Andy Stevens

Uncovered

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:50:00 GMT

Judge a book by its first page; no cover, no title, no byline.

Verba Prima

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:19:00 GMT

Verba Prima is a collection of famous first lines. Not a bad way to spend a morning.

Restoring the Onscreen iPad Keyboard

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When I bought my iPad Air M3 to replace my older larger iPad Pro, I knew that most of the time the iPad was going to be affixed to my Ku Xiu Magnetic Charging Stand next to my Dell monitor. It's an extendable arm stand clamped to my desk that uses magnets to hold the iPad in place, and it charges via the Apple iPad Smart Connector, which is offical term for the pin contacts on the back of the iPad. Starting wtih iPadOs 26, the iPad treats devices attached to the Smart Connector as input devices, which means that the onscreen keyboard stopped appearing when I tapped into a text input while connected to the stand. To make things worse, the little toggle to turn the onscreen keyboard stopped appearing, too. In order to force the onscreen keyboard, I had to turn on Assistive Touch.

Open Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch
Turn on AssistiveTouch
Under "Pointer Devices," turn on Show Onscreen Keyboard.
The one side effect is an often onscreen widget that displays the AssistiveTouch menu. You can disable this in the same menu by turning Always Show Menu off.

The Boring Internet | Terry Godier

Wed, 13 May 2026 12:16:00 GMT

Seems like a lot of us are waking up and wanting something different from the internet. Terry lays out what tech we own today, the tech that underpins the internet, and what they (the big platforms) can't take away from us. Understanding why this matters is the fix to the feeling many of us have of not owning our tech, but I know from experience that some look at this technology and see something they think they can never understand. It's not intuitive to everyone, and so if things "just work" it's good enough, even at the risk of becoming the product and extorted. Still, the argument is pertinent and valuable; it's the only argument, really.

Since You Arrived — A Series

Tue, 12 May 2026 09:57:00 GMT

This series of websites is a remarkable effort to capture a moment. Every volume is worth exploring; Vol. II: What Color Was the Sky rather poetically paints the picture you might not have seen last night as the sun set, and is my favorite. They just released Vol IV: taken, an alarming look at how much information you forfeit just by visiting a website, and how easy it is to track you based on that information. Great website authorship, through and through.

I Bought Friendster for $30k — Here’s What I’m Doing With It

Sun, 10 May 2026 21:04:00 GMT

Mike Carson bought the domain and rights to Friendster and is planning a reboot. The catch: you can only become friends with someone by physically tapping phones together. Does this bring genuine interaction back to social networking, or will it be a gimmick that hinders meaningful growth? I guess time will tell, but I'm rooting for him.

Note

Fri, 08 May 2026 20:32:07 GMT

I'm enabling an optional notifications feature, should anyone decide to install this site as a PWA. I know the oldschool among us will prefer RSS or social media, but maybe someone's crazy enough to want notifications.

Post by @annierau.bsky.social — Bluesky

Tue, 05 May 2026 21:53:00 GMT

Domain names really are like houses that people move into over time. It's such a strange experience visiting a site, only to see it no longer houses the content it once did. Nowadays, it's mostly domain squatters, but this sort of thing used to happen in the early web all the time.

that hot librarian content you crave, part 3: shelf ranges

Sat, 02 May 2026 09:34:00 GMT

I'm taking note here for the next time I reorganize my bookshelf.

Uses – David Bushell

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

David has put together an excellent list of web development tools. I've known about a few of these but never bookmarked them, now I can just bookmark David's website instead.

Melonland

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:53:00 GMT

The 90's internet aesthetic never died, it transcended itself to an art form, and maybe Melonland is the single greatest collective example I've ever seen of such art. So much instant nostalgia, my heart has been aching for this. What a wonderful website. I'd love to link every page but that'd be nonsense, so just go click around and be delighted.

Have a F*ing Website

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:03:47 GMT

The easiest path to a presence online is without a doubt social media. And some platforms, like Facebook, have done a passing job in supporting small businesses on their platform. But interacting with a restaurant or other brick and mortar business that's ONLY on social media, especially a social media that gates their content behind an account login like Instagram, is a surefire way to dissuade me from giving them my business. A bit crass, but small business owners need to hear this message.

Note

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:23:38 GMT

I'm attempting to integrate ActivityPub with my website. If this makes it to the fediverse, hello!

A Semantic Poetry Element

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I created poem-element (and the markdown plugin to support it) in an attempt to combine all of the best practices for coding and displaying poetry on the web, and to distribute it as a semantic web component.

The HTML Review Issue 05

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 09:28:08 GMT

When I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius I was gobsmacked by Eggers' use of footnotes, drawing, and other literary accoutrement; it felt like he used every feature of the printed book form to tell a story. HTML Review delights the same senses for online works. Even if you don't like the words, what the works here accomplish in form and ambition is, well, staggering.

Artist paints Lovecraft's Great Old Ones into all 46 of Hokusai's woodblock prints

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:28:01 GMT

Katsushika Hokusai drew tentacled sea creatures in the 1800s. H.P. Lovecraft built a mythology around them in the 1920s. Japanese illustrator Goki Yamada has now put them together in Thirty-six Views of Evil Gods (邪神三十六景), a 128-page art book that inserts Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and other Great Old Ones into every plate of Hokusai's famous ukiyo-e series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" — the woodblock prints that gave us "The Great Wave off Kanagawa."

