2024 in review
a fast and loose reflection, published several days into 2025
This was a year of wild karmic re-balancing. The universe giveth, taketh, giveth back, taketh no backsies, and ended with a grunted “huh-wha?” First time traveling internationally. First time discovering the the very real sensation of bed bug-related PTSD. First time posting regularly online in what feels like ages. First time having my living space be targeted with window-smashing vandalism and assault. First time riding a bike extensively since Junior High. First time giving myself food poisoning. But before I get too deep into the “woe is me territory:”
An incomplete list of gratitudes
Affordable housing
The peace of downsizing
the film Hundreds of Beavers
Living what felt like an ascetic for the majority of summer.
New friendships and connections
Events produced by Look at This
An affordable studio space I’ll be moving into mid-feb
Permission to slacken my focus on one medium, exploring visual art without an end-goal of profit
Kate, for funding and encouraging a life-changing international trip
A monthly-ish practice of shrooms for meditation and reflection
Discovering the limits of my stubbornness in refusing help.
The transformational hopes brought on from it being the year of the dragon.
I went into this year excited but feeling defeated. I just left a situation of living with an ex after sleeping on a couch for Too Long, jumped into living in a house with four wonderful randos, and completed an artist residency with a large event that left me absolutely shucked. Leaving this year. there’s still more rest to be done, but the optimism remains.
An incomplete list of images that lingered during
Bogs and bog bodies
Airing out the smoke of the smoldering fire in my belly
A laughing moon
Spaces that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside
Staged radio shows
Creature design and a deepening fascination with horror structure.
Automata
Labyrinths
Thrones made of trees
Nestling within the nooks and curvatures of nature
Bed bugs, in my nightmares
Loose intentions
Build a profitable amusement enterprise
Deepen creative healing
Be gayer in my community connections and, sorry immediate family members, pleasure
Be closer with family, blood and chosen
Reader beware: the rest of this post is navel-gazing — indulgent and imperfect. The following reflections are like old maps of the uncharted world: there be drag-ons.
January
Collaged the fuck out of what I wanted for this year. Caught COVID and lost my voice for three weeks. Got deep into anthology shows from the 80s and early 90s after discovering Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. Holy shit, it’s everything I could love in an anthology show:
O. Henry twists earned within 30 minutes
Stories and pacing are legit great, at least for the first three or four seasons. Direction honors the tension built in the prose.
Largely great performances by a rotating cast of poeple (a surprising amount of Phyllis Diller!)
Roald Dahl introducing each episode’s story by fireside. I cannot stress enough how much I love it when stories have intros like this.
Most importantly for me, directly related to my enjoyment of all anthology shows I delved into this year:
A wildly inconsistent tone and quality among episodes.
The New Twilight Zone nailed this. In an hour-long episode featuring two to three stories of varying length, you could get a five minute comedy about Sherman Hemsley outsmarting the devil, or a devastating 30-minute drama about aphasia. There’s no way to know!! You could get a story about tween boys meeting a leprechaun where everyone learns an important lesson to a soundtrack of fun and farty tubas. Then out of nowhere, you see George F.F. Martin’s screenwriting credit for something with not even a hint of fantasy murder!
The most entertaining anthology shows evoke a sense of “What the f— am I watching” followed by rapt attention.
If you’re gonna watch one of the more serious ones that has aged like fine wine, the episode Quarantine is one of my favorites (not virus related.)
Feburary
Healing my voice one week before a musical comedy set for everyone’s favorite possessed automaton Freak Sinatra. The show line-up was:
Fan dance
Bellydance
Burlesque
Bellydance
Me, a person in a suit playing a jazz standard parody torch song to a cosmic horror
A band
I honestly almost dropped off after being bed-ridden and voiceless for a long time, but I started an ADHD workshop program and reorganized my week to make a costume and rehearse what I wrote before health took a turn.
I received two compliments about the show that affirmed what I love about comedic performance. I was told I wore a brave and captivating vulnerability despite being the only fully-clothed performer.
Wanted to perform more. Didn’t! In hindsight, I’m good with it, but was incredibly frustrating at the time,
Also, watched Hundreds of Beavers. Highly recommend. A 2024 black and white silent comedy. Live action Looney Toons. Even in the few parts where I found myself rolling my eyes, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer audacity it takes to make a nanobudget movie that swings for the fences.
March
Hosted a collage night with co-conspirator Jess Smoot at The Dorothy, a wonderful queer-femme bar that had us over for their Enby night. We pre-cut limbs, heads, bodies, etc for people to build monster. I set up an ELMO projector so people can participate in a live and ever-changing collage of primarily French art-nouveau posters. I fucking loved this and crave to do more events. Fortunately, one came up in…
April
Lunar eclipse! Come join me and the smiling moon in ushering an era of delight.
Helped produce an unhinged poetry show called Word of Mouth with typewriter poet extrodinare Kro! Built a small cardboard installation for writing poetry by threading words along. I don’t have a pic of the finished product readily available, but here’s it mid-make, plus other bits I produced and some poster-jamming I did to promote the show:
Also, Kro has a great Substack about being a typewriting poet. Go follow Kro now.
