July 2026

July 3

"Living with unnamed depression is like carrying weight you can’t see. Your unconscious mind, that ancient keeper of patterns, begins to believe you are the problem, not that you have a problem. These whispers from the depths shape how you move through the world, building walls that paradoxically feed the very thing you’re trying to escape. The walls become prisons; the prisons become personalities. Soon, you’re not sure where the depression ends, and you begin." ~ Excerpt from my essay, On Depression

Once I got more comfortable meditating and exploring the benefits of introspection, [and] for those of you who are unfamiliar with introspection: introspection can be to meditation as lucid dreaming is to dreaming. Anyway, I discovered that depression is actually fairly easy to curb, and much more so than anxiety, for example. It may seem ridiculous to some, but the most effective way to curb depression is simply to name it. “I am feeling depressed.”

Acknowledging that you are depressed creates a distinction between you and depression. The invisible tether that depression wraps around you, making it difficult to isolate and feel like it’s revealing some hidden personal truth, is an illusion. That’s the real danger of depression. Of course, the real-time recognition of depression takes some practice, and then forming the habit so it doesn’t slip in undetected, weighing on you, can take a little more practice.

I’ve been nearly depression free for years. When it does slip through, as it did yesterday, I acknowledge it and its impermanence, and I allow myself to feel it and let it pass.

 

July 4

It feels harder to find authenticity anymore. I touched on this a little last week. Everything turns into an argument, or a performance, or some passive‑aggressive way of signaling which tribe someone belongs to. I’m thinking about it today because of the Fourth of July. People are treating it like a trial, some way to prove loyalty, resentment, or whatever identity they’re clinging to.

I don’t understand the need to make statements for or against everything. It’s rarely about the thing itself; it’s about posturing, ceremonial gestures of favor, a requirement of which is flaunting hatred of each other in increasingly creative ways so that your chosen tribe allows you to adopt the requisite persona.

I don’t know. It just seems like whatever you choose to focus on becomes the shape of your life. If you want anger, resentment, and anxiety, you can always find new ways to blame anyone but yourself. Life is hard—I know that—but it’s not the fault of whatever group you’ve decided to blame. It's because you feel trapped by a lifetime of choices that you refuse to accept as choices. If you don’t want regret to define the end of your life, you might want to shift your focus.

Happy Independence Day!

 

July 5

So, AI… as a comprehensive informational resource, it can be useful. A single source that consolidates the whole of biased history. I suppose, too, that I shouldn’t be surprised that AI was introduced before the infrastructure existed to sustain it. There are countless examples of our species applying things to society that actively work against our self-interests.

I’m more interested in the different artistic methods of AI.  As an artist living at the dawn of this thing, I find the introduction of AI art unsettling. But what annoys me most right now is the thoughtless reaction from idiots regarding the work artists are producing. Every time an artist introduces a new work, it’s immediately criticized as AI.

I like to play around with details and effects in Photoshop; I enjoy photo art. People forget that digital art existed long before AI. My photo art is nuanced and time-consuming. And suddenly, every photo that isn’t obviously unrefined in some way is AI according to somebody else. Regarding my writing, my voice is unmistakable, but my cadence changes depending on what I'm writing; my essays don't read the same as my fiction. I don’t know, man; I guess I wish people were more conscious, more thoughtful about their reactions to AI. But that's equally true of behavior in general.

 

July 6

There’s a feeling mavens chase. You might think of it as being “in the zone,” or “on fire.” In the movie F1, Brad Pitt says this about it, “…sometimes, there's this moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it's peaceful, and I can see everything…cause in that moment, I’m flying.” It’s such a great account of it. In Finding Forrester, Sean Connery said, “No thinking… You write your first draft with your heart…the first key to writing is to write…not to think.”

There’s nothing like losing myself in writing. It feels a lot like how Paul McCartney described writing “Yesterday”; Brad Pitt describes driving a car. It’s something inherent regardless of your pursuit. When the moment flows, and instinct and harmony meet, everything comes together. The greats chase it, and the best have a way of tapping into it. The people whose names are synonymous with their exercise: Shakespeare, Andretti, Williams, Picasso, Wright, Astaire, Peart, Jordan (etc.). *Michael Jordan’s actually a great example of this.

(*This is a great opportunity to settle the argument. You can tell when a person is in search of-, or is in the zone- by how they perform, and you can tell what they’re searching for. Michael Jordan was searching for it every time he stepped onto the court. He tapped into that peace—he was chasing the feeling. LeBron James was chasing statistics)

 

July 8

We’re not a forward-thinking society, not anymore. We stagnate until some form of change is introduced, and we collectively resist whatever that change might be for as long and thoughtlessly as we can until that change is either rejected or assimilated into society.

