A couple years ago, two friends and I went to maybe the worst comedy show of our life. It was so bad that one comic called the energy “funeral core” and he wasn’t wrong. It opened on a dead dog joke, and no one was really able to lift us from that space.

One of the last comics of the night said he had a trick that would shake the audience awake no matter how bad things go. He said he liked to tell people it was his birthday because they’d hoot and cheer from reflex. We laughed. It was one of the first good natured and easy laughs of the night.

Anyways, tomorrow is my birthday and I was going to email out a post based on that comic’s idea. I mean, you have to read the birthday post.

But I’ve decided that, instead, I want to do what I want to do.

I want to take a look at all the creative work I’ve poured into myself over the last year or so, and see what I’ve distilled it down to. I hope this serves as a time capsule for me, of sorts.

This is my creative eco system right now!

“Telling my story” is a smaller part of that system right now because I have spent the last couple years looking for a shape I could wrap it around. I didn’t know I was looking until I found it and now I’m sort of impatient to get started. I keep reminding myself that I’ve had the brakes on for years and I can wait a little while longer while life stuff gets settled.

Right now, telling my story means occasional blog posts, a few zines a year, and creating a massive amount of illustrations as I figure out my style.

On the other side is “Helping people create and think creatively”. There’s a lot of projects here but everything on the “lowering barrier” side is collaborative. Biggest Little Zine Fair and PocketArt work pretty much the same way — interested creatives submit a small amount of art that we1 then help sell. 100% of proceeds go back to the artist and then they get to be part of community. Cheer Peppers is a month-long challenge in November that encourages bloggers to churn out a post a day. We2 support by reading and by offering an informal, non-carceral container to participate.

On the resource sharing side, I have Kites Library, a resource-sharing archive on carceral matters. In a similar field, I also have knowledge-building zines about any topic I want people to know about (firefighting in prison, autism, how to be a helper), usually either framed around question-first thinking, or personal writing. Lastly, there’s &Friends Contracting, a creative agency for small, soulful projects that need a little help to finally get done. There’s a bonus project in this category that hasn’t been developed enough to put on the graphic, but I want to list it because it’s showing me a new direction that I see coming in the future. It’s called Gild & Give and it’s hyper specific gift lists for neurodivergent folk. Eventually, it’ll provide real information on how to navigate stuff and gifting culture. For now, it’s just lists.

And that’s it. That’s what I most want to log about year 40. I lived despite the odds, and I led with creativity, and I loved the laundry-load of life I’ve been given so many chances on.

Time for 41! Happy birthday to me!3