The Sandbox :: August

 

The Sophomore: An Unfinished Fiction

They sat in the blanket of a light breeze; the sun above drifted slowly, then suddenly—as if to challenge their senses—from an encompassing hue of light to an inspired array, compressing the evening sky in a moment so still it was suddenly dark. The streetlamps only began to illuminate in the blackness. Among everything, a translucent burn, an indistinct ember glow, made only partly visible the features of the two men veiled behind the ashy plumes of staunch cigars, while a third man sat hidden in the shadow of the night. The man concealed would have remained hidden had he not been subject to speaking with his hands. In the wispy, exhaled smoke, sharing the aroma of leather, of coffee, and of toasted almonds. The three men came together for the first time in nearly a decade; they were each from a different corner of the country and agreed to meet somewhere near the middle; a town that not one of them had visited before: to reconnect, to bemuse, and to escape a small part of their lives which had, in some ways, enveloped and consumed them.

Their conversation challenged two men furiously; in the silhouette of an ash lifted from the cigar cupped tightly between the teeth on the left side of his bearded mouth, while the right side was, on occasion, relieved of the verbose conflict as a set of hands assertively pirouetted through the smoke-the night as if desperate to inspire their own context. The third man relished the moment, savoring his cigar, and the night effortlessly disregarding the summons to contribute, staring up into the night sky and imagining it as if a shroud draped over the world were stabbed millions of times with a pin.

It's amazing how uninvolved we are in our own lives, how we allow our behaviors and reactions to be manipulated by unconscious habit.

Story Ideas
A Braveheart parody where William Wallace is a spider.

Ants in the Bathroom: An Unfinished Fiction
The cat—a black‑and‑white tuxedo with two white paws (front right, back left) and two black paws—waits at the front door, restless. He looks up at Jonah, his human counterpart, and lets out a gritty, gravel‑thick sound that passes for a meow. In moments like this, it comes out defeated, as if he’s forgotten how to shape the noise and settled for something heavier. His white chest glows against the midnight black of his coat.

Jonah steps toward the door. The cat rises onto his hind legs, reaching for the handle with both forepaws, mimicking the motion he’s watched thousands of times. But the door never opens for him. Jonah answers with his own sound, a mirrored call, and then turns the handle. The tuxedo bolts outside, shoulder‑checking the doorframe before sprinting toward the tree line, the same ritual every time. Jonah closes the door slowly behind him.

There are two sinks in the cottage, each offering its own version of relief. Jonah often splashes cold water on his face to escape the thick, humid air drifting through the open windows. Sometimes the heat is so oppressive his eyes water, and the cold water feels like a small mercy. He never consciously chooses between the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink. If he did, he might consider the towels. The brown hand towel in the kitchen, used for spills and wipe‑downs, or the sky‑blue bath towel draped over the shower rod in the bathroom. But Jonah doesn’t think about any of that. He flips the bathroom light on, opens the door, and whatever thought he might have had dissolves.

A single red ant crawls up the wall behind the toilet, moving in frantic, uneven lines. Jonah doesn’t kill every creature he encounters. It depends on the situation. If he’s on the couch at night, smoking hookah and watching a movie, or lying in bed waiting for sleep, any creature that appears near him meets a swift end. But the bathroom is different. It’s private. It’s where he showers, bathes, and handles the basic human rituals of living. That matters to him.

Cold water slides down his face as he considers the ant. “How should I handle this?” he asks himself, but also—in some small way—the ant. Then he notices movement near the base of the bathtub on the blue‑stained cement floor. Another red ant, just as erratic as the first.

Jonah’s mind begins to work. He searches the bathroom thoroughly. Walls, ceiling, under the sink, behind the toilet, the shower curtain, the tub. No more ants. Just the two.

“Perfect,” he thinks. “We’ll make a pact.” He speaks to the ants as if they’re listening. “If I ever come in here and see three or more of you, all of you die. But if there are only two, I’ll ignore you. That’s my pledge.”

He dries his face with the blue towel, turns off the light, and leaves.

