An Audit in August.
At the end of July, James Gunn got fired from his job directing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after Mike Cernovich, alt-right ne’er-do-well and unrepentant rape apologist, unleashed a massive, expertly timed onslaught collage pieced together from of the ill-considered jokes about pedophilia and other unenlightened opinions Gunn had once put online and had since disavowed. This is not an essay expressing the whole of how I feel regarding Gunn’s firing, save to say that Mike Cernovich is a cackling misanthropic pustule of a man, and that the uniquely human paradigm of transgression, atonement, and forgiveness is a multifaceted process that winds and bends and catches fire and cools and might never resolve to anyone’s preference.
Gunn’s experience, in its way, compelled me to finally complete a project I began six years ago, migrating a selectively curated batch of blog posts over from my old LiveJournal — nowadays a platform owned by Russian interests, just like our president — to WordPress, with a handful of small corrections and cleanup for dead links. I also took the opportunity to grab a number of my long-form commentary posts from Facebook and convert them into journal versions. The final count was a little over 700 compositions — including essays, plays, poetry and prose — that I felt best represented the state of my mind and the form of my feeling at the time I chose to write about them.
Things I Learned From The Migration
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When I started expressing myself this publicly it was June 2001. I was in my early 20s, and the internet was still something of an awkward, knock-kneed colt, trying to cross a rushing stream on the random pattern of rounded stones that had managed to push above the surface. So I composed a lot of writing that, upon reflection 17 years later, was not only poor in construction but poor in its foundations. By which I mean, I was choosing terrible things to write about and then writing about them poorly.
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As such, by moving forward a post at a time, I was able to pinpoint the period in which I finally felt I knew how to wield my voice, because it’s the period I found myself choosing to retain more content than not.
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It’s around 2007 – 2008.
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Very few of my core philosophies and political positions truly changed over the course of those 17 years but the manner in which I sought to advocate for them did. Over time I attempted to reconfigure my rhetoric from an arsenal of grenades to the precise and powerful longbow. I find I would rather strike true once instead of having to clean up the mess I leave when I let my anger fly unchecked. I do not always succeed, but I try.
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If we knew each other online from 2013 to 2014 you probably knew about my terrible, psychotic downstairs neighbor and our 18-month attempt to fight back against the trauma she inflicted on our family. And I decided, after looking over the posts I’d written on Facebook about the subject, that I have no desire to bring them forward into the blog space. For now I leave the record of this nonsense in the stewardship of Mr. Zuckerberg and with the sentinels of my own mental scars.
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As far as I can tell I did not write anything that would cost me a job at Disney.
I’m leaving in the pre-dawn hours of the morning to attend a family wedding in Toronto. When I return I believe I will permanently shutter what remains of the LiveJournal, and let whatever I deemed unnecessary to myself moving forward fade into any oblivion there may exist on the internet.
And I shall remind myself that the price of self expression is that your past can be both fleeting and permanent at the same time.
Creative Control 
Great post