A Case For Myself

I’m Throwing A Party

This is something I do not believe I am ashamed to admit but will concede may register to some as bizarre behavior or a cry for help. I’ve taken to, on occasions I am certain that the house is empty and therefore no one is in earshot, when I’m eating or sipping something particularly tasty, or scratching The Itch that had to the moment eluded me... I’ve taken to letting out just a few wimpery moans like a bound submissive.

For me it really elevates the entire experiences of taste and satisfaction, and I figure it is harmless hedonism. I’ll bite into an imitation thin mint from a two-sleeve pack that I bought with a “pro-hydration” drink for five dollars cash at one of three local mini-marts, and I’ll take a sip of the aforementioned drink from a martini glass and inhale through my nose and heave a sexy moan. But not “authoritative” sexy, like when I find a good breakfast sandwich, it’s more a “proud-pathetic”.

I’m dogsitting in Northeast DC for a few days; a bit hunkered down, though the District dodged the carnage of the latest winter storm. I move in either secrecy or tactless clompy motions through these days that move in manners much the same. As such; I see it fit, today, to smush together a bunch of thoughts, as has been my habit lately.

I cuddle in the basement with the pup and a cup of tea while re-re-re(...)-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I come up with a sprawling theory about art, capitalism, and pop culture and it is empathetic, discerning, and inarguably articulate. Unfortunately, I expend so much energy writing these words to queue it up that I unthink it entirely.

I write little jokes and I do not file them away for another project because I, frankly, do not feel like thinking about another project right now. Here’s one:

No, self-certified spiritual guide/youtube holistic dietician, you do not understand…

Every time I stay awake past three in the morning I get all lethargic?

I’m Throwing A Party. A book launch party! With -tails, mostly mock-, but also with cock- as a prefix available for purchase. I made a flyer:

I wrote a slightly lengthier piece about the book here.

There was a moment recently, like the sun peeking out from cloudcover, where I brought myself to the realization that readers don’t begin each of my essays with the implicit knowledge of my personal history I so often take for granted. The sun told me that I still haven’t made a proper case for myself. Why the hell should anyone listen to me? Especially when it is, now more than ever, so crucial we engage with media that has good intentions behind it.

Writing through the process of building upon knowledge kind of feels like a masochistic thing, because each revelation makes a slight fool of so much that came before it. Oh, I have endless sympathy for fools, but never when the fool is me.

It is in this sense that age is both the greatest teacher and the cruelest deceiver. I am always the smartest version of myself that I will ever be, barring a number of big glaring possibilities like early onset dementia due to traumatic brain injury; so how do I make peace with the depth of the knowledge I have yet to dig, or never will?

Most Americans are, in real time, grappling with horrific revelations at every turn, doubly grappling with the layered guilt of being, on the most reductive global scale, A Baddie (negative) right now… struggling to know how to indicate to our friends and family that we are, indeed, doing the work to rebuild, to (un)learn, to heal, and, in turn, possibly struggling to understand that our friends and family are doing that work, too.

There’s this obvious, huge, world-shattering shit storm; then there’s this other one over here, and a couple others over there. The global, foundation-breaking kind. And they’re kinda the same thing but not entirely, and there are really dangerous on-ramps involved in each of them set up by the ultra-wealthy pervs, the blackmailed pervs, the lead-poisoners, the outright evil, or any combination of the previous, to ensure that those responsible are never held as such.

I simply do not see, clearly, the way through this, yet I continue to find myself marching forward. When my faith in institutions fails, I reaffirm my faith in humans. Humans survive. Humans innovate solutions. Humans overcome, and we have done it enough times to know how to do it right.

So why should anyone listen to me?

I’d like to start my case with an observation. I also want to be clear, I am not a researcher, but I am someone I think you should listen to:

Much of the purpose of the Generative AI explosion is to delegitimize actual human expertise; the kind of committed knowledge that is only achieved through rigorous and extended study. “Do your own research” turns into “AI tools can help you do your own research”, which then becomes “research using AI tools”.

A good-faith AI intellectual would stop me right here and say something like, “obviously AI tools can just give you a starting point, you have to dig deeper and understand when AI is giving you a hallucinated answer and look at other sources!”

My response would be, simply, “No!” Much of my personal work this year has been the intentional bending of my personal algorithm on social media towards policy experts, and the near-constant consumption of music, books, and the kind of art that makes you think someone dosed your tea with THC-infused honey from their local farmers’ market.

