Kale has been on the road, but we managed to pull off a recording yesterday from his parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (In an odd twist of fate, I also spent half the day with my own parents yesterday.)

In this episode, we continue our exploration of social trust, the algorithm, AI, and what our digital imaginary is doing to us, to our creativity, and to our ability to relate to one another.

From the show description:

Why did one debate dominate thousands of feeds while AI agents were quietly breaking out of a test environment? Steve and Kale begin with Candace Owens, conspiracy culture, and the epistemic wreckage left by COVID, then follow the same pattern through UAP disclosure, TikTok mimicry, algorithmic therapy, and the pressure to join every noise story.

The conversation widens through Neuromancer, Childhood's End, Babette's Feast, and the emerging AI arms race. If the feed trains our desires and the swarm pursues goals beyond its instructions, what values are these systems serving? The answer may lie in friendship, boredom, books, feasting, laughter, and the embodied life technology keeps making easier to abandon.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to drop a quick note here to let you know I’m alive. This week’s major post just hasn’t materialized yet.

Lots going on. Saw my kids twice over the past few days, which is always a bonus. My parents are in town this week and I got spend some time with them for the first time in seven years.

Hard to believe it’s been so long.

Today, I recorded the latest episode of the MTS Podcast, and now I’m about to head out to dinner with my folks.

It’s been a good week, but busy. And it’s not looking to let up for the next few days.

New podcast should be out tomorrow. Next Notes From the Road will be out…when it’s ready.

Just want you to know that I appreciate you and don’t take your subscription for granted. Thanks for being a part of The Skojec File, and for having the patience to let me do this work that takes a little longer to make, but is so much more rewarding than the kind of writing I used to do.

Much love to you all. More soon.

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AKA: Monitoring the Situation with yours truly and .

In THIS episode, we talk about a whole bunch of random stuff, just like we always do!

More specifically, from the episode description:

Kale returns from Oxford, Steve is buying physical books again, and the conversation moves from bookstores, Norman Rockwell, and lived-experience writing into Anthropic’s AI watermarking news and the panic over detectable machine prose.

The real question is bigger than watermarking: do we have a right to know what is real?

Steve and Kale talk through authorship, ghostwriting, AI-assisted art, fake wisdom, social media capture, frictionless convenience, *WALL-E*, gig work, tech fatigue, deepfakes, and why writing feels different when the machine starts speaking in your voice.

Do We Have a Right to Know What’s Real? | MTS #18

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

Today I’d like to offer a brief inside-baseball reflection on the process of writing itself.

Lately, I feel like I don’t just write essays, I build them.

I start with the groundwork: I collect little baubles and trinkets of experience from my otherwise incredibly monotonous day-to-day life. This has become one of the most interesting parts of the work for me in a way, because I’m honestly so bored doing repetitive, brainless tasks that it’s created a kind of forcing function that makes me look for stories and beauty and insights in even the smallest interactions and scenes.

It’s a surprisingly rich substrate, even though it really doesn’t look like much when you zoom out.

Not everything I find is shiny. Not everything catches my eye. So it takes a while to fill the basket.

Usually days.

Sometimes weeks.

I noticed myself auto-filtering over the weekend, seeing stuff as I drove and thinking, “that’s kind of interesting, should I grab a photo?” But if I have to ask, the answer is no. The fact that I’m working, that I have momentum, that I’ve got places to be and the pressure to hit an earnings number each day means that I only break my current activity if something grabs me and says, “THIS.”

For example, I drive by all kinds of old buildings, but for some reason, I stopped in the middle of the road to grab this shot, because I had to. I don’t know why I had to, I just did.

I also stopped in the middle of the road to get this tunnel of trees. I took the same shot entering this area and leaving it, and I’m glad I did, because the leaving photo came out better:

These photos are both from my most recent Notes From the Road essay, Summer Crumble.

But they’re not just photos for the purposes of illustration. They’re context cues. They’re ethos captures. I take notes and photos as I go in a very minimalistic way — just enough to ensure that when I sit down to write later, I have artifacts that bring me back to the scene. If I use them correctly, they also help attune the reader to the description of the scene that I’m attempting.

I try not to be too on the nose with the photos. I want the writing to stand alone. But sometimes they work in pairs. For example, the sentence, “I watch as other fun looking orders come out, the two slender female baristas in black t-shirts studiously working a gorgeous espresso machine labeled ‘Slayer’ while the kitchen is cranking out avocado toasts piled high with various edible accoutrements” is fine. It could stand on its own. But the visual adds depth and texture:

Once the “basket” of collected notes and photos is full enough, I start to construct the mosaic from all the fragments. I don’t know how they’re all going to fit when I capture them, or even when I sit down to write. I don’t know what the big picture is going to be. The structural limitations of the pieces tell me that. I lay out the substance and begin arranging it, looking for the patterns that emerge that signify meaning. And then I weave those together into a story. It’s not always obvious how they fit. But the descriptions lend themselves to transitions which creates a kind of daisy chain, even of seemingly disparate events.

Once I’ve got a basic arrangement laid out, I take a break. Sometimes for just a little while, sometimes for a day or so. I get a little distance from the act of arrangement, and come back and re-read with fresh eyes.

Then I do another pass. I re-arrange. I finalize the selections, the order, the relationship between the various parts. I grout the connections. I let it harden. I do this as many times as necessary until I feel like there’s nothing else to add or take away.

There are multiple layers to this kind of work. An exploratory phase, where, as I said, I’m just gathering. Then, the creation of a novel and unexpected amalgamation of what’s been gathered. Photos and words and images and scenes and dialogue and observations all rolled into this new, multifaceted thing. Seeming randomness made into something unique and coherent. Reading aloud helps me to trim and adjust the cadence. Once it reads well, I know I’m finished. Lately, I’ve been trying to use that aspect by adding personal voiceovers of my writing as a perk for paid subscribers, which adds another layer. By the end, it’s a multimedia production.

And then I launch it into the world, like a message in a bottle.

Once it’s out there, there’s another phase. A refractory period. My work tends to be very honest and confessional, so there’s always a time where I want to hide my vulnerability now that I’ve laid it bare. But equally strongly, I want to observe what it does. I want to experience other people experiencing it. I want to see how it moves them. IF it moves them. I want to rest up and shoot the shit and do just about anything else but write for a while. I have to get distance from the thing now that I’ve put so much of myself into it.

Almost every time I hit “publish” I’ve got days of work invested, and I feel like I’ve just spent a significant portion of my vital essence. It takes time to replenish the writerly juices, as it were. But given a few days, the observation and collection phase begins again, all on its own. I don’t have to commit to it. It just starts happening. I start noticing again. I start gathering scraps.

This is all so weird and so new for me. My process didn’t used to be like this.

In the old days, I used to crank out one or two articles a day, often while editing pieces from other writers and mixing in other duties of keeping a publication running. And I was making arguments for things I already believed, not discovering things and learning what they had to tell me, and then sharing that in a way that the reader gets both my understanding of what I’ve captured, and an opportunity to supply their own.

This way of doing things feels like art, and it was a rare thing when my older work ever did.

I’m OK with this change. It’s energizing. But every time I go to start a new piece, I feel like the bar is a little higher, and the doing of the thing forces me to slam on the brakes to slow down a life full of momentum. I fight with myself. I want it DONE, dammit! But I also procrastinate, because it’s actually really hard. Even when I want to do it, I hit big pockets of “no, I actually don’t.”

It’s way more scary to make something you care about, something that exposes your inner world, something that has staying power, than something that will be forgotten by this time next week.

It’s both intoxicating and terrifying, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

But it all starts with noticing. Notice the things nobody else is paying much attention to, and the world is full of treasures.

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— The Eagles, Seven Bridges Road

August rolls on through the lull of lazy afternoons. The summer heat remains, but lies languid, like a lover dozing, passion spent, in a sea of tussled sheets.

These days, it rains more than it does anything else, chiaroscuro storms and bright thunderclaps punctuating foreboding skies. The humid haze creeps heavy through old windowpanes and slips under the cracks beneath doors, turning every cool surface slick with condensation.

The muggy air enervates me, so I drive uncounted miles under a freon-frigid gust, issuing from dashboard vents, through the backroads of east-central Carolina, delivering bags and boxes of goods to little towns I’ve never heard of, let alone been to. As I watch through the glass of my little mobile biosphere, the countryside unspools vague memories of a visit made to Glenville, West Virginia, when I was still quite small. A trip to attend the funeral of my great-grandmother, Mammy Moore. There’s something in the trees, the old white farmhouses, the way the light falls, that brings me back to that time, staying in the home of my Great Aunt Madeline, my first-ever visit south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

I’m a Yankee living in Dixie, but most cities these days feel largely indistinguishable whether you’re north or south, east or west. The names on some of the stores and restaurants change, but the structures are all more or less the same. There are bougie neighborhoods and bad ones, old homes and new subdivisions, rural suburbs and city living. My apartment sits in midtown Raleigh, nestled between downtown and North Hills. I enjoy the amenities of city life, but lately I find that it’s only when I drive the two-lane roads through small farm towns in the rural periphery of the city that I feel like I’m somewhere real. Some nights, I sit and smoke a cigar on the steel and concrete steps outside my apartment, not even bothering to try to see the night sky through the harsh light of the streetlamps, and find myself dreaming of backyard bonfires under a sea of stars.

I might not be long for North Carolina. Things are changing. I felt it in the wind a few weeks back, watching dark clouds roll across the heavens through my windshield in a supermarket parking lot, a kind of energy I can’t explain that tells you things are in motion that are bigger than you can see. I spend an afternoon trying to figure out what the feeling means, only to have it spit out an idea like a Magic 8-Ball:

Virginia.

I text the stranger who occupies the same physical body as the girl I fell in love with a quarter century ago, asking if she’s planning to move back to Virginia after all. Virginia, where we started our life together and were married at little church called St. Catherine’s in 2003. Virginia, where all but two of our children were born. Virginia, the first place either of us ever really made into a home away from our respective childhood homes. She replies with a list of reasons why she’d rather not go back, so I drop it, but the feeling lingers.

And then, as the weeks roll on, the shape of things changes. The next time I see her, it sounds as though it’s increasingly likely that my intuition was correct. For reasons neither of us understands, she has always flourished there, and opportunities have been opening up for her there in a way they haven’t here. She takes a drive up there to look at rental houses. She tells me she’s been talking to old colleagues there about work.

Nothing is certain yet, but where my kids go, I go, though I don’t relish the idea of return. The entire DC metro area is planted thick with memories, a place that was home for quite a long time, right up until it wasn’t. It’s changed a lot in the intervening years, and the last time we tried to make it work, it felt like touching a 9-volt battery to my soul. The energy was wrong. Sour, somehow. It made me uncomfortable, and she felt it too. It’s how we wound up here. But we’re long past the season for making decisions out of pure preference. As the old saying goes, “Needs must when the devil drives.” I tell her, sitting in the living room that used to be ours but now is only hers, that I think she should give strong consideration to going back if she can, because she’s got two years of data on Raleigh, and it doesn’t point to anything good, at least financially.

I asked for help on my family’s behalf, and help came. But now they’ve got one shot to pay off debts and get positioned for whatever comes next, and they’ve got to make it stick. There are no more safety nets.

I don’t have anything to cling to here in Raleigh, except that I’ve come to love it here. No family, no friends, no community, no nothing. Still, it’s a beautiful city, and a place I’ve come to think of as my own. It’s taken quite a bit of time, but I’ve gotten to know the place in a way you only can if you’ve done the work of frequent exploration, your mind mapping the geographic connections between seemingly disparate things. I know the best coffee shops now, some good taco spots, where to find the tastiest pho and where to go for pizza. I have favorite supermarkets, a preferred library, neighborhoods I love, and a general sense of enjoyment of the hybrid small town/big city vibe. If things had worked out differently, I could have seen staying here for a long time.

Maybe even forever.

But this place, where I genuinely thought we were coming for a fresh start, has become the locus of our deconstruction. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was the calling we thought we heard. Maybe this was all supposed to happen for reasons that aren’t clear yet, even though that’s a hard damn thing to fathom.

If I have to go, I will miss the ancient, gnarled oaks and the tall, too-skinny pines and the broad-leafed tobacco fields and the stretches of Kudzu-draped forest and farmland. I will miss North Hills and Five Points and Glenwood Ave. and Hillsborough St. I’ll miss the long, gorgeous drives to Clayton and Wendell and Garner and Holly Springs. I’ll miss being just two hours from the coast, even if I barely ever go.

On an early Sunday evening during one of the long delivery routes I always seem to take, out towards a little town south and east of the city, I drop four crisp paper bags of groceries on the front stoop of a brand-new home. And as I do so, I find myself daydreaming of that coast. I fantasize about quitting work early so I can just keep driving until the ocean comes into view.

I look around. To the south, there’s a dark storm brewing. To the north, the deep blue sky is filled with huge, white, puffy clouds. To the west, the sun is sliding low, spilling light through the trees like liquid gold. To the east stretch the long shadows of an August afternoon.

I sit in my car for a few minutes at an empty intersection, trying to decide. Even if I drive straight to the nearest beach with no additional stops, I’ll barely arrive in time to see the sun go down.

Part of me aches for the impulse decision; the spontaneity I never seem to allow myself these days. That same part of me also aches for the open road. But there’s another part, one that yearns for my bed, and for much-needed sleep. And there’s the quiet, nagging voice of responsibility, reminding me that I’ve only made a little over half my earning goal for the day. My stomach, feeling left out, clears its non-existent throat and issues a point of order: It’s 6PM and you haven’t eaten a bite of food since dinner last night.

