Nothing is Embarrassing
When the shame spiral isn't the only ride you can get on.
When Matthew asked me how writing this newsletter’s November installment (this very one you’re reading right now, likely at your desk dreading a call, perhaps in bed betwixt [yes, I said betwixt] the embrace of your toasty sheets in the winter morning, probably in traffic waiting for the light to turn green [GET OFF YOUR PHONE!], possibly anywhere and everywhere) was going, I laughed incredulously, and told him that I hadn’t yet written a word.
There’s never a good time to sit down and write something meaningful—or anything at all. It’s akin to getting married or having a baby. You can't wait for the most brilliant, opportune moment to start planning a wedding or procreating because, one way or another, something will happen, and perfect it won’t be, like the weather that day suddenly being 15 degrees colder than forecast or the test being false positive.
Am I sorely unwise to liken my writing non-schedule for writing to the sacrament of marriage and the equally sacred sacrament of premarital sex considering I (1) have never been married and (2) have never tried having a child? Honestly, no. Marriage is a slapstick on par with any one of Charlie Chaplin’s films, and so is having children. (Unless of course you are someone I know personally, in which case, marriage is a beautiful ministry and love and devotion and your baby is the cutest.) (Reader, this is about as good a time as any to let you know that I in fact am a man without principles. Not one. I am a sellout who flip-flops to the wind and will fight, flight, freeze, and fawn all at the same time, everything contingent upon the circumstance at hand. If Chevron CEO Michael Wirth called me up and asked me to become the notorious climate polluter’s new Art Director for a yearly salary of $500,000, I would respond with a resounding yes. Okay, you get the point.)
I’ve been doing lots of thinking about the concept—nay, the horrors—of being embarrassed. I recently read an essay, where the author, a gay man now in his 50s, mentioned shame being hard to shake off when it’s been baked into you for so long, and my only reaction was to [freeze in gay]. A bulb had been lit, a gag for the ages that rivals Aviva Drescher throwing her prosthetic leg onto a table full of guests in the season six finale of RHONY, buttoning up her Swan Song performance with the infamous line, “The only thing fake about me…is THIS!” The prosthetic legs clanging against the cutlery, the party detonating into maelstrom.
I’m not generally an embarrassed person, but I used to be. I grew up hyperaware of myself—how I talked, how I walked, even how I stood—is this how I’m supposed to do it? What do other boys do? Every time I moved so much as a muscle on my forehead I was aware. The way I tied my shoelaces, the way cut my fingernails. Even the way I crossed my legs while sitting in front of a computer. And whenever someone pointed anything about me out, I would fold into embarrassment. I don’t want to make more dramatic than it was, and I damn sure don’t want to use this newsletter as a conduit for unpacking some bred-in-the-bone trauma from my upbringing, but you can imagine how growing up that way could get tiring. Shit, just talking about it is tiring. I almost don’t wanna even finish this sentence and just delete this whole paragraph and start over.
But see, that would be me succumbing to the shame. And we’re not doing that day.
I can’t give you an exact timestamp of when I stopped living in shame and fear and started living in openness and caritas. Honestly, I think it’s simply a result of a host of lived experiences. You go through enough of the same shit and make enough of the same mistakes that something in the back of your brain finally mollywhops you into a higher level of awareness, and you tell yourself, “You know what, fuck this shit.” (I seem to kick off all my revelations in life with a “fuck this shit.”) You realize that being embarrassed isn’t even a feeling, and when the shit shakes out, it’s nothing but a made-up concept that you can very easily reject, like geometry, or the two-party system, or the new Wonka movie.
‘Cause really, so what if you blacked out that one time and did something stupid? So what if you couldn’t parallel park on Abbott Kinney and everyone around you was watching? So what if you’re on a Zoom thinking you were on mute and you fart so loud the glass windows shake as if an omen of a tsunami? So what? It’s okay. We’re all a little ugly and we all make mistakes and we are all beautiful and we are all worthy of forgiveness. We think about ourselves too much, give ourselves too much lorryload that everything we do—ever—becomes an albatross that makes it impossible for us to just be. We all have to be more okay with just being—good, bad, very good, and very bad. There’s no embarrassing or cringe or yucky or sideye. Without all of that self-involvement devolving our self-intent, there’s more room in our heads for other seeds to grow.
There is no conclusion to this essay (and I’m not ashamed to say it! ha-ha). But I would love to end with this: the shame spiral isn’t the only ride you can get on. Realize that and you’re golden.
⚰️ JAMES’ DEATH ROW MEALS
Spicy tuna on crispy rice at Momosan Boston
Sicilian pizza at Pedone’s in Redondo Beach
Large diet coke and french fries at McDonald’s 6 packets of ketchup
Beef bulgogi and all the white rice I can inhale
A skinny spicy double mezcal margarita with a sugar rim (My toes are curling at the mere thought of it)
🚽 JAMES’ PUBLIC ENEMY LIST
Apple Music subscribers (if you use Apple Music I’m gonna automatically categorize you as someone who deems showers optional in the wintertime. Or brushes their teeth only once a day.)
