October 2026

 

October 1

October always looks so fucking weird when it's spelled out.

 

October 2

The hint of rain

tapping the leaves,

petrichor rising

from the ground.

A downrush,

water pooling,

the air thickening.

 

Birds go quiet

except for one who

seems to enjoy the shift—

the wind, the smell,

the exhilarating joy

of the moment.

 

Inside, smooth

ceramic warms

my hands.

Hot liquid,

a small slurp

for taste.

 

Rain keeps

working the earth,

and the earth

keeps answering.

Petrichor, and

everything it carries.

October 3

Every night, as I wait to fall asleep, is when I have my best ideas for the following day’s journal. It’s always in that space between wakefulness and whatever comes after; the space where thoughts feel honest and more distilled. I’ll land on a sentence that could carry an entire entry, or a small observation that suddenly feels like the center of something larger. And then I fall asleep, and the whole thing disappears.

Morning wipes the slate. Whatever brilliance I thought I had the night before is gone, replaced by the vague memory that something was there. I try to reconstruct it, but it’s like trying to remember a dream that evaporated the moment I opened my eyes. I know the idea existed. I know it mattered. But I can’t get it back.

I’m never sure where my phone is at the end of the day. It migrates from the couch to the kitchen counter, somewhere near the patio, occasionally under a cat. And my physical journal, the one that used to rest at my bedside, is sitting on a bookshelf in a storage unit in Montana. It didn’t make the trip here; left next to a handful of things I never intended to leave.

The mind gives me something, and then it takes it back. Maybe it’s a reminder that not every thought is meant to survive. Maybe the ones that matter return on their own. Or maybe I need to stop letting my phone wander off like a feral animal.

I miss my bedside journal: the weight of it, the way it waited for me, the way it caught whatever I threw at it before sleep could erase it. I miss reaching for it in the dark, scribbling something half‑formed, knowing I’d find it in the morning and recognize myself in the handwriting.

For now, I’m left with the nightly ideas that vanish. The ones that feel brilliant for a moment and then dissolve. Maybe that’s part of the process; the quiet proof that the mind keeps working, even when the body is ready to rest.

 

October 4

 I love stuff like this

 

October 5

I don’t think about it often, but on occasion I think about how people talk about living in a “simulation.” I’ve read a little about the physics, the theory, but I can’t help but consider the source, and by that, I mean the emotional, fluid, unpredictable nature of the meatbags who explore it.

We often ignore an obvious variable, whether we’re looking at something scientifically, existentially, or even spiritually: an inherent, persistent sense that something about modern life doesn’t fit the shape of being human. When people look at the sky and imagine a grid, they’re not having a breakthrough about quantum mechanics. They’re naming a friction they’ve felt for years: a high-tech metaphor for something ancient.

We’ve always been a species that builds containers: homes, routines, calendars, expectations. But somewhere along the way, our containers stopped being neutral. They started shaping the contents; they started shaping us.

Human nature isn’t geometric. Our minds shift with mood, memory, chemistry, and the minor, invisible details of every day. We’re not static files retrieved from a hard drive. We’re landscapes: changing, uneven, and unpredictable. That unpredictability isn’t a flaw; it’s what's kept us alive in a world that never stopped moving.

But the structures we’ve built expect us to behave like code. Predictable, repeatable, and efficient. The modern world runs on inputs and outputs, metrics and consistency, on the idea that a person should perform the same way on a bleak Tuesday in November as they do on a bright morning in May. Our modern world is artificial intelligence. It expects desires that can be charted, choices that can be graphed, emotions that can be managed into compliance.

When you force a fluid creature into a rigid box, friction is inevitable. We feel that friction as anxiety, burnout, numbness, or a suspicion that something is off. And instead of questioning the box, we try to optimize ourselves to fit it. We track sleep cycles, quantify focus, monitor calories, and treat emotional fluctuations as bugs to be patched. We try to become more consistent, more predictable, and more geometric.

The irony is that the very thing that makes us human—our capacity to change—is the thing the system has the hardest time accommodating. Consistency is useful for machines. It’s dangerous for people. Societies stagnate when they prioritize maintenance over movement, or order over evolution.

When people say they feel like they’re living in a simulation, I think what they’re noticing is the weight of the structure we’ve built around ourselves, not a cosmic machine, but a human one. A framework that mistakes regularity for progress and compliance for peace. A world that feels artificial not because it’s coded, but because it’s rigid.

