Twenty-nine years old

6/22/26

When I think about my ideal mornings, this reality I hope that will eventually become true, they always begin with some sort of prayer. In the fogginess of my immediate arrival into this new day I have been granted, I imagine myself groggily walking up the spiral staircase into my carpeted attic and sitting myself down, slowly stretching, slowly sipping in the first breaths of the day. It is idealistic, yes. And it has not happened very many times yet. The handful of mornings on which I have followed this blueprint I have been afraid to fall asleep in the coziness of this room combined with the fatigue I feel during the moment of awakening each and every day. Perhaps someday I will figure out why I can never seem to rest well, but it feels as if that time is quite a ways ahead of me. For now, unreachable. And so what it is that I actually do each morning is roll out of bed, make some very strong, delicious coffee, watch a few YouTube videos, and drink my favorite drink of the day. It is a routine, one I follow intuitively, but it is not one that I am proud of. I feel no shame towards it, but it does not make me feel as though I am beginning on the right foot. Once my pot is finished and once the recommended videos have run out, I am sitting on the couch in front of a black screen with an empty mug, quite unsure of what to do next. And so I think to myself, I wish I would have started my day the other way, the way which I always wanted to.

My mornings are tough and I wonder if I will ever know why. My speculations inform me that I won't, but I know that could very well just be my reactionary, emotional mindset during those moments in which I scrutinize myself. Part of me wants to live more like a monk. Part of me believes that only then, under a strict regiment and expert guidance, could I achieve my truest potential. But I do not think I would want the restrictions all of the time, I already restrict myself so much on my own and so I think that I would severely miss the days which I am silly, loose and flowing with my friends. They are rare, few and far between, some people in my life serving as checkpoints for me to uncinch the saddle on my back – serving as many things, but this being a very big one. I'm not sure. But I acknowledge how all of my actions thus far in my life have led me to this marvelous moment, in the twilight months of my third decade, and so much of that pressure is relinquished into the air, it evaporates like steam coming out of my pores, off of my body, I hop out of the hot tub and go see how long I can stand outside in the subzero cold. I am right where I need to be.

This weekend we went to a friend's cabin, a cabin we have all been to before, we return there each summer solstice and it is always a highlight of the year for us. There were ten of us this year, my wife and some of our closest friends. It is four hours away from the metro area and I could not think of a more secluded place to be while still holding on to all of the amenities that we would ever need. The feeling of peace in that place, the serenity that exists there – your eyes follow the long yard all the way to where it meets the water and it is feels endless, an ocean of green meeting an even larger ocean of blue. Across the lake and up the hill is the most picturesque rolling plains I have ever seen, it is decorated with small, plump trees, the kind of scene a child would imagine when they attempt to paint the subject of nature. The clouds in the sky are small, they are simple cumulus formations and there are many of them. Looking further into the sky you will see the great beasts of this water, the pelicans, they soar above us all, they circle out of curiosity, or perhaps to establish their boundaries, to tell us that this is their home and that we are mere visitors. The noises of other birds are all around us, as well as the noises of the jumping fish. The landscape here is the most precious landscape in the world to me. The trees in the yard are hundreds of feet high and I marvel up at them each morning I am allowed to wake up here.

It was underneath these giants where I found my most prized memory of the trip. I was laid down here, underneath them and their branches, and during a pause in the music I opened my eyes and stared up to them. I saw each and every leaf in my view dancing in the breeze, dazzling sparkles of light reflected off of their shiny skin, it was like they were waving to me, to me and everyone else, in all directions at once. I was captivated. And then the wind in the air all fell to the floor and so they stopped dancing at once, it looked as though they had all turned around to face me, that we were facing one another and I had immediately had the feeling as if I was being watched with a thousand eyes. My view darted from one to the other and I was not scared, but I felt a very strong presence, like I was being watched, without judgement, though still like I was out of place. I felt shy. I stared as long as I could before breaking eye contact with all of them. I looked down and felt the wind pick back up, striking me most where the beads of lake water still rested on my torso.

I was at the edge of the circle around my friends. They were in their own formation, taking turns massaging one another, one girl on the inside at a time, the rest of them rubbing feet, hands, and head. It was a beautiful ensemble, an assembly line of pleasure and connection. When I had come back to from my own moment, I heard one friend say how she wishes they were naked. Another friend then removed her top and the rest followed suit. And then all of a sudden they were all topless, continuing their massaging, happier than even before. I smiled with them, feeling shy once more. A different friend had turned to me just before this to tell me she was happy I was here, that my presence was calming to her. I felt glad, this sentence made me remember that they were all on drugs together, it made me think about all the times that I had said that exact same thing to other people, to her, as well. Suddenly the topless massaging of all of these women in my life made even more sense. I understood it would be different if I were to stay and so I told them I would leave them to it and they all laughed, though I did not feel any jagged edges in the giggling. It was warm, it was all so warm, and I know that I wished I could stay. One of the friends asked me if I wanted a turn in the middle and I said no, but only because I wasn't sure if it would be appropriate. She said, yeah a guy might get a boner if they were in the middle, and I laughed because I knew it was true. I walked away from the circle with a feeling of understanding, I am happy that I do not push certain limits because I know that it is with this pushing that uncomfortable situations and actions can occur. Yes, I wanted to stay, for so much more than the gentle arousal I was feeling, for the communal warmth of sisterhood amongst women that I am allowed to see so often throughout my life, but I am happy that I left as soon as this situation began. I understand how different it could begin to feel among themselves if I were to stay for just a few moments longer. It was already a special thing to witness for that brief moment and I do not wish to exaggerate it longer. When I walked across that long field of grass and up to the wooden staircase, I took one last glance at the group of my friends and my wife, and I could feel the connection emanating off of them. How beautiful they looked to me, how precious this moment was, how primal and ancestral and wonderful. Something was said and they all laughed again. They looked to me as sirens of the sea and I felt a strong tingle up my spine and the movement of blood throughout my body. I opened the sliding door into the house to spend my time doing something else.

Do we all go through cycles together? Communal shifts of the tide based off of the collective time period we experience together, these must be true, much truer than we seem to give them credit for. I recall how last year it felt as though all of our close friends were breaking up with their partners, all so relatively close to each other. This year it feels as though all of our close friends – many of them the same as last year, some entirely different – are experiencing the shift of one cycle and into the next. It is transitory, they are climbing out of one rotation and into another. It is a different cycle entirely, a different mode of life, a different setting on the dial. Too many of these things happen too close to each other for me to believe that it is all just coincidence. It is serendipity and it is full-fledged, like the further along we move in this messy timeline of ours, the more the nature of this universe reacts, a cosmic retaliation against our unnatural creations. It is too clear to ignore. I reflect on how something as unavoidable as menstrual cycles can sync up to one another, as robotic as even metronomes in the same room will do the same – how on earth would we not be able to sync up the beginning and endings of these collective cycles we all go through? Surely we move about the magic in the air all day every day and patterns will emerge, we will push and pull collectively without knowing, without seeing or even feeling it, but we will do them with increasing strengths and eventually we will rock the boat so much it will capsize, we will be going about our lives as normal but the force would be the same as if we were all tugging on the same rope at the same time, each day being another HEAVE! in this everlasting game. Can we feel the cold plunge of the icy water we have just fallen into if we cannot even tell that we have gone overboard? Tell me, what in god's name could we accomplish if we all remove the blinders from our faces and tap into energy manipulation as a tool, as a collective, as a community and as one, one thing, one being, one consciousness?

I am feeling these feelings again. The other day it occurred to me, actually, striking me out of nowhere, that I could feel the nerve endings in my arms. It is not a crazy thing to experience, I have felt them before when my doctor friend told me about the concept of nerve flossing, so I know I had felt it before. But it was in this situation which I knew it to be the same experience as when I thought I had lost my mind on those drugs ten years ago. It was the exact same thing, and I had not felt the sensation as clear as this since that moment, that moment I can still recall with perfect clarity. I was tapped into my body in this specific way, though this time it did not take drugs. All it took was what is already inside of me, all naturally. I know now that the dam is broken. I know now that everything feels so different. I know now that the outdated belief of mine that I need foreign substances to access a deeper part of me was a sham, I know now that the events in life which feel large, that feel as though everything past their occurrence is automatically with them in consideration is actually a farce – it is human to believe this, certainly it is, but the actual rate at which the changes in my life occur are so much slower than I previously thought them to be. Reading my old words, I have always known that this true, I have hinted at this same realization through different wordings, but I never got over the hump to making the actual connection. The dam for me broke open a couple years ago, at least for the way I am thinking of it in now – and the debris of the explosion, the concrete in the air, it has only just begun to plop and splash back down into the water below. An experience like this would take seconds to occur if I witnessed it with my eyes, though the reality of this metaphor has taken place over a year and a half. Something like that. There is not a science to this, it is just the emotions inside of me. I know that I am more grounded, I feel like I can breathe deeper and calmer, there are less tremors in my heart. My life is more vibrant. My love is more vibrant.

My ego leaves me, the distance between us grows larger every day. I move through my life and I recite these words I wish to tell people in my head like an actor reciting their lines. I have so many things to say, so many things to get off of my chest. I am realizing that when I pepper them into my life, to different people at different times, it can achieve the same relief which I thought just moments ago could only come from unloading all of them on to one singular person. I am learning so many things. I experience the expressions of different people differently, too, there is rarely any criticism anymore and I love that to be the case. I take what is valuable to me, and I leave the rest of it, hoping that someone else will find what it is they need from whatever this thing is, simultaneously hoping that the creator got what they needed from it too. I am valuing time spent inside of a craft more than anything else. The idea of talent becomes equalized and so everyone begins at the same place. This idea itself being subjective only to myself, for that is all that matters for me.

I perform these meditations much differently than when I started them out. It is quite interesting to see the evolution. The one thing that has remained the same, though, it is that I am practically begging for them to be read.

6/11/26

I am giddy like a little kid, inside of me it feels as though a massive air bubble has been let out, I am younger than a child, I am a baby, I am not old enough to speak and all I can do is cry, my tears and my primal, high-pitched sounds are the only verbal communication I have. Even when my fit is over, I am still frowning, my eyes are still wet. Perhaps nothing is wrong, but I am visibly upset. It was from the discomfort. And now, just a few weeks away from an entire year, that air bubble, that toxic gas within has been released. My great tantrum, the one that lasted an era, is finished, it has ceased to exist, and my toothless smile is visible for everyone to see.

The pressure was not ever-present. I could function alright, though it felt like it was always nagging me. When all other activities ended for the moment, my mind eventually wandered back to it, that discomfort inside. That unfinished book. All of my free time was dedicated to this one thing and in three weeks it will be the anniversary of the day I set out on this journey, the beginning of putting all of these words over the last decade together. I could not read very many other books in this time because I was too busy reading my own. I could not see many friends because I was too busy seeing myself. Even during moments in the house, I would be talking to my wife, speaking with my cats, and I would say uh huh, mhm as I slowly backed away and up the stairs to come back to my battle station, this place I am at even now, typing again, though typing in a different way. Typing with relief. With freedom.

This last year was a great one. It was extraordinarily difficult, so tough I can not even reflect much on it because I do not want to reopen those old wounds. I can't, actually, you cannot open a scar the same way the wound started out as. I wrote about them then and that is all I wish to say about them. I'm glad that I did, for I know no other way, but to revisit them is something I am unwilling to do. Despite all of the hardship, the year was wonderful and I am so grateful to have retained my life, my wellbeing, and those who are closest to me. So much of myself, so many of us all, were put to the test in so many ways. And those days are now behind us.

Last night I was watching a YouTube video, one about the racing game I like so much, and I reflected on how long it has been since I started watching them. Somewhere between three and four years I would have guessed. In that time, the only person who knows that I watch them is my wife, and that is because she lives with me, she sees them too. How odd of a thing to recognize, that such a relatively large part of my life, my interests, is not known by anyone other than my life partner. I don't even play the game, it is something that is purely for my entertainment, particularly good for eating meals or late night boredom – but the premise is the same either way. I don't speak out loud about it to anyone, at any time, other than when my wife has asked me what I'm doing. I'm passionate about it, sure, kind of – as much as I can be. Am I a part of its community? Well, I guess so. I know much more intricate details than an average person. I am a part of the audience, I may not be a player, but I am still a part of the community at large. I had never thought of that before.

I also watched the Knicks defeat the Spurs last night in game four of the NBA Finals. It was the largest comeback in Finals history and I watched the whole game. I was absolutely geeked watching it, and when it was over, when the comeback was completed, I was jumping up and down with emotion. It was at this moment that I reached for my phone and began to type out messages to three of my friends, separately, and not sending any one of them. I didn't know if they would care, I didn't know if they were even awake still, I know that they knew it was happening, but I just didn't know if their feet were in that realm enough to appreciate what had happened. I didn't dwell on this much, I was typing things out just to relieve myself of all that was going on, but I immediately wished that I was back in college, high school even, that those group chats with the boys were still alive and well. These are the exact moments which blow those message threads up. But I am old enough to where those types of chats, at least with people who would appreciate this moment, have been dead for many years.

The person who I am is spread out over many different groups, many different people, many different relationships. I have always wandered around, making friends and building bridges, though not setting up my camp for very long. I retreat back to my own area often enough no matter who it is that I meet. It is just who I am, and I see it inside of my family, for all of us. My mom, my dad, my brother. We are all so similar in that way. I do not wish that it were different, but it can feel a bit lonely at times, though at large, I appreciate it deeply. It was strange to feel those things last night.

However this morning I woke up to that feeling inside being gone. In fact, most of the feeling was in relation to the book I've just finished anyway, not the social side of things. I am done with the first rough draft of my book and I could not be more proud of it. It feels like I have finally set sail after nearly a decade of preparation and I am out in the open sea. I can still see land, for I am still in the harbor, but my journey ahead is long and it is vast. Expansive. Adventurous. The next few months will be slow, I'm sure, but I want to relax inside of them and enjoy my time here. I have put so much faith into this creation, things came together just as I knew that they would, and whatever happens with it I will be happy with. The sail is up on my raft and I am being carried by the sea breeze. I kick my feet up and I put my sunhat over my eyes. I take a snooze in the shade of it and I will be happy wherever it is that I am headed. I have a general direction, but I am not in a hurry. I am not rushing anywhere.

This feeling inside of me, this lack of heaviness, it is a freedom. My days are blown wide open now. I can comfortably fill them in with activities, lessons, tasks, meet ups, whatever I want, whenever I want. In a way, it feels like I can go back to living, the thing I am best at. I am so grateful for what this last year has taught me. I feel a motivation to be studious again and I feel comfortable returning to my Spanish lessons. Going upstairs and being disciplined to write this book is something I want to hold on to, only translating that mindset into a different field. I love to grow, all I do is grow, all I can do is grow.

6/10/26

The more grounded I become, the deeper I sink into the other world. Some days I imagine heaven in  the sky while on other days it might be below me, but really I know that it is all around, I know that it does not make a difference which direction I look, on which day it may be. If I feel it, then it is there, and that is all that matters. It presents itself to me without warning, though it is never shocking. My height decreases because I am slowly descending into it, my line of sight appears shorter and I am only snapped out of it when a loud enough sound from my regular world registers in my ears, breaking the trance. I look down and I see carpeted floor, not quicksand. The fuzzies are a little taller, though. Either that, or my feet have phased a little deeper towards whatever it is that draws me down there.

My experiences with deja vu have reached a new level and it is a marvelous thing. They freak me out a little bit, they are clearly so much more advanced than they used to be and I can't help but marvel at them while they are happening. Up until now it would take ideal circumstances to remain transfixed in these states, these moments which I am tapped right in to something beyond comprehension. A break in the conversation during a lull in the day, these moments which feel like I have lived them before, they would only last a few seconds. They are mere glimpses, they are normal. Now, however, they will occur for upwards of thirty seconds, I can speak during them, I still have my autonomy though it feels rehearsed, it almost feels like myself and whoever I'm speaking to are recreating a scene we've already played out before – that perhaps many people have played out before. The details are so personal to us, though, they are strangers whom I know nothing about and they are explaining details of their lives which I could never know beforehand. But I know that I knew that, before they even tell me. Somewhere inside of me I had that knowledge. It was just locked away inside of a safe, fool and tamperproof, and this exact moment I am in the middle of experiencing just so happens to be the key needed to extract the treasure. How many experiences have I missed out on because of my own free will? How many times have I unknowingly abandoned a moment which I was meant to experience? Is that a possibility?

These new situations are armored. They are more aggressive than those of the past. I am deeper along in this journey and so the window is opened wider. I am being allowed more insight. Someone is granting me this access. I cannot predict what will happen during these moments, it is more like a natural understanding. Like for just this one minute, I am inside the air-locked chamber between the inside of the spaceship and outer-space itself, for just this one minute while the air is being re-pressurized, my actions are not my own. My thoughts are, my actions aren't. I am just along for the ride in this moment. But it is more than that, too. It feels like a glimpse into a different place, unreachable within this body. I can only see them as windows, I can not walk through it like a doorway. I wonder if someone is trying to show me something. I wonder if the window is even opened for me or if my body has just synchronized itself with what is happening around me in that particular situation. Surely my conscious actions over a long period of time impact my subconscious bodily growth, but that is all so impossible to understand or analyze any deeper – at least, I would not be able to present anything to anyone about it, there would be no substantial evidence. But I do not need evidence in my life. For the things that only impact myself, for the movement of my soul, I need only my natural understanding. And that is there, intuitively, unwaveringly.

I see the growth in myself working in two ways at once. For as long as I can remember, in my adult life, I have been victim to my dreams. They often dictate my days. It is only if I experience a dream so random that it does not have a clear meaning that I feel as if I can start the day fresh. This is about half of the time. The other half, they are so clear that it is impossible to ignore what I am trying to flesh out. I see people I do not wish to see, I act in ways I don't want to act, and so these mornings, the other half, I am forced to work it out and begin my day even slower than I already must have it be. Regardless, the dreams are intense almost every night, though I am thankful that they are rarely nightmares. They are rarely pure joy, either, most of the time being some giant blob of intensity existing somewhere in the middle-ground.

I am getting better, though. I am able to regulate my emotions towards them more, not letting them ruin a day which has not even started yet, not having to ignore them completely. I remind myself every morning – and other times during the day – that I am a powerful man, that I have agency, that life is so much easier when I am uninhibited by outside substances or others' words. Put plainly, I think it is just maturity. And I am happy to be maturing.

Someone told me recently that they were having a bad day and my first thought was it seems like you're always having a bad day. It made me wonder how many bad days are self-perpetuated, it made me wonder how many other people feel like they are always having bad days. Do these people feel as though they are having bad existences? I certainly hope not, though I certainly would not be surprised if that were the case. It reminds me of the other people that I know who always seem to be caught up in something, some drama that is said to have been done to them, though after so many times, so many years, I can only help but wonder why these things keep happening. I will always give the benefit of the doubt, especially to my friends, to my family, my actions do not grow cold, in fact they grow warmer, still – it is not my life – but these thoughts come up in my head. It forces me to reflect on all of the days which I have seen myself do the same thing, unable to get out of the rut I feel as been placed at my feet, though digging it deeper on my own, having no one else to blame but myself. Manifestation is not a yes or a no, it is always occurring, the degree always varying, it is not a set amount like gravity on this planet, but as a concept it is always there, the gravitational pull of all beings. I sit with this thought and take my lesson from it. Another one of the many, many things to remind myself of when it comes up again. I am no different than these people I speak of. The only difference between us is the response we choose to give it. The emotional response may not be chosen, but the responsive action is certainly able to be. Like all things, it is a practice.

I know now that I cannot live a life which is untangled from others. Nothing in this life is pure, it is all messy and criss-crossed and tainted and shared, it is a beautiful realization to come to and I have chosen to accept it. Without sacrificing myself, while still holding enough ego to enjoy this ride I am on, I have let down so many walls. I do not fight against circumstances which are losing battles, I am embracing that life is dirty and influenced by something as small, as natural, as the breeze this afternoon. Finding the balance between making my own way and letting myself be turned around a little bit, that is the dance of life which I wish to live, that is the fluidity I am seeking out. Yes, it is awkward at first, it feels clunky and my emotions do not like it, but I know now that it is the method of movement which is correct for me. It will always provide me the most ideal outcome.

What an interesting time to be alive. The social zeitgeist has reverted back to the age where technology was new and hopeful, yet we can see how mutated it has all become. We are all aware that the recession we are in is because of very avoidable things, though knowing that we, the people, do not have much say over the systems which created it. We are just dressing and expressing and creating and speaking in the best ways that we can for the time. It is still life, and so I will still try to make the best of it.

5/31/26

It was only a few months ago, this period of time in which I was making conscious, daily efforts to live peacefully in this city. I feel very far away from that now. It is difficult to understand if it is due more to a fractured patience on my end or if it is just the summertime rolling steadily through us again, bringing with it its annual chaos. The stillness of the winter is cold and it is lonely, I know that our collective energy level is much more subdued in those other months, I know that when it is warm outside and we can see the birth of new life again that it is rejuvenating, truly, it is spectacular, but enough years have gone by now in which I know that I cannot allow myself to get too carried away in the updraft. For my own sake, I will be happy, but I also need to heighten my senses and up my guard. It is more difficult, less safe to move around when everyone leaves their caves for the season.

There are parties each night in the parking ramp behind our house. The kids play loud music, there is yelling and cheering, their toy cars spin their wheels in place and they screech and smoke, their engines rev and shoot fire and it sounds like an earthquake full of gunpowder. I will try and have a conversation with my wife in the kitchen, only for it to get cut short because I tell her, I'm sorry, I can't concentrate at all. I can barely hear you. And so we move to our bedroom and shut the door, feeling like we must lock ourselves away in a corner of our home just to enjoy some time together. Feeling like we can't have the breeze enter through the open windows because right along with that is the deafening sound of these people's expensive playthings. I hate how bitter it makes me feel. I hate how much peace it takes from me.

