The Voices You Don’t Have

There comes a point in running a blog where you start to notice the shape of what you don’t know—not abstractly, but in the specific texture of the gaps. Fashion was always a hole. Games too, beyond the surface stuff. Literature, unless sticky porn magazines from the eighties count, which I’ve decided they do. Politics, whenever it required more than controlled outrage.

What I actually wanted was people who were genuinely deep in their thing. Not summarizers, not people who’d read three articles and formed a take. People who lived inside a subject the way you live inside a neighborhood: knowing the shortcuts, knowing the embarrassments, knowing why the thing everyone loves is actually mediocre and the thing nobody talks about is the real one. Someone with a Pikachu tattooed on their right toe. Someone who works in a brothel. Basically: people with a life and the nerve to describe it directly.

Writing alone is a particular kind of insanity. You say the same things over and over with slightly different phrasing and start to believe you’re covering ground. Other voices don’t just add topics—they disrupt the rhythm in ways that make you realize you had one, which is a useful thing to know about yourself.