Note

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 05:25:32 GMT

We're down to sub ~250ms load times now that I've moved the site behind the Bunny.net CDN! Additionally, I've added swipe support to photos. Web Mentions may or may not be fully functional at this point as well. I'll update last week's post with more of the changes for those interested.

Moving to Astro (with AI doing the heavy lifting)

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:24:02 GMT

I made the leap to Astro from Nuxt. I never really felt at home with Nuxt. When I migrated to that framework some years back, I did it not because it was right-sized for this site, but because it came with bells and whistles and knobs I wanted to pull. But the documentation was thin, I wanted to hammer it into a static site generator, and the process of porting the site to a new framework left me feeling stifled. For years, I've written every line of code by hand, and just wiring up the different layouts and components and logic made my head spin. Maybe it was trying to learn Vue when I had never really grasped something like React. For me, building sites has always felt more rewarding than filling them with content, but I did want to get to the point where I filled my site with content. Burning out before I got to that point was the problem.

Recently I felt the itch again to build things, so what did I do? I decided to change frameworks, naturally. Except, this time around I had AI.

Say what you will about coders and AI-slop, but porting code between frameworks is actually a great use case for generative AI. I used Claude Code, the current belle of the ball. Of course, it's not perfect. If I didn't have an intuition about what needed to happen at every step and anticipating what it was planning on doing, I probably wouldn't have made it very far. I'm sure there are some spots where the code could be improved. But I've been able to keep things pretty lean by asking questions, debating Claude's decisions, and iterating to optimize. I've actually learned more by asking why Claude proposed changes than I would have by Googling--this is the first project in a while that didn't send me spiraling across Stack Overflow. (Caveat: Claude is probably trained on Stack Overflow). Being able to add whole features through creative writing sped up development time by days or weeks. And I get the push-back on vibe coding, just blindly willing the LLM to predict the right way to do things. But having a tool where I can say, "remove all CSS classes that are unused across the site," or, "standardize all of my link colors," and having confidence in that tool to pull it off, is pretty spectacular and, I think, well worth it.

As for results, I'm currently sitting at 100% on PageSpeed Insights for both mobile and desktop in the Performance, Best Practices, and SEO categories, which to be frank, is what a simple personal site should accomplish with breaking a sweat. That just wasn't possible over the last few years as I carried multiple frameworks and libraries over from version to version. Now, all my JavaScript is vanilla, and only used to control the theme switcher, SVG generation for the animations, and the content filtering on category pages. This update also gave me the opportunity to modernize what I could in HTML. Given the advancement of native browser APIs over the last few years, HTML and CSS can do most of the heavy lifting. Speaking of CSS, Tailwind is cool and great for more complex websites with thousands of UI elements, but I've decided to transitioned back to hand-rolled (well, AI-and-hand-rolled) CSS, dropping many KBs in the process. I imagined AI would trip particularly with CSS, but Claude is surprisingly good at understanding text descriptions and writing CSS to match.

Here is a list of the optimizations I made for page speed and performance:

Inlined CSS — Astro inlines stylesheets at build, eliminating render-blocking CSS requests
Font subsetting — Instrument Serif subset to A-Za-z only (26KB → 10KB)
font-display: swap/optional — prevents font-loading from blocking text render
Self-hosted fonts — no external requests to Google Fonts
Static-only output — zero client-side JavaScript framework, no hydration cost.
Lazy loading images — loading="lazy" on feed and album photos
decoding="async" available for images
View Transitions — page navigations swap content without full reloads (~3KB runtime)
Aggressive cache headers — fonts and _astro/ assets cached via Netlify config
No CSS framework — hand-written CSS, no unused utility classes to ship
Shiki build-time syntax highlighting — code blocks pre-rendered as HTML, no client-side highlighting library
content-visibility: auto — available for long feed pages to skip rendering off-screen content
CSS light-dark() — single set of rules instead of duplicated dark mode overrides, reducing CSS size
Preconnect hints — for external service domains
prefers-reduced-motion — skips animation entirely, saving CPU on devices that request it

The other big update to this site is support for IndieWeb protocols. There are still some kinks to iron out with WebMentions and POSSE, but I'm sporting all the appropriate meta-data and I've got IndieKit working in the background. Claude made that relatively painless, too, and it didn't get mad when I kept asking what protocols did what. My site gets very little traffic, I doubt I'll be liked or replied to anytime soon, but it's nice to have.

Content-wise, I've migrated my Flickr data here. I just couldn't subscribe for another year of Flickr Pro knowing that I was using it as glorified photo storage. Now my photos are in an Akamai Cloud Object Storage bucket in Jersey.

I've taken up the feed approach to the website, it'll be easier to share what I find interesting without dedicating blog posts to every minor link or nod I want to publish. My guess is, blog posts will remain sporadic while what I'm calling my Commonplace takes form.

