What is Chimerica?
It’s a portmanteau, a combination of America and chimera.
Wikipedia says it is a combination of China and America.
Don’t be ridiculous. How do you combine “China” and “America” and get “Chimerica?” There’s no overlap in letters. If one were to combine “China” and “America,” you’d get “Amerina.” That allows a shared letter, “I.” “America” and “chimera” have a shared “mer.”
Okay… so what does the combination of “America” and “chimera” mean?
I don’t remember. It seemed clever and politically insightful several months ago when I thought up the word.
Why did you call the website Ghoulish dot Me while you clearly wanted to call it Chimerica?
I couldn’t call it chimerica dot com as that is already “the future website of chimerica management services, inc.” Their site is “currently under construction” and just because the copyright on the site says 2003, there’s no reason to assume they aren’t going to begin actively using that site any day now. I was offered the option to call the site chimeri dot ca and I almost did name it that despite the domain costing more money. However, I was concerned while reading something about certain dot ca domains not protecting your personal information and then I read they can delete your website if they find out you are not Canadian.
Well, who are you and what is this website?
My name is Johnny Barksdale. I wrote some things in some zines and on Tumblr. Some of the zines never went to print. Some of them didn’t really get into anyone’s hands. I went to Milk’s house once when he wouldn’t respond to my calls and I gave him all the copies of one. I wrote a horror themed one which I gave away at an event at the Red and Black Café. The first one I did was a split with Patch Corduroy.
As for this website, I had hopeful plans to create a communal website for myself and others to share creativity on the internet, but I think it’s mostly just going to be me. I hope to create another zine at some point, but then I would need to figure out how to distribute the physical thing to people so dumping things on the internet is a nice way to not need to think about if anyone is interested or knows if I exist. I think having a website puts a tiny bit of pressure on my brain to write, but what I end up posting is largely something I wrote in one sitting because I have forced myself to write. However, I will say that I am not posting ideas I abandoned halfway through so I do have some standards.