My simple conclusion is that I can learn just about everything I need to learn by treating content from experts as personal lectures. My simple conclusion grows slightly more complicated with the knowledge that the internet is a vast, boobytrapped expanse, but it is precisely that knowledge that has helped me improve my own experience online.

So in the interest of making a case for myself, a case I will bring to my party; a case I will continue making for probably at least another month or so… I want to paint a short picture of why I am the way I am and why I think the way I think.

I was born and raised in West Concord, Massachusetts. The “West” distinction is important to approximately 100 to 1,000 people globally, but I want to be a voice for those people. I was a planned C-section birth. My mother, when deciding which day to schedule the surgery, consulted a psychic, who told her that June 10th, 1997 would be an excellent day to have a baby who would one day throw a party in Washington, DC.

I began performing in community theater in the fifth grade as Little Jake in Annie Get Your Gun. Around this time my parents were separating and it was a million different things, and something about the financial crash? I’m not polishing this draft sentence, that’s how this feels in memory. It’s miles away, but I’m certain it built me. I did some work in independent film and radio and was paid one hundred and eighty dollars to be an extra in a low-tier Adam Sandler film that I never ended up watching.

During High School I gravitated towards philosophy, but I was Pretty Good at most things, save time management, and therefore, studying. At the end of a shift at Haute Coffee while mindfully sweeping the cafe floor I met two teachers who were running a program called Rivers and Revolutions and they offered me a slot in their upcoming semester, even though the program was technically full.

Our cohort studied niche, local authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. We studied Indigenous art while walking the historic trails around Walden Pond; we commuted into Boston to spend the day seeing some of all the ways a life can look. We meditated and sang and created; we studied and lived Desmond Tutu’s lectures on “Ubuntu”, I am because you are. It was hoo-hah, it was “hippie”, it was magical. It was painful to go back to “regular” public education, but it was all, indeed, Public Education.

I graduated High School in 2015 having landed an eight-week unpaid internship in Australia after getting my first college rejection letter and panicking. I worked thirty-hours per week as a barista in a fine dining restaurant (I got fired from the coffee shop because I misdirected some Feelings from a severe depressive episode [I had, at that point, been having a lot of those]) to pay for it.

I ended up staying in Melbourne for five very formative months during which I worked door-to-door in the Bush for a week (couldn’t hack it, pyramid scheme), learned how to stretch ten dollars over four days (food platter from cafe at closing time, saran wrap), and formed an early bond with wine that wouldn’t quite balloon into a problem until a couple years later, but certainly showed promise! Other things happen, as they have previously in this synopsis and will continue as we move forward, that I am choosing not to mention. That’s what it means to live a life!

After working at Starbucks for a few months because I had, by then, obliterated all of my savings (None of the things I have done would have been possible if not for the encouragement and support, which has taken financial form, from my parents) before my first semester of college at Woodbury University in beautiful Los Angeles, California where I rediscovered a love for philosophy (in spite of my original Psych major) and alcohol (it is a dry campus so please note that I never drank on campus). It was from a big denim couch in the common area where we used to have Smash tournaments and watch Black Mirror that we also watched the 2016 presidential election coverage. Hoo boy!

On the night of the 2016 election, I decided I had seen the sign I had been looking for to return to Australia and I transferred to the University of Melbourne. I cannot, in hindsight, tell you exactly how I managed to move from Los Angeles back to Concord back to Australia by February of 2017, but I can tell you that The Housing Situation of it all made things feel less than seamless.

It took two and a half years for me to complete my degree in Australia. The thing is hanging on me wall! I do have a degree in smart words from a globally respected institution but I also sometimes have nightmares about sitting my very last final exam for Philosophical Logic and partially believe that I failed it and they decided to just be nice and let me graduate.

Philosophy. Of course,. comes from Filo meaning “flaking pastry”, And Sophie’s Choices. The Meryl Streep film.

My time in Australia was obviously formative, transformative, multilayered, at times quite painful! I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about it someday but it would need more pages than I have the mental ink for right now.

I returned to Boston for a brief and emotionally/behaviorally questionable stint that led to my relocation to DC for work and warmer weather. During this stint I built (by request, not by self-motivation) a spreadsheet that became a misinformation tracking project (in which I was tangentially involved) that led to me receiving my first and, to date, only federal subpoena (on behalf of my former employer).

