Is You Is or Is You Ain’t - Blaugust the Seventh
I have never been particularly adept at maintaining a disguise in this grotesque carnival we call meatspace. I mean, I’ve tried—but façades are exhausting, brittle masks held together by the flimsiest twine, forever threatening to split under the weight of breath and sweat. It is not that I weave elaborate counter-mythologies about myself, no… I simply cannot abide the endless pantomime.
I already find the alchemy of friendship maddeningly difficult, and the idea of others abandoning me when the mask inevitably slides to reveal my raw, unfiltered self is… well… unpleasant. That moment when the illusion shatters—when the flesh-and-ink chimera gives way to whatever eldritch specimen lurks beneath—strikes both parties like the dissonant howl of some cosmic tuning fork.
That’s dramatic. I just don’t want people to like a counterfeit me. My abandonment issues are legion enough without me manufacturing new ones out of my own shenaniganery.
So who is me?
We will not be re-opening the tomb where my online name was interred with its secrets, forged in the last gasps of an internet that still understood the word privacy. That is a sepulcher best left sealed.
Instead, let us speak of the entity tapping out these words.
I am Will. A forty-something millennial haunting the rolling hinterlands of Wisconsin. High school was a charnel house of social discomfort, so we’ll skip that particular necropolis. I emerged into Beloit College, a tiny liberal arts institution squatting on the faultline between Illinois and Wisconsin. If you’ve driven past the massive can of beans, you’ve passed its gates.
Where you start is infrequently where you end
I began my collegiate rituals in the alchemical temples of chemistry. Enough credits allowed me to bypass the usual gauntlet and plunge straight into the year-long ordeal of organic chemistry. I preferred the dark metallic solidity of inorganic work—organic chemistry felt too much like trying to trap shadows in a jar—but graduation demanded I endure it.
Midterms brought the grand ritual of the Wall O’ Chemistry: each supplicant choosing a molecule to synthesize as their final trial. Ten to fifteen steps, a month’s worth of delicate transmutations. I refused the obvious paths, convincing the professor to sanction my strange alternative. The materials for the final two weeks were to arrive later, after the preliminary steps.
Everything went beautifully—until, of course, the final reagents never materialized. Two months of labor undone by a missing shipment. “It won’t affect your grade,” the professor lied. I walked in with a B+, walked out with a C+. Somewhere in the unseen dimensions, the molecule I never finished still weeps.
Pissed wasn’t quite the word, but it prowled nearby. I abandoned chemistry’s cold embrace and fled to the twin disciplines of Psychology and English.
What do you do with two degrees not in tech?
Apparently, you walk into Epic Systems on your 22nd birthday and never leave. I started there in 2004, and the building has wrapped its labyrinthine halls around me ever since.
My most defining role: Head of Accessibility. I conjure processes to ensure our software bends toward equity—that a blind scheduler can navigate the system without the interference of invisible, incomprehensible barriers. My work helped bring UI Health and the Chicago Lighthouse together, filling queues with skilled blind staff who navigate the system like cartographers of unseen realms. You can read about it here: An Epic Undertaking. It’s good to have proof from voices that aren’t mine.
What do you do here?
Accessibility has become vocation, obsession, lodestar. For six years I chaired the local disability rights committee, engineering accessibility into the city’s bones. We seeded new diversity liaison roles, ensuring that no civil-rights project sprouted without roots in accessible design.
That commission was how I survived the first Trump administration. Think global, act local—before the larger madness swallows you whole.
Otherwise…
Side quests, ripe for their own grimy dispatches:
- Married to an absolute nerd of the highest order.
- 130% cat person; felines are the true archivists of the soul.
- Born without a left arm, a congenital absence that leaves its own ghost-limb itch in my dreams.
- Once a professional photographer—capturing light before it dies.
- Founded and ran Bunny Rope, a novelty rope business whose knots tied more than objects.
- Taught adult sex and sexuality classes for three years.
- Keeper of a small orchard that hums with bees and mild menace.
- Pokémon obsessive, especially Go.
- Writing voice distilled from Hunter S. Thompson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Douglas Adams—a cocktail that should never be served, yet here we are.
I write incessantly. My shelf of journals from the past decade leans like a paper monolith, each spine a vein of ink leading back to prior versions of myself.
Cat Tax
The feline toll must be paid before departing this text.
