This is the internet homepage of Bix Frankonis. The unsupported use case of a disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon—now with global pandemic, climate crisis, incipient fascism, and uphill battle for disability. Send me email, or read my blog.

I was born on October 25 in upstate New York, use he/him pronouns primarily by default, have lived in St. Johns, Oregon, and environs for twenty-six years, and have been online since a dialup gopher server in 1993; and I am a straight, celibate, aromantic, agnostic, autistic, introverted, antifascist, middle-aged, cisgender white guy of Italian, Lithuanian, and Polish descent.

I’m impaired by autism spectrum, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, sensory processing, persistent adjustment, and developmental coordination disorders; aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory; an unspecified, undiagnosed windedness and fatigue; and something my therapist and I refer to as “complex chronic stress”, which in some sense is akin to viewing daily life given the above through the lens of conservation of resources theory and arguably equates to the persistent adjustment disorder.

Getting the blog restoration project back underway; have resumed the daily walk to varying degrees; hoping my doctors finally decide it’s time to explain my persistent low lymphocyte and white blood cell counts; helping The Belmont Goats with some social media stuff during their anniversary; still dealing with a lingering eye floater; waiting on the next stage of the disability process; needing to decide when to schedule robotic bladder surgery; realizing that my coping capacity has degenerated; and still being struck repeatedly by the ugly irony that of recent years 2020 for me was the easiest.

I’m reading Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker for fiction (briefly pausing The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan after Book One) and The Matter of Everything by Suzie Sheehy for nonfiction (I had to pause Saving Time by Jenny Odell because my loan expired); recently finished Rose/House by Arkady Martine and The Edge of the Plain by James Crawford; up next in fiction is The Time Invariance of Snow by E. Lily Yu, then Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess if the publisher fixes the justification bug in the Kindle edition, and in nonfiction whatever library hold drops next; or you can buy me books and impact my choices

This week I’m watching Nancy Drew and Silo; making my way through the latest batch of the terrible Manifest; making my way through the new season of Prehistoric Planet; making my way through the latest season of Secrets of the Zoo: Tampa; weekly rewatching Grimm; making my way through Supernatural and The Clone Wars; rewatching Longmire; lagging behind on Hot Skull; I’m supporting the writers strike just like sixteen years ago; and you should watch Mrs. Davis and Beef, two very different shows but among the best of the year.

Most recently I’ve seen Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (rewatch), Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (rewatch), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (rewatch); my plan to make my way chronologically through my watchlist has stalled out; and I’m not going to get to the latest Marvel movie until Disney+ because my sensory threshold no longer can handle it.

My rotation of late has included An Horse (Modern Air), Excellent Skeleton (On Mercury Sea), Metric (Formentera); and Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Is Is); and I use LoFi Girl playlists to work and get to sleep.

I’ve been listening to Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me, Synaptic, 1800 Seconds on Autism, Science, Quickly, The Grimmcast, Star Trek: The Pod Directive, Quanta Science Podcast, and The Joy of Why; and making my way through Prehistoric Planet: The Official Podcast and Gates McFadden InvestiGates.

I’ve been saving news articles and blog posts every morning to read over the course of the week, often falling way behind and getting down on myself about it; you can browse them on Instapaper; and you can read my current top recommendation: D.L. Mayfield on how conversion therapy is all around us.

It’s baseball season, which means as a born-and-raised, life-long if sometimes-lapsed Red Sox fan, and thanks to free MLB.TV, I’m watching games almost every day and experiencing the usual frustration.

My diet these days consists of cold cereal for breakfast, except for a weekly brunch out; turkey, provolone, olive oil mayo, and iceberg lettuce on sourdough for lunch; brown rice, diced chiQin, broccoli, sweet corn, and buttery steakhouse seasoning for dinner; a cup of coffee and a shortbread cookie for dessert; apple oatmeal crumble bars between meals; and an Arnold Palmer and Cheez-It crackers for a snack.

I grew up with a “mellow yellow”, domestic shorthair named Saffron; in college I’d briefly lived with and then misplaced two black-and-white, domestic shorthairs named Peter and Petruchio; for my first seventeen years in Portland I lived with a stunted, grey-and-white domestic shorthair named Scully; since late 2014, I’ve lived with a gray-and-white, domestic shorthair named Meru (for the protagonist in Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT), who thinks my singing is the sound of distress and on Friday afternoons insists that I pay attention to her instead of my therapist; and last year I lost to degenerative illness a dilute calico, domestic shorthair named Willow.

It’s exceedingly rare that I leave the vicinity of downtown St. Johns, frequenting its various coffee shops or my regular brunch spot, excepting a trip to the neighborhood-adjacent goats, a doctor’s appointment, or a visit to the zoo.

You might or might not know me from such former projects as a pioneering internet petition against government censorship; a worthwhile cybercafe failure; several years of celebrated stand-alone journalism; the founding of a successful, annual fan-based fundraising campaign; the surprise uncovering of and research into a long-forgotten World War II shipyard workers zine; organizing video contest submissions for the DVD of a trailblazing web series; or project managing a resident herd of urban goats; but not from my childhood dream of becoming an outer-space moving van driver.

Rolling Stone emphasized my “long black eyelashes”, “face that sees very little sun”, and “quick wit”; Mike Doughty said that Soul Coughing was “playing it all” for me; Bruce Sterling referred to me as a “punk”; a Portland public relations professional called me a “sissy”; and a now-disgraced pop culture icon told people not to worship false versions of me and might have called me “twitchy, unreliable-looking”.

I believe that “if nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do”; that cynicism is but frustrated optimism, resulting only from first believing that people are capable of better and then all too often being proved wrong; that this is why even small, everyday courtesies are important; and that we should be building capacity, equality, mercy, and solidarity.

You can support me by sending money through Apple Cash, Cash App, PayPal, or Venmo; or by gifting from my Amazon, IKEA, or Kindle wishlist.

You must abide by these rules to contact me: no fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.

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