When making anything that is not a pure act of self-expression, we consider the audience. What we want out of our work inevitably comes to influence the work itself, as to express intending to be misunderstood is not expression at all.

Of You who would read this, there are two: those who know me and come here at my insistance, and those who don't and come here at their leisure.

To the former, thank you.

To the latter, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry because this is very much a pure act of self-expression. I am not considering you at all, and you did not know that when you came in.

The least I can do is explain what went wrong.

You can call me Cypress. Beyond my own reasons, you may call me this because I share traits with the Cypress tree:

• I'm resistant to change throughout the year.
• I prefer temperate climes.
• The etymology of our name is tautological.

I am making this web zone because I miss something that I didn't appreciate enough when it existed: The Old Web As I Knew It, after the Eternal September but before the co-opting of The Old Web by the plutocratic forces that corrupt every aspect of capital-T Truth.

I think there is something powerful in the nature of the archaic personal website. To construct a plinth in the technological surf demands far more of us than casting a tweet into the wind, or updating our status to those who know us well enough to know nothing's changed. To be here, to make my little corner of the internet, is to erect something more permanent. Any and all things you see here, to the best of my ability, have been made by my own two hands. What comes to be on this slab of digital stone matters far less than the fact that anything came to be at all.

I never read the works of David Foster Wallace. First off, I don't believe in authors. I don't trust the intentions of anyone the industry trusts for publication. Second, and more to the point, I don't have it in me to focus on any one thing for as long as a book, and if I suddenly did, I wouldn't start with 3.2 pounds of words. Despite a complete unfamiliarity with his work, I do know that he was a man that asked more of the world than he had within himself to give. What he asked for, as I heard of it in casual mentions and retoolings of the phrase, was something worth respecting: the New Sincerity.

My work here is my contribution to that: here I will speak freely and with an earnest appreciation for the world. I am here because it is easier to be indifferent than to hate or to love, to pair your admiration and denigration, to cling to nothing and be above everything. I am here to be brusque in all things.

I am here to divorce myself of irony.

Signed, Cypress, drunk on watered rum