by William Skink

While I can disdain the idea of “having an image” in order to sell oneself if you’re gonna peddle your original content, the reality is unavoidable. Even more challenging, an elusive “authenticity” is often sought because it’s an important ingredient in the recipe of inspiring others to give you money for the fruits of your imagination.

I can’t ever recall a time being interested in the clothes I wear, or the higher form of “fashion” involved in matching pieces of fabric on the human body. That’s why it’s so weird that I now eagerly anticipate packages with two hundred dollar pants coming to me from Philadelphia. How did I get here?

William Skink is a pseudonym I picked because William is my middle name and Skink is a type of lizard that can regrow its tail/tale as a defensive mechanism. I also first started blogging as “lizard” many years ago, so it made sense.

In 2010 I started a year long writing project (in October, when my second kid was born) that officially birthed William Skink as more than a pseudonym. William Skink became a character I gave over authorship to.

This will sound weird, but William Skink has become a sort of firewall I use between my real life and the influence of the muse, which I have come to mistrust as a force that has my real life interests in mind. Put another way, the muse can do great things for your ego, but your ego rarely does great things for the people in your personal life.

When I left my job at the shelter, I bit the tech-bullet and invested in hardware and software. I trudged through my disdain for technology to become competent with ProTools and FinalCut. I recorded screaming accompanied by keyboards, stitched video together, and helped support the Bota Box brand with my wine consumption.

Somewhere in my search for video content I ran across footage from Wasteland Weekend, an extended festival-like gathering of serious LARPers (live action role playing) dressed in an amazingly creative and inventive variety of post-apocalyptic attire.

Well, since William Skink wrote dystopian poetry, he was going to have to look like the part, RIGHT? And here was the perfect aesthetic.

Fast-forward through a bunch of Etsy purchases and Halloweens providing cover for my “costume” to the present, where my abstaining from wine guzzling has melted fifty pounds off my frame. Papa needed a new pair of pants, and William Skink needed some threads for the guerrilla marketing of his upcoming title WELCOME TO THE COVAXICON, and as providence would have it, we stumbled upon the Delicious crew.

Not caring about the clothes I wore was, in part, a reflection of not caring what I was doing to my body with alcohol. With that factor having changed, the fruits of my mind can now be delivered by a healthier body.

And I’m going to look damn good doing it.

To the delicious crew: THANK YOU for making amazing clothing!

P.S. Let me know if you would like to commission a dystopian poet to write up some catchy jingles. With the ego-blessing of the muse I can convey that William Skink’s poetic style offers a unique, post-modern mix of simple rhyme schemes and low-brow language to communicate the perils of the spiritual warfare being waged against us by dark magicians and transhumanist sociopaths who are currently leveraging technology to become immortal man-gods.

In other words, it’s good shit to combat some evil motherfuckers.