Between you and me, Jonah has known about the ants for a while. Last year, he and his father tore out the old shower and installed a bathtub and a new one. They built two false walls to fill the space where the standing shower and sink used to be. One of those walls sits beside the small room that houses the water heater. A room with a makeshift door that opens to the outside. Ants, spiders, and all manner of creatures slip through the cracks, past the insulation, and into the hollow space behind the tub. They live their lives. Jonah lives his. No one complains. Or so it seems.

One night, Jonah wakes from a vivid dream about his future life in Monaco, driven by the very real need to relieve himself. Standing upright is its own challenge. He feels his way around the bed, past the table at its foot, and into the bathroom. The light stings his eyes. As he stands over the toilet, he notices his young calico—orange, white, and black—staring at the corner where the floor meets the bathroom shelf.

Jonah got cats because he liked cats. It hadn’t occurred to him that they’d be useful in moments of adversity, especially when it came to creatures of the scorpion variety. Curious cats are even more useful. This calico is very curious.

After flushing, Jonah’s curiosity keeps him from walking away. He crouches and sees a tiny red ant hiding from the calico’s paws. A beast, the ant nation would later call her, with fangs and claws and a reputation for ending lives. Their leader, Ampersand, would speak of her often.

Ampersand was born among countless eggs, neither first nor last. Average. But average wasn’t enough for the ant who would become general. He wanted recognition. His father was a technician, steady and obedient. His mother was the queen, too occupied to notice him. So, Ampersand’s desire grew quietly, shaping itself into ambition. In a collective where everyone looks the same, how does one ant stand out? He realized the irony—we are one, but I am not one—and decided the only way forward was to behave differently.

Jonah searches the bathroom again. No ants except the one cornered by the calico. He honors his pact. Which means, for now, the calico must let her would‑be snack go.

Unfinished Reflections
I was a junior in college, studying psychology. It wasn’t the major I wanted. I’d known—or thought I’d known—since I was twelve or thirteen that I was meant to write. It felt less like a decision and more like a summons, the first quiet invitation into adulthood. But at that age, the people around me didn’t take it seriously. Writing became the thing I did in private, while my empathy nudged me toward a more “practical” path. It didn’t last. By the middle of my junior year, I dropped out. I quit both of my jobs—shelving books at Borders and pulling espresso shots at Starbucks—packed my forest‑green Civic with things I didn’t need, and before sunrise on a cold December morning in Texas, I pointed the car west and started driving.

I remember the early stretch of Interstate 10, tapping along to Journey and the Eagles on the steering wheel, watching familiar landmarks fall away behind me. Each mile carried me farther from the life I’d known until there was nothing recognizable left. In its place came a kind of loneliness I wasn’t prepared for. The emptiness that arrives when familiarity finally lets go.

One of the more revealing exercises in self‑discovery is to look back at the routines you’ve had throughout your life. If you think about them clearly, you can see what occupied your mind, how you felt, how the major rhythms shaped the minor ones, and how changes in relationships, jobs, housing, and circumstance shifted the way you understood yourself. What’s strange is how quickly a routine becomes absolute. Once it settles in, the old ones disappear, and imagining a new one feels almost impossible.

My routines have changed so often I’m still surprised by how easily I get lost in whatever my current one happens to be. Since moving to Montana, I’ve slept in two different bedrooms. In the early months, I woke to an alarm, got ready in a bathroom I’ll never see again, made breakfast in a kitchen that’s already fading from memory, stepped out a back door, crossed a yard, and walked into a garage that no longer exists in my daily life. Then I’d drive thirty minutes to Bozeman. For more than a year now, I’ve woken up much later than I’d prefer, getting ready in the same hotel suite I’ve lived in for 520 days. I sit on the couch with music playing softly and write for hours. My car goes unused for days. In the evenings, I walk down a couple of flights of stairs to the lobby and work the front desk: checking in guests, sweeping floors, guiding drunk travelers into the 120‑year‑old lever‑operated Otis elevator, handling whatever small issues arise. I’m in bed shortly after the next morning begins. In twenty years, I’ve had at least twenty‑three major shifts in my morning routine.

When your routines change, your brain has to rebuild its sense of familiarity from scratch. It has to step out of its comfort zone and expand into territory that feels uncertain. The more dramatic the change, the more room your mind has to grow.

