Back in the day, tapes were my preferred (only) method of owning music. I’d make pause tapes off the radio, buy lil cheap tapes from the BX when I thought the clerk wouldn’t notice the “explicit lyrics” sticker, and dub them off friends. My mom had CDs, and my uncle had CDs, and I would dub those, too.

This was long before I even knew earbuds were a thing, so I rolled with hand-me-down cassette players and giant (relative to the size of my head) earphones. I got hype when I finally got a tape player with auto-reverse. A side effect of having giant earphones is that it’s easy to tell when someone is listening to music, and if you were, say, my grandfather, that gave you an opportunity to inquire about your grandson’s wellbeing and taste in music. After, you could confiscate the tapes out of concern for the fact your grandson is putting poison directly into his ears.

He took a lot of my tapes, and it’d take the intervention of my mom to get them back, nine times out of ten. One time out of ten I would steal them back, but that would either require waiting long enough for him to forget he had it or getting caught because he definitely didn’t forget. I swear I heard my Wu-Chronicles tape one and a half times before he took that and I didn’t get it back until I moved to Spain a year later.

At one point, later that same year, I picked up Chant Down Babylon on cassette, a Bob Marley compilation featuring remixes of his songs by R&B, rap, and rock musicians. I liked it because it was more or less a murderer’s row of people I was into—Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Krazyie Bone, Guru, Rakim, Flipmode Squad, Lost Boyz, MC Lyte, Chuck D, and The Roots—sharpening up songs I wasn’t familiar with or wasn’t entirely into.

I’m big on black history and loving the skin you’re in, but I’m not really a Bob Marley dude. I don’t hate reggae, I’ll bang it on occasion, but I don’t love it or have the depth of knowledge needed to love it. It’s aight, basically. If Legend comes on shuffle, I’ll let it ride. My mom owned that one and a couple others, and we used to sing along to stuff like “Buffalo Soldier” in the car, so I’ll forever love singing Marley songs, but I don’t do a lot of independent listening. I liked this album a lot, though, because it had All My Favorites.

Also, my cunning teenage brain saw it as an opportunity. It’s pretty clean, as far as lyrics go. The raps were hot and Bob Marley was cool or whatever, so maybe this was the album where I could finally convince my grandfather rap was the new hotness. So I pass him the tape with a “Hey, you might like this!” thinking I’m slick. He takes it and some time passes. He eventually gives it back to me, and I’m thinking I not only won, but that I’ll get my Wu-Chronicles back on my schedule, not his. I ask him what he thought.

He thinks for a minute, laughs, and says, “Well, grandson, I think they did ol’ Bob dirty with that one.”

Months later, I stole the tape and left the country.

Last year, and the first half of this year honestly, delivered a series of wake-up calls, frustrations, terrifying moments of clarity, and downers. It made me realize that I had a life that I had gotten comfortable in, but it was not a life I needed or deserved. I was maintaining, treading water, instead of enjoying it and living up to my potential. I needed to fix myself, and the problem is that I did, and do, not know how to do that.

I came up with a plan anyway. The biggest part of that plan was the imposition of order onto my life, a schedule I try and follow, and reinvigorating my sense of discipline. I doubled down on the work ethic my grandfather taught me and all the hard or annoying lessons about sacrifice and getting things done I was tricked into learning as a kid. I’ll probably talk about that at a later date.

I’ve been steadily working, with breaks for school, since I was 14. My first freelance gig was around ten years ago. I’ve been aware of my depression eight or nine years now. When I was younger, I thought I avoided it by working. I wrote until the wee hours of the morning often, I worked until I got bored, and I slept a lot because I was tired all the time. When I got a salaried job, it took a lot of time for me to change gears, but even that job required unpaid overtime at a few different points over the calendar year, so any time I switched gears, it was all too easy to fall back into old habits.

I moved to San Francisco in 2007 and had to figure out how to live on my own, be an adult, get used to a new city, and build a social life. It was stressful, but fun, because it was new. I made mistakes, I had fun, and it was worth the time. But last year, in the throes of the blackest mood I’d felt in a while, I realized it wasn’t enough. I don’t do enough. I don’t like enough. I wasn’t happy enough.

As part of my vague plan to fix my life, I decided that I needed to enjoy more. I try to say yes when friends ask me out, though sometimes circumstances and inertia make me feel okay with flaking out. But I do try, because I want to do things.