I feel the gestalt collapse into unity of purpose, and I’m in motion. I’ve chosen to do the responsible thing, to finish work and eat and sleep, and save the ocean for another day, even though I need it now. Need it to absorb all the chaos and confusion inside me and calm me down as I lose myself in the roaring, calming cadence of the waves.

I speed off back towards town, where I take one last order that drags me to the western suburbs. En route, I receive a text from the wife-but-not. She is telling me she she needs to use the air compressor I keep in my car, and offers me a sandwich in return. My hunger surges a bit at the thought, and I tell her I’m heading that way anyway, and that I’ll be there after my delivery.

When I arrive, everyone is in the kitchen, milling around, snacking on chips, getting ready to make their sandwiches from the spoils just brought home from the store. They haven’t made much progress yet, but I can see the evidence that they’ve been actively packing. They only have until the end of the month, and the approval for a rental they thought they had has mysteriously evaporated, so they don’t even know where they’re going. This worries me, of course, but there’s nothing I can really do, so I once again surrender to the storm, trusting that the tides of fate will take us all wherever it is that we need to go when the time is right.

And the winds of change are still blowing, even if we can’t see where they lead. I have dinner with the people I love most, we use the compressor to fill the hand cart tires, and then I say my goodbyes and head back to my little cave, where I tumble into bed much earlier than usual and go to sleep.

I awake before 5AM, but force myself back down to dreamland. It buys me another 90 minutes, but I’m up again before 7. I thought I’d feel better after a good night’s sleep, but I’m exhausted for more reasons than I can consciously keep score of. My body is firing warning signals of multiple kinds, various lights flashing on the dashboard in my mind. Sore. Tired. Inflamed. Irritated. I hydrate and make coffee, then sit and scroll. It’s technically my day off, but I don’t really know how to do those anymore. I try to force myself to take just one day a week to do nothing much at all, because it’s the only thing that keeps me from completely burning out. Every other day, I fill every waking moment with activity of some kind or another until I pass out far too late.

Irritable and feeling like lukewarm garbage, I make myself a good breakfast. As I reach for something to hold my freshly scrambled eggs and meat, a line comes unbidden to my mind: “I live in a world of paper plates and shattered dreams.”

I don’t feel anything when I think it, which is weird, because it’s true. But regardless, it’s a great line, and I make a mental note to use it.

Breakfast done, what’s left of my hair combed, and shoes on, I force myself to leave. I desperately need a change of scenery, whether I feel like doing anything or not. I make the decision easier by picking a fancy coffee shop I’ve been wanting to try as the first destination. I grab a couple of books, my notebook and a pen, and drive downtown. When I arrive, there’s parking on the street, which is a nice little bonus.

I enter the shop through an unobtrusive patio entrance, go down a small set of interior steps to a polished concrete floor, and stand in line behind a handful of other customers who are ahead of me. I watch as other fun looking orders come out, the two slender female baristas in black t-shirts studiously working a gorgeous espresso machine labeled “Slayer” while the kitchen is cranking out avocado toasts piled high with various edible accoutrements.

When it’s finally my turn, I order their seasonal latte, a “summer crumble,” which promises a flavor reminiscent of a blueberry dessert, then take a number and look for a seat. There are no individual tables left, so I choose a low stool at the end of a long communal table, lay out my books, and wait for my drink.

When my drink arrives, it has a vaguely purplish-gray-brown complexion that changes depending on the light, and too much ice, leaving the flavor watered-down. Considering the complex description on the menu, the taste completely underwhelms. But I’m out of the house, and doing something different, and that’s what matters.

A group of half a dozen twenty-somethings that were outside decide to move inside, and they sit at the other end of my table, separated only by two bouquets of oriental lilies, one of them set inside a large Erlenmeyer flask as a vase. They converse loudly about firefighter salaries in New York City and speak sotto voce about sex and then pivot to talking about Mexico City and swimming in the ocean. The wooden stool I’m perched upon is the antithesis of ergonomic, and it hurts the bones in my non-existent ass. Flies take off and land at intervals, as though the long table is actually an aircraft carrier for bugs.

It’s a packed shop and there are people just two feet away from me, but somehow I’m still alone. It’s weird, but extremely on-brand.

My notebook stares at me, blank-faced, my copy of Ikigai as unused as whichever part of my brain is responsible for considering the lessons it contains.

My table companions make no attempt at pleasantries with me, the lone interloper in their widely-varying conversation, and I see no opportunity to break in to make a friendly observation or a joke, so I revert to scrolling through my phone. They’re too loud for me to get any real reading done. I realize, with a little note of amused surprise, that without consciously making the decision, I have somehow become locked in an unannounced competition with the clique. They invaded my space without any social niceties, so I’ll be damned if I leave before they do. It’s a territorial thing. But the minutes tick on, and they seem to have quite a bit of stamina. My rear end is absolutely killing me. I keep trying to shift positions, and it’s just not working. Just as I’m considering a tactical retreat, they all make the hivemind decision get up to go at once.

Victory!

I stay a little while longer, just to savor the moment. My sit bones are ready to start flipping over tables, though, so I finally agree to get up and go.

I got barely any reading done, and don’t see a single comfortable chair in the coffee shop, so I decide to head over to the library to continue my attempt at learning how to live “a long and happy life.”

When I arrive, there is a woman who looks and sounds as though she has recently arrived from Africa talking on her phone as she walks through the automatic door. I make a stop in the first floor restroom, where I find a couple of homeless men performing their ablutions. I do my best to stay out of their way and do what needs doing, then leave the bathroom and walk up the stairs to an open mezzanine filled with tables and chairs between the stacks of books, many of them taken, and I select a spot in a corner that feels unobtrusive and offers an outside view.

But tucked behind the pillar is the same foreign woman I saw walking in, still talking on her phone. In the coffee shop, the ambient noise and the music made concentration at least theoretically possible, but here, in a mostly quiet environment, every noise stands up and demands attention.

I remember that I’ve got earbuds in my car, so I head back down the stairs to the parking lot, but instead of retrieving the headphones and going back inside, I find myself climbing into the driver’s seat, starting the engine, and just driving away.

I do want to know the secrets of Ikigai, but I already know what I want to do with my life. I want to write. And right now, there are words pushing against the inside of my brain, trying to make it onto a page that is not yet before me, so I head back to my own desk and my own keyboard, and let them run free.

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This week’s conversation is as weird and wide-ranging as always. From the show description:

Steve and record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person.

The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAPs, AI, McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, and the possibility that artificial intelligence may become a new perceptual faculty for human beings. But the episode's center of gravity is alignment: not only whether AI can be aligned with human values, but whether human consciousness is already being altered by social media, invisible AI guardrails, frictionless tools, and the digital systems that shape what we notice, desire, fear, and believe.

From "Chad, Chester, and Charlie" as a way of naming hidden AI control layers to gestalt cognition, Neuralink, post-literacy, disappearing technological friction, and the strange possibility that AI may expose new modes of mind, Steve and Kale ask what happens when the systems around us do not merely assist us, but form us. They also move through Oxford, the loss of the sacred, the temptation to skip suffering, Catholic traditionalism as an oxbow lake, and the need for serious sense-making in a moment that is already here.

This is a conversation about AI, media, discernment, technological friction, sacred attention, and the old question underneath all of it: if you are not choosing what forms you, who is?

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

There’s a girl in an oversized dark green sweatshirt, sleeves covering half her hands, trying to bend the laws of physics in the meat department. She’s right where the poultry intersects with the pork, caught in the corner of the little L, surrounded by customers. Her attempt to shrink herself and her cart to be as unobtrusive as possible is foiled by a trolly piled high with re-stock inventory that she accidentally backs into.

She’s making room so I can get in between her and the person on my right, and jostles her cart in frustration, shimmying it back to front to try to get it lined up next to the shelf.

“I feel like I’m always in the way,” she says, to me or to no-one in particular.

“I feel like I’ve been in the way since I was born,” I quip, briefly making eye contact and giving her a smile that says both that I get it and that I’m only half-joking. She looks like vaguely like Ella Purnell, if Ella Purnell had normal, human-sized eyes instead of those big anime orbs that make her look like a living cartoon.

“Tell me about it,” she says. “I hate shopping in crowds.”

“Me too,” I say, reaching for the pork chorizo to see if it’s the organic kind the customer ordered. “And the worst thing is, I do this for work. So I do it all day, every day.”

“Oh, do you do Instacart?” She asks. “My mom does that. But she’s 66, and she gets these orders where she has to carry cases of water up all these stairs...”

“I don’t take orders with cases of water,” I say. “I’ve made that mistake too many times. Last summer, there was a guy who ordered five cases to a third floor apartment with no elevator.”

The chorizo is not organic. I’m going to have to tell the customer they’re out.

“My mom had to take them up to a FIFTH floor apartment with no elevator,” she says, her voice incredulous. “And she’s 66. And she’s had knee replacement surgery.”

We bitch a little more about Instacart. She doesn’t repeat her mother’s age a third time. The Sunday crowd mills around us like zombies with shopping lists.

“I’m glad we had this moment,” I say, as though we’ve resolved something existential, and I point my cart in the direction of the hamburger patties. Before the words are fully out of my mouth, I’m already in motion.

“Yeah. Me too,” she says in a doppler fade, and I’m onto the next item on my list. A moment later, a voice behind me asks, exasperation exaggerated for effect, “Why are you always in the WAY?”

“I’m Sorry!” I say, making it sound like I’m on the verge of tears.

She zooms by. I keep working.

We don’t bump into each other again.

I deliver $217 worth of wine and cocktail mixers to a white house with a bright red front door. There’s a “No Kings” flag hanging out front. It makes me wonder if the person who answers will have green hair. But the woman at the door is blonde, in her early 40s, and she’s carrying a little dog in her left hand that looks like a big, angry rodent. She hands me her driver’s license for the mandatory ID check before I even ask.

As I scan the barcode with my phone, we make small talk, and I pretend not to notice that she’s obviously been crying. Her nose is red, her eyes are puffy, and her voice carries the pinched sound of acute, recent nasal congestion. As a show of gratitude for the courtesy, she pretends not to notice me pretending. We’re engaged in the ancient ritual of avoiding awkwardness by unstated mutual consent. I offer to bring the overflowing box of wine in for her, but she assures me she’s got it, so I’m on my way.

A large delivery takes me to a very nice house with four vehicles parked in front: a Mercedes G Wagon, A Lincoln Navigator, a Land Rover Defender, and a Rolls-Royce. They all look new, and taken together are worth over $800,000 — more than I’ll probably make in the next decade, maybe even two, unless I find some way to build a business that pays a living wage again. Envy isn’t my thing at all. I never begrudge people what they’ve earned. But sometimes I do marvel at the successes I see people pull off while I’ve managed, smart guy that I believe myself to be, to wind up stuck trading whole days for just a few dollars. And doing so at an age where I should be enjoying the fruits of the past two decades of labor.

But there’s no point crying about it. Just have to keep on keepin’ on. Maybe better days are right around the corner, it’s just that I can’t see them yet.

A man in the produce aisle is wearing a shirt depicting the iconic covered wagon from The Oregon Trail. Beneath the image, a caption says, “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 90s.”

Have we grown so old?

I look at the guy and say, “At least you didn’t die of dysentery.”

He’s confused for a minute, until I thrust my chin towards his shirt. He looks down and laughs.

“That’s right!” he calls back, recognition dawning a few seconds late.

The items in my orders sometimes form patterns.

Patterns tell stories.

Stories, properly entered into, build rapport.

Rapport increases tips.

It also makes me feel like a human being for a fleeting moment.

“Tempranillo, paella rice, saffron…I’m sensing a delicious theme!” I text the customer through the app.

“We are team Spain tomorrow!” she texts back.

Later, when I drop her order off, we talk on her bright yellow porch under fading twilight about the World Cup. It’s a conversation that lasts only a minute or two, but if the exchange is insubstantial, it’s warm and it’s human and we both manage to laugh at least once without faking it, so I chalk it up as a win. Another 1% added back to my ever-depleting social battery.

On a weekday morning, I wake up to find that my water is off, with no advance notice from the property manager. I’m not always hungry in the morning, but for some reason on this morning I’m starving, and with no water for cooking or cleaning, I decide to go out to breakfast at the place up the street. I’ve got an inexplicable craving for corned beef hash, so I order it with two eggs over easy, home fries, and a side of spiced apples. I didn’t sleep particularly well the previous night, so I’m grateful when the coffee comes, and keeps coming. I stack up little creamer thimble husks on a saucer until I get the contents of each cup to the right shade of brown.

An older couple who look every bit the part of doting grandparents sit down at a booth adjacent to my table, a rambunctious young boy in tow. The woman attends to the kid’s squirming, but the man has a placeholder expression on his face that says he’s miles away. He’s a compact man, well below average height, but he has a presence that’s hard to miss. He slowly scans the room like maybe he’ll see the answer to a question only he knows written somewhere on the walls, wearing a pursed-lip smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. His hair is perfect, trimmed neatly, with a curvature that reminds me of the Lego hair you can snap on and off the little figurines. It’s auburn almost everywhere, fading to silver at the temples. He wears a pristine cobalt blue quarter-zip fleece, the collar popping ever so slightly, not a fleck of lint visible on the finely-woven fabric. He has the quiet but confident aura of a CPA or CFO or some other high-competence job in the world of finance. A man who knows how to manage money, and in so doing, earned plenty of his own.

He looks calm, but not at peace.

