Welcome to ephemera press by me, Jake.
I’ve had a real “unexamined life is not worth living” feeling that’s crept up on me in the last year. COVID-paranoia, marriage, quarantine, parenthood, work, agoraphobia—these are gears of various radii and torque that gnash together in a way that has made me feel a bit out of control of my own life, as my own voice and desires are superseded by the responsibilities foisted upon me in a particularly brutal year.
Fuck does that sound dramatic. This is not a cry for help and I’m not about to take a Hemlock-juice cleanse. Everyone’s had a shitty year and mine has been less shitty then most, but coming out the other end of it, I do yearn to critically engage with aspects of my own day-to-day thoughts in a way I am currently not. If my life is going to be an escalating treadmill of responsibility, it seems like it might be spiritually rewarding for me probe at it.
Writing again, even on an inconsistent basis, feels like a way to do that.
Something I lament is that I feel like a much more passive-thinker then I used to be. I think it’s because we live in an era of a “first takes advantage”, where push-notifications foist upon us opinions we don’t care about on events we don’t know about, but feel quietly obligated to catch up on. I intake the same algorithm-gavage of content everyone else does, filtered through whatever political lean I postured in college, and it’s oppressive! It feels harder than it used to write an original essay—let alone an original thought—when thousands of people—some dumber, some smarter, but all certainly louder than you—compete to fill your head with a zeitgeist you don’t even care about.
Anyways, I’ve been trying to turn my brain off this noise by leaving social media and focusing screen-time on group chats and more personalized communication. When I was a single and unencumbered dude, back when Facebook felt personal and authentic, I felt like I was a quirky guy with weird ideas that I liked putting out into the world in a way that I’ve since accidently trained myself not to be.
ephemera press is going to be a project where I hold myself accountable to the sparse sparks of creative thoughts I still occasionally have.
I think my life is difficult, rewarding, and would be positively banal to a general audience, so I don’t know how autobiographical EP will be. However within my daily rituals—when I’m chatting with my wife over coffee while my daughter is mysteriously quiet in the other room—or I’m watching my daughter interact with her cabal of neighborhood cronies—I sometimes feel like I stumble upon a kernal of some profound, universal truth. Typically, I immediately void my brain of these thoughts for something more pressing, like stopping the dog from eating week old pasta salad out of the garbage With ephemera press, I want to force myself to tease out these moments where I feel like I’m onto something to an essay, even when I’m not.
As an aside, I also think ephemera press is just a dope ass name for a thing. Like if I commissioned some artist—concept unseen—to create a logo for something generically called “ephemera press” it would probably have a slick geometrical vaporwave aesthetic to it. It sounds like one of the titles an ambient artist would submit to the label that’s insisting that “you can’t make every track untitled because it will break our Spotify optimization”.
This is all arrogant preamble for me to say the following: I’m forcing myself to write again and damnit, I am going to start by reviewing the Netflix adaptation of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. Since I generously expect maybe 10 people to regularly read this anyway, I’m going to self-indulgently harness some middle-school goth “so random!” energy on this dumb thing my daughter has been watching and go from there.
If your interested, the button is below: