I write because the alternative is probably becoming a farting TikToker or a disgruntled Walmart greeter. When the world’s spinning like a bad trip and truth seems as rare as an honest politician, I grab my laptop and start pounding keys—though part of me misses the satisfying clack of my old Smith-Corona, the way each letter hit the page with conviction you can’t get from backspace and delete.
I’m the daughter of a Greek immigrant who arrived here in the ’50s with nothing but a suitcase full of dreams and a perfect Sharkskin suit. Dad believed in the American Dream back when believing in things didn’t require a disclaimer or trigger warning. My mom was from a German Irish family in Jersey City, working for NJ Bell at 16—back when phones had cords and operators knew your voice, when human connection required effort instead of just sliding right.
Those Bell System operators, with their headsets and switchboards, were the original network administrators. They understood something we’ve lost: that communication was a craft, not just noise filling digital space.
I write because my brain won’t shut up at 3 AM, spitting out fragments of memories and half-baked ideas like a broken record—and yes, I know what a broken record actually sounds like, that rhythmic skip you’d either learn to love or drive yourself crazy trying to fix. It’s either write them down or go mad; the psych ward’s already got enough poets, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate my collection of vintage concert ticket stubs anyway.
Some people collect stamps. I collect uncomfortable truths, forgotten album liner notes, and stories that make people squirm at dinner parties. In this age of alternative facts and algorithmic echo chambers, telling it straight feels almost revolutionary—like wearing combat boots to a debutante ball or playing vinyl at a Spotify party.
My archive isn’t just nostalgia porn for Gen X and Boomers who remember when MTV played music videos. It’s evidence of a time when culture had weight, when you couldn’t just stream your way out of boredom. When you saved up for an album, you listened to the whole damn thing, even the weird experimental track three songs in. When a book’s broken spine meant something, marked the passages that changed how you saw the world.
I write because somebody needs to remember what it felt like to discover music through late-night radio DJs who actually had taste, to find books in actual bookstores where clerks with strong opinions would argue with you about Kerouac versus Kesey. Before algorithms decided what we should like, before everything became content to be consumed and forgotten.
As I have since I was a teenager, I like to think of myself as one of the outsiders—the midnight philosophers, the corner-store intellectuals who read Kant between cigarette breaks and discussed Kubrick over truck-stop coffee. We’re all just trying to make sense of this beautiful mess, armed with our vinyl collections and dog-eared paperbacks, our Polaroids slightly out of focus but somehow more honest than any Instagram filter.
The digital world gave me a career I never planned for, paid the bills while I watched the analog world disappear piece by piece. Now that I’m free from the corporate cellblock, I can finally do what I should have been doing all along: curating the memories, the moments, the cultural artifacts that shaped us before everything became instant and disposable.
So yeah, I’ll keep writing. Not because it’s noble or profound, but because someone needs to remember when things were made to last, when culture required commitment instead of just a click. It’s either this or screaming into the void, and honestly, the void’s already pretty crowded.
Besides, my generation survived New Coke, the death of Saturday morning cartoons, Y2K panic, and the sound of dial-up connecting at 2 AM. We’re tougher than we look, and our stories are worth more than whatever algorithm decides to surface next week.
It might as well be me who tells them.