Poem type for Creative Works in Schema

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:31:01 GMT

I proposed this addition to the Schema Bib Extend Community Group in 2015, and then fell off following the discussion. I probably wasn't the first, but I wrote the proposed schema itself. Turns out, it was accepted some years later. This my first real contribution to the web of any substance. Now that AI is using Schema to help ingest data, I'm hoping more folks find it and find it useful.

Note

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:25:52 GMT

Just a note: I made the move from Nuxt to Astro, and in the process dusted off a few things around here. I’ll do a more detailed writeup soon. If things are breaking, do a hard refresh.

Other People's Email

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I get lots of other people's email, but this time was different. This is the first non-fiction I've published, about scams, relationships, and private communication on the public internet.

The Rules of Fear

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When I was little and had to get up at night, I would leap far from my bed, convinced that a monster's slimy, scaly claw would burst from beneath my mattress and snare my ankles if I didn't, dragging me down into the underworld. But If I leaped far enough, landing somewhere squarely in the middle of the room, just out of reach of the bed, I could defeat the monster. Those were the rules.

Of course, this doesn't make any sense: if the monster wanted to grab me and pull me to hell, it probably wouldn't flail about. No, it'd probably team up with the monster in my closet (who I adamantly felt I could defeat by keeping the door shut at night) and escape into the real world, unencumbered by any fantasy of security I had in my adolescent mind. But I was little and naive and believed in the sanctity of my own rules.

Now that I'm an adult, you'd think the logic of my rules would be more complete, but the logic remains the same. For instance, I firmly believe that if I wear my seatbelt, obey traffic laws and street signs, don't use my phone while driving, and go the speed limit, I'm safe from crashes. Seems like a good rule. But you'll notice this rule doesn't account for the whims and mistakes of every other driver on the road. This rule for operating a vehicle is shaped by the things I can control, and yet it assumes that being in complete control of my actions influences how other drivers perform in my presence. It's flawed when dissected. But the underlying fear is so great, the consequences so serious, that I don't think I'd ever drive anywhere again without this rule.

I believe that if I am open and transparent with a person, if I meet others as humans and treat them as I want to be treated, any person can become a friend and an ally. But as it turns out, having this one-size-fits-all rule about humanity is a great way to be taken advantage of, as has happened plenty of times in my life. But if I didn't have this rule, every interaction becomes a fearful melange of doubt and over-anticipatory self-preservation, weighing motives, every moment spent in concert with someone else reduced to a series of unanswerable "What if?"s. Without this rule, I'd probably never interact with another soul ever again.

I've heard the phrase "the lies we tell ourselves" when discussing the things that get us through the day. Maybe they're not actually lies per se, but truths we willfully ignore, and maybe those truths are fears we remediate with rules. It could be said that actively filtering the world around us means you're not living in the real world, but if the hallmark of the real world is a truly unfiltered worldview, I highly doubt anyone is living there permanently.

Lately, however, the "real world" has become almost inescapable. And by that, I mean it's becoming difficult to create rules for my own fears to help me navigate the day-to-day.

The threat of nuclear war has been the greatest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It keeps me up at night. And so, to sleep easier, I make up a rule, like, as long as I'm not living within 6.54 miles of a geo-political or economic center, the chance that the bad guys will attempt to blow up my house is actually quite minimal. I know after reading that sentence, you're probably absolutely bursting with optimism. It's not a rule that completely addresses my fears, but it's better for me than dwelling in the unfathomable. It doesn't attempt to cover the fallout or the human cost, it's simply something within my control.

I fear for the state of democracy in my country, and so I tell myself that the idiots speak louder and get more airtime than the sensible ones and that most everyone I know is reasonably sensible, that the moment we're having is just a moment. But I don't know everyone in my country or even my own town, hell, even my own street, and so this rule relies on the bubble I live in being representative of the general populace. Again, not a great rule, but it stops me from expecting the worst.

Some of these rules can feel like faith. I don't deny or reject this comparison. Faith in technology and science, humanity's general goodness, and the divine can all help us get through the day. And the faithful can treat their beliefs as the basis of fact. But I'm not a man of deep faith. I'm a man of many beliefs that are always being unmade and tested. (As I write this, I wonder if that's what real faith actually looks like). My rules as they exist are simply constructs that reflect where my compass needle is currently pointing.

In that vein, I recently changed one of my rules. I'm fearful that in an economic collapse, a food shortage would leave my family and me starving, unable to provide for each other. The rule I made up was that if things got dire, we could migrate to an area of the country with more agriculture, and we'd be near the front of the line for food, avoiding the impossible logistics of the supply chain. I never liked that rule. It felt like escapism. After watching the war in Europe boil over, I changed my rule. Instead, I think that if we lend a helping hand and work tirelessly to better the lives of those around us, it might come all back around. This sounds like faith, but I see it as the rules of a simple economy that barters deeds and favors with food, water, and shelter. And again, this rule is based purely on what I can control all the while assuming the goodwill of others.

