August 2026
August 1
Before watching the movie Once and afterward listening to The Swell Season, I had never heard of Glen Hansard or The Frames. Once was amazing; it's easily one of my favorite music-centric movies, and for a while, Markéta Irglova was a celebrity crush. I learned about The Frames and liked them; their album "Set List" is lying around here somewhere. However, I never listened to the album or them consistently enough for The Frames to be a staple in my catalog. And I haven't listened to his solo albums yet. I have a feeling once I do, Glen Hansard's death is going to hit me a little harder than it already has.
August 2
"I watch the woman ahead of me in line at the grocery store, her cart containing only a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread, while mine overflows with the week’s necessities. Something flickers across my consciousness—the impulse to let her go first, simple as breathing. But then the calculus begins: I’m already late, she’s probably fine waiting, maybe she’s one of those people who would be offended by the gesture. The moment passes. The impulse dies. And I’m left standing there, complicit in the small erosion of human decency that happens a thousand times a day, in a thousand checkout lines, across a thousand cities where people like me choose convenience over connection.
This is how kindness dies. It’s not in dramatic acts of cruelty, but in the accumulation of rationalized indifference. We want to be good. The desire lives so close to the surface of our consciousness that we can feel it stirring whenever opportunity presents itself. We want to hold doors open with genuine warmth, to chat with waiters in the same way we do friends we haven’t seen in years, to offer help to strangers struggling with heavy bags or confusing directions. Compassion is our factory setting, the default program running beneath the layers of learned cynicism and protective detachment." ~ Excerpt from my essay On Navigating Our Social Abyss.
August 3
I’ve been thinking about how strange it is that the world people keep building doesn’t seem designed for people at all. Not the real kind: the organic, constantly developing, emotional, unpredictable beings we actually are. The world we’ve assembled over generations feels better suited for something standardized, something consistent, something that doesn’t change its mind or its direction or its heart. Something that isn’t us.
It’s no wonder people feel overwhelmed, alienated, or quietly resentful. We’re trying to live inside structures that weren’t designed for beings who change, who feel, who evolve, who break down and rebuild themselves over and over again. We’re trying to fit into systems that treat unpredictability as inefficiency and treat emotional depth as an inconvenience.
We learn to suppress the parts of ourselves that don’t fit neatly into the expectations around us. We learn to hide our confusion, our curiosity, our shifting identities. We learn to perform stability even when we’re in the middle of becoming someone new. And slowly, without noticing, we begin to shape ourselves into versions that are easier for the world to manage: quieter, flatter, more consistent, less alive.
The world we’ve built reflects what we’ve prioritized: order over nuance, efficiency over exploration, standardization over individuality. It’s a mirror showing us how uncomfortable we’ve become with the unpredictable nature of being human. It reveals how deeply we’ve internalized the belief that life should be optimized, streamlined, and controlled.
We didn’t build a world that accommodates human beings. We built a world that expects human beings to accommodate it.
And maybe that’s the real tension; not that the world is hostile, but that it’s indifferent to the organic reality of who we are. It wasn’t designed for people who grow unevenly, who feel deeply, who change direction without warning, who need time to fall apart and time to rebuild. It wasn’t designed for people who are still becoming.
But the fact that the world isn’t built for us doesn’t mean we have to keep building it this way. We can create systems that honor nuance instead of erasing it. We can build environments that make room for emotional complexity, for curiosity, for reinvention. We can stop treating unpredictability as a flaw and start seeing it as evidence of life—a world designed for beings who are always becoming.
August 4
Every morning, the world announces what’s trending, as if these topics are talking points expected to mandate the day's conversations. Today it’s the U.S.–Iran standoff, the Reflecting Pool, the Michigan Primary, fashion cycles, and a handful of product rollouts. A lineup so eclectic it feels like someone spun a wheel and said, “Sure, that’ll do.” I Googled what’s trending, by the way; I didn’t just know that.
And I can’t bring myself to care about any of it.
Not because I’m apathetic. It’s more that none of these things have anything to do with the interior life or aesthetic world that actually matters. My inner world is over here trying to figure out why certain thoughts keep returning, why certain ideas won’t leave me alone, and why I care about the shape of my senses more than the shape of the news cycle.
Meanwhile, the trending list is shouting, “Look over here!” And I’m thinking, “I really don’t want to.”
These topics feel like someone knocking loudly on a door opposite a brick wall. They demand attention but don’t offer anything meaningful in return. They pull people into a constant state of reaction, as if staying informed were the same thing as staying alive. It’s impressive, really; the world has managed to turn distraction into a civic duty. What I’m interested in moves differently.
I’m interested in the slow work of becoming someone who can sit with his own thoughts without needing the world to declare what matters. I’m interested in curiosity that grows from stillness, not from whatever happens to be flashing across a screen. I’m interested in the kind of noticing that doesn’t trend because it exists now only as a mirage between fingers. And honestly, I keep wondering what life would look like if more people focused on their inner worlds before reacting to whatever the world deems urgent.
Trending topics feel significant because they’re built for speed, for reaction, for the churn of attention. They’re built for people who want to feel plugged into something external, something engineered, even when that “something” is mostly static disguised as significance. It’s like being handed a megaphone and told it’s a meaningful conversation. They’re just soundbites between clichés.
August 5
Southeast Montana is stunning. In particular, the drive from Billings to Sheridan, Wyoming. The way the landscape—rolling and seemingly endless—transforms from gentle hills to impossible formations, as the road winds and courses through the prairie, is like nothing I’ve seen.
August 6
I'm road-trippin '. Service is spotty, and when I do stop, it's nonexistent.
August 7
Parked in a Rest Stop outside Trinidad, Colorado. It smells like pine, freshly ground. The air is saturated. It's a nice reprieve from the smoke, thick, leaden, and unpleasant, except at sunset when dusk, meeting the smoke, swells with pale amber and flush reds, filling the sky with the semisweet sense of awe.
August 8
At night, I hear only birds, crickets, cicadas, and maybe frogs. The train is faint, soaring only from some depths of my memory, still inconsistently consistent. But the voices, those that vibrate through hollow brass funnels spreading behind the walls, those voices are gone. Unceremoniously. And as quality a background as the voices can be, they are also not missed.
August 9
I’m looking for the most underappreciatedly beautiful places. The sandhills of Nebraska, Arkansas’ lakes, Oklahoma’s rivers, Colorado’s prairies, and Texas’ canyons. The places we don’t talk about. The places in-between.
August 10
There's a word for it, I'm sure. The way life will follow you through years of changelessness, the thoughtless comfort of tying your shoes in the same way, in the same place, surrounded by sights so familiar you can see the muted silhouette behind your lids. Until a shift so sudden it doesn't seem real, like your weight lands awkwardly in the indentation of steps textured by permanence, and your world, your entire world, is unbalanced by adaptation.
August 11
Where do most people live?
Inside the most immediate moments, those pressing tightly against us, smoothed only by the sincere passing of soft words entangled within the imperceptible space between lips? Or in the interpretation of urgency, the way we imprint the concealed parts of ourselves on the narrative that lives uniquely in the fiction behind our eyes?
August 12
I struggle to use social media. It seems to work only when you spend way more time posting feeds, stories, reels, joining and engaging in groups, other profiles, and your own profile on every platform.
And then you can’t help but be consumed by that world. It affects how you think, how you feel, how you react, and how you interact with people. If you’re lucky, you might have some time every day to make art, and you do it all so you might be able to spend a week vacationing somewhere in relative solitude.
We talk like it’s about control, but really, it’s about priorities.
August 13
I found both SNL and Monty Python sketches satirizing director Sam Peckinpah. Sam Peckinpah lived in the Murray Hotel in the late 70s. I also live in the hotel, directly beneath his room. I'm a writer and photographer living in a historic hotel. Sam used to shoot his pistol through the ceiling; the current owner's grandson found a slug buried in a wall. I still sometimes smell gunpowder and hear footsteps coming from his room when I know there isn't anyone staying there. People come from all over the world to stay in the hotel where Sam lived.
