Hi everyone. Welcome to the direly overdue first substantive addition to my website. I think there’s no better way to start this whole Project than by talking about why it took me so long to make it to begin with.

Let me start with context for everyone reading this who doesn’t know me personally (i.e., basically everyone reading this). I registered the https://zonk.neocities.org name at least two years ago and even made the background picture you see now, but that was also literally the full extent of what I did. The webpage otherwise sat mothballed for two years because I was too scared/lazy/inept/dysfunctional to sit down and actually learn CSS/HTML. That’s slowly starting to change though, I hope, in part due to the encouragement of my wonderful partner, as well as me taking a course on introductory web development last quarter at my college.

I’ve think always had extraordinary difficulty with finishing things that I start. I’m quite adept at starting to learn a programming language, or make a blog, or learn art, or study a textbook, or finish a book, or maintain a diary, but the challenge always comes after I made the first few steps and it then suddenly feels like all my hydraulics failed and I can apply myself to the task no further.

Here’s a painfully relevant anecdote to illustrate the point: in my senior year of high school (prior to the two-years-ago mark when I registered the Neocities name), my English teacher had issued an assignment of a mock college application essay. I had chosen to go with a prompt that went to the effect of asking what my greatest creative talents or interests were. Of course, I had no portfolio in any formally recognized discipline of art whatsoever, so I would need to apply the only creative talent that I did earnestly possess: bullshitting.

Off to the races I went maestroing some fable about how my voice dysphoria made me reserved and softspoken, but with the benefit of instant digital communication of the written word, I was able to Find My Voice in a website to express myself after all. The topic was sufficiently indulgent in California Liberal Ideals to earn me a respectable grade (and the prose itself I’m sure wasn’t too bad either), but from start to finish I had a rancid taste in my mouth from how flagrant of a lie this was. There was no website. It was a complete fiction – at best, it was an abstract and unrealized project that lived in a cramped tenement of dreams in my heart.

The only way I was able to drag my conscience into following through on this plan was by constantly telling myself “Well, I might not have a website right now, but in a few weeks, I’ll be graduating high school early, and have the whole winter to actually make a website! I’m really just doing things slightly out of order, that’s all!”

Once again, out of uncountably many times, I had pushed off a slight challenge that would have ennobled my spirit and given me an excellent creative outlet into the icy abyss of The Future, where it would frictionlessly slide further and further away from me until I ran back to catch it. This present website is one of my many, many attempts to catch up to everything that I have pushed away from me.

There’s no need for me to enumerate everything I have failed (or perceived myself as failing) at doing throughout my life, not least because of digital privacy reasons. The point now, instead, is to make a public, if obscure, declaration that I am not going to continue procrastinating on living the only life I have anymore.

Welcome to Zonk’s Zone.