The Trick is to Keep Breathing

She knows the human heart
And how to read the stars
Now everything's about to fall apart

"The Trick is to Keep Breathing" by Garbage

Back in the early 2000's, a fair number of the stories I shared online featured Garbage lyrics as epigraphs and section headers sprinkled throughout the text.

When Version 2.0 came out in 1998, I'd only just discovered their self-titled first album the year before in an 8th grade math classroom at Catholic school, passing notes back and forth about music with the first girl I ever had a crush on.

(I call it a crush now. Back then I didn't know you could use that word about girls, too.)

Making a completely new layout every few months for my website was how I grew up on the internet, so it's only fitting that version 2.0 of this site comes just shy of six months after the first version. Even though I loved the way the old layout displayed on MY computer, I had to admit that the foundation was unsalvageable in terms of showing up that way on every other device.

Trying to patch the issues only ended up introducing different problems.

Coding was the easiest version of that lesson.

(I had to learn it harder ways before it really took.)

This layout is inspired by one of the first website layouts I ever created, back when the only way to make sticky navigation happen was with an iframe. Or five iframes, if you also wanted consistent percentage-based margins and padding. It's my love letter to the typography and print magazine layout design that shaped my teenage aesthetic.

Every image here came from the real world, taken with a Galaxy S10 and a figurine I repainted to look more like my wife, Maya. Most of them were edited for contrast, brightness, temperature, and saturation in the default gallery app. Anything with a gaussian blur is a sign I got frustrated with the default gallery apps and took it to Photoshop to tweak.

When I started this project in the last weeks of 2025, I had just finished the process of tracking down the earliest traces of my online presence at the Internet Archive to print them in case the billionaires decide to burn it all down or gate access behind a subscriber fee.

I found a Tripod site I made with the built-in WYSIWYG editor when I was 13, its broken links to my truly awful first attempts at multi-chapter works thankfully lost to the digital aether. A few stories from my first year of high school linger on a cached copy of the first Geocities page I ever made. Finding fully preserved tagboards and guestbook entries and visitor counters felt like moving through a museum exhibit featuring the emoticon, before the emoji took over.

I had a point somewhere in here, but I've been working on writing this for two weeks between my full-time job and life with kids. My ADD brain lost the point probably that first day and I've mostly been adding a sentence here and deleting 4 more there, trying to find the thread again.

(I've got three short stories in various stages of drafting with the same problem.)

When I started writing and making websites, I was finding my voice. My work was prolific, but the quality was hit or miss. (Let's face it, the late 90's and early 00's web was not a bastion of artful visual design, and every writer has to make the same mistakes to outgrow them.) My standards were high, but my desire for the dopamine rush of posting something good enough and getting positive feedback for it mostly outweighed my perfectionism.

Now I have the opposite issue: I have a voice, but little time to be prolific and zero desire to share anything unless I'm satisfied with the quality.

But on the bright side, the passing notes in music class to pretty girls looped back around to playing new finds for my pretty wife and inevitably ending up down the rabbit hole of "This reminds me of..." that often inspires new work.

fin