August 14
Sitting outside with my cats. Everything is green. Wind navigates a forest of bamboo stalks, whistling as it reveals a path through. Cardinals, more than I can count: brilliant reds, hop from branch to branch; green leaves stir beneath their weight. Far enough south now that the wildfire smoke’s a soundbite; I still feel it leaving my lungs, still thinking about the train. In the shadow of a train is something inspirational. An idea, a feeling, that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else. A warning, which under any other circumstance is disruptive and unpleasant, but a train passing, followed by the cly-clack, cly-clack, cly-clack, filters through the heaviness in the shoulders, softening the edges and lifting us—lifting me.
August 15
I don’t have a tribe.
My parents were both raised in Republican households—one in Ohio, the other in Mississippi. I don’t know exactly how their early experiences shaped them, but my sister and I grew up in a Democratic household. Somewhere along the way, their worldview shifted. That alone taught me that political identity isn’t fixed; it’s inherited, absorbed, questioned, and sometimes abandoned.
When I was 24, I realized how much my own bias was shaping the way I interpreted politics and the world around me. I was concerned about the biased influence on my political and other perspectives, so I made a deliberate effort to let go of that bias. It wasn’t easy. Letting go requires noticing your reactions in real time, acknowledging whether they’re shaped entirely by unproven loyalties, but most importantly, allowing for the possibility that your first thought might be wrong. That takes patience, humility, self-reflection, and accountability.
I’m a behavioralist. I pay attention to patterns. And for a long time, I haven’t seen meaningful behavioral differences between contemporary Republicans and Democrats. The rituals, the outrage cycles, the media narratives; they mirror each other more than either side wants to admit. It’s hard for me to support any party when the system itself seems designed to amplify division, reward performance, and obscure the truth.
People like to believe they’re capable of being wrong, but in practice, that’s rare. Letting go of bias taught me that critical thought doesn’t necessarily require abandoning your beliefs; it merely asks you to examine them honestly and return to them, if they still hold up. That practice has made me a better, more grounded person. And being unaffiliated has meant that my views often weave across political lines, leading most liberals to label me conservative and most conservatives to label me liberal.
While I find a way to process the world today, I’m sitting with only the sober recognition of how far we’ve drifted from shared moral ground. I’m not looking for another tribe to replace the one I’ve rejected. I’m looking for something beyond tribalism altogether: a willingness to see clearly, even when it challenges the stories we’ve inherited or the identities we cling to.
At the very least, we need to invite moments of reflection that transcend parties and labels, that slow us down long enough to question the stories we’ve inherited, and that challenge our personal notion of how we decide what we stand for, and what we’re willing to look away from. Without that pause, we drift further into certainty, further into performance, and further away from the humility required to live in a shared reality. Reflection isn’t a luxury; it’s a responsibility.
August 16
I love this performance.
This is a fun song to sing while driving out in the middle of nowhere with the windows down.
People can change; not all at once, and not by accident. It happens slowly, in the moments when you notice yourself slipping into old reactions and you choose—in real time—to do something different. You learn to catch the automatic patterns as they rise, to see them without flinching, and to replace them with something intentional. It’s difficult work, but it’s possible. More than possible. The notion that we cannot change is laziness and an unwillingness to confront our discomfort and our shame.
August 17
Date Ideas # 12
Do something unconventional.
Go for a walk through your favorite park.
Find a shaded area under a tree and bark at some birds.
And then, maybe, dig a really cool hole!
August 18
I went to The Odyssey today.
I haven’t been inside a theatre in years. I couldn’t even tell you what the last movie I saw on a big screen was. But I wanted to see The Odyssey on the Big screen; on IMAX. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reaction to a film quite like the reaction to this one. I don’t follow the back‑and‑forth, so I’m not entirely sure what the debate was supposed to be. Elliot Page being in it? Lupita Nyong’o as Helen?