Democracy works when our representatives collaboratively decide what should be regulated and what shouldn’t; conservatives need to recognize that some things need to be managed, and liberals need to acknowledge that others should be left to better judgment. And once these decisions are made reasonably, it’s the responsibility of the general public to respond with respect, accountability, integrity, and acceptance.

It’s also the responsibility of both the general public and our representatives to thoroughly explore the issues that challenge our society. Every single issue, when fully examined, presents overlap. Compromise, like coping, is a word maneuvered by marketing strategies to mean anything; fortunately, we really don’t need to compromise; we merely need to devote the time and effort to search for political convergence.

Societies collapse when they stagnate, and societies stagnate when forward movement matters less to the general public than party vindication.

 

July 9

I don’t spend a lot of time driving; at least, I haven’t in a few years. I used to drive the streets of places where the landscape blends with music. Interstates, highways, city streets, towns, country roads, farm roads, and nameless roads all over the country—except the Midwest; I don’t have a lot of experience with those states. I was always conflicted about the impact of my aimless driving, but it’s such a great emotional recalibration. I’d find a road that disappeared into the country, where I could adjust the volume and the verve of the music and sing. Coupled with the beauty of country roads, small-town America, or historic buildings obscured by progress, and that natural and manmade beauty, when bound by the stir of passion that only music can inspire, it’s… well, I guess, it’s a wordless adventure. It’s not something I can describe, nor would I if the words suddenly came to me.

My drive lately has been through Montana’s Paradise Valley. The Absaroka Mountains to the East (Kenny Loggins, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Brown Bird) and the Gallatin Mountains to the West (Jimmy Buffett, Brooks & Dunn, Paul Simon), Yellowstone country ahead of me (Band of Heathens, The Devil Makes Three), the Yellowstone River alongside the road (James McMurtry, Andrew Bird, Dave Matthews). Snowcapped mountains until June (Queen, Murder by Death). A Black Bear runs across the street near Pine Creek Lodge (Michael Jackson, Bright Eyes, Robert Pollard); Mule Deer follow their trails for the most part (Fleetwood Mac, Sufjan Stevens, the Grateful Dead); a Bald Eagle glides overhead, an Osprey, then a Golden Eagle (John Parr, Owen Pallett). A herd of elk crosses the street (Rusted Root). They move so smoothly, steadily, it’s almost like watching the river navigate the rapids; it’s unending, and there have got to be hundreds of them (Ayub Ogada).

I missed my drive today.

 

July 10

It's been a while since I've kept a daily log/journal. I used to keep a small leather notebook in my back pocket and scribble in it often. I made it a daily, if not hourly, habit. When I left the last newspaper I wrote for, I broke the habit. And now, until this becomes normal again, it’s strange how hard it can be to come up with things to write about. Of course, there are some things I can write about without hesitation. Namely, um: behavior, and particularly the poor, unconscious behaviors that shepherd us throughout our days, but that’s tough to focus on and, after a while, comes across as pessimistic and cynical. I suppose I could talk about my own behavior. That might come across less negatively.

Behavior has always made sense to me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a natural ability to pick up on and identify patterns in body language, mannerisms, syntax, micro-expressions, and attitude. The downside is that I can’t turn it off. And what makes it worse, I’m metacognitive and emotionally intelligent. Either one of those can be valuable, but together, and especially along with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Conditioned Emotional Response, I’m hyper aware of my emotions and how they influence my thoughts. Still, my brain has made a habit of hiding things from me, and my emotions have been misaligned. Anxiety is self-sabotaging.

I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years to remedy this, and I’ve come a long way, but because I’m metacognitive, there are layers to how I think and perceive the world. Every thought is accompanied by an immediate second‑order awareness of how and why the thought formed. My mind doesn’t move linearly; it moves in stacked strata, evaluating the surface layer, the structural layer beneath it, and the implied logic beneath that, all in real time. The trickiest part, because of the abuse I’ve suffered, is accurately identifying the differences between how I think and how others might think (and feel). Essentially, I see everything except what I need to see—at least, what I think I need to see. Unfortunately, I don’t recall how to weed out those nuances. I think about this a lot.

