Guess Who’s Nine?!

August 1st, 2025

Somebody turned nine years old today and I’ll give you one guess.

I’ve expressed my love for Marvel in countless ways over the years; she’s been there for me for a quarter of my life, and through some of my hardest times: getting sober, losing my job during the pandemic and then my mom the same year.

She’s an extraordinary being.

I don’t understand people who don’t understand animals, though it doesn’t make me angry; it creates a pity in me. They’re our fellows on this planet, brilliant and funny and caring and pure. Being disconnected from nature (which includes our furry friends) disconnects us from our own humanity. I don’t know another love exactly like the kind she gives me and I’m grateful for it every day.

So, please, feel free to wish our baby girl a happy birthday and I will read each one to her. She’s the best and deserves every drop of joy and sunshine she gets today, and every day.

Leaving Me Here On My Own

July 28th, 2025

I finished my summer Ethics course this week, and to wrap it up we had to film a short video about what we learned. I feel so strongly about taking this class that I wanted to share it with you, too. Feel free to respectfully debate me anytime.

“I had a fantastic time doing a deep dive into ethics this summer, and by ‘fantastic’ I mean I have become an insufferable human being who is terrible at dinner parties.

I already enjoyed philosophy quite a bit before this class, but to be allowed and required to read and watch and write about so much over the course of eight weeks was – and I’m biased – something I think every citizen of our country should do at least once every decade or so. One of my favorite parts of all this is actually very silly. I love how we got to know a philosopher just long enough to go, ‘Hey, this is a great theory’ before – BAM – we were introduced to all the reasons why it was a bad or incomplete theory. That’s great training for how we should approach any idea, new or old.

This summer, I got to reexamine everything I think and then really ask myself why – and sometimes I didn’t like the answer. I also got to articulate why I didn’t agree with what someone else had to say – and they didn’t like the answer. There were a lot of disliked answers. But this was all in the service of having robust, thoughtful, civil discussions with the people in my life, which is what we should all be trying to do today.

It’s interesting that I would find a thing or two in each ethical theory that I already believed in, and I realized that that’s how this works. We take what’s useful to us and throw away the rest, and try to explain to others why what we keep is important.

Speaking of politics broadly, I read an Atlantic article earlier this summer about Alasdair MacIntyre, and how America has become so fractured because we’re not speaking the same moral language. We don’t have a framework to agree upon. So we have an ethical crisis because we’ve basically ignored traditional virtue ethics in favor of our individuality and our emotions. It’s left us with no moral legs to stand on, and we sound incoherent to each other when we speak or, more likely, when we shout. Having a basic knowledge of ethics would go a long way in helping us find a common ground and a common moral language again.

I’m so glad to have had this class at this time not just for my own sake, but for the tools it’s given me to help people figure out their own ethical frameworks, instead of parroting talking points or headlines or engaging in one of my favorite overused phrases, cognitive dissonance. So thank you to everyone in this class who stayed engaged and thank you to Wes for organizing such a well-rounded course. This is time I used very valuably and I can’t wait to do it again in a decade.”

Shadows on the Wall

July 22nd, 2025

I’m almost done with my summer Ethics class and I am intolerable.

Allow me to annoy you with my pointed criticism of cultural biases (it’s like all I do these days).

I’ve written several essays over the years about philosophy. I once talked about how all of it was pointless up to now, as the world is still fucked up despite everything that has been thought and said, passed down and around; I wrote another when I realized I’ve been doing philosophy this whole time and apologized profusely.

The thing is: I’m a nerd for a lot of things, and philosophy is one of them.

As a result, I cannot stop challenging everything everyone says, and it’s only gotten worse.

For example: I don’t think that human beings need to work. Really. And I got in hot water last week for feeling this way, but allow me to use a conceptual example to explain.

Imagine a boy who is born on a faraway island. His parents have a small hut, and they grow some of their food and catch or hunt the rest. Besides this, there is no work. The boy is basically allowed to do whatever he wants for the rest of his life: go swimming, play games, fall in love, paint, think about stuff, whatever.