I arrived in DC for New Year’s Day, 2020 to a sharehouse in Capitol Hill with an above-ground fire pit in the back yard and alley-access to a corner market that sells wine, Crucial Detail! I retain cultural queerness and Australianism by drinking heavily, a habit that is exacerbated when, three months later, in March, well, you know.

After my job shifted everybody to fully remote on March 13th, a policy which would, after two weeks, morph shape slightly to include that Someone (me), one of two employees who would remain in DC (and in the same organization, I’m Glossing Over Things) would swing by in person around once a week to check and organize the mail, and Miscellaneous*.

So I spent the following three years of varied global caution surrounding illness commuting to the office once or twice per week to sit alone and sort mail. Again, I am *Glossing Over Things, including the genuine care my manager and my colleagues always displayed for me on a professional level, and the fact that, for a lot of people, there was never an option to stop working on location.

In this time a few things happen: I move to a different sharehouse in a different neighborhood, the 2020 election, January 6th, 2021. I’m working on projects related to the Census and the youth vote and civics education and managing a regular-release publication with careful fact checking and editorial standards (related to disaster recovery and racial disparities) and I’m still drinking and a surprise dental cost kicks off a snowball effect of credit card debt.

I spend most of my time asking to be put on projects, to be exposed to more, hoping it might lead to higher pay, more responsibility, more respect. I support events in the halls of the Capitol, I shake the respective hands of Ambassadors, a couple Senators from various countries, researchers and writers and thinkers… important people. I’m learning and there are teachers everywhere, but I never see a cost of living adjustment.

So I start writing and performing again. It is 2023-2024 I manage a paid gig as the featured performer at an open mic. I’ve started to have really bad acid reflux by this time. It’s not just because I’m still drinking heavily (and trying to quit and failing to quit), but I would venture that That Did Not do anything to help. I’m in more debt now, that stresses me out. I get a second job, I fracture my skull and my neck. Wuh oh!

The whole hospital thing, with the neck brace. I worry that, like, “Oh, I have this big trauma” gets tedious to explain every time my work inevitably stumbles into it. Yeah, stuff like that changes everything that comes after. It’s now one of my personal shitstorms.

I’m back at work and I really don’t know what to say or how to say it, but I don’t drink. It’s a lot to explain, oh, also I was possibly a smidge suicidal. Who wants to hear that? Not coworkers! That’s inappropriate mostly-virtual office behavior! So I’m mostly silent. This sentence accounts for a lot of time * and I’m glossing over the general breakdown of social media and a lot of horrific global events.

January, 2025 rolls right around and I publish my first essay. I decide to just write something, anything, every week (a decision on which I follow through). I organize an office move, which is a hefty operation. I transfer us into this new and great office, one with other people there! I work three Saturdays in a row for no extra pay, two months later I get laid off. I had been applying for other jobs for quite some time and had started pet sitting to get some money on the side.

As part of my severance package, which I am exceptionally grateful to have gotten and am angry to have to be grateful to have gotten, I get a co-working office membership for two months (same space, I like it, it’s nice), two weeks of pay for every year I gave, and six months of COBRA payment reimbursement. I apply to two hundred jobs and I keep writing and I channel all my shit in super healthy ways, it’s crazy. I fight with the Unemployment Office for two months, and the Unemployment Office wins without even doing anything. I still don’t drink.

I catsit more, I dogsit, too. Other things include that I decide to self-publish a poetry book, as famously referenced in The Essay You Are Reading Right Now, I break barriers with the feral cat that lives in my neighborhood, and All This stuff that is happening continues to happen! I also go to Paris for Love, and Love thanks me and tells me to be patient. I am reading. I pay attention to how the pages sing; their rhythm, their layered lines and

REALIZATIONS!

I’ve spent all these years building a Unique Wisdom that I am trying to hone into something that is at first glance fun, at second glance informative, and, at third, reliable (which is distinct from being absolutely free of bias). I want to help people rediscover the act of reading for pleasure, of coming across a sentence so atrociously decadent that they have no choice but to whimper like a whiny slut (for literature, not for me). And I don’t want to corner myself into writing about anything specific or feign some sort of authority over these supremely complicated topics that smarter people than me are already working to solve. I just want to do what I am best at.

So I’m throwing a chill ass party. I’m celebrating my work. I’m making my case. And I’m almost halfway through my comfort rewatch. Take care of yourselves and your communities. If you are in the DC area, I would love to see you there. You can get more information and register your interest here. As always, you can find me on Instagram.

With Sincerity,

J.K.