People who react to messages instead of responding like a normal, civilized person. (I will punch your face in. And yes I keep a tally of who’s done that to me, especially after I call it out. Some of y’all are on wafer-thin ice.)
Drivers who let everyone go before them at a four-way stop even though they were there first. (Don’t be stupid. I will slash your tire so you never go on the road again.)
Depop sellers who price-gouge. (Motherfucker, is this 2020 pandemic times with the hand sanitizer and paper towels? Get your life together. And GET A REAL JOB!)
Do you have a public enemy list that gets you as mad as mine makes me? Leave a comment.
🧾 A RECENT NOTE ON MY NOTES APP WITH NO CONTEXT
the only reason I haven’t given up yet is because I still don’t have the yellow Le Marzocco espresso machine of my dreams
🍎 EMOJIS THAT APPLE ABSOLUTELY DID THEIR THING ON
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What’s yours? Leave me a comment.
🎲 LIFE UPDATE IN 300 WORDS OR LESS
The last time we spoke I told you I was busy doggedly searching for a Silver Lake/Echo Park/Atwater Village apartment. My friend Josh, another illustrator and designer, and I went about this home search with about the same vigor and determination as one Leo DiCaprio pursuing a young woman before her twenty-fifth birthday.
And, unlike Leo DiCaprio’s relationships, the journey has the makings of an HBO production: two morally ambiguous antiheros (being gay and foreign places that in that category); unnecessary queries about sex (a landlady asked us if we were a couple and informed us she preferred couples only after we said we were just comrades in house-hunting battle); excessive violence (Josh had to fight for his life over the phone because the background-checking people had affiliated him with another Josh); a complex narrative structure (on a mission to secure a quaint two-bedroom casita in Atwater Village, we wrote a letter to leave on the landlady’s doorstep, and on the search for a printer, we walk into a sticker print shop, where an otherwise listless girl hooked us up with a printout, which ended with the revelation that she knew the landlady in question and that this shop was the landlady’s—a twist! But which begets another twist, with the deal falling through after the landlady’s husband inauspicious ends up in the hospital, rendering her without time to knight us with an application approval); and a critically acclaimed ending, because when one door closes (in this case a Spanish dwelling), another one opens, for we got an apartment!
It’s in Echo Park and it’s got Spanish villa vibes on a walkable block with a private yard and a front patio and a bathroom with checkered tile. And I love it and I can’t wait to show you. But I was too excited while viewing it to take decent photographs, so hold for some images when I move in via IG story most likely, which will alas have to wait a little while longer, because I’m off to Cabo for a much needed reprieve from sitting in front of my computer and pulling on pixels.
‘Til December! Lots to look forward to.
🎰 JAMES JUNK JUKEBOX
Super Over by Leah Kate — What if Olivia Rodrigo and Addison Rae collabed? No longer a what if. Leah Kate, especially, this song, satisfies that craving. See also 10 Things I Hate About You and Brainwash. Listen when doing uphill cardio.
Peppers by Lana Del Rey + Tommy Genesis — I have this thing where I won’t listen to an album that I know will be good, so Lana’s new album from March this year didn’t get played ‘til recently. I am obsessed with Peppers, Taco Truck x VB, and Fishtail.
Black Friday by Tom Odell — A ballad rife with truths. Don’t listen if you’re feeling fragile.
All the Pretty Girls by Kenny Chesney — Thanksgiving time always ushers in a moment of reminiscence, this year taking the form of a look back to my old music inclinations. Country music peaked in 2017.
🫗 CHAOS FUEL
🧹 Fonts
Solvent by PintassilgoPrints, ITC Zapf International by Hermann Zapf, Plasmatica by Apostrophic Labs
🛝 Internet Things
1-800-D2C — This is fun! Ever been on an online store and was so impressed with the design/dev and you just had to know what, how, who? This site has all of it. It’s like a cheat sheet for those who love looking at brands’ web design + dev like me. So many times on this site I’ve been like, wait, this is hosted on THAT old ass website platform!? Okay, maybe software ageism IS bad.
Adopt-a-Unicode — Move over Adopt-a-Highway, for a formidable opponent has entered the ether, because did you know you can adopt an emoji or even a unicode the way you could adopt stars? Yeah. It’s a thing. If anyone’s in the mood to gift me this holiday season, let the record show that my favorite emoji is 👨🏼🦳 ‘cause that’s my type and unicode,﹆, because it’s so meaningless that it’s teetering on being meaningful, kinda like how this newsletter post has been.
Oh, and before I go, here’s your annual reminder to get that reduced Adobe subscription by faking canceling and getting that half-off deal. Me personally I was able to finagle my way into their student deal that took my towering $59.99/mo to an orgasm-inducing $15.99/mo + 3 months pro bono.
Don’t say I never gave you anything.
elsewhere on the ‘net
Twitter / TikTok / Print Shop / OnlyFans / HomeFree / YouTube
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Gorgeous as always 🤎