Is this boy a horrific disgrace and parasitic failure, a waste of hypothetical humanity?

If you said, “Well, no, that’s cultural,” then I got you. That is exactly right.

The idea that people need to work is a cultural bias of ours. The way that America has designed its society has indentured every generation of its citizens, so almost all of us have to work jobs that most of us fucking hate. If you want Amazon packages and coffee shops and strawberries year-round then, yeah, everyone has to work. But human beings don’t; just Americans.

You have no idea how hard of a pill something like this is for most people to swallow. Or maybe you do, because you’re choking on it right now.

But the wealthy and powerful use shit like this, our deeply ingrained beliefs and biases, to get us mad at each other instead of them. They perpetuate them, pour gasoline on them and light them up.

Thought exercises like these are how we stop staring at shadows on the back walls of caves and develop our own moral frameworks that can withstand the extreme cruelty and immorality of our present climate. We need to be standing on our own two feet, ethically-speaking.

So: I know I’m intolerable. But I’d much rather be adjusting my eyes to a painfully bright sun than spending my days underground.

Book Fair For Grown-Ups 2025

July 12th, 2025

So: the Book Fair For Grown-Ups by Inbound Brewing Co. happened today at the State Fair Education Building after going viral last year at their brewery. I thought it was such a neat idea and signed up immediately.

Now: I do a lot of events. My expectations are always as follows: I hope to talk to some cool people today. That’s it. That’s all I hope will happen. This is why I’m generally so genial at events. They almost always meet my reasonable expectations.

The Book Fair For Grown-Ups radically defied any rational expectation I could have had for it.

I don’t think I have ever seen so many people in the Education Building before, and it was all a bunch of delightful nerds. There were cookie blind dates with books. I saw old friends and made so many new ones. We laughed and we cried, seriously. We opened at noon and I sold out of The Weirdos by 3:30?! I got interviewed by NPR?! Who the heck thought it was a good idea to interview me?! (Btw, thanks, Juan!)

Look, I know there were line issues. But I am here to say that the only events that don’t have growing pains are the ones that don’t grow. Do with that information what you like.

Thank you so much to: Inbound, Rachel, anyone who worked or volunteered, all the other vendors, but especially to every single reader who showed up today. Wow. You made this a day to remember and I am so grateful to have been a part of it.

I am so excited that there are dozens more people who will get to the middle of Theia and say “wtf dude. really?”

The Mole on My Neck

July 8th, 2025

Last weekend, I was playing video games with a little kid (a little kid I know, not some random little kid) and between Mario Kart races he pointed at me and said, “You have a mole on your neck.”

At first I thought he was being a dick. Like little kids can be. Have you ever taken a little kid to the grocery store and was terrified that they’d start saying honest shit to the person standing behind you in line?

Anyway, I was wrong. Because he followed that observation up with another one.

“Look,” he said. “I have a mole on my neck, too.”

And that’s what I’ve been trying to get across.

There’s this cliché we say, that human beings are so similar to one another and not as different as we seem. But that’s too abstract. And it’s why we remain so divided.

What we need to do is find specific shit we have in common and start there.

Like somebody wearing a t-shirt featuring an obscure band you love. Or enjoying your favorite beverage or snack. Or talking about a book you just read or a show you can’t stop talking about.

Or the moles on our necks.

I try to get my son out of the house every day. We usually go for a walk. I’d say it’s the thing I care most about right now as a parent, to keep him connected to the outside world and ground him in nature.

Whenever I see another person out there, I think: Wow. Look. You’re just like me. Walking around in the dirt, looking at trees and birds and shit. And you chose to do this. You chose to come outside and be hot and to put down your fucking phone for five fucking minutes and we’re both here, just a couple of humans breathing actual air and seeing each other.

Seeing the moles on our necks.

There are some really shitty people in the world right now, and they are hurting so many, but I refuse to believe that they’re the majority.