Sometimes, especially when I'm tired, I'll see someone I know well, like my parents or brothers or folks around town or people I know from work, and I'll suddenly lose all of the associations I have with them, all of the qualities they represent to me. They look remarkably unfamiliar as if they were strangers in a crowd. For an instant, I physically see them as the summation of all their trying, their guessing, their stumbling through life; in a fraction of a moment they are just as fearful and confused and trying-their-goddamn-best as me. It can be overwhelming to think that none of us truly have this world figured out, when so often I count on the perceived wisdom and guile and completely-togetherness of others to help me retain a sense of normalcy in my own life. My rules depend on these people being dependable, I assume so much of them. In some ways, it's entirely unfair to saddle them with the weight of my own uncertainty.

Am I a fearful person? Though fear is a major motivator in my life, I wouldn't say I'm any more fearful than the next. Some of my fears are rational, and many are irrational, but most of my life is spent being curious and in wonder than in a constant state of fear. This may be afforded to me by my social and economic status, it could be my upbringing, or it could be part of my DNA. But, as I've outlined here, I am not uncomplicated by fear. And certainly, I don't have a rule that helps me with every fear. Take death, for instance. Not the sudden, tragic, happens in-the blink-of-an-eye death, the accidental death, the death that I have rules to help avoid. I mean the death at the end of a long life, the death one questions fruitlessly from the time they're old enough to understand mortality to the day it finally happens. I don't have a rule for that fear. It's the one eventuality we all have, and all I have are uncertainties.

There are probably many more constructive ways to deal with fear. I know some practice hard to accept certain realities in their life, to plan for and stay in the present, let life take them where it will. Maybe that's the one path forward, and these rules are just mitigations we put in place that don't solve anything real. I'm happy for those folks who live fearless lives, through whatever mechanism allows them that comfort, whether it be faith or fact or something else. But for the rest of us, I think it’s good practice to interrogate our fears and see how they hold up in different light. Maybe the fear you have is beyond yourself. Maybe it’s something small and easily remedied. The important part is just learning to function in the face of that fear, however you can make it happen. That’s the rule.

I Don't Understand Poetry

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I must admit something, and it's embarrassing: I don't understand a lot of poetry. I realize this despite having spent more than a decade of my life publically identifying myself as a poet (which, to be fair, is not a long time in this artistic pursuit, and also, to be honest, comes with a lot of stereotypical behavior). I have multiple degrees, attend workshops, read the classics, and write a good amount of my own poetry. At points, I've received some positive feedback and warm receptions to my ideas. On paper, I've got all the tools I need. Then why do I feel like such a confounded failure?

As a senior in high school, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I'd read about Mark Rothko before I went. His work is pretty and colorful, but its meaning and value stymied me. I hoped I'd really "get" the paintings by seeing them in person. I remember Orange and Tan dominating a wall in the middle of a gallery. I spent time viewing the work from different angles and distances: close up, to the side, then backing away and seeing the totality, and even further, seeing the painting within the context of other works in the gallery. I wasn't going to leave that room until I "understood." And I didn't dislike the art. But, for as long as I stayed in that location, I felt no rush of emotion. Nothing washed over or built up inside of me at that moment, no lightbulb above my head. I'd read about people breaking down in the presence of Rothko's paintings. Why wasn't I, too, overcome? Was I emotionally too detached?

I have physical and emotional reactions to music. I'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but like many in the modern Western age, I've probably been exposed to tens of thousands of songs in my life, largely without even trying. Within seconds, I can feel the rhythms that make me want to dance, the atmosphere that makes me want to cozy up with a nice warm beverage, the ecstasy of celebrating a beautiful moment, or the expansiveness that feels like staring longingly into the night sky. The effect is immediate and afforded without any formal training.

But that's kind of a lie, isn't it? With music playing such a strong part of popular culture and our shared cultural moments, and the fact that we've all been exposed to thousands of songs in our lifetimes, aren't many of us experts on contemporary music? Isn't the life we've lived a kind of formal training? Music is so commonplace it's a part of how we process our own histories, fashions, and cultural milestones. Maybe a random individual can't discuss contemporary music in terms of theories, chord progressions, and movements, but it wouldn't be surprising to hear them discuss the music in terms of influences, aesthetics, sounds, and genres.

In contrast to the commonality of music, there's an appreciation of visual art that is underdeveloped in the general populace. I would volunteer that I'm part of that group. What kind of fine art paintings does an individual encounter daily? Even if the answer is plenty, I would posit that the skills needed to speak articulately about fine art are rare. How does one, for instance, make the leap from still-life, renaissance-style paintings, the likes of which flood popular museums, to Mondrian, even if they have a gut instinct to like one over the other?

The same is true for poetry. While poetry is making a strong comeback in recent years, its readership is but a fragment of the readership of other literary pursuits. It exists in popular culture as a weird mechanism used to heighten a moment's gravitas or harken to a previous, more refined time, even though aesthetically, poets haven't written in those fashions for a hundred years. Rarely does a contemporary poem become part of the culture outside of distinct literary and academic circles. And even when one does, the ability of a bystander to highlight why a poem has succeeded, or conversely why a poem fails, would be slim.

