first post : final post : cast off
(This is a mirror of a post originally made on Cohost. The site is sunsetting, will be going read-only on October 1, and the servers will be taken offline + all user data permanently erased at the end of 2024. Cohost was a social media website without algorithms or metrics, made by my friends, and I liked it a lot. I wrote a little bit about it at the end.)
i've been busy and i'm not a writer at the best of times so as usual with me all i have is scatterbrained thinking out loud.
i've never really done a last dispatch before. a lot of the time, i just haven't been there when the lights at a website finally went out, or i didn't know at the time when i was making my last post. i recently wrote out what i thought would be my final facebook update after years of inactivity, only to come back less than a week later. i needed to post on my mother's fb wall to let people know she was safe after hurricane helene ripped through north carolina. you never know when a natural disaster is going to break all historical records and obliterate your hometown i guess. i am incredibly lucky no one i know was killed in the hurricane but a lot more is gone now than just the person i was when i was in college. even if it bounces back, things are never going to be the same.
this and my birthday next month have me thinking about my younger self, my sadder self, the me who lived in the house where my mother is now sheltering in place. the 2010s julian very few of you ever met couldn't imagine a life outside of that town, or one not totally (dominated by|terrorized by|reliant on) the computer.
of course, it's only possible to move forward, and i can't hold it against him for how he handled what was on his plate. he didn't have a good time. i wish i could let him know that things will improve, and that there will be things to look forward to, but i'll settle for being happy now. i don't think about myself as much anymore in terms of things that have been lost, either. i have more now than i did then, more people who i love and who love me too.
it's a common refrain but cohost fixed a lot of the self-injurious behaviors i built up from years of internet usage. for reasons beyond the scope of this post i once was at a point where i could not go an hour without compulsively checking notifs, everywhere, over and over. i never even had clout or social media fame in any capacity, and i didn't rely on twitter numbers to pay my bills. i just ended up with a lot of pathways where something was wired wrong. having access to a quieter website helped mend that. i'm looking forward now to taking it slowly, and i'm glad for the freedom of making art without caring about the numbers. it's a tremendous privilege and luxury.
(cohost also majorly restored my confidence in posting adult art. i don't think i realized how much, even beyond the risk of getting a warning or locked account, websites with TOS against nsfw induced apathy in even sharing the things i was doing, no matter how excited i was for it. it's been an honor to find the joy once more in posting my characters sexually tormenting one another. that fire won't go out again.)
i'm doing all kinds of things at their own pace lately. i'm rebuilding my website soon, from scratch this time. it's been nice to figure things out as i go more and more, realizing there's not consequences to something being shaped weird. it's handmade, that's the point. the newsletter doesn't need to be slick, it just needs to be written up. what matters is that it exists.
i'm into film photography and judaism now, as a direct result of being on cohost. in both cases, it was people sharing about what they loved, and what it meant to them, that made something stick in my brain in a totally new way.
when i started going to temple, i became fast friends with a man who later died abruptly the same year. it will be very difficult when his yahrzeit comes, because with it will come the knowledge that he has been dead for twice as long as i ever knew him. it was such a painfully small piece of time that he was my friend, but that window was a blessing because i almost didn't have it at all. he was funny and honest and a radical and an honest to god genius who never ran out of things to tell me about. i still think about him on friday night, about how he stood out, without argument or ill will, among the other singers, for insisting always upon the yiddish pronounciations. he's a jew who i will carry with me for the rest of my life, and i met him because of cohost.
i still don't know very much about cameras but i found something that feels good to work with, and i love talking myself hoarse about it with people new and old to the topic. it's a little like converting, in that way.
a lot of things will never be the same. i'm thinking about casting my sins into the sea in the coming week, and my nine rolls of film waiting to be developed, with photos of perfect weather in cal anderson park and the ocean and my friends smiling on them.