tomgromak.com — Writing and music from Tom Gromak — on technology, creativity, and figuring things out as I go.

I was about an hour from finishing my website redesign (hope you like it!) when I hit my subscription limit. I could have stopped there, waited for it to reset, and picked back up later. Instead, I kept going, knowing full well that everything from that point on was going to cost me actual money on top of what I already pay every month. By the time I was done, it had cost me sixty dollars.

Modern life comes with a background hum of tiny indignities. Fill out the form. Scan this QR code. Sit through the ad before your call gets answered, and rest assured, your call is very important to us. None of it is a real hardship. It’s just friction, usually delivered by someone who has no power to change, so by design there’s no one to even be mad at other than a faceless company.

When I launched this site, I had a whole theory about what it would be. I’d write about what actually interests me rather than chasing fads, skip the tracking, and see where it goes. No growth hacking, no algorithm chasing. Just a homestead on the open internet.

A year and a half later, I’ve published more than thirty articles and a full run of monthly newsletters. It’s a real body of work now, and somewhere in the accumulation it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like a practice. So this seems like a good moment to look up from the work and ask myself how it’s going.

I’ve been workshopping spoken word pieces, almost like poetry, to weave into my music. Monologues, textures, things I want to find my own voice for. So I asked ChatGPT for some feedback on my early ideas.

When most people think of summer, they talk about beaches, picnics, and pools. Not me. My best summer memories are at night, when dusk goes on forever and it’s ten o’clock before the stars come out. We used to hang out on my friend Mary’s second-floor porch, laughing, playing Cosmic Wimpout, and spinning old 78s.

The sounds of a city at night enveloped us. A chopper brumming on the next street over. A party across the way. Crickets mixed with car radios, echoes bouncing off buildings, warped and Doppler-bent. We talked until dawn some days. How was there ever that much to say?