1. Throwing Down the Gauntlet •
The path may be unclear, but the destination is always the same
In BC in the winter, the short dim days bleed into long nights, and streets end abruptly in undrawn fog banks like a misty ps1 horror game.
There is apparently an epidemic of missing cats whose signs are themselves missing the information you'd need to be able to help in any way. Ink bleeding... blurred out and faded away.
The damp sticks to your skin, goes in and out of your lungs with every breath.
Elija's family of craftspeople built his late grandparent's house sometime in the 70's, and due to an ongoing dispute between its inheritors it is now held in a purgatory of complex legal escrow.
He and his father mostly live out of the basement, consuming from a bottomless well of coffee and maintaining a deep, unrelenting keto: A piece of dark chocolate with butter on it here, a sliver of a protein bar there, and one big meal a day consisting of a plate with 12 hot dogs on it or a deeply discounted pot roast.
I came here to try to force myself to do something. I signed up for a 3 month coding bootcamp called GAUNTLET AI where I had to score above the 97th percentile on an IQ test and solve 2 leetcode easys to get in. I thought having somebody somewhere expect literally anything of me might make for a good change of pace, but in addition to having no intake interview, there was a strange absence of human involvement at any stage of the process.
Begging Claude to painstakingly construct mediocre clones of existing projects step by step is a remarkably low dopamine way of building software. Like babysitting a turtle that's running a race and poking it with a stick every time it starts to veer off course. I dropped out after 24 hours.
Even after quitting, work is all that exists here. Work, a set of free weights, a comical amount of supplements and, of course, the mostly untouched remains of his grandparent's STUFF and THINGS.
Something that fundamentally sets my aesthetic sensibilities apart from other people, rendering me tragically unhirable as a designer for the last decade, is what Paul Fussel might describe as a prototypically lower-middle-class sensibility that I inherited from my mother: a fascination with salvage.
I like collecting things that are already here, unusual because they forgotten and unloved (even unlovable at times), and giving them a new home.
Living, ostentatiously at times, with bizarre mismatched combinations.
After I was kicked out of the course (instead of leaving gracefully I complained publicly on twitter until Austen Allred saw my tweets), I decided to shave off my beard in a desperate bid for narrative clarity. But I dramatically overestimated the abilities of my Henson brand safety razor, and after 10 minutes of struggle I was left with a patchy mange-like appearance on my right hand side. I will be stuck like this for 3 days waiting for the electric clippers to arrive.
Such is life in limbo.
END