Late last year, I moved from San Francisco to Oakland. The move brought with it my first roommate, a lot more space, and, of all things, a balcony. It’s not a big balcony, or even particularly cool. It’s got entirely too many spiderwebs, for one thing, and the tree that’s nearest to the edge (within touching distance) ranges from very pretty to very gross, because it’s sick with something. The balcony faces the two buildings behind my place, with a thin sliver of street viewable, and I’m on the first floor, so the sky is limited, too. But I have a nice little angle on the sky and the trees next door, a little more blue than green, and the weather tends to be much nicer in Oakland than it ever was in SF.

I went to Target. I bought an ugly green lawn chair and a small table. I put both on my balcony, and now my balcony is one of my favorite places. I spend as much time out there as I can, weather permitting. When I get off work, I’ll go and sit and read, snack, tweet about rap music, listen to music, or think through whatever I’m working on at the time.

On the weekends, I’ll take naps outside. I need to buy a straw hat like we had when I was a kid for a proper nap, but I get by. I’ll spend hours outdoors on a Saturday, streaming TV or movies or music to my laptop while I enjoy the weather and sky. I was wiped out for the 4th of July this year, thanks to a fun-but-heavy work event earlier in the week. Low sleep, new scars on three outta four limbs (minor on my arms, less-so on my legs), and sore muscles left me too exhausted to go to anybody’s cookout, so I took it easy. I read outside, I napped outside, I napped inside, and I played video games inside.

My balcony won’t fix my life in and of itself, but I do enjoy it. It’s sacred to me. I avoid working outside, though I will fool around on tumblr or edit something I’ve written. It’s an oasis of not-work, an exclusive club that only lets in things I enjoy. I’d probably spend a little more on the lawn chair if I had to start over from scratch, but it works. It feels good.

I needed to carve out this space for myself. I have workaholic, hermetic, and depressive tendencies. My default state is self-protective–“The prickly outer shell’s genetic, it helps defense mode/But it also helps to fuck up a couple of sacred friendships”–and that isn’t necessarily how I want or need to be. It has its benefits, but it can’t be the whole experience, so I’ve been trying to consciously dismantle it for a while now. The balcony helps. It’s a step forward, rather than marching in place.

Getting there.

I really like Fabolous. Probably more than anyone you’ve ever met, I bet. He’s my platonic ideal, more or less, of what a rapper can be. He’s lyrical and thugged out, but he likes rocking over R&B and pop-oriented beats, too. I feel like not a lot of people strike that balance very well, but Fab sticks the landing. But really, I like dude because he’s a comedian, and I’ll take a laugh over basically any other subject matter in rap, period. He’s made two different comedy-themed songs with the Clipse (“Comedy Central” and “Joke’s On You”) for no reason at all. He’s generally funny, and even his murder rhymes are smiley face bars. The Soul Tape 2, a free mixtape he put out last year, is really good. It’s one of my favorite rap releases in the past year. “For the Love,” “We Get High,” “Life Is So Exciting,” and “BITE” have videos, if you’re curious. But the part of the album that sticks out the most for me is probably this one from “For the Love:”

You squares could never stop me, y’all try angles to play me
Two lines for you fuck boys; pause that, now play me

Far as I’m concerned, this is basically genius. It bends in on itself and is dense as heck. It works on a few levels, and it works perfectly on each level. I especially like the way “two lines” transforms into a pause button, which has two lines, then “play me” brings it back to triangles. It’s a reflection of the structure of the line before it. There’s a slang meaning for that second line, too. “Two lines” meaning deuces meaning BYE. A “fuck boy” is your everyday average punk, in this specific case haters who thought Fab didn’t have bars. “Pause that”–Fab has to say “pause that” because he said “fuck boys,” which sounds like “fuck boys,” and that sounds gay and so you need a no homo in there somewhere to even things out.

This is the thing that sucks about rap. Its highs and lows are all tangled up together, so even when I’m enjoying what I love most about the music, I’m still untangling it in the back of my head. While I understand the logic behind “no homo,” every time I hear it I stop in my tracks, because “no homo” represents the exact opposite of what rap is about. So much of what makes rap something I really, seriously love has to do with confidence, whether that means having the confidence to get on the mic and bare your soul or to lie and lie well about who you are and where you’re from, and that makes “no homo” one of the wackest, weakest thing you could possibly say.

You can’t be the biggest, baddest dude on campus and still be so afraid of just being confused for possibly being a gay dude for even a moment that you feel obligated to throw in disclaimers into conversation, just in case someone possibly takes your double entendre as anything other than a joke. That doesn’t track. It’s not confident. It’s an example of pure insecurity, I think. Even if you strip out the homophobia out of the equation entirely, it’s still an incredibly soft thing for a rapper to say. It’s about being afraid, and that’s it. I feel like a real man would just say what he wants to say and dare somebody to test him.

