unplugged - josh, where u been @

touching base with my blog after 72 years. 

i'm back and more of a sad, lowly hipster than ever with a film camera.

​i've never been the kind of guy to declare that, at the end of a relationship, "ugh, what a waste of my time. a year wasted on him, and now what?"
 
i try and think: "what did i gain and learn from that relationship? what could i have done better? heck, what did i do good in?" 
 
it's been well over a year since i last dropped a post on my blog. during our break from one another, me and this site have been on a strictly professional level. clipping some of my work on other sites here and there, but never getting intimate. making posts all night long like we used to. 
 
i cheated a lot. i've been writing for about 12 sites since breaking up with my blog. so why have i come crawling back? i've lost my voice.
​

a scrapbook of my pain. at this point, tired wasn't an emotion, bc i felt nothing.

when you write for others, it's an offbeat experience. as a writer, i used other companies as forums to chat about my views whilst reconciling my voice with theirs to, i guess, pay my rent for the expanse my views were taking up. on the onset it was cool. "yah, just punching out some articles. deadlines are tight. send help." was a template text i could've just stuck to my notes app and copied and pasted when i needed to reply to a "wyd" msg.

my life became deadlines. the title 'freelancer' defined me. became me. formulated my writing to an economy of words converted to seo-appeasing buzz terms. neutering my views to fit the brief and to rehearse a tone of voice that wasn't my own. not megaphoned by my own values or beliefs. muted by a tick-box governed commercialised narrative of fashion, lodging them to into a stuffy system of economic signs and commodity logos. think the kinda articles you'd find over on the digital sides of the perfume mags (Cosmo, i'm looking at you).

top 10 must-haves for spring!!!1!
the ultimate guide to suits!!!1!
if you don't own these ss17 pieces you'll become an incubus of the bubonic plague, and ugly aesthetics and Trump will haunt your loved ones for 3 eternities!!!1!

​yawn. 
 
a blog is a odd little space in the digital landscape that's me. it's publicly displayed, privately run by me, and c'mon, that's odd. to most folks, coffee shops are living rooms, and our bedrooms are our temples to walk around naked and not have to arrange our face to make it understandable for others. for my old place a year back, me and my flatmates converted the living room to my bedroom. aka wut is privacy is it a type of pizza topping or. i craved solitude. having none irl and none on the web, my identity was being chopped and cut and chaffed by the gazes around me. framed to boxes. [insert white girl #inspo tumblr quote about 4 sides of boxes and more than that]. my ability to write became contingent on the approval of corporate bodies or apparently holistic creatives that are too busy trying to sell than to inspire.

​with the semi-recent news hitting the stands that Mode Media corp has flatlined, i'm now in a stage of my career i haven't been in some time; without one. re: my writing, i don't have a space to exercise it anymore. Mode was, by the late summer, the only site i was scribbling for. i got by with a steady pay-check and an equally steady grind of articles. working under their name even scored me seated tickets to LFW this SS17 season just gone. woah. 

with the site erased from the dead, barren glow of peoples' laptop screens, i think it's time to reboot this blog. 

​*white #fblogger voice* watch this space. ​