Keenen Davis

My name is Keenen T. Davis, and I live in Monmouth, Oregon. Trying to explain what I do in one sentence is usually where things go off the rails, because I have too many interests and approximately none of them know how to stay in their assigned lane. I’m a Direct Support Professional, an aspiring ASL interpreter, a student with a strong interest in engineering and economics, a musician, a fiction writer, a website administrator, an amateur systems builder, and a tether between the material and the spiritual realms. My faith is central to my life rather than something I keep in a little Sunday-morning box; I spend a lot of time studying Scripture, theology, the Book of Mormon, the nature of God, and the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. I’m the sort of person who can start a conversation about God, and somehow, forty-five minutes later, we are discussing public transit, atmospheric pressure, linguistics, constitutional law, and why somebody’s spreadsheet formula is broken.

I am intensely curious about people and systems. Sociology and history have fascinated me for years, especially the question of why societies organize themselves the way they do and what happens when you change one little piece of the machine. That probably explains my longstanding involvement with NationStates and the Liberty Democratic Alliance, where I work extensively with Consigahria, a fictional nation I have developed down to its government ministries, economy, cities, laws, weather systems, transportation networks, culture, religion, news media, and assorted national catastrophes. I build regional economic and weather systems in Google Sheets, write legislation and government correspondence, analyze statistics, design administrative tools, and occasionally discover that I have accidentally built something considerably more complicated than I originally intended. Beep. At that point, obviously, the only sensible response is to make it more complicated.

Music occupies another enormous section of my brain. I’m a bassist, amateur pianist, and songwriter, with past experience on cello and clarinet, and I can sight-read music. I write and arrange my own songs, pick apart harmony and bass lines by ear, and can spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding exactly what one chord ought to be doing underneath one word. I also love jazz, R&B, country, and pop; choreography; performance; and the intersection between music and American Sign Language. ASL itself is one of my greatest interests. I’ve studied it for years, use it regularly, and ultimately want to work professionally as an interpreter. Languages in general tend to catch my attention, so I have also wandered through Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, and assorted writing systems because apparently one alphabet was insufficient.

Then there is the creative side of the operation. I write stories, political satire, fictional journalism, legislation, dialogue, prayers, theological arguments, and whatever strange scenario my ADHD brain decides to place on my desk that afternoon. I enjoy web design and information architecture, especially when I can turn a website or spreadsheet into something interactive instead of merely decorative. I like cars and racing games, particularly when I can spend weeks tuning and customizing one car until it stops being “a car I use in a game” and becomes my baby. I’m interested in transportation, infrastructure, meteorology, economics, government, law, emergency services, martial arts, languages, and technology, and about seventeen subjects that I have undoubtedly forgotten while writing this sentence.

During an ordinary week, I can usually be found somewhere around Monmouth and Independence, at home working on one of my projects, studying, writing music, tinkering with spreadsheets or websites, talking with friends, or being supervised by my Russian Blue, Carly, who maintains very strong opinions about ownership and territorial jurisdiction. I live with friends, so home is rarely an entirely solitary environment. I also spend time with my LDS ward community, missionaries, and study groups, including weekly worship and Book of Mormon study. Depending on the week, there may also be appointments, counseling, errands, DSP-related work, time with my PCA, or an excursion somewhere in the Salem area. A substantial percentage of my life nevertheless occurs from a desk, where one monitor contains something perfectly reasonable and the other contains a 48-hour weather model for a fictional city of several billion people.

The people around me come from several different parts of my life. There are close friends and roommates, family and adopted family, people from church, missionaries, counselors and support professionals, Deaf friends and people I communicate with through ASL, fellow NationStates players and regional administrators, musicians, and the assorted people I meet simply because I talk to people. I tend to move between very different social worlds without seeing much contradiction between them. I can discuss theology with somebody in the morning, economics in the afternoon, sign language over dinner, and bass articulation at midnight. Somewhere in there Carly will demand something, somebody will say something ridiculous, and I will probably have another idea for a spreadsheet.

Fundamentally, I’m somebody who likes understanding things, building things, and above all, helping people. Sometimes that means counseling somebody through something painful. Sometimes it means interpreting an idea into language they can actually understand. Sometimes it means writing, teaching, praying, making music, or figuring out why a system behaves the way it does. And sometimes it means staring at a spreadsheet at 1:37 in the morning and saying, “Now wait a minute,” because one number is doing something it absolutely has no business doing.

That's me in a nutshell.