Is that because poetry is too academic, gatekept, and elitist? It can certainly feel that way to anyone forced into learning about poetry at school. But, I think the answer lies in where we encounter poetry: if we aren't encountering it in journals and magazines and books and tweets and YouTube performances, making individual discoveries, and only as a mechanism used by other arts and artists or systematically drilled into us, how can we ever expect to develop our own sensibilities and tastes? If all we ever hear of poetry is someone else's opinion, how can we ever form our own?

When I left school, I was completely lost in poetry, and that shattered me because if I hadn't become the artist I wanted to be by then, what was all of that education for? In undergrad, I developed an idea of who I was as an artist that was, admittedly, very myopic. I had not been exposed to many contemporary poets outside of a few anthologies and had not pursued them beyond the classroom (which, to be clear, is entirely my own fault). I was almost militaristic in my preference for classic and formal verse because that's the world in which I found myself succeeding. But then, in grad school, I started to open up my field of view (though, at the time, it felt like I was a clam being shucked). Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about myself and the craft became subject to question. The poems I was proud of now embarrassed me for how unoriginal they seemed. My images and metaphors were cliches, my voice a relic, and all the hard work wrangling lines into rhyme and meter were seen as unnecessary, distracting, and outmoded. I wanted to sing, but I couldn't muster a single note without feeling like a hack.

I took a workshop with a well-known editor some years later, years in which I wrote little and read even less. He shared a poem from one of the workshop attendees and asked us to explicate the poem. My mind immediately went towards counting metrical feet and looking for a form, which was plainly not what the editor meant. A few moments passed when no one spoke, all of the attendees trying to think of something clever to say. And then the editor said something that really cut to my heart: this isn't hard. You are poets. You all should be able to speak fluently about this poem in terms of poetics and craft immediately.

I knew that language at one point but in a completely different context. I had no contemporary frame to compare this one specific poem. I couldn't explain who the poet was reacting to, what they were doing on the page visually, the social and political ramifications of the poem, the liminal spaces between words and phrases that the audience would dwell in, etc. As the workshop evolved, I could see and recognize all of those things, but it's obvious that I hadn't interacted with enough contemporary poetry to form the proper understanding.

When someone writes a love poem in English, they are unknowingly (or knowingly) part of the grand tradition of English love poems (and poems translated into English). Does that mean you can't enjoy a love poem if you don't understand its poetic lineage? Of course not. But having read a wide variety of poetry can only heighten the ability to see the distinctions and similarities between poets, to catch their subtle nods and more overt shout-outs, to see them responding to the immediate world around them as well as the great history, and most importantly, to see where new ground is being broken.

So, when I say I don't understand a lot of poetry, the admission is not one of frustration with the way poetry is written today. It is, in fact, a frustration of my own self-inflicted lack of exposure. And it's not as if I wasn't being told to read widely at every step of my poetic education. It was, in fact, demanded of me. But I took from all these contemporary poets a little sliver of craft focused on form and meter. If a poet wasn't working within those constraints, I moved on. How freaking wrong is that? Reading poetry shouldn't be an act of understanding what's important to yourself but what's important to the poem and the poet. Developing preferences and influences naturally comes later.

In this way, I've been very self-centered in poetry for my entire education. This realization fills me with shame. Over the last few months, I've tried coming to terms with my biases, and I'm starting to make peace with them so that I can grow and, more importantly, so I can simply start enjoying more poetry, understanding more poetry, and taking part.

This brings me back to why I wasn't moved by Rothko. Without knowing where art was before Rothko joined the scene, I couldn't appreciate how revolutionary his ideas were. If I didn't know what his contemporaries were accomplishing, I couldn't see his individual greatness. If I didn't know the language of art, I could not understand what his paintings were saying to me. To put it plainly, I didn't know what was at stake when I viewed Rothko. It's as if you read the end of a book before reading the rest of it. When a central character dies on the last page, that death is meaningless and unearned. But if you read the entire book and understand that character's journey, their triumphs, and suffering, that death becomes real, and all matter of emotions boil to the surface.

I'm still not saying you have to understand all of the poetry just to enjoy a single poem. But it's a matter of exposure. How challenging would one rock and roll song be if you had only heard classical compositions? What if instead of one rock and roll song, you heard twenty songs by twenty different bands? One poem in your life may not lead to an emotional outpouring, but what about another twenty?

Is contemporary poetry challenging? It can be, but so can any new practice. And comparatively, for all of contemporary poetry's difficulties, there are equal barriers to classical poetry, like outdated language, archaic symbols, and cultural representations that are increasingly less and less like our own.

We're not going to live in a society where poetry is hung on the walls of every house and championed, though that would be nice. But, if we're serious about poetry, we must meet it where it exists. We shouldn't be upset for not "getting" poetry to begin with, just as we shouldn't be upset about not hitting a home run on our first at-bat, or knowing everything about a new job on the first day, or burning a few chickens the first time we cook for ourselves, or tapping into a curb the first time we drive a car. "I don't understand poetry" isn't an excuse. It's a side effect of simply not having done enough of it.

