Who made this mess?
RyanDavid Burningham
I write and publish Outside The World. The site includes essays, poems, photography, archived posts, and professional work dating back to 2000.
Also credited as RD Burningham and Rylee Burningham.
26 years / still no content calendar
About Outside The World
This site belongs as much to the 21-year-old version of me who started it as it does to the 19-year-old who stumbled into the phrase “Outside the World is New” while walking around Provo, Utah.
It belongs to the young father, the anxious husband, and the creative employee. The aging drifter, the poet, the religiously undevout, and the person interrupted by daily beauty. Humble, proud, depressed. Historically angry, presently tempered. It built itself for them.
This site belongs to the person with the Canon DSLR, the Palm Treo 650, and the iPhone 4. The one who built a Hackintosh because they could not afford a Mac. The individual with a broken ring. The one who found true love.
This site was built by the person who listened to Sting on 13th East, to David Gray on the way to Snowbird, and to Gracie Abrams during an existential midlife crisis. Remnants and shadows of those musical notes are entwined in both the words and the structure of these pages.
This site was built by dozens of versions of one person over the past 26 years. They all distill into the individual typing these words now.
The site is a mess, but a mess with purpose. Dig around as you would in the sandbox of your youth. Smile when you find the buried action figure. It’s all here, even (especially?) the embarrassing stuff. Which, really, is all of it.
Whether the subject was a chicken on the stairs on my birthday, a stranger making fun of my iPad, or an awkward recollection of childhood, this site records a human soul touched by the world around it. It also records that soul’s reflections back toward a world that gives and takes so much.