It is more than just the irritation of other people behaving in an obnoxious way. When I drive down the street I drive normally, slowly, at a safe distance. In my mirrors, I see the luxury sedans with pitch dark windows speeding and swerving through all the rest of us, in the middle turn lane to my left or the bus lane to my right, doing whatever they can to get in front of me, just to stop at the next red light. Right where I was going, too. I let them do their thing, because I know that if I don't, then the chances of an accident increase dramatically for both of us. Most of the time I don't even honk. I just shake my head, make sure the dash-cam is running, and keep a safe distance behind them. It's a little sickening, though I choose to ignore it because thinking about it for too long would only make me sicker.

I will be 30 years old in just a few months. I am aware that some of this internal mess of anger and judgement from myself and on to these people whom I speak of is due more to this fact, I know – and see, more so with each season – that this has always been true from older people to younger people, I am certain that the distance between us will only grow larger as more time goes on, the older I become – these kids I am upset with today will join me in ten years, we will then look on the kids of the newer generation with the same eyes, together. It will always be this way.

The thing that I am most uncertain about, the thing I find most difficult to understand, is if this is to the same degree as the generations before me. What I mean to ask is if this is so normal that it is only a result of aging, or if we, the products of such flawed systems gone on for this long, are becoming more and more mutated by their pressures, thus acting out in much worse ways? Certainly the advances in every industry imaginable open the door fully for anyone to do anything, but how many things must we try to do before realizing that there is nothing left to try for the first time anymore? Until suddenly you have reached the ceiling of your arena and the only way above it is to pay your way into the next level with an amount of money you could never attain? I imagine children and adults of the past had such an enormous, nearly endless imagination for what might happen in other far away countries. Regardless of the fact that one would never even try the majority of things there are to do in the world, the simple idea that there were those things out there was good enough. The earth still felt impossibly large. But now, we are too connected, the niche corners of hobby and skill are suddenly booming with ecosystems of their own – where there were once only a handful of eclectic nerds who lived and breathed their specific choice of lifestyle, now there are thousands. Rules are made, new metas created, every young kid who wants to find a unique thing apart from their real life peers will find one easily, because they are big now, they are noticeable, they have traction, the rules of the wiki are right there on the sidebar. The instructions are clear. You pledge yourself to something in ten minutes, and suddenly it becomes your identity. These things are not happened upon anymore, they are not created alongside other people who share a similar hobby, they are adopted too quickly and in an unnatural way. The world continues to rotate quicker, the arm on the clock ticks faster and faster.

It is over-saturation. Performances of any kind have reached new limits and it is honestly astounding. Part of me watches in awe, amazed beyond words to see something broken which I never thought would happen in my lifetime, only to see it done again the next day, and, again, the next. The bar for what is deemed impressive climbs higher and higher, seemingly out of reach, though grasped once again, somehow, in some way, albeit by someone much younger than myself, younger than my brother, even younger than my cousin. Behind all of these records though I see strained muscles, veins popping from skin that are hard as diamond – these feats are broken, yes, but it does not seem natural anymore. At a certain point, it does not even feel positive. The love of the game continues to fade as more people claw at each other, just to beat another meaningless number on the leaderboards, not for any pure desire inside of them.

Sometimes I wish that more people would do less. I think it is a tiring, self-sustaining idea to always be trying to up another person, time, thing. From my perspective it seems as though more people would do much better for themselves if they simply embrace who they are before wandering about, looking for something to attach themselves to. Whichever flavor of fulfillment you want to analyze it under, I really do not think the answer would be any different. It's as though as soon as there is an itch on the brain, we want to find the closest remedy, the one that has the highest rating, the jacuzzi with the most people in it – it is human nature, I would never deny that. It is animalistic, too. But in this moment in history, at this extraordinarily unique crossroads of nature and technology, with our level of connectedness, I think we owe it to ourselves to slow down and breathe. Everything we would ever need is already inside of us. Any quality of ours worth shining can fit a number of different fields, I have no doubt about that. It saddens me to know that so many children think that those past their mid-twenties are already washed up, when that actually seems to be the point in which true living, freedom, choice, adventure, fun, actually begins. It is not the kids' fault so much as it is the system in play, everything they have been shown – the abandonment of all hope for a bright future  – but it is still a sad thing.

So I will say again: I think it would do us all a solid if we spent less time searching for something to attach ourselves to and more time focusing on what we already have, who we already are – and if we do not know who we are, I think we owe it to ourselves to sit and think about that. Self-discovery is something that no one else can do for you. There is no wrong path in that process, it will take outside influences to advance you further along in that journey, but the pace, the steps, the decisions, are entirely up to oneself. If I am a child and I lose my mother at the mall, what is my best option? Instinct tells me to search for her, my mother's instincts say the same. Once we realize that we have become separated, our heart rates increase and we then begin to walk faster than normal as we pace around the plaza, up and down the levels, in and out of the stores, we are both moving and circling around each other without knowing it. We prolong the search because we are rapidly trying to fix the problem without thinking, we are only acting. It makes all the logical sense in the world that this is happening. But what if, instead, I chose to calm myself, what if I took that moment to sit with my discomfort and panic and figure out a gameplan? This elevated logic moves me calmly to the middle of the shopping center and keeps me there. My mother has a much easier time finding me when she is the only one moving, when I am standing still, when I let her come to me.

I loathe to see the victim mentality in myself. I loathe the preacher inside of me, too. You made me this way, if the world was just than I would not feel these feelings so very often. I would not feel anger towards those doing the exact same things as me, I would have more patience, more grace, I would calm down and I would stay calm instead of constantly just trying to come to terms with all the chaos happening around me all the time. I go about my life and I hear the crying of a baby behind me, always over my shoulder, I am too preoccupied to see who it is, what is happening to them, I am only concerned with my own tasks at hand, though now they are painted a much darker color because of this fucking baby. I glare ahead of me and sneer over my shoulder, hissing to someone, can you shut that fucking baby up? My words wind through the air like venom through blood, the baby stops its noises to calibrate the contempt I just tossed their way and when it finally registers in their tiny little brain they wail and scream now instead of merely cry. They are angrier than before, and now so am I. It is up to me how long I continue to walk before finally stopping and then facing the crying child. To my horror, the baby is no stranger, it is actually myself. I am alone and I have no one to help me, the only person who could have done so is the older version of me, and instead of aid, I gave only poison. It is a toxic cycle only realized too late. My poor self, this poor baby, oh no, I'm so sorry, I reach out to try and comfort them now but it is too late, they grow up before my eyes, they grow stronger while I wither away rapidly, I am descending into my grave as they follow their own path and my last vision of this life is seeing him cursing his own crying child. Pity, pity.

God does still not come up in my life the way they might in that of a religious man, though I continue to think of them more so with each passing year. I can't help but feel as though it does us all irreparable harm to advance away from them as we mature as a species, and it does seem like that is the direction we continue to travel in. The disparities among us are much too great for anyone to honestly think that any successful person has god in their minds. They might think they do, but clearly, they do not. And now back to the troubles I have with the behaviors of the other side, these people whom I initially spoke of in this writing, I can't help but think that they have also lost sight of this universal god as well. On both ends of this spectrum, both ends increasing in opposite directions, furthering their distance – day by day, we are more and more godless. We replace our creator with tech and bodily thrills. I do not think that there is a point of no return, I can not entertain the idea that this point exists, but we are definitely moving more that way than the other way. We continue to lose respect, for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the rules that bind us all together and keep us safe and functioning in a healthy, happy way. We are clearly regressing from the trajectory created by our ancestors, we are losing the pace of progress we had been making for so many centuries. We are faltering, we are fractured, we already have lift-off, so there is no turning back. The only remedy is a correction of course, though we still have a long road ahead of us before orbit, before we can really alter anything drastically. We are strapped in, and it makes me sad to think about. Though I am never hopeless. There is so much time left.

My mind becomes clearer with age. I'm sure it is because of experience, I am also sure it is because of my abstinence from all mind-altering substances. I am proud of myself. It is with this peace that I work towards which gives me the confidence that I can still find my own rhythm to this life. Like everything else, it will not be perfect, there will never be that one moment where I find it, but I have done enough along these lines already to know that there is no other option. Which means I have a deep trust in myself. There is nothing better that I could give myself than this. I am not trapped inside myself, I am not jaded nor distrustful, many days I believe myself to be too open, still – I rebalance the weight of myself on one end of the scale and everyone and everything else on the other and they continue to level themselves out. Both sides can see each other clearly, it seems as though they understand that there are parts of the other inside themselves. It is not hard to see. So then it should not be hard for the bigger version of myself to see, either. No, by that logic, it should not. Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps you should sit with yourself a little more. Yes, perhaps I should. It's nice here.

If I reframe my concept of a waiting period – whether in anticipation or for the inevitable – from a day to a lifetime, everything entailed in that concept becomes more real to me, therefore more achievable. If I choose to ignore all signs of my life at this moment, all moments which led up to this one, and decide that I will have no idea what I will be doing in ten years from now, I think I am doing myself a disservice. I am insulting my own intelligence, intuition, experience, and wisdom. Of course it would be impossible to paint the details accurately, but surely I could take a stab at the bigger picture. I would likely not be that far off. Who better to guess than myself? To validate my life up to today, to look behind me, see myself now, then look ahead, certainly I can predict where it is that I am likely to go. I'm not sure what this means, but I like the thought of it. It makes me feel less in the dark. It makes me feel more solidified in my being, my body, myself. Anything less than a hundred years ago may as well be yesterday, anyway. A lifetime is a lifetime, and we have been built upon tens of billions of those already. A large number, but still, in the realm of relative understanding. We know what we know because of the generations before us, all the trials and errors of their ways. I know that the lives we live now are more similar to theirs than any one of us would ever even believe. In fact, we know this to be true, all one must to in order to see this is read the words that were written yesterday, one hundred, two hundred, one thousand years ago – and it will be the same in the other direction, too. Writing is the most wonderful form of art and expression there will ever be, its bounds completely limitless, its product utterly timeless, it is the most explicit truth you could ever have about the documented moments of our place in this timeline. It is different given the contexts of our lives – the details – but the broader image, our human bodies, human feelings, brains, emotions, desires, actions, they must be so similar that they would appear identical laid on top of one another. So what? Exactly! So why let yourself get all hot and bothered?

I swim back to the surface of this deep lake of a thought, I breach and I breathe in the air above me. I hear the sounds of the others on the beach and I slowly make my way towards them again. I'm tired of thinking, tired of being alone. I straighten myself out as I approach the shore, looking for the sand with my feet underneath the water. I find it and then I am walking instead of swimming. I walk past the kids making sand castles and moats, I smile at them even though they are too busy to even notice me walking right next to them, much too occupied in their world of imagination, so lost in thought that they are barely even present. It's amazing to witness. I look instead to the parents behind them and we smile at each other and it is nice. We raise our eyebrows and shoulders just a little bit, to translate to the other that we are impressed with what it means to be a child. Such pure things. The water drips off of me and it is gone very quickly from the blazing sun drying me off. The dry sand becomes wet underneath my feet and it sticks to me as I walk back to my towel. I sit down and wiggle my butt into the sand to make a comfortable seat. I reach into my bag and pull out some potato chips. I eat them and watch all of the other people around me, young and old. I eat and chew at a methodical pace, lost in thought and admiration. The pieces of chip get stuck between my teeth and the water that drips down from my bald head runs along my face and ends up in my mouth, the two flavors and textures blend together and create something new. I realize I have tasted this exact combination, many times before, and I am here once again tasting it for another time. I close my eyes and lay down on my towel on top of the sand and give in to the sensation, giving into my memories, tasting them again, fully, intentionally.

I am laying down in a soft, single sized bed, it is about 2AM and everyone else is asleep. There are four of us in this tiny house, and there is not one sound being made right now. The only light is from the moon outside of the open window, it is not a bright night, but it is there. It's chilly but I am warm underneath the covers. I am fully awake, but I know it will be short-lived. I see the lace curtains rustle silently in the quiet breeze of the nighttime air, I watch them move and think that it looks pretty, I look up to the moon and the stars and then to the other tiny houses across the street. I would not be surprised if every last person in this small town was asleep right now except for me. I lay down with my eyes open and stare at the wallpapered ceiling above me. It is then that I hear the very loud, very faint sound of a train in the distance. It pierces me with its loneliness, it feels as if it is speaking to me, it feels as though I am the only one able to hear it right now. I wonder how far away it is, I do not think of the conductor, only the train, the metal beast which speaks to me with hot steam and a whistle, that frowning wet mouth with so much to say. I realize I've heard this sound before, many times, that only out here in this lonely town can I hear it speak to me in this voice. How many times over how many years I have heard this same cry. I close my eyes and lay down on the bed again, to try and travel somewhere beyond my comprehension, to speak back to it.

5/12/26

I have done a lot of listening lately. It has not been for any intentional reason, rather it is just because I do not have much to say right now. In fact, when I do find those moments where I want to express myself, to share my thoughts on something in a genuine way, I do not make it very far before regretting that I had begun to respond. For some reason I am more than happy to take the backseat and let the rest of the people in my life figure things out. I'm chillin'. I mean that sincerely.

My listening wears different hats depending on the situation. At times I am omnidirectional, my ears are like sonars for all of the things around me. Any sort of natural computation is done in a subconscious way. During certain tasks I will be focused on what's in front of me and only after that task is finished will I rationalize what my ears have just picked up on from the surrounding conversations. The more I zone out, the more I seem to tune in. It is so interesting to me. I feel as if I am conducting my own field recordings even though I am not recording anything, the audio is only held for a moment inside my head. Instead of being in nature, I am merely sitting at the bar after a busy night, counting the money and adjusting the till. To me, it is very peaceful. It has just been an observation lately.

At other times, I will be with someone, face to face, one on one. We will speak about honest things, we face the same direction and we understand each other. I will listen to them as I catch up with their life. I will relate to them internally while they speak to me about the details of what has been going on with them and when I finally open my mouth to speak back, to comment on their journey, to tell them the ways in which they have moved me, I can not. I only make it a few sentences before stopping in the middle of the next and saying, I'm sorry, I don't want to cry right now. My friend tells me, it's okay, you can if you want to. And I say I just don't want to. And so I stare out of the rainy window at a car trying to parallel park. My friend puts her hand on my back and rubs it up and down as I blubber for a minute and try to keep the things from spilling out further. I find my breath again and continue on, a little tense, but relieved to be in such good company.

And then there are the times where I am being talked at, without even the option to respond, without a human being on the other end. I am on hold on the telephone trying to dispute a parking ticket. The robot automator system informs me that there are forty one people ahead of me and I simply don't believe it. A quick google search tells me that this company is a major scam and has a class action lawsuit against them in the making. I wonder, how did I get wrapped up in this? They make me feel alone. None of the options the robot automator gives me feel good and so I hang up and try to contact the property manager of the place where I allegedly did not pay to park. I explain the situation to her and it eventually gets resolved, after a couple more fake wait list calls. The whole thing leaves me feeling cold, like I have just been touched, even tossed around slightly, by a mechanical arm.

I hear, too, the constant criticisms from one coworker to another. Some days they are my own, other days they are my wife's. I hear all of this nonsense and want absolutely no part of it. I wonder how some people have made it so far in their lives when they bicker and hold grudges for the smallest of things, they will make mountains out of mole hills and I am only left with a puzzled look, a wide-eyed glance in the opposite direction, one that says my god, man, get a grip. The comments are petty, they are made up, they are trite, ugly, completely pointless things, and they swirl around one way and then someone else swirls them around in another. I do not understand why people will not speak to each other if it is really so pressing. I do not know why I need to be a part of so many meetings, to mediate between grown adults, some of these people older than me by more than twenty years.

I will be talked at during my shifts and want to run away. Even the normal, professional things; the specials of the day, the new wines we just added on to the menu, the things that are 86'd when they shouldn't be, even the customers who have the audacity to shout my name from behind the bar to get my attention, like they think we are close enough to do that, like they think they know me – it is nauseating. I will be talked at ten times in two minutes and I will not have said a word back to anyone, too busy being swarmed with information, overwhelming me immensely. I will nod my head and move on, silently wishing everyone would just shut the fuck up. I know that I am not being fair to them, I do not take it personally, I don't even hold on to it – I just can't seem to take any of it right now. I just want to show up, make my money, and go home. I want to turn off my phone and stare out my window when I am home and I want nothing more than that. Exactly that.

The boundaries I have set for myself are so much better than they ever have been. But I have seen quite quickly that they will clash with the life I have lived for these last few years. Frankly, some of them just do not compute, and I have to be okay with that for now. I can complain, and I do, but I must leave it at that. I am thankful for my job and I will continue to do it well until my time is up. Some people I will never see again after that place and I am pleased with that thought, not in a malicious way, simply in a way of acceptance, simply because I tolerate many of these people. I do not actually like them.

And that is a concept that fascinates me, too. Because the people who I do like, who I love, even, sometimes I can not handle what they say to me either. They will pay me compliments, they will say I like your hair grown out or I like when you smile more and I will be upset at them for thinking that my existence at different stages gives them different amounts of pleasure. It is in these moments that I will not even say thank you, I will say some form of okay and move on, even physically if that is alright. I will physically move my body to be away from that conversation. There is a chip on my shoulder for something that is so menial, I know that it is ridiculous to feel this way, but it is the principle of it that gets to me. Oh, you like it more when I do this certain thing or another? Fuck off. Just accept me as I am and move on. I don't want any compliments and I do not want any criticism. I am just living, man, can you not see that? There is nothing here worth commenting on. Move on from that shit.

I think it is the constant pressure. I know it is not unique to me. Even when I am calm on the inside, the pressure outside of my body squeezes me shut, the inside of my body is a finite space with some pretty important things in there and when they get too close to each other I begin to feel uncomfortable and that discomfort quickly turns to panic and general uneasiness. Suddenly, I am very uncalm. I do my best to be a stoic, to control only what is within my ability, to accept anything outside of that as it is, but it does not work in some situations. And I am learning that many of the situations I find myself in now, in this life I have been living, are not conducive to the way of life I wish to live.

I am constantly forced to prioritize myself above others, to a fault! It is how I make my income! I hand out plates of food or glasses of liquor to these people, many of whom are honestly wonderful, but attached to the plates and glassware are pieces of my sanity. When the meal is over, pieces of my wellbeing are also scraped into the trash and dumped down the drain. I have a few hundred bucks in my hand, but at what cost? How long can I keep this up, how long can anyone remain in the hospitality industry? And it is not just at the restaurant that this happens. It is so easy to fall into the trap of treating your life as though you are constantly waiting on other people. I love what I do, but I do not love what it has made me become. I am on year thirteen in this business and when I talk to people who have logged over twenty, I realize I should leave sooner rather than later. I feel as if I am making myself unwhole. And only after these small acts of doing so can I really feel it.

These meditations are nice for me. Again, I am reminded that I need to take my time to do the things that matter to me in order to feel like my best self. I think about my ancestors, those who did not have access to all of the reality-questioning technology and media that we are exposed to most hours of every day now. I think about looking at the stars before there was any light pollution, sitting around the campfire before it was a pleasurable thing instead of a necessity, what existing with less and thinner walls would be like, how much more invested in the life around me I would have been. I love to spend time at home but it does not take long to realize that a house is just a physical representation of living inside your head. I could not leave for an entire day, for an entire week, if I wanted to and everything would be totally fine. Although my mental health would not be.

Can I do these things that I wish to do? To slow down even more drastically than I already am? Is it a realistic or sustainable thing to do in these times? I wonder. I know that, at least, I must try. It feels right and so I will be okay in continuing to attempt to do so. At least for now.

Despite the frustration, I have enjoyed most of the listening I have done lately. I speak to a new coworker about how proud of her generation she is. I do not know if I feel the same way, though I admire her pride, even if I think it is a bit naive. I can't help but think of myself at her age, almost ten years younger than me, and question how silly I must have sounded to my older friends at that time. I speak to the two men from out of town who get a quick bite to eat after the Timberwolves game, after we beat their team in the first round of the playoffs. We speak about the southeast, we cast these lines of minimal knowledge we each have about the other's homes and we speak long and passionately. I can't help but think to myself that we all do the same things in life, just in different places, with different details. I speak with the man who violently crashed his car outside my home as I was taking out the recycling, I ask him if he's okay and he says I don't know and I tell him you look okay. I help him find his glasses and then we speak to the young woman who was the other person in the crash. They are both okay and we are all calm again and around even more neighbors now. Only afterwards was I able to realize how present this precious moment had been for the last twenty minutes. Fragile, scary, lived out without thinking, just talking, figuring things out, listening and then doing. Three hours later I look outside my window and everything is gone, the cars, the authorities, the debris swept up by the tow truck driver, like nothing had even happened.

Of course, the most listening I have done this last month has been to myself. I go through all of my old work and I am carving out the details of this structure I have created. I have never felt so confident about what I have said. There are mornings where I feel intense joy, like the high from a drug, as I continue to craft my life's work thus far, into a neatly packaged thing. I can't wait to share it with whoever would choose to listen to me. I speak with myself from the past, I see him organizing his words as a prophet in my own personal universe. He was much wiser than I ever gave him credit for. I am much wiser than I was once able to see. I remember that same principle and carry that over into the present day, as much as I can. I will continue to listen and I will continue to trust, for it has gotten me this far already.

4/18/26

At times the self doubt will appear at random, taking me by surprise. I have learned that this self doubt does not need to be crippling, though. Just because I am temporarily highlighting an insecurity of mine does not necessitate any further action, much less any need to change a major aspect of my life. My mind is just breathing, filtering out the thoughts of what it means to be a human, a creature with self awareness. I am ebbing and flowing and that is alright. It is only natural.