On Feeling Alive

Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of van-life YouTubers out there. Folks who have, for either real or show, bought and refurbished vans and box trucks and old ambulances and trucks with pop up campers, and set off down the road in search of an unencumbered life. Without the need to stay tethered, they roam, primarily out West, it would seem, where the spaces are vast, from park to camp, back road to backwater, sometimes off trail for days at a time. They have it all: a place to sleep, a roof over their heads, a few days provisions, and an unending road unfurling from who-knows-where (but, importantly, always putting pavement between past) to the promised future. Even if it means making showers an every-few-day affair. It’s all so very bohemian, romantic.

I remember in high school a few buddies and I came up with a road trip plan. A week or two, NJ to California. We’d hit a few parks, a few small towns and a few major cities, maybe the world’s biggest ball of twine. We could make do with diners and gas station beef jerky, chip in for gas. None of us had long range cars, but we figured a Ford Escort could seat five comfortably. We’d see the country. We’d connect with the world, the American people, the landscape, the ceaseless sky and road. We’d see where the sun sets in the Pacific. We’d watch the moonrise over the Rockies. With a little savings, with a printout from MapQuest, we could make it work. Who was stopping us? After all, this trip would only be the beginning of everything, a rebirth into young adulthood.

I went off to college before plans made it any further than dreaming, as did a bunch of us. That’s what I was good for in those days, plans. Some of the guys stayed in town, and I think a few years later some of them did go on a road trip across country. I don’t know if for them it was as picture perfect as it all seemed to us then. If it changed them, if it redeemed them. If they’d do it all over again.

But this is to say I get the dream of van life. I get the dream of waking up somewhere new each and every day, building a life of limitless possibility. And apparently, especially during lockdown, so did many across the country. YouTube tends to amplify a voice, I doubt there are millions of van-lifers out there, but there are many thousand, and the creators among them are becoming more popular by the day.

A few days ago, they started showing up again in my suggested videos on YouTube. I don’t watch every one. Maybe it’s because I’m jealous of their freedom, or maybe it’s the opposite and I think it’s impractical, to want to settle down and build equity. I can’t make up my mind. At the end of the day, I think having watched a few surmises the premise of many.

But a video popped up that grabbed my attention. Natalie Lynn's “I Just Turned 20 and I Feel Alive.” The thumbnail is a frame of Lynn sitting cross-legged in the middle of an abandoned, tree-lined stretch of road somewhere in early fall, in the late afternoon, a mountain in the background where the road thins in the distance. She’s holding up a small cake with a single lit candle, smiling. Just out of frame would be her two-toned green and white camper van parked on the side of the road. I, too, have felt like Lynn, twenty and alive, but it’s been a while to say it nice. I wanted to relive those moments. To feel the boundless again.

As she says, Lynn never expected to be celebrating her twentieth birthday on the side of the road, but there she is, eating cake on the ground of a pull-off by what looks to be a lake with her friend Matheus, cars zipping past at twilight. The music is charming, off-beat. Then they’re dancing on a guardrail, goofing really, and Lynn’s voiceover says something that I remember all too well:

The point is, the older I keep getting, the more I start to realize I have to get comfortable with the fact that one day eventually I, and everyone I know, is going to die.

Maybe that’s the right of passage we all go through. Not the epic trip, not the various tests of character, but coming face to face with one’s own impermanence. At least, that’s what it was for me. This overwhelming sense that unless I got my shit together and did something, anything to leave my mark on the world, I’d be forgotten. I needed to rack up experiences as if they were points in a game, to feel the highest of highs and lowest of lows, to fill my diaries and letters with every color of life. Someone, somewhere, sometime in the future would look back and say, “this Andy guy, he lived.” But, like Lynn, that’s only because I was terrified of death.

Later in the video, to remind herself of her own impermanence and to face death head on, she and Matheus climb out over the abandoned Vance Creek Bridge in Washington, the second highest railroad bridge in the country. It scares them. But as the music swells and the drone pulls back from atop the bridge to reveal the damp, smokey, impossibly gorgeous Washington hill-top panorama, it’s impossible to not sense that at that very instant, Lynn is on top of the world. Alive in death. Alive because of death.

This is the promise of van-life. To live bold so that every moment feels, if not planned, deliberate. Earned. Well spent. Alive.

The comments on Lynn’s videos are relatable. Viewers want to either have the award-winning artistry and vision to capture their own lives as well as Lynn does, or to literally have her life, her freedoms and her philosophy and experiences. So much of YouTube’s popularity is spurned on by either admiration or envy, and Lynn’s videos garner both in spades, as do most of the videos in the van-life genre. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know.

Lynn is an influencer, in the same bucket of creators as the Kardashians, despite the fact that she’d probably cut off my head for drawing the distinction. Instead of hawking beauty products, Lynn is sponsored by an online thrift store. And I get sponsorships, you have to earn an income. But, having a sponsorship like that, even if it’s as quirky as Lynn seems, makes you wonder about the duality of living a truly free existence while obsessively framing every moment in order to make art, which in turn is only validated by viewership on a social media platform. It’s art in a nutshell in any genre, risking the authentic for the well-choreographed. It only works if the audience knows the art is genuine. I’m in that audience. I want to believe in Lynn.

