that's why empty boxes are free

That’s the question, right? I don’t know. I needed a place to write and the world to see it while simultaneously knowing no one would see this. A whole WordPress blog feels too intense. A substack and slanging newsletters feel cheesy. But a Tumblr using the name of my original account that I’m sure no one will see because I’m not popping in any way, shape, or form on the net….perfecto “chef’s kiss”. 

But what’s with this title? I honestly don’t know. I had some philosophical ideas when I came up with the original title while stacking merchandise for America’s favorite bulk box store and saw people crashing out over the best boxes (usually from produce). Maybe I thought we should be charging for these, or maybe it was from when I was moving and asked Wal-Mart for a buggy of boxes, and they gave me one. 

Like a dork, I went to America’s favorite waste of water and environmental polluter, and it actually gave me some decent insights into where I was going with it after describing where I was in life and where I was working, as well as some background on my original idea. HOWEVER, they are too on-the-nose and philosophical. 

At the end of the day, an empty box is just that. An empty box. For a big box store, it’s trash. A nuisance. By-products of preparing to peddle goods to the public. They are free because they lack value, and you are doing the corporation a solid. They don’t have to worry about disposal, and they get free labor to remove it. A win-win for capitalism. 

That same empty box is the container of someone’s life who is making a change. leaving an office or their parents’ home. Hell, the container that’s sending them back to their parents’ home or a different job. It’s the container of a life that doesn’t exist any longer. To be shoved into the back of a closet. Hidden from the day-to-day realities of the present. To a cat or some unfortunate unhoused individual, it’s a home. 

The empty box’s value is contingent on what you put into it. The value of something isn’t fixed; it’s based on context and need. That same corporation, giving away boxes at the end of its journey, values them so much more when they need to fill them with product. 

Yes, I know. A bunch of babbling, yapping, and nonsensical analogies to possibly make a ridiculous title work for a Tumblr page 15 years ago that spent more time thirst-following and reblogging than actually using it for the cringeworthy creations found at the crux of this whole thing. 

So what are we doing here now? Well….once again, like a dork, I was inspired. Somewhere at the intersection of listening to Cey Adams and Aaron Draplin wax poetically about their creative journeys on Design Matters and absorbing the writing of Jill Louise Busby and Ashley Ford, I had the epiphany to write about my journey or a graphic design timeline, if you will. So, of course, I planned out a list of moments and started writing drafts, and then just stopped. There’s nothing I love more than an abandoned project. The computer that I’m typing on is FILLED with creative moments that were abandoned for something else. 

Since I got a new role serving as the entry point to middle management, I needed to journal more often. Journaling became a release I didn’t know I needed. Once again, like a dork, I found myself on one of those fancy AI-assisted journaling apps. Not because I needed some LLM to tell me it’s okay and that I’m not a weirdo. I needed something to guide me when journaling. I would easily jump into a blank page in a notes app and write a barely coherent sentence about my day. “I mean… it was aight.” Not at all what was needed for documenting my day-to-day mindset or for fleshing out the feelings I’m consistently tucking away so I don’t appear to be a wuss (good ol’ 80s toxic masculinity at work). 

OK… but why are we here now with this title and this writing about your timeline? This title—as nonsensical as it is—was one of the few things I created as an adult that felt genuine to me. And perhaps all of these moments in my life are, at face value, empty boxes. A bunch of moments, baggage, and minutiae that don’t really mean anything in a vacuum, but pushed together, they lead me to what makes me… me. I wish I could be like some of my peers or the people I idolize who say they always knew they’d be… this. But I never felt that way. Being a designer was something I never imagined I’d do, and it wasn’t some clear, intentional path. It was something I ended up in. Something I grew into without really noticing.

So I’m trying to go back and look into all of the boxes. The moments that didn’t feel like anything at the time. The ones I dismissed, or forgot, or didn’t think counted. Maybe they do. Sitting down and finally unpacking all of these moments can finally answer the question I led with. 

I don’t recall seeing anyone do it or even remember why, but at 13, I decided to start scrapbooking. I think the spark came from the sudden pile of hip-hop magazines that began piling up in my room. I wanted to keep them all, but I knew that wasn’t feasible. Perhaps this was my way of having my cake and eating it too. 

I’m thinking it was early 1998, and I was drowning in my blooming love for hip hop. I’ve always loved it my whole life, but it was different now. I was listening to the lyrics and developing an understanding of the art form and production, not just enjoying the records on the radio. I started reading hip-hop journalism more enthusiastically. I grabbed a vibe or source magazine here or there. But the October 97 issue of the Source, with Master P on the cover, started my need for a monthly fill of hip-hop scribes. 

