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all of this was inevitable, i suppose; we just had no way of knowing, at the time

Every day of my life feels like the obvious continuation of a profoundly absurd chain of events.

So as I sat at the end of a conference table, in the audience of several published auto journalists at a private event in an exclusive garage full of millions of dollars of horsepower, and heard myself say the words:

I’m actually a damn good writer. I just… never write. When I do write, I know that I write well, but the process is painful. Literally physically painful - like picking broken pieces of glass out of my skin.

It was as if I could feel my soul leaving my body.

One of them winced at the casual vision of body horror that I’d just provided. Both nodded politely. And I, no longer seated at a conference table, was passively observing myself in the third person, from the upper corner of the room. My mouth made some more noises; they were probably insightful, or at least interesting. The conversation continued along on its own inertia. And I sat there, fully aware that I had just said,

I’m a writer! Except for the writing part.

To several writers. Whose work I’ve been reading for a few years. In a room, with air in it.

In my defense, it’s true. I am a good writer. I’ve published a handful of essays on software engineering. I consider them to be good. I like to write about the parts of software engineering that other people tend to avoid; I don’t write Python tutorialshit for commoners or condescending dev-tone schlock about “maintaining a healthy work-life balance” or “5 Jira hacks to pwn the Libs that you MUST DO NOW” - I prefer to run the gamut from the sacred to the profane. I’m not going to link to it; if you know who I am, you can find it. If not, don’t bother.

But in the sense of actually writing the things that I want to write? I’m bad at it. Software is hard; writing about software is harder; writing about software in such a way that people want to read it when they’re away from their desks is harderer. (Ed: that’s not funny, take it out.) But software is sterile; it’s technical; it’s inhuman. It’s easy to write about software and claim that yes, the things that I’ve written are technically correct. But it doesn’t matter.

Life is not sterile. Life is not technical. Life is human. Life matters.

“I write but only about software” is a defense against becoming the person that I’d become if I weren’t so afraid to go through the trouble of writing about the rest of the things in life that matter so, so very much more.

So I’ve done what any other brain-damaged thirtysomething midwit would do in this situation: I’ve created a Substack. (It’s this one.) And as a show of good faith, and in better interest of not letting this turn into any more of a 2008-era Blogspot missive that starts with “hey guys been awhile since the last update, wow lifes crazy” than it already is, I’m writing the “intro post” second - I promised myself that I wouldn’t actually post anything here until I had an essay done. So I have an essay in the hopper, and it’ll go up later today.

I’m doing this because I believe in writing - in the process of reifying and organizing abstract thought into concrete communication, for other humans to read. Said another way: I’m doing this for myself. You’re free to follow along, if you’d like.