This prompt came up while I was prepping for Arisia 2025. The gaming room was a highlight this year.

Far too often I'll look something up and fall into a rabbit hole of linked information. Perhaps the perfect afterlife would be more access to more information and an eternity of exploration, learning, and reflection. But in this world, for the time we have in it, we make ourselves into a composite of all the experiences we have. Learning is the process of collecting more LEGO blocks we can use to build more of ourselves.

I originally sent the post out with commentary here, but what is there to say? Lewis Carroll would have loved the word "skibidi" and probably could have produced an appropriate back-etymology for it grounded in Old English. Gen Alpha's use of wordplay is the continuation of a loooooong tradition.

The moment I had in mind was the long-ordained time, place, and manner by which a President and Vice President of the United States will be inaugurated for the next four years. The only question we ever had was, which candidate would be riding on which escalator.

As I worked on the poem, it became more generalized and personal. One version of the poem became the finished product that I'm quite proud of, and which I think is all the better for being self-referential.

Old drafts and alternate versions descend into creative oblivion. Those versions might have very different tones and meanings. Part of me strongly prefers a version that got cast off, but an author's neurons are a democracy.

Producing more frequent creative output also means hitting more frequent decision points and more frequently throwing away promising drafts. Or maybe not throwing them away, but at least mentally collecting them in a pool for future use.