legacy
noun[ C ]
us /ˈleɡ·ə·si/
Like many, I grew up in an unstable emotionally and verbally violent household. Like less many, once I was old enough to successfully rebel I sought refuge in anger, drugs, and the bowels of the rotten.com version of the 90’s (which effected my mental health and inner world exactly how one might expect).
In 1995 I was a fixture in the hacking community, spending most of my adolescence dumping online, buying nirvana bootlegs on USEnet, venting slurs on IRC, attending DEFCON, and spending a short stint directing operations of a retail computer store in my home town of Sacramento. I first began selling my artwork as a freelance web designer in 1996 while exploring self photography as I ran one in the first wave of internet sadgirl webcams online.
In 1998, I relocated to break software and run test labs in Seattle, transitioning client-based chat service networks to what would eventually become the centralized web-based social media fuckshow we have today. In my tech era’s death rattle, I worked a bit on burgeoning smartphones as well.
Somewhere in between obsessively documenting my personhood and wildly oscillating between being an encouraging sagelike armchair therapist and a punitive aggressive asshole, I was active in the digital music era at the turn of the century, recording, mixing, and releasing independent ambient electronic music at mp3.com under the moniker “Not Applicable”. The contrast between my vicious commentaries and the vulnerable, tender music I was making developed a small but mighty international fanbase of gen-x geeks and weirdos.
Discovering circus in 2001 was my gateway to reconciling communication with my alienated body, eventually combining performance, emotional expression, mindfulness, exercise, and teaching others. By 2003 I had left the tech industry in a characteristic self righteous huff, had figured out my behavior and origins were abusive and that I could do something about that, thus the holistic healing journey I am still on began. In 2005 various forms of therapy to various levels of affect had followed, deepening the content and overall timbre of my online presence as well as my artwork.
By 2007 I performed regularly as a resident aerialist and ensemble troupe member at a Seattle underground theater, working full time administrating a medical office, and attending massage school at night. Over the next few years I directed three stage shows, and beginning in 2009 I served three years as the board president, co-founder and creative director of Vita Arts, a 501(c)(3) as part of my first wobbly and problematic forays into activism. With Vita, I designed the Integrated Workshop, a mesh of performance and teaching that tore down the fourth wall; one of my favorite things to do as a director as well as performer.
In 2008 I went into massage business as Artful Touch where I eventually integrated the work of Karen Clay’s Somatic Unwinding and became certified to teach The Grief Recovery Method in 2014. That same year the murder of Michael Brown found me washing teargas out of eyes in Seattle’s streets, and I began the long painful process of ultimately shedding virtually all of what had become my life.
In 2015 I moved into a van and traveled the country, touring music and chicken little’ing about the impending falling sky while sustained by odd jobs and a small group of Patreon supporters. I returned to Seattle in the summers to work with DirtCorps restoring wetlands, installing green water infrastructure ala Rainwise, and working to support the White Center Food Bank with fresh food grown at Citysoil urban farm. In 2018, after multiple years on the road, I settled for a time in Tacoma, WA re-establishing Artful Touch and participating in climate activism with 350 Tacoma.
In 2020, COVID-19 invited me to pivot hard from demonstrating into mutual aid, finish off the final iteration of my healing practice, and accept after multiple decades I’d reached burnout. Covid also obliterated most of my faith in the working class to confederate to usurp the rise of fascism. In the first months of the pandemic I genuinely anticipated at least enough of the proletariat would collectively rise up to use our precious moment of real economic leverage to push for genuine change and care. I hadn’t gotten my shit properly sorted out, but I thought I was an outlier, that we would ultimately stick together, and I thought I knew what my role in that looked like.
Turns out, we as collective couldn’t even take mildly inconvenient long term precautions to protect one another from preventable death and disability via viral pandemic we’d all been hearing about being on the brink of experiencing for decades. Over time and as more people in my life who originally prioritized things like masking relaxed and forgot, I devolved into despondent resentment and hid, revisiting the dark teenage years of near total isolation while “society” doubled and tripled down on excluding “disposable” people from participating in life.
What little faith I had left in so-called “civilization” pulling it’s fucking head out of its ass was crushed in 2023 along with Gaza, replaced with a profound and lingering disgust I still struggle with daily.
It is now 2025, and once again I face the reality that the privileges I feel a constant pressure to protect and retain despite the great cost, things I have grown to identify as resources that support and bolster me – like my ability to isolate, identify with alienating behaviors, addiction, and my relative insulation from the realities that BIPOC and disabled people already understood before covid hit them the hardest – have culminated in social and moral deficit more than fuel for me or for anyone else.
Thirty years after embarking upon, eventually reaching escape velocity, and subsequently returning to an excessively isolated and largely selfish existence of impotent criticism and actualizing myself creatively online to remain in some form of twisted connection with other people, I’d come a long way. And, as was the case the first time, I emerged from the experience shaking off many false notions I had of myself and feeling fundamentally changed.
What interest I have retained in expressing art as the focus of my life, and what little was left of my sense of myself as the leader, teacher, and liberal whisperer “healer” I was is dissolved. I look back to what I once thought I could be aligned with and not only do I see a superficial soulless hole there now, I recognize I always felt that crater, a suckwound of constant discontent with my life and my impacts, no matter how much validation and support I received.
I’m sick to fucking death of staring at my own pixelated smirky face, inviting myself to be consumed as content, telling the same core story of overcoming my bullshit over and over again hoping it incites other people to change. I’ve found myself committed to relative obscurity in terms of what used to be a very public attention seeking persona broadcasting a dramatized post-produced version of a magnetic personality forged in self exploitive capitalist “fight fire with fire” hustle culture that has been impossible to genuinely connect with, or through.
In my mid 40’s my attention has shifted from staring at (and screaming about) the glaring harm western society has foisted upon the world and ourselves, to the quiet study and practice of concepts like postactivism and transformative justice.
May “God” forgive us all for our shared complicity, and guide me, specifically, through another round of deep transformative healing, the reemergence of interconnection, and toward a completely new social paradigm I’m incapable of imagining myself belonging to, yet.