What is deepsicks?

Musings from April 2007

I don’t recall when “deepsicks” dawned on me. Some late-teen, early-twenties epiphany of word smashclash discovery, pulling together several things: deep six graves and deep six tossing over, combined with Dorothy Parker’s condemnation, “This is not a novel that should be read lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Probably a bad thing, hey. But it piqued fascination and described my aspirations: to write with the energy, brightdark and grindoom that would incite being hurled across the room in awe—the horror! the horror! the exaltation.

Yes. Precious. Worse, chronic bronchitis (“the deep sick”) and a grueling high school basketball drill (“the deep six”) were also tied up in it. I’ve used it as internet moniker and a collection of ideals, loosely defined—a rose by any other, a cut just as deep.

Yet now… huh. This place was never all that gloomy, and the past several updates are predominately Happy Things, the site through and through a crossbreed of life celebration and self examination—hardly the bleeding mess, disturbing text one might expect. Now that I am a well-adjusted adult (tar-har), how unfortunate I should hang my words beneath the banner “deepsicks”… or is it. I don’t know. I don’t like feeling that I need to defend deepsicks any more than the pressure to deny it, whether by trashing it here as youthful indiscretion or transferring my creative life to a less ominous domain.

The name hasn’t limited me—my experiences or expressions of them. It may cause pause for those unfamiliar with my work and personality, but I don’t believe it’s entirely a misnomer, either—clever.cute or not. It’s like a tattoo. I wouldn’t get it now but I got then, and I’ve changed and stayed the same in remarkable ways. It meant and it means and I am still me, and honor the past smirkingly, forgetting for the moment I was always tongue-in-cheeky, a deadly goof and a sharp tool.

So may your mouth corner tug, shoulder shrug yippee! be quicker than your knee-jerk step-back whoa. I pass pits of despair and point out the candy mountains but for the most part here, walk solid ground. And dance. A lot.