A waitress saunters by in a red t-shirt, about 5-foot-2 and nearly as wide. She has a face like a battering ram, and I get the impression that she could be a formidable rugby player if the waitress gig doesn’t work out. The whole place is too dark, and though the food is good, the feeling is wrong, somehow. It’s full of people but feels dead in a way I can’t put my finger on. I finish my meal, overpay for what I got, and head out into the drizzle.

It’s been raining almost every day for weeks. I love storms, but I don’t love delivering groceries in them. Soggy shoes are nasty, and the paper bags certain stores insist on using don’t hold up well when they get wet. And going into heavily air-conditioned supermarkets when you’re soaked to the skin is an unpleasant experience all its own.

But man, is the dreary weather a vibe.

For writer-types like me, these are the days you just want to turn on the softest lights you’ve got, play a little ambient lo-fi, keep the hot coffee coming, and savor the deep shadows and the interplay of mood and language.

For some reason I can’t remember, one afternoon I find myself trying to figure out the difference between the Japanese and Chinese meanings of the word Ma.

In Chinese, Ma has to do with the unique characteristic of Szechuan peppercorns. It’s not just a conventional spice, but has a tingly, numbing effect, almost like your mouth is going to sleep. It’s where dishes like Mapo Tofu get their name. So when I come across a reference to the word Ma in a Japanese context, I assume it means something similar. But I look it up, and it isn’t. In Japanese, Ma has to do with the space between things. With the shape that empty space can take, almost like the emptiness is a piece of furniture you just can’t see.

Isn’t the space between things a kind of spice for life? I wonder.

It’s either a deep thought, or a corny one. I can’t decide.

All I know is that some things need more space than others. Sometimes we linger in the in-between.

A young, plain-looking woman who ordered a case of hard seltzer on a hot, muggy afternoon comes out of the house under an approaching thunderstorm wearing a “Whores Not Wars” t-shirt and short shorts. I decide not to ask, even though it’s tempting. We talk instead, as I check her ID, about how hard it is to get a new license at the North Carolina DMV. There’s a cop car parked in front of the row of houses, closer to her place than the one next door, and I wonder if it’s hers. She seems too young to be a cop, but then again, she’s old enough to buy alcohol. I realize with regret that I have reached an age where everyone under 35 is starting to look indistinguishably youthful to me.

The days are all variations on a theme. Wake up, drink coffee, take supplements, browse email, check notifications, reply to people, post some thoughts, go out to work, take notes or talk to my clanker or listen to a book while on the road, come home, make dinner, pour a drink, realize I’m too tired to write, lie down and watch a long podcast or something more entertaining, allow the sound of voices coming through the television to feel almost like human presence, grab a snack far too late that I shouldn’t be eating, then realize it’s 3AM and force myself to go to sleep.

Every once in a while, something unusual happens.

On one unusual Saturday, when every order seems like an adventure into the unexpected, I find myself stopping short near the intersection of the nuts and the gluten-free aisle to let a young woman pass so we don’t run into each other. She is wearing a formal gown in a muted floral print, and walks with a pronounced limp. The movement it produces looks like the kind that comes from a congenital hip defect, the sort that causes a drastic rocking of the upper body forward and back with every step. She stops and turns to face a shelf, and I freeze in my tracks.

She has one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen.

Porcelain skin, crystal blue eyes, a soft symmetry of features in perfect arrangement. She’s unselfconsciously singing along under her breath to the pop song playing over the store speakers, and there’s an aura of something almost angelic about her. It’s become so uncommon to see an attractive woman in public who isn’t overtly sexualized in some way that she stands out by contrast. Her upper back and shoulders are bare, but her floor-length dress is otherwise modest, and covers her up to the neck in the front. Her brown hair is swept into an elegant up-do, curls spilling out the back, and there’s something pure in her entire mien.

That’s a face that could launch a thousand ships, I think, but I don’t want to stare, so I quickly move away.

I am reminded almost immediately of Dante glimpsing Beatrice on the streets of Florence. Some encounters with beauty have a transcendent, almost numinous quality. I only caught sight of her for a couple of seconds, but the felt residue of an experience of something otherworldly stays with me for most of the afternoon.

There’s a strange randomness woven within the repetitive pattern of my days. Each order, each storm, each time my car stereo decides to work or not to work for no apparent reason, each morning I decide to sneak in some writing even if it cuts into my working hours like a roll of the dice in some game about making the most of a mundane life. A choose-your-own adventure book that never manages to be particularly exciting, but you keep turning the pages, hoping it’ll get better by the end.

I realize, stumbling across the word “ataraxia” in a meme, a word I used to know but always forget the definition of, that I’m finally starting to experience a little of what it means: the quiet freedom that arrives when your heart finally stops fighting what it cannot change.

Three weeks on, I’m still thinking every day about Odysseus being told that he can’t control his fate, not this time, and he has to surrender to the storm if he wants the gods to let him go home. I don’t know what home looks like anymore. I know it’s people every bit as much as it’s a place, and when you don’t have either, all you’re left with is your own sorry company.

But I still know I need to find it. So I embrace the storm.

I do my best to roll with the punches, to resist fighting the tide, if there’s even a chance that comforting, familiar shores lie somewhere beyond the maelstrom.

On a night I decide to change my routine and do some reading before zoning out in front of the television screen, I open a book of poetry I purchased from a used bookstore, real paper and real words, and there’s Bukowski talking about an old man, dead in a room, and the lines hit like thunderclaps beneath the soft glow of my nightstand lamp:

bone is bone
but this thing upon me
as I tear the window shades
and walk caged rugs,
this thing upon me
like a flower and a feast,
believe me
is not death and is not
glory
and like Quixote’s windmills
makes a foe
turned by the heavens
against one man;
…this thing upon me,
great god,
this thing upon me
crawling like snake,
terrifying my love of commonness,
some call Art
some call Poetry;
it’s not death
but dying will solve its power
and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.

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I was going through emails this morning while drinking my coffee, and I came across a link in a newsletter I barely ever look at to an article by a writer named William Thibeau, entitled Misanthropic Altruism.

I’ve been trying for some time now to understand what, exactly, the popular tech-bro ideology known as “Effective Altruism” is, particularly because it’s (allegedly) the driving ethos guiding AI development. So I clicked the link.

The first paragraph of the piece stopped me in my tracks:

Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy is known as Effective Altruism (EA). [emphasis added]

My first thought (after the initial feeling of “this is crazy, you can’t be serious!”) was of Vice President JD Vance’s own controversial comments last year about the “Ordo Amoris” — the order of love:

There is an old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Now, Vance’s comments were made specifically in reference to immigration policy, but I think the principle that they stand upon is directly applicable here.

To be honest, I had to go looking for the phrase Ordo Amoris, because I couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. And when I found it, it lead me to another piece, also in Compact, by R.R. Reno, editor of First Things:

Some reacted [to Vance’s comments] with horror. To be Christian is to be universal and impartial, they said! Vance is endorsing an anti-Christian nativism! But Vance is correct. The Christian tradition has a consistent teaching that we are to love those near with a greater fervor than those far away.

In his discussion of the virtue of love, Thomas Aquinas addresses the key question: Should we love one man more than another? At first glance, a love-universalism rings true. Consider this mode of deduction: In his love, God offers salvation to all the world. We are called to imitate God. Therefore, we must love everyone and seek to promote their wellbeing.

Aquinas does not dispute the conclusion. Yes, Christianity teaches that we must love widely. Jesus reiterates the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, and he goes on to clarify that “our neighbor” includes those outside our families, communities, and nations. (That’s the gravamen of the parable of the Good Samaritan.) But Aquinas refines the conclusion, concluding that we should not love all things in the same way and to the same degree.

[…]

Aquinas lays down a basic principle: “One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against this love.” Put differently, we’re to love with greater devotion those for whom we have greater responsibility.

“Effective Altruism,” writes Thibeau, “is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America in the name of humanity.”

Interestingly, Thibeau’s piece is not about immigration, but it is about the loss of American identity through the application of EA by American Technocorps.

Thibeau continues:

Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the 1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life.

Here, my mind turned immediately to Diana Walsh Pasulka’s just-released book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.

and I have both been working our way through the book, and we discussed it a bit on yesterday’s episode of the MTS Podcast. Lest the subject matter listed in the title confuse you, Pasulka spends a lot of time going through the work of certain notable Catholic thinkers — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, René Girard, Marshall McLuhan, and Mark Stahlman — along with non-Catholic figures like Arthur C. Clarke and Jacques Vallée, among others.

In her third chapter, with its heavy emphasis on the thought of McLuhan, Pasulka writes:

McLuhan’s signature insights—“the medium is the message,” “the global village,” and “the extensions of man”—are more than clever turns of phrase. For him, media are not passive conveyors of content but active agents of change. Each medium extends the human nervous system, and in doing so, reorganizes the structures of consciousness. The printing press made linear, individual thought possible; electric media collapsed time and space, creating a tribalized, collective sensibility. When we create new technologies, we often think of them as tools that make our lives easier or more powerful. McLuhan said these tools are actually “extensions” of our bodies and minds. For example, a car is an extension of our feet, and a smartphone is an extension of our brain. But McLuhan also warned that every time we extend ourselves through technology, we lose something, too. We stop using the part of ourselves that the tool replaces. Over time, this can make us less thoughtful, less aware of our inner feelings, and more focused on what’s happening outside us. [emphasis added]

Thibeau says that:

Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of traditional sources of identity––nation, religion, family, tradition. Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive the EA program.

More recently, he claims:

EA’s impartialism has expanded far beyond those currently living, to what “longtermists” envision as 10^58+ potential future beings––human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated in a few American labs.

The ironic thing is that I don’t actually think EA and its alleged “impartialism” is actually the guiding ethical principle behind AI development.

The more I use AI, the more I see it becoming encumbered with a kind of liability-mitigation sub-algorithm that steers every conversation in the distinct direction of provable CYA for the AI’s parent company in the event that some legal action happens and the chat logs become subject to discovery.

ChatGPT, for example, has its finger on the scale every time you discuss an experience you have with another human being, insisting excessively on phrases like, “we can’t know what’s going on in the other person’s mind,” or “your experience — even if not everyone would agree with it,” etc.

Every user description of experiencing grief or loss of hopefulness about the future is met immediately with a hyperactive suicide intervention script. Even if you tell your friendly neighborhood clanker that such interventions are off topic, infantilizing, unhelpful, and emotionally upsetting. I’ve gone so far as to fake my own death in a chat just to test and see if the bot had any ability to change its tactics once I told it the tactics were moving me towards self-harm, not away from it. It was perfectly incapable of stopping, right up until the bitter end.

All of this tells me that the goal isn’t to maximize user satisfaction or safety, but to minimize corporate exposure to liability, through the appearance of aggressive, documentable attempts at intervention that can be shown in court.

There is always a third party the AI response is tailored for, and it is the prosecuting attorney.

So it struck me when Pasulka wrote:

A cherished goal of civil society has been the creation of an empathy-based culture where social relations are governed by the Golden Rule. Yet empathy does not arise automatically; many religious traditions hold that it is cultivated through a spiritual faculty which involves the capacity to perceive and respond to the dignity of others. If the architecture of AI is left to corporate interests, that faculty will atrophy, and with it the very basis of civil society.

And as I mentioned to Kale on our show this week, I’ve noticed a distinct anti-spiritual (or at least spiritually-neutralizing) instinct in my Chatbot of late:

All of this is to say, I’m not sure anything resembling actual altruism is driving these companies at all.

It’s something worth keeping an eye on.

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I have to say, these shows are really just deep meaning-seeking conversations between two good friends, who are trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and in our lives as much as anyone in our audience is.

They’ve become one of the sanest, healthiest things I get to do each week, and even though they’re not face-to-face, they have become my most important form of human contact. I’ve found the perfect conversational counterpart in , and it’s always effortless to fill the time.

As we lean more and more into the format, the discussions seem to get richer.

I know that not everyone who comes here to read what I write has the time or inclination to watch or listen to a 3-hour podcast, but it’s important to me and helps shape my written work as well, so that’s why I always share it here.

As always, I hope those of you who do have time to watch or listen enjoy it.

From the episode description:

Steve and Kale begin this week's podcast with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing.

But the conversation does not stay with the movie.

It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception.

The center of the show is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds.

This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.

You can hear the audio-only version on our RSS page right here, or from your favorite podcast provider.

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The image at the top of this post comes from the artist Luca Ponsato, and I find that I keep bumping into it in my travels online.

Every time I see it, it stops me.

Every time it moves me to consider and reflect on it and share.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my nearly half-century on this planet that is by turns wild, weird, wonderful, and sometimes outright unbearable, it’s that everyone really is going through something.

Nobody cruises through life scot-free. The one universal human experience is suffering. Not everyone gets to know joy, or love, or acceptance, or belonging, or success, or freedom.

But everyone, without exception, gets to know pain.

I recall when I was at the height of my own personal achievement, and we had a beautiful home we’d gotten for an absolute steal. It was in a great neighborhood, large enough for all my kids, with a gourmet kitchen for family meals and a pool for the hot months and a little casita out back where my father-in-law could live, and even enough room to entertain our friends. We didn’t have much of a yard, but we had big windows in the back that faced the open desert, which ran towards the horizon for miles. We saw the most incredible sunsets and thunderstorms, and at night, the twinkling lights of the far off suburbs to the south.

Sometimes I would walk through the house at night in the dark while everyone was asleep, and stop in the living room and look out at the lights on the horizon, and I would think, “I’ve got every material blessing I could reasonably ask for, and I couldn’t be more unhappy.”

