Al

Hi, I'm Al

I'm a disabled New Yorker with a background in social science and public health research. I write to process things, document patterns, and blow off steam.
Since 2025, my disability has made writing significantly harder, and sporadic. It feels like a part of my soul has been eroded by the neurological damage.

But enough horrific despair!

BIFT stands for Before I Forget That: a personal philosophy around writing things down immediately and organizing information in ways that hold up under pressure. It's the principle behind most of what's on this site.

I also care about preserving my voice, and tracking snippets of it through the drafting.
Thanks to the glory of technology I can look back at the progress of my writing through university, with the papers written under professors really pushing the importance of key writing books to inform communication, and I can also reference the long and short writign I have done for and with friends.

As an austistic child I would be the overly open kid who would wander over to approachable strangers to knowledge-dump on them. Horses, cats, Star Trek, history and medical/scientific factoids.

This website has sections that feel like an extension of that.
The source files are ones that I can reference to:
'Oh, my style got more structured and tense when I did not have my pain managed' or 'The rough draft of this piece showed my cognitive hiccups/Oh this was a Dear Livejournal type depress-o-post.'

Most importantly: In writing I can moderate my voice. I can structure and revisit and revise. In collaborative settings writnig allows me regulating how I respond to things.

Projects and Tinkering