To New Beginnings

This is the same old KHMR, but with a new home. I want to get back to blogging in its most basic form, where the words matter more than anything else and the readership is incidental. Which isn't to say that I don't want and value readers, just that I don't want to value them more than I value what I'm giving them to read, and that's how I started to feel with Buttondown. When a newsletter is the format, it adds a certain amount of pressure to stick to a schedule, to write a certain number of words, to give people something worth reading and, if I'm very lucky, paying for.

There's still a subscribe via email option here, and I welcome you to use it, but you can also subscribe via RSS, and you can also not subscribe at all. There are no rules, for you or for me. Isn't that liberating? I can just show up when I feel like it, write what I want to write, and leave again, and you can either read it or not read it, and it's all okay because this doesn't exist to be monetized. Everything here is free, which means I don't have to stress about whether or not it's worth the money.

That said, I still live in the world as a disabled, brainweird, and chronically ill person, and so I still need money. If you want to help out with that and you have the means, you can still do that via Ko-fi, Paypal, Venmo, or Stripe. Everyone who was paying for KHMR in its previous iteration still is, but please let me know if you no longer want to and I'll cancel your subscription, or you can cancel it yourself with no hard feelings. Your dollars are indescribably valuable to me, but only if you feel it's worth giving them.

My goal for this space is to use it as a canvas for experimentation. There may be book reviews, there may be poems, mine or other people's, there may be lists, there may be links. There probably won't be many photos, both because words are what I'm interested in and because this platform doesn't allow for many of them. This is a minimalist site where the focus is on writing, so come prepared to read.

I keep thinking to myself lately that I haven't been happy in a long time. I used to be so good at finding the glimmering little nuggets of mundane joy that kept me going, but I've lost that ability this year. I want to get it back. I want to play and dream and imagine and invent, the way I did as a child before life and the world ground me down, unabashedly, fiercely, furiously. I would love it if you did those things alongside me. There's a better reality out there, we just have to make it.

I'll leave you with one photo of something that has made me happy recently. I bought myself a rainbow cane in the hope that it will make me want to use it more, and this is me in a very good dress, on my very good porch, holding it.