Wicked Cliche

Goals For Age 43

Last night I posted a list of some of the things I achieved while I was 42, and it was an impressive list. I’ve been keeping lists of my achievements almost every year now for many years, whether around my birthday, the new year, or both, and I’m incredibly proud of myself as I watch my growth, in ways that matter more than how much money I make, which still isn’t really much of anything, but money has never been a goal except that I wish to be able to live at least as well as I do now, but independently. My life is no magnificent thing as it is, but if it were mine rather than being dependent on the government, that would make me happy… but even while I need help, I am still a person. I still matter. I still make huge waves in the universe with my contributions in many forms, and most of them are positive. I work very hard to be able to give back to the world in whatever ways I am able, because giving back is a priority for me…and I want to give back love and hope and joy and inspiration. I do not wish revenge, even for the people who hurt me most. I want to give back good to the world, in hope that I can be part of the revolution and help us work towards peace and a better world. I don’t know what that will look like. I have my doubts that peace on earth is even possible, but I work for the Universe and I do it in the name of peace and balance.

What can I do this coming year at age 43 to grow even more as a person? I have some ideas…

daily meditation (to my best ability)
get outside for air and a little walking (daily, but also to my best ability.)
if I don’t get outside, I absolutely MUST meditate, even just for a couple minutes
regular gratitude lists
keep creating art, trying new things and trying to master old things… one thing I wanna work on especially is drawing hands.
create at least one suite of tarot cards for Inktober….pot leaves, records, paint brushes, or microphones
do a book signing and reading at the gallery
do the craft show at my mental health center in December.
get to my cousin’s wedding party for a family event
redo The Godchild Part 1 and call it “My So Called Delusions: The Godchild”, “My So Called Delusions: The Mixtape Years”, and “My So Called Delusions: Becoming an Artist”
publish “My so Called Delusions: The Godchild” around Easter
get stress test
start walking to the pharmacy to get my own meds again, and maybe walking to the pond, and making an event of it each time… even if I have to buy myself a little toy from the toy section or a candy bar. It’s only once or twice a month.
get back to losing weight. After my med increase, I’ve gained weight for the first time in months, but I wanna turn that around and get under 200 pounds, or at least fit into my Skidz, which I only need to lose about 10-15 more pounds to fit into
start seeing friends more… inviting people over and maybe even going out
possibly work on new books “Moo, the Cat” and “Good Catholic Kids”
get back to music in some major way, whether it be writing and performing more hip hop songs (even if I can’t do it live at first), learning a song on bass or keyboard, or learning to make beats. Ultimately, I’d love to perform my rap in front of an audience again, but we will see how that goes.
start dancing and lifting weights again
possibly get one of the many tattoos I’ve been putting off for a decade, if not something completely brand new… but maybe that brick wall I was gonna get as a sleeve with VERA in graffiti letters.
stretch more often and maybe even try yoga
do another art show
attend art shows at the gallery
go to reunion or get together with Beacon friends
see the ocean
have a friend or two come visit me from out of state
watch some of my all time favorite movies to help inspire me for when I try to turn “Good Catholic Kids” into a screenplay
get to know some new music, since I haven’t paid as much attention to new stuff the last couple years
go experience live music
walk in the woods in autumn
add my own graffiti to the graffiti wall
see family more
finish reading the book I’m reading, and read at least a couple others. Seeing as I didn’t read any at age 42 except for my own, nearly 20 times and a few books about publishing. If I finish “On Writing” by Stephen King and read a couple others, I’ll be happy to start there.
cook at least once or twice a week and keep up with cleaning!!!

Accomplishments Of Age 42

held a kick ass zoom party for my 42nd birthday with friends from all over the world performing and showing art, since I never had a 40th party
did several paintings including this new one from September 2021

performed a few songs live at the Armory with Parama and Steve

helped elect a new president
high school reunion on zoom
many zooms events for Jam’n Java and Soulkore open mics
hosted 2 more zoom open mic art parties, all successful
found a record bookcase in the trash and collected records to fill it

designed 22 major arcana tarot cards

worked on designing web site Wicked Cliche Art and Books, including page for creative friends
learned web site marketing techniques to get the site seen
picked out and framed 25 old drawings and 25 old photos for a 2 part art show with 2 successful in person shows

these were a few of the photos in the show

did some political activism, mostly fighting for accessibility in the local art community (Sign a petition to help save Out Of the Blue Gallery)
wrote “I Write the System” (autobiography)
wrote and illustrated “Be The Best You” (children’s book)
started major rewrite on the godchild (memoir trilogy)
designed a cover for my book
learned about amazon advertising and other ways to get my book seen
had stickers and business cards made
hand-made hundreds of stickers including a couple I put on a utility box over racist graffiti

