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.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support me and my work.

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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17 days 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.

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“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:

Audio-only versions can be accessed right here or on your favorite podcast provider.

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I want to write a better post than the one that’s about to spill out of me.

But the truth is, I’m exhausted. It’s 11:27PM on Friday, July 3rd, and I just got home from a really long day of doing Instacart deliveries on a day with a 113°F heat index, and scarfed down a dinner I probably shouldn’t have eaten this late. Does not help with sleep when you’re still digesting.

The day started with Instacart having a generational crashout, the app refusing to work for shoppers for hours. I tried to start work at noon, but couldn’t even click on an order until 2PM.

And I was one of the lucky ones.

Shopper/drivers got stuck with orders they couldn’t finish in the store. The app just stopped working, and they couldn’t complete the transaction.

Others got stuck with groceries in their car, but no destination. The app doesn’t give drivers the address until they’ve completed the checkout process. One lady on X said she was sitting in her car with melting bags of ice and nowhere to go.

Since this is a holiday weekend, it was busy as hell today. An incredibly bad day for the system to go down.

It’s been a weird week, which is why I’ve been so quiet. Between work, one particularly bad day where depression/grief snuck up and got the better of me, and Eli, my youngest, getting his tonsils out, I’ve had no time to sit down and write with a clear head. I’m going over there first thing in the morning to take care of him because his mother has an appointment she can’t miss, so I need to get to sleep soon. It’ll be a nice chance to spend some time with him.

And to top it all off, Sunday should be my 23rd wedding anniversary. That’s hanging heavy over me, I’m not going to lie.

But with all that I’m carrying in my heart going into this weekend, I want to stop and offer a moment of gratitude. There’s a lot about my life that I hate right now, not to put too fine a point on it. But there are things that I love, too, like my kids, and writing about my adventures (even when they’re often otherwise banal), and the customers who appreciate me and go out of their way to show it, and most relevant to this particular post, the fact that I won the lottery when it came to countries you could be born in.

I unironically love being an American. I always have. I’ve travelled outside the US a fair bit, having road tripped thousands of miles through Canada and Mexico, done a mission trip the Bahamas, and visited nearly a dozen countries across Europe. I’ve also been to every single state in the continental 48. (Alaska and Hawaii are still on the list!) And out of all that travelling, I’ve gotten some perspective on the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

America is, as we’ve all experienced in various ways, a country not without its many flaws. It has been fracturing for a long time, and I find that tragic. Nevertheless, there’s not a single place I’d choose to live instead. There’s something beautiful and bold and totally unique about it here. It is a vast nation with some of the most breathtaking landscapes on earth, and an unparalleled abundance of opportunity.

It’s still a land where more dreams come true than anywhere else.

On my mother’s side, I’m descended from a family lineage we can trace back to the Mayflower — the same family that produced such noteworthy figures as Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Orson Welles. On my father’s side, I’m the descendent of Irish and Slovak immigrants who arrived here much more recently. My dad is, himself, a second generation American.

The thing that really drove it all home for me for the first time was when I got the chance to visit the Omaha Beach and the D-Day memorial in Normandy, France. It was 1999. I stood in the bomb craters. I looked at the cliffs that the Army Rangers had to scale. I stepped inside the pill boxes and stood in the shadow of the coastal artillery and imagined the terrors that the Allied Forces faced on that fated day.

It’s a place that’s sacred, in a way I don’t really have the words to explain. It helped me to understand the cost of sacrifice in the service of something higher. A noble ideal.

So many of the white marble crosses simply read, “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms, known but to God.” The individual identities were lost, subsumed into the greater cause. As a 22-year-old man, that really struck me. I had never come face to face with something like that before.

It was powerfully sobering.

But it also made me overwhelmed with pride in my country. And of course, many of my own family members served. This includes my grandfather, Bill Emmons, who was in the US Army Air Corps:

Along with several of his brothers (Paul, Roger, and Lewy), and his sister, my great-aunt Mary, who served in the Coast Guard during the war:

My great uncle Ralph “Lewy” Emmons did not fight on the beaches of Normandy, but he nevertheless came home a decorated hero.

His obituary described his service as follows:

Some will remember him walking with a severe limp due to injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, but not many know that he received the first artificial hip implant. He served in the Army Air Corps with the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment and was a military intelligence staff officer retiring on disability with the rank of Captain. He was awarded the Purple Heart Medal with oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star Medal, and Combat Infantry Badge. Also awarded European-African-Middle Eastern Ribbon with 4 stars for campaigns in So. France, Rome-Arno, Ardennes, and Central Europe, one arrowhead for invasion of So. France, the American Defense Ribbon, American Theater Ribbon, and WWII Victory Ribbon. Lewy showed us that intense suffering can be borne; bravery comes in many forms; nothing is too difficult to learn; and humor is necessary always. He was devoted to God, his family, and his Catholic faith, and was a member of the Nocturnal Adoration Society.