I think that most people have a mole on their neck, just like mine, and it’s just the first of an infinite amount of things we have in common.

Everything is Alright

July 2nd, 2025

Last week, we were chatting at home and she asked me a hypothetical question: what would I do if I accidentally had a sip of alcohol? How would I feel? Would I consider it an end to my sobriety?

I told her a definition I made for myself a long time ago. To me, the end of my sobriety is only one event: the conscious decision to pick up a drink. If there was ever an accident, I would trust myself (and the hours and weeks and years I have spent with dear sober friends who have taught me how to live like this) to find my way back.

This afternoon, we spent some time in downtown Northfield, picking up cheap vinyl, watercolor supplies, and coffee from Goodbye, Blue Monday (it’s exactly how I remember it from high school?!). After, we stopped by a local restaurant.

We ordered a couple of non-alcoholic drinks to start. We took a sip of our own, and then tried each other’s. She thought something seemed off about mine.

I asked the server about it and, sure enough, mine was alcoholic. It was totally my fault; all of their non-alcoholic drinks share a name with their alcoholic counterpart, and I failed to specify which one.

My hypothetical suddenly came true. An accident had occured.

And, like I was so sure I would, I found my way back.

I took it seriously. I stopped acting until I had more information, and once received, I made different choices. It really was as simple as that. My entire existence today is based in the idea that I can change and make better decisions and you never really know, not truly, until you’re tested.

This kind of situation can be a major setback for some people; I’ve seen it happen and I’ve heard the stories. But since I defined my own sobriety, in terms clear and certain and meaningful, I am able to use this as an opportunity to reflect, sigh in relief and, above all, be grateful.

I’m sharing this because sometimes I make this look really easy. I’ve been sober for almost eight years and there are many of you who don’t even know the me I used to be, and this guy I am now, who is nice sometimes and has never drank, is the guy I always was.

But that isn’t true. And I struggle. It’s an alcohol-based world out there and dangers await around every turn; but there’s also grace and love, especially the hardest kind of grace and love, which is the kind we give ourselves.

If you’re struggling, I fucking see you. This shit is hard and nothing makes it easier except love, and I love you. You should love you, too.

I have to say, though, that the hardest realization of the day came a little later: our server never carded me.

And that is actually the thing that will keep me up at night.

America’s Shadow

June 11th, 2025

Let’s talk about immigration real quick.

“Real quick” because I know how short your attention span is and I’ve been thinking about this so much lately that I can probably share in a few words.

We can chat about the complex reasons citizens of a country feel the way they do about immigrants to that country but, in America, there is a big one that I feel is often and duly ignored:

We have not dealt with what we did.

The shadow.

When the group who made up our modern majority came here, they committed horrific acts that we have not addressed in a truly meaningful and healing way.

And, because it is not settled, the American people are deathly afraid that someone else is going to do it right back to us.

When I look around, I feel like that’s really it.

People are not upset because being undocumented is a criminal offense, because it’s not; it’s actually a civil one.

And the people in L.A. are doing the thing that every good person I have ever met in my life (and also Jesus Christ) would do: they’re taking care of their neighbors.

Meanwhile, we’re being gaslit by a dictator butterfly who has finally emerged from his authoritarian cocoon (what a beautiful monarch).

He says that people who wear masks cannot be trusted — then sends masked people to our cities to tread on and disappear us. He says that anyone who commits violence and crime will not be tolerated — but pardoned 1,500 violent criminal insurrectionists. He tells us that he cuts federal spending and he’s trimming the fat of the government — but is in the middle of passing an insane bill that you need to read to believe (and maybe not even then) while also putting on a birthday military parade that is costing taxpayers $45 million dollars.

$45 million. The next time I hear one of you complain that your taxes are going towards feeding the children of your community through a free lunch program (which is as pro-life a program as any), I’m going to remind you how much more of it went towards a fascist parade.

