You who the earth was for

Your pure face turned away

I saw a church sign a few weeks ago that said KEEP THE FAITH AND STAY ENCOURAGED, GOD WILL DO MORE IN 2024. To be honest, it seemed a little apologetic, if not threatening. Even by 2020s standards, the end of 2023 felt especially bad in my circles, and the public year ahead looked grim. Nearly every member state at the UN could call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and it wouldn’t happen if the government I pay taxes to didn’t feel like forcing the issue. The presidential election would be a retread of 2020, and the information economy was melting in a pile of gray LLM goo. The last thing you could want from 2024 was more of how we were trending.

2023: Some personal highlights

"Accomplishments" is a little much but a year's a year

Got my sex changed at the DMV

Dua Lipa is fine and I am learning to hold my takes lightly

If you go girl give us nothing, nothing go girl gives also unto you

I like the new Dua Lipa song just fine. This reflects personal growth, as I subconsciously decided sometime circa 2018 that I didn’t like Dua Lipa, didn’t “get” Dua Lipa, and would actually enjoy myself less if I noticed her music was playing somewhere, reallocating a real share of my mental energy from whatever I’d been thinking about to thinking about that instead. This is dumb, obviously. I’m saying at the top that this is dumb. I hadn’t watched that video until just now and can't suppress the thought that the camera work is to choreography what the Catwoman basketball scene is to basketball, but it’s fun to look at, and the song goes. I had no good reason to avoid either of these conclusions.

I'm the mayor and I don't have $3

Remembering the time my hometown mayor tried and failed to get into a minor league baseball game, then $3, for free

I was born and mostly raised in Johnson City, TN, a medium-sized town in the upper right corner of the Tennessee parallelogram. It is the birthplace of Mountain Dew and the home of East Tennessee State University, where I was in the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music program for several years but never actually finished the minor. Its city government is run by a five-member board of commissioners, a city manager appointed by the board, and some assistant managers with special areas of oversight. Every two years, the board selects someone among themselves to be mayor, but it’s mostly a ceremonial position, for ribbon cuttings and elementary school visits and that kind of thing. This detail will be important soon.

I have seen the face of strawberry god

Your strawberry scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could

I like New York a normal amount

An introduction that's at least as much about Ohio, if we're being honest

I moved to New York in August 2020, in a Dodge Grand Caravan rented in a panic after the 12’ truck I’d scheduled was “upgraded” to a 16’ truck I had no prayer of driving to, let alone around, my new city. Before that, I’d hauled all my stuff from Columbus, Ohio to my parents’ farm in east Tennessee, where it and I would stay in an outbuilding for the two weeks between the old lease and the new sublease — essentially driving a giant checkmark across the eastern US, as though to spite Pennsylvania. The OH-TN leg had taken two trips in an eggplant-purple Honda Fit I would sell shortly afterward, six hours each way, back to back to back to back. I slept on a floor mattress in there somewhere. I don’t really remember. The last act of my Ohioan life was competing in a remote egg eating contest, where I performed respectably after heaving furniture around all day. I ate a dozen eggs in ten minutes, did my best to sleep, and got up to start loading the car.