People interpret life through whatever mix of race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and culture lives inside their own heads. That’s their lens, and often their failing. The problem is that most people don’t have enough self‑awareness to distinguish between their interior monologue and the world outside of it. So, they project. And once projection becomes habit, they have an endless supply of stupid shit to say.
I’ve never understood why people feel the need to impose their beliefs onto others. It’s at the root of almost every problem we have, and yet we can’t seem to get past it.
As for The Odyssey, I thought it was fantastic. Nolan’s an incredible filmmaker. But I also haven’t been to a movie in years, so what do I know? If I end up reviewing it, I won’t do it here. It’ll go in my TV/Film writing collection.
August 19
I went looking for a supplement today.
I’d read about it online, then got dressed, left the house, sat in the car, and drove away. I’ve never liked shopping on the internet. It’s not really about privacy, though I do prefer keeping a low profile. It’s more so that I think people should have to leave their house to buy things. We’re already a culture leaning hard into materialism; making consumption effortless feels like the last thing a species with limited self‑awareness needs.
My phone refused to connect to the world, so I ended up driving blind, as I used to as a teenager. I stopped at three or four stores between where I’m staying in the Texas Hill Country and San Antonio. Shelves were thin everywhere. I mentioned that later to someone, and they pointed to COVID and tariffs; both probably have a part in the story, but it’s online shopping that’s doing most of the heavy lifting.
People drive through shopping centers as reminders: Right, I was going to order [that thing] from Target. Or I’ve never seen that store before; I should check their website. Then they swing through Starbucks, maybe Chick‑fil‑A, and shop on their phones on the interstate between texts on the way home.
After talking through online shopping, COVID, and tariffs, I said, “I don’t understand it.” They looked at me like I was missing something obvious, like the part I couldn’t grasp was how those factors affect inventory. That wasn’t it.
Of course, I understand how any of those things could thin out a shelf.
What I don’t understand is why we keep building stores if we’re not going to shop in them.
These places know we’re not coming. The shelves, among other things, make that clear. So, what the fuck are we doing? Do we even know? We’ve reached a point where everything is routine, habitual, stripped of intention.
The Texas Hill Country used to be beautiful. Now it’s paved over with strip malls no one goes to, development stretching from Boerne to San Antonio in one long, uninterrupted line. Construction is happening everywhere, every day, as if the act of building were the point. We’re building for the sake of building, as if momentum itself were a plan.
August 20
I grew up with dogs. I love dogs. I love having animals in the house, but we have to understand that these animals rely on us for everything. It's our responsibility not only to keep them alive, but to ensure they live healthy, happy lives. For almost the last fifteen years, I've kept cats. I have two cats. I have a tuxedo cat named Fig and a Calico named Dinah. I wanted cats because my lifestyle has been both vagrant and heuristic. I didn't grow up with cats. I always believed they were independent. For my first few years with cats, I lived with that expectation. After a few years, I discovered cats get as attached to their people as dogs do. It's very important to me to make sure they're happy. And sometimes that's a pain in the ass.
August 21
I found a great Myers-Briggs test.
If anyone is interested, let me know.
It only takes six hours. You get two fifteen‑minute breaks and one thirty‑minute break. At the end, after you’ve exhausted questioning your life’s choices and you're preparing to hand the test to the moderator, they throw a glass of wine in your face and call you an asshole.
August 22
Yesterday, someone reread my U.S. Top 5 Coffeehouses article, and we were talking about it. They weren't happy that Black Rifle Coffee Co. is on the list because of their political affiliations, and I was like, "Well, I just like their coffee," and they said, "Our money talks." I thought about that afterward. And I realized then that politics isn't my filter, and that concept of voting with our money is a great advertising slogan, but it is just a targeted marketing campaign; it's one affiliation's response to another's performance.