Many van-life YouTubers make videos about the behind the scenes, the day-to-day minutia, risk the glamour for the insightful. They recognize that folks want what they have, and they can make content to empower the right decisions for those that are on the same path. It’s a concession, really. Sometimes the ideas for new videos run out, sometimes the never-ending rapture of the road has its downtime. Not everything in a free existence comes freely, and has to be earned.

And, I think, that’s the ultimate long-tail of recognizing one’s own impermanence. That for every world-changing moment, there are chores. For every grand experience, there are ten spent staring at one’s feet. Some of life is unavoidable, but it is no less living. It just doesn’t make for as good content.

But this brings me back to why I started writing this. At what point does the living become the artistry itself? At one point does philosophy mix with cinematography to the point that the two are irrevocably yoked? At that point, can anyone make the distinction between content and creator, and isn’t that the dream of every artist? To be awake in a dream? Watching Lynn’s video, I overwhelmingly believe that she is who she portrays herself to be. That this is real. When Lynn goes beyond just talking about her vulnerabilities, her fearing death at that specific point in her life, and expresses this twenty-minute video with such clarity and wit, she’s expressing something that validates who I was back then and to many extents, who I still am today. And for that, to me, it succeeds.

On Forgetting

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

There are some memories we think we'll never forget. And that may be true, especially of life's defining moments. A first kiss. A winning shot. Famously, the first time experiencing ice. They persist with hyper clarity months, years, decades later. How could we ever let them go?

But, there is another kind of memory that we almost never keep. The mundane, the unextraordinary, the habitual. We might remember these moments for a few minutes, sometimes for a few seconds, but rarely more, like locking the front door on the way out for work. We did the lock the front door, right?

For me, one such mundane memory was a memory that I didn't even realize was a memory. That is, until I forgot. Until one day all of those memories of the thing I had done hundreds, if not thousands, of times in my life seemingly disappeared. I knew I had the memories, I recognized the shape of the space they used to inhabit, but all were un-recollectable, all out of grasp. It was something simple, so incredibly simple. I forgot how to tie my shoes.

Around this time I developed plantar fasciitis, which is foot pain caused by inflammation of the connective tissue running from the heel to the toes. It was caused, I think, by wearing unsupportive shoes, shoes that I, in fact, never untied after the first time I tied them. It was, in retrospect, a problem I created for myself. There's no real good way to cure plantar fasciitis other than by having the right footwear and giving the feet time to heal. So, one morning I untied my shoes, put them on, and then bent over to tie them as tight as I could. For maximum stability. I took both laces in either hand, looped one around the other, and--well--I couldn't remember what else to do.

So, I did what anyone in my situation would do. I YouTube'd it, and the memories came flooding back.

But while I've simplified the types of memories into two broad camps, those being memories we never want to forget, and the memories we might never truly make, I should mention there is another category I've neglected: memories we don't want to have. And I, like all honest human beings, have those memories, too. Tying my shoes is not one of them. But, forgetting something so basic got me thinking. What if it's possible to forget things on purpose? If I had tried to forget how to tie my shoes, not tying them might have been a good first step.

So I turned to the internet and found that Googling "how to forget" is probably not the best place to start. However, there was one search result, to a New York Times article that ran earlier in 2021 entitled How to Forget Something that confirmed what I had found in my own life:

"...You can also work on what cognitive scientists call direct suppression. “You just kind of put up the mental hand and say, ‘Nope, I don’t want to think about that..."."

In the past I've described how I combat an intrusive thought entering my mind as "changing the channel." Meaning that I recognize the thought I don't want to think, the one that causes all that suffering, and then immediately pick something else to think about. Sometimes this direct suppression, if enacted early enough in the thought cycle, is easy to do. Sometimes it's not. But it's the only thing that I've ever found that works.

I've tried meditation, tried to just observe my thoughts as they run circles around my head, always returning to the breath. It may work for some, but I've never been successful in not going down the rabbit hole. Usually, I just feel exhausted afterwards. But with thought suppression, with saying to myself "no, I don't think I will do that," I've at least been able to stem the tide.

The interesting part about doing this is that sometimes I avoid a memory without even realizing that I've done it. I've sort of trained myself to see those thoughts coming on, and I shake them off (sometimes physically so). Do I still think the things I don't want to think? Yes, every day. Do I spend hours ruminating on them? Sometimes, sadly, yes, I give in. But, when it works, there's no panic, there's no banging my head against a wall, no fists against my temples.

I think the key is the thing I talked about at the beginning of this post. The return, the coming back to the memories we want to keep. Luckily, I still have some of those. Earlier in that NYT article I referred to there's a good line:

"...Your brain is always in the process of forgetting, but Anderson believes you can forget with more intentionality — what he calls motivated forgetting — and that you can get better at it with practice. “You sculpt your memories,” he says..."

By reinforcing the good memories, returning to them, instead of the negative, we forget to tie our shoes. We forget to give in to the memories that hurt. And the added bonus is that we begin to remember other things that make us happy, too. One doctor I knew told me: "memories that are wired together fire together." If we think of something that makes us mad, the pathways in our brain that store those angry memories tend to activate in unison. Pretty soon, we're fuming over something entirely unrelated to what initially made us angry. The hack, as it were, is that the same thing happens for memories that make us feel good.