We rarely think about how many different lives we’ve lived—how many places we’ve come from—and how that might shape where we’re going. I’ve lived in Montana for two years now, and my daily routines have already changed three times. Each one became so normal that my brain could have convinced itself it was the only life I’d ever known, and that everything before it was a dream.

It’s hard for me to imagine people living the same routine for decades, though I know many do. Sitting here now, I know that a year from today will feel foggy, like a distant memory. I can’t picture where I’ll be. A year before this, I lived in a brand‑new apartment complex in Santa Fe, and my commute was a three‑minute walk. The year before that, I drove forty‑five minutes to a neighboring town. Looking back can feel just as surreal as imagining the future.

When I first heard the phrase “own your truth”, I thought, finally. And when “be the change you wish to see in the world” started circulating more widely, I thought maybe we were heading toward something honest. A movement willing to examine and challenge the deeper wrongs in our society. It didn’t occur to me that the idea could be misinterpreted or exploited.

But over the last couple of decades, I’ve watched people use “living your truth” as a way to excuse behavior rather than deepen self‑understanding. Living an authentic life grounded in inner wisdom was never meant to justify self‑serving, thoughtless, finger‑wagging reactions. You need inner wisdom first, and that requires real excavation, real introspection, real work. Authenticity doesn’t come from getting high and meeting God in a phone booth or staring at the ceiling during a hot bath. Once you’ve done the work, self‑serving behavior stops being an option.

I’m still stunned when I see someone behave in a blatantly unkind way, claim they’re “living my best life,” and then condemn someone else for doing the same thing.

A Sort of Political Stream-of-Consciousness
There’s a kind of freedom in this country that’s so ordinary most people barely notice it. It’s woven into the background of our days. The ability to speak, move, disagree, and build a life that feels like our own. And yet, somehow, we’ve grown hesitant to use it. We’ve let the noise of politics, the pressure of affiliation, and the weight of constant outrage convince us that exercising our rights is either futile or suspicious. We’ve become so tangled in partisan identity that we forget those rights were meant to belong to everyone, not just whichever group we’ve decided to stand closest to.

It’s easy to blame the government for this: for the overreach, the posturing, the policies that seem designed to provoke predictable reactions. But the truth is quieter. We’ve allowed ourselves to be conditioned by shortcuts in thinking, by logical fallacies that reward loyalty over clarity. We’ve let bureaucracy feel so exhausting that opting out seems easier than engaging. And in that exhaustion, we’ve surrendered pieces of the freedom we claim to value.

At the same time, there’s a growing belief that virtue requires intrusion, that caring about the well‑being of others means policing their choices, their worldview, their private sense of balance. It’s a strange kind of moral vigilance, dressed up as compassion but practiced like surveillance. When someone insists their version of goodness must override yours, it stops being virtue and starts becoming a quiet form of coercion. Freedom doesn’t survive well under that kind of pressure. Choice can’t be genuine if it’s graded against someone else’s moral scoreboard.

None of this changes our complicated history. The United States was built by people who carried both vision and contradiction; men who spoke of liberty while standing on the backs of entire communities. Progress has never been clean. It’s been uneven, painful, and often slow. But we have learned. We have acknowledged. We have amended. We continue to reckon with the past while trying to build something better than what we inherited.

We’re not perfect, not as individuals, not as a nation, not as a species. Expecting perfection from our development misunderstands what growth actually looks like. Change unsettles us. Familiarity comforts us. But even so, we adapt. We learn. We move forward. And maybe it’s time to recognize that progress requires more than outrage or allegiance. It requires patience. It requires listening. It requires letting go of the affiliations that keep us divided and choosing a standard rooted in shared humanity rather than inherited grievance.

If we want to move toward any kind of harmony, we’ll need to remember where we came from, where we’ve stumbled, and where we hope to go. Freedom isn’t a relic. It’s a practice. And it’s one we have to choose, deliberately, consistently, together.

