Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
Continue readingGrief
“Just Another Wave In The Ocean… Destined To Disappear”
Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.
Continue readingA Eulogy To Akira Toriyama: How The Dragon Ball Manga Changed My Life
Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and so much more, passed away this month. I learned about it last night (on the 7th of March, since I’m writing this on the 8th and you’re reading this on or after the 15th) and have spent the last day reflecting on the impact he had on my life. I don’t really talk about it a whole lot (because it was more than two decades ago and for other reasons that will become apparent soon), but I got into manga, comics, and graphic novels as a whole because of Dragon Ball. Before finding those bright red volumes on the “new” shelf at my local library one day when I’d ridden my bike there for some books to read, my entire conception of comics was confined to the syndicated comics that ran in newspapers, so much so that I didn’t call them comics. I called them “funnies” because they showed up in the “funny pages” of the newspaper. Sure, I’d read tons of picture books as a kid and a few things that rode a fine line between graphic novels and picture books, and sure, I knew what comic books were, but they’d never been a part of my life before I picked up one of the brightly colored books and was transported to a whole new world via a whole new type of story. That moment, that first borrowing of the first Dragon Ball book, was a major inflection point in my life to the degree that I can’t even imagine the person I’d be if I never picked it up. The change wasn’t drastic in the moment, but it laid the groundwork that I’ve built a huge portion of my life on since then.
Continue readingReflections On Grief And The Future
It probably seems weird to start out a year this way, but I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately. I lost a grandmother last year and its almost exactly five years since I said my final goodbye to my grandfather a few weeks before he passed away. However, since I’ve had time to mourn and process the loss of my grandfather and had already begun to mourn my grandmother before she passed (since I have been estranged from the family for almost five years and hadn’t seen her since my grandfather’s funeral), there’s all sorts of grief mixed up in there as well. For instance, I grieve the way things are with my biological family. I don’t regret the choice I made (nor do I doubt that I made the correct decision), but I grieve both that I had to make this decision at all and that things might have been different if my family had, even once, done the work they needed to do to show my they could change. On a less dire note, it has been just over ten years since I moved to my current city, a place I expected to be for five years at maximum before I finished paying off my student loans and left to go pursue a post-graduate degree in some form of writing or English literature. I am still paying off those loans and have given up on pursuing a higher education because there’s likely no financially viable path forward for me down that route. I also thought I’d be in a committed relationship of some kind by now, living in a house, and surrounded by my adopted family made of friends and the biological relatives I’ve chosen to carry forward into my future. There are a lot of things I thought would someday be and that now might never come to pass, and I grieve those too.
Continue readingMy Exhaustion And Depression Teamed Up On Me
Between therapy, not sleeping well last night (I was actually in bed on time for once, I just couldn’t fall asleep and then I kept waking up throughout the night), and the general events of the last two weeks, I just do not have the energy for much today. I finished Sea of Stars and want to write about it, but the thought of even starting on that post (by copying over the relevant bits of a discussion I had with someone about the game) have me feeling so exhausted that I’d rather lay down on the dirty floor of my office and not move for a week than try to parse through all the pieces of that largely one-sided discussion (my mistake for engaging with someone without checking if they were up for in-depth critical analysis). I mean, hell, I can’t decide what I’m doing to do for dinner and tonight’s grocery night, which means I could guiltlessly cop out by ordering Chinese food from the local place since I’ll be getting home late. Nothing like buying a bunch of food and then not eating any of it. Sure, it’s because I’m exhausted from a long day of work and then going grocery shopping afterwards, but it still feels weird to do. Plus, as much as I enjoy getting takeout from the local Chinese restaurant, I tend not sleep as well after eating it. Seems like eating something else might be the better choice in order to address my exhaustion, but that will take a degree of effort that picking up my dinner would not.
