I shower with my earrings in. I’ve been doing dumb shit like that since I was a teenager. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is about me, but there must be some small print in my warranty that talks about defects and glitches like that. I wouldn’t know though. Who actually reads the warranty?

For instance, I don’t spread peanut butter or jelly with a knife. I prefer a spoon. There has been well-documented instances of me choosing to go hungry rather than using a an UN-SPOON because life gave me the Freudian dilemma of just accepting the hunger pains instead of using a knife like some condiment survivalist. I’m not out to hunt and carve a “pb&j” out of whatever resources I can scrounge together from cabinets, refrigerators, and Wonder Bread bags.

There is a lot about me that most people would consider abnormal. I prefer to eat pancakes with chopsticks because it makes me feel smarter. I like to wear women’s deodorant because it smells better and I don’t mind smelling like flowers for most of the day. I wear my socks at half mast all the time because I’m certain my metatarsals are more important than the plantar and dorsal surfaces of my feet. I think dung beetles are at their most cute, when they are rolling a poop ball around with their hind legs in a backwards handstand. That’s just me. Christopher Marlowe once wrote, “oh Faustus, lay that damned book aside and let’s talk about how weird Jae Davis is.”

I believe this weirdness is a sign of a creative mind. I tend to turn everything into an adventure for the sake of having a new story to tell myself whenever I reminisce. You might not remember making a bowl of oatmeal any differently than how you’ve done it your entire life. But you’ll remember that bowl if it was actually tap-shoe full of oatmeal and you ate it with your bear hands! (Originally the use of the word “bear,” there, was a typo, but now I want you to reread that line as if it referred to you as having paws of the ursine variety!)

I feel like everything odd about me has made me into the writer I have blossomed into. No, I know that all of the fantastically convoluted characteristics I possess are continuously gestating within me, leading towards my eventual metamorphosis into a dictation manipulation, figuratively formidable, poetically metaphorical ibis with wings long enough to transcribe reality into whatever form I deem it fit to be in—the Djehuty.

Writing is my life now. I can no longer see myself doing anything else, for all other things are beneath me. I am a creator through and through. I am the Deity of Lexicon and Syntax. I am a god among words. I am a world breaks and a universe forger! I am Jae! Hear me…ummmm…read me…maybe…no….ummmm…watch me write? Hell yeah. That works!

“I said, ‘good day!'” — Willy Wonka