During a pause in the action, I will tend to ask myself the same question: am I living correctly? Am I doing enough, remembering enough, speaking enough? Do I toe the line the right amount? It is a balancing act to live the lives we do. We battle our instincts for the sake of the society we make up and we are better for it. This is how we progress. But certainly I am not alone in wondering if I am aligned enough with everyone else. I critique my actions and my thoughts when I compare them to those that I see or hear from others, of course I do, but what I tend to forget is that I lack the context that any sort of fair comparison would need – and that context is an impossible thing to obtain. That context exists within the unique perspective of any other, one, individual person, unable to be translated fully. It is their lived experience which fine tunes their own personal equation in which they follow. It is unique to them. And so this process of my own eventually becomes null, the answer is a muddied product of this same process, it is always a different flavor of an anti-climactic shrug; what does it matter anyway? Regardless, I am a human boy, and so I will surely continue to compare and contrast myself to others whether I intend to or not. My brain will continue to meditate on its own, that little shaman man at the center of my universe sits cross-legged with closed eyes, he breathes slowly and rhythmically in the middle of all of the stars, sucking them in with his inhales and freeing them all with his exhales.

I do not know what this life is. I think about what it could be all the time. I will always revert back to some sort of questioning, especially in regards to acts like work, driving, spending money, all of the excruciatingly common things we partake in daily, but specifically the things which are human-made. It is not uncommon for an aggressive reprieve to slither its way out of the woodwork and find me, pierce me with its fangs, save me from monotony for a moment, the venom works its way to my muscles and tenses them upwards, my neck jerks my view to the sky and I am forced to look away from the task at hand and into the eye of heaven. They give me a wink and whisper into my ear: I'll be waiting. No matter how hard we may try to distract ourselves, there is no escape. And I am at peace with that. The things which once caused me so much dread, so much fear and remorse, they backed me into the corner and it was only then, after all this time, that I realized I must clear my own mind and refrain from the constant need to flee. I stopped my legs from running, I sat myself down and crossed them. That is how I made that peace.

The word anti-exploratory crossed my thoughts the other day. That is how I have been feeling recently. No new music has stirred me much in the last few months and reflecting on that is what caused the thought to gain traction, eventually producing that word: anti-exploratory. I do not return to the safety of the past out of desperation, more so as a place to retrieve some comfort. It is like a nest, I travel back to this place to pull some meaning from somewhere I am confident to find some. And so I do.

But it is not just in the things I seek out. Perhaps I have begun manifesting them too because they seem to have a way of finding me, certain minutia which have not crossed that path of memory in ten, even twenty years. Two weeks ago a guest at the bar wore the same perfume as my high school girlfriend. My nose perked up and I did some short, quick sniffs to see what it was that was so intriguing to me. Like a dog, I found this smell amongst all the others and I thought of her, of course. I drank in this aroma for a moment and my brain gave me flashes of the past, these dormant emotions were touched once more and I ached for them. It was then that I remembered it was her birthday and it was then that I could not help but see this experience of life for what it is once again. I was being shown something, something was presenting itself to me. And I chose to listen, like I always do. I do not believe in coincidence. Two weeks before that, a coworker of mine came in wearing the same perfume as the mother of my childhood friend, the same family I can not stop thinking about lately. It is so specific, so warm and comforting that I transformed back into that little boy who looked to this woman with heart-shaped eyes and felt that familiar sensation of safety combined with youthful love, I felt that lust that is platonic by nature, too young to mean anything different. It is a lust for life, for the memories of what once was, like peering through a doorway you are retreating away from. When I snapped out of this trance I saw the door close and the vision vanished. I was at the bar once again, standing near my coworker. I felt at peace though, knowing that the universe was speaking to me, knowing that I tuned in at the right time. Grateful that I do not know how to avert my gaze to these inexplicable, unquestionable miracles of life.

I continued on, traveling deeper into this anti-exploratory phase. I brought my wife to my elementary school a few days ago. I spoke with the receptionist on the phone and she told me to come by whenever, that any day was okay for me to roam the halls and relive my past. It's the same woman as when I was in class there. When we arrived, she told me a few names of teachers which I would know and I could not believe that I remembered some of them. Again, she touched those previous parts of me which have remained static for so long. We walked around and I spoke to new teachers about how I went to school here twenty years ago, and I thought how it might be the first time I've ever said anything about how I used to do something twenty years ago. I began to wonder what I will be referring to in the future when I talk to someone about thirty years ago, forty, fifty...

Back in these tiny hallways, I felt more removed than I anticipated to feel. I saw my own memories overlayed on top of the reality I was standing inside of and they felt separate. I could see the differences too clearly, the remodeling they have done proved to be too stark of a contrast from the glow of what I was remembering. The backgrounds did not line up. We made our way to my kindergarten classroom and we saw the new teacher leaving for the day with all her bags, locking the door behind her. I thought about calling out to her but I did not. Instead, we slowly approached and could only peer in between the gaps of the privacy glass of the window. This classroom is the one I dream about the most. So many memories made within its four walls, memories I am still able to recollect. I pulled up the photo I had found of my class during this year, 2002, and I look into the baby faces of all my classmates. I remember nearly all of them, first and last names, though when I think about the moments we shared here I see more of their adult faces in my mind. I had grown with most of them for many years afterwards, some all the way through high school. To see their little facial features, toothy, kid-like grins, it is sweet, but it is odd. And for those who I did not mature more with, I know that their faces exist in my head with much less maturity than is probably warranted. These characters in my memories are neither grown nor young, they are some abstract mixture of the two. Much like a dream, the details are blurred. I am punched in the gut with this realization. My wife and I smile to each other and carry on with our tour. I see these new children in front of me much smaller than I perceive myself at their age. I look to them and when they look to me I do not see myself in their reflection. We look each other in the eyes for just a moment, I anticipate something to stir inside me, but nothing comes. When the brief interaction is over I see them for who they are, children, strangers, and I see myself, now, approaching thirty years old. The hallways are different, the lockers, the new addition to the north side of the building. The baby-faced classmates of mine do not even live in this city anymore. Neither do I. My time here has passed. It passed long ago.

I routinely find my way back to this room in the corner of the building. I go there to sit and to be alone and think. When I experience those breaks in the everlasting conversation of life, I will cease any form of expression and turn around, retreating back into the dark hallways, making my way to a place which I know to bring me peace. I can't have any more stimulation for the moment and so I reach across my chest to lower the volume on the speaker which hangs from my backpack only to find that it is not in the position which I am used to. The subconscious calculation of where to place my finger has missed because I discover I have a new speaker which hangs from a new bag. I've already had them for close to a year. I snap out of the trance and readjust, not paying any mind to the fact that I had traveled so far back in time that I had adapted some outdated actions. I am in and out of it without will, I am too loose, too free to be able to control it, control in this sense would mean to stifle the magic and I do not want that. I won't fan the flames, but I will not intentionally plant myself too firmly either. Perhaps this is what creates the effect of slowness. Maybe I just prefer to let the wind guide me instead of paddling against it. Maybe. I turn the corners of these halls and think the same thoughts with a more mature mind. From a bird's-eye view it would appear that I am just traveling in circles, that I have been doing so for years and years, but if you were to come down and roam them with me, you would feel the weight of gravity as we climb this spiral staircase. Looking over the railing, you would be able to see how high I have made it thus far.

My body hurts in the same ways it has been hurting for quite some time. It introduces new hurts as well and it is up to me to find the remedies for them, for the aches and pains, the soreness, the fatigue. It protests my usual usage of it and I understand its cries. I do my best for now, though it is minimal. My current path is one of whimsy, less physical than the truth of reality demands itself to be. I console my body and tell it I will get to it, that we will get there soon. I just need to smooth out these mental edges before I can come back to improving my physical health. I have known what it feels like to be lost for a very long time, and I know that I am no longer there.

4/14/26

Each day now is quite fluid. The ideas which used to plague me, throw me into a frenzy, those anxiety-attack-inducing thoughts which disguise themselves as self improvement – I take them in and let them go with grace. It is a skill I have learned along the way. Through sacrifice and discipline I have found this comfortable space where I have gained the ability to do these things which I once could only dream of. It's such a blessing, and I know that I owe myself thanks in having it.

There are still so many things that I wish to do, so many things I know that I will come across. Instead of strategizing the best way to get to all of them as quickly as possible, I shelve them for later, out of sight and out of mind. I push them further down the road ahead of me, they follow for as far as I can see the pavement and then they vanish over the hill. Where I once was stranded, flat tire and without a replacement, where I could not run from these pressing matters which did nothing but hiss and close themselves in on me, I am now equipped with the right tools. More importantly, I am alone. I am without distraction, without the pressure from these ideas that told me I must get to them to become a better me. I am alone on the side of the road, I put the jack underneath the car, I turn and I turn, I sweat in the silence of a still spring afternoon and I take a moment's rest to observe where I am. I witness the beauty and I validate myself as part of it. I continue on with my task unbothered.

I still think of these things everyday. These future tasks will be enjoyable, they are important to me and they will be done. But the difference now is that I have the healthy ability to say I am not there yet. I look these things in the face and tell them sternly, yet mostly, still, without emotion: I will get to you. Go back over there, I must return to my life the way it is now. For my sake and for yours, you must leave me, I will meet you there later but I am not there yet. Neither of us can afford to resent each other before our relationship has even begun. Be at peace, I will find you when the time is right. That's as much detail as I have for now. I am not there yet, that is all. This simple phrase has stuck with me through these last couple weeks. I continue to repeat it to myself and therefore I know how important it must be to me.

In doing this act, I have found so much happiness. I am less troubled, worried, bothered. I am more calm and I give off more natural peace than ever before. I swell with the pride of what it means to be comfortable inside of my body, I shake hands with the thoughts in my brain and they lift me up, elevate me higher, they do not nip at my heels and try to drag me down. No, I am not in a phase like that anymore.

I write these words and the scenes paint themselves in my imagination. They appear to me organically in the moment and I know that however they visualize themselves to be is how I will remember them for the rest of my life. The entries I reread from ten years ago appear the same way they did the day that I wrote them. What a magical thing. I am discovering how visual these meditations actually are, they are all just little romanticized, exaggerated bits of reality. They exist in a different plane, they exist in a vacuum, they are micro-stories to teach a lesson or to express an emotion. I paint such pretty pictures for myself, the brush is just in my mind instead of my hand.

Contrast and comparison are themes in my life lately. Perhaps it is more evolution than either of those two ideas. It is the ending of some things and the beginning of others. Today my old car was towed away from me forever. Yesterday, when I sold it, I was waiting for the man to come buy it with the old title in my pocket and I checked the mail before he got here and inside the mailbox was the new title for the new car and in that moment I held two distinct landmarks of my life, different eras, one at its close, the other just the beginning. My wife tells me about the two regulars, unrelated, who have just received the news that they have terminal cancer. She tells me this the day before I find out a regular of mine is pregnant. I asked her, are you taking a break? And she responds, oh, from drinking? Yes. But it's actually because I'm pregnant. I was so happy for her, I was so sad for my wife's regulars. My wife learned yesterday that her restaurant is closing after fifteen years. She told me through tears I learned to speak english here. My second family is here. This is the day after I confessed to a friend my recent feelings of immense, inexplicable gratitude to have a consistent job, to make consistent money. There are so many more things to be said about these events, I have spent the last few days overtaken with these contradicting topics, I can only write the objective details about them without getting too deep into it, I just don't have the time right now. I have thought for hours on them. I am writing them here so as not to forget about them, for I do not ever wish to forget a feeling, particularly one that lasts for so many days, those feelings which show up to me as signs rather than circumstance. Yes, I give them the meaning that they hold, but god knows I am an impressionable boy. Even if I do find meaning in everything it does not matter because I will still have my own qualifications for what holds more meaning compared to more trivial matters. Right?

Oh, the memories are revamped. They hold more weight with each day, though, again, they leave me without residue. They do not make me lighter and they do not make me heavier. They are there and then they are gone. I am not listening to much new music, I prefer the old stuff right now. I think of old friends and old strangers. Even now, I am rushing to write all these things which I have felt lately – an impossible task. Tomorrow I will visit my old elementary school and walk the halls I roamed twenty years ago. I will let the nostalgia win and wash over me fully. I will become shipwrecked by it and I think that is what I want.

It does not matter how I spend my days, I will always be fulfilled. I suspect it will always be this way because, so far, it always has. Any day I am filled with emotion is a day well had, and those are the days which make up my life. It is an awesome thing to let the world wow you, to reach out and touch the magic that is in the air at all moments. No, I am not looking through rose-tinted lenses, I mean this for the ugly parts too. But who could deny that the translation of life into your senses, computed by your nature, is not an awe-inspiring thing? Who would debate me on that? I am not a hopeless romantic, nor a naive optimist, I am just a man with an open heart, I feel big feelings and I am proud of them, and so I am proud of myself. I am proud of who I was, who I am, and I am sure I will be proud of who I will become.

4/12/26

The photograph rises from the horizon of my computer screen, it comes into my view as I peer through this digital window. I see the familiar marble of blue and white in the background, though the shape is not complete, it appears as if a celestial beast has taken an astronomical bite out of its side, this chomp reducing the sphere to a mere crescent of its original self. It is interesting enough on its own. But the foreground of this photo holds the most weight, that is undeniable. Before me I am staring into the chalky white craters of the giant rock which orbits our home, muted behind the line of sight of Earth's reflected light. I see them for what they are, I know what I am looking at, and I am transfixed in a silent state of awe. I am behind the moon which is in front of the Earth. I am on the dark side. My first thoughts are that of gratitude, I contextualize the meaning behind the translation of this image we have been gifted and I think how many millions of human souls have wondered what the dark side must look like. So unreachable for so many millenia. And here I am, waking up one morning after a long night's shift, drinking my morning coffee, enjoying this lovely spring morning, and I am given this treasure to look at. It is more than a lifetime's worth of honor, it is more than generational. It is the crowning achievement of humanity, and I am a part of it, as are you. I look up to the sky and thank these four astronauts who have traveled further away from home than any other living being ever before them. They have transcended man, they send these images as gods to us, and perhaps as aliens to others.

After the initial shock, when I am able to take in the rest of the moon's surface, I begin to see these massive craters in an earthly way. They appear to me as raindrops on the surface of a circular lake. I bring my face closer to the screen and I can make out the ripples inside of some of them. I lean back to unfocus my gaze again, I shift more comprehension into the periphery of this field of view and I think yes, they are just like raindrops. These asteroids collide with the surface of this rock, pulled into it in the same manner which liquid rain is pulled down by the gravity we experience ourselves, on the surface of our planet. Again, the scale of everything relative to its counterparts proves to not matter so much, we continue to see that certain relationships, behaviors, characteristics, specific phenomena occur throughout the known universe in the same way which we know them to happen here. Again, the relative nature of all that we could ever know begins to shrink. Suddenly I am cleansed of all my worries. Any earthly trouble is minimized to absolute zero and I am lost in reflection once more.

I continue to dream of my old friends, their parents, the life that I once lived. That past is gone just as yesterday is gone. They are both expired present that have impacted my life today and I am who I am in this moment because of them. I have learned so many things in my life. I see class in daily life and I wonder where I lay on the spectrum of things, I am curious how naive I was to the wealthy people I would spend all this time around. Does a normal child have these experiences? I wonder where these friends are now, what kind of cars they drive, I think about their rich parents and how they would have looked at my parents as I approach both of their ages. When does one begin to acquire their wealth? Well for most of the upper class, it occurs before you are born, I'm sure. I wonder if the parents of my friends would dislike me now. I wonder if the parents of my friends saw something in me and wanted to mold me to be like them, a poor kid with the charisma it takes to gain wealth. I wonder if they would be disappointed in me if they saw me now.

My wife and I spoke about something my penpal told me, about how they continue to write despite not feeling like they have produced anything worthwhile since last November. I know exactly what they mean and my wife does too. It is a necessary thing to push onwards in your creative journey, practicing your craft, improving your tone, your voice, and your messages, but it is imperative to remember that you may not be proud of everything you make. In the same sense of living a normal life, most days are going to be quite ordinary. Ordinary is good. It is only with the majority of experiences being ordinary that we can really ever consider other, much less frequent moments extraordinary.

When I listened to the speeches of the astronauts from outer space, I heard their rehearsed words and was moved, though I wanted even more to hear genuine dialogue, not something polished for all of us back here. I remind myself that almost all famous speeches throughout history were also prewritten and practiced, it makes sense to put time and intention into your message, but I did not want it in that moment. I remind myself that I am doing the same thing with my writing as we speak, these last months being dedicated to exactly that. I call myself hypocrite and carry on. We live too fearful of public backlash. Old videos pop up in my recommended and I watch them with intense curiosity, there is no acting to be found, it is all just people being organic around each other. Maybe it is cringe and awkward at times but it is real. I think that we are losing that.

These thoughts swim around in my head and I am better for them, though I become dizzy rather quickly. My grasp on these things has loosened. I experience my evolution as a writer, as a thinker, in a very different way than I once did. There are so many words to look back on, it is more clear than ever before, and time will only pull me further away from that starting point. There is no going back. The astronauts up in space begin their journey home after they become the furthest things away from it, but that does not happen in a linear life, only in nonhuman trips and travels.

I am tired now.

4/8/26

As I peel more layers off, I rediscover that I am, indeed, happy. More than that, I am proud of the man that I am. Shedding the burden of excess, baggage, unnecessary worry, is liberating. This much is obvious, but what remains a mystery is a reliable method of initiating the act of shedding these troubles. If this were a consistently achievable practice, surely we would all be a little bit calmer in our day to day lives.

At this moment in time, however, I have that method in front of me. As long as this particular phase of the work is unfinished, I have access to deep meditation. To healing. I page through this digital dictionary of my life, it is massive, and the task of organizing it has proven to be a beast. I have not bitten off more than I can chew but the chewing is taking quite some time. I am just glad to report that I am enjoying every bite, savoring the richness, complexity, of what went into it. I read the words of my past and I see him, my past self, with so much more wisdom than I had previously believed myself to hold.

I do not have much to say. Some days are still difficult, I question many things that I know I should not. It is the worry inside, though that is lessening too. My initial motivation to write this entry stemmed from the thought that I am thoroughly enjoying my life right now, despite the bad days. I can handle the bad days because I am living a fulfilling life. I am regaining lost confidence in myself, discovering the true powers of a human body, inside the mystical human mind. Each day I am improving, though I know I do not even need to be. The only expectations which I must fulfill are the internal ones and I know that I will because I always have, I always do, and I always will.

I am still alone, very often. I still have that desire to remain alone, but I am reaching out to friends more. It is just a lesser quantity of them. The emotions continue to pierce me deeply, they are more intense but I am more masterful in my handling of them. I am proud of who I am in this life of mine.

4/1/26

Who could have been the first to teach their children that a long, fulfilling life lay ahead of them? Who dared be the one to make them that promise? I am at some stage in life now in which I know it is likely that I will make it there, but I must do some extra work on my own to practice my gratitude. Each day alive is a blessing. No days are guaranteed. And I do not wish to be caught with my pants down if my day may come sooner than hoped.

I do not walk around with regrets on my tail. I do not have anything following my trail that I must keep watch to, nothing to tide over. Through practice, I have become quite good at living presently. I experience situations in my daily life and I do not hold on to them with more meaning than is warranted, not even the things I might consider spectacular. Whichever moments remain with me are the ones I bring along into the next day. They are not chosen, they are there because the imprint lasted longer than the rest, it is a natural thing, they are not selected. Much like everything else, I acknowledge them, and that seems to be enough.

My personal path forward continues to veer away from everything else. I wish it did not, but I cannot deny that it feels as though I remove myself from others, more and more, the further I go. But it is not everyone, it is not a rejection of people as much as it is a rejection of what the people have created, these systems which are unnatural and extend into multiple generations. As I interact with people and things and change my movements to do tasks within these systems, I feel a perpetual crowdedness. It is like when I am at work behind that tiny, skinny bar, moving, shaking, stirring, dancing with my coworkers in the extremely limited space which we share for the night. That feeling follows me outside of the restaurant's doors, though, too. When I feel my neck lurch forward and the arch of my back raise, when I must look over my shoulder to make sure that I will not bump into anyone before making my next move, when my physical actions do not feel fluid but, instead, disjointed and awkward. I feel trapped, very often, in some ways.

During our road trip together, my wife and I were free. We spent money without care, we woke up each morning excited for what the unknown day ahead of us would bring. I have written about this exact scenario before, when we return from a trip, and I am not happy to be home. The unnatural things catch up to me once more and they are always heavier than they were before I left. Yes, the vacation was a break from everyday life, but at what cost? I know the break is necessary, I can see the difference in my demeanor upon our return, feel the weight inside me lighter, but the work on my desk has also grown in my absence. And I know I must get to it soon.

Two nights ago we spent the last night of our trip at a campsite in central Indiana. It fueled my soul once more, despite the exhaustion from such a long road trip. All vacations are exhausting in some way, no? Life is exhausting. We need the breaks. When we pulled into our campsite, I promptly removed my shoes and settled down on the ground to set up the tent. My wife sat at the picnic table and did some sketching. Before I got into the task at hand, I laid on my back, the green grass underneath me, the golden sun raining down on my stretched out body, and I felt I had returned again. I have been here before, I've written about this before, because it is a recurring thing, something coded inside of me, inside of us all. No matter where I will lay, I will feel that same thing. Over the campfire that evening, my wife and I sat eating our veggie dogs and Spanish rice. I asked her, do you think that you have lived a life as a human before? She thought for a moment and said maybe. I love to watch her think. I love even more to hear her answer. We spoke about natural understandings, the inherent instincts within that give us knowledge of the field, the things that are known without the need to learn, the things that will never be lost, because it is deep inside you, underneath the conscious self. My answer to the question when she asked it back to me was no, I don't think so. I don't feel like I have that knowledge the way others do. My wife told me that maybe this is my first life here on this Earth, that maybe I had lived somewhere else before. This is definitely not your first life, she told me. I laughed. I reminded her about those words I had written for her when I had first met her: If I am smart, then she is wise. If I am old, then she is ancient. Looking back on it now, perhaps I do have those feelings inside of me. I feel the things which we talked about when I am plugged back into the grass.