Found Unfinished in My Computer I
I’ve read articles by idiots who suggest that workplace drama is a necessary retreat from the doldrums of work, providing a ‘healthy’ diversion from what might otherwise be an emotional and mental stressor. My opinion diverges from this absurd notion for many reasons. The thing is, most people don’t make rational linear progressions between information and their reactions—at the most basic level, think of “if this, then that” statements. Are people consciously discerning? If yes, then workplace drama wouldn’t always lead to frustration, resentment, framed cliques, and conjectures that invite prejudicial theatrics; separating reality from fiction, setting emotions aside, and viewing workplace drama as a game rather than a reflection of social politics. It might be reasonable to suggest that drama is a necessary escape from work-related stress. However, since we typically don't approach drama this way, this notion is unlikely to hold. 

I started taking Salt Lake’s light rail, TRAX. I fucking loved TRAX! The obvious downside is that south of Salt Lake City, there was one line running the length of the city(s) and none running the width. It didn’t matter; I walked to the stop from West Jordan, I didn’t care—I fucking loved TRAX! There’s a station at the hospital in Murray, and Barnes & Noble was across the street, which was convenient enough. I learned how to ride for free. The process involved some adult hide-and-seek, car hopping, and occasionally leaving one train to avoid getting caught by TRAX employees walking the length of the train, scouting tickets. Sometimes I’d buy a ticket. Downtown Salt Lake City, TRAX is free, but once you leave the Free Zone, you purchase a ticket on the platform, board the light rail, and then show your ticket to an employee as they walk by; riding TRAX, even if you were to buy a ticket, it wasn’t guaranteed that an employee would happen to be by. You could buy a ticket and never be ticketed, which put my process somewhere in the Gray Area Zone.

I worked on the sales floor [Barnes & Noble] for the most part. However, I was the only employee who could also work as a cashier and work in the café and the music department. My days were split between departments, especially because I’d cover breaks throughout the store. I was never stuck in one department all day burning out. Also, the people there were awesome. One of them introduced me to a coffeehouse in Sandy, Sunset Coffee. Collectively, we spent a lot of time at Sunset Coffee. Sunset Coffee sits on a hill near the mountains overlooking the valley. Once I was introduced to the place, I spent a lot of time at Sunset.

One afternoon, a customer found me on the sales floor; he was hesitant to interrupt me because, aside from the color and a general description of an image on the cover of a book he was looking for, he didn’t know the book’s title or author. As he described the cover, I pictured the cover as he described it. After two or three minutes, with him still trying to piece it together from his memory, I led him to an aisle, slipped a book from the top shelf, and handed it to him. “Wow, um, this is it. Wow.” He said, before taking the book to the cashier. The only other memorable customer interaction I had was with this one kind of pompous man in his forties. He was rounding the corner from an aisle, and we nearly collided. I walked around him to his left, noting his visible frustration. A few minutes later, we met again in a similar situation, and I walked around him to his left. This time he paused and called out to me. I don’t remember what he said exactly, but he was upset that I walked around him to his left instead of his right. He said something about how the natural flow of things meant staying to the right. Afterward, I was embarrassed because I take pride in behaving with a certain acknowledgment of social etiquette. It dawned on me after he left, unfortunately, so I couldn’t challenge his ridiculous notion that not only was he, of course, applying road etiquette to general human interaction, but clearly, he’s never left the United States; he probably won't be too happy when he does. Also, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I was the first person in this man's illustrious forty-year lifespan to walk around him to his left.

I’ve already written about this point in my life; while writing these anecdotes, I remembered a customer interaction at Borders in San Antonio I forgot to include. David Robinson walked in with his children. And as families do immediately after walking into a place, they dispersed. Robinson found me in an aisle and asked if I had seen his kids. So, David Robinson, if you’re unaware, used to play forward for the San Antonio Spurs. Robinson is one of the best players. David Robinson is 7 ft 1 in. I’m looking up at this guy standing in the aisles asking me if I have seen his kids, and the only thing I could think to say is, “Dude, you’re the tallest thing here. Just look around.” And fortunately, he laughed and spotted one of his sons fairly quickly—bookstore stories.

Old Bookstore Project Notes
I finished the SEO project! Finally, the last six months have been draining. For a while, it got harder and harder to force myself to sit down and finish it, yet I felt invigorated by the last few pages. I started uploading books to the site again and redeveloping a marketing strategy. Also, it's time to blog again. 

* Commentary: I used to own a bookstore. After a few years, I moved it online, but after ten years of buying and selling new and used books online, I closed the store.