I said “quick” and I went over by a few words. Sorry. I get a little passionate sometimes. But there is going to come a time, not too far in the future, when we look back and see who was standing up for the right things and who wasn’t.

The right things are so fucking obvious right now, guys.

Even if those relationships are repaired, the ones that have been ripped apart by this ethical demolition Donald Trump planted right underneath our feet, they will never be the same.

We will know who cared. We will know who actually kept in touch with their morality and empathy. We will know who was kind.

And we will know who abandoned every decent thing that makes us human because they lost any and all connection with the human that they are.

[Please check out Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue from last night if you want a better idea of what is happening in L.A. and the hypocrisy of sending in troops now, when the city is not burning, versus the complete lack of response during the actual wildfires just months ago.]

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Comments on the Comment Section

June 9th, 2025

The internet has done a really good job of making us feel really bad about the state of society and I’m going to try to simplify why while offering, I hope, a little sip of hope.

There is one undeniable fact about any comment section on any social media page:

It lowers the bar for humanity.

It does so, I believe, in two distinct ways:

  1. Externally: the quality and condition of human beings who self-select to participate in comment sections is questionable at best and affects how we view humanity.
  2. Internally: how people act on the internet sets the stage for how we approach and interact with people on the internet and, more generally, other humans of the world.

I think a lot of us make the fallacy of believing how people comment on the internet is indicative of how the whole of humanity thinks, feels, and acts in reality.

This simply isn’t the case.

And I want to refer you back to my earlier use of the phrase “self-select.”

“People” do not make themselves heard on the internet; the particular and peculiar kind of people who want to be heard on the internet make themselves heard on the internet.

Do you hear what I’m saying?

A comment section does not give you a balanced view of humanity’s perspective on any person, situation, or topic; it gives you the view of what vocal people online think of a person, situation, or topic, and that is actually a very small percentage of humans on this planet.

More broadly: the internet is not the real world.

Yes: the internet can affect change. It can affect words, thoughts, and action in the real world.

But it’s not reality in itself.

And I think being ignorant (or forgetful) of that objective truth has led a lot of us to have a pretty fucking miserable view of the people who live on this earth with us.

The solution is an obvious and healing one: talk to the people around you and, if you can’t stop reading the comments, at least be smart about what a comment section is.

It does not represent truth. It does not represent a sensible proportion of the population.

It only contains the specific kind of people who want and choose to be part of that kind of conversation in a very public kind of way.

They want you to think that their views are widespread or common or even popular.

They want you to think that hate is the default and the only type of important talk is shit.

They get off by making you feel alone, because that is how they feel, and so deeply.

Don’t let them. Get to know your neighbors. You will not love them all. You were never meant to. But you will see their value and their values, and you will be frequently, pleasantly surprised by how good so many of us truly are.

SpringCon 2025

June 7th, 2025

Another SpringCon is in the books and I just wanted to give my gratitude to all the organizers, volunteers, attendees, and my fellow writers, artists, and vendors. You all are the best and I’m not just saying that; you’re kind, inspiring, and annoyingly talented.

I took basically no photos today and that’s a testament to how in-the-moment I stayed.

I know that we live, as they say, in “unprecedented times,” but an event like this reminds me of what we should be doing; it’s natural medicine, the cure to apathy, rage, and hopelessness.

If you’re reading along at home, I can tell you how:

Figure out what you’re passionate about. Find the people in your community who are passionate about that, too. Go to an event where those passionate people are. If there are no events, create one yourself.

And then give the people you find there all the love you have and feel it back ten-fold.

That’s how these events go for me. It’s not about sales or the “grind,” the relentless pursuit of capitialism; it’s about connection and conversation and catching up with a hundred of my closest friends.

If things are going well, I love that for you. If things are hard, remember that you have this huge community behind you. And if you’re scared of all the changes you’re going through, embrace that fear, take a huge breath, and just know: the best is yet to come.

I don’t know it; I just believe it.

Thanks again to everyone to suited up and showed up. I’ll see you again soon.