To Bio, or not to Bio

A strange dilemma, and a Love Poem to my first Canvas Tent, Pt 1

Oh, the internet world of Bio’s, where we are expected to snatch the vining, climbing tendrils of our curiosities, the delicate petals of our mind’s capacities, the hoof and bone of our hand-crafts, the pile of rubbish of what we have done, the delicate churning of endless ways of being who we are, into a catchy little quip, to sell the essence of our souls to digital passerbys with the attention span of a moth. How? How am I supposed to decide who I am? What sacrilege is this, that I must dictate what I am in the world, in my community, in my family, in my many places here among the sway of days?

The idea of being self-made is horrifying. None of us, even the most socially isolated scraggly mountain man of the canned beans and anchovies variety, has accomplished even one fragment of an achievement alone. It is a philosophical blunder to believe that we are here, eating and breathing and shitting, on our own. We are made of myriad beings, alive and collaborating beings, symphonies of beings, a cacophony of strange beasts and persons and spirits all conjoining together in endless fluctuations of togetherness, all of which constitutes our idea of ‘self’. Personal doesn’t actually exist, not in a thriving, living cosmos. and the idea of being '‘self-made’ brings the edge of The Big Grief near, an immense hollowness in the heart, this idea of somehow being individuated, separate, stagnant, sterile, and so utterly disjointed from the way of the Life that we can even believe in such a thing as being self-made.

Writing a bio feels sticky, like the floor of a punk house in August. Dirty, smudged with the prints of ego-delic pressure. Oof, it brings me out of my body and into the eyes of a faceless public, looking in at myself, my two liner selling point, designed to somehow convey the juicy meatiness of what I’m about. How can I make myself seem true to what I am? How do I present a totality of what I offer to these times? Is it even possible? What if I’m misunderstood? What if I leave out a part of myself that is crucial to understanding me, and what I do, what I believe in? Yikes.