I appreciate my big feelings. I cherish them and see them through. They cannot be ignored because they are what make me who I am.

3/22/26

My wife came to me to ask a question, but she dug her heels in before she had asked. Her predetermined demeanor, a bit combative, did not register with me right away. She asked and I began to think about what she had asked, considering all of the things which I normally do. Yes, it is laborious for a simple question, but I do this for all things. It is a slow process because I am a slow man. Before too long I began to feel that familiar sensation like I was being hurried along into something I'm not sure I had agreed to, encouraged to just make up my mind already. In this moment I had asked her why are arguing with me when I'm just thinking? She said, because you didn't answer after like ten seconds, you just went quiet. And I responded with another question, more confused than anything: ten seconds is too long to think?

We ended this situation cordially, and with love. We both reached a common agreement, it makes sense that we did because we both want the same things. As we got deeper into it, I began to speak about how I had just heard the same thing from my general manager last week during our annual check-ins, that she just wishes I was a little bit faster. She tells me a different variation of the same thing every year. I don't care enough to tell her my opinions on this because I lack the sufficient amount of respect to do so, so I just nodded my head and said okay. I told my wife of all the times I see my coworkers make drinks incorrectly, without enough care of the product they are making, I told my wife how I just can't put something out that I am not proud of, that to produce a product which I know is not made the correct way is an impossibility for me. It doesn't matter that we are talking about something as stupid as cocktails, it is the principle of the whole thing. I told my wife how I have heard this same issue pointed out to me in different ways all of my adult life, all of my past partners, frustrated with me taking my time, not always, but enough to be noticeable, enough to be a thing to talk about later, something else to smooth out. I worked myself into a frenzy of sorts. My wife sat back and listened to me. She told me it was good for putting words to these feelings and I told her that I did not know they were so strong, and that they just came out. Just before leaving the table, she thanked me for sharing my feelings, even if I did so with a raised voice full of frustration. She said, I understand you more now, and that made me feel like maybe this dumb conversation was worth something.

The other day I put on music which came out seven years ago, music that my close friends and I were listening to every day. I was doing menial things at work and when I was about a quarter into the album I leaned over a tall box as if I had been shot through the heart, slightly crippled with my eyes closed and face winced. I was incapacitated, but not for a physical reason, it was just a shock to my emotions. It is that shipwrecked by nostalgia feeling, if that can be a feeling itself. It is so profound it is like a shockwave through my body, and I began to cry for a moment in the basement of my job while putting the liquor order away. If I was less mature, I would have felt embarrassed, but I am old enough now to know that moments like these are to be cherished. They are what make me feel alive.

I remember my friend Sean, the one and only person who has given me an artistic chance. I have never sought these experiences out, yet he found me on a random day and he provided with some over these years. I reflect on the most profound one, the spring day where my wife and I biked across town to the old building I was set to speak in. We made our way to the room, a beautiful studio of two friends of Sean, it sat about forty, and many of my friends were there. I spoke first. I stood before the wide windows with the sun pouring in at the podium, I spoke into a microphone and I just decided to start. I had put together these words from recent passages I had made over the last month, I spoke for fifteen minutes and by the end I had worked myself to tears again. I could barely finish my piece because I was choking myself up. I did not dare look up to all the people looking at me, the people in front of me who were sniffling too, and in one of my moments of silence in which I attempted to pull myself together, I heard Sean say feels good to be human, don't it? I nodded to him and smiled. I finished as best I could, I gathered my bag from the floor and scurried twenty feet to the other side of the room, behind the partition, I moved through the claps and sniffs, I squatted down to the floor and I sobbed, for I could not hold it in any longer. My friend Cellou rose from his seat and rubbed my back while I did so. It's a memory I have held on to tightly in the three years since it happened.

When I first met Sean for coffee after our initial encounter, he told me he was drawn to me because when he read my words from the book I had given him he knew that I felt a lot. He told me his exact thoughts: this cat really feels. I had not realized how true this was up to that point and I could never know how true it would remain. I am a lover, I am a friend, I am a calm man and I am slow, and more than anything, I feel. I am a feeler and I am a proud one. When my wife tells me that she understands me better now, I feel as though I understand myself better now too. I need help, just like anyone else. I need a lot of it. These feelings are intense, they are profound, they stir the confusion which already resides within. It is my duty to move through them deliberately, I know that no matter how small they might be, they are what make me who I am, and I cannot rush past any. This is how it feels to me.

3/14/26

The way I described it to my wife was this: the backdrop is the cosmos, I am suspended in the middle of nothingness yet I am surrounded by everything. I am not in a void, I am in a pocket of stillness among distant stars within a galaxy. I am back in the womb, though not a womb of flesh and warmth, I myself am not a man, when I look down to where my feet should be I see the same thing as I saw above me, to the left, the right – nothing. Speckles of light, impossibly far, peppered in against the blackness. But when I look back up, I see a wall. And when I position myself backwards a bit more, I see another wall, slightly further away, above the top of the first one, the one in front of me. It continues on this way until I can not see the end, the light becoming dimmer the higher it goes. It should be an easy enough climb, I think to myself, eyeing the divots and footholds. And suddenly I am climbing, I am more than halfway, I have just reached the top, but I am hesitating to finish the ascent. The thoughts come back to me, I think of the why, I ponder what it will mean when I complete this final hurdle. I'm stalling.

That is more or less what it's like. All this talk of a new car, an eventual home, the eventual child. These pillars of human achievement continue to pass me by, or rather, we continue to climb up these large steps. There is no going back once finished. The only way up is forwards. And I have a hard time doing things without over-considering the meaning behind it. There is always meaning in actions.

I spoke to my father a few days ago for a couple hours about the new car we are about to purchase. I wanted confirmation from him that it is not a stupid thing to do. He told me about his financial mistakes in the past, how foolish he felt, the lessons he learned, and he reassured me that this was not like the ones he had committed. I thought out loud about saving up my weekly allowance, how after a few months I had netted $100, I remember so clearly going into the toy store at the mall and purchasing a Power Rangers robot. I was beaming with pride at what I had accomplished. I loved that thing, I cherished it, and it broke on me much sooner than it should have. I remember returning it for a new one and the same thing happening not long after. I felt I had been robbed, in a way, like I had just learned some unjust lesson and the unjustness itself was more realistic, more heavy, than anything else I was able to read between the lines at that age.

That $100 was child's play, literally. It's been two and a half decades since that moment in time and now I am married and my wife and I are about to purchase a brand new car. Thirty thousand dollars. That is three hundred of those Power Rangers toys in the shape of a car and with the ability to take us wherever we want without worry, providing us safety, with minimal bells and whistles but also, surely, entertaining us. We are not used to things like this. We are ecstatic, we know we deserve it, we have saved up all this money and we ask ourselves what is this pile of money for if not to be spent? She knows this much better than me. I respect my frugal nature and I am glad that I have it, but it is in times like these where I can not help but feel like I have boarded the airplane and heard the captain confirm the doors are sealed with the feeling of certainty that I have forgotten some important belongings back home.

Last night after work, the two of us spoke again about the slight distance between us. We continue on like normal, we are content with our path and the love, commitment, and trust we have amongst one another, but we are still figuring things out as we move. As we climb these giant steps. I had worked myself into a corner about something much different, it seemed I had opened a door much wider than anticipated and I began to speak about the expectations on myself which I project on to other people, yes, it made sense, we had begun the conversation about expectations, but I had spun this thing around, broken one side of the two-way arrow and pointed both ends at myself, I could hear the words come out of my mouth and I had to announce multiple different times that I was not spiraling, I am not in a crisis, I spoke calmly and slowly and so I did not appear to be frantic, but the substance of what I was saying was lunacy, it was that specific brand of existential meaning, the search for it, the seriousness of life and the inability to pal around with everyone else, the extreme juxtaposition, the hypocrisy, of being so confident in some ways and so insecure in others, often just one measly stride ahead of another, how I myself did not understand the feelings which I have so often, about how when I go upstairs to write these stupid words I am desperately trying to find the meaning within myself, that that is the entire point of these things – my wife had long gone silent and her gaze turned to one of sympathy, her eyes lowered slightly and I could feel that she felt bad. I sat scrunched up on the quilted bench at the foot of our bed, eyeing an empty corner of our bedroom as I spoke, and when I met her stare again this is what I saw. That look I have seen so many times before, from her, from others. She began to speak about her interpretation on what I had just said, she told me to correct her if she was wrong, and I shrugged and told her, no, I don't know either, you can continue. I don't even know what I'm feeling. And that right there feels like the truth of it all. She said, well, maybe it will get better with time, and I shrugged and said, maybe. She left to go make some food, and I was left with the memory of all the times I had heard that before.

It does get better with time. But I do not feel like I come closer to being able to explain my thoughts or feelings. In fact, where I'm at right now, I feel worse off than I used to. Looking back at the hundreds of thousands of words I have written in this decade, I see how my prose has improved, it is so much better than it used to be, the word choice, the formatting, in every metric that is true, yet in every last one of these entries I continue to babble the same nonsense. I can paint such beautiful scenes, stir up the most dormant emotions inside of myself that I am moved to tears, the me of the past riling up the me of the present with so much precision it is like I have been jabbed in my nerve endings and have been left paralyzed – but there is no end, no completion, no resolve. It does not feel that way to me, ever. I do want to share these words, this is true, I don't even have a reason to do so other than to be heard, felt, listened to, hopefully even understood, at least a little. This has always been the case. But, in resemblance to life outside of these pages, there is no resolve anywhere inside of them. By the time I read these again, or you, whoever you may be, I will have moved so far ahead from this point in time. I will have forgotten the instance where I even felt moved enough to write this entry. There is no resolve here.

Upwards and onwards, I will continue to climb. I will be slow, I will stall, I will over-consider the meaning behind it all. I will have fun, but most of the time I will remain in a dormant, semi-serious state, pondering what it all may imply. I do not mind it, and so I remind myself that it matters not what others may see in me, or think, none of it. I will be helped along with a little pat on the butt when I am near the top of the stair and I will gently tumble on to the foot of the next. I will look around at the empty space which surrounds me, I will peer off the ledge of where I have just came from, and I will see no person, nor thing, only the emptiness of space, and the twinkling stars so far off in the distance.

3/1/26

There is a thin wall between my wife and me. It has been built up before, and it has paved its way back. My wife goes through another period of mourning and I can not recall which number this one is. For all of the reasons I love her, I seem to be left confused by her. We speak about how different we are. We acknowledge our different backgrounds, lived experiences, treatments throughout life. We have found our way to each other and I know that we were meant to become unified in this way. I am at peace with that, I prefer it. I am honored to be her husband. But for the last few days I have been more frustrated than normal.

She wants her space and so I give it to her. I tiptoe around her as she expresses her emotions without action, though I seem to understand the message regardless. I feel as though I am waiting for her to return. For all this time I have committed myself to this life we are building and I do not stray. She commits herself too, but then she leaves. She tells me she never expected to be married, and now she is a wife. She meets young people like her and she lives through them, she knows it is vicarious, I do not blame her for it. But when I pick her up from her night out, she cries and then vomits in the toilet. I rub her back and hold her hair with a confused look on my face, a confused feeling in my heart. I feel alone, hurt, abandoned. I understand what she tells me. We are honest to each other and that is why we work. But I cannot help her with this predicament. All I can do is wait for her to come back. I've been here before, I've sat in this same seat of the waiting room, I will twiddle my thumbs or read my book, I can slouch down and put my hat over my eyes to take a short nap, but I will never know when she is ready to come back out. It is difficult.

I can not help but recall the last night she spoke to her brother. Her brother's husband yelling at her do what you always do! Run away! How sad I felt for her, how mean those words felt to me. And now after all of these times I have used that same phrase to her. In a different tone and under different contexts, but I have told her that is how I feel. Like she is running away from me, from our home, from our cats, from our life. She told me today at breakfast how her biggest fear of becoming a mother is that she will run away from the child and I told her that these last few days have made me scared of that too. It is now not only a personal fear, it is a collective fear, between the two of us. I do not know how to help her except to be here for her. She tells me I feel guilt because it's not fair to you, I know that. I respond, there is no way to make this better unless you live for yourself first. She tells me she is happy and I believe her. But the wall is still here, it divides us, on the couch and in the bed, it runs through the middle of the car as we do our errands and it is in between our hands as we hold them together over our gloves.

We got married to each other because we love each other. We got married when we did because we needed to hurry up and finish this round of the game before the judges switched. It has been the most spectacular and reciprocated relationship of either of our lives, but we know that it was rushed. Without regret, we are simply assessing the situation we are in now that we are afforded more time, time that was not guaranteed before we wedded. Time that still does not feel promised, though for much larger reasons now.

A few days ago I got coffee with a coworker. We spoke to each other in the corner of a new cafe, we enriched each other's minds with the type of conversation that is shared between friends, it is energy for the heart and fuel for the mind. It was so stimulating. We were talking about the history of humans, how getting older has put these impossibly large numbers into more perspective, like the world feels just a little more graspable when you consider how patterns emerge over time. We spoke on the afterlife, how the very large must also be considered very small given a different perspective. There was a pause in our flow of thoughts and while he looked away out the window I saw his tea cup shake in its saucer, the handle pointing towards the door now pointed right at me. I saw his hands folded together on top of the table and I looked to him if he had seen what I just saw, but he was lost in thought and again I was reminded of how little I know about the true nature of this world we inhabit.

I have spent so much time alone. My wife has too. We get along so well, in part, because we are deeply individual people. I have never been more proud of a partner than my beautiful wife. We watched Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon tonight and the commentary was so ironic, the clash of desired individual freedom against what certain people may want from you. What you might want yourself versus what is expected of you. The hero of the film speaks about how you must never hold on to anything in this life because you can not take any of it with you. Material possessions of course, but not even the body you take up. If I can not hold on to my own body, how could I expect to hold on to that of another? No, I am not possessive, of my body nor my wife's. But it was a good reminder.

I will be here for my wife when she returns and I trust that she will be waiting for me when I choose to return as well. I will see her leaning on the gate of the bridge I am to cross to mark the end of my time away and my heart will sing when she comes into view. I will approach her, we will smile, we will share a kiss, we will tear down this wall once more and we will take each other's hands and fly up into the treetops, prancing along the branches as we make our way home.

2/24/26

The whole point is to feel comfortable in your body. As comfortable as you can, at least, that's the whole point, I think. We all walk around as these magical beings whose matter is fused together by God, we can be broken or cut and we heal ourselves innately, without any effort at all, we sew ourselves back together and build ourselves back up. From the inside out. We are walking miracles, really.

We are all the centers of our own universes, it makes sense that we feel this way because we only have our one perspective to live with forever, we are stuck with it, we are stuck within ourselves. To have empathy is natural to some, yes, but I think no matter what there is still some vulnerability in feeling it because at the end of the day you still have to trust that another person feels things similarly enough to you in order to provoke the empath within. Like when you are a kid and you just have to trust that everyone else around you is also a human and not some robot or alien and you are the only real living being, that kind of trust.

I am a six foot tall man who lives on a planet who is five million times bigger than me. Still, somehow, that is tangible to my brain. It is not as practical as other comparisons in daily life, but I can still comprehend it, at least in part. When I go up in the sky inside of an airplane, I can see the curvature. It is real to me because I see it with my sight. If I am to think about the distance from here to the sun, it stops making sense. And if I go in the opposite direction, if I compare my collective body, the summation of my parts and what makes me my physical self, if I compare this unit to a molecule within me, or if I try to break me up into all of the different molecules that create me as I know me, it also stops making sense. There are certain scales that simply do not compute. We can find out certain numbers with these computers we have created – miraculous in itself – but they do not make real life sense. They are just representations, they make it easier to comprehend, at least we are now on the right path towards comprehension, but they just do not get close enough to where it can really click. And that is okay, that is actually how it should be. We are alive in these human bodies and these human bodies have limits.

What I am trying to get at here is that I have become so much happier when I have practiced and improved my willingness to accept. Acceptance has become key in my overall happiness in life, it is actively choosing my battles, it is not letting the existential bits of things throw me into a spiral. I have turned existential dread into existential peace. And it because of acceptance that I can do this.

My existence is confined to this body and this body is confined to this planet. Anything that happens on this planet I can have a say in, no matter how small it may be. If I can touch it and translate its meaning to my organic computer brain, then it is real to me. I learn from history but I know that history does not repeat itself in the same way it once did because there are always new flavors coming out, new realities that historical parallels need to stem from. We cannot copy past events from our timeline and paste them into the future, even as an exercise, it just does not work that way.

Acceptance is the first step. It is the first step in any program and it is only with acceptance that I have been able to discover my peace.

2/22/26

The effects linger in the air, like the dust after an explosion, we gather ourselves and try and move forward the way that we were before this all happened, but we do this with debris in our hair, shrapnel in our bodies, fear in our minds. Some of it is paranoia, yes, though most of it feels more alert, more based in reality. It is less insidious than it once was. Less manic. Now it is just learned behavior showing itself when it is now, for the most part, unneeded.

And to find that balance is the difficult part. So much was just learned and then immediately used in real time but now that the masked killers are less in their number, now that we do not see them the way we once did, it can feel like we are looking for nothing. A month ago we would leave the house on hunts and we would find altercations so quickly. Now, days go by without any sort of physical attack. It is all just old rentals, misleading data, outdated by mere weeks. These entries which gave us so much edge in our defense are now, essentially, meaningless. I pass by the intersections which I now have burned into my memory and it has reverted back to the state it existed in for all the years before. Nothing is going on, but the dagger is still wedged in our consciousness.

I feel intense disappointment towards those who cancel on our meeting plans last minute and as I stand at the back door of my neighbor's house waiting to be let in, alone this time instead of being one of ten, realizing that they will not be home for another twenty minutes and that it would just be the two of us  this time instead of two dozen, I wonder if it is normal in life to feel these things towards others. It must be. I wonder how many times people have felt disappointment at me and I conclude that it most certainly is more than I will ever know. I am no better than anyone else. But I do not cancel plans last minute the way others do, not as often, though I am not perfect with that either.

I try to spark the meeting discussion in the group chat instead and only get two replies for the rest of the night. Nobody seems to want to talk, and I get it, but when we had an event scheduled for tomorrow which needs planning, people, time and commitment, I feel a bit disheartened. But, well. No matter. We deserve a bit of a break. I think.

My dreams are extra intense and they are centered on movement, I am biking some place new and I camp there overnight, I evade the threats as they come to me – there are still always threats – but there is pure joy and jubilation after they are overcome. I finally feel the free space in my mind to even think about planning future camping trips and that alone is motivating. I feel full of a new purpose and remember how it is to feel alive in this body of mine, those ways which I have learned to fuel my soul.

All of my friends around me are socializing like crazy, they are rabid with energizing themselves, mad people feeding off of each other. My wife joins them for all of it and I accompany her for some of it. It is a beautiful thing and I am pleased to be a part of it, too. I see that we are all stark raving mad to soothe ourselves back to normal and it brings me peace to see that we feels these things collectively. We all feel these things together, always, just as we have come out of one phase together we enter into a new one. I am in good company and I am grateful. I feel my emotions more balanced and I am grateful for my clear headedness as we begin a new chapter, that's all. It's a lot of emotions, though. I must remind myself not to feel as if any of them are wrong and I do, I do.

2/12/26

My pajamas have become another uniform. They symbolize my quiet time, I wear them when I drive the cooks to work in the morning and when I pick my wife up in the evening. I put them on when I have finished my bike patrol for the day. They do not go back in the drawer anymore, instead, they are draped over the back of the wooden rocking chair in our bedroom whenever they are not on my body. I will wear the same pair of cozy socks and long underwear, sweatshirt and undershirt, for days at a time. It has developed into some sort of ritual and I have now been made aware that these clothes represent peace to me. I can touch them and feel as though my stressors are washed away for a moment. Just like when I set my phone down after tying up all of the strands of communication for the day, it is these acts which close the covers of my daily log and when the book is shut I am able to unwind and feel comfortable. I set the jobs for tomorrow up on the bench by the door, where I sit to tie my shoes, for that is their place in this moment, I am not to touch them until the sun rises once more. Everything in its right place, and then, I can rest.

I have known now, at least for a little while, that I need to give myself more grace. For some deep and complicated reason – or many reasons – my varied emotions over the course of a day have historically made me feel unstable. If I am not motivated, happy, or any type of content, I will feel critical of the chemicals in my body and ask myself sternly what's wrong with me? I have made much progress in this exact field already, though. The first step was to be made aware of it, and the next step is never-ending. As soon as you have reached the top of the staircase, another step presents itself. There is no rhythm in the climb because there is no constant pace. You only want to continue upwards when it is needed and so it is perfectly normal to remain on one level for an extended period of time, smiling and lighthearted. But as soon as those feelings of self-doubt creep in, the judgement follows, the negative questions begin to roll in, and then, eventually, you arrive at the same realization you've had so many times before, that your body is just reacting to the stimuli in life, that these ebbs and flows are to be expected – my friend, this is what life is! – and then you turn around and see that next step upwards.

The duration of this period of self-critique is what I continue to get better at. That is all I am concerned with regarding this specific aspect of self-growth. Self this, self that, I suppose that is what these meditations are all about.

I spoke yesterday with some friends about how easily we forget things nowadays. Even now, I sit down to write my feelings and I forget what it is I came upstairs to say. I work things out though and I stumble upon them again, finding my way through the dark. I think about technology, our social-media-driven generation, the short videos, our shrinking attention spans – I compared it to our parents' generation, how they grew up with these rigid rules of hierarchy, generational and societal, how there was constantly so much pressure on themselves to appear, to be, better than what was expected of them. Of course, the road was paved smoother for them than for us, at least those who were privileged enough to be allowed on the road in the first place. My friend remarked, thank god those days are over and I laughed, agreeing with them, though feeling a little disheartened about the reality we are in. I like when people take themselves seriously, when people hold themselves accountable for the sake of others, for society, though I am also glad that we can relax a little bit. Knowing that the eras in which our parents and grandparents grew up in were all a sham anyway, not in total, but absolutely in the achieve your dreams sort of way, I am at peace feeling as if we are simply unmasking the facade. We just aren't playing pretend anymore. I know that is a good thing, I know it was inevitable, and I am proud to be alive in this moment, as tough as it may be.

