“PimpSkirt”. Why?, You may be thinking to yourself (or not 🤷🏽♀️ ). I’ve told the lame story so often, I’ve finally taken a moment to elaborate where it counts most. I first discovered the internet in Spring of 1999 at Irving Public Library. I was there picking up my reserved copy of The Coldest Winter Ever. I had just discovered urban fiction novels and thought I was using the library catalog to search upcoming releases when I saw the “Yahoo!” Logo on the screen. I had heard about Yahoo!, but this was my first time using it! I believe I signed up for an email account which I do not remember, but that was as far as I had gotten. The internet was something like a toddler at the time, meaning that we didn’t have Google, Siri, Amazon, Twitter or any of that. People weren’t sharing photos, videos or audio just yet. I think we were about a year away from AskJeeves, but none of this quelled my excitement. By 2002 I discovered the Yahoo! Chat rooms, which spawned what we know today as “the comment section” of your favorite social media. The world wibe web got LIT up for the black community with the social networking platform BlackPlanet, which I believe is the origin of today’s social media model. We were able to connect with Black People EVERYWHERE!. One of my chat buddies used to call me “PimpSkirt” and I found it endearing. I decided to adopt this as my screen name and it stuck ever since. It is fitting for some reasons and should you choose to follow along, you will come to understand why 😀. Some find it deplorable. Some get confused. Others think it’s cool. It is what it is 💁🏽. This is my handle. (That’s what we used to call “@‘s”. —- for anyone confused by the ancient word)
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.
All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story;
to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
woman of letters 