But then I started thinking a lot about how we view the world through the lens of our experiences. We view the world through filters. We compose and revise our filter throughout our lives; it adapts through experience, reward, trauma, and other meaningful events. But generally, we're not aware that we're viewing the world through a filter, let alone when our filter changes. The context of our thoughts and reactions can give us a glimpse into that filter, but we rarely make that association consciously.
Filters can be complicated both because we aren't aware of them and because they reaffirm our bias; we unknowingly relate them to our identity and our beliefs because our filters are fiercely personal.
Unfortunately, politics influences most of our filters; in fact, most people in the United States view the world through a political filter to varying degrees. And I realized, at least consciously, I could sense it for a while, and that's why I don't relate to most people. After all, my filter is more inherent, more cosmic, and it would explain why: one, my policy opinions aren't loyal to any one affiliation; two, I genuinely don't give a fuck about politics.
August 23
Someone should make an animated or stop-motion picture of Braveheart where William Wallace is a spider.
August 24
The strange balance I find myself forced to confront—considering how I feel about politics and how everyone else feels about it—is that if I want to stay relevant—or rather, if I want my writing to remain relevant—I have to mold some kind of niche. Some way to discuss current events without the foul stench of political rot lingering in my words. But my biggest hurdle is effectively communicating the distinction between my words and political rhetoric.
August 25
Stop by my new Substack: The Human Pattern. I'm not as familiar with sites like Substack and Medium as I should be; nevertheless, I'm learning how to balance life with being on the internet. It's not how I prefer to spend my time, but it is the shape of our world right now, so it's important to forge a role.
August 26
Wait, would I know if I were a bot?
August 27
Collectively, we lose something when people like Dolly Parton or Tim Curry pass away. I’ve carried both of them through decades of my life. I grew up watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show; I dated a girl who played Janet every year, and I still can’t hear someone ask “What’s for dinner” without thinking “Meatloaf.” And there will never be another Dolly, not in presence, not in generosity, not in the strange way she’s threaded herself into American feeling.
But what often strikes me is how odd our language becomes around death. Depending on the circumstances, we talk as if each loss is unprecedented, as if after thousands of years we still expect death to stop happening. We respond to it like it’s a rupture in the natural order instead of the thing that has always been woven through it. It lacks authenticity, I think, the way we respond, and I don’t know; it influences our relationship to death in ways that may not be healthy.
August 28
I’m working on my manuscript again.
For months, the music from the bar downstairs has been wearing me down; it’s been too loud, too constant, too close. I couldn’t focus. I needed distance. I’m in the Texas Hill Country for a while, surrounded by trees, birds cutting through the quiet, transforming the quiet, the occasional scorpion reminding me I’m not alone. If I want signs of human activity, I have to get in the car and go looking for them.
It’s been wonderful! Finally, the kind of quiet that lets the work breathe, the kind that makes room for clarity and the slow, steady rhythm of writing.
August 29
When a system stops working, we do one of two things: we ignore it and pretend like everything’s fine, or we scrap the whole thing and start over. There never seems to be a middle ground: no repair, no thoughtful adjustment; neglect or reinvention; that’s it, and that’s strange to me.
August 30
A breeze through bamboo
rings differently; sometimes,
When the breeze is heavy,
and the canes strike,
they sigh hollow
and deep.
Where the
stalks are the thickest,
the wind comes through
brisker, and whistles
on its way out.
August 31
One of my biggest daily annoyances is how things that have no business being politicized end up politicized in this country. Whether you eat healthy, where you get your coffee, how you spend your mornings, what you read, what you don’t read… everything becomes a signal, a stance, a declaration you never intended to make.
It’s exhausting watching ordinary choices get dragged into some imagined cultural battlefield. Much of the time, people aren’t trying to make a statement. They’re just living their lives. But that almost makes the issue more infuriating, because it becomes selective. Whatever issue becomes an issue only when you happen to make the connection; it’s not even fucking consistent. And we’ve built a world where even the smallest habits get interpreted as commentary, and suddenly you’re part of a conversation you never agreed to join, and that may or may not even come up.