“No homo” and “pause” bum me out, basically, for the obvious reasons and thanks to the fact that they’re a huge speed bump in something I really enjoy. It’s a reminder that I’m listening to a person play a role or make stuff up out of whole cloth. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it pops my suspension of disbelief, because I guess that is a thing I have for music now. I stop believing in the song and can’t sink into it any more.

From a craft standpoint, it’s simply bad writing. It’s weird to sit down, come up with a line, be pleased in those lines, and then build in a disclaimer. No one has to say something that they feel could be misconstrued. It’s like backing yourself into a corner. On top of that, “no homo” isn’t flexible. Outside of a few cheap hits (“no promo,” “no pomo,” etc), you can’t really flip it and load it down with meaning. “Pause” can be flipped, “bitch” can mean a man, woman, dog, car, blunt, sucker, building, room, or u-turn, but “no homo” is pretty much always gonna mean “Nope, still not gay!”

“No homo” feels like a very uncreative part of an exceedingly creative art form, in part because I never really grew up around it or had it in my vocabulary. It’s not that I wasn’t homophobic or around homophobia—just the opposite, obviously—but that’s now how it was expressed around me or how I expressed it. “That’s gay” was one thing, but I didn’t know “no homo” as an ongoing thing until I was grown and had already started really listening to rap and figuring out what I was cool with and what I’m not. So it’s actually easy for me to point at it and reject it. “No homo” isn’t a part of me, so it’s nothing, but “suck my dick?” That’s harder to let go of.

I don’t remember exactly when, some time between 2003 and 2005, I came home from college. My older aunt called me and told me that Lita, my younger aunt’s best friend, had died. I was quiet for a moment, and then I said, “Okay.” She asked me if I was all right, and I told her yes. We hung up, and I think I might have taken a second for myself, and then I went about whatever my business was at the time. Lunch, maybe. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even grieve, thinking back. She died, I found out, and life went on.

It’s not that I didn’t like Lita. Just the opposite. She was a constant fixture in my house growing up. My younger aunt is around nine years older than me, just old enough to want to tease me when I got old enough to be teased, and Lita was around the same age. She was familiar enough that it feels weird to type her full name. She was always Lita, and sometimes Lita Mae when my grandmom was around, I think. Like my uncle’s friends Tick and Charles (I called him Chuck when I was younger, I thought I was funny), she was sort of my friend, too. My cousin was closer to Lita, I think, because she was good friends with Lita’s younger brother and son. But she wasn’t a stranger.

Lita’s death was my introduction to death as an adult, and it bothers me that my reaction was numb or non-existent. I never talked to anyone about it, I never stayed up about it… I never felt anything. I feel more about not feeling anything than I do about her actual death.

Part of it is my memory. It’s not hard to picture her, but it is hard to remember her. She’s a collection of sounds and visuals that don’t quite coalesce. I remember her face and her smile. She laughed different than most people, not a giggle and not a guffaw. If I had to type it out, it’d have the first three letters of hyuk, but without the yokel associations. She laughed like it began down in her toes and rolled up until it reached her mouth, like a reverse avalanche. It was throaty, diaphragm-y.

She liked elephants. That was her thing. I’m not sure why, I don’t think I ever asked, but that was it. My mom sent me one of the elephants Lita gave her a few years ago, I think just because she was moving houses and had no space for it. I look at it sometimes and I think, “Oh, Lita liked elephants.”

She had a son. He was young when she died, though I guess he isn’t any more. He was young enough that I didn’t want to hang out with him when I was a kid, but in reality, I’m probably just ten or twelve years older than him, like my aunt’s just nine older than me. She had a couple brothers. Her mother is still around, I think. It’s sad.

I sometimes think about her and why I feel the way I do. It feels deficient, almost, like I’ve failed her. Like I owed her a classic grieving period for all the times we had, but I don’t remember them and therefore failed her. I don’t know what she liked to eat, listen to, or do. I remember watching one of those custom music video tapes her and my aunt did. It was corny and funny, but a time capsule. It was 1992 in a nutshell. That’s sort of how I see her, me being a pre-teen and her hanging out with my aunt. Frozen in that specific time, that memory.

I’m not sure why I wanted to write this. It felt like something I needed to say to someone, anyone. I wish I could remember her better.

I quit my day job on Monday.

It was the second career change I’ve hit in the past month. ComicsAlliance closed a month ago. I knew the Friday before the news broke across the comics internet. It was a surprise, and an unpleasant one, but I took the weekend to get used to the idea and start making plans for the future. I worked through it, got over it, and moved on before everyone else found out it happened.