I don’t even remember why I bought it. I had no idea who Master P was! I was a Puff Daddy/Bad Boy stan. I wasn’t really familiar with rap beyond the radio and what I saw on BET/MTV. I was just with my dad at the Rite Aid on Monument Street. I had purchased many a GamePro or comic book there. But this day, I bought The Source.

That purchase of the Master P source coincided with my going to Canton Middle School—a much easier institution than Roland Park Middle, which meant this kid could soar academically without being punished. Since I was doing so well in school compared to my 6th- and 7th-grade campaigns, I wasn’t nearly as locked down and could grab a new issue of the source each month. I want to say that my mom got me a one-year subscription for Christmas that year. 

Anyway, these issues were piling up, and I decided to cut them up. and paste them onto pages of construction paper. I still remember the first night (for some reason, I’m always able to highlight a moment I want to remember later, as it will be important in my future). I was sitting in my room, all alone, at my desk, with Jackie Brown on my TV (it was probably a bootleg version since it hadn’t been released yet, according to Wikipedia). I was just there, like an evil scientist, chopping up page after page and month after month, pasting them onto paper and inserting them into this large red three-ring binder. It was not the most refinined production but it meant everything to me at the moment. It was like I was building my own hip-hop magazine, using the best articles, photography, and ads from the source, and subsequently from Vibe and XXL. 

Somewhere, I found the bravery to take the binder to school and share it with my other hip-hop-obsessed classmates. After falling back from sharing my creativity in previous years, this was a big step for me. To my surprise, I wasn’t laughed at. People actually liked it. No one thought I was weird. I mean, maybe, but Baltimore city kids do not hold their tongues or aren’t afraid to be cruel. I’m pretty sure I would’ve heard about it. 

What started as a one-time thing became a daily and weekly dedication to cutting things of interest and adding them to the book. I wasn’t limited to just my rap mags. I would grab my mom’s old Ebony, Essence, Sister2Sister, and anything else she no longer read, and would grab imagery that appealed to me.

So it’s time for a time jump. Remember how I said I was thriving in school? Well, of course, that couldn’t last. I was the smart kid who couldn’t handle the rigor of the actual advanced classes because I was distracted by anything and everything. I didn’t want to sit and read and do the right thing. I could get high grades in regular situations, but when I was thrown into the super advanced places with other smart kids, that doubt would creep in, and I would just fall apart. Am I just making excuses? I don’t know. But it happened so many times that there has to be a reason. I’m at the top of the class in elementary school, but the move to Roland Park made me fall apart. It could’ve been cross-city travel. All of the textbooks. Hormones and wanting to be a cool dude with the girls. Who knows? So, of course, if you don’t understand/respect your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Once again, top of the class at Canton Middle, so I go to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Surely none of my past problems would affect me here, right? Right? RIGHT?! 

Well, to be fair to my 13-year-old self, I didn’t even want to go there. I’m not a math/science/engineering kid. I knew that then. My mother did not listen to me. So, of course, all of my Roland Park issues, on top of legitimately struggling with the work (like what even is drafting?!?), made me sink. So all the good things I was surrounded by in 8th grade melted away within 2 school years. My dad thought I needed to get rid of distractions, and I didn’t deserve to have nice things. My mom had redecorated my room around a 90s basketball theme, with my beloved Chicago Bulls. He tore all of those posters and photos down. At some point in this time period, he tossed my beloved scrapbook. 

My mom was furious about the room. She invested a lot of time, energy, and money into it. I’m sure she was indifferent to the scrapbook and to my time, money, and energy. I took that book to school daily. I recall that at one point, some of my female classmates would make requests for photos of their favorite stars when I was doing my cutting/curating thing. Some of the guys did the same. I wasn’t charging. It was for the love of the game. It was my thing. Was it a distraction? Sure. It certainly wasn’t the reason I got a 40 in Chemistry, though. It wasn’t the reason I kept getting detention in Mr. Bleich’s class. 

My 2” red 3-ring binder filled with ragged pasted collaged pages of hip hop magazines, past and present, became fodder for the garbage can. I’m sure I’ve suppressed the emotion so I could proceed with my life as a normal functioning human, but I’m pretty sure I was devastated. A school that I didn’t even want to go to cost me a chunk of my identity. I was no longer “the magazine guy”. I no longer had evidence of being a real hip-hop head. It was just gone because I was not good at calculus or drawing lines with a compass and T-square. And I didn’t realize it then, but I lost more than the binder. I lost the proof that I could make something people actually cared about. I was already being crushed by the curriculum, the travel, and the fact that I didn’t really want to be there. Now my identity was snatched away because I couldn’t handle Mr. Roach’s dry lectures. 

No, I didn’t suddenly improve as a student. In fact, I transferred to my zone school, and like clockwork, I was back to the top of the class. The summer before senior year, my aunt showed me her senior year scrapbook, which she compiled from all kinds of things that occurred that year. News, Music, Movies, bus tickets, and social events. Everything. compiled in a single book representing a year of her life. the last year of her public education. Just like that, I was back in the game, being a cutting, cataloging madman again.