We then moved the discussion to firearms, I spoke on this curiosity which was born inside of me just a month ago, the one which couples with the idea of preparedness, that I am interested in shooting a gun. Learning how they work. Perhaps getting a license and owning one. My friends nodded their heads and those who have shot one before commented on how it made them feel sick to use it, to wield all of that power beneath a simple flex and retraction of the muscle inside of your index finger. It is sickening, and I have never done it. Typing this out now, I do not want to do it at all, I simply feel as though I might be foolish not to while I am still able to. Before more rights of ours get stripped away from our clutches. My trusted friends shared more, saying how their first thoughts were different versions of the same realization, how they were people with no mal-intent, how easily one who operated more maliciously would be able to make sinister ideas into horrific realities. How easily it has already happened, for decades, every day, it continues. It is harrowing. I hate that I have even considered this, though I am aware this did not generate inside of me as much as I feel cornered by this aspect of our shared reality in this corner of the globe. It has wiggled its way inside of me and whispers in my ear. I have no choice but to hear it out.

Later on that night, while we were cozied up in bed, I talked through my recent obsession of downgrading to my wife. I want to de-google, to unsubscribe from the handful of nasty North American  subscriptions I have, to eventually move away from the digital ecosystem I have been a part of for over fifteen years. I have done lots of digging, I have deleted accounts and stopped the monthly payments, I have found the foreign substitutes which would still allow me to function as normal – I simply want to vote more with my wallet, as they say. I am no stranger to making my life less convenient for the sake of personal growth and so given this extra level of motivation, to do my share in suffocating these companies, to strike against the powers that be, I am happy, willing, eager to do so. My wife was less enthusiastic. She used words like comfort and convenience to illustrate how she does not wish to shake things up more than they already are right now, and I listened to her. More than that, I heard her out. My wife comes from a place where she did not have the luxury of choice, where lived conditions near the higher end were still less than the mid to low tier in this place. She used rhetoric about one person not making a difference and I heard her and understood her feelings.

But I see myself make a difference every single day. In times like these, it is more tangible than ever. Every day I have been outside with the purpose of engaging, monitoring, protecting, I have felt the difference in the ecosystem I live within. Perhaps it is because so many others are out doing the same thing, but that is still to the point. One person a million times over is one million people. It's obvious, yes? I see the notes that I send our dispatcher appear in the nightly summary of our collective day of patrolling, sent out to thousands of people, and I know that I made that difference. I see crowd-sourced graphs of trends we have seen regarding these masked kidnappers, amazing data of summations and further analysis, and I understand it would not have been possible without every individual waking up that morning to go outside and engage. I read a message at night which calls for more observers in the early hours of the morning and when I wake up the next day and join the call, there are thirty people in there compared to the usual handful. I see the individual differences made each and every day. I choose to hold on to that, intentionally and with hope.

The border czar says that this occupation is over. He says that the masked villains will leave in the coming week. None of us believe him because we have been lied to our whole lives. There have never been more people aware and awoken as we have right now, even if the results this week show him to speak the truth, we know that there is more coming, whether it is here or elsewhere, we know this reign of terror will continue for the coming years. We speak in our community discussion chats about our skepticism, perhaps even cynicism, and we follow that up with the shared feeling that we have won this round. We, the people of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, the great state of Minnesota, true patriots who fight for the good of all people, we have fended off tyranny. The war will continue, but we the people will continue also, continue building our networks and building our defensive strategies, less in battle, more in the act of connection itself, in love being more powerful than hate, in joy as an act of resistance. I find myself hoping that the blueprints we have begun sketching will continue on even in times of peace, that our children and grandchildren will eventually live in a world where all of their neighborhoods have community chats to coordinate social gatherings and mutual aid. I hope that we, the people, the human race, will continue to build upon what was learned in Minneapolis the year 2026 began.

2/9/26

We gathered in the basement of a building down the street. On my walk over, my thoughts were focused around the sequence of events that led me to this moment: a piece of paper was left at my door, I sent a message to an address, I received a message in return with the information necessary for me to attend this meeting, and because of all of these things, I am now walking down the block to a house I have only ever passed by before. I was impressed with what human beings can do with simple words and basic information, the ability to move people through ideas alone. Somebody wanted to do something and all they had to do was broadcast their intent and now here we all were, together, physically. There was a sense of amazement underneath this very basic act and I held on to it during my short walk.

A group was gathered at the back entrance. We were waiting for one of the residents to come down and let us in. We gave brief introductions before we all pitched our camping chairs in the laundry room inside. When we were all settled in, it reminded me of what I imagine those meetings I have been told to attend would look like. Strangers sitting together in a circle about to share intimate details about their lives and feelings on the current state of affairs. I did not know these people, but I trusted that they exist in a grey area between family and stranger. All of our home lives exist within a hundred yard radius of one another and most of these people I had never seen before. I knew that the minutiae within our lives would overlap many times if analyzed underneath the microscope and therefore I had immediate trust in these new bonds we were just beginning to build.

Later, I would be inside my coworker's house whom I know well. We would be joined with a handful of other workers for other businesses at our specific intersection of the city. A week prior, someone had started a community chat for those of us working here and it has been growing. Every day, the web grows larger, expanding outward, crisscrossing many times over, the blueprint becomes more detailed as we work towards new drafts of this very new system we are in the middle of creating. Us workers share these intimate details of our lives as well. We know the same residents, we know the doings of what goes in on a daily basis. That horrible car crash that happened a day before which left two cars totaled, one engulfed in flames, we all had different angles of the same event. This is the reality of everyday life that goes on when you share your coordinates with other human beings. I learn that some of these companions of mine share the same digital spaces, too. I have spoken with them before, though wearing a different mask and while speaking in a different tone.

In terms of our businesses, we come up with ideas which would aid in an effort towards a general, sustainable strike. We speak of one day a week being cash only, not contributing towards the global economy, to inconvenience ourselves a little bit to make a point, to prove to ourselves and the outside world that we create the world which we live in. We have that power and we will not forget it. Energy is high as we bounce ideas off of one another and we leave with a gameplan and we feel energetic and hopeful in spite of all the darkness in the shadows around us. We, the people, have the momentum right now. There has never been a better time to embrace ugly circumstances and twist them into something worthwhile, something new and something better.

This same night I would end up at one more neighbor's apartment, another Internet friend who needed a face put to the alias. I was joined by another. It was the three of us and the roommate in the apartment hanging out and we all appeared so different from one another. Age, color, demeanor. It made me laugh in a genuine, appreciative way. Another twisting of the circumstances into creating a situation which would not have happened otherwise, yet here we are, sitting inside of it, embracing the ugly and making it pretty. We introduced ourselves and confirmed to each other that we are real life neighbors who all have our best interests in mind. In just one day, I had filled in my neighborhood with new points of interest, had made about two dozen more connections than I had the previous day, and I was filled up entirely of compassion and some special form of rejuvenation.

We continue to live through an explosion of new information and ideas. We are all more creative than ever, our collective priorities have shifted and I cannot help but think of the word renaissance. All of these actions are real and raw and authentic and with the people's best interest in mind and at heart's core. My friend sent an essay discussing how the patriarchy is unnatural and to humanity's demise. I read through these scathing hot takes and I was left a bit stupefied because I agreed with them all, I did not need any convincing, but these feelings I have felt for all of my adult life were suddenly punctuated into a precise list and all I could do was look to the crowd and gesture to this article, extending my arms and shaking my hands in an aggressive, wordless way, telling everyone to look at this woman spitting these facts right now! It is times like these, words like these, which provide shifts within the bedrock of my understanding of what it means to live a life in a human body within these human constructs. Natural in some ways, unnatural in others. I care so much about them that it ultimately removes all care and frees me from any restriction. Free, free to move and think and listen and speak however is fit.

I continue to be overloaded with emotion. I cry those slow, constant tears, much less jerky than my normal fits, the fits which have been on brand for me for quite some time. Yesterday, one of our cats could not defecate and so instead of doing the things I thought I would be doing, I spent my afternoon at the animal hospital, a sensitive place for me, seeing as I have already had the unfortunate experience of seeing three pets let go at these places in the last six years. I sat in the waiting room with my struggling animal, my best friend Bubblegum, and even though I knew she would be alright, I could not be entirely sure. She cried in the car and I spoke to her the entire time, just as I do when we go to have her check up at the vet. She cried when we arrived in the hospital and after ten minutes she calmed down, more so entering her state of tension at the acceptance of this strange circumstance, rather than becoming comfortable. I read my book as she closed her eyes and breathed quickly in the corner of her kennel. When the nurse came to grab her, my heart sunk. I was calm before, and now I am not. Ten minutes later I watched a dog be carried into the emergency room in the hands of the owner and I made the mistake of taking a glance and I saw a giant canine who was unresponsive, drooling out of the side of their mouth, a beast of an animal who was currently unresponsive and at the mercy of a health battle. All of the nurses became alert and stood up to rush this pet to the back where they would be seen first. When I watched this unfold, I was stabbed in the heart, I returned to my book but my body was filled with the tingling of uncontrollable emotion and I thought of my sweet Bubblegum, away from me, probably scared herself. The other owners around me remained fixated on their tablets and books and I tried to join them but I could not focus on anything after what I had just seen, after I revisited my own trauma of losing these animals who have been so dear to me. Eventually I was reunited with my angel, I was given the diagnostic – a simple fecal mat stuck in her hair and skin which covered the rectum – and we left to come home and return her to her happy place. She purred immediately and I wept with my wife at the emotional journey this afternoon provided me with. I give blessings to the universe, blessings to that dog who was unconscious, blessings to the caretakers, I look up in the sky and I give my gratitude for it all.

Yesterday night, we went to the annual staff party to celebrate our love and joy in spite of the ugliness around us. We protest in an intimate way amongst friends who are more like family anyway, we speak about how what we are doing is, in fact, a protest itself. The revolution is fought with love and we are in battle right now, right now as we sing karaoke and play trivia and exchange our secret santa gifts in February. We acknowledge multiple times how great this is, what we are doing right now, and we cry and hug and are joyful together. We watch the super bowl and we see Bad Bunny unite us all, we do not care about the sport, but we care about the stage and the message which is given. I have tears in my eyes as I look to my wife and she has even more in hers. Benito lists off all the countries of the Americas, one by one, I see my wife bow her head briefly as he says Venezuela, I learned long ago to distinguish the word North America from America, because we are all the Americas together, I see the message of this with the performance and I wonder who else is just learning that right now, the importance of distinction, the meaning behind it and the privilege to live inside of the words which have taken over other words, swallowed them up to mean something different when the smaller ones are erased from the new definition.

I have spent so much time in the past focusing on how I am a solitary man and that much is still true, though I am choosing to highlight the social parts of myself more right now. The time calls for it and I am embracing it. It is an exhausting and unnatural thing for me, but instead of accepting defeat and leaning in to the easier outcome, I am working on bettering myself for my friends, my family, my neighbors, and myself, and I am enjoying the process, thoroughly, truly, radically.

2/3/26

My wife tells me every morning that I am not sleeping well. She informs me that I jostled her awake a number of times before our alarms were set to go off, though my body aches so much that I do not need her to tell me that my sleep was poor. She tells me she can hear me panting, short, quick gasps for air as I am living through whatever dreams I am having. I have always dreamt vividly. I remember most of them, at least immediately after waking up, but lately, I do not. There are flashes, sure, but no real plot line to follow. The lack of structure makes sense when I compare that to the visions of terror I hold on to – there are dark cars lining the perimeter of the park, there are men chasing me, they have already gotten my friends. I can not find peace no matter where I turn.

The paranoia is real. Silhouettes of plants and hung jackets make me tense up when I see them from around a corner. My mind continues to play tricks on me, morphing reality into being much scarier than it actually is. I know that it is a heightened defense system, an animal trait, and that I am protecting myself, but it is unnerving to live through day after day, week after week. I feel so soft for feelings these things, I reflect on the ease of my life thus far, I contemplate on how my peace has been robbed from me only recently, meaning I have never truly had to fear for my wellbeing at the hands of those in charge, and I compare that to my friends, my family, my peers, my people, my neighbors, those who have never quite had that same level of comfort to begin with. I feel open and soft, though I do not feel shame for feeling these things. I keep these feelings inside of me, speaking their truth only to my wife and my therapist, to my other white friends too, never wishing to make this trying time about me, trying to limit my whiteness as much as possible. But it is still real to me. I am not foolish enough to discredit my lived reality.

I move through the events in my life trying to give off a sense of confidence, trying to display that I am a member of my community who is ready to help at the drop of a hat. And it is true, I am that person who I have tried to become. Through practice and willpower, I have made it so. But when the neighbors all go home and I am left by my lonesome once more, I slouch my back and hang my chin into my chest. I shut off my senses and I curl into a sitting fetal position, nearly no trace of energy left to try anymore. I wish that I was only being dramatic, but I just can not seem to scrape up any more of my own reserves. The salty water in my eyes begin to drip at a constant rate, I have become a leaky faucet of impure, confused emotion. Normally my bouts of tears come on strong and crash when I have had enough, their formation being more of a tidal wave, a strong, righteous and natural phenomenon, whereas now I am simply a defect needed to be fixed by an underpaid, under-appreciated handyman. I know that this means my baseline is off. I know that my emotions make sense, but I do not like it.

The things that I must amp myself up to do each day, to go out and actively look for these evildoers, it makes me sick to think about. I do not want to do these things, I simply feel that I must, and so I do. These masked kidnappers will go out and abduct my neighbors whether I am inside or out, on my bike or in my bed, and so I choose to be out, to do whatever I can to mitigate this horrific, unthinkable conflict we are living through. When I am bitter about it, I think to myself that real men just want to spend time with their families, their friends, themselves. Real men want to improve their lives for themselves and for those around them. Real men move with respect and understanding, giving reciprocated effort to try and meet strangers where they are at, to work towards a common goal, to shake hands with those we will never see again and send them off with smiles. Real men work towards peace, towards and with a changing reality inside of an everchanging world. The men who look to terrorize, the men who treat guns as toys, who think that the enjoyment from hobbies must be at the expense of others' happiness, who laugh in the face of those who are open, honest, and kind, who speak about hurt emotions when they are, by every measure, the most fragile babies in the history of humankind, these are not real men. These are boys whose bodies grew up, but whose hearts, minds, and souls, did not. They are stuck, they have been stuck, and I fear that they will never mature. I fear that they are a lost cause, and so I do not much care what happens to them, though I do hope that they receive their karma in some form. It does not pain me to say or feel these things. I turn my cheek on them as they have turned their cheeks on everyone else for all of their pitiful existences. I do not wish them well.

Living through this time makes me feel sick. The body aches are intense and the headaches are constant. I am never well rested. I continue to swallow the mucus at the back of my throat, from the cold and the emotions, and it tastes disgusting. I am reminded every moment of how unnatural this time truly is.

We are having friends over tonight, and I know it will be nice. I keep on trying to remind myself that joy is an act of resistance, but I have not yet been able to find that in a genuine way. Any time I try, it feels forced. I remain unwaveringly sober, but I am filling my fragile body full of caffeine and I feel like a mess. I am anxious and depressed and so stressed that pain fills my body in many different places at many different times of the day. I have not been able to find rest from anything at any time. The only thing that makes me feel even a little bit better is that I know I am going through this with all of my neighbors here. I know I am not crazy and I know I am not alone. But when all I have tried to do is make my life more sustainable, to be slapped back down into this unstable undercurrent is very disheartening.

Though I know that I am a real man, and so I continue to try, every day.

1/27/26

They speak of infiltration, though I don't really seem to mind. There are no secrets being shared within these digital walls. All of my friends on here are my neighbors, yes, but they are still strangers to me. They exist as real people, such as myself, but if we were to pass each other in the street or sit next to each other at the bar, we would be none the wiser. And that is okay for now, that is just how this thing has been working. I know that some people with bad intentions got access to our little chats, but really, anyone could have. It's just an open link. There are thousands of us amongst these various groups – I have even heard tens of thousands – and all we do is share basic, real time information amongst ourselves in order to work towards a common goal. It is very impersonal, though we all do it for an extremely personal reason. It is a strange sort of paradox to try and describe; because of our love for and commitment to one another, we remain anonymous.

Though the anonymity ends quite quickly. Those outsiders who live far away, those who try and expose us, they are not living the same reality that we are. They sit on a screen in their basement while we are only checking our phones when needed, when we are outside interacting with our neighbors, who are also each other. We recognize faces. We may not know government names, but we know chosen handles. It's still recognition and I believe that it still counts as a relationship.

Tomorrow morning my wife and I will walk down the street to a neighbor-stranger's home and we will all remove that foreign label we have for each other and then we will all just become good old fashioned neighbors. We will shake hands and it will be solidified and I look forward to it. A few days ago, my wife and I walked to the liquor store and we spoke again with the woman who we always speak to. She was distressed. It was the second time we had seen her like this in the last three weeks because it was the second time that the same thing had happened in the last three weeks. She lit up when she saw my wife, she grabbed her phone to show her a photo, is that you? she asked. It was not, but the sentiment was sweet, that when we are at home consuming the nightly news which is documenting the reality we are physically living through during the day, we are still thinking of our neighbors, who we may only know a little bit. She began to cry and so my wife stepped around the counter to give her a hug. I followed suit and then there we were, touching, consoling, grieving with a woman who we have known for over a year, and whose name we still do not know. They may be the first thing given to us, but they are not actually that important.

This afternoon we stopped at the Mexican market to buy some groceries and we saw the same cashier who we have seen many times before. She was also there when I stood watch at her door a few weeks ago. She and I do not even speak the same language, yet we are something. Not quite friends, but not quite strangers. She recognized my wife and me and she gave us a bottle of Coke for free, she and my wife spoke briefly in their shared language and I have held on to that kind gesture for the rest of the day. This market is only less than two blocks away where the most recent execution was. Just a few mornings ago, I was standing at this intersection we parked at and I was screaming until my throat was hoarse, screaming at the masked killers who continue to terrorize our people. In the moments in between the shouting, I would see the faces of my neighbors, I recognized many of them, though it was not the time to say hello. Many of us ourselves are masked now for our own protection anyway, but when you've seen a face enough, you can tell just by the peek you might get around the eyes and the nose. In the same manner, you can imagine the fuller facial expressions from that peek, and I saw many of us wearing similar emotions that morning; exhausted, vengeful, heartbroken, confused. It was at this intersection where we shamed the men in the middle. I have never experienced something quite like it. From the floors of our lungs, we drew in our long breaths and screamed the same word, Shame, over and over again, long and drawn out. The effect felt physical, like we were hurling the sickness that we all felt at these emotionless, dangerous zombies. It was odd in a very profound, very powerful way. I know with certainty that any of us regular folk would have a hard time being dealt something so severe as intense public shaming, though I still wonder, days later, how much it actually affected these cold, robotic killers.

At this point, in my own reality, I do not care much who thinks they know about me or my community or what is going on here between us and to us. Opinions do not matter when one's livelihood is being threatened every day. Our rights as United States citizens are being stripped from us, they are taken away and waved in front of our faces, just out of arm's reach, they are dangled and we are being ridiculed for thinking that we were ever once safe to begin with. The bullies' faces laugh and they stick their tongue out at us before going cold in an instant, reaching for their gun, murdering another one, then haphazardly trying to find out how they can spin the narrative to not make it seem as bad as it really is.

1/24/26

The morning began as normal. I have been waking up with the sun a few days out of the week lately to drive the prep cooks to work and today was one of those days. I quite like being up before the day is in full swing and it is a rare thing for me to experience this so I embrace it. The prep cooks live far away, they ask me to tint the back windows for the days that I drive them so I do. I made a massacre of it, it looks ugly and the film does not stick well in the cold, but it is up. The main cook told me pero está bien, lo funciona. Still, they wear their scarves up high and their sunglasses stay on. He and his brother wanted to repay me for it but I told them no. A week later, he handed me money during our handshake goodbye anyway.

Today I picked up my other coworker to ride along with me. She is on the way and she is a good friend. We chat about the state of our city and we also chat about normal things, too, though our normal is quite skewed right now. Our collective existence is tilted and we can not pretend otherwise. We slip and fall together but we are together so it is okay. We talk of social change and the need for many different people to fulfill many different roles. I tell her that all these days I spend biking around the neighborhood, watching and reporting, following and filming these evildoers, they make me feel fulfilled within my community, though it is not something I enjoy doing, at all. Each morning I am scared for what might happen. Half of the days there is nothing in our neighborhood – though there is terror everyday in some neighborhood here – whereas the other half lead me on very intense chases, very full of adrenaline. Each morning I need to psyche myself up to leave my house. It is an odd reality. She agrees and tells me her experiences. We are very much on the same page and I appreciate that deeply. The prep cooks talk amongst themselves and I feel how nice it is to drive for an hour through the arctic winds in a cozy car full of acquaintances. The sun is out and there is no traffic because it is Saturday. I drop everyone off at their location and then I am home, back to the warmth of my house, where my wife still lies asleep. I was going to do some relaxing before going back out on bike patrol, before I would have to come back home to warm up again and prepare myself for work tonight.

But the relaxing did not come. I had started to receive push notifications from the community chat about the presence of the masked villains outside a local donut shop. Observers were being requested and I said shit as I began to get ready to go back out, sooner than I thought. Before I could even get dressed, I saw the real time notification that a man had been shot. Again. And so my heart sank and I got that sickly feeling in my stomach as I knew I was about to enter the scene of a murder. Again.

