tl;dr – You are on the internet. This is a website. You’re allowed.

Below I wax poetic and git a lil gushy. On a more practical level, deepsicks proudly uses WordPress for most of its content (a few pages in the graveyard still rock web 1.0). Its current theme is Wu Wei by Jeff Ngan, which I have considerably modified, and the site is optimized for Firefox and Chrome. For a history of site stuff, including overhauls and milestones, see the Site News category.


Greetings, friends and strangers, and welcome to deepsicks. I imagine many think they arrive here accidentally. Google me or a periphery and dear god, the never expecting are now intruders upon secrecy, privacy profane. There are things I wish I could throw away—but not many. However personal and personally meaningful, this is not a diary. So don’t worry.

The inevitability of internet memory was less than a whisper six years in the making and now, nearly six years of deepsicks later, I stand corrected but tall. This website has a long history—from its piecemeal coding to its Frankenstein scripts, a CSS switch mess browser snafu WordPress party mix of amateur awesomeness and dogged shrug-grins hey, I’m doing the best I can self-taught and -talked into the worthiness of this venture, the great experiment adventure of internet self-expression begun when, again, the inevitability of internet memory was a distant threat and unlikely dream.

In 2002 and earlier (angelfire! geocities!), for me, non-techie, barely out of my teens, there were no long-term consequences for behaving badly, or worse, writing poorly. There was no indication of digital permanence and permutation, that I myself would be permanently changing; something clear commanding, indelible telling, firm and affirming, watch your back your cards your mouth, your ftp, mentality, the way you construct the way you perceive you live your life. There was, eventually, the real world chimes of career-minded shaming one day, you will regret this. Blacklists and blame. Evidence of anything is a crime. And there was no chance that I wouldn’t believe it. I did, and I do.

But there was no one day, you will be proud. Memory and totality and honesty and skill—patience and practice and face plants and class acts—will mean something. In the depths of deepsicks I read and remember, I linger and suspend. Reminded of an unseasonably warm March day, five years later I feel the breeze on my face. I smell the particle board wood of that attic bedroom space I tried to break dance in the ninety degree days, the hippie girl on South 35 flashing her peace sign for all time, I feel the phantom shocks of my kidneys in rebellion. Watch the car ahead of me leap into the sky and little Eli salt his puddle. I navigate road trips, rapturous flips and losing grips on life only to ricochet, regenerate, relive relearn remember. Friends. Family. Self. No self. Pieces into patterns into perfect circle cycles—new sights, new sounds, new ways of feeling feelings.

The danger of search and exposure, untoward eyes on frank emotion and exercises in silliness, tries to monopolize inevitability, history and longevity. But really… who could predict the gleam, the warmth, the heartsurge satisfaction of creating and sustaining a public space for expression. Who could warn? who could promise but a future self in retrospection: One day your glow will burn out any doubt whether life is amazing, and blessed. Each story a wave, tsunami, hello! and echo on a never-ending Doppler effect.

If everything I’ve written is evidence, deepsicks is proof that I am content.

Whoever you are and however you got here, these are not the things that I cannot hide. They are the things that I want to share. You are supposed to be here.

- January 2008



Here are some addition riffs on the name deepsicks from April 2007, in plain text below and in neat but somewhat distorted text view here.


I don’t recall when “deepsicks” dawned on me. Some late-teen, early-twenties epiphany of word smashclash discovery, pulling together several things: deep six graves and deep six tossing over, combined with Dorothy Parker’s condemnation, “This is not a novel that should be read lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Probably a bad thing, hey. But it piqued fascination and described my aspirations: to write with the energy, brightdark and grindoom that would incite being hurled across the room in awe—the horror! the horror! the exaltation.

Yes. Precious. Worse, chronic bronchitis (“the deep sick”) and a grueling high school basketball drill (“the deep six”) were also tied up in it. I’ve used it as internet moniker and a collection of ideals, loosely defined—a rose by any other, a cut just as deep.

Yet now… huh. This place was never all that gloomy, and the past several updates are predominately Happy Things, the site through and through a crossbreed of life celebration and self examination—hardly the bleeding mess, disturbing text one might expect. Now that I am a well-adjusted adult (tar-har), how unfortunate I should hang my words beneath the banner “deepsicks”… or is it. I don’t know. I don’t like feeling that I need to defend deepsicks any more than the pressure to deny it, whether by trashing it here as youthful indiscretion or transferring my creative life to a less ominous domain.

The name hasn’t limited me—my experiences or expressions of them. It may cause pause for those unfamiliar with my work and personality, but I don’t believe it’s entirely a misnomer, either—clever.cute or not. It’s like a tattoo. I wouldn’t get it now but I got then, and I’ve changed and stayed the same in remarkable ways. It meant and it means and I am still me, and honor the past smirkingly, forgetting for the moment I was always tongue-in-cheeky, a deadly goof and a sharp tool.

So may your mouth corner tug, shoulder shrug yippee! be quicker than your knee-jerk step-back whoa. I pass pits of despair and point out the candy mountains but for the most part here, walk solid ground. And dance. A lot.