Of course, I didn’t know the war veteran. I knew my grandfather’s older brother, who wore a lifted shoe and walked with a cane and called me “Stephen the Louie” because he thought I looked so much like my dad, Lou Skojec. I still remember his voice — but not his face — but then again, the last time I saw him, I was probably about 3 years old. When my great grandfather died, Lewy became a recluse, and the family lost touch with him until he fell severely ill in his old age, when they finally discovered his whereabouts just a brief time before he died.

All this is to say, I feel a deep connection to this land and its people, and the dream it embodies. When I look around the world, I realize, as someone said today, that there is America and its freedoms, and then there is everywhere else.

In fact the more I look at what’s going on in Britain today, the more certain I am that our Founding Fathers knew exactly what they were doing.

I think this incredible experiment is still a dream worth fighting for.

But for now, it’s well after midnight, and I desperately need some sleep.

Wishing you and yours a happy Independence Day, and America the Beautiful another 250 years!

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How many of us can truly say we know God?

Might seem like an odd question, coming from someone like me, but it’s at right at the bleeding heart of my struggle with faith.

I know a million theological propositions that I’m told are known about him, but I don’t know how we “know” many of those things, and more importantly, I don’t know him.

On a superficial level, I don’t know what he looks like, what he sounds like, whether he has a good sense of humor, what his interests are, whether his handshake is firm, if he’s a hugger or a bit more into personal space, what his favorite foods are, etc.

I’m being somewhat facetious here, but not entirely.

Obviously we don’t know these things about God, but there were quite a number of people who at least got to know these things about Jesus, whom not a single one of us has ever met, but are asked to believe is God-made-man. And these aren’t mere trivialities. They are all important embodied relational cues we use to understand the human beings that we love. There’s not a relationship we have with anyone on this earth where we don’t know the answers to most of the questions above, and many others besides.

And if you don’t know the answers to these questions, you don’t have an actual relationship with that person. That’s how it works. That’s how human beings relate.

So when I hear people talking about having a personal relationship with God, I always look at them like the “wait, you guys are getting paid?” kid from the meme.

How do you have a personal relationship with someone you’ve never seen, never had a two-way conversation with, and couldn’t pick out of a lineup if your life depended on it? I have online friends I’ve never met in person over decades of contact whom I know more about on a “personal” level than I know about God.

What I have instead is a list of propositions I have been told — by other human beings — that I am supposed to believe. And I have a list of threats about what will happen to me if I don’t.

I say “I” but I actually mean “we.” Because no matter how faithful you are to these propositions, unless you’ve had miraculous experiences (which are, by definition, hugely out of the ordinary), you don’t know God personally either.

You just have a different relationship with the lists than I do.

We are, of course, masterful at imagining we can at any given moment glean God’s presence, assume his intervention, and make some fragmentary assemblage of the coincidental breadcrumbs in our paths in our attempts to puzzle out the divine will. And because we believe that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, we go all in on our conviction. I certainly did from the age of 15 to about the age of 43.

I was an altar boy, a lector, a CCD instructor, a youth group leader, a religious ed teacher, a door-to-door evangelist, an online apologist, and a writer of thousands of essays on the subject of faith. I got a four-year degree in Catholic theology. I did missionary work in four countries. I made it not just my personal mission to spread and defend my religious beliefs, but also my means of providing for my family.

I went all-in.

And so, when it all came apart, the consequences were as catastrophic as you might expect. Every egg was in that basket when the bottom fell out of it, and all of them broke when they hit the floor.

Of course, it didn’t happen all at once. It happened little-by-little. I felt my faith slipping through my fingers three full years before the last thread of religious conviction in my heart unceremoniously snapped.

I had a family. I had children who needed me to lead them by example. I had literally millions of readers at 1P5. I had a difficult marriage I’d been begging for God’s help improving. My entire social sphere, every single one of my family members and friends, were all Catholic. I had been not just “Steve” but “Steve the Catholic” for so long, there was no separable identity.

I also knew that, as a man of conviction and nearly compulsive honesty, I would not be able to keep quiet about the change in my beliefs. Telling the truth as I understand it is not just what I do, it’s who I am at a fundamental level.

