A new, ongoing thread on this blog, separate from the build log: what it actually takes to get anything done here, told by someone who has been an outsider in this state since the hour he arrived. No fixed schedule. It gets written when there's something true to put in it.
Every page on this site runs on the same rule: publish the record, not the adjective. This one is the exception, and it's worth saying so up front. There's no citation for what your own life did to you. This is just what happened, in the order it happened, starting with the day it started.
I left Lynwood, California — ZIP 90262 — in 2001 and landed in Omaha, ZIP 68105. Same country, different planet, is how it felt for about a week. Then, on my first day here, an American citizen told me — another American citizen — to go back to my country.
I know I am from where I am living, in this foreign frame of mind it takes to say that to another citizen. Only in America do you have to hear something like that said out loud — and only in America do you get to turn around and hand it right back: if I could, I would be there, in Cali, you fool.
That's not a bit I worked out later. That's close to what actually came out of my mouth, because the absurdity of it hits you immediately even when the sting does too. A citizen, telling a citizen to leave the country neither of us was ever going to leave, both of us standing in the same one the whole time.
Twenty-five years later I'm still in this state, and this week I spent building a tool to make sure a bounced email doesn't get mistaken for silence, mailing letters to certified candidates nobody else was writing to, and reading a government's own certified list instead of trusting a summary of it — because around here, getting a straight answer out of anyone, elected or not, takes exactly that kind of doggedness. Nobody hands you the record. You go get it, you check it twice, and you write down the date.
That's the actual throughline between a guy who got told to leave on his first day and a guy who now runs a civics site that writes to sitting senators. Both are the same stubbornness aimed at the same problem: being treated like you don't belong somewhere, and refusing to accept that as the final word.
This isn't a complaint post, and it isn't going to become one. It's a record, same as everything else here — just of a different kind of fact. What it costs, in effort and years, to be heard in a place that first told you to leave it. That's worth writing down too.
No schedule. No performance. It runs alongside the build log — Homework, Published Live — but it isn't that. This is the part of the story that doesn't have a citation, written by the same person who insists on one everywhere else on this site.