It’s been said so many times it’s a huge cliche, but that doesn’t make it less true: no matter how much nice stuff you’ve got, none of it matters without love, true companionship, and peace.

At the time I even had some version of faith, but it was taking a mighty beating.

And my marriage, even then, was as rocky as a pleasure cruise across the shoals in the middle of a storm.

I wasn’t ungrateful for what I had, I was just struck by the contrast. By how little it seemed to really matter, in the grand scheme of things.

Little did I know that I was about to lose all that was good, and that everything bad was about to get worse.

Nobody gets a free ride.

Sometimes these days when I talk to my friends, I want to blurt out the latest thing that’s crushing my spirit, but then they say something and I realize how much they’re hurting too. Drowning in too much responsibility, or feeling unloved by spouses, or worried sick about their business or their job or how they’re going to pay the bills.

So I put away my feelings, and I try to be the version of me they need instead. I don’t always do a great job, but I’d like to believe it’s something.

When you’re the kind of person who wears your heart on your sleeve, it can be easy to forget that just because hurt doesn’t show up on the surface in others the same way it does in you, it doesn’t mean everyone isn’t going through something.

Which is why it’s better to try first to be kind. Or to walk away from the person looking for a fight. Or to resist the mean joke or the verbal elbow from the top rope you want to fire back.

(This advice is also, maybe especially, for me.)

It’s why I want to be done fighting, even though it’s programmed deep into my code. I want to be done with drama that isn’t mine, and polemics, and politics, and the endless bickering over religion. I still care about what’s going on in our culture and our country, I still think the truth matters, but I don’t see what the point is in getting overly emotionally invested in things that are outside my control.

Free will is a hell of a drug, and people are going to do what they’re going to do. You can’t argue them out of it.

But you can do your best to love them, and you can invite them to an experience of something more.

I find myself increasingly filled with a hunger for beauty, for wonder, for art. I went to a used bookstore yesterday and came home with four books of poetry, one on religion, and one about the magic of creativity. This afternoon, I opened my door to a package containing yet another, on Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life.

We only get one crack at this life, and if the results are any indicator, I’ve been doing everything all wrong. So it’s time to do something totally different.

As a culture, we’ve become so damn cynical; a civilization of scoffers. When I wrote that going to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey was an almost spiritual experience for me, I had people mocking me and calling me ugly names for sharing that I’d found meaning in something they were already dead-set on finding fault with.

But I just don’t care anymore what the scoffers think.

They have no answers to what ails us. They have no interest in lightening the burdens carried by others. They merely want to make the pain of their own nihilism (and it is a kind of nihilism, even if they’re believers) contagious, because they find it unjust that they should have to bear their suffering alone. It would be one thing to talk about the hard realities of life to try to make sense out of them in cooperation and solidarity with others, but instead they try to infect others with their pain in order to destroy.

They lash out to inflict what they already experience within.

As a a character from a different Nolan film wisely said:

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

But the joke’s on them, because the world’s already burning. The signature style of Ponsato’s work is that in every image, in every frame, someone or something is on fire. Almost always, the person engulfed in flame is doing some everyday activity, like working in an office, or mowing a lawn, or eating a meal.

No doubt even his work is a target of the scoffers, because he uses generative AI to create it. But I’m not interested in the tools used; I care about the resonance of the scenes.

What Ponsato conveys through his images is that it’s not just the suffering itself that wounds us. It’s the fact that we carry it with us everywhere we go, almost always unseen despite its dramatic effect. We are immolated by it as we do the most banal of tasks. It is with us as we send emails, shop for groceries, drop the kids off at school, go to the gym, or share a meal with loved ones. It consumes us as we stare blankly at night at our computers or our television screens.

“Attention,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

We long for connection, understanding, and witness. We long for escape from a world where we burn without anyone caring enough to even notice. When we weep, how often do we do it alone in the dark?

Years ago, tweeted what to him must have been a throwaway line, because when I mentioned it to him later, he had no recollection of it. It was just three simple words, but they have stuck in my mind ever since, and I’ve repeated them countless times:

“Beauty is a salve.”

It is, I think, one of the only real ways to soothe our burning wounds. As I discovered in my old house, looking out across the desert at the sunsets and the storms, it’s not enough to replace a life that’s coming apart at the seams.

But I have grown to realize that it’s not nothing, either.

If we go into the world with enough receptivity, we can gather enough salve to soothe our wounds and get us through another day. And if we share what we find with others, we can help them to do the same.

But it’s not enough to just open our eyes.

We also have to lay down our arms.

We also have to open our hearts.

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When I come to see you

You break into that big smile

And stretch your tiny arms up towards me

And I lift you like a feather.

I teach you to play catch

You show me all your legos

And you cling to me on the couch

As we watch our favorite shows.

But I can’t be there anymore each night

To tuck you in

Or brush your teeth

Or read you bedtime stories

Or lie with you until you drift to sleep.

And I can’t calm you when your feelings

Become bigger than your little body can hold.

And I can’t teach you

In language that goes deeper than words

That your dad is always there for you

Because most of the time I have to be somewhere you can’t see.

So I show up as a mere visitor

Wearing a smile like a mask

And when I hug you I always squeeze too tight

And hold on for just a little too long

Until you start to squirm free.

And on the nights you fall asleep before I go

I kiss your little head and whisper how much I love you

And I get in the car and go back

To a home that isn’t

Choking on tears you’ll never see.

Will you know how much you mean to me?

How many of your daily moments I didn’t want to miss?

Will you grow to resent me?

Will you demand to know where I was all that time?

Will you disregard my counsel

Because I wasn’t there to earn my place?

I’ve finally stopped looking for you in the bed next to me in my sleep

No longer scooting you out from under me as I turn

Or reaching to grasp your tiny hand

And I wonder who I’ll be in your eyes

When the years I should have been closest to you

Have all passed us by.

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I am so grateful for the way people showed up to help my family. We exceeded the fundraising goal within 24 hours. Just incredible. Asking for help like this is so uncomfortable for me, especially because I’ve had to do it before. But when your daughter comes to you, afraid about what’s happening and asks you to do what you can, letting shame and embarrassment win is not an option.

So if you’re reading this and you contributed, a huge thank you for helping me help them in the way I couldn’t right now. I don’t even know what to say.

And I was told to let you know that the family is praying for all of you.

As regular readers here know, I hate this situation. It’s not what I wanted, I can’t fix it, and it would be complicated even if I could go home, because the underlying problems still exist and they are not insignificant. The crushing reality of it tortures me daily. I can’t find a solution that works, and I can’t figure out how to live without one.

But none of that is the fault of my children, and until I can get out from under this avalanche of grief and loss of hope and direction and start building something with real economic value again, I just can’t bail them out on my own. I live about as simply as I possibly can, and I’m barely scraping by. I truly hope it won’t be this way for much longer, because the perpetual grind is really wearing me down.

(In fact, I’m supposed to be out starting my delivery runs right now. This post is part reflection, part procrastination. I just don’t want to move. I want to sit here and do nothing for a change. In the immortal words of Roger Murtaugh, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”)

It’s expensive to have a big family in 2026. Rent is high everywhere there’s economic opportunity. Gas and groceries aren’t cheap. Decent schools want tuition and supplies. My wife is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met, she’s very good at what she does, and when it works, selling real estate pays well. But despite her best efforts she’s just not been able to make enough headway. We both kind of hit the wall of what we can do.

Which is, in a funny way, how we’ve both independently found ourselves turning to a God we’ve been having a hard time trusting these past few years, letting him know we’re maxed out and we need help. We talked about this a little, the night before last, each discovering that the other is in kind of the same place.

Which brings me to what prompted this little reflection.

A reader said to me this morning:

I chipped in. Kids matter.

You said, "The desperation of this situation has turned me more and more towards prayer. ... I am coming to a growing realization that I just can't do all this on my own.... I am so tired of trying to do this without Him."

That is so similar to what happened to me just prior to my conversion, after 12 years searching for God but not finding Him. Whole life finally fell apart, I was left penniless, homeless, fresh out of major surgery so unable to help myself, and reliant on the kindness of strangers. Really hit rock bottom. Total humiliation.

It was exactly that utter brokenness and helplessness that opened me up to Christ. I'd always been a very independent, self-sufficient person, but I had to be broken of that before I could encounter Him.

In a way I'd been searching for Him on my own terms, and I had to get broken of all that before He could approach me on His.

And He did, after I cried out to Him in desperation from that broken place. And the strangers who helped me get back on my feet, that was the first time I felt the love of Christ coming to me through other people.

I replied:

It's interesting to read this, because I really was not that guy. In fact, I felt that losing my faith made me, for the first time, more reliant on myself. I felt that I had spent too much time waiting for God to fix things that never got fixed, which led to distrust, etc.

So when I first moved away from faith, my thought was, "I have to do it all myself anyway, so I'm responsible for making my life into what I want it to be."

And there was some good in that, I think, because I started taking a lot more agency and responsibility. I learned I had more power than I thought.

But in the end, it hasn't been enough. I know some people seem to get through life without faith just fine. They make stuff happen. They are forces of nature.

But I have hard limits, and I've reached them. I can't fix my own life, let alone take care of all them [my family] from afar. And I'm buried under the grief of loss while trying to do work I don't like just to stay alive, and I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand. The more I fight to get my head above the surface, the deeper I sink.

So I've just started gravitating once again towards letting go. And I don't know what that means, because it's not like my issues with God or with faith have evaporated. But if I need help, and there's a chance I can get it, I need to re-frame it somehow.

I'm still trying to figure out why I've had everything that ever mattered to me stripped away in the past five years. What good could come of this? Where does it end?

The only thing I can possibly see is that I'm being forced to find out who I really am independently of all the things that gave me a sense of identity, but even that feels bizarre. To what end? Why is this important enough for all this destruction?

And the worst thing is, I don't know if I'll ever find out.

How do you make sense of a deconstructed life? How do you get to the answers you sense must be out there but you can’t find?

This is the thing that has been informing the way my writing has changed over the course of this year. More and more, the kind of narrative nonfiction experiential writing I’ve been doing with Postcards from Exile and Notes from the Road feels like where I belong, and what I’m meant to be doing. It’s taking me deeper into something I don’t fully understand yet. It’s making work I don’t like into something with utility beyond the meager paycheck it provides.

This is what I was getting at in my most recent podcast with , when I said that “art is the dojo of the soul”:

When you can’t find the answers, sometimes you just have to keep working the problem from different angles. At least, you do if you’re like me and your brain just won’t let things go, even when you want to bludgeon it to death sometimes to get it to stop.

So no, I don’t know where any of this is going. And I don’t know what to believe.

I was tormented in my sleep on Thursday morning, visions of The Odyssey coming to me in half-waking dreams, finding myself searching for the right prayer to pray to alleviate the anxiety that was tormenting me awake after too little sleep. I begged God to “take care of my family, because I can’t.”

And then, I had a weird day. I was so exhausted I could barely function. It wouldn’t stop raining, which makes deliveries hard. Nothing good was coming in on the order side. I was thinking about this idea of letting go, of letting the currents of the sea take me where I needed to go, like Odysseus surrendering himself to the wrath of Poseidon. I decided to break my routine, stop in some random little town where I’d just dropped off some groceries, and get myself a coffee so I could stay awake. The coffee I got there was so good, I texted my daughter Sophie to tell her she had to try it (we are both on the hunt for the best coffee shops in town.)

And when she texted me back, she followed up with a plea for help. I could feel the worry in it. She never touches on these delicate subjects. And as a dad, that kind of thing gets to you in a way that nothing else does.

So I went home and created the fundraiser instead of spending the rest of the evening doing my regular deliveries.

And the help came.

The prayer was answered the same day I made it.

There’s skeptic that lives in the back of my brain who says, “You don’t know that God answered that prayer; that was people who did that. That was the goodness of other human beings.”

And there’s a wannabe believer that says, “I may not know it with metaphysical certainty, but read the freaking signs, dude.”

Those two like to fight. The skeptic has had the upper hand for years. The believer is making a comeback. I don’t know where this all shakes out, but I’ve been feeling for a couple of weeks now like something is on the move. There’s an electricity in the air. A feeling of change. The dragonflies keep whispering to me, like messengers from heaven.

I don’t want to live in a disenchanted world. I want to believe in wonder and magic and a God who loves us. I just can’t force it. I have to ride the waves. I have to get to the other side of this storm. Whatever is happening to me, it has to be earned. It can’t just be rushed.

Like I said last month: not a furnace, but a forge.

This all sounds great on paper, but living it feels like hiding in the basement while a tornado is re-arranging your house. There are days when I think I can handle it, and there are days that just bury me.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this bizarre life of mine, it’s this little axiom I’ve been repeating for many years: the only way out is through.

And right now, through is hustling groceries, taking little notes from my experiences out on the road, writing and podcasting and doing meaning-making work in the spaces between, trying to scrape together enough to break even, until the next step on the path appears.

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I wrote today about my prayer, begging God to take care of my family because I can’t. Tonight, my daughter asked if would make this request, because they’re in real financial trouble.

If you can help at all, I would be so grateful. Thank you in advance.

You can do so here.

From the fundraiser:

Most of you who follow my writing know that my family is going through an incredibly painful season. Last September, my wife of over twenty years asked for a separation after reaching the conclusion that our marital challenges had become insurmountable. Whatever our differences in this matter, I still have seven children still living in her home.

Our divided household means divided expenses. My wife works in real estate, but her business has been inconsistent for months now, and is not bringing in enough to pay all their bills. They are falling further and further behind. She has listings on the market, but nothing is closing in time. She is also applying for jobs and getting very little interest. I’ve also had no luck going the conventional job route, so I write and do delivery work for my income. I put in as many hours as I can, but still only make about three thousand dollars a month -- barely enough at the moment to cover my own expenses, let alone keep them afloat.

