The State of the Ruins (ex-Now!)

06/04/2026

This used to be a “now” page. I still like the idea of marking the present, just not in bullet points and bright optimism. A page for what I am living with, writing toward, and carrying right now. Nothing exhaustive or efficient. Just true for the moment.

The State of the Ruins
notes from the life I am currently inhabiting

Still circling sound, inheritance, weather, and what remains after the fact. Making a zine out of a scream. Writing poems that pretend to be about wind and are secretly about consequence. 

writing toward
NaPoWriMo, zines, the composting remains of a future book, and poems about inheritance, aftermath, and what lingers long after the fact.

reading
A few books at once, poems in scattered tabs, blog posts from tender corners of the internet, and whatever language feels like it might hold me for a minute.

resisting
The pressure to become a brand, a machine, a tidy little success story. The demand to turn every feeling into content and every quiet thing into performance.

longing for
A room of my own. More time. Less dread. Better health. Softer days. A life that does not feel like it is always happening elsewhere.

avoiding
Emails. Decisions. The unbearable cheerfulness of productivity culture. The false intimacy of urgency. The slow panic of unfinished things.

surviving on
Tea, occasional poems, weather shifts, private jokes, stubbornness, and the thin but persistent hope that something I am making will one day look back at me and say: yes, this counted.

listening to
Rain when it comes. Fans when they pretend to help. Silence when it sharpens. Songs I return to when I want to feel less alone in my own head. Also, this.

unable to stop thinking about / occupied by
Sound as warning. The body as archive. Weather as witness. The ordinary becoming unbearable. What gets passed down. What stays in the throat. What remains even after the leaving.

writing toward
Still circling sound, inheritance, weather, and what remains after the fact. Making a zine out of a scream. Writing poems that pretend to be about wind and are secretly about consequence.

reading / keeping near
A few books, poems, blogs, essays, and songs; some as comfort, some as excavation.

lately
Saturday slipped past me, as it tends to do, and I found myself returning to old work again; half-finished pages, abandoned ideas, the remains of a book I thought I had left behind. I keep finding that the things I do not finish do not disappear. They ferment. They wait. They return in altered form and ask to be touched again. So lately I have been writing from that place: from the aftertaste of things, from noise that does not leave, from weather that feels too personal, from all the little ruins still warm to the touch.

still unfinished
a future book with roots in older wreckage
a zine made out of inherited sound
several poems still circling the same wound from different angles
the fantasy of becoming someone else, somewhere else
a gentler relationship with time, the body, and the self

-

12/10/2025

I unpublished this page for some reason that I do not remember now, so my site was removed from nownownow.com. Fair and completely justified. I forgot to tail this issue further. So, I am keeping this as-is. 

14/04/2025

Now, it has been a year since the very first detailed Now! 

16/03/2025

Now, I am planning ahead for GloPoWriMo 2025. You should join us too!

05/01/2025

Now, I have resigned.

14/04/2024

This page's creation stemmed from my desire to have my site listed on nownownow.com. But, as I spent some time thinking what is my now, well, I went down my rabbit hole of existential well. Though it provided some good, supple food for thought, I decided to document my current "nows" in hopes that coherence would somehow manifest.

Now, I find my daily self entrenched in a very mediocre remote job with a meager salary, a mere cog in the machinery of corporate mundanity.

Now, I reside in the confines of a small town in a small country, where the pace of life moves to the rhythm of quiet simplicity, where I sit by the cliff and watch the world pass by.

Now, I am on a daily journey of poetic expression as a struggling participant to the NaPoWriMo contest.*

Now, I navigate the banalities of routine, while clinging to sprouts of solace in between the mundane rituals of fresh and crisp responsibility of housekeeping.

Now, I am building my blog by reaching out to people and trying to socialize in the blogosphere (like this!) with my two best brutes: self-expression and connection.

Now, I'm grappling with a particular challenge called adulthood.

Now, I have my own room, a larger space to expand my haven of solitude and minimize self-reflection.

Now, I cling to the fundamental pleasures of life, finding comfort in the simple acts like eating grapes or chopping vegetables.

Now, I am thinking of joining a religion because God feels like they could use some pointers from us mortals. Eye-roll.

*Funny but interesting coincidence: I discovered this website today. And, today's NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem of at least ten lines in which each line begins with the same word. This technique of beginning multiple lines with the same word or phrase is called anaphora, and has long been used to give poems a driving rhythm and/or a sense of puzzlebox mystery. When I sat down to write this page, I noticed I wrote all the lines starting with the same word, Now.