Just yesterday we had the largest mass protest in Minnesota history. I wanted to go but I chose to stay back in fear that the masked killers would use the focus of downtown to reek havoc on our neighbors. Many others had the same idea because on the call that usually hosts about fifteen of us, there were suddenly over 60. My heart soared as I felt the warmth, the safety, the camaraderie of community when I looked at that number. Our state was shut down, the majority of local businesses closing doors in solidarity with the people, and I was reminded that people are always going to show up, but they are especially going to show up when we are not pestered with work. When more pressing matters present themselves to us – or when they are brandished in our face alongside threats and intimidation – we will show up larger than what any of us thought was imaginable just a day before. Our state was shut down and we showed out. The wind chill ducked below -30º, and we still showed out. Helicopters flew above us to document this historical army of regular fucking people doing their civic duty to demand a better life, to demand a better future, to demand a better present to be living inside of.

But that was yesterday. Today is not the same. Today, the wind howls outside and I cannot tell if it is nature whistling or if it is the thousands of my neighbors doing so at the presence of the masked killers. Today there is another helicopter above us, but it flies in circles, and it flies for hours. It is not documenting the size of an enormous crowd, it is surveying the crime scene, letting us all know that big brother us watching us, making sure we do not do anything out of line – or perhaps urging us to, so the forces in this occupied state have a breadcrumb of reason to declare more power over us, to shrug their shoulders and say: you made us do this to you.

I arrived fifteen minutes after Alex Pretti was executed in the street. The video was not out by the time I left, but I did not want to see it anyway. My neighbors called for action and we came in droves. Multiple intersections were blocked off already with the masked villains, those fucking pigs, all corralled together in the center. The feds and the local law. I screamed with all the rage I have been holding on to the last two plus weeks, I screamed until I could not anymore. FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! SHAME! SHAME! SHAAAAME! My neighbors roared with me and we watched as more and more swine rolled in. Cowardly hiding their faces, following orders they do not know what for, emotionless, callous, internally compromised with the sickness of evil. Some were laughing again, of course they were. These people have had the hearts sucked out of them. I pray to whoever is up above that they receive their karma some day, that when their own life is ended they are cosmically reprimanded at the atrocities they have all partaken in here, in this moment, on this Earth, in this city of ours. I screamed at them until I was dizzy and it did not do a damn thing, I did not feel better at all, but the screaming still needed to happen.

I went down to other block and they began shooting gas grenades into the crowd. Immediately, my neighbors went to grab the dumpsters from the alley and they created a barricade against the projectiles. Dozens and dozens of the masked killers and local pig fucks faced us in every direction. They stood still and they appeared to me as inhuman. I snapped a photo because it was so surreal. These men don't feel a thing, do they? I moved over to the other end of this street to keep watch and make sure that my neighbors would not be ambushed from behind and detained or shot and killed. I positioned my bike as my own small barricade and soon enough a few neighbors joined me. A young mother and father stopped their car with the window down to get as good of a view as they could, I walked over and told them that they had been deploying gas and to be careful with the baby in the backseat, they told me thank you and they drove away. Another neighbor began to direct traffic while another came up to me and asked where can I be helpful? I responded, I don't know, I just don't want these people to get ambushed. So they stood next to me for a few minutes and offered me some hand warmers.

It was in this moment that I realized nobody here knows what they are doing. We were called here by our neighbors to show up, and that is what we did. But there are no rules to this. There are press running around with their passes and cameras, medics going to those who have been caught in the gas with their red bags and respirators, many people continuing to create a barricade with trash cans, mattresses, couches – it does not move fast most of the time, but it is a constant chaos. Emotions are incredibly high, at least for the neighbors, perhaps not for the robot army killers with masks on their face and no free thoughts in their heads. We lead with our love, and maybe that is messy and confusing, and sometimes it sucks to care even a little bit because then you are invested and you have to fight against the people who try and make life bad for your neighbors and your friends, but it is always worth doing because if we do not have love then we do not have a single other thing worth living for. And the people down the street, in direct opposition to us, they have abandoned that. They have signed away their souls at the least while at the most, they are ending other people's lives. It is completely insane. It's been ten years since the soulless abusive pedophile first took office and look how far we have crumbled. It is true that we were always meant to topple, you cannot stay upright when built on such a rotten, evil foundation, but certainly this man took more than his fair share of Jenga pieces from the bottom.

I left this scene after an hour and a half. I had lost feeling in my hands and more and more neighbors continued to show up so I thought it best to go. I saw later that the block had been won back, taken again by the people, but I was at home for that, breaking the news to my waking wife. I paced around the house and my hands ached with agony as the blood began to trickle back into the tips, I could not stop looking at my phone, catching up with the community chats, watching the new angles of the murder come out one by one, sending and responding to so many text messages, trying to not lose my mind with the overload of information but also trying not to get lost in my own head with the anger, confusion, and paranoia that were once again being brought to the surface. I set my phone down at the other end of the bedroom only to go grab it again less than ten minutes later. My wife got called off of her shift, though her restaurant would remain open. I was calling my own coworkers trying to figure out what we were going to do, not understanding how I would possibly be able to work given the current state of things. Homeland Security is lying to us on Twitter once again, bold face, cold-hearted lies through their venomous fangs, the governor says the National Guard will be called in again, and I am thrown back to the days of 2020 when we were out all day, week after week, going home because of our curfew and the horrible state of affairs we had back then, in this very same city. And we have reverted back to it once more, though this time, much worse. Indisputably worse. We can not return from this.

My coworkers moved some shifts around and those who wanted to work would work while those who did not would not. I was able to stay home with my wife, my wife who can not leave the house because of these masked killers out and about anyway for fear of being targeted and harassed. I distract myself with my game, or try to, while my wife goes upstairs to be alone and watch her own news. We are both overwhelmed beyond words. There are no words. I go upstairs to tell her that I am still going to go to the candlelight vigil at the park in between the murder scene and my job. It has only been just over two weeks and I am already preparing to go to another vigil for a murdered neighbor. It does not feel real.

We kiss each other goodbye, I tell her that I will be safe and that I will see her soon. I exit through the back door in a rush and I go down the stairs and into the garage to unlock my bike, but I find that the key has snapped off inside the frigid locking mechanism, and so my bike is now stuck, still locked to the internal wood frame of the garage. I stand for a moment with my hands on my hips and assess the reality of what is going on. I close the garage door and walk back up the stairs. I explain to my wife what just happened and she says I think you should take that as a sign and I reply to her I think I would be a fool not to.

I take off my outdoor clothes and put on my pajamas. I still can not believe what is going on. My wife and I lay on the bed together as the sun sets through the stained glass in our west-facing window. Our two cats are laying on the bed with us. I feel lucky, but that feeling is overshadowed by immeasurable grief. We order pizza and talk about watching a lighthearted movie later, though who knows if we will be able to sit through it.

While we wait for the pizza to be delivered, we move to the living room and we are quiet together. Our lamps are colored a dim red and it is easy on our eyes. I go and grab two candles while my wife grabs two holders. We pull the shades on the windows up and set the holders on top of the window sill. We light two candles in our two street-facing windows and we give each other a long hug, multiple minutes long, as we quietly cry into each other's shoulders. When we are finished, we sit on the couch and hold hands. They were our neighbors, I say to her. Rest in peace to our neighbors, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We look at the candles flickering on the glass against the backdrop of the night sky. We look beyond them and we see candles in the windows of our other neighbors as well. We mourn together tonight, again, and we can only hope that it is the last life lost from our community, though it does not feel like it will be.

1/22/26

The sensations have returned, those moments where I feel dizzy or just slightly off balance. It is either like that or like the confines of my body, the perimeter of my skin, separate from their bind for a moment and let in the energy of life from all around me. It is like taking a line of an upper, like opening a window when a house is in the midst of a flood, the slightest crack will allow a shocking amount of liquid inside and it dirties up everything and you either have to clean it, or live with it. I think that, as humans, we are always underwater with our windows up, for that is how we have learned to live. That is how we focus, we turn off survival mode when unnecessary and we are able to grow and think and become stuck in a less natural state of life. But the life does not quit around us, we have just stopped letting it in.

Until moments like these occur and you can no longer afford that privilege. Waking up in the morning and feeling like death is much, much more possible today than it was last month. I do not feel death creeping towards me, though I would be in denial to say I do not see it creeping around me, through the alleyways, in different vehicles than yesterday, trying hard to blend in, though never getting it quite right. I am alerted, more than is needed, when my brain catches something off about a situation as of late. We are all on edge. I fill up my car at the gas station and the next day there are groups of my neighbors who are assaulted and arrested in the very same spot. Even if I could have the foresight of these future events, to know these details, I'm not sure how useful they would be. Even when I have been at the gas station with these masked villains, these evil men, I have watched them go when they threaten to run us over, I put my phone away and I wait behind to eat my snack and catch my breath after the chase. Five minutes go by and then the gas station is back to normal. I watch a regular looking woman fill up her car and she has a bright orange lanyard around her neck, wearing one of the whistles that we all use. And she has no idea that there were just twenty armed killers here, they were the last ones to touch that very same pump just before her. This is just how life is, in the mundane portions of it as well – especially the mundane portions.

I do not want the foresight. I do not need to have it to know that it does not work that way, either. I was already well into my twenties when I realized that psychics and mediums do not know the exact details of the things which they interpret, that it is more like sussing things out, taking the floating blocks of someone else's particular puzzle which they can not even see, they hand over the pieces without knowing, and the interpreter's job is simply to make the best sense of it they can. We all have baggage, the good and the bad. We wade through the same pools of water and we all make our own trails, the ripples interact with each other, and they all change course. That is how it is, and then, so be it.

However, these moments when the boundaries of my body feel like they just let all the air in the world inside of me and make my head feel big and dizzy, I can not help but wonder if there is something going on inside of me. Surely, I know that there is, but to what extent? All of the bad that has been going on lately, I do not feel scared about it. Enraged, you betcha, but it is not led by fear. It is calm in its nature, like myself. I feel protected in some way, divinely, like I am trusting my gut with my actions and because of this they could never lead me astray.

Yesterday, when I began my patrol, I felt calm and I felt ready. I joined our community call and I took off on my bike very quickly, for fellow commuters were already tailing a convoy of vehicles which housed the villains. The head villain, as well. The callouts were as good as they could be because these evil men do not use turn signals and they are hard to predict. I turned around and then back around a couple of different times. It was a little warmer than it had been the last few days, it was snowing and I was already getting wet and dirty. But the adrenaline in my body kept me distracted from it. I biked to an intersection they were likely to pass and eventually they came rolling through one street over, parallel to me, and I began to kick again.

I got to a point where I could cut them off because of the bicycle's nimbleness and I joined my fellow neighbors who had been following them already. I biked right next to them, myself in the middle turn lane between both sides of traffic, I blew my whistle in their faces and they laughed at me, gesturing me to continue following them. I felt calm and determined and so follow them I did. There were about five SUVs full of them, the main villain in the second car to the front, it was white and it was covered in the dirty, wet snow from the day. The license plate read EGLRPTR and I found it stupid enough that I almost laughed but I did not because these men are terrorizers and they do not deserve the lightheartedness of good people. We followed in pursuit and made as much noise as we could. It was loud. Passersby on foot and in cars joined in when we went by them. There were maybe 20 of us, including all of the press cars, trying to get the best story for the day. They turned off one busy street and on to another.

Further down this road, I acted as a traffic conductor, holding cars on green so the entourage could pass. I had done this before and these people understand because we are on the same team. But at this intersection, in this moment, I saw another black SUV speeding towards me, jerking the steering wheel, unclear on which way he was headed. So I did not move. Not one thought of moving even passed through my mind before this SUV with two ugly men inside swerved right past me, the driver yelled get the fuck out of the way! and I was unfazed, though I probably should have been. A neighbor rolled down their window and told me to be careful out here. I nodded because he was right. I know that I am protected, but I need to be smart. I gave thanks to the sky, looking up to the universe, and continued on.

We followed them to a very random intersection near a school. It was completely residential. The leader cars, with the villains inside, stopped right in the middle, for no apparent reason. We were anticipating them getting out, but they did not. When the leader villain opened his door the first time, I saw his tiny head peek out and I said oh my god, that's him. All the other doors opened when his did, probably because these goons simply follow the wordless orders they are given and nothing more, but he closed his door back shut and so did they. The noise continued to grow and suddenly there were ten, then fifteen, and then twenty plus other people who had exited their homes, some with whistles, some with megaphones, and they berated these cars. I kept my distance and continued to whistle. It was an amazing sight to see, how quickly my community will come together to shoo these pests out of our home. Disgusting words hurled at these disgusting men, we hung out in the middle of this intersection for at least ten minutes before they sped off again, no goal in mind. It was here where I knew that this was simply a parade. There was no target here, no nothing worth doing. It was all just a publicity stunt. I continued to update my community call on their whereabouts before exiting our neighborhood.

The convoy had grown, still. I don't even know how many miles I had followed them for. I know that it was over an hour. I sped along the sidewalks so as not to get caught in the street snow or wedged between vehicles, I watched press stick their heads out of the window and take photos of me biking fast and blowing my whistle. They told me that they were impressed I was still with them. I shrugged my shoulders and felt impressed with myself too because I did not think I had this in me. But the adrenaline kept me going, I know that for sure. Eventually I dropped out. I was far from home and this was going nowhere. I called my wife to tell her where I was, to tell her what was happening. She was glad to hear from me. Without even trying, I stumbled upon the group ten minutes later because the villains were fueling up on gas. I saw a crowd of press in the corner of the parking lot, huddled around something, I imagined someone was being detained, but it really just turned out to be the leader of the villains doing a patented photoshoot. There were angry people all around, cursing his name, continuing to make noise. He looked calm, serene, even, with his head to the sky at angle he must have thought looked honorable. I couldn't believe it. I refrain from speaking with these masked killers for my own safety, I have promised my wife that I would, but I inhaled deep and let out a FUCK YOU, GREG before getting lightheaded from the exercise, the exhaustion, and the lack of rest. I pulled my bike around to the other side of the building and ate my snack, drank my water, while the entourage began to leave. I don't even know the combination of feelings that I felt. I was witnessing the epicenter of the pure evil which is happening in our backyard, and it is all just a publicity stunt. I felt even more cheated than I had been before.

So I made my way back home. I hopped on the community call again after recharging my phone and I had learned that observers were arrested and gassed much closer to my home while we were chasing this gang of terrorizers. My heart broke. Less than twenty minutes later and the very same group of cars we had been chasing was back near my home and they were now doing the same thing as the other squad. Gassing, threatening, tackling, detaining. I heard a neighbor on the call cry out you monster! How could you do this to us? and then the dispatcher saying I know this is stressful, just be calm, try and mute yourself when not giving information and I felt such a messy, conflicting combination of emotions again. I was alone and I was biking slow, my head hung low, I felt cold and alone. I felt an overwhelming feeling that they are just making examples out of all of us.

...

We are all being collectively traumatized and it sickens me.

1/14/26

It has been just over a week since I got a text from my cousin telling me that she just had her baby and my first thought upon reading it was did I even know she was pregnant? I must have, somewhere at the bottom of the drawer in my brain, that information was there. Once new but quickly forgotten. It makes me wonder, though – even if that note was crumpled up down there, even if I held it inside, if I don't retain that information, did I ever really receive it? I can't seem to check that box off in good faith. It's the same effect as if I had never had it to begin with. The text was equally surprising as it would have been if the info was brand new to me. I can't figure out how to sit with it, and so I take it at face value and tell her how excited I am to see her beautiful baby girl. Cora Quinlan. The newest life on Earth, at one point.

My other cousin, her brother, informed me that same day that our aunt had died a few weeks ago. I don't really know what happened, all of a sudden she got a cough, and then it was over, quite soon after. And I realized then that I had forgotten about my aunt as well. Just as I forget about my grandmother frequently, just as I am still unsure what those plans were for her ceremony, where she is buried or where her ashes were strewn. I wonder if I am a bad family member. To some, I'm sure that I am. But I take after my father and he divorced this side of the family a few years back. I have done my best to be a bridge, at times, but I see that my subconscious actions fall more in line with him than I previously imagined. The older I get, the more I resemble the man who gave me life, the noises I make, the smells I give off, the way I speak to friends and strangers. Those kind, gentle eyes and warm smiles. I am proud to be like my father, though being like him has shown me things about myself that I am not actively proud of.

One week ago was when they shot Renee Good in the face. One week ago is when the adrenaline started again. One week ago is when one life was taken from us and so the birth of a few hundred thousand began again. We are closer to 2020 than we have been since that time, since another life was taken from us inside the same city. We are closer to each other than, perhaps, we have ever been before. It certainly feels this way to me.

I have ceased all feelings of irritation towards any of my neighbors, north, south, east or west, if we live close to each other on a map, than we are family right now. The rage I feel towards these masked men, these invaders, these killers and kidnappers, is much more calculated than six years ago. Back then, an internal issue turned into a worldwide phenomenon. This time around the international news was sparked by an outside attack. It is so, so different. Our buildings do not burn, not so much as a window has been broken. Instead, we have dropped it all to do our best to be here for one another. It began long before Renee Good was murdered in cold blood, but the momentum surely shifted then, one week ago, today.

We communicate daily, thousands of us, across different webs of information in real time. I have never been a part of something so large and simultaneously so close together. I bike down these streets and I see different versions of myself posted on every street corner at different times of the day – I see myself in my neighbors and that is a blessing. We pull up on each other and we see that our hearts are in tune. The trust is immediate. Perhaps it is naive, we remind each other every day to assume that we are being watched, listened to, and followed. There is proof that we are. Though when you follow the information given to you just a moment ago and come to find a real human being in front of you, when your intuition tells you yes, this one can be trusted, it is a profound thing. We outnumber these masked invaders by a wide margin. We will not be protected by anyone else aside from ourselves. The trust is here, it is solid, rock hard and ready to roll. We have not been let down yet. Yes, they are still taking family members, they pull tricks on us and we are so upset everyday, we are scared, full of anxiety, light on sleep, forgetting to eat – but we are making noise and alerting each other when things are wrong. These masked invaders are more scared than we are, we see it from even behind those neck gaiters and sunglasses, we can see the tension in their eyes when they are looking down the scope of their weapons, we swarm on them quickly and they run away, back into hiding, back to the cold, lonesome company of themselves. I wonder what they talk about when they are together. I wonder if they even know each other's names. I wonder how many of them feel the shame that they should if they are not completely gone yet. Yes, I am scared when I am the first one to see one of their squad cars, but not scared enough to retreat, and without fail, I am joined by my neighbors, and we make much louder noise when we are together. When I am with my community, I am empowered, and so the fear leaves me.

The anger sprays off of me in every direction, different variations of the same source shoot out like the tentacles of ten octopi. My past self would fall victim to them, they would ravage me from the outside in, I would be consumed and become emotional, reactionary, a lesser version of me. No longer. I have shed the poison which once controlled me and I am clear-headed. I weave these void tendrils like a puppet master, I braid their separate segments into one – strength owes itself to its numbers – they look like the vines of an ayahuasca plant and I control this new power with my flute, they rise like a cobra snake, they dance for me, I pet their scales, they hiss, I sing. What was once frayed and directionless is now bound tight into a mighty strength. I am focused. None can throw me off of this course. Routine has gone out the window and I have let down my guard. Whatever is needed of me, I will do. To protect my people, I will do it. I had this vision last night.

I go to the scene of the murder alongside ten thousand others on the same day this shift took place. We joined each other in collective grief and it was overwhelming in such a human way. In an immediate response, in a call to action, because of, and for, one another.

I post up inside of the Mexican market, they have asked us to lock and unlock the doors as customers enter and exit. Without any qualification, my friends and I are now security guards for the afternoon. It is because of the trust we all have with each other.

I pick up a stranger who is also my neighbor and we drive around together for two hours, going where is needed, listening in on our group call. Dispatch tells us what to do and where to go and we do what they say. It is the trust we all have with one another which keeps us safe.

I intercept a group of the masked invaders because of my knowledge of the city. I chase them on my bike for fifteen blocks, a motorcycle joins me, another friend from the call, we whistle and honk and now more neighbors follow along with us, we pass bystanders who scream and gesture to the villains, we pickup stray vehicles like the growing snake in the arcade game. We chase them out of our neighborhood. Dispatch relays the information to that neighborhood's group call, and I mosey towards home. I am alone again, just like how it started. I feel the sensation of what it means for actions to impact people, a simple whistle getting the people out of their homes, honking which attracts more honking, more people. The trust is palpable, it oozes with goodness. I am overwhelmed with gratitude, with some inexplicable combination of emotions which I have never felt to this extent. When I must rest, I see my neighbors outside and when they are resting, I hope they see me too. At the moment, I trust them with my life – and that is only barely an exaggeration.

The ones who I fight alongside, they are all types of people. The ones I see the most are small, they are not armed men, they are queer and punk and they are ruthless. I was with one of them this afternoon and they were soft-spoken to me as we waited outside of the Wendy's for the plainclothes agents to return to their vehicle. They took a lap around the block, we followed, me on my bike and them in their car. After a few blocks, I left to go confirm the vehicle information and the next thing I know they are yelling on the community call about how they are being swarmed by other vehicles, I hear a megaphone in the background say THIS IS YOUR ONE AND FINAL FUCKING WARNING and still, they continued to pursue, honking and whistling, reading off the new license plates so the plate-checkers can add them to the database. I was in awe. This is who I pledge my allegiance to.

My tummy hurts every day from the stress. It cries out to me and I gurgle and pop on the inside. I'm sorry, boy, life is hectic right now. The masked invaders laugh when provoked, yet I am still not scared of them. Their ugly laughs give me adrenaline and I know it is not a sustainable source of energy, nor is all the caffeine. I just cannot focus on anything else. None of us can. My phone has 250 new messages from one group chat, in less than an hour. I am dizzy with the information. I must remember to take a seat on my couch instead of my saddle, to lay on my bed before I lay down on the pavement, collapsed from exhaustion. I must remember to trust my community, my friends, my neighbors. More than anything, they have my trust.