 

July 11

One of the best and worst things about living in a 122-year-old hotel is the hotel bar. The hotel doesn't own the bar; it was sold off 20 years ago. My suite is directly above the bar. I can sit on my couch, get a little high, sip on something warm, and listen to the ambient music or conversations that I can sometimes hear, although I hear mostly snippets, not enough to make sense of. On good nights, when the live music's at a reasonable volume—reasonable, in this bar, generally means in the 90 dB range, because the building's 122 years old, remember. There has been a lot of contention between the hotel and the bar over the volume of the music; it's been a problem for years since the current owners took over the bar in '23.

The bar’s general manager has little if any empathy. He doesn’t care whether his actions affect anyone. Over the years, I’ve pieced together his involvement in the issue with the music. Fortunately, lately, the bar and hotel owners have found common ground. The new live music contract includes a clause stating that if the music volume exceeds 100dB, the band won’t get paid. There’s a decibel meter on the wall facing the stage. I discovered that the meter doesn’t register bass. I learned that their manager knows, exploits, and manipulates that, in the same way he does with everyone around him (my ex-wife is an expert manipulator; I know the signs), and he often keeps the volume at a reasonable level, but cranks the bass just to try and piss me off. But he’s a piece of shit, and I’m not, and so, I get the last laugh.

It’s not the noise itself that finally pushed me away; it’s the indifference behind it. It’s such a shame because it’s a great bar. The food’s amazing. And I really love the music. You can still access the bar from the hotel lobby. But there is no room service :/, which especially sucks because, even though it’s not like me to blacklist something I like because of the behaviors of people associated with it, I just can’t go over there anymore. I can’t get over their indifference. The way they’ve treated our guests, the hotel employees, me, and especially my cats (I've even heard bar patrons say, "uh, the music's pretty fucking loud," and they still refuse). How people treat one another is significant to me. The one constant in everyone’s life, without exception, is that we are always surrounded by people; the people in our lives might change, but there will always be people. *Empathy is significant.

 

*Suicidal empathy doesn't exist. That's a marketing campaign. The danger is actually from senseless loyalty, not empathy. 

 

July 12

When I was 20, I packed my little green Honda Civic and started driving west on I-10. I graduated from Boerne High School a couple of years earlier and dropped out of UTSA. I knew what I wanted to do, but couldn’t pursue it, and the loss left me directionless. So, I set out to find myself, as they say.

In the following years, I traveled, and I wrote. I lived in Idaho, Utah, New York, New Mexico, and Montana, and explored several amazing places. I discovered Joshua Tree, Sedona, Moab, Marfa, New York City, Santa Fe, Jackson, Durango, Abiquiu, Livingston, and others. I never really found the direction I was looking for, at least not over those ten years of aimless wandering. I did, however, spend time sleeping in subway stations in New York City (that’s a story I’ll dive into later), immersed myself in Meow Wolf before they became one of the largest art collectives in the country, helped organize a TEDx event, befriended George Martin, Brad Zellar, Walter Kirn, happened upon Marina Abramovic sitting across from Ulay during her exhibit, The Artist is Present, saw Ozzy and Cat Stevens perform dueling Crazy and Peace Train’s, and freelanced with magazines, newspapers, and journals. My twenties were intense, before I found myself in an abusive relationship and spiraled into post-traumatic stress that distorted most of my thirties.

These small American towns I discovered are vortexes of equilibrium, reflections of self, and collectives of spirit. If you don’t know yourself and want some insight into introspection, spend a year in Joshua Tree, Sedona, Moab, Marfa, or Abiquiu. These places don’t change you; they introduce you to yourself. What I learned about myself, I didn't even know I was looking for.

 

July 13

Last night I was thinking about what I wanted to write today. Several collections of my essays might best be categorized as reviews; my travel, food, music, and TV/film collections all probably read more like reviews. When I started writing my essays for this site, I was thinking about two things. First, while I have been writing for the better part of twenty years, I've never felt great about what I wrote. A few years ago, I decided to reevaluate my writing. In the process, while I was reading or rereading every book on writing I could find, I wrote and rewrote many of these essays to help me measure my development as a writer.

The second was an effort to write and publish as many pieces as I could. I wanted to have a solid portfolio available to my readers. I wrote about the things that interest me, for the most part. But I hate writing reviews. I don't understand the concept. However, I knew that the best way to write as many pieces in a short period to get this website running was to use a template, and a review template was an efficient way to do that. I grimace when reading those pieces, though. And I always intended to rewrite them at some point. 