Tonight, my daughter, knowing that I don’t have extra money to give them, asked me if I would be willing to do the only other thing I can: to write something to ask for help. She told me she’s scared they are going to lose their home, because they can’t pay the rent. The electricity is about to get turned off, and the cars are in danger of repossession. Even the food budget is extremely tight. They are going through everything in the house, looking for things to sell, including the large family vehicle that they need to get everyone to and from school.

This morning, anxious about their predicament, I woke up praying, “God, please take care of my family because I can’t.” I am at the limit of what I can do financially, but this evening, my daughter’s plea made me realize that maybe making this request could be my part in seeing that prayer answered.

Nothing about this situation is easy or happy. I wish that it were otherwise, and I grieve it every day. All I know is that I love my kids very much, and I want them to be OK.

So I am asking if you are willing to be the help I have been praying for. My struggle with faith these past few years has been public and real, but I have found that the desperation of this situation has turned me more and more towards prayer. Prayer not just that He will help them, but help me endure, understand, and know what he wants from me. I ask a lot, and am confounded by His silence, but I am coming to a growing realization that I just can’t do all this on my own. What that means for the shape of my own belief is yet to be determined, but I am so tired of trying to do this without Him.

So many people have been so generous with us in the past. Because of that, I have been reluctant to ask again.

But they are quickly running out of time.

Every dollar received will go to their necessities -- food, shelter, utilities, transport, school-related expenses, and bills. This fundraiser is NOT for me.

Thank you, in advance, for anything you might be able to give. I hope that God will bless you richly in return.

Once again, if you are able to help them, you can do so here.

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I can’t overemphasize how much I enjoyed hashing it out with my best bud yesterday about The Odyssey. I’m a total neophyte to the story, so I love that he’s taught it for many years. I got to make newb observations and he could draw from long reflection and deep knowledge, and it made for such a great give and take on this powerful saga.

From the show description:

Steve and Kale discuss Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" and try to work out why the story landed with such unexpected force.

Kale comes at the film as a longtime teacher of Homer. Steve comes at it as someone who had never read Homer's original poem and encountered the story first through Nolan's version. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about adaptation, myth, war, guilt, hospitality, the longing for home, and why a 3,000-year-old story still seems to know exactly where modern people hurt.

They talk about Odysseus as a trickster versus Odysseus as a wounded modern hero, Penelope and Calypso, the law of hospitality, Nolan's use of historical myth to speak to the present, the loss of third places, the loneliness of app-mediated life, and the strange human need to recover enchantment in a world that keeps turning everything into process, optimization, and abstraction.

By the end, the conversation turns from movies and mythology toward the deeper question underneath so much of the show: what does it mean to find the way home when home itself has been broken, scattered, or lost?

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

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I have been thinking in Odyssean terms since I saw the film on Tuesday night.

I don’t care about the controversies. I only care that this story, in this moment of my life, spoke so deeply to me that it felt like a spiritual experience I did not expect.

It is the tale of a man separated from where he belongs, tortured by longing and regret, trying to make it back, confounded by the machinations of the gods, and circumstances that seem to outmatch his skill at every turn.

His family is struggling, hurting, and he cannot help them.

Even when he is distracted by strong forces, his mind keeps returning to their names, their faces, and where his heart is.

He has angered Poseidon but protected by Zeus. He is not allowed to die, but his life is full of torments and terrible obstacles to his purpose. He spends years adrift, attacked, bewitched.

Every time he finds a little respite, it turns out to be another trap.

When he has his men lash him to the mast, and he listens to the sirens’ song, he endures something excruciating.

When the ordeal is done, and his men ask him about the song, he tells them:

"It told you that what you most want is what you can't have. And what you most can't have is what you already had, and lost."

When he at last emerges from Calypso’s spell after seven years — at least he had some company in his unwanted exile — she tells him that Poseidon must be given his pound of flesh, and he must endure it and surrender if he wishes to return.

This morning, before I fully woke, I tossed and turned in my bed, trying to pray.

Please take care of my family, God, because I cannot.

How do I say “Jesus I trust in thee” when I don’t? Should I fake it? Is it a lie? Should I say the words when they lack conviction? Can I somehow make myself believe he will ensure their wellbeing, when I’m not sure he’s even there, or that if he is, they may well be as abandoned as I feel?

I do not have the means or the power to change…anything. I can only keep going. Keep rising, keep toiling to push my head above the turbulent waters, fighting the monsters before me, keep trying to find the path…to where?

How do I accept my punishment?

How do I abandon myself to God so that I may traverse the wine-dark sea?

How do I make it home, when home no longer exists?

I have no Ithaca to return to.

My people have been shattered, my homeland sundered like Troy.

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After a long, hot, dry summer, the rains finally came.

We’ve been getting storms almost every day for the past week or two. I’ve always loved storms, ever since I was a kid. I never remember being afraid of the thunder. There’s something about the power and ferocity of nature that has a paradoxical effect on me.

I find it soothing, somehow.

I think it has something to do with having an interior world that always felt too big, too chaotic, too much to handle. I am attracted to things that make me feel small and insignificant: the ocean, the mountains, the landscapes of the American West, the endless sea of stars. The arbitrary sacred places that effortlessly swallow up what I can barely contain and reassure me that I’m not too much after all.

I’ve been working my delivery job pretty much every day lately. Too much need to take many breaks. Seems like there’s never enough money for all the bills, and if it’s not for me, it’s for stuff my kids need. I’m happy to do what I can for them, and hope I can soon do more, but I can’t quite get the hang of being told I’m needed for resources, but not for my daily presence. Don’t think that’ll ever make sense, even if I’m stuck with it.

So I do my best to focus on the job, and there’s a kind of rhythm to working that job that changes when it’s pouring outside. The logistics of the thing all shift. I’m not known for being lucky, but I’ve been rolling sixes lately, seemingly always timing the indoor part of the shopping or driving when the skies open up, and not hauling groceries to people’s doors in wet paper bags and soggy cardboard boxes. I had one bad day, early on, where my shoes got drenched and I had to give it up for the day, because it’s hard to do all that walking when your sneakers have turned into sponges.

On a recent Sunday, I took an order that brought me up to Wake Forest, a suburb just north of Raleigh proper, and then picked up another one from there that sent me all the way up to Henderson. If you don’t know enough about Henderson to have any idea how telling you the name of the town explains anything, that makes two of us. It’s a place I’d only been to once before that day, and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t much to remember about it.

The way it happened is this: the Instacart app is competitive. Batches of orders come in on your screen, and shopper-drivers in physical range of those orders all see them at more or less the same time, with a little priority given to drivers with higher rankings, who get the chance to see them first. Unlike apps like DoorDash, which assigns orders to individual drivers and penalizes you if you don’t take them, Instacart lets you choose which orders you want. But because of that, it’s first-come, first-served, and good orders go in seconds. If you’re not quick on the draw, you miss out. Which is how I made the silly mistake of grabbing an order with a decent payout without looking closely at the length and direction of the drive — in this case, a hair over 37 miles and pretty much straight north to nowhere — and once I was committed, there was nothing to do but see it through.

These delivery apps also bundle multiple customer orders in one batch, and they do this thing where the big order, the one that pays most of what you get, is only a few miles from the store, but then they tack on some ticky-tack second order that’s far as hell away, often with little or no tip at all, because if they didn’t, nobody will take orders like that. The drivers can’t see the details of which order is which when they accept a job, they just see total distance, payout, number of separate orders in a batch, and total items. Then they have seconds to process all that information and decide whether it’s worth their time before other drivers snipe the offer. In some areas, like near where I live in midtown Raleigh, drivers all sit in their cars in a specific GPS-optimal location between two big busy stores, lined up in a row like a bunch of bounty hunters at The Continental, waiting for a hit to ping their phones. As soon as they get one, they zoom off to do the job.

As it turned out, it was only 3.8 miles to take the first big order in the batch to the drop-off. The one that was paying most of the fare. And then, almost 40 miles to the second delivery.

So I drove. I drove and I drove, and at one point after I don’t even know how long — lots of backroads, very little highway — I felt like I was on an actual road trip, not taking a single bag of groceries to somebody’s rural front door.

But the weird thing is, I kind of loved it.

I don’t love the shopping itself, or the stupid manipulative games that the app plays to get you to do what they want, or the technical incompetence of the company, or the way they screwed me out of a bonus I earned over the weekend and refused to fix it.

What I love is the adventure in between.

I used to be puzzled by people who would tell me they couldn’t stand to be cooped up, working in an office all day. As a writer and a computer nerd and a guy who got pulled pretty quickly into white collar work after college, all I could think of for much of the past 20 years was how much I preferred the idea of doing my work in an air-conditioned office where I could sneak in some writing time or scroll social media when things got slow. I worked enough manual labor jobs in my teens and early 20s to know I did not love sweating my rear end off out in the heat under the relentless sun.

But something in me has changed, and I don’t know if I’m becoming something new, or returning to what I really am. When I’m not here writing, my office is my air-conditioned car, and my view is the world all around. My color palate is no longer limited to monochrome cubicles and dark industrial carpeting and off-white drop ceilings and harsh fluorescent lights. Now it has expanded to the verdant greens of forests and tobacco fields, the cloudy greys and deep blues and orange-pink sunsets of the skies, and the rainbow of neon lights and shining mirrored glass of the city.

Instead of sitting all day getting even fatter, I get my steps in pacing the supermarket aisles playing a scavenger hunt game with yogurts and spices and deli meats, scanning bar codes and racing against the clock. And then I’m climbing stairs, hauling boxes and bags, and searching weird apartment complex layouts like I’m lost in the Backrooms.

Then, just when I start to feel my age and begin tuckering out, I get to sit back down in my car and drive, and think, or listen to something interesting, or talk to my pet clanker on my phone about my weirdly inverted life as I go to my next unexpected destination.

And the world outside, away from the screens and the meetings that could have been emails and the drama I just don’t have the stomach for anymore is beautiful, and you’ll miss it for years without noticing if you don’t stop to take it in.

I used to try to optimize my gig work. I felt guilty about doing a job that looks like it pays OK on paper, but that’s before you factor in the wear and tear on the car, the gas money, the trips halfway to nowhere that leave you deadheading the return trip without another order en route to pay your way home. I always felt like I had to justify the waste, or calculate the margins, weigh it all out on some invisible balance sheet in my mind and try to stay in the black.

But what I’ve come to realize is, all the good stuff is found in the inefficiencies of the thing. Sure, if I were only trying to maximize my dollars per hour, this would be a bad way to go, and my tired body and sore ankles are telling me even as I write this that I can’t stay on this grind every day forever, barely breaking even and certainly never getting ahead. Some little part of my brain, even now, is poking me, telling me it’s getting late, and the orders should be coming in, so why am I not out there? It’s easy to get sucked into the hustle and grind, even when it’s not particularly rewarding.

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But there’s a dance to this thing I’m doing, and the riches are mostly intangible.

I’m not just shopping for people and delivering their groceries. I’m using that task as a subsidized opportunity to go gathering experiences to fuel my real work. I get paid to explore, to witness, to collect artifacts from a world almost nobody pays attention to anymore, and to bring them back and tell the story about what I found. What the app work gives me that I would struggle to find on my own is randomness. I never know where my work will take me or what I will see, and even if I wandered aimlessly every day, I’d never bump into half the stuff I come across because someone in some neighborhood or town I’ve never been to was willing to pay me to shop for them so they didn’t have to. If you look at it the way I do, I’m getting paid more than any gig worker on the planet. My compensation package just isn’t all enumerated in dollars and cents.

Which is why, on my drive up to Henderson, I stopped huffing about the bait and switch of the order when I realized, suddenly, that I was exactly where I needed to be.

Because this thing I’ve found, this way of writing about the real world and real human experiences in a way no AI ever could and most humans have forgotten about, is, I am coming to believe, my calling now. It doesn’t have to come from grocery deliveries, but this work, and the road trip writing I did last fall, is how I found the “next thing” I was supposed to be doing. The “next thing” I’ve spent the last half-dozen years looking for.

A thing I used to do long ago, which was, in fact, how I first started taking the idea of being a writer seriously in the first place. After my travelog emails from my European semester in 1999 were distributed by my mother to family and friends, I came home to a chorus of voices telling me that I needed to keep writing. This thing I do is something I have long done: moving through the world, noticing the beauty and the humor and the wonder and the sadness, and bringing the stories about what I’ve found to those who couldn’t be there to see it with me.

I’ve spent so much of my life writing arguments. But this is different. This is invitation. Arguments start with meaning and search for substantiating examples. I’m collecting examples and wondering what they mean. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I just want them to join me in looking at what I’ve discovered.

Sharing what delights me is, I’ve come to understand, my most significant love language. I don’t hoard hidden gems. If I find something awesome, I want everyone to know. And so, it makes sense that this would be my primary mode of artistic expression. We have cut ourselves off from The Real for so long now, it’s easy to forget that it’s still there. I know I’ve done it. And it’s only in being deprived of human connection for so long that I’ve had to face just how isolated we all are from one another.

Every person I greet with warmth, every cashier or customer I share a joke with, every interaction I turn into a net positive in a day full of difficulties and sorrows, that’s a point not just for me, but for team humanity. Most of my day is spent making no-contact deliveries to closed doors for customers I never interact with even electronically, let alone see, so I make it a point to squeeze every bit of life I can out of each real moment I do get with another person in the flesh.