sent out over 100 press kit announcements
did several paintings
designed and sold t-shirts and other merch
bought art from a few friends
created a home gallery
did major cleaning
put several pieces of furniture together
edited “I Write the System” 17 times
wrote query letters to about 75 publishers
got a bite on my book from a publisher but would have taken months to years so I decided to self publish again
found, created, and cooked new recipes
lost 50 pounds
visited with koda
went swimming

walked in the woods
went to Robin’s Farm Park to take photos
went to the graffiti spot a few times

created new digital art
sold a couple pictures and some stickers
participated in a spirituality group
practiced meditation
broke up with a sort of toxic boyfriend
better learned how I want to be treated
talked to a friend about maybe wanting to know them better
wrote a few songs and poems, including a poem about “The Godchild”
spoke up about mistreatment in a number of health care and housing situations
had my apartment inspected and rejected several times and dealt with the fear of having to move, which would have been a huge downgrade most likely if not homeless
visited my parents a few times
made many new friends
saw a few good movies and shows including “Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom”, “Kid90”, “Disclosure”, “Legend of Korra”, “Summer Of Soul”, “His Dark Materials”, “Cobra Kai”, “13th”, “Da 5 Bloods”, and now trying “Sweet Tooth”
tried all kinds of new delivery places I loved
learned to start wearing masks or face shields when i went places despite the anxiety attacks
got vaccinated
dealt with severe mental health symptoms and all kinds of extreme stress, daily triggers, and so on, and I am still here
started learning keyboard and got a little better at bass
published two books

A Week In “I Write the System”

It has now been one week since I released “I Write the System.”

So far, so good.

There have been a couple minor issues like the fact that my cover is slightly off center and there are no page numbers, and Amazon ads were down all week, including their contact team who I still need to get in touch with after trying several times last week, but people are buying and reading it. I had a surge of buyers the first few days, which had me in the top 20 books in my categories three days in a row, but I’m not ranking since my surge of buyers went down and my ads aren’t up due to a glitch.

Here are a couple pictures from Day 1, when I ranked in the top 10 in Gender Studies and LGBTQ Biographies…

I’ve been having severe anxiety with people reading my book, because of how personal it is, as well as just the general state of the world lately. It’s been rough; but I’m meditating, relaxing, listening to records, doing art, taking baths, cooking, talking to friends, and whatever I can to get through it, and I invited one of my artist friends over to hang out for my birthday.

Here is some digital art I’ve recently done…I need to start doing more stuff by hand, but these are fun to fuck around and make art with…

I made this list of my 50 Favorite Rappers, and someone I met in a hip hop group who’s never said anything else to me informed me that Apollo Brown was not a rapper. Ooops. Well, it’s an honest mistake. He’s a producer who works with a ton of great underground rappers and everything he produces is fire, so he’s one of my top hip hop artists, but I gotta replace him with someone who probably should’ve been on the list already… MF DOOM.

Here is the list though. The rest of them are rappers, and all worth checking out…

It’s been a hectic week and I suspect it’s only gonna get worse for a bit unfortunately. Hang in there. Maybe read my book for inspiration. Put it down if it’s overwhelming, but you can check it out here…

I will leave you with some new music by local artists I really dig and was excited to see them work together, Walter Alice and Brandie Blaze…

Reading A Couple Chapters Of the New Book By Jymi Cliche

Presenting : two videos of me reading from my upcoming book. It’s an autobiography about my life as an intersex person with Bipolar Disorder and Complex PTSD. The majority of the book takes place before my transition. I am now living as a non-binary trans man. These two chapters take place in the 90’s when I was in high school. I will be showing the second of these two videos directly on Facebook and Instagram Monday night, to get ready for my upcoming book release, which will be somewhere in the next 3-25 days.

I was gonna add photos to the book, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to, so instead, I’ll put a couple of the photos here, showing what I looked like at the time these chapters were written.

This first chapter I’m sharing is from the end of 1993, when I was fifteen years old and was first put in the psych ward after years of being badly bullied, abused, and giving up on life. I had already made my first suicide attempt a couple years earlier and was still suicidal while also trying to get sober from my early addictions, so my church told my parents to put me in a notorious psych hospital I call “Claymore,” and I dropped out of public school and went in-patient. That is what the first chapter here is about. I made it psychedelic looking to go with the theme, and I decided not to put this one up on FB and Instagram since it is incredibly triggering. Just be warned there is talk of all kinds of triggering shit in this chapter. It’s about an adolescent psych ward, and it’s real.

This is a photo of me at the age I was in the psych ward. Technically, this photo was taken a few months after I got out, but it’s still pretty close to that time.

If you choose to watch both videos, this is the one that comes first. They are around 23 minutes each.