Maybe this scrapbook wasn’t just about my love for rap and an excuse to wield sharp objects. It was a space for me to create. Since school was my primary focus, my performance was directly connected to my extracurricular activities. At Canton, I was doing well, so I had the space. I started scrapbooking just because I wanted to. At Poly, sure, I was failing, but I brought this identity with me. It helped me fit in. It wasn’t just about the music, photos, and cool ads, but it was a place for me to show up when it felt like everything else was falling apart. When my dad tossed it, I just stopped making things. Not because I stopped loving hip-hop. Because I got the message, or rather his message. This side of creativity is distracting from the main goal (school), so you don’t deserve it. So I shrank and hid it once I arrived at Patterson. Having the excuse to create again as a senior helped reintroduce me to scrapbooking, but it wasn’t in the wild, radical way of the past. Gone were the maniacal cuts and pasting of collages of the past. It was cleaner. I used sheet protectors to save news articles and ads. 

Perhaps it was because of the seriousness of that senior-year scrapbook’s content (9/11, Aaliyah’s death), but the love wasn’t really there. It felt more like me checking boxes for things I needed to remember from that school year. While I ravenously gathered materials to add to it, the hours I spent sitting at my bedroom desk putting things together were gone. Aside from having less time now that I had an after-school job, maybe I didn’t want to show me caring about something, so it could be used against me (which, now that I’m thinking about it, seemed to be a throughline with my parents over the years). There was a big difference between 8th grade and senior year. I didn’t bring it to school and share my collection with classmates. I was simply archiving my school year in a clean, neat fashion. 

I don’t really recall where it came from or why it was said, but God, do I remember it.

I was at Aunt Pam and Grandma Betty’s house. I’m not sure if I was showing her my work, but I remember my mother saying to me, “You need to learn how to draw.” There was no further explanation, just a put-down of my artistic expression.

Adolescent me was taken aback. I was sitting on my knees at the coffee table with crayons in my hand and a white piece of paper with something scribbled on it that doesn’t make sense to me now. I finally got the gall to respond with a whimper to avoid getting slapped: “Not everyone can draw.” Honestly, my own self-defeat about not everyone being good at drawing, plus her words, made it easy for me to back away from the crayons and paper.

This sentence became the foundation and further confirmation whenever anyone judged something of mine. I recall drawing and creating stories all the time. I had pages of weird story ideas, like my rabbit spin-off of the Ninja Turtles. Grandpa would give me these white legal pad-length sheets to draw on, and I would get right to it.

Then one day, I stopped.

I don’t remember deciding to stop. I don’t remember what the last drawing was. But by the time I was in middle school, I was reminded by peers that what I made wasn’t good enough. I would write stories that people told me weren’t good (ok, sure, I remade Vampire in Brooklyn to be Vampire in Baltimore, but damn, I didn’t need to get dissed that hard). Of course, I wasn’t good at this. I’m not creative. I can’t even draw.

Why did I just stop one day? My preteen wars with puberty and isolation along with my sudden transformation into a poor student probably didn’t leave enough space for creation when my parents weren’t constantly punishing me. Or maybe I was comfortable just sitting on the sidelines watching others create. I was such a hip hop head. Surely I couldn’t be as creative as them. I found the little outlets that I’ll write about later (such as my rap scrapbook of 1998-99), but I was so afraid to show them that I kept them tucked in my bedroom. Do they really count if no one sees?

I find myself reliving that moment when I see my kids’ work, and I refuse to tell them how macabre it is at times. Ok, macabre is incredibly harsh, but sometimes I have no idea what the hell it is, and you know what that’s ok.

Taking Design Studio and learning from that awful Rudolf Arnheim book that when children draw they are “engaging in ‘intellectual realism’ rather than visual imitation, representing the basic structure rather than photographic detail.” Kids aren’t failing to draw, but are inventing the representation of something from their view. So perhaps I didn’t suck at drawing as a child; I was just being a child, expressing myself.

Why are those words just so sharp in my mind? It’s amazing to me how words and moments that could otherwise mean nothing to someone could be a defining moment in the foundation of someone’s life. I continued to write but limited myself to journalistic writing. I could only do fact-based reporting in articles or essays. None of the narrative plot-driven things. I didn’t even like doing feature articles. Just straight hard news for me.

Somehow, I became a professional graphic designer, and I still feel uncomfortable making preliminary sketches of my work because I’m concerned about how they’ll look. I don’t even like my handwriting, so I refuse to share my notes. Hell, I practice signing cards on a blank sheet of paper to make sure it doesn’t appear too illegible.