Continue readingAction and Consequence in Pursuit of Mourning
My grandmother’s funeral was on Friday morning [here’s a periodic reminder that I write these a week ahead of them getting posted]. It was at half past eleven in the morning at a church I’d never heard of before, despite driving past it many times as a child. My extended family, in a series of decisions inscrutible and unknowable to an estranged member like myself, scheduled every part of the process of saying goodbye, wake to funeral to post-funeral lunch, all in one day. A long twelvish hours for everyone involved, from time they had to rise to prepare until they all arrived home or at least had finished going their separate ways for the day. I rose at six, following a night of poor sleep–my waking hours filled with anxieties about what being spotted at the funeral could mean and my sleeping hours filled with frenetic, fragmented nightmares about what going unseen at the funeral could mean–and shuffled my way through my morning routine. I left fifteen minutes late, pushed to almost half an hour by the time I finished getting gas and enough caffeine to keep my tired mind awake for the drive, but arrived five minutes early by only taking a single bathroom break during the two and a half hour drive, and that only when I’d gotten within quick driving range of my destination. Also speeding. Lots of pushing the speed limit during the empty mid-morning hours of my inter-state travel.
Continue readingThe Difference Between Mourning And Closure
Content warning for discussions of death, grief, and childhood trauma.
I wrote about some family-related stress a couple weeks back. I spent my therapy appointment between then and now working through my feelings on the matter and what I’d do in the future, which turns out to have been particularly prescient of me (and seems even more so when I add that my therapist was ready to cancel our usual every-other-Monday appointment for the week I wrote this since it was a federal holiday and I instead suggested we reschedule for a few days later that week, which turned out to be the day after I wrote this). My grandmother began to fade earlier this week and passed away today. I’m, of course, still processing this. All of the emotional preparation and complex feelings of relief and grief intermingled don’t make this any easier. Even my complex feelings about my family and how I have processed my feelings for them don’t really help since, ultimately, this moment is when it all goes from being abstract and self-enforced to being incredibly concrete and real. No matter how else I feel about her, my grandmother was a major part of my life for my entire childhood. She is in many of my oldest memories, even if they’ve taken on a more bitter than bittersweet cast as I’ve come to better appreciate the horrors of my childhood and the way my grandmother served as a source and focal point for much of the generational trauma in that side of my family.
Continue readingNo New Posts Today Or Tomorrow
My grandmother passed away on Wednesday and the funeral is today. As a result, there will be no post today or tomorrow. I should be back on something akin to my normal schedule by Monday, but we’ll see how it all goes, I guess.
Grief Taken Nightmare Form Has Invaded My Dreams Of Late
I’ve had a weird and entirely discomforting thing happen a few times over the last couple months. While having fairly normal dreams (and the word “normal” is doing a lot of work here because I tend to either not remember my dreams, feel them so strongly that the emotions from them color my entire day, or have horrible nightmares), a cast of charactes from a past dream have invaded and changed the very nature of the dream they arrive in. You see, a few months back, in late April, I had a dream about defeating a horrible warlock. It was a pretty typical fantasy story dream, with a cast of adventurers on my team as we did stuff I don’t remember that eventually culminated in taking down an evil spellcaster who was trying to perform some kind of ritual that would give him some kind of ascendant power (I’m pretty sure it was immortality). This warlock had a crew of misfit-type underlings that we were mostly able to bypass as we went in for the kill. As I struck the head from this vile sorcerer, the mooks we’d bypassed swore undying revenge on me, specifically, but I woke up pretty much right after that so I didn’t think much of it.
Continue readingSense Memories, Grief, and Growth
The last time I was updating my blog as rigorously as I am updating it now, I wound up stopping because I had too much stuff going on. Between work, my grandfather’s final months, trying to support my family during that time, sorting through my feelings about my family, and being forced to confront the loss of the one person who seemed to just be happy to see me any time my family gathered, I just didn’t have the time or energy to keep up posting. Plus, a lot of the time I spent on things like consuming media or resting vanished as I wound up driving back and forth from my home to my parents’ home. It was a trip that took about three to four hours to travel just one way, depending on the time of day and traffic, and I was doing that at least once a week, sometimes twice as I haphazardly worked from my parents’ guest bedroom when I could and had to return home when work demanded my physical presence. The only thing that made this segment of late 2018 (from November onward) and early 2019 possible was that I’d just gotten into podcasts.
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