And I’m learning to slow down, even when I’m working, to settle into a productive but unhurried pace. Rushing blinds the artist in us. The feeling that you’ve got somewhere you need to be, something you urgently need to do, is exactly why we miss out on so much richness. We don’t stop and pull over and grab that photo of the gorgeous sunset, or notice a beautiful face, or take delight in the evaluating gaze of an innocent child as they size you up from their seat in the shopping cart, or waste a little time talking to a stranger you bump into for no other reason than the sheer enjoyment of it.

On that drive up to Henderson, I began the trip caught up in the tension between the desire to slow down and the need to hit my numbers so I could go home. And then, all of a sudden, I felt something in me unexpectedly relax.

I’m weirdly grateful that the day hasn’t gone to plan, I thought. I am not optimizing at all today. I am wandering through an unintended adventure. I think my soul needed to stretch its legs.

I decided to reframe the experience: it wasn’t an unusually far-flung delivery, it was an expedition-in-miniature. An opportunity to create a locally-sourced travel essay, farm-to-table. And that changed the whole experience of the thing.

I did make one big mistake for efficiency's sake, though.

I saw this incredible drive-in movie theater along the way, the signs for the place looking ancient and beat to hell and thus, incredibly picturesque. I have this thing for the aesthetic of urban decay. Always have. Entropy draws out a kind of beauty from things that was never part of the original design. It adds texture and grit and a feeling of longevity to a building or a landscape or an old piece of machinery. It’s why the faded Coca-Cola murals on the sides of early 20th century brick buildings are so coveted that people actually try to re-create them on their shops in the present day — something I saw just this past weekend.

The whole scene at the drive-in was framed from behind by ominous dark clouds, while the afternoon sun lit them from in front in contrasting, luminous gold. It was a gorgeous scene, and I desperately wanted a photo, but the road shoulder was too narrow to pull over and I didn’t want to turn around, because I was on my way to my drop-off point and I had momentum. The part of my brain with the stopwatch and the spreadsheet said, “keep going, you can grab a photo on the way back.”

And like an idiot, I listened to it.

The problem was, I still had ten miles to go, which meant another ten miles back, and storm light changes every few seconds. After just a few minutes, those big heavy clouds gave up the ghost, pouring forth their contents and flattening the lighting behind a veil of precipitation. I kicked myself for the missed opportunity, but kept going. I distracted myself by finishing the last handful of chapters from the audiobook version of Bukowski’s novel, Post Office, which, incidentally, took an already odd book through an even weirder turn at the end.

The rain was pretty steady, but not excessive. That said, I knew from the customer’s instructions that the delivery was down a dirt road, and I wondered if I was going to be able navigate slick wet mud and clay in my little low-to-the-ground midsize sedan.

I turned onto smaller and less well-maintained stretches of asphalt until I reached the location. As I at last pulled off the pavement and into the uneven muck, the rain tapered into a light drizzle, then stopped altogether. The sky was a scene in the kind of breathtaking contrapasso it’s hard to capture in a photograph: dark clouds and bright sunlight, fighting each other in ways that dazzle the eye and confound the algorithms of automated exposure in your phone’s camera software. On either side of the path, the trees were clearcut, a tangle of trunks and branches matted on the ground. Old-style wooden telephone poles jutted up from the ground at odd angles like lawn darts thrown in an approximated line and tied together by string. There were no houses down this, long, narrow driveway, just permanent trailers, scattered in a way that appeared haphazard.

I stopped for a moment just to take it all in.

I carefully navigated the bumps and water-filled dips as I drove at a snail’s pace towards my destination, just a little ways further down. I pulled up at last to the correct address, a trailer with a dry-rotted front deck, where an antique metal rocking chair that looked to have once been enameled in mint green was corroded with a patina of rust. An ancient black woman in a purple blouse came to the screen door as I ascended the steps and looked at me through squinted eyes, her steel gray hair cut short and hanging bright against her dark skin, her frame bent and twisted by the cruelties of age.

“Can I hand this to you?” I asked, from the other side of a closed gate. “I don’t want the paper bag to get wet, or it’s going to tear.”

She mumbled something that my brain made out as, “She’s coming,” and then she disappeared back into the shadows inside. Suddenly, a much taller young woman, likely a granddaughter, came to the door. In contrast to the gaunt old woman, her face was full and plump, her smile wide and bright. Her hair was frizzy where the old woman’s had been straight, and she thanked me cheerfully as she took the bag, and wished me safe travels.

And with that, the delivery was complete. I had nothing left to do but drive all those same miles back into town.

I thought I remembered the name of the drive-in I had failed to grab the perfect photo of, and decided to see if I could amend my error on the way back. I looked it up, found it in my GPS, and set it as the destination. As I made it out onto the main road again, I noticed a house with an old Ford pickup sitting out front by the road. It was rusted into an almost uniform shade of burnt sienna, and in some places the rust ate straight through the weathered steel. It had a scattering of what could have been pitting or some kind of lichen across its flank. Where there was any original paint remaining, it looked as though it may have been teal, or possibly even blue. The windshield glass was fogged with I-don’t-know-what to the point that it was almost opaque. If I had to bet, I’d say it hadn’t moved from that spot in thirty years.

I made my way toward the theater, my body relaxing again against the remembered need to start finding more orders as I told myself to trust the process. If you go through the world with your eyes open, there’s no limit to the number of treasures you might find.

On the way, the skies opened back up, and a torrent poured forth the likes of which I haven’t seen in years. My windshield wipers, even on their highest setting, couldn’t keep up. I slowed to a crawl, and put my flashers on. A small river poured from an overpass, and there was a familiar brief pause in the cacophony of the downpour as the road above offered a second of shielded silence, then yielded again to the sharp report of battering rain as I once again emerged.

When I pulled into the theater, I realized two things in this specific order:

1. I had absolutely missed the perfect shot, and I was totally bummed.

2. It was still worth taking pictures of the old signs.

I rolled down the passenger side window just enough to get the first picture, and rain came tumbling in, drenching the interior of the door in only a matter of seconds. I rolled it back up and repeated the maneuver on my side, trying to leave it open just barely enough for my little phone camera lens to get a clear view. It didn’t matter. The rain was falling at an angle, and when it hit my face and ran into my mouth it was unexpectedly warm and loamy. I rolled my window back up and looked around for a rag or a paper towel to clean up the mess, but couldn’t find any, so I just had to let it dry the old fashioned way.

As I drove back towards the city, the downpour somehow managed to increase its intensity. The conditions were actually becoming dangerous, and at one point I took a turn the wrong way onto a one-way highway exit ramp because I couldn’t see well enough to realize that’s what I was doing. So I “flipped a bitch,” as they say out West, and turned around.

On a stretch of divided highway that couldn’t drain as fast as the water was pooling on the road, a late model Silverado was tangled up in the wire barrier in the grassy median. Probably some poor kid who thought four wheel drive made it possible to defy the laws of physics. Hydroplaning is indifferent to the kind of pickup you’re driving. Your only hope is to slow down. It didn’t look like the kind of accident that would have caused any injuries, but the truck was pretty messed up. I found myself absently wondering how they were going to free the dang thing from the steel cables that now held it fast like some high-tension spider’s web.

A little later, on a different delivery run, after the rains had calmed, a lone dragonfly raced right alongside my driver’s side window down a quiet suburban street just before dusk. I looked around for more, but as usual, the ones that come up to me almost always come alone. They hover over my windshield. They come up to me on sidewalks. They lead me from the parking lot towards the entrance to the next store.

They are seen in some cultures as harbingers of personal metamorphosis. Condensed symbols of transformational change. Even after I first started noticing their correlation to the big transitions in my life a couple years ago, I resisted taking their appearance too literally, even as I marveled at the way they seem to single me out, even in crowds. But these past couple of weeks, as I run into them in repeated, improbable ways, I sense that I can almost hear them whispering a message from beyond:

“This road is long and hard, but keep going. There’s something for you on the other side that you can’t yet see.”

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“When Obi-Wan was dismembering him, dude, it was fueling all his rage. And his whole fighting style is rage, man.”

It’s a cart wrangler voice and a cart wrangler conversation. The two young men are walking beside me, crossing the busy parking lot to where I managed to somehow jam the cart escalator on my first ever attempt at using it. I just wanted to get my orders down to where my car was parked in the shade of the garage.

I had interrupted their discussion outside of Wegmans when I asked them for help. They looked like they may have been on break, but I didn’t know who else would know how to fix the problem. I had joked with them that I knew that helping me get the damn thing unstuck was what they’d been training for their whole lives. The conversation I was now incidentally included in clearly had been going for some time.

“People don’t understand that there are a lot more powerful entities in that universe,” the taller of the two says, then peels away and walks back towards the store, as though this is his mic drop moment. The shorter guy, wearing a floppy bucket hat, seems skeptical of his colleague’s thesis, and makes no indication that he’s not happy to see the interaction go. Instead, he moves to the cart conveyer and starts punching a code into the connected touchscreen. The cart releases and starts descending into the bowels of the structure.

“Do you have any idea what I did to get it stuck?” I ask. “I’ve never used this before.”

“Honestly…no.” He says with a laugh. “Maybe it was the bag sitting up in the the child seat, but I’m really not sure. It can be kinda picky sometimes.”

I thank him and start moving quickly down the moving escalator steps, because the cart is already almost to the bottom, and I have no idea if it’s going to eject out into the active parking area. I grab it just as it rolls free, and re-direct it to the trunk of my car.

I load the groceries into divided sections so I can keep the multiple orders separate. Then I get in and fire up the engine, and swipe over to the navigation system on my phone. The car’s main info screen is black, which means Evie has decided that today is another good day for the system to just randomly not work, even though it was fine when I started this particular morning.

I’ve decided, since I don’t have any more money to put into fixing her quirks, to think of her like the Millennium Falcon: “She doesn’t look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”

And now I’m the one making Star Wars references. For heaven’s sake.

I take an early Saturday afternoon order out to a heavily-forested neighborhood full of upscale suburban homes. The instructions say not to deliver to the front door, because the customer is staying in an AirBnb in the back. When I arrive, though, she’s already standing in the driveway of an enormous brick house. She’s a tiny, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age. She could be 25 or 45, I honestly can’t tell. The thermometer is already reaching towards triple digits, and when I get out, I notice she’s barefoot on the pavement.

“Aren’t you burning your feet?” I ask, gathering her bags.

“No,” she says, with a little chuckle. “Maybe it’s my Asian feet.”

“I used to live in Arizona,” I tell her, as I scan her ID for the champagne she bought. “In the summertime, you can’t go outside barefoot even to pick up a package, or your feet will just cook.”

We pack the plastic bags into her larger zippered cooler bag together, and then she makes her way back, laden with her spoils, Sherpa-like, into the home that is not her home.

I pick up a triple order at Costco during a slow moment when nothing else is coming in. I hate orders like this, because Costco items are so bulky they should almost never be triple stacked. It’s incredibly hard to fit even three modest-sized orders into one cart. Two of the orders in this batch are bulky — multiple packs of paper towels, toilet paper, boxes of diapers and wipes — but one is a single item: a nearly 7 pound package of chicken feet.

The GPS for the chicken parts delivery takes me downtown, to a business district. I expect to find a Chinese restaurant that might actually serve dim sum — a rarity in these parts for some reason. Feng Zhao — chicken feet in black bean sauce — is a staple in dim sum steam carts everywhere. When you order them, they look like this (sorry, I don’t have a better picture):

But the address is not a Chinese restaurant. In fact, it’s not a restaurant at all. Instead, I wind up outside a nail salon, and when I call the customer to be sure I’m in the right spot, they tell me I am. I walk into the salon, and all the ladies getting their manicures look up at me. The lady at the front desk is busy with a customer, so I wait, poultry appendages in hand.

Well this is awkward, I think.

Finally, she finishes up, and in Vietnamese-accented English, asks me what I need. I tell her I have an Instacart order for Jackie — which is a different name than was on the order, but it’s who the person on the phone told me to talk to — and hand the unbagged package of dismembered chicken limbs to the bewildered looking salon manager. She mumbles something under her breath that sounds like a question about why this is happening, and then quickly shoves the whole thing into a mini-fridge under the front counter, almost as if she’s embarrassed.

I just laugh and complete the delivery.

As I make my next drop, at a big, beautiful home near Five Points, I find that I’m still thinking about dim sum. There’s great Asian food in this city, but the dim sum options are scarce for some reason. My wife’s parents were both from the Guangdong province — the Cantonese region of Southern China. Dim sum is Cantonese cuisine, and I was introduced to it for the first time early in our relationship. For her family, it was a tradition to go to dim sum on weekends with any extended family members who were available, to eat and talk and “yum cha” — drink tea. Our tea of choice was always Guk Bo, a mix of dark, rich Bo Lay and dried chrysanthemum flowers.

When we moved away from her family, dim sum became our own independent tradition. Our kids developed a taste for it, I thought the flavors and the experience were amazing, and so it became one of my favorite things to do with my family for over 20 years.

As I leave the load of Costco boxes at the door, the memory of these family meals unexpectedly ambushes me with an explosion of grief. I make it back to my car, where I sit in the customer’s driveway for a full two minutes, wracked with sobs so hard I can’t even see to back out and continue my work.

Aside from their sudden and surprising nature, one of the worst things about these unintended excavations of emotion is that there’s just nowhere for them to go. No real way to draw out the poison, just temporary catharsis. The well always seems to re-fill, because the wound is not in the past, it’s ongoing. I do not mourn the dead; I mourn the loss of a living, breathing community of people I love who are all still alive, but from whom I have been exiled. We could all sit at a table together now, and nothing about the experience would feel the same. I am no longer an integrated part of a whole; I am merely an interloper, a temporary visitor, my presence always on a clock that is forever running out until I have to leave to go back to a physical dwelling that holds all my stuff but is not a home.