It's strange to me that there are people whom we rely on to tell us what's good and what isn't. It's so arbitrary, and yet most of us rely on critics to tell us what to like. And we'll second guess ourselves and our interests because somebody else told us we were wrong. We might hang artwork in our homes that we can't stand, because somebody told us it was good. We might never watch a film that could genuinely change our lives because Robert Ebert was in a bad mood. And it's so normalized in our culture that entire industries, and artists, are limited to the impressions of people who "study what's good?" That's so fucking bizarre. 

 

July 14

I love it when the train whistles, interrupting my thoughts briefly, and then the train starts skating by so rhythmically that it becomes a part of the mood, the setting that we settle into, the seamless silhouette that inspires our thoughts, and that furthest point we can imagine before the dream replaces our measure of time, and then suddenly it’s there again separating itself from the voice and music downstairs, the force of the wind resisting the traffic on the street, the echo of footsteps and doors slamming. The same train, minutes later, clackity, clackity, clackity…

 

July 15

The wind gently presses against the high grass in the plains, as if it were resting upon it, and with such care not to harm the grass. Instead, the wind brushes the spike, presumably running its invisible fingers through the field, arms outstretched, palms out, feeling every moment. The things that surround us. The things we see once and then never again.

 

July 16

A little after midnight, I was sitting behind the front desk. It was a busy night... the hotel was full. But I'd had a fairly quiet hour behind me and was beginning to settle into the idea of calling it a night. Lee Greenwood, who was a guest at the hotel that weekend, walked in with some energy and immediately sat at the grand piano in the center of the lobby. 

I'd never heard of Lee Greenwood before that weekend. I'm sure I'd heard one of his classic America tunes growing up on base, or in elementary school in Texas, or at Hobby Lobby, but I wouldn't have been able to place the artist, nor would it ever have crossed my mind to look it up -- especially back then. People at the hotel were talking about him, so I Googled him. 

Anyway, he starts playing the piano. It's after midnight. The building is 120 years old. When played, you can easily hear it throughout the hotel up to the third floor, and the fourth if you're in the hall. I'm there alone. Lee Greenwood is playing the piano. So, I walk up to Mr. Greenwood, my arms out in front of me but tucked in gently at the elbow, kind of getting ready to brace, as if I'm about to accept a ball thrown my direction. My palms were out, fingers spread, and bent at each joint, as if I were trying to calm an aggressive dog; tip-toeing slowly toward the piano.

I touched the top of the piano softly to try to get his attention. He looked up slightly, but tried to hide it, and continued playing. "Um, Mr Greenwood, you know, so it's past midnight, and this is a hotel. People are trying to sleep. Can you, I mean, can you not play the piano right now?" Lee Greenwood stops playing, but he doesn't look up. Not right away. "Excuse me?" He eventually grumbles softly; I'm not sure his mouth even moved; the sound had to push its way through the pursed lips of a chapped America. 

I didn't say anything. In a moment, his head rolled upwards, and his eyes were trying to focus on me. "Do you know who I am?" "Well, I mean, kinda... but it's still after midnight. I'm sorry, man." Lee Greenwood sits there for what felt like an eternity. And then he slowly lowers the fallboard over the keys, stands slightly, though bowed, scoots the legs of the piano bench roughly across the carpet, and then holds for the slightest moment, waiting for applause? I wasn't sure. And then he stands. Lee Greenwood takes one long step to the side, takes a second long step past me, but then he stops and turns. He looks at me one last time. Lee Greenwood doesn't say anything; he just wanted to take one last look at my face. Lee Greenwood was never going to forget me. And I was never going to forget Lee Greenwood.

 

July 17

I can still feel the steam rising from the grates, the noises of the city, the way the light reflects off everything, giving everything a certain shine. Before I moved to New York, I had been living in Salt Lake City; I had only been there for a couple of years. Moving to Salt Lake had been a mutual decision between me and someone from my past, and I was ready to move on. I had a job waiting for me. Barnes & Noble was opening a flagship store on the Upper East Side. I had a place waiting for me, a small apartment in the Bronx across the street from the Botanical Garden. I was excited and terrified as I boarded a plane to New York City.

I booked a hostel for a few nights, an anchor while I pieced together the new life I had started building in Utah. First, I reached out to my new landlords; I wasn’t able to reach them. I left a voicemail and an email, then walked up Fifth Avenue to meet my new boss. I met the store manager, assistant managers, and department managers, and then familiarized myself with the immediate area before heading into the subway and up to the Bronx. I found my new building, tried calling my landlords again, but nothing; I wandered around the botanical gardens for a while before heading back to the hostel.