It can be something small. That quick witted quip you said in an elevator once that made people chuckle. That time you made the perfect lasagna with a week's worth of leftovers that you later dreamt of. The first day of summer break. You'd be surprised at what comes back to you.

Change is never easy, and rewiring your thought patterns takes practice. My God, does it take practice. It can seem fruitless at times, truly. But, I promise you, it is possible. I have the proof. If I can forget to tie my shoes, after all these years, anything is possible.

Implementing Docs as Code - Lessons and Benefits

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A RedMonk Conversation: Documenting the Alternative Cloud

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I sat down with KellyAnn Fitzpatrick of RedMonk to discuss documentation and the alternative cloud. At Linode, we are a very public documentation team: we work in the open on GitHub using Docs as Code, and we document use cases and learning paths in addition to our own products. It helps that we are on the Marketing team; that gives us a different perspective on documentation's reach, and the leaway to take advantage of that perspective.

Notes on a Living Room

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Selected Poems

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Issue 8, Spring/Summer 2015.

For the Nude Descending the Stairs Towards Me

Sun, 01 Sep 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Winner, Tampa Bay Hotel / Plant Hall Beautiful-Weird-Cool-Spooky Old Place Writing Contest

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Finalist, Norton Girault Poetry Prize

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Aunty Marcy

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Published under Leroy van Stets.

ASPEC Mason Daly Poetry Award

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

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Thu, 25 Dec 2008 12:01:36 GMT

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Thu, 25 Dec 2008 11:59:58 GMT

IMG00010-20081225-1200.jpg

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:09:26 GMT

Roof Deck

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:20:48 GMT

Six Toed Cats, 2

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:02:21 GMT

Six Toed Cats, 1

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:01:24 GMT

Kitchen Table

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:34:20 GMT

Top down

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:45:16 GMT

Lines

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:44:42 GMT

Self Portrait

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:01:47 GMT

Spider Dinner Silhoutte

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:25:43 GMT

Spider and Dinner

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:22:48 GMT

Spider and Dinner

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:22:28 GMT

Nature

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:39:29 GMT

Off Kilter

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:35:20 GMT

Ben and the Entrance Ramp

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:29:29 GMT

What does this picture say?

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:47:57 GMT

Reading

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:21:36 GMT

Dumpsters

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:47:16 GMT

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Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:40:09 GMT

Auto Service

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:38:27 GMT

Espresso and Cappucino

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:36:26 GMT

Vine Sensibility

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:34:06 GMT

World Liquors

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:24:54 GMT

Power Station and Dumpsters

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:23:34 GMT

St. Pete Police Station

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 15:17:40 GMT

Green Bottle Light

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:14:11 GMT

Green Bottle Light 2

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:10:19 GMT

Breakfast Foods

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:16:32 GMT

ahhHhHH....

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:10:55 GMT

El Gallo

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:35:23 GMT

Mr. Hyde

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:02:26 GMT

Dr. Jekyll

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:01:40 GMT

Birds and Electrical Burns

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:55:27 GMT

Bench in the Shadow

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:36:43 GMT

Cookie?

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:33:33 GMT

Cookie!

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:33:24 GMT

Hrm?

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:33:08 GMT

Eckerd Sail Team

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 16:20:04 GMT

Sadhu 7

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:28:31 GMT

Sadhu 5

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:26:52 GMT

Bad Dude

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:48:20 GMT

Volunteers and Kids

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:40:53 GMT

Meager Man

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 23:30:27 GMT

First time in Philly

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:00:42 GMT

Nice tree. Damn pole.

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:59:54 GMT

Over-night in November

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:15:14 GMT

Cold Snap

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:14:30 GMT

High

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:38:06 GMT

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Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:37:52 GMT

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Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:46:58 GMT

Threepart Issue 4

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:00:44 GMT

Saturday Morning

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 08:58:12 GMT

Rob, Sandwich Shop

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 08:55:58 GMT

Food Shopping

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 13:30:11 GMT

Primero bar

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:37:14 GMT

En Route, pt. 2

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:12:18 GMT

En Route

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 10:58:54 GMT

Desaturation

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:39:27 GMT

Meta-Photography

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:38:12 GMT

Caught in a Crossfire, pt. 2

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:31:22 GMT

Caught in a Crossfire, pt. 1

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:31:18 GMT

Lysistrata

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:14:20 GMT

Lysistrata

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 16:13:51 GMT

Kapital

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 23:16:59 GMT

Puerta de Europa

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:46:59 GMT

Dad at Dinner

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 12:37:45 GMT

Loyola Resedencia

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 06:19:50 GMT

Loyola Resedencia

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:51:49 GMT

Loyola Resedencia

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:51:29 GMT

Padre Rubio Hall

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:49:24 GMT

Numero 34

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:45:56 GMT

Numero 34

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:44:51 GMT

Numero 34

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:43:57 GMT

Numero 34

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:43:50 GMT

Loyola Resedencia

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:43:21 GMT

Loyola Resedencia

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 05:42:59 GMT

badge

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:38:52 GMT

Bed

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:13:40 GMT

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Fri, 02 Jan 2004 02:20:45 GMT