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CFY,K

Where Have I Been?

Welcome back to Curtains For You, Kid

Shit, what’s it been? 10 years? More? And what have I been doing, in the meantime?

Kind of a lot.

I moved to Texas to chase down a lady. We dated for three months, broke up for two, then got back together forever.

In December 2017, on a snowy night in Austin, we welcomed our daughter into the world. She looks just like her mom. We look like this:

(Photo by Molly Hatcher )

What else?

I abandoned Curtains For You, Kid, but I did a lot of blogging and content marketing on behalf actual companies. I wrote a book. I co-hosted 80 episodes of a podcast. I started a bunch of other personal blog-type things that never felt quite right.

I quit smoking. I quit drinking coffee. I quit, like, shaking all the time. I took a strange collection of random jobs and pieced them together into a career.

But I don’t spend a great deal of time looking back on the past. I’m not super active on social media. I’ve never had a Facebook account1. I’m just trying to do new shit, and be in the moment so I don’t miss out on anything cool my kid does.

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.


Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
By way of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

But then, the other day, an old friend sent me a picture. In it, I’m probably 19 years old. Got a little baby beard going. The kid in that picture suffered from a great many delusions — many of which he didn’t have the vocabulary to even address — but, to his credit, he was singularly devoted to the upkeep of his weird little blog.

The picture — which I might be willing to publish at some point, but not now — arrived as Tele-Friends was ending, and I was starting to look for a new thing to do2. And whatever I was going to pour my creative energy into, I wanted to put in practice everything I had learned over years of blogging and podcasting and marketing. Because what would be the point of learning all that stuff without doing anything with it? Except with one crucial caveat: I’m going to give not even one fuck if no one’s reading this thing. Don’t get me wrong: I’ll make Amazon affiliate deals. I’ll set up a Patreon. You want to advertise here? Holler at me. I’ll make monetization possible, I just don’t care if it ever happens. A lot of things can kill your blog, but first and foremost is a craven, self-conscious hashtagging scramble for attention.

Like. That can work if what you’re after is attention. But if you just want to do a thing as best you can, the important part is doing the thing. Everything else is everything else.

So this picture showed up, and I remembered being 19, and having this blog, curtainsforyoukid, that I kept up with for years, really only to keep track of far-flung friends. It was a wild era. We all heard “Cola Bottle Baby”3 for the first time together. We played with the cutout filter. I made a lot of unfortunate jokes4.

And despite how cringey and embarrassing it is to look at a lot of this stuff now, I want it back. Or at least the parts of it I like, the parts that make sense now. I still really like the dumb name. And all I want, really, is a container. Or a banner to put things under. A receptacle for writing, experiments, little video things maybe, and whatever else. And your reactions to all those things.

So.

Here it is.

Welcome back.

Where have you been?

  1. Not really. I’ve had access to accounts for professional purposes, and somebody set up a dummy one for me so I could post updates about Tele-Friends, but I’ve never used it on a personal level.
  2. This isn’t entirely true. I had already started writing “Asked and Answered” for STAG. And it was right around the time I started doing “Loosies.” But still.
  3. RIP Edwin Birdsong
  4. You don’t have to dip too far into old iterations of CFY,K to find some insensitive language. I won’t defend any of it. I will say: None of it was cool. I’ve grown a lot as a person since I was a shithead college kid, and we as a society have grown a lot in terms of what we will and will not tolerate, and that is for the best. I apologize, 100%. Won’t happen again.