Under the watch of Saint Bread, we made our pact.

For the uninitiated, Saint Bread is a small bakery and outdoor eating space on Portage Bay near the University of Washington Medical School. I had met up with a friend, and talking of tattoos and of years that are both short and have infinite days, I proposed pact for when our respective years are done — we go get neck tattoos.

It’s ridiculous and non-binding, but also in this world, what is here to judge us, to hold us back, especially when we are people who want to put ourselves in line, be friend-shaped to those on the margins?

Truly, it’s either this or knuckle tattoos.

This will be the third time I’ve started this newsletter this week. My last effort was 1200 words that said nothing of the heart. I was dancing around a fire and unwilling to invite anyone to the perimeter.

And three times in one week, I’ve had folks from different parts of my life indicate concern for my frank vulnerability these days. It starts with a check-in or some query of intentionality of my soul-nudity. My main response is the realization that people are actually reading this. I don’t often consider that this is read by anyone unless it is mentioned.

My best writing is improvisational and automatic. I try not to edit until the very end, and maintain work in a flow state where my ego becomes decoupled from the product.

Wait, what was I saying? See, I’m backing away again.

Write like no one is reading.

Earlier this week, I was between the rage of realizing how many years I bonsaied myself to fit in other people’s spaces, losing my creative fire, and a brief ecstatic spark kindled since returning from my trip. I started writing down my recommendations for the non-existent guidebook to your very own, cataclysmic, grief tsunami of a ‘Year of Whatever.’ Caveats of course YMMV, because “Controlled Demolition” is maybe not the best of any recommendation.

Today, I’m wearing my Holy Mountain Brewing, Aleister Crowley front, and “Death to Ego” back, t-shirt. Grief and trauma hold hands and leap from the top of the Tower to the ruins they will have to build from. It’s not that the self-destruction is inevitable but that the destruction has already happened and it’s the dissonance of a world going on while the rubble remains uncleared and ignored. I think that makes the continued destruction of self the next logical step.

This is not unfamiliar territory for me. I think that one of the quiet ways that Jon and I bonded in our early months were clinging to each other having both been survivors of precarious circumstances, and prone to somewhat dangerous ecstasies. Is it self-destruction, if you’re well-read on the topic, philosophical about it, or can that make it a controlled demolition?

I think that’s the tightrope that’s walked in this liminal space the grievers dwell. To talk about this space, to echo creation in the ruins, is to make the uninitiated uncomfortable. This world shares their world, and sometimes I see the shadows of the uninitiated cross mine.

It’s OK to be not OK except it’s not OK when you have bills to pay and a job punching an AI button to make the economic engine go vroom for a select few.

And I guess there is a freedom for me to just write and write and write because any masks I have to wear don’t fit anymore, and I know that no one is fine, really.

So take a lover or three in the delight and disgust that is the horror of the human body, and all the goo inside and out. It’s just another conversation without words.

Keep a notebook on you, one in every room, voice memos on your phone, keep record of this because someone will believe you some day when you tell them where you have travelled.

And someone might love you for it.

And above all, the point of this controlled demolition is to clear the rubble of what has already fallen, to make it safe to build again, and for others to build with you.

So I guess (as the pizzas have come out of the oven, and it’s time for me to wrap this up), I’m saying that I’m not always sure of the difference between the controlled demolition, and the self-destruction.

I do know that no matter which one it is, I need to reckon with it.