Maybe the simulation isn’t out there. Maybe it’s the geometric cage we keep trying to fit ourselves into. A shape that was never designed for the way we actually live, think, or feel.

 

October 6

What The Land Keeps: A Modern Myth

 

I. THE WAKING OF THE LAND

Hear it: the land is speaking now, has been speaking since before the first mouth opened in the red dark of morning, has been speaking through the interval of all that burning and all that silence, and it will speak past the last mouth that closes in the cooling air of whatever evening comes final. Listen. The land names itself first: canyon, caliche, chalk-white escarpment that remembers the sea’s floor, remembers the weight of water that has not come again in seven thousand years, remembers the slow accumulation of shell and silence that became this shelf of stone where the hawk turns now without wing-beat on the thermal’s invisible shoulder. This is the record. The land is the record; not paper, not carved stone, not the syllables arranged by those who came briefly and believed they were the first. The land is the record, and it holds everything, and it has been holding everything longer than holding has a name.

What it holds: the first fire that was not lightning. The migration paths worn into the granite’s face like old prayers worn into the threshold stone of a house of worship, worn by the pressure of the faithful returning. The agreements spoken over shared water in the dry season, when scarcity made the speaking necessary and the agreement sacred. The children who did not survive the drought that is not remembered now in any language currently spoken, but is remembered here, in the specific angle of the arroyos, in the way the soil changed color and never changed back. What it holds, it holds without grief. To hold is not to mourn: to hold is to be accountable to the fact of a thing; its weight, its measure, its refusal to be unmade.

There are places in this terrain where something enormous happened and is still happening: a wound that is also a door, an opening that is also an archive, a silence that, if you press your ear to the warming rock in the hour before dawn, is not silent at all. The time here is geological, not human. The land does not divide itself into before and after. It divides itself into layer and layer and layer, each one a century speaking, each one patient, each one holding the one above it as the one above it holds the next.

And so, the land asks: Who walks here, and do they know what they walk upon?

II. THE NAMING OF THE WOUND

READ MORE...

 

October 7

Livingston, Montana, is in the news again.

I'm not there right now. I'm spending the winter in a cottage in the Texas Hill Country, but for the last few years, Livingston has been home. I've walked those streets thousands of times, sat in those bars, and eaten in those restaurants. A film production arrived in town recently, and protests followed shortly afterward. The production office is just down the street from the hotel where I was living. The reason it’s in the news almost doesn't matter.

As I read about the online reactions, I found myself thinking less about the movie itself and more about intent.

Artists create to understand the world, themselves, and one another. However, some now seem to create merely to provoke. Sometimes, the reaction isn’t a side effect of the work—it is the entire design. And that distinction matters.

I’ve always believed in artistic freedom. People should be free to express whatever they need to express. But freedom of expression doesn’t exempt us from discernment. It doesn’t exempt us from examining why we are creating something, or what purpose it serves within a functioning society. As much as we celebrate individuality, none of us exists independently of everyone else. Every choice we make, and every story we tell, enters into a relationship with the world around it. Authenticity matters, but so does self-awareness, and a largely disregarded part of self-awareness is the acknowledgment of others.

The goal isn't self-censorship. The goal is to understand ourselves well enough to know what we are contributing. Are we creating understanding, or are we simply manufacturing a reaction?

The work that stays with me is rarely interested in winning an argument or baiting an audience. It isn't looking for enemies; it is looking for recognition and reflection.

 

The older I get, the more skeptical I become of anything that requires outrage to succeed. Outrage is easy; understanding is difficult. Outrage creates noise; understanding creates insight. Outrage demands an immediate reflex, while understanding asks us to think.

Watching the conversation unfold around Livingston, I wonder how much of modern culture is built entirely on this mechanical loop. How many books, films, and podcasts exist because someone genuinely had something to say, and how many exist simply to trigger a predictable response? It seems to me the response has become the product. We are all just looking for innovative ways to bait one another into reacting emotionally and thoughtlessly.

What we are losing isn't artistic freedom itself. What is disappearing is our willingness to use that freedom in pursuit of self-reflection. Art once asked questions and explored contradictions. It demanded that we sit in uncertainty long enough for something human to emerge. More and more, we have replaced that beautiful, uncomfortable process with cheap provocation. The ultimate goal is no longer exploration, but engagement.

And maybe that's why art feels like a vanishing industry. Not because it is being taken away, but because we are steadily forgetting what it was for.