This is just the beginning

and yeah it's scary

So I was on YouTube the other night, as I tend to be. I’ve managed to cut a lot of social media out of my life, but man do I love some YouTube. We all have our vices, right? I’ve spoken plenty about mine on this platform.

Anyway, The A L G O R I T H M put this video into my feed and I thought, “huh, interesting.” So I checked it out and you know, sometimes things just find you when you need them. Synchronicity.

In this short clip, we find a young man stuck in the in-between. As he meanders through city streets, he talks about life stuff and ultimately ends his thoughts with, “Take action. You find out through doing, not by thinking.”

We hear things a lot, especially in this information-rich age we live in, but sometimes you need to hear them over and over again, and you need to hear them at the right time for them to really hit you and move the needle.

I’m in a lot of in-betweens right now. We all are, aren’t we? I know where I’ve been. The future lies somewhere ahead of me. I don’t know exactly where I’m headed, what the universe has in store for me—the good, the bad, the undeniably handsome ;)

But the one thing I’m certain of is what my next move is.

What’s that? The next right thing. However big or small.

And then the next right thing after that.

This weekend I will be mailing out the first issue of The Guidelines Zine. This is the next right thing for me. I’ve been wracked with resistance, doubt, and fear since I announced the project. It’s been easy to judge myself, wonder why so-and-so hasn’t signed up, rationalize why I should just drop everything and move to Italy.

But the things you resist most are usually what you most need to do. So we’re doing it.

The project is titled Knuff Ced, which was inspired by an old trend from the 1830s of intentionally misspelling common phrases. These misspellings were then abbreviated and became sort of linguistic status symbols that distinguished folks who were in-the-know. The term “oll korrect” gave us the colloquial “ok.” And the term “knuff ced” —a misspelling of “enough said”— was abbreviated as “kc.”

Which is, of course, my name. When I learned about this stuff (while watching a YouTube video about the etymology of “ok”), I thought, “huh, that’s my name!”

Synchronicity.

It’s also the pen name I’ve finally settled into. My inner artist, my inner child, he’s the one doing all this. It’s only right he gets the credit.

Here’s a poem from the zine to whet your appetites.

If you want to subscribe to The Guidelines Zine, you can use this link. These will be mailed out this weekend(!!!) and should hopefully arrive shortly.

Thank you for reading! Please like, share, and subscribe if you enjoyed it. I’d love to have an even more in-depth conversation in the comments!

If you’d like to support the journey, you can buy this former barista a coffee. It would be much appreciated!