I never heard from the people who would be my landlords again. I extended my stay in the hostel; eventually, I left it for a cheaper hostel, the cheapest hostel I could find in the city—that was an experience, but I’ll write about that another time. I stayed in hostels for about three weeks before deciding that if I wanted to save money and eventually find a place, I’d need to be a little creative. I asked my boss if I could leave my belongings, two travel suitcases, in the break room, and I spent most nights wandering the streets of New York City. When I was too tired to stay awake, I slept on or under the benches in subway stations, sometimes on the floor, like in Grand Central. I was often woken and shooed by the cops.

Finally, I found a space in an apartment in Brooklyn across from the Brooklyn Museum. Of the four buildings I would live in NYC, it was the only one that had rooftop access. I’d often sit up there, looking out across the Brooklyn skyline, and in the distance, Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Financial District. I’ll never forget walking the streets early in the morning when the city gets quiet.

The silence in Union Square, the only movement coming from the ticking clock in the darkness; even Times Square is quiet, except for McDonald’s. I’d sit on a bench in the dark in Washington Square Park… it was so quiet; even then, I never felt like I was biding time. It surprised me how easy it was to sit there, thoughtless, listening to the fountain in the night, echoing footsteps I could never place, the occasional cool breeze crossing the park, the marble benches that were both cold and warm at the same time, the peppers of water from the fountain.

July 18

The soft adobe curves of Santa Fe, New Mexico, catch a light that’s stolen from a less familiar planet. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, like weathered sculptures, their snow-dusted peaks blush in the aged glow of the sun and thaw in the morning mist; their sharp details soften. The crisp, chastening mountain air hints of piñon pine. This city seduced me completely. I fell into its rhythms the way you fall into deep water: shock first, followed by surrender. The city has a way of enveloping you, flowing through your emotions, and filling them, making them familiar. There were mornings when I’d wake to that high desert light flooding my room and think that I had somehow slipped into a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. The art here doesn’t merely hang on walls; it breathes in the architecture, pulses in the conversations overheard at coffee shops, and lives in the way shadows move across Canyon Road.

 

July 19

Because he's one of the best.

 

 

July 20

My first time in Montana was in 2013 (I'm pretty sure). I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I flew out of the Santa Fe airport toward LAX (Los Angeles). After a five-hour layover at LAX, I boarded a plane bound for Portland. I sat at the Portland airport for a few hours before walking out onto the runway and climbing the stairs onto a twin-engine plane; it was the smallest plane I'd ever been on. That plane made an emergency landing in Spokane, Washington. We departed and boarded another twinjet airplane that took me to Missoula. I shared a cab with one of my co-passengers, stumbled into my hotel room, and passed out. The next afternoon, I saw Brandi Carlile and Ray Lamontagne at the Big Sky Brewing Co., and Ray Lamontagne was incredible. I still think about his performance of "Henry Nearly Killed Me (It's a Shame)."

 

July 21

Karma is about learning, not just about good deeds; the reward of steps taken to better us. Invisible points we keep only for ourselves to measure our growth.

 

July 22

I’d mentioned previously that people seemed to be more argumentative than I remember them being when I was less socially indifferent. I’ve come to discover that we’ve always been entirely way too thoughtless in the way we approach politics in this country. When I was younger, for whatever reason, I assumed that reason factored into the legislative process, that we were more willing to work together for the best interests of the country.

I’ve come to learn that, depending on which party is in power, the needs of only that party are met; to me, that just seems like the dumbest fucking thing ever. At some point, collectively, we started playing political pong rather than working to maintain forward motion. I can’t wrap my head around why anyone thinks this is sustainable, but whatever… this isn’t a political observation, but I wanted to cover these bases first.

The observation I want to address here is entirely behavioral. I mean, I’m sure there is a political component to it, in the sense that social media and the internet are more responsible for politicized escalation than any person or affiliation, and we simply haven’t learned how to compartmentalize reality from our own Machiavellian interpretation of reality; however, the way it's influencing basic, everyday interactions is alarming. 

It seems as though you can’t ask someone to do something, or not to do something, in any context, without there being some mindless, combative preamble. Why are we arguing about this? Just say, “Yes,” or “No,” or pause, and respond sensibly. What happened to us?

“I’m sorry, what do you mean by that?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just trying to clarify wha…”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

 

“Here, let me help you with…”

“I can do it myself, goddammit!”

 

“Hey, could you slide over a bit. I just need to get by.”

“Or you could fucking wait, I mean Jesus… just be patient.”

“Right. I mean, I could, or you could just take a step to the side.”

"..."

"Please, can you please... can you just please... come on, I mean, please just move to the side. This is a small ask." Whhhyyyyy????!!!!