I hung out with people, I had some nice times, and then the week started. People slowly started noticing, rumors started flying, and people started talking about what ComicsAlliance meant to them. Some people were hilariously negative, but most were overwhelmingly positive.

I didn’t dwell on the reaction to the closure, but it was hard to miss. I’m on Twitter during my workday because I like to take brief breaks while I work, and it’s nice to be able to hop off, have a conversation and hop back on. I write quickly, so it doesn’t particularly set me back or anything. But that day, it seemed like every tweet and retweet was about ComicsAlliance.

It made everything real in a way being told about the closure over IM didn’t. I thought I’d made my peace with it, but I didn’t. I realized that it actually did hurt more than I expected it to, and that forced me to think a lot about where I’m at, where I’m going, and what I was capable of doing.

That part sucked. I’m not particularly great at doing commercial posts, the kind that bring in the hits, and I don’t care about reviewing the same comics week-in, week-out. Who cares, right? I could bend and do those things, but I’d be faking it. I’d be hacking it out. That, to me, is a worse sin than being bad at something. Do it or don’t, but don’t do it in half-measures.

I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to do and what I felt I could reasonably do. I had this plan to go full freelance by the end of the year, and had started reaching out to people to see if I could make that happen. Not so much — everyone wants one or two pieces every now and then, but nobody wants a regular stream of features. Something’s better than nothing, but something didn’t quite fit my goals. Something would keep me where I am, instead of pushing forward. It would be treading water, when what I really needed was to swim. I’ve been treading for years, I realized, and that wasn’t good enough.

I put a lot of thought into what I do, offline and online, and decided I needed a change. That’s why this site exists, to give me a chance to do something I need to do in order to move forward.

Quitting my day job, the thing that pays my rent, wasn’t part of the plan, until suddenly it was a necessity. I made the decision one day and, just like when CA closed, I thought it through and I was comfortable with it, or at least accepting of it. There were a couple weeks of hardcore turmoil, but when I made the decision, I felt better. I’d been talking it over with friends, too, which helps me process things.

I gave two weeks notice on Monday morning. I walked to Starbucks in the afternoon with a few friends, and pretty much as soon as we left the office I told them. They were real supportive, which is nice. Nice is understating it, maybe. But I felt good about it. Even still, it didn’t feel real until I was walking to the bus. My eyes were watery and my head was full of bees. It had finally sunk in.

Listen: I’m 29 years old. I turn 30 in November. I’ve been doing this job, or some variant thereof, for eight years. I did two years freelance. I’ve been working with people in and around this company since 2004 or 2005. I quit college and moved to San Francisco in 2007 when I went full-time with a salary. I got an apartment that was as expensive as it was small and I lived there for five and a half years. I’ve been through four offices and a lot of interns. I’ve flown to Japan for this job. I’ve had this job longer than I’ve intentionally done just about anything in my entire life. 4thletter! is the only thing that comes close to beating it, I think. This gig is older than most of my friendships, even.

I moved around a lot as a kid. I went to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools. That’s nine schools for thirteen years of education. I rarely spent more than two years in the same house. I quickly learned how to make friends (be funny) and how to get over losing friends (put it out of your head).

It’s less true now. I think I’m still pretty good at making friends, but giving up friends? Giving up other things? I always underestimate what it’s gonna feel like. I feel bad, then I get over feeling bad, and then I realize, no, I’m not done yet. I didn’t process it as well as I thought I did.

I have new things coming, things I think are gonna be pretty cool, but it’s weird to shut the door on two major parts of my life, to turn away from almost ten years of my life, and see what’s next. I have faith things will work out okay, but it’s no less terrifying than it was when it was a hypothetical scenario. But I’m getting by. I’m getting used to the idea. I’ve got another week of normal left and then I’ll figure it out as I go along.

I had this joke I wanted to tweet last year as I shifted mental gears from a too-brief stay in Los Angeles back to what’s needed for day-to-day life in San Francisco. I don’t remember how I was going to structure the tweet exactly, mainly because I was pretty wiped out at that moment, but it was something like “shout-out to everybody else who makes peace with their own death every time they get on an airplane.” It’s half-jokes, but it’s half-true, too. I didn’t tweet it because I was about to get onto a plane and it seemed like it was in terrible taste. Reality spent a lot of 2012 calling every bluff I could come up with, and the last thing I needed was a plane to fall out of the sky and it to be my fault.