May
This is when my year starts to kinda suck! Bed bugs! Chronic car problems! The general feeling of being lost! Couldn’t get to my mom’s house in the burbs to spend time, and felt embarrassed that my life could feel so precarious at times. I began clowning again, which, after a few times on stage sparked the realization that something is still amiss in my performing life that seeks remedy.
The big freeing moment here was taking healing arts workshops at Life Force Shamanic Arts in Chicago (though you can Zoom in from anywhere.) I didn’t realize how ungrounded I had become since the upheaval of the past few years. Joan does important work I haven’t seen anywhere else, and with a humility (and price) that is refreshing compared to other practitioners I’ve worked with. I went on to deepen my education throughout the rest of the year. Hooray to mixing comedic arts with healing arts! We’ll see where I’m at by the end of next year.
Psst — In early 2025, the plan is to set up a monthly energy work free clinic featuring several practitioners with varied modalities. Stop by, tips encouraged but not expected. More details will follow.
June
fuck this month.
Good: Worked with Kro on Rat Hole Music Fest, super excited about this.
Challenging: Biking everywhere while having lingering tiredness and ache from long COVID put me out for a whole week of bedrest.
THEN, the day before the fest, I ate some chicken and rice that decided to hang out in my esophagus. Not choking, mind you. Just chilling. Impervious to water, blocker of any additional food. At hour six of the blockage, I biked to the emergency room and spent the night on anxiety meds. I’m assuming it was a mix of anxiety and acid reflux? Plus, this strange throat thing has popped up in my family before. Woke up fine, but they still wanted to check out my throat and stomach, so I wasn’t discharged until roughly 6p.
Add continued bed bug management and making good on a promise to get rid of a bunch of possessions… the month was exhaustion and a panic attack. 1/10 would not recommend.
July
Through a mysterious benefactor (my game design friend Kate,) I was able visit Crete for an informal convention/birthday get-away focused on designing possibility spaces and changing player’s relationship to playing. It felt validating. It was beautiful. I’ve felt a struggle in sharing my approach to play as an access point to spirituality, and this event helped codify some beliefs that had previously been amorphous. Met a bunch of great people! Led a new moon ritual (oh how I’ve missed those!)
First time traveling out of the country! Nervous! So many gorgeous vistas, but my camera roll is mainly anarchist graffiti.
August + September
Blurry! I recommitted to quiet goals earlier in the year to having a more entrepenurial spirit.
I started a project of creating an oracle deck out of paint swatches. It is currently a 80-ish card deck called I n t e r i o r s, ranging a rainbow of colors with names that evoke natural place and inner landscapes. If I post here again (as previously stated in other posts, I’m only doing this as long as I enjoy it,) I’ll probably delve into that process. I started doing daily readings on Insta. As a reflective exercise, colors and names prompt realizations and identify life patterns. As a creative exercise, writing analysis for each pull was a massage for my strained writing muscles.
If i didn’t start this oracle card experiment using paint swatches i collected from Home Depot, I would not have started writing on Substack again.
October
Hazy! I dropped 20 pounds after biking all summer, and I started a super-secret podcast project shhh. Overall a good time? Statistically, certainly anxious. Focused on survival and self-expression. Continued posting swatches regularly. Dropped plans to go to NYC for my favorite annual punk cabaret celebration of life. Also, like, I think I was sick for halloween week proper? Bah to it all.
Watched Frankie Freako, a hyper-specific pastiche of 80s movies, inspired by an actual tv ad for a chat hotline where kids could talk to a monster puppet with badditude. Again, audacity.
On the plus side, I saw a Jim Henson exhibit with the fam and met an angel.
November
Unknown persons vandalized our house the Thursday after the election, and continued every two weeks into mid-December. Windows smashed on multiple occasions and a roommate maced outside our house. My windshield bashed in with what looks like four good hammer whacks. The rental company promised cameras that never materialized, so we had to make due with the help of community. It all sucked. BUT Thanksgiving with family restored connections I have previously struggled to feel present in.
Election day landed on the same day as my dad’s birthday, who passed away 15 years ago. He would have haaaaated this political reality. I took a long walk at night, talking with him about how everything is wildly fucked.
Watched The Substance, followed by Altered States. Four great tastes that taste great together (iykyk.) Altered States is my favorite horror movie featuring Bob Balaban, though I will entertain recommendations.
December
I felt this was generally covered over the last few posts?? After writing throughout the year, I am taking more chances with sharing writing. Life is becoming a marathon rally against perfectionism. I’m proud of the krampus page, and want to make more pages. Optimistic about stillness this winter. Moving into a studio apt come mid-Feb with an insanely good subsidy. Looking forward to the new life that may bring.
Add in the recurring theme of learning my relationship to relationships and boundaries and, whew boy, what a year!
A framework has been laid out for next year. Honoring my promise to not promise future projects, I’m excited for wherever the year takes me.