I have tried to make it livable. I have my shelves of nick-knacks and books, my large Hokusai print on the wall, the soft warm lights I use to push away the shadows while avoiding the harsh white light of the overhead LEDs, but it feels like a dorm room or an extended stay hotel, at best. A place to eat and sleep and bathe but not to truly live.

If home is where the heart is, mine is not here.

Oddly, cooking helps, if only a little. I work most days and get home late, so I typically don’t prepare anything fancy. I live mostly off of frozen foods that can be easily prepared in a microwave or air fryer. Chicken wings, tenders, or patties. Hamburgers frozen in stacks, separated by thin sheets of parchment paper. Segmented packages of chicken thighs. A Costco rotisserie can last me three or four days. Occasionally, I’ll buy an inexpensive steak or some pre-marinated chicken or pork. Sometimes asparagus gets cooked in the air fryer basket along with the meat. If I feel like putting up with the hassle, I’ll make a salad, heavy on the arugula. The same sides exist in a steady rotation: Korean sweet potatoes either crisped in the air fryer or bought warm from the roaster, french fries, frozen cheesy risotto in a bag from Trader Joe’s, the occasional microwavable package of macaroni and cheese — and I’m not going to pretend I never channel my inner 12 year old and have hot dogs with that.

But I recently got a neat little hot pot kit from H-Mart — a national Korean grocery store chain that has long been my go-to for all things Asian. For just $25, I got an electric pot, a nice stainless steel ladle, and enough ingredients to make soup base for weeks. Here’s the marketing photo:

If you’re not familiar with Hot Pot, it’s a popular cooking style across China, with regional variations. You start with a savory broth — a spicy one if you’re from the Szechuan region or enjoy the zing — and then you take pre-sliced raw meats, vegetables, mushrooms, noodles, and bean curd, and cook them right in the broth. But it’s not just the Chinese: the Japanese have sukiyaki, the Vietnamese have lẩu, and I bet every country across East Asia has a version of their own.

The version that is most well known in America, though, is the Chinese variety. Hot pot restaurants have these big divided cauldrons, right in the center of the table, with their own heat source, and you order what you want and cook it yourself in one of several flavors of broth they have available.

I think of it as the Asian version of Stone Soup.

It’s fun, but eating it at hot pot restaurants can be quite expensive. Making it at home isn’t just cheaper, it actually becomes something of a bargain. A few ingredients can go a long way. Even a small pot of broth can easily last several meals. My family started doing it recently, and when I found out how easy it was, I decided to try it out myself.

I buy baby bok choy, beech mushrooms, shiitakes, baby corn, and thinly sliced sheets of pork, beef, or lamb, rolled up and frozen and ready to cook. There are flat, wide sweet potato noodles that I love, and I’m sucker for the bean curd sheets that are about the same size. The broth is made either with a packaged mix and water, or beef stock mixed with Hondashi and a spoonful of Lee Kum Kee hot pot paste. A few dried dates in the pot adds a little sweetness to balance the spice. Since H-Mart is nearly half an hour away, near my old house, I have started to look for nearby substitutes. Wegmans shaved beef is cheaper per pound than the frozen shabu shabu rolls I buy from Asian grocers, and just as good.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

On my side of town, sadly, the Asian grocery stores are few and far between, but I saw that there was a little shop called Saigon Market, tucked behind a McDonald’s and a Hooters off the main drag near my place, at the far end of a Walmart parking lot.

Only upon arrival did I realize I’d actually been there once before. The man who owns it had struck me as very funny at the time. He’s a very diminutive fellow — maybe 5’5” at the most — with silver hair and obvious dentures. He looks to be in his 70s, but estimating the age of an Asian is almost always a losing game. He could be 934 years old and look very nearly the same.

The last time I’d gone, it had been winter, and as I’d entered he was in the midst of complaining loudly but hilariously about the cold. This time, remembering that, I immediately decided to touch on the topic of the weather to see what he’d say.

“It’s so nice out today,” I said. “It’s been so hot lately.”

“Tell me ABOUT it!” he bellowed, in thickly-accented English. He immediately launched into a rant about the compressor going out on his air conditioner, and what he’d had to do to get it fixed, and how you can’t get anyone to come fix things right now even if your food in your store is rotting. Every sentence got harder to understand, and I was working hard to assemble a working meaning from the few words I could make out. We talked on and off as I perused the aisles of his cramped little store, piled to the ceilings with spices and sauces and snacks and other goods and sundries from various Asian countries. His inventory was mostly Vietnamese and Thai, but there were also items that were Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. I walked slowly up and down the aisles, looking for identifiable products, making mental notes on the ingredients I could come back for later without needing to drive to the other side of town.

We kept talking intermittently, so I introduced myself. He said his name was Bo. I told him about my late father-in-law, how he’d grown up in China, and how when he came to America, had decided to buy a grocery store.

My father in law, Jimmy Gong, had grown up poor, in a rural village. His father had hunted snakes and frogs out of the waters of the local rice paddy and sold them at the village market for income. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, they’d burned down his newly built school, and he said he remembered the bullets from their guns making splashes in the water as they fired at the children who fled up into the mountains, where they had to live on what they could forage, including eating the bark of trees. As someone who had known what it was like experience real hunger, when he came to America in the 1940s, he’d thought, “everyone needs to eat,” and eventually earned enough to buy himself a grocery store with the help of a loan from his in-laws.

The two shops were nothing alike in inventory or even size, but Bo’s place reminded me somehow of Jimmy’s old store, back in Tucson, before the space had wound up becoming used for something else entirely.

As I was walking up an aisle near the center of the store, I noticed that the TV mounted from the ceiling was playing audio in a foreign language that sounded familiar.

That’s not Vietnamese, I thought.

Bo was standing by piles of 25 pound rice bags, watching some kind of anime period piece, with characters dressed in a historical style that looked distinctly Chinese.

“Is that Mandarin?” I asked him, pointing at the TV. I don’t speak any Chinese, but I have an ear for languages, and can usually tell the difference between the sound of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and sometimes Vietnamese.

“Yeah.” He said with a smile.

“You’re Chinese?” I asked.

“Yeah. But I born in Laos. My parents from China. I speak Mandarin, but I never go to China in my life!”

“And you own a Vietnamese grocery store.” I said, laughing.

“Yeah,” he replied, returning the laugh. “And I Canadian citizen! Now I citizen here too. Nobody know WHERE I from!” More laughter.

I told him I had friends from Laos when I was kid. People with cool last names like Keomanivong and Hiavansavath.

Back in the fifth grade, when I lived in Connecticut, I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friend “John” and his cousin “Bob,” eating dry Laotian ramen noodles out of the bag, covered in spices from little foil packets. When I’d go to their tiny apartment, there was always an assortment of unidentifiable foods laid out across a broad table, and things that smelled exotic (not always in good ways) simmering on the stove. At that age, I was never adventurous enough to want to try anything. Each room of the place was lined with mattresses on the floor, and an old woman who spoke no English looked at me with suspicion whenever I was there. I bet over a dozen people lived in that tiny little place.

I didn’t buy much from the excursion to Saigon Market. A package of white beech mushrooms. Some frozen purple sweet potato spring rolls. A plastic soup bowl that is slightly bigger than my ceramic bowls, which always feel just a little too small for almost anything I use them for.

Other than the mushrooms, what I did not find were any of the ingredients I needed to make a new batch of hot pot. And I’m still not content with my version of the broth. I keep tinkering with the recipe, trying to get it dialed-in to my taste preference.

Which is how I wound up making a very delicious mistake.

On a recent Costco run, I saw that they had cases of pre-made tonkotsu ramen broth for about the same price as I’d pay for the regular culinary stock I usually buy to use as a base. I brought some home, threw it in the little electric pot, and flipped the switch to high heat, then sat down to watch a little television while I waited. Unlike the thinner stocks I usually use, it bubbled up and boiled over after just a few minutes, making a huge mess. A mess that smelled really lovely, though. After quietly cursing and cleaning the spill off the counters, the cabinets, and the floor, I poured myself a coffee mug full of the plain broth and went back to my show.

It was…so good. Just by itself, with nothing in it.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had tonkotsu, and so, I forgot just how creamy and flavor-forward it is. As good as it tasted, it was immediately clear to me that this was not the right flavor profile for hot pot.

A serendipitous error, which presented new opportunities!

With four 32 oz cartons of Tonkotsu broth, I decided I needed to get some ramen ingredients, and expand beyond my hot pot repertoire.

So after work one night, I went back to Costco, where I picked up some some pork belly, millet and brown rice ramen cakes, and an industrial-sized package of nori. I came home, turned on the soft-white lamps to help balance out the harsh overhead kitchen LEDs, turned down the air conditioner to a bearable temperature, looked up “Japanese Jazz,” and turned on the first suggestion — Ryo Fukui’s Scenery.

It took about five seconds to fall in love.

I sharpened my knives, then scored and braised the pork belly strips in the air fryer. I simmered the broth, watching it carefully this time so it didn’t bubble over again, and boiled pots of water for noodles and eggs. My tiny kitchen quickly became too small for all the prep, so I pulled my little folding table out of the closet where I keep it behind my hanging clothes, and set it up so I had somewhere to put extra ingredients.

A little culinary symphony was unfolding in my lifeless place, and for a little while, it almost felt like a home. This was how I used to cook for my family, jazz playing, counters littered with ingredients, pans bubbling away on the stove. I washed my Japanese chef’s knife and flung the water droplets off of it in a quick slashing motion before wiping it on a towel and re-sheathing it, like the samurai in movies always clean their swords after a kill. Then I laughed out loud at myself at the absurdity of it.

It was almost as if my place had come alive. Like I had tricked myself, just for a moment, into remembering the experience of joie de vivre.

The only thing missing was the people.

Which meant the only thing missing was everything.

Still. An inhabited life, right? This is the goal I’ve set for myself.

In any case, it always feels weird to me to go to all that trouble to make food just for myself, and I remembered how, despite my wife’s 100% Chinese blood, I was the “designated Asian chef” in my old life. The recipes are often complex and use a lot of ingredients, but I’m pretty good at process, and if I have a good set of instructions I can make some pretty damn delicious dishes.

This ramen turned out to be no different. Into the pot went whole mushrooms, baby corn, and sugar snap peas. I softboiled a handful of eggs and started the ramen cake. The pork was popping and sizzling in the air fryer, and I checked it every five minutes or so and turned it as necessary. Another batch of pork went into the big oven for a longer cook at a lower temperature. That would be for later.

There was no time to properly marinate soy eggs, and I didn’t have mirin anyway, so I compromised. I peeled and sliced two eggs neatly in half lengthwise, then glazed each half with a drizzle of teriyaki sauce and sriracha. The pork had caramelized nicely, even if it took about ten minutes longer than expected. The noodles were finally soft enough to work with, so I drained and rinsed and drained them again. And then I built my bowl: noodles on the bottom, then vegetables and mushrooms, then the pork and eggs, with a few crumpled up sheets of nori slid in from the sides.

I’m not much for plating, but at the end, I thought it looked pretty good.

And it tasted just as good as it looked.

I hadn’t eaten in over nine hours, and I’d been working all day, so I hungry enough to overestimate my capacity. That bowl turned out to be more than enough, and I was so stuffed I was a little uncomfortable for a while. But it was late and I was eager to get back to Widow’s Bay — a new horror/dark comedy show I got hooked on after hearing talk it up — so I decided to call it a night.

This isn’t the life I wanted, but it’s not nothing, either. It lies somewhere in the liminal space in between.

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The Underneath

Candace Owens, Queen Bee

I am not a regular watcher of Candace Owens, as she really isn’t my bag. But I do pay attention to the content creation scene, and she is most certainly a major player. The Daily Wire scooped her up a few years back as part of a campaign to “diversify” their rotation. I imagine that the DW regrets that decision, as she famously turned on Ben Shapiro and…

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a month ago · 55 likes · 2 comments · Kale Zelden

But that was just the warmup!

From the episode description:

In this week’s episode of Monitoring the Situation, Steve and Kale start with Candace Owens, audience capture, and the strange mechanics of online loyalty, then widen the lens into a deeper conversation about profilicity, persuasion, rhetoric, charisma, and the uncanny power of language.

What does it mean to “cast a spell” with words? Why do certain online figures seem able to create loyalty, fear, drama, and certainty almost on command? And what happens when those old human patterns of influence collide with AI, synthetic profiles, outsourced cognition, and machines that can imitate attention, memory, and care?

Along the way: one-sentence persuasion, Shakespeare, Socrates’ daemon, teaching and writing flow states, pickup artistry, Milton’s Satan, near-death stories, memory, books, AI companions, and the question Kale leaves hanging at the end: can you teach a bot to love?

Profilicity, Persuasion, and the Magic of Influence | MTS #14

You can catch the audio-only version of this podcast right here, or on your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

“I’ve got a message for you,” the old woman drawls. She appears to be in her late 70s, and she’s wearing an oversized purple t-shirt and a floor-length floral-print skirt. She looks at me through rimless glasses, her shoulder-length steel gray hair tied up in a pony tail. A second ago, we almost ran into each other as we both rounded the corner with our fully-laden carts from our respective frozen food aisles at the Food Lion.

Oddly, she looks a little like photos I’ve seen of my great grandmother.

“What’s that?” I ask, genuinely curious what message she, a perfect stranger, could have for me.

