about the author
Behind
the pages.
Kit LaVelle
i am both an amateur and professional over-thinker. outside work i read, mess with tech, watch the wildlife in my yard. i leave food out for the squirrels. a deer ate it. there’s also a fair amount of reality tv, which i would like to attribute entirely to my interest in human behavior, but some of it is just garbage i enjoy.
i get interested in things past the point where it’s useful. you mention a word and i start wondering where it came from, and now we’re doing that instead of whatever we were talking about. or i’m reading about air conditioners. no, not shopping for one. just trying to understand why this one works better than that one.
there is no good place to put any of this in a bio, but here we are.
i like taking things apart and finding out what’s going on. people too, although they tend to object to the screwdriver.
an interesting disagreement will keep me around longer than somebody nodding at everything i say. please have an objection. an actual one, not “you think too much.” we’ve established that. i do need to be able to ask questions without the questions themselves becoming a problem, though. sometimes i’m still trying to understand something everybody else has apparently agreed to move on from.
i like direct people. i don’t always pick up what was supposed to be implied and i resent having to reconstruct a conversation afterward. just say the awkward thing. we’re already having an awkward conversation, you’re only withholding the subject.
dry humor, dark jokes. somebody who can admit they don’t know. i have more patience for that than bluffing.
i’m independent and slow to get close. i need time alone even when things are going well, so somebody who needs a lot of reassurance would probably have a miserable time here. i like long conversations. i also like being left alone to finish my book. both of those need to be possible.
nonstandard deviation
the longer version
A little more context, since you’re still here.
a lot of what ends up here starts with the parts of what i have taken apart spread out on the floor.
sometimes i know what i’m looking for. usually i don’t.
something from six years ago will come up while i’m thinking about something from tuesday and suddenly they’re related. or i think they are. sometimes i write for a while and realize i was wrong about what i was writing about.
sometimes it takes 1,500 words.
there is a lot of that.
the small things tend to stick around.
a chair. a text message. somebody pretending to be asleep. a compliment i didn’t know what to do with. a crane fly hitting a window over and over.
i don’t know why those things stay and other things don’t.
i write from memory and my memory is not particularly interested in being useful. i remember details and lose context. sometimes something comes back years later and changes what i thought happened.
so this isn’t a record.
it’s whatever i remember whenever something comes crawling back to remind me it happened.
people show up without introductions because i know who they are. you might get three paragraphs into some "he" or some "you" with no idea who the hell i mean. sorry. sort of.
you may get to the end of something before you figure it out. you may not ever figure it out.
that’s fine.
there’s music attached to most of these. sometimes the song has something to do with what i wrote. sometimes it just feels like it belongs there.
same with the pictures.
and then there’s this:
ChatGPT: clock it 🤏⏰ AI-generated interpretation // robot exegesis
i let ChatGPT read some of these and tell me what it thinks they’re about.
sometimes it’s right. sometimes it finds meaning in things i didn’t mean to put there.
sometimes there really was just a bug on the window.
i leave it in either way.
there are no comments because i don’t want comments. there are six reaction buttons. that is enough.
i’m not trying to turn any of this into a story about becoming a better person.
some things changed me. some didn’t. some things mattered less than i thought they would. other things stayed around much longer than they had any business staying.
sometimes something gets funny eventually.
not always.
the name came later. most of this was already here.
semperflux.
i didn’t name it and then start writing about change. i noticed afterward that i already was.
old versions of myself. people leaving. people coming back. things i thought were over. things that were over and still managed to come up again.
me, mostly.
always changing.
it is the only thing about me that stays the same.
whether i like it and whether it is an active effort or not.
anyway. welcome. sit anywhere. the chairs are all bad.
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