This second chapter, which will be up on Facebook and Instagram, was about a year and a half later, when I was attended my alternative high school. I try to use them as an example of a better functioning, although still flawed system than the main public system.

It’s called Rumors because it starts off with me talking about some of the rumors I heard about myself and why I left public school. I also talk a lot in this chapter about the things I loved at alternative school, including being part of the Boston Pride celebrations as a newly queer person, and finding the LGBTQ world that was still so taboo in the mid 90’s.

The picture was probably a few months before this chapter took place, but still that same time period. I was 16. That photo is from my 16th birthday party.

My book will be out soon. Thanks for your interest. I hope you enjoyed the videos!

“Truth Is Ammunition” – When You Love A Song Nobody Knows. Do You Share It?

A few weeks ago, when my boyfriend was visiting, I played him one of my all-time favorite songs, in which I am one of, if not the only person who even has a copy of it anymore. He was madly in love with it, and how could he not be? I have great taste in music, and this is one of my favorite songs of all time, easily.

The artist is a local Boston folk singer named Pamela Means, who I saw perform it at a house concert in Arlington when I was about 21 years old, so that’s like, 1999/2000ish, and that is around the time the song came out.

I was in a photography class at Middlesex Community College when I went to the house concert, so I took some photos. I decided to do a little photo manipulation and upload the song to Youtube so that others can enjoy this beautiful song I can’t get enough of. Definitely check it out if you made it this far.

Pamela Means at a house concert in Arlington MA

This song is a personal anthem to me…

That’s a photo of the CD “Cobblestones” and my 8×10 photos in my old photography binder.

Here is one more random picture of my pin-up board in the kitchen, where I have a similar themed message “The truth is a virus,” which isn’t from Pamela Means, but my all-time favorite movie “Pump Up the Volume.”

The message is out there. This song speaks to me.

“TALK HARD” (Also from Pump Up the Volume)

Heard Back

Well, I heard back from the publishing company who wanted to read my book, and they said that 1. they can’t publish it as quickly as I hoped, so it wouldn’t work anyway…2. that in the future I probably shouldn’t try to rush a publisher (oops… but, of course I was only trying to be fair and tell them I was already planning to self publish and had already sent out press kits announcing it, so if I didn’t hear from them by the 20th, I would need to begin uploading to Amazon. I sent the query to them 5 months ago….but I get it, and knew it was a risk to attempt it) and 3. right now publishing companies almost exclusively only accept memoirs from subject matter experts, celebrities, and popular social media influencers. They did not end up even reading it, so no feedback on the actual book, but I’m proud of myself for getting the callback response from them. It is a sign that I am a good enough writer, with an interesting sounding book to get the attention of a publisher. Most never get this far, so I will take the achievement and move forward with the regularly scheduled programming…

I’m really not too upset that I’m gonna be self publishing again. A lot of people say it’s actually the best option for mildly successful authors who write the kind of books that speak to a certain type of people more than mainstream society. It’s not like a blockbuster film or summer reading…That kind of stuff does well with a publisher but indy type authors can get totally taken advantage of by publishing companies sometimes, and while I know the place I heard from was a legit small company, I don’t have a clue what going with them would look like, or if it would even be something I could make work. I already know how to self publish even though I’m planning to use my own ISBN’s this time and have to figure all that out, but I’m in control and I mostly know what I’m doing and what to expect, so it’s a lot less anxiety right now to just self publish anyway, and I can release when I said and not be like Kanye.

I’ve been doing a lot of editing, and tonight I made a video of myself reading a chapter from my book, about my first time in the psych ward, and I will post that in a couple days. One day at a time, one thing at a time, I am getting there.

Here’s a picture I took of my street art. It’s hot as fuck out there.

Boston Graffiti

I have been taking photos of this graffiti spot for almost 15 years. It has changed quite a bit over the years… most notably from an abandoned illegal spot only a few people knew about, to a bike path going right through, where artists are now welcome to paint legally.

Sometime I should do a collection of the best photos I’ve taken there over the years. It’s gotta be over a thousand by now, easily… but here are some from when I went last week.

My Vacation In Digital Art Images

This time last week, I was settling in with my boyfriend on our first night together in two years when he came to visit for 5 days. It was a great opportunity for me to take a break from the stress, socialize, get out, do some fun stuff, listen to some of my favorite albums, watch my favorite movies, and eat my favorite foods…and share them with him, of course. We had a blast. At first my transition back into the daily grind was off to a difficult start and I had a meltdown three days in a row, but the Universe sent me a little sign at the very least, if not some great news, that one of the publishers I sent a query to wants to take a look at my full book. I don’t know if I’ll go with them or not, if they even choose to go with me, but if they do, it will depend on a number of things. I wrote down all my questions tonight, just in case, but I don’t know what to expect. I’m just grateful I got a letter back that wasn’t a rejection. That’s a good sign I’m doing something right.