But yeah, basically: at some point in the past five years I started being afraid of airplanes. Not afraid to the point that I don’t fly when I need to, obviously, but afraid in the sense that I pay too much attention to every dip, shudder, and jerk when we’re in the air. The Fear came as a big surprise to me. I’ve been flying alone since I was a kid. I grew up grooving on fighter jets and dog fights. I’ve seen the Blue Angels several times. My hometown is near an active air base. I’ve been flying since you could do teary goodbyes at the gate instead of at the curb. Flying was how I got from Home to wherever Not-Home was at the time. It was essential, and I liked planes enough that it was fun. But that changed as I got older and I didn’t even realize it until it was too late.

The pilot on my trip to LA last year said something that threw me off, but also threw the root of my problem with planes into extreme focus. He was explaining the amenities and flight time, as usual, and he mentioned that we’d “reached our cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet… or seven miles.”

The thing is, thirty-three thousand feet is an absurd number. It’s not real. You can’t point and say “I live thirty-three thousand feet in that direction.” You can’t really grasp it. It’s a big number, in the way that a light year is big or the Pacific Ocean is big. It’s so big that it’s almost fake. It’s a number that’s big enough that all you can do is nod sagely and go “Yeah, huh, that’s pretty big.”

Seven miles, though, is concrete. It’s a small number. It’s an honest number. I know exactly how long seven miles is. I know how long it takes to drive seven miles. San Francisco is seven miles across and seven miles down. In middle and high school, when I didn’t care about physical fitness, I could walk a mile in about fifteen minutes, just enough to make the grade but not nearly fast enough to excel. I’m faster now, but let’s assume a base mile time of 15 minutes on average, times seven is one-oh-five, which puts you at just under two hours to walk seven miles, assuming a steady, leisurely pace and no breaks. Seven miles is a real number, and the pilot made me very conscious of that fact during the flight.

Being conscious of the different ways I could die is part of the problem. Part of the flying experience is being very, very aware of each and every possible death you might encounter while within an airport or airplane.

Outside the airport: if you see something, say something, snitch your face off, snitch as hard as you can because of terrorism! Also don’t park your car for longer than ten minutes, because we will send someone by to check you out in case your car has a bomb in it.

Inside the airport: terrorists got us so scared we’re looking at an orange alert, a high risk of terror attack, a five out of six on the scale. So step through this scanner, let us dust you for bomb juice, take off your shoes because one of those blew up once, and let us check you for weapons, lighters, and liquids. Yes. All of you.

At the gate: please keep your suitcases on you, because someone who has made it through our security may, in fact, have smuggled something and may want to place it inside your luggage because… that’s how these things work. Trust me. There’s a danger here.

On the plane: put your seatbelt on so turbulence doesn’t break your fool neck. These masks will give you oxygen in case we depressurize and the cabin is flooded with freezing air and your eardrums explode. Oh, and put your mask on before you put a mask on your kid’s face, because if you die first he’s definitely gonna die. Sorry. Oh! We’re really high up, too, ha ha. Are you ready to fall for minutes, not seconds, in the event of utter catastrophe?

I know in my head that flying is one of the safest ways to travel, but they do so much to convince me otherwise that by the time I get to the plane, I’m nervous and fidgety. By the time we hit turbulence, I’m thinking about how long it would take for the plane to fall out of the sky and if anything embarrassing is on my computer at home. When the plane takes a steep turn, I press my feet against the floor, desperate to change the orientation of the entire plane and keep myself steady. I grind my teeth.

Driving a car is wild dangerous, but the only advice I got the first time I got behind a wheel was “Drive slow, don’t hit anything, and try not to wreck the clutch.” That was it! Later, of course, I learned about driving in the rain and other situations, but that’s knowledge gained through experience, instead of instruction. When they give you a car, they say, “Hop in this tiny cube and fling yourself down the road at 70 or 80 em-pee-aich if you want to get anywhere on time. Wear a seltbelt.”

I used bike to work before I moved, and I still occasionally pedal around Oakland. I’m pretty tentative on the bike after my accident in 2012, but I’m still way more tentative about flying. This is despite the fact that I know firsthand how much bike accidents hurt, how easy it is to die on the road, and how often cars will make terrible decisions at your expense because them getting to a red light first is more important than being a responsible driver. Biking, especially in San Francisco, is definitely a “take your life in your own hands and pray that everyone else is paying attention” situation, but I’m still cooler with biking than I am with flying.

I’m obviously not going to stop flying. I’ve had The Fear for a few years now, and I’ve flown at least a dozen times since. It’s not bad, but it is annoying. I do think that finally realizing it was being so conscious of my own death, however unlikely it may be, is the break I needed to stop quietly trying to push my feet through the floorboards on a flight. I think, anyway — the flight from LAX back to SFO was much easier, though I did a lot of thinking about this before the flight. But we’ll see how it goes. I can’t stay in the Bay forever.