And so, as any man of faith would do, I got on my knees and begged God for it not to happen. Literal tears, streaming down my face, beseeching him to renew my belief. On any number of occasions.

“Help me see what I’m missing,” I’d plead. “Help me to understand. Help me to believe in you and love you.”

I wasn’t praying for material goods. I wasn’t asking for a bigger house or a better job or a nicer body.

I was imploring him not to let me go.

But he did anyway, without so much as a barely-perceptible intuition that it was all for some higher purpose I just couldn’t see.

It’s been about 5 years now since my personal Thanos-snap, 8 years since it all started going. And I’m now not only not any closer to answers, but I’ve lost everything I had left that I cared about.

This isn’t a self-pity party. It’s just an honest assessment of the stakes.

Someone made the joke after listening to my discussion with Paul VanderKlay about all this that I was “Steve Job.” As much as I can’t stand the Book of Job and see it as an indictment of a God who treats us like disposable playthings, not beloved children, it hit the mark. (If only I had the material resources of Steve Jobs, though, so I could spend more time in contemplation instead of schlepping!)

The most obvious conclusion to me was one of the following:

1. God is not, in fact, loving, but is actually cruel and delights in the suffering of the people who try their hardest to please him.

2. God is not, in fact, there at all, so his failure to answer prayers is not an indictment of who and what he is, but rather an ontological misunderstanding.

I have been inclined to choose #2, but I am fundamentally not a materialist. I am, as I wrote recently, an agnostic who prays.

But this forces me out of the binary scenario I laid out above. And the only other option I’ve been able to conjure up is this: maybe God exists, but we don’t know nearly as much about him as we think we do.

This third option is inherently complicated. Religion is most compelling when it is dogmatic and authoritative. When each church tells you that they are, in fact, the only path to salvation, and all the other poor suckers trying to find their way through other means are in for a rude awakening when they die.

Who cares that they’re doing the best they can with what they know? They never for a moment had anything dispositive to go on, but damn it, they chose the wrong way of getting to God, so it’s hell for them for not solving the impossible mysteries of the universe with laser precision.

Offer people a “certain” way out of that, and that’s one effective way to get converts.

People who live with the fear of choosing wrongly, who have been told repeatedly by their religious leaders and teachers that leaving the path they’re on — or that the people they know and love who are on a different one — both lead to hell cannot, by definition, truly believe in the love and mercy of God. Somewhere, deep down, they know that the system is rigged. That they have been subjected to a test they do not have the resources to pass, and that a lot of it comes down to dumb luck (which faith you were born into or exposed to at the right time), perseverance in the face of legitimate doubts, and never second guessing.

So when someone in the club of the “elect” — someone who believes the same things that they do — falls away, they are struck with a kind of paralyzing fear.

“If it could happen to them, it could happen to me.”

They may not be conscious of the fear, but they react as though it is exceptionally dangerous. Like a contagion, which, left unchecked, might destroy them and everyone they love.

Thus they say things like, “You can’t lose your faith against your will,” or, “those who apostatize never really had the faith anyway,” or any number of similar thought-terminating cliches. This is the theological equivalent of wagon-circling.

They will ridicule, ostracize, and exclude as ruthlessly as necessary to spare themselves the need to face the reality that sometimes even believing in and knowing the faith with real depth and affection is not enough to stop a person from losing it.

Who Determines Whether a Scotsman is True?

The occasion for this reflection was a Substack I read yesterday by a Catholic writer who goes by , called True Scotsmen Leave the Church: A defense of fallen-away Catholics and apostates.

I don’t remember where I came across it, but as I read it, I found myself thinking, “Wow, it sounds like she’s talking about me.” (Only later did I find out from the author herself that I was, in fact, one of the inspirations for the piece.)

She begins by describing the day she found out, as a married adult expecting a child, that her parents were getting a divorce after 27 years of marriage.

As someone whose 23rd anniversary is a little over a week away, and who is painfully concerned about the effects my impending divorce will have on my own children, I immediately felt the gravity of the comparison:

Most of my friends’ parents had gotten divorced during our school years—this was also the case for my husband. Going into marriage, I’d felt reassured that we had the example of my parents. Though very devoted to our vows, it is always best to a have a tangible example that a lifelong marriage is possible when you are surrounded by broken families.

You can imagine how the divorce impacted my feelings about my own marriage’s security. It did not do anything extreme, of course, but it made me nervous. If the most ideal example of marriage in my life could fall apart, was there really hope that mine could withstand anything?

My footing became a little more uncertain.

