I’ve been wanting to publish what I’ve written somewhere more publicly available for a while now. I’m also very easily distracted and almost medically unmotivated (the “almost” might be inaccurate; I’m also too unmotivated to book a psyche eval). In introducing a new project, one that should hypothetically and very, very gradually (see above) end with almost everything I’ve made uploaded and in one spot, it would be intuitive to list the biggest reason why this undertaking is being performed now/ why it hasn’t be performed before. However,

since I already got that out of the way by the second sentence, I’ll be explaining the smallest reason instead.

I was in the restaurant business for some 7 years, and a server for 5. This is a shockingly long amount of time to spend in a job that you are horrible at. I am prodigiously gifted at failing to keep track of more than one task at a time, and a total lack of social ability or performative decorum could only be compensated for with skills earned through a lifetime of bible thumping (i.e, filling customers with deep, guttural dread) . This was 5 years spent with comical levels of anxiety over impressively low stakes, where, even when I did manage to hit par, the second hand stress I unleashed onto management was in of itself enough to cost me 2 jobs.

Ultimately, I found that food service only had 2 redeeming qualities: “people watching”, and writing. The Kafkaesque methods I had to employ to make up for the aforementioned lack of multi tasking skills would leave my notepad looking like you had opened up to a middle chapter of House of Leaves; food orders, addendums to food orders, each tables current course, estimated time for the next course in 5 minute intervals, estimated wait times on food prep in 5 minute intervals, basic diagram drawings of seating arrangements numerically categorizing guests, etc etc. Under normal circumstances, I’m by no means “data driven”; but when a 55 year old requesting more lemon wedges for their ice water is the psychological equivalent of 9/11, creating a complex system granular enough that you can plug all the “chaos” (i.e, maybe 4 tables) into it and Cover All the Bases, is ego inflating.

5 years of that level of self abuse doesn’t just vanish overnight, especially not when it’s couched in smug satisfaction, and the post restaurant life saw an “inexplicable” desire to spend time writing; like a recovered smoker still subconsciously making that limp peace sign with their non-dominant hand. And it had to be literal writing, with pen and paper. If I had worked in more upscale places where servers are given tablets or clunky touch screen card readers, things would be different. But the muscle memory was now Pavlov’s dog’d in.

The problem with that is, unless you plan on using pencil like you’re in elementary school, the only recourse available to apply the endless stream of edits you, as a nervous little shit trying to prove something to someone, absolutely have to make, is a bottomless pile of strikethroughs and parenthesis and superscript and now you’ve constructed House of Leaves again except this time it’s poetry you’re actually trying to perform out loud so every Tuesday is you dodging the Minotaur while simultaneously trying to project your voice without sounding like a circus barker.

And the smug satisfaction comes creeping in again, until you love the insane wedding cake edit methodology almost as much as the poems themselves, and any future publication just wouldn’t be complete without all those little alterations preserved, like leaving in all the pearl headed pins a tailor sticks in a suit.

And so, at last: the smallest reason why I held off on self publishing as long as I did, is that copying over both the poetry and the adjoined pile of endless drafts and rehashes, means a lot of extra effort that takes so fucking long.