
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8. "the village of eight graves" by seishi yokomizo
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9. "remote control" by nnedi okorafor
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10. "aya" by marguerite abouet & clement oubrerie
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11. "winter in sokcho" by eliza shua dusapin
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12. "the perfect heresy" by stephen o'shea
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13. "before gender" by eli erlick
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Not a bad book on the list. And Tia's a personal friend. If you are reading this, you should support her!
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*** THE END ***
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Well, that's it, I guess. I made my goals in a notebook already and I don't feel the need to personally share all of them. The general idea is "Do all this but more and better," which is what every goal boils down to. Here's to next year's End-Of-Year post being on Neocities and probably in a more legible font. Until then!
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2025. dec 14.
OK I HAVE BEEN BAD AT UPDATING BUT THERE HAVE BEEN MANY POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS ON ALL FRONTS:
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Me and the good homie Dale Anderson have been playing music since April (me on guitar, Dale on bass). Regular Sunday practices also include our artist-in-residence Kayti Didrikson whose raison d'etre is drawing live music, so she sets up canvases with paint markers and gel pens and all sorts of things and draws the sessions. We have also been fortunate enough to be joined by Chad Jones on drums recently so the whole outfit is going well. We recorded some demos at Benji Price's home studio that I'll put up on the Bandcamp later on. Kayti will do the album art. I've pitched the name "Mineshaft Canary Cult" as the band name, which we have to pitch to Chad, but might wind up fitting. We shall see.
Recent Shows:::::
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December 6th - Dale and I played as a part of the house tour for the Charles Dickens weekend so we posted up in this really fancy house (with its own fucking brick pizza oven!!) and did our usual set twice, plus some Nick Drake covers.
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December 4th - Philip Dutton very kindly invited me to do a Pub Nite with him at the Mainstay in Rock Hall, so we did two hours of covers (plus a couple of my songs, a couple of Philip's songs, etc.) Everyone was so kindly and lovely. A good show all around!
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Illustration News:::::
Today, I am submitting my illustration commission for WFMU's upcoming issue of Lowest Common Denominator, their zine of user-submitted art and writing. I had emailed to ask them if I could be considered to illustrate one of the written pieces. The theme for the upcoming zine is "The Song," which focuses on particular songs that make people feel strongly (good or bad, I suppose). They reached out in mid-November to see if I'd illustrate a piece about Patti Smith's "Gloria." The piece is fucking cool. I was like "Damn, how to I get this to do it justice?" I think I have, so I'm off to the UPS Store now to get a good quality scan that I can send Kendra, the zine coordinator. I will post process notes this week about that since it was a very fun project that had more than one false start.
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Other Notes:::::
Home recording has been going slowly (and will go even more slowly now that I've thoroughly fucked up my laptop screen, womp womp). Truthfully, I was so deathly nervous about the Mainstay gig and finishing this illustration on time that those have taken up all of my creative brain space since late September, so I'm hoping to get back into the swing of things. We may do a First Friday set at my dad's shop in January (need 2 call him about that today)......
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Work on the novel (yes you heard me) is also extremely slow for the same reasons as above. One day I will finally finish the "One of A Kind" tragicomedy in 3 acts. In any case, I defo will post process notes for the Patti Smith illustration, so if you are reading this (which is cool but unlikely), look for that.
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Moneypenny: out.
2025. apr 28.
I'm in the process of migrating my website over to Neocities, but that's dependent on the speed at which I finish the Free Code Camp courses to learn how to use html. I've also become disillusioned with the scraping of Instagram for images to train AI models so I don't post work there anymore.
I'll continue to update this website until I have a viable replacement.
2024. apr 22.
I've got five songs I'm going to put out as an EP, and am currently in the cover design phase of things. I did two completely different cover designs and asked the friends on my close-friends Instagram story to vote on it. 7 votes for one, 7 votes for the other. The point of the poll was to help me decide, and now it's a 50/50 tie!!!! The real work to be done will be in cleaning up the last couple of songs, but in the meantime, I've been dillydallying with the illustration software. (For those who hate Adobe on principle, I really cannot recommend Affinity Designer enough). In any case, we'll see what the results of the poll are but in the meantime, I think I have made my decision.
2023. oct 15.
I have not made use of this section recently and to the millions of fans I've disappointed, you deserve better from me. :'(( * sob sob *
Anyway, as much as I'd like to stop writing songs that sound like diary entries, I probably won't ever, just because that's what my default setting. I spent this weekend turning a sort of C+ riff into "Muscle Memory," a song that I have not posted anywhere because I'm saving for when I have a few more finished songs but I am very excited with how it turned out. Arrangement, stand-alone song...etc. And it came together super quickly! When I feel like there's a song that needs to come out, I set up my guitar and play though my laptop with headphones and watch old movies on mute. Weird, but it's a fun way to noodle through riffs while not getting bored and having nothing to look at. When the song becomes a fully fleshed out thing, it almost feels like I'm scoring the movie. I did that when I wrote "Portal Portal Portal," I watched "Valley of the Dolls." I watched "Kwaidan" while I wrote "American Kaiju" (another to-be-released song), and this time I watched "The Red Balloon" while I wrote "Muscle Memory." (Also "Swimming Lessons" was recorded formally while watching "2012." So it goes).
Maybe it's just trial and error, but already this song sounds infinitely better than the finished version of anything on "Therapy is Working." I guess I've had about a year and a half since I put that out to get better at the thing I enjoy doing, but it's still really wild to hear such a drastic change. This sounds like what I thought I was getting on that album, and listening to it now is like "Oh god what was I doing!?" but I guess that's the nature of trying to improve your skillset at something. Growth is wild. So it non-growth. It's all crazy. I need to write more songs.
2023. aug 12.
The intent here is to have a maybe running log of things I'm working on, which at the moment is just this damn website. It would be massively embarrassing to come back to this in another four years and have it just be this one post, although that wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing. I did a lot of cleanup today.
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In the interest of making things interesting, here's a draft I'm working on called
Dream House
I feel really good about this as a song, but the rhythm part is so involved that I'm kind of intimidated. I want the rest of the song to be as fun to play as the intro riff, and to find something that works will take a lot of patience and mistake-making. I also have been trying to keep my desk clear, so to record anything else, I have to haul all of my equipment out of my closet and set it up. I think I'm just being lazy because that would take me five minutes, but there's that mental barrier there. IDK why I'm even explaining all of this to the void. Maybe someone can relate!