Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring released in 2001, when I was seven years old. At the time, my media diet consisted mostly of watching The Powerpuff Girls and obsessively reading and re-reading the first four Harry Potter books.1 I would like to say that my father was thoughtful and felt that I would have enjoyed another fantasy series with wizards and magic but knew that a three-plus-hour theater experience was tall ask for a seven year old. Unfortunately, I know him, and I think it more likely that he is cheap and thought the movie looked cool, so when Fellowship released on home media, we trucked to the neighborhood knock-off Blockbuster and rented it on VHS. That night, I crowded with my two older siblings around a (by today’s standards) laughably small tube TV and tucked in with no expectations or understanding of what the movie would be about.
This blog started on bearblog.dev as cassie.land. Bearblog is a great platform, but I wanted a challenge in my life, I guess, so I taught myself to use Hugo and moved to esotericbullshit.net (cassie.land was repurposed for my NAS). I love the esotericbullshit moniker and URL — it makes me laugh — but as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to share your link when it contains profanity.1 Perhaps that’s copium for a growing domain purchasing addiction, but I intend to make this one stick.
My father left when I was six and never stopped leaving. At school events, scheduled visits, personal lows, I scanned the crowd for his face and didn’t find it. I grew used to his absence and started to resent the appearances he made; when he did show up, I’d wish he hadn’t. At my college graduation, he parted with the gift, “I’m glad you’re not a fuck up like me,” turning my achievements into his own deluded, narcissistic pursuit of sympathy. He at least — and unwittingly — stumbled upon a truth: I succeeded despite his example and influence. Never because of it.
Since I moved this site to Hugo, I’ve been using an app called GitJournal to post from my phone. I have a beautiful desk setup with a clacky mechanical keyboard that’s a joy to write on, but the simple fact is that I’m a lazy shit and want to update my blog from the couch. It’s all mostly worked fine, with some headaches. I originally intended to use GitJournal to store my Github repo to my phone’s filesystem and then point an Obsidian1 vault at that.
My thirtieth birthday party, the day before my actual turn from one decade to the next, was a beautiful night. My mom, both pre-emptively staking out her territory as an Italian-American grandmother and (past but an adverb?) fulfilling regrets at never having been able to throw me a childhood party, brought too much food and snacks and love — or staying up and out past the early afternoon, which is a kind of love for us; my friends, older than me in years and with busy families and schedules, brought wisdom and comfort in growing older gracefully; and my friends closer in age drove great distances to celebrate me — or at least, with me.