The rest of this post will be the manipulated photos from my staycation… I took and altered all of the photos, except for the ones of me in the water, which were taken by Koda but altered by me…

Getting Ready For “I Write the System”

I’ve been working on some promotional art and my book cover. Here’s what I have so far. The first picture is something I made using the art of the original book cover in which I decided not to go with, but I put a lot of time into it and thought I could still use it to promote…

“I Write the System” explores how society forces us into separate, binary genders. Intersex people and others who don’t fit into society often fall through the cracks and suffer great trauma, which for Jymi Cliche led to a life of dependence on the very system that abused him from day one, when he was operated on at birth and conditioned to believe he was female.

The book begins with Jymi at age four, exposed to the system for the first time through nursery school, where he knew right away that he’d never fit into this world. The story follows him through school, friendships, addictions, the mental health system, and too much trauma to handle at times. It wasn’t easy for him to rise from the ashes of the constant disasters going on around him and begin to put his life back together. He has dreams of being successful one day, but is still fighting Complex-PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, and a number of other severe diagnoses, along with being a non-binary trans man in the binary system.

Using dark humor and inspirational stories to balance the trauma and struggles, Jymi offers ideas for change and a message of hope. His memoir encourages the idea that in time, things can get better, even if it feels impossible.

Here is the cover… It’s an androgynous baby photo of me in the late 70’s and the layout is meant to resemble a political campaign poster, as well as a classic rock concert poster, and the colors are meant to resemble the pink and blue on the trans flag, but I don’t really like pastel and didn’t want it to look like a baby book, so I darkened it. It is also sort of meant to loosely resemble the American flag, which really doesn’t mean all that much to me, so I am okay with altering it, but I am talking mostly about the American government system when I talk about “the system”.

I’ve done about 14 edits on it and plan to do one more before I prepare to upload it for its September 11th release date…

Do You Think You Are A Good Writer?

Someone in a writing group asked a question to the group, “Do you think you are a good writer?”. I thought I’d blog my answer.

Growing up, writing was the only thing I did that people took positive notice of. I was always in the mid-level classes and was failing most of them due to the trauma I was going through, which had my attention spent on other things. I had a reputation as a “bad kid”, yet was also considered one of the best writers in my town, which wasn’t really a small town and there were several famous people from there, including a famous author who once taught English at the public high school… (not to me, but my mom had her).

I had a difficult life though, and after a few years of community college, I had to drop out of school. I spent much of the next couple decades in and out of psych hospitals and hanging out with street gangsters while on high doses of court ordered anti-psychotic injections and going through ongoing abuse that I only just partially escaped a few years ago. All the stress and trauma and chemicals have done so much damage to me, and I’d becoming lazy with texting and social media being the majority of the writing I did. When I wrote my first book in 2013 out of a desperate need to tell my story, the writing was awful and I’m kind of embarrassed by it now, especially since I only just released it a year ago.

However, I spent the last few years as an artist in an art gallery showing my art, performing my music, and talking about intellectual things that got my brain working better. I started reading more and meditating and writing and memorizing songs, I had to learn to self-publish and make web sites and press kits and send query letters and so on. It’s been a hell of a year in growth. I like to think my writing is getting back to the point where I can confidently say it’s not bad. My new book is a huge improvement from the stuff I released last year and I’m feeling grateful to have some of my magic back, but I think the biggest thing that makes my writing decent isn’t so much the writing quality, but the way I simply and honestly explain things in ways in which people can learn from. I present new information in a manor of speaking which helps people to understand perspectives they never considered before. I may not be the best writer to ever live, but I’m decent. It’s something I was born with, and I’m improving day by day as I write so regularly now.

There are still days I think my writing is shit, but I belong to a writing group on Facebook, as I mentioned, and it appears from the questions and feedback I see in there, that 99% of the people in there have no writing skills whatsoever, although some of them are not writing in their first language, but the majority of people in the group are Americans, and they make up about 95% of the authors of millions of self published books on the internet that I compete with to be seen in a sea of available books out there. Anyway, no disrespect to them. If you love to write, then write! It’s okay if it’s not good. It might get better, it might not, but writing is good for the soul no matter the quality. If I have to compete with a sea of terrible books, I know mine will stand out at least a little, and they’re getting better… but like I said, no matter your skill level, I think people should always write or sing or do art or whatever you love, as long as you aren’t driving your neighbors crazy with five hours of vocal exercises every day!!! Live your life your way and try to be proud of everything you create because it wasn’t here until you made it.

I recently got these funko pops of Alfred Hitchcock and Spike Lee, two of my favorite filmmakers. Some day I wanna write and direct a movie.

Anyway. That is that. Here’s a few songs about books that I love… (songs I love, about books, I should say)