It makes us uncomfortable when we witness the failure of a deep truth in our lives. This is extremely understandable—we all want a steady, sure foundation to rely on. When the foundation cracks or breaks, the likelihood of other things falling apart increases. The entire thing may go up in flames. This is true of longstanding situations in our lives, such as our parents’ marriages, but it is also true of the lenses through which we view the world: our philosophies, our religion, our lack of religion. If truth itself can be undone, what is there?

The truth is, my failed marriage and my loss of faith are inextricably intertwined. I was never more convinced that any single event in my life was providential than the meeting of my wife. After four years at arguably the best university in the country for a Catholic young man to meet a good Catholic young woman, I had nothing to show for it but one brief relationship followed by a haphazard collection of crushes and a handful of first and second dates with various girls I didn’t ultimately connect with.

Then a series of unlikely coincidences led me not only to Phoenix, where I never intended or desired to go, but to the same workplace where I would meet my future wife, who followed her own string of odd coincidences there, only for me to have the specific spiritual knowledge she needed to overcome a particularly challenging situation that led ultimately to her conversion, and a very religiously intense first year together.

I was more sure that God had led us to be together than I’d ever been sure of anything that could not be empirically proven.

But the respective wounds we each carried with us, along with wildly different upbringings and personalities and neurotypes, overwhelmed the real attraction and complementarity that existed between us. It did this to such an extent that it came to feel as though God led us into a trap, inside of which we would both suffer without relief, no matter how much we prayed and begged and sought the aid of the sacraments, until at last the whole thing came apart.

And it nearly came apart a number of times before it actually did. The inefficacy of “the grace of the sacrament” couldn’t have become more clear to me within the marriage; as I have been forced to watch it end without my consent, I cannot help but concede that it was never healthy, and that we were both suffering dramatically within it.

So when Rose writes, “When the foundation cracks or breaks, the likelihood of other things falling apart increases. The entire thing may go up in flames.”

This is exactly what happened to me. Corruption in the Church alone wouldn’t have done it. My theological questions, objections, and doubts didn’t kill my faith on their own. It was the perfect storm of the theological as experienced through the personal that came down on my faith like a hammer blow and finally shattered the thing that had always been most precious to me.

And I assure you, I believed this was impossible. I believed it as surely as the people who try to make excuses for why such things can’t happen to true believers — though I never made those arguments myself. I never thought I would lose my faith, but I could certainly understand how others did. I came to that understanding by watching it happen to people I knew. People I respected and admired for their faith. People I loved.

Rose continues:

We like to reassure ourselves that our worldviews and beliefs are as obvious as 2+2 equaling 4, but we know that isn’t true. Quite frankly, if it were, we wouldn’t have faith itself, which is ultimately a gift from God. “Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by him. ‘Before this faith can be exercised, man must have the grace of God to move and assist him; he must have the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind’.”

It appears that our belief is, to some degree, out of our control—however, we know that God desires for all men to be saved, so it is not as arbitrary as some would have it. The burden remains on us, as God will do His part.

This is a terrible responsibility to have. I have felt its heaviness for ten years now. I once had a priest tell me in the confessional that faith can move mountains, but it is as fragile as tissue paper. I struggle to recall truer words, to be honest. The very thing that acts as the eyes of my soul and intellect could be obliterated.

There is not a creed in existence that is self-evident.

The most one can hope to figure out about God by the light of natural reason is the idea of St. Thomas’s unmoved mover, and even his “proofs” for the existence of a God without personal attributes appears to many philosophers as a case of special pleading. But even granting that Thomas’s reasoning is sound, we arrive not at a Father God, or the Trinity, or the “ineffable poverty of the divine, incarnate, crucified love” Von Balthazar speaks of, but the God of the deists; the divine watchmaker; the indifferent embodiment of cosmic life force who makes all things but does not care about or intervene in the affairs of men.

As for the question of faith in the specific God of a particular creed, this is one of those religious doctrines that seems to elude the most zealous of Christian triumphalists. They appear to think that man can gin up religious conviction all on his own. That faith is something earned through personal effort and a willing embrace of suffering, rather than a supernatural gift that can be given or withheld as God pleases.

More from Rose:

The existence of apostate Christians is not a secret one. Many are often very loud about it. Can you blame them? What else is there to do when everything you’ve believed falls apart? Stay silent? Do nothing? Is that what Christians do when they convert? Of course not. It is in our nature to share our stories when they are being rewritten.

This section felt very personally relevant to me. I had always been taught not to “scandalize” others through sinful behavior or the expression of religious doubt. But what I experienced was nothing less than the alteration of my entire worldview, and it was the worldview I had become famous for espousing. To fail to address my “deconstruction” felt to me like living a lie.

I had, frