About Me

This here blogger, C. Rhea

First, an origin story…

I was born and slow-braised in St. Louis, Missouri and I love her madly from afar. I owe everything to those people, those trees, those rivers.

I was trying to figure out what one does with Bachelors’ degrees in Spanish and Religious Studies so I walked the Camino de Santiago, “The Way of Saint James” along the Northern route to Finisterre, “The End of the Earth”; at a minimal velocity, I might add. Snailing along convinced me to trust an old appetite to move here and sell my most precious belongings, including my sweetass beige 2006 Corolla SE.

Within a few minutes of completing the Camino, I got shat on by a seagull and a scrappy little half-Basque, half-Spanish pilgrim from Bilbao invited me a couple rounds under his umbrella. Later, a drunk gypsy stole the journal I’d kept throughout the pilgrimage – easily among the greatest losses of my life and it shall likely haunt every letter I lay down – but the little bilbaíno helped me look for it (bless his heart, but to no avail) and made me fried chicken on the 4th of July, 2012.

I moved in with him a few months later. A final thing scribes are obliged to mention: Look at this dog, the Pete of many names, he owns us.

Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

Second, why the words come out like this:

(This is how all this began.)

Do dig me some oblique wordcraft even though this is, full disclosure, a means to gain enough experience and qualifications to legitimize eventually charging something for it. I’m the perfect candidate for attending to your every translatable need. Yeah, but back to what I was saying, you know, I seek the challenge of honing these neural strings towards interpersonal harmony. Just take a look at my CV. My greatest weakness and my greatest strength are what you and I should quiz me on. My hope is a whittling away at understandability. What else, oh right, and I’m just fighting to fit into my own technocratic generation’s corporate culture, regarding the following…

A) Define your brand! (pluck it from the fire and scorch your hide);
B) Market yourself! (rationalize [by monetizing] all that FaceCrook and Twiddle scrolling);
and C) Improve your image and visibility! (PhotoCrop out all the second-guessing, bury the inherent hubris)

Oh hush wee cynic, go along on now and just utilize existing economic mechanisms to CREATE rather than simply CONSUME.

Don’t want to be so cringingly, nails-on-chalkboard obvious, but honesty is vulnerability is sobriety is liberty when I crave a binge on shame. The rush of mostly real is sacred and so are you.

Really not interested in helping you to GitThangsDoneSon or gain innerself-helpful insight into effectivenessity (although Goodness knows I need it) but I’ll likely indulge in a self-conscious experiment or two towards that end. There’s your disclaimer and there’s your signature on the waiver.

I’m a barely legal documented alien voyeur with hardcore neurosis about making exhibitionist art and a taboo fetish for amateur linguistics & anthropology.

Feeling so far from home, while simultaneously building my nest here, demands a degree of religare or ‘to bind, tying back,’ the Latin root of the word ‘religion’. Due to some combinations coincidental of habitat + heredity, I find myself most comfortable in liminalities… the in-between places, the layered identities and accounts, the back and forth clicking of tongues in translation … such that my terminology and narrative style hearken to a core inclination that I got tah got tah got tah straddle the so-called sacred and mundane.

With this as my faithful steed and some oft-profane myth and metaphor in my saddle bags, I’m scouting the memetic ritual: the transmission of cultural information. I set out on this verb-ridden E-endeavor with this approximate destination in mind…

Connection: that which has been the stuff of
cosmology, spirituality and religion
for innumerable years of human history…

Connection: be it to here and now,
be it to sometime past or approaching,
be it to our fellows or to The Other…

Connection: the mechanism,
both an ends and a means that religare
shares with the Information Age…

Welcome to one of a myriad of temples
where we seek the oracle, perform the rites,
and kneel humbly before the omnipotence
of digital intellectual property rights.