There have been a few moments in these times where I feel myself filling up, welling with emotion and becoming twice as heavy as I just was. I have not let a single tear drop thus far. I am not against it, but if it passes a certain threshold, I begin to feel my instincts shoving it back down below, deep into my gut. Perhaps this is also a reason why the tummy pain keeps coming. It is a very strange thing for me to experience, given I have built a life around my emotions and letting them roam free, straight from birth. It is much more survival than it is choice, I know this. But my body is now doing something that I have trained it not to do and there is a lack of control here which I have no choice but to accept. Not a single choice. I fantasize about when this is all over, those of us who have weathered the storm, fixed the broken rudder amidst the rain and waves, helped steer us back to land, that we will flood the streets and be joyful and exuberant to our heart's desire. This cursed feeling of entrapment will be lifted and we will all hug each other freely. I imagine I will burst at some point before then, too. I cannot continue to shove these things down for much longer. Even though it is always surprising, impressive even, to push the body and see how far it can take something.

At least I know, as a community, we are far from breaking.

...

I have woken up each morning with my first thought questioning if this is really happening. Once I determine that it is, that my thoughts are true and real and not just lingering fragments of a dream, I question the severity of it. Am I overreacting? Are we all, collectively, going crazy? No. It has been the same answer for a week now. It is a collective nightmare, one that we cannot wake ourselves up from until the dust has settled.

I spoke with my mother tonight about how I would not mind if these ICE agents were dead. I would never wish to be the killer, but they have already, all of them, drawn first blood. They have ravaged our neighborhoods and they have ruined, even ended, lives. And we still do not know when it will be over. Where is the remorse? The compassion, the empathy? All gone? When did it run out for them, how long have they been this way? And they are given permission to do this? Encouraged, even? It is ludicrous. And so, with the balance of the universe in my mind, I feel as though their times should be finished. If not now, soon enough. I can wish a soul well on their eternal journey without feeling as though their bodies still deserve to be here. They do not. They have run their course and met their end. And all of this, for what? I wonder if they have asked themselves that.

The response of our community could not have been planned. Six years ago, we had a test run at this. We were infiltrated, cooped up, a little messy. We have had until now to build ourselves back up, stronger than before, and now here we are. With organization and spirits high. Not a window has been broken, the world looks in on us behind untouched glass, clear as the sky. We have slingshotted even higher than before, higher than ever! I cannot entertain the idea that us Minnesotans have ever been as connected as we are now! Yes, this situation has exposed us for our true selves, good hearted people with love and care on our sleeves, but that alone would sell us short – we have elevated higher! And we are all better for that.

I continue to think of myself as an old man. I remember what the psychics have said about my future. The Nuremberg Trials happened eventually, even after the hellscape the Nazis created surely felt like an eternity. These new Nazis will meet their fates as well. And I will rejoice when they do. We all will. We will breathe that communal, collective breath, and we will be rid of them and the world will be a better place for it. I will be an old man one day.

1/4/26

Historical events surround us, they continue to happen and we have no choice but to adapt to them. I page through the books in my library, remembering others that have led to this most recent one. The authors find patterns and suggest different hypotheses, and now, because of their work, I hold them inside of my own mind. Analyzing the past is the greatest path towards understanding the why. I refuse to get lost in the dark caverns of others, they shout to the dampened rock in front of them, deep within their lairs, and their voices echo all the way back towards the entrances. They speak without waiting for a response, though even if they did, there wouldn't be one.

Emotions aside, can we not agree that multiple things can be true at the same time? That the lesser of two evils is still the better choice? When lives are at stake more than anything, do you really mean to tell me that your emotions are more important than this literal life on the other side of the globe? Because that is the effect of your opinion. Your determination on the legitimacy of something that is much larger than you will ever be – it is much larger than any one of us will ever be.

We all exist at a point in history where we have learned from and built upon the generations before us. We have our own children now and we hope to make the world a better place for them, for the kids who are still kids, those who are helpless, innocent to the systems of us grown-ups. The ways of the world and the powers that be. Yet, with pure certainty, there will be a day when we become helpless again, our children now caring for us while they are burdened with creating an even better version of the world for their own children's sake. A new generation, come and gone, in the blink of an eye, and history will continue to mimic itself with only slight variations.

1/1/26

Time heals all. Wounds, bruises, sores. Time provides the neutrality of the calm ocean current at twilight, thousands of miles away from any and all land. No, it is more like the unimaginable emptiness of space, for there are still waves in those ocean currents, the relatively frequent storms that shake the water, the moon's influence, the pushing and pulling – what I am thinking of is dormancy. Time eventually settles all matters into a long state of dormancy. To our human conception it might as well be forever, though it is likely not forever forever. I suppose it could still be like those ocean waves, then, to the cosmic eye.

Over time, all things become buried. Fossils and artifacts become covered in earth, the vast majority never to see the light of the sun again. Much like our own histories, the dirtiness of life continues to build on top of its past self. The Earth will never become smaller. Centimeter by centimeter, it stacks on top of itself, layer by layer and year after year. These inanimate things now buried, whatever significance they carried with them to the sentient ones, loses all meaning when the ground eventually takes over. Myths might be created, stories passed down and down and down, until the real thing which sparked the tale now pales in comparison to the collective, imagined, product. It has already transitioned from a treasure into a lesson. Generations of dissecting these fabled objects, pulling meaning from its legend. Perhaps this is healing too, in a bit different way.

I see myself validating my own bodily emotions more with age. I lean into them, I put on my costume as I leap from behind the curtain to act out my emotions alongside everybody else, but I am smiling sheepishly behind my mask. I feel giddy because I know that I am exaggerating. I am playing the part of Riley Quinlan in This Thing We Call Life. I do my best to method act, though, deep down I am still that same boy who always knew that none of this really matters all that much. It does, of course it does, but you know what I mean. I hope. You're right, though, I've only got one life to live – are you sure? – so, what the hell! I might as well live it up! I prance around the stage going from group to group, listening in on whatever problems everyone else is acting out. With my hand to my ear, my gaze tilted slightly upwards, I feel myself gathering some very good information. But when the director yells cut! and I expect to to see the physical changes of expression, to hear some compliments floating around, there are none. The people continue to bicker and it becomes clear to me that my peers were not acting. I back away quietly while they are all still arguing about their trivialities, I exit through the large, metal, swinging doors in the back, I am blasted with the real life sun on my real human skin, right into my real, human being eyeballs, all the cones and rods inside of them transfer the overloaded information to my intelligent, evolved, ever-growing, physical brain, and my brain fires signals to my nerves and my nerves move the muscles in my arm and all the way down to my fingertips and my hand rests above my eyebrow, the fingers block the sunlight, and my body tells me that I am sad now. Another thing to feel confusion about, another genuine misunderstanding. There is no escape.

Time will heal it all, though. I lean into these feelings more now because I do not have a choice, but I must make it clear that my action is due to acceptance, not defeat. I see that I am locked into this ride and I will see it through. For all I know, I myself, my soul, may have chosen to come back here for some reason or another. Even if it is just to experience the miracle of life again. I would rather be wrong about that idea and have given it my all then to have failed the mission. Oh, but who am I kidding, there is no mission. I am just here. That is all.

I would like a baby, though. I hope that is in the cards someday.

12/21/25

I am not a psychic, but I know certain things to be true. Deep within me, I move around these things that are honest, things that feel as though they are just a part of my reality. And if I did in fact make them up on my own, I do not take credit for them. They are abstract objects which give me the impression that they are pure, filled in 100%, and I abide by their existence. Just as I cannot walk through a wall, I cannot ignore these true things within me, and so I move around them, I observe them like a tourist in a gallery, I take what they give and continue on.

I experience love at so many different moments throughout a typical day and I take these moments for granted. I wish I didn't, but I know that I do. Like most other people, it seems as if I hold on to the negatives more than the positives. Or, at least, they seem to weigh a lot more. I think it's only human. I think I do better at remembering this more than others, though I do not wish to make it a competition either. My loving moments make me feel a sense of belonging, like I am nestled into a nook in the curvature of the universe, snug and warm and in synergy with all that is life. Today I feel love, intense love, no question.

In my recent days I have also felt a lack of intention. I watch that feeling come and go like a satellite in outer space, I follow different trails of thought for the differing emotions inside myself, and I give credit to all of them. Some fizzle out quickly, some lead me into other, bigger and more general, trails of thought. They are all valuable. When the satellite falls off of the horizon, I am left with the understanding that yes, it is true, this feeling of missing intentionality. And so I think I will continue to let that thought marinate and begin to step towards it, a gentle combat, swiftly correcting my course, for I do not care about speed as much as I care about direction. And I have that power within, that is always true.

As I continue living my life, I am reintegrating other lives around my own. I care about people, I love my friends, and my actions are reflecting that once more. Now that my wife and I are out of that cave we had made a home, we are happy to be doing so. Things happen to my friends, things that do not involve me, though, because I am their friend, I am still caught in the sticky web of what that means. I think this is where the past version of myself would say hell no and complain about knowing too many people, but this current version of myself just sits and observes it once more. I listen calmly, I know that I have not done anything myself and so I do not allow feelings of empathy inflate and quickly conflate into feelings of remorse, regret, shame, or embarrassment. My steps are slower and more deliberate. I know that this is just what life is and I am settling into my pace. I have matured further than ever before and I am becoming a good friend again.

I listen to old men speak about memories from their past, they speak about things they would do with their fathers, very ordinary activities in their nature but extraordinary to their lives because they have held on to them for all of the decades they have lived through. Long after their fathers have passed, surely long after they had become fathers themselves, perhaps even grandfathers, they reflect on these times with fondness and with tears in their eyes as they relive these special moments. I can hear them but I cannot see them for the tears in my own eyes are blinding me. I listen to these old men and I think about my own father, all of the minute details I have held on to, down to the smells, these romanticized versions of my past which I will hold on to for all of my days, that I will eventually tell my own son. I will be that father. Just as I once was that son, I will become that father. And it will be sooner rather than later.

I am ready for that. I have always wanted a daughter, ever since my childhood self grew out of telling my mom that I wanted a sister, when I knew it was too late for my mother to have more children – that same train of thought, that same trail of desire grew and matured from sister into daughter. But my gut continues to tell me that I will raise a son. I have lived a life full of femininity, in myself and around me. It has been an honor to be trusted by women, to learn from them and adjust my actions accordingly. I would love nothing more than to be a true man for my own daughter. Though I think I might be better suited to raise a boy, to mold another man who can be trusted by women, to be a good example instead of a bad one.

Though at the end of it all, I still simply wish to continue on with normalcy. The more normal my life continues to be, the calmer it becomes. I see the beauty and validity in all of the other life around me and I am so much more open to learning from all that I observe. I am able to express myself more authentically, thus creating a more authentic reaction from those I interact with for the day. It is a terrifically simple, self-fulfilling method of living. I continue on in that direction, unbothered by whatever pace I may be at.

12/13/25

Outside the air is frigid and I have a hard time on my way home without shivering. All I can think about is my house with all the radiators on and that is all it takes for me to smile through my chattering teeth. I know that my discomfort is temporary. I relish in it for a moment, only for knowing that it will leave me soon, remembering that the same mindset may not be there for other people. I pull from the air around me and from deep within myself, I fill my cup with gratitude and it keeps me warm on my return journey.

A coworker told me last night, in jest, that I am too worried to be a person. But that that is what makes good writing. I understood what they meant, though I chose not to expand on it. Their perception of the words I write down, the limited number of entries they have heard me perform, follows that logic much more accurately than reality does. I can't help but feel misunderstood when something like this is said, I can't help but think: if this is all you've pulled from my writing, then you have missed the point. Either that, or you have not listened to me enough. And that is fair. You need not listen to me at all, in fact, but if you are reading this right now, I would kindly ask of you to look a bit deeper.

In this process of reviewing the hundreds of thousands of words I have wrote this last decade, it is clear to me that I am not drawn to my computer for any one reason, nor even only a select few. It is impressive to me, really. I think of the way that I have always described the act of crying, that it is just the physical release of intense emotion. I cry for many different reasons and I cry on most days. It is the same for my writing, I find very strong parallels between these two things. I write when I have been filled full of some feeling, when I have gathered enough talking points over a certain duration, when I wish to tie them together in some cohesive manner. It is always about what is happening to me in my current life, what I have felt most recently. This is why I call these entries my meditations, why I call the collection of them my journal. And I write in my journal for all the emotions which I feel underneath the sun.

Today I write for gratitude. I drove my wife to work this morning and she told me, out of the blue, how grateful she felt. The car was not yet warm on this subzero December morning, but the sun was out and there were no clouds. It surprises me every year that even well below freezing the icicles will melt on a sunny winter day. I asked her why she was feeling that way and she told me it was just a general feeling. So we smiled together and continued down the road, happy and calm and in our shared contentment. I live for moments like those, and I will write for them too.

12/8/25

Before I am even awake, I jerk my leg away from my wife's hand as she reaches over to say good morning. I am not yet conscious of my actions, though I begin my day with the feeling of shame, for I can sense her own feeling of rejection. The first images in my head are of her delicate hand recoiling away from something ugly. Her intentions were sweet and the ground was neutral – don't all mornings begin with neutrality? I wish I could have met her there. Instead, I felt I was jostled awake when all I want right now is to knock myself out again. I know deep down that no matter how soft her touch, I would have reacted the same. And I despise that. But I cannot ignore the pain in my head, the throbbing of my temples, my fat, shriveled tongue sitting uncomfortably in my mouth. I do not breathe the way I did a couple months ago, it is harder, drier, uglier. Sleeping has once again changed from rest into recovery. I felt shame for my actions just a moment ago, and that has immediately spiraled into feeling shame for my actions over the last two months. This does not feel that neutral to me.

Over the last week, my wife has informed me that I am sleepwalking. She woke up a few nights ago to me standing in the bedroom with the lint catcher from the washing machine in my hands, I was cleaning it in front of her inside of our bedroom. She asked me what I was doing and I was unresponsive, yet she was able to silently persuade me back to bed. I woke up the next morning and asked her what the lint catcher was doing on the floor and she laughed and told me what happened. With no memory of this at all, I laughed with her at first, though when I was left alone again I felt that familiar feeling of fear. To her this is just something silly, acting unconsciously, doing very normal tasks, the monotonous chores around the house – to me, though, I know that it is only a matter of time until I sleepwalk to another part of the house, find something that drunkenly resembles a toilet – a drawer or a chair – and piss all over it before going back to bed, waking up confused at what this sticky, smelly mess is and where it came from. I have needed other people in my life to tell me what I did the night before, otherwise I would not have known. God forbid I stoop even lower and wet the bed again, like I have already done multiple times in my adult life...so when she tells me about the lint catcher, I feel fear, that residual shame I have locked away comes back, and I know I cannot continue on like this.

Cumulatively, I have spent two of the last five years of my life sober. I am so proud of that. At my age, it is an uncommon feat and it is not one that I brush off, not at all. Over the years, the breaks have come quicker and quicker, lasting longer each time, and so I continue to add on more sober days than I do drunk days. When I made the decision in October to go back to drinking, I was excited. My wife and I did not know where our life was headed and so I took what I could, something that actually was in my direct control, and I changed it. Because I could. Because I wanted to, because I wanted to run away again. I feel no regret in that, I do not blame my past self for the reasons behind it nor do I wish I would have kept my sober streak alive, even in hindsight. Life to me is not a numbers game, it is just about your lived experience, it is an abstract thing that only you know how to continue on with. I went back and I felt like shit the very next morning. What a surprise! Though I did not care even a little bit, in fact, I was elated to feel something different, to be back at the bar with my best friend, the foam of Guinness on my mustache, sipping Irish whisky and feeling warm, buzzed up, silly, talkative, all of the euphoric things I was grasping for. Over the next two months, this would stay the same, more or less.

I told my therapist, though, after about a month into this thing again, that I knew I was in an unsustainable upswing. I knew that this lifestyle I had returned to was not one that can manage to keep itself afloat for very long. My anxiety was nowhere to be found, but I knew it was only building up again behind the curtain, ready to attack when I least wanted it to. I was running away, I did not expect anything less. Then, the news came that my wife's immigration case was accepted, that the green card was in the mail, that we would be staying here after all. It gave us more reason to celebrate and so now the words were that I deserve to let loose and have fun. And it was true, I do believe it added a bit more fuel to the fire and allowed me a little more time courting this dangerous thing which had, already, historically, taken so much peace from me. But I just didn't care. Then I began telling my friends that even though I was still so happy, I felt my body heavier, both physically and spiritually. I could very clearly feel how much worse my health was. The contrast was right in front of me, I was living through it, I had just raised the bar for baseline wellbeing for nine continuous months, of course when I revert back to daily drinking and smoking for two months I am going to feel far beneath it. I began telling them that my spirit felt dimmer. I said these words and I felt sad for myself. I could see the looks of concern in my friends' eyes, one laughed at how obviously bad that is, one sat back and got goosebumps and teary-eyed. It is a dramatic thing and I just cannot help but be honest with people.

Before long, I was using the word addicted. In my past, I had shied away from words as large as these –  there is just so much beneath the surface to what it could mean and I never wanted to unpack any of it. This time around, though, I found that I could not run away anymore. My legs were too tired, I am older, my lungs, once again, were full of smoke. I do not personify things such as alcohol, because they do not deserve to have life associated with them, but I eventually realized that this demon inside of me was addiction itself. I have wrote about it many times before, not coming to terms with the truth that it is the shadow within, the darkness of withdrawals and cravings, eating away my insides while making me dumber and more prone to doing it more, and then more, and then more, and then more, still, even when you cannot believe that you have any more room left inside of you. It is the shadow within that moves my hand to pour that drink when I know I do not actually want it. It is more than habitual, it is an addiction. When I got here, I knew it would have to come to an end. I was not deep enough back in it to feel hopeless, not like the ways I used to feel.

I gave myself until the new year, I said that I would reassess then, though I made it only two days afterwards. I left the shower that morning and told my wife I think I want to be done again. Like today. She touched my leg and I did not jerk away this time. I felt such intense love from her just as I do everyday, I could not have a better partner. I felt the immediate relief of making a decision and the hangover that morning was something I was happy to deal with again because I knew it would be the last one. Forever, I am not sure, but at least I know it will be for a while. I cannot think in terms of forever anymore.

It feels like I have escaped from something, a haunted house inside of a burning building, I danced again with the devil and I had never felt him stronger. It is scary to think about, even right now, already having been a few days away from him. I write these words, too, more as documentation than from my typical motivation of fleshing out a feeling. I am removed from the darkness I speak of at the time of writing, thank goodness for that. I simply knew I needed to keep this for myself, before the addict in me recedes into the background once more and eventually convinces me he was never that strong, never that dangerous, to begin with.

I count my lucky stars. I give myself a quick pat on the back for doing what it necessary, and now when I go lay in my bed after a long day at work, I sleep like a rock because I have done a good job for the day, not because I have gone back to knocking myself out every night again. I will not sleepwalk anymore and when the sun comes up and my wife touches my leg to tell me good morning, I will gently roll over, I will smile at her and reach out to touch her hip, I will kiss her sleepy face and I will tell her good morning right back to her.

11/25/25

They speak and your ears may hear the words, but you will not understand the depth of their message unless you look into their eyes. The eyes speak in a different way than the mouth does, for it is not tied to language. It is not limited like words are. The windows to the soul can pierce you, transcending any sort of structured communication, instantly transferrable understanding which cannot be written down, read aloud, or properly explained. Human bodies interacting with one another and proving once more that we are irreplicable, truly miraculous.

I see pain in these eyes, there is trauma too deep to associate with simple words. We move around the world in our bodies and we experience the same things, for we have the same chemicals, hormones, genetic coding, universal circumstance – but, still, how difficult it can be to tell another person what you are going through, to even try to do so, and to be left not knowing whether they really feel you or not. But all we can do is try. All we must continue to do is try, and if we combine the spoken words with the visual contact, we will be much further along than we were before. The key, to everything, being to humanize each other in every situation. The amount of miraculous possibilities explodes when two people allow themselves to be vulnerable together.

My mother spoke last week about aliens visiting us in two years time. We listened to her and tried to decipher whether the aliens were green men in UFOs or more like angels from god, messengers of the universe, paying our universe a visit to try and correct our course so we do not kill ourselves too quickly. She explained herself well, she noted how crazy it must sound and despite our sideways glances towards each other while she spoke, we listened to her and responded in a calm way to something which sounds very farfetched. I told her at the end of it all, you did not lose me. Knowing her, I was able to understand her position much clearer than perhaps my brother's partner was. It was an interesting conversation, one I was just happy she felt comfortable enough to share with anyone, because I do not know how long she had been holding that inside. If my mother is crazy, than so am I.

In the car ride home, my wife and I spoke about technology and the older generations who are alive with us now who did not grow up with it, how much easier their thoughts can be hijacked by podcast hosts and YouTubers who gain their trust, maliciously or not, and make them believe certain things are going to happen. At its worst, they are parasites who rob their listeners of peace and money, while at the most innocent, they are just kooks with inflated egos spouting nonsense they eventually learn to believe themselves. We live in a precarious time, particularly considering the rise of technology, the loss of control we, as a society, have over it, the division our political climate faces and enforces, the interconnectedness of the globe, every keystroke and physical action being documented and recorded...we are being squeezed very tightly. We must be due to burst and ooze out between the fingers of our creator sooner rather than later.

My wife went on, then, of how I was talking in that circle and she told me that I was speaking from my head. She was right, I was looking up at the ceiling of my mother's living room, mentally scanning through pages of The Cosmos, reciting Carl Sagan's words about the high probability of us being alone in the universe, not as a cynic, simply as a man who has recently changed camps on his opinion regarding extraterrestrial life. She compared this to herself in the same situation, how she was speaking from her heart, agreeing on the possibility of alien life out there, wishing to comfort my mom as she felt our eyes on her, perhaps realizing how absurd this type of speaking could sound to a bunch of kids 30 years younger than herself. We spoke of the different sources of speech, the head versus the heart, we both agreed we switch between these two very often. We both agreed it is a very large part of the reason we adore each other so dearly. Since this conversation, I have come to believe that the ability to tap into both of these sources throughout everyday life is so vital, so necessary to have compassion and empathy to your fellow neighbor, especially in the times which we all face together. And although I was speaking from my head back at my mom's house, I much prefer to speak from the heart. It is more human, it is more natural.