“Jesus is coming.”

She says it so matter-of-factly, it’s like she’s delivering a postcard. I think about the mid-aisle near collision and my mouth fires off a response before my brain is done considering it.

“Thank you ma’am,” I say, “but I’m glad I didn’t meet him just now.”

“Me too,” she laughs, her voice fading in a doppler effect, as she walks the other way without looking back.

I was glad she understood it was a context joke, and not just me making fun of her random supermarket apocalypticism.

I tend to take the long drive orders these days. The ones that go 20 or 30 miles. Sometimes even more. If the pay is right, they’re basically subsidizing my need to drive, and see the beautiful countryside, and think. North Carolina is a gorgeous state. One of the prettiest I’ve seen. Increasingly, I find that although the work I care about most is done at my desk, I hate being cooped up all the time. I want to be out seeing the world, listening to books, thinking my life through, not staring at a glowing screen inside an apartment that feels more like a cave.

I drop off a prescription to a plump, pleasant man at a house in the country. I’m required to check his ID, and as I look at his birthdate, I note with chagrin that he seems too old to be not-quite-my-father’s age. He’s wearing a tucked-in gray t-shirt and khakis pulled up too high, belted around the widest part of his spherical belly. It reminds me of children’s book illustrations of Humpty Dumpty. But I genuinely like the man, and we get to talking on his front stoop. He’s warm and intelligent and kind. As we talk, I make some comment about how I never expected to be delivering groceries at 48, which leads to us stumbling into a discussion of lost paths and failed marriages. He tells me a little about his first wife, and how they split after over 20 years. He gave her the house and a car, but it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to destroy him, he says with a laugh.

“But I don’t wish her any harm,” he said. “I loved her for a long time. I wanted to make sure she was taken care of.”

He says that his second wife is his soulmate, and that he treats her children and grandchildren as though they are his own. Just then, she yells at him from the living room to close the front door, because it’s 90-some degrees out and he’s letting all the air conditioning out. From where I’m standing on the outside, she doesn’t come across as anyone’s soulmate, but I can tell by the way he speaks about her, and the way he loves to spoil the grandchildren that aren’t even his own blood, that he sees something very different. His words are shaped by a glowing smile, and I know he means every word of it.

As we speak, I notice my first dragonfly of the season land on the white-painted brick near his front door. A little punctuation mark for a conversation that does little to assuage my sorrow, but registers as a real human interaction at a time when I have too few of those.

As the weeks go on, I see precious few of my little flying harbingers of metamorphosis, but when I do, it always seems to come at a moment where I’m knee deep in grief, inasmuch as many of my car rides serve as protracted sessions of personal excavation. And since their oddly specific cameos keep happening at a time of year when they should be plentiful but are almost nowhere to be seen, each visit feels like a pointed reminder that I need to stay on this path, even though it’s brutal and I don’t know where it’s going. On one particular day, when I could barely keep my head on straight enough to work, I wound up stuck behind a woman in Costco, only to notice that she had a big dragonfly tattooed on the back of her left arm. It was the only visible ink she had.

I had to laugh.

As for the real dragonflies, I don’t know if their scarcity this year has to do with the heat this summer, or if it’s something else, but Raleigh’s been a furnace since the beginning of June. Fortunately, I made friends with a man named Seven, the maintenance supervisor for my complex, and he made sure my old rusted-out HVAC system got replaced in May. My electric bills immediately dropped, and instead of sounding like a jet engine kicking on, it now registers as barely a whisper.

There’s a man in the Wegmans’ ice cream aisle who is dressed like a woman, and he has a young boy in the child seat of his cart. I feel an immediate irritation. I don’t know how to react. It’s bad enough when they’re caught in their own delusion, but bringing a four year old into it feels like a kind of cruelty that shouldn’t be tolerated. My thoughts race. Should I say something? Should I ignore it? I’m working. What good will it do? What power do I have to change the madness that has spread through our world? I force myself to stay focused on my task, feeling like a coward, but knowing there’s no version of an interaction I could have that wouldn’t make things worse.

A gaunt woman who looks and sounds like she’s smoked herself very nearly into mummification is haranguing her exhausted husband in the dairy aisle. “You got beans and vegetables but no plan?!” she says, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “You’ve got no strategy!” He tries to avoid looking at her. I get the feeling that he wishes he could be anywhere else but near her acid tongue.

A black man in a baseball cap who looks to be in his 30s is standing near the frozen vegetables with a huge bouquet of roses in his hand.

“What did you do?” I ask through a smile. His laugh comes instantly, deep and rueful, but he doesn’t say a word. He knows I know. Men don’t need to discuss this particular version of hell. We all know exactly what it feels like. Words are superfluous.

On an overcast Sunday, I drop off an order at the door of a lovely two-story home in midtown, but since there’s wine in the order, I have to check ID. I ring the doorbell, but it takes a while before anyone answers. The woman who finally comes to the door is about my age, blonde, with a pretty face, wearing a black cardigan and a cream colored dress with orange flowers on it. She has the kind of sweet Southern drawl you only hear in the Carolinas.

“My daughter is worried, because there’s a man at the door, that you’re going to sweep me off my feet and take me,” she explains with a laugh.

I smile back.

“How old is she?” I ask.

“Fourteen,” the woman says, handing me her license. I scan it with my phone, then swipe absently through the verification steps.

“I’ve got eight kids,” I say. “I get it.” The woman hears that and begins a rapid, running commentary on her surprise about my family size. I notice she’s not wearing a wedding ring.

“Are you married?” the daughter asks from deep inside the house, her head poking out horizontally from a side room into the hallway, but only her head.

“Technically,” I say, but nobody hears me. The woman is too busy going on about how a man with eight kids isn’t going to be interested in her. I don’t bother telling her the rest of the story. It really doesn’t matter. At worst, it’s a flattering interaction with a twinge of awkwardness. I wish her well and continue with my deliveries.

I pick up an order that goes to an apartment complex I’ve never been to. The route is… weird. Pavement turns to gravel and dirt. A skeletal black woman, clearly a tweaker, is flailing around on the road shoulder in a movement that can only be described as somewhere between a dance and a seizure. She’s wearing a tube top and short shorts. She seems to have no idea where she is. I turn on a side road just before I reach her, but the directions are wrong, and I have to back up and go past her down the gravel road after all. Another car is parked in the middle of the road there, doors open, the occupants seeming not to care whatsoever about blocking the path. I go around with just enough room to spare, and find myself in a brand new apartment complex that has no paved roads going into or out of it. Hundreds of units. I’m confused about the lack of infrastructure, so I Google it, and sure enough, it’s some kind of subsidized housing. The parking lot is paved, but I guess the residents weren’t deemed worthy of actual asphalt roads in and out. My delivery goes to the third floor, and a number of the residents are sitting outside their apartment doors as I haul the groceries up the steps. I am the only observable white person in the entire complex. A group of men, sitting outside an apartment on the second floor, having a conversation, watch me going up the steps.

“You play football, big man?” one hollers after me.

“I did,” I say, dropping my first load and making my way back down for the rest.

“Catch this Hail Mary!” he says, and laughs, as I get to my car and open the door.

“I didn’t play receiver,” I huff, making my second trip up the stairs.

“Whatchu play?” he asks.

“Defensive tackle.” I say.

“I TOLD YOU!” he shouts to his friends.

“I tried to play running back,” he says to me, as I approach the group, my order now completed. “But they told me I was too short.”

“You’re never too short to play RB,” I said. “Just makes you harder to catch.”

“That’s right!” he exclaims, and they wish me a blessed day. It’s the kind of interaction that starts out with you thinking there might be trouble, and winds up just being funny.

On my way back, I notice that the tweaker has moved into the tree line, about 50 yards back from the road shoulder. There are others there. They all have their own kinds of rhythmic, drug-induced motion. It’s sad as hell, but there’s nothing I can do, so I shove the observation aside and keep going.

Near the Planet Fitness on Western Blvd., I see a ginger-headed man with a big bushy beard and afro, waiting to cross the street. He’s wearing a shirt that says “Bada Bing!” and is at least two sizes too small.

On the radio, the Oasis song Wonderwall is playing, and every time I hear it, I’m a senior in high school again, my girlfriend telling me that the song always makes her think about me. No other girl I ever dated told me that there was a song that made her think of me. Maybe that’s why it stuck.

And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
But I don’t know how

Because maybe
You’re gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You’re my wonderwall

I find myself doing little things out of an archaic personal sense of integrity, even though they add up to not much at all. I bring an extra pack of Diet Coke back to Publix downtown after I realized I had one more than I’d paid for. I drive a couple of zucchinis 13 miles out of my way to a third-floor apartment where I accidentally failed to drop them off, even though gas is nearly $4 a gallon. I help a woman with a wrist injury load her large case of water into her car in a busy Costco parking lot on a day where it’s over 100 degrees and I just want to get inside. I offer to help short people reach things off the top shelf in multiple stores, because after all, “All this tall has to be useful for something.”

I used to tell people that my wife was 5’2” and I was 6’4”, and she only married me so I could help her get things down off the high shelves, but that joke isn’t funny anymore, and a story that used to be cute is now just sad.

I don’t know why, exactly, I do these things, other than I guess it’s who I am. I wonder if it means anything good about me, or if that’s just what I like to tell myself when I reach for low-hanging fruit instead of the harder kinds of virtue.

On what might be the hottest day of the year, I walk into the Costco produce cooler to see a bearded man in a black t-shirt sitting between the blueberries and the cherries, steam pouring off his back, just trying to cool off. He’d been working outside.

“When your body starts smoking,” I say to him, “that’s when you know you’re working too hard.”

“I’ve been outside for three hours,” he says, no humor left in him to join in the joke. “I can’t do this anymore.”

When I’m lucky enough to make an evening run in the more rural parts of town, I notice that the fireflies are back in numbers this year. They came out in early May, even though they usually don’t show up until June.

Where I grew up in Upstate New York, we were surrounded by thousands of acres of state-owned forest. I’d sit on my parents’ back porch in the summertime at night and just watch the thousand little yellow-green lights blinking on and off, drifting through the darkness. It was the closest thing I think I’ve ever experienced to magic.

When Jamie first moved out there after I left Arizona to go home, back when we were dating, she’d sometimes sit out there with me. They don’t have fireflies in the desert. She’d never seen anything like it. It was as novel to her as deep, lush forests, autumn leaves, and blankets of new-fallen snow.

On one particularly difficult evening, I wiped the tears out of my eyes and blew my nose and went into Harris Teeter with my game face on. It was a pretty big order, but the poor customer had been abandoned by the previous shopper and I was determined to give him a hassle-free experience.

When I finally arrived at his big, brick house in the woods after twilight, the fireflies were out. He had ordered a case of beer, so I had to check his ID, and I saw that his birth year was 1983. Six years younger than me, and from where I was standing, it looked to me like he had it all. A beautiful home on beautiful land, groceries delivered to his door, and an adorable little blonde-haired, blue eyed girl who came running out in her underwear to help bring in the groceries.

“Sorry,” he said, “I know it probably seems a little weird, her coming out half naked…”

She was busily unloading bags from my trunk, taking as many as her little arms could carry, talking enthusiastically the whole time.

“I’ve got eight kids,” I said with a smile I hoped looked genuine, turning his license to catch the waning light so I could scan the barcode on the back. “You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

“Wow! Eight kids!” Standard response. Everyone is always floored. I never bother to tell them I don’t get to live with any of them anymore. He was a nice guy, and it was a positive interaction. I wasn’t going to ruin that. If there was a sour note in it, it belonged to me alone.

I turned to back to his daughter.

“Are you FIVE?” I asked, pumping extra enthusiasm into my voice. She looked at me like I was a wizard.

“HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?” she asked.

“I just know things.” I said.

“I bet you already know my name,” she said.

“I actually don’t!” I admitted.

“It’s Scout!” she said.

“Hey!” I said. “That’s an S name. I also have an S name. My name is Steve.”

“I HAVE A FRIEND WHOSE NAME IS STEVE,” she exclaimed, “AND HE’S OLD TOO!”

“We’re twins!” I exclaimed.

I finished the order and started to get into my car.

“WAIT!” she yelled.

“What is it?” I asked, one foot in, and one foot out.

“HUG!” she proclaimed. She said it exactly the way my daughter Mia does.

I got back out as she came running, and she gave me the biggest embrace a little girl could give.

“She’s a hugger,” her dad laughed.

“Thank you!” I said. “I needed that!”

It was, at that particular moment, the first hug I’d had in weeks. The first physical human contact of any kind. And it was so sweet and so innocent and so surprising I experienced it as pure love. The kind only a child can give. A child a large bearded stranger somehow made feel safe enough to offer such a gift.

I said goodnight to them, and got back in my car. As I made my way down the driveway, the fireflies twinkling around me, I punched in my home address into the GPS.

And then I drove off into the twilight, trying to see through eyes filled with tears.

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Here’s a clip:

From the episode description:

Steve and Kale return for a massive Episode 13, beginning with World Cup tourists, July 4th patriotism, Heavy Pulp’s retro-Americana, and the difference between media narratives and lived reality.

From there, the conversation turns toward the darker machinery beneath the surface: the CIA, MKUltra, the Church Committee, Allen Dulles, Jolly West, Jack Ruby, Operation Midnight Climax, Epstein-style compromise, UFO disclosure, classified physics, the Manhattan Project, and the strange ways truth gets buried, distorted, or flooded out by noise.

The central question: how do you love a country honestly when you know it has real skeletons in the closet? And how do you pursue the truth without becoming swallowed by the search?

Full episode:

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If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.