It’s been a year since I started Spirit & Glitch. Technically significantly longer (technically like two or three years…), but the whole thing just snowballed out of nothing, and it doesn’t have a birthday. So I declare that it’s today.
I started Spirit & Glitch with several intentions:
-Create an expressive outlet
-Create a business
-Resolve all of the ways that “art” and “business” seemed to exist in my mind as two entities circling each other with knives
-Come to terms with everything I didn’t know about business, marketing, having customers, building a brand. I had a lot of resistance to all of those things, and stronger than the resistance was faith that such things can not be inherently evil in that they’re a part of life.
It’s been a ride. It’s been super messy. It’s turned my life upside down. It’s been excruciating. It’s been joyful. I’ve learned a lot.
If you know me through the internet, howdy 👋 you know me through a very narrow pipe through which I’ve been trying to build a clothing business for the past year. You should know that I’m multiple orders of magnitude weirder and more complex than I let on.
If you know me in person, you’re probably sort of confused about what I’ve been putting out. Especially lately. It’s been off. It’s not been me. It’s felt like a delirious destitute man’s Alan Watts trying to promote Hot Topic as therapy.
Truth is - the last year has been one in which I’ve met, danced with, and come to terms with more demons than I thought one person could have. About art, about business, about being seen, about spirituality, about love, about literally every area of my life. I’ve been quiet about this, or rather, sharing that adventure with an extremely small group of people.
Spirit and Glitch has been the catalyst and the outlet and oftentimes the vehicle through which those processes have occurred. If you’ve ever started a business, you probably have some sense of what I’m talking about. If you’ve never started a business, trust that the stuff it forces you to come to terms with can turn you upside down and inside out, and that that’s a good thing.
Where it’s at now is - I understand how to run the business portion of it, and feel some sense of closure in that I don’t need to keep experimenting. Thank fucking God.
However, the art portion feels like it’s on life support. And it’s not for lack of inspiration - it’s the medium. I’ve got worlds of energies and images and archetypes that want to come out of me, and I need to come to terms with the fact that they are not going to fit into the kind of artwork one puts on leggings. Even dope Spirit & Glitch leggings.
And this stuff has all been screaming for release for awhile - I’ve had more adventures in the last couple years than most people have in a lifetime into the depths of my own psyche and identity, masculinity, femininity, identity, God, life. It’ll resonate with some people. It’ll alienate some people. But, no matter what, it needs to come out.
So - I’ll still share some of it on the Spirit & Glitch page, but I need an outlet where I can just mainline philosophy and archetypes and existential experiences and whatever art wants to ride along with it. So, I’ve made my own page where I’m going to share all of that openly without trying to figure out what parts work for a clothing brand.
I’m also going to post that in the Writings portion of Spirit and Glitch and put it front and center on the website, because that’s what’s live right now, and I do want the business to be about more than just clothing.
I’m going to keep playing with AI art as well, as much as it’s in service of my writing and expression.
And for now - I’m going the turn off my laptop and go the hell to Burning Man. We’ll see what reality looks like on the other side.
I love you all. Thank you from the depths of my being for tuning in and being on this ride with me.
Love,
Alex
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