When you get people together and allow them to share their thoughts, it feels as though our uniforms are stripped off. When your fellow person wishes to share an opinion, a curiosity, a revelation, and your only goal is to listen, magic will happen. Yes, it is about respect, but deeper than that it is the practice of remembering that you are one body of billions, one soul from an infinite pool of siblings, and so we do not know any more than anyone else regarding the human spirit. The miracles of life. There are no stupid questions when you allow yourself and your neighbors the safety to explore ourselves. It is in the words, it is in the eyes, and it comes with the surrender of our defenses.

11/12/25

It got to the point where it felt as though the numbers were assaulting me. Weeks of unbelievable occurrences, the slight variations of 212 on clocks and license plates, in books and TV shows, it was as if the universe was shaking me by the shoulders and laughing, pleading with me to just trust them, though knowing it was not dependent on that. It was going to happen anyway, whether I believed it or not. And I did believe it. I just couldn't give into it, not fully, not yet.

The first time I had focused on these three digits together was when I tattooed them on my friend's arm. He told me what they meant to him and I was happy to etch them into his skin in a permanent way. Though I tried my best, they were not perfectly uniform – I suppose that is part of the charm in stick 'n' pokes. The 2s are different from one another and none of the individual numbers are filled in completely. But the message is there, they are distinguishable, clear, and understandable. It must be five years since I gave that tattoo. I have seen them around often since then, thinking of that friend each time, not knowing that this combination would evolve to mean something to me, on my own, during the most difficult challenge of my life.

They represent surrender. Trust and faith. Letting go and understanding that things will sort themselves out. Remembering the moment that my wife and I got the news, how grim that morning was, it is hard to imagine these two things going together. By the afternoon we were at our dear friend's apartment, lying on the sofa in their dark, shaded living room, being held by them and crying together. Our friend was optimistic, of course they were, they were reasoning the new situation to themself and determining what could be done. But we knew that there was nothing. We knew that we faced a headless monster who does not allow any types of bargaining. We knew that our fate would be determined entirely one way or the other, it was a yes or a no, approval or denial, no in-betweens, no misinterpretation. That day was so sad, so cloudy, filled with turmoil. We began to numb ourselves because we were now removed from our environment.

Yet here we are, five months later with the approval notice in our hands, on our way to holding that magic green piece of plastic, with the peace and glee that the numbers had been promising me for all this time. I will always have trust in the future, I know that my wife and I will be alright because we will be together. It is just so nice to know that it can be here, where we had already begun to build our nest.

We bowed our heads and held our hands, we said our own version of a prayer to my parents for their protection and to the federal officer who approved our case. We knew he did not need to, we know this is a borderline favor. We do not know what he saw in us or what he thought of us. I do not need to want to get to know a person to give them thanks where thanks is due. I shook his hand in a spiritual way and moved on from it. There is still a level of respect due when two parties who could be polar opposites reach an agreement. This is what that prayer was.

11/5/25

I am a satellite orbiting the Earth, I circumnavigate according to my own plan and I observe the center of my rotation whether I want to or not. My path is circular, I orbit without ever being able to interact with what goes inside of it – you know, the good part.

No, I am more like the ejected astronaut being hurled through the dark emptiness in front of him, away from his spacecraft, away from his colleagues, away from home. I am not dead and I am not unconscious, my suit functions as normal, all I would need to do is initiate the thrusters, just a touch, to stop my momentum and to reel me back in towards where I just was. But in this moment, I do not have any emotions towards my predicament. Rationally, I imagine that I will eventually wish to be back in the company of those that I know, to be back in a comfortable setting, but as I continue to fall away from those things, I can not find even an ounce of care. The nothingness in front of me seems unchanging, the bright lights in the unbelievable distance will never begin to feel closer, I know that I could do this until I perish and I would have the same backdrop as I do now. I think these thoughts and I am still not swayed one way or the other. And so I just keep falling away, I guess.

My wife has been telling me that I have been less patient with her. She's told me three times in the last couple weeks and I feel such a big bruise on my ego because I know that she is right. I have noticed as well. I am insecure in feeling myself float this other direction and not feeling enough motivation, enough dignity, to try and come back to her, to our life that we are making together. I feel shame towards it all. Instead of manning up, I curl deeper inside my spacesuit, close my eyes, fetal position, and refuse to change trajectory, despite being fully capable of doing so.

I see my friends have fun and make plans without me. It's all I've ever wanted, you know, to be left alone. I have practiced avoiding people and events for years, as long as I can remember actually, and now it seems my wish has been granted to the fullest extent. But we still all love each other, we tell each other all the time, every day, or whenever it may be that I see them again. I know that if I really wanted to I could very easily reach out, I would be welcomed with open arms. I am so grateful for that. I just need to move my fingers in a specific way on my touchscreen and then my physical future would be changed. For the better. But I do not move my fingers in that way. I do not move my fingers at all. I continue on in isolation, I fall deeper into the embarrassment I feel towards not being a good friend, deeper into my insecurities as a person, as a human man, as a weak-willed coward.

These are the things I feel when I am at my worst. My situations are not actually this dire, I dramatize them only to accentuate how I may feel when I get caught in those internal, negative feedback loops. But I cannot do them the disservice of downplaying too much, the severity might not be so intense, I may be exaggerating, but there is still truth in all of them. I think this is how I've always written. Exaggerating to accentuate. 

Sometimes I feel as though I do not know how to enjoy things. Even when I am by myself, I sit still and I stare into the corner of the ceiling, mulling about my feelings, my thoughts, continuously piecing together my life, reflecting on what it means to be alive. It is not deep, it is actually very surface level, for the most part. It's like my nightly closing work, or early morning opening work. I clear the cache inside of myself, I am constantly refreshing my own webpage. I can never be turned off. Even the things that provide me pleasure, they always leave. I can masturbate and it will be gone in a few minutes, or I could go on vacation and have it be gone in a few days. But it will always leave me. My baseline is some type of rearranging, some type of observing and analyzing, organizing what it means to be a human being with a life. And there is no output. I guess these words could be that, they are the product of this process, but I do not publish them as articles or self-help books. Instead, they are just some insight into my own routine, it is about the process itself, that is the point, it is not about consuming the answer. It is about peering into the window of my own mind, standing up, leaving the guardrail, returning to your own process, and so I, someone else, many others, may peer into your window now, if you should let us.

To me, that is what it's about. This, these words, this life. I remember all of the times I have smiled so much that my face begins to hurt. My cheek bones beg to return to their neutral position of rest, but socially I wish to keep smiling. And it is mostly genuine, the social being that is a large part of me wishes to express my happiness in these gatherings, birthday parties, weddings, whatever it may be, I flex my face to show these people that I am happy for them. Because they are happy, I am happy, this is true. But when I return to my comfort zone, my face is neutral, always relaxed. To an outsider I may even appear upset. I get asked sometimes at work why I am so mad, so serious. I give a confused look to the questioner and respond by saying I'm not angry, I'm just concentrating. I just made 20 cocktails in 10 minutes, this is how I look when I am thinking. Perhaps I even strain my face a bit in the opposite direction, maybe I do look displeased...but I spend most of my time neutrally anyways.

I do not think people smile in heaven. When I imagine a collective consciousness, I do not imagine facial expressions at all, nor body movements, nor words, nothing to touch the senses we as humans depend on to translate meaning from one mind to another. No, all is understood instantaneously because all is felt as one, everything must be felt all the time, every possible iteration of human life must be happening all around the world, all of the time. But the highest percentage must always be some type of neutrality. That is what the clearing the cache to me looks like. It is my flavor of neutrality.

As the human race, we are all the furthest along we have ever been, as the present moment progresses and swells, as the past grows larger inside of us, we gain more knowledge and experience like a human body gains weight. Things move slowly to us, but from the outside, it is essentially frozen. Slow and fast, future, past, I must strain again to practice thinking in a nonlinear way. It feels unnatural, though I believe it to be much truer than thinking of things so two-dimensionally. My point is somewhere in the arena of remembering that nobody knows more than anyone else, at least to the degree that it may determine who is more worthy of things. We are perpetually on the same level, an equal playing field, though we are constantly pretending that there are levels to this shit, when it is just not true. We think these things on the micro and the macro, when neither are fact, when neither of them ever will be. We are all alive in the same moment, today, still climbing the precipice of what it means to live in a globally connected world. Everything is faster, everything is worse, the past had more peace, the future is bleak. If it was not due to the Internet, it was due to the automotive. It will always be true, except now we are exposed to everyone's opinion all the time. It is utterly inescapable. But, the future will be even worse later, just as we will look back on today's present moment as an unimaginably poor level of living conditions.

And so I do not lose sleep about such trivial things. I do not lose sleep about anything, actually. My sleep is always the same every night, I fall asleep easily, and I do not sleep well. I can be drunk or sober and it is still the same. I accept that this might never change, it is just my body and my mind's relationship to each other. Life is not heaven and life is not hell. I can make every decision in my life and still not change the outcome of it. It is not prewritten, but it is probably with 99% certainty it will be one way or the other, while still holding 100% that I will die the same way as so many others before me, and so many others to follow. All I do is feel my feelings, reflect on them, clear my cache, continue to be alive in the present moment.

11/2/25

A week and a half ago, I felt it all coming on. I was having a normal night at work until all of a sudden I began to feel the gravity of all the things I had been disregarding begin to pull me inwards again. It is like a black hole sucking me into my own self, it lives somewhere in the chest, it is a very natural thing. I am unsure if it's a bodily reaction to a specific sequence of events or if my thoughts had unknowingly tripped some type of alarm, but I knew what it was the moment I felt the weight again. It is not a bad thing, but it is a serious thing, something unable to be brushed off. Peering over the edge, I saw the pile I had been avoiding, and it had gotten taller. In that moment, I had the option to run away, and that is the option I took. I still wasn't ready yet.

I have maneuvered around the feeling since then and it has not been too difficult. Until tonight, I had not been forced to see that ever-growing pile of shit, it has been somewhat easy to continue on with my life and it is worth noting that I have done it in a much different manner than all the other months of this year. I am social again, I feel rejuvenated and elated around my friends, I feel belonging, like I am actually one of them. No longer the outcast who holds his own self-made barrier in front of him wherever he goes, I have given myself permission to let loose again, to dumb myself down, to feel intense things from a different angle. These experiences have not come without a price, but for now it is a price I am willing to pay. I am happy doing normal things, and running away from my problems. Just a little bit.

Though tonight, when I had come across that angelic video of a Russian chorus, young boys in a tall, slender church, performing some foreign masterpiece for their town, posted online for millions of us who had the pleasure of finding it, I felt that gravity swell inside of me again.

I feel, now, another transition, and I wonder why I must do them so often, to live life in such clearcut phases. I have not come up with any answers yet. I have been avoiding my writing, avoiding my thoughts, avoiding any strenuous activities for any reason. All I've been wanting to do is lay on my couch and play my game, to go out and party with my friends again, to be drunk and happy like all the rest of them. But I can feel the transition already completing its cycle once more and I know that I will return to real life soon. The life that I am meant to live is what I have spent most of my time doing. And that is thinking, feeling, writing, reflecting, speaking, listening, taking life on the chin, and taking it pretty seriously.

The boys in the choir moved me so easily. My eyes filled with tears and I remembered how good it felt to be touched by something like this. I was gifted some type of vision, the past or the future I could not tell, though it was full of peace and simplicity. If it was not a vision of my own individual life, it was a vision of something I am still a part of. I could feel the relation to my own self, my soul sung back to these boys and the images in my head took a familiar shape, the feeling of belonging being reverberated back to me in perfect harmony.

I know it is okay to run away. I know it is okay to miss the way I was just five weeks ago, when I had all that experience of hardship with a clear mind, completely untainted. But maybe I am meant to find more balance. Maybe these transitions are supposed to always be occurring, bleeding into the next so frequently that they are no longer transitions, they are just life. A transition can be from the living room to the bedroom, or from today into tomorrow. I told my wife a couple weeks ago how I am excited for the decision to be made and for us to have finally finished going through the hardest thing we will ever have to go through together. She responded quite seriously, asking me nicely to stop saying things like that, that certain things will be the hardest thing, and then I remembered how it was true, I have used these words before with her, and for different situations. I thought oh my god, if everything keeps getting harder, then it will never end. She asked me to reconsider the classification of these events, to just take them as they come, to deal with them the way that we do, the way that we are so good at, and to just treat them as life. It's just life. And with this simple request, she changed my perspective on something I have been building up for almost a year now.

I've grown tired of neglecting myself. I had a nice time in my hibernation, I poured 80 hours into a video game in one month's time and it felt remarkably comforting to do that once more. But I would like to ease back into the things I have spent most of my time alive doing again. The leaves on the trees are bright, entirely vibrant, and I can not help but feel excited for the stillness of the colder months. The wind was monstrous today and so many of the trees are much more bare than they were just yesterday. I feel calm at the thought of another winter spent here. No matter what happens, I know we will have that.

10/8/25

There is a kitten in front of me. A tiny, little, orange, two month old kitten, and she is the newest addition to our family. She is a handful, she bites the computer screen whenever I pull it out and so my usual tasks have been all turned around. My wife and I love her crazily, she drives us wild and despite all of the irritations that come with toddler cats, our hearts pound loudly for her. The meeting with our other cat is going smoothly too. Slow, but smooth. We are well prepared after our failed attempt last time. It is interesting to touch the same wounds from a year ago, to feel the spot where pain once came from, now only to feel the hardened callous of a scar, the leathery plastic type of skin, the one that is proof of wisdom, information gained, oftentimes, proof of a loss. But that is how we get better.

Alongside the new kitty, I broke my streak that I was once so proud of. I still am proud of it, I talk about it openly and honestly, my decision was not impulsive, it was calculated despite it being a big risk to take. But I am happy with this new page turned. I tied my old record and I have learned much more this time around. My life did not return back to my old ways and so I knew that taking the first sip would mean I am in new territory. And I felt it immediately. The morning after was a wave of relief underlying the intense physical pain I was feeling on the surface. Life since then has been good. It has not been perfect, but it has been good. No matter which direction I take in any circumstance, it feels new, and new feels good. Moving with all of these tools in my bag makes me feel confident. I change my outfit each day, my mustache is back at the request of my wife, I've bought two new pairs of shoes after years of not doing so. I feel as though I am shifting from moment to moment, not even day to day, whenever I move rooms within my house I am putting on new hats, equipping different crests, I shed certain abilities by gaining others – there are only a certain number of slots to build my character.

So, I am happy with my life. All things considered, there is nothing I would change right now. I have held on to that feeling of acceptance that I earned a couple months ago and it feels good to hold. Acceptance is like a super power, it is the key to a calm life, and it is the singular attribute I wish to take with me whichever room I enter. And it is something I am discovering has levels to it. Even if I try with all my might to accept what is in front of me, my reactions may be emotional first. Just this morning I asked something of my wife and when her response was not what I wanted, I rolled my eyes at her. I left the room, I came back, and I apologized. The eye roll was reactionary and I felt a little embarrassed that it happened, but it did. It would be worse to ignore it, to justify it to myself when I was alone in the kitchen, to seal the envelope and store it in my drawer of justifications. She and I have spent so much time together lately and for some reason my insecurities are flaring up, worse than usual. It is a slow and constant cycle of happiness, content, negative reaction, and then dealing with what those reactions entail. Sometimes I can keep it to myself, other times these reactions are done to her. Neither one of us is perfect, but even just going off of how many back-and-forths I have given her these last few weeks, I have given many more apologies than she has.

And I mean them all. I feel shame too often, but it is a shame that I know means progress. It is like two waves in the ocean crashing into each other and rising as tall as a building, one being my ideal world, one being the real world. Acceptance is something I need so badly, and securing it as my prized possession is a step well taken. I am grateful for it. I am grateful for my wife, grateful beyond words that we can speak about our problems calmly, resolving them as quick as they come. It takes effort, compromise, lots of willingness, but we have both, and we have lots. We end all of our nights with a tickle fight, laughing so hard we cry, expending our last bits of energy before sleeping soundly beside one another. She is my soulmate. I know whatever bad may come my way, it is only in balance with the unbelievable amount of good that she has brought to my life.

A couple nights ago at work I had a regular ask for my birthday, time, and place, she said it's not for your Zodiac, it's for your Human Design. It was slow at the bar and I was intrigued enough to play along. She read me my synopsis from her app and I began to get tears in my eyes, a bulge grew in my throat and I couldn't speak back to her. She asked me if I was getting emotional and I told her yes, and she told me hers made her emotional too, she said these things to me as she read words back to me that I type by myself in front of my computer, she spelled out my appreciation for being a soul inside a human body and I was stunned, my soul sung from the inside of my shell in the shape of tears and my human brain thought about how amazing it was. This stuff doesn't happen to me in public, only in the confines of my own home, where I am comfortable, where I am safe. Standing in front of her and her friend, naked, amazed, moved, shook, it was raw, it was so powerful.

I still check our immigration case everyday and nothing seems to change. I wonder what is going on behind the scenes, how many days have happened where our case is untouched, waiting for someone else to initiate the next step, and I wonder which days progress has been made. I wonder what I was doing during those times, well aware there is no way I will ever know in this lifetime. I hope to know when I am gone from this Earth, when the details that are happening now will not mean anything at all, for curiosity's sake. I know that the bigger pieces mean something, the larger shifts inside of me, the character building, those mean something. But where I live, how I spend my days, the human made checked boxes or lack thereof, I realize that these are not important to me, to my soul deep, beneath my shell.

It makes me glad to know that a human lifetime feels fulfilling to us, that it is enough time to learn and experience so many things. I can only hope the same can be said for butterflies, for birds, for tortoises, for all spectrums of life. The intense idea of relativity, things being different for different species, different stars, different levels of life still weighs on me heavily. Not as a burden, but more as a pillar of truth. Like the laws of nature, it is something that everything which happens inside this reality, the one where you are reading this right this very moment, something I accept as a boundary. Nothing I could ever know existing outside of its reach.

I feel like a simple man, though sometimes I feel too much for my liking. Physically and mentally, sometimes I wish I was harder, tougher, more durable. I feel like a sponge, but that is who I am. And I love who I am. There is no question I am in a new chapter now, there are too many changes to deny this truth. I have also just turned 29 and so I know that this chapter might be the last before the new book begins. I love changing, I love getting older, I love my life for what it is.

9/23/25

I light the torch that is mounted to the side of the wall for my return journey. I know well that I will need it. I've removed myself from the company of the others, I slunk away without anyone noticing, though I didn't mind much if anyone did. It got to the point where it was hard to keep wearing a smile, so I let my mouth hang, my eyebrows relax, and I continued on.

I couldn't help but fantasize the past tonight. This path has gotten to the point where I keep finding myself saying okayyy, I get the point, are we near the finish yet? and being met with no answer each time. Just the impersonal drone of the space ahead of me. No end in sight. And so my impulses told me it would be better to chug a beer, to drink my stinky whisky and just forget about trying to do anything. All I wanted to do tonight was let life steamroll me and be okay with it. I wanted to drown, I am tired of treading water, it is not an act I can do for much longer. But I made it back to shore for the evening, high tide helped me on my way, and my reward was my wife in our bed reading her book, looking like a grandma, drinking her THC drink.

The path has turned into a tunnel, the tunnel is where I lit the torch just a moment ago. I stop in the middle of the eternal concrete, wet and dark, and I wonder if others' look similar to mine. Surely there are many which are similar, though, surely again, mine is the only one with the same exact cracks and drips in front of me. I think of all the advice I've read online about sobriety, immigration, bicycle repair, all these topics I've took to the internet to learn about and help me in my own specific situations, and I am reminded of this tunnel I am staring at. I compare it to the hypothetical paths of all the others whose words I have read, whose words have helped solve problems and provide reference, knowledge, a priceless comparison; and I am thinking that no matter what theirs might look like, they, too, have a forwards and a backwards. They have covered ground and still have ground left to cover while I have studied their lessons. The same could be said for me, obviously.

I say all this because it struck me today that I have filed these words of advice into a superior category, one that lives above my own reality, I have replaced the carrot on the stick for motivational speeches in some form and I try to chase them down, forever. The words are static, though the people are not, because they are people, because people can never be fully static. We change, we adapt, we fail, we learn without help because that is what living inside this universe entails. My original thought about this was in response to hypothetically breaking my sobriety. But once I followed it a bit further, my cravings were soothed and I was left with a piece of newfound knowledge that I found on my own. I lit the next torch ahead of me. Though I will still never forget all those behind me which were lit by others.

Others are not perfect, so I should not expect myself to be either. And I don't, for most things, but it is also, perhaps even more so, bad for me to personify the words of others into some type of perfect beings, unachievable in an eternal way, because we are alive, and we will not be someday. Comparison to the expectations of deities not only robs my joy, it laughs at me, looking down on my attempts to make it up to their level.

So I accept all that. I am also accepting that the powers that be can change whatever rules they want to fit whatever actions they want to take. My wife and I wish to leave because there will never be safety for her, at least not a guarantee. We live in a despicable place, embarrassing in every regard, and so the bitterness has grown calloused and our departure date may be sooner rather than later. We want to move to a place where we are both immigrants together, a place that would be happy to have us, a place where we can make a new citizen for it and watch it grow safely, happy, and away from here.

I feel a bit alienated from others lately, and it makes sense to me. It's been hard to talk so much, so I have been feeling lazy. I've been needing more time to recharge. Maybe it's a safety mechanism, too. It will be odd to see these words when I am much further down the line, when I have moved on from this place, physically and emotionally.