Words of a Terible Kid

Hi Mangesh. I have always loved making websites. The first website I made for myself was in 2020. It was a simple HTML website without any responsiveness. Hosted on GitHub pages, with a “.me” domain borrowed from a friend. I had an online friend Theo who had a very cool looking b/w website. The website was full of his thoughts, essays, frustration and poems. That is when I thought that I also wanted to have such things on my website.

In the past 5 years, I’ve been through 20+ iterations of my website. I tried to make it look cool, aesthetic, weird, blunt, brutal and anything you could imagine. I always tried to make what I saw and what I listened to. I prefer putting things blunt and raw instead of going through the fake kindness of those polite words.

In September 2023, I stepped out for the first time with 3 bags packed for Bangalore. I was super excited to make my own money, learn things, live alone with a junky. I was 17 back then, and I was super excited. But little did I know, things were going to go very quiet for me after that. I became very quiet after that, often deferred from speaking at home. In the midst of all this, an idea came to my mind. I considered myself a terrible kid because I was making a lot of mistakes one after the other. And all of those mistakes were clear signs of immaturity and childishness. A phrase came to my mind, “Words of a terrible kid”. I wanted to title this as my blog site and I thought I’d write all the weird and terrible things I’d done. I wanted to write things which were never written, I wanted to do everything on my own. Designing the website, taking pictures for it myself, writing completely non-plagiarized content. Everything should be of my own. I mean it when I say “everything”.

I changed the title of the site to “Wayfaring Strangers Den” and did not undo it for a long time. Since I turned 19, I thought I’m not a kid anymore. But now I want to undo it. I have always had this feeling where I felt slapped by self awareness. A lot of times, I’ve changed my opinions according to my own convenience. I don’t know how boredom feels, because I’ve been a part of a curse called hyperactivity.

I have written things according to the mental state I was in. The kid walks in the land of wayfaring strangers. I write in a very abstracted way, in hope that someday, someone will try to interpret my words like a song. I write like an open book test, in hope that some student will come with questions and try to search through the book. The thumbnails are all photographs taken by me for the most part. The drawings are often made by me and if not by me, I’ve given credit to the artist from whom I’ve stolen it. There’s always some correlation between the post and the image I use. I like details a lot and I feel lives are meaningless if you don’t have an eye for detail. I often write details from the image which is in my mind. I try to hide in and write as many details as possible. Calling things as Rock Opera, placing birds on the guitar as G# Chord and even the grammar mistakes. When I see the images and the text, it helps me connect to myself when I’m reading it again. There’s some meaning for me in every word and every corner. There’s some meaning for the future kid who will be reading this.

I don’t want to be an engineer, I don’t want to be an artist, I don’t want to be a musician, I don’t want to be a writer either. I want to be itchy.

I’m doing nothing different. I am writing what I’m seeing and listening to. That is also where the problem is. I want to be like Helen Keller, blind and deaf. And I want to see what happens to my mind after that.