Opening Statement

July 30, 2026

Welp, here goes. The moment you’ve all been waiting for. The impetus for the site wasn’t catalyzed by an entire lifetime full of reflection, pent up creative energy, or even boredom, but rather, as many a good idea sprouts from, a book. To be specific, the book “Stay True” by Hua Hsu. I knew about this book for a few years since its release in 2022, specifically from an Oberlin cross country teammate, who shall remain nameless. I won’t go into specifics, but this teammate, from my snobbish point of view, had exquisitely poor taste in literature. Most of what they read seemed to fall under the same aesthetic as those Instagram poetry accounts that post three sentence poems: shit like “My love springs eternal from your endless glance, the shadows dance in my soul, who are you to control my fate?” Stay True, on the outside, seemed to carry this same aesthetic, with its Pinteresque cover, its use of photography, its short length and its popularity amongst clientele I usually prefer to keep at an acre’s-length distance from. It was like one of those books found on a Kamala Harris-supporter’s coffee table, right next to Becoming by Michelle Obama (which I torturously read in high school), The Glass Castle, Educated, and Abundance. Look to your left and you’ll find three separate recycling bins under the sink, four different vessels for compost. Step outside and smack dab on the lawn is that sign “In this house, We Believe Love is Love….”, never mind the fact that the people inside have been doing everything in their power to block the affordable housing complex scheduled to be built, revel in their forest green Subarus emblazoned with Coexist bumper stickers, and practically cream themselves when they see that their house on Zillow has seen a 312% increase in value in the past 5 years since the pandemic, while their recent liberal arts graduate festers away in unemployment limbo in their bedroom… ok I’ve gotten off track. But this book cooked. I read the blurb on the inside sleeve in Bookmans, a staple of the Tucson community, and it piqued my interest; a memoir about losing a friend who is nothing like you but became a close friend, about finding your way through college and the dreaded After. In the book, the author, Hua Hsu, goes to UC Berkeley in the 90s, and during his time there designed his own zine that he distributed throughout campus, sandwiched in between discarded newspapers and strewn about coffee shops. I thought hey, that’s a great pursuit that has probably been neutered and cauterized by our digital world, why don’t I try my hand on it, although let’s not get too excited, I’m going to use these bastardly electronic tools even more to build my own website, throwing hours into it to avoid my all consuming terror at pursuing writing or somehow letting people see what I write. So yeah, welcome to the Gila Monster Den, aka Barber Blogs, although the titles (and layout, gifs, aesthetic, etc) will all undergo horrific mutations over the next few months until we are reduced to a pixellated gif of Kurt Cobain twerking and a 3,000 word manifesto on why I think Phoenix deserves to get napalmed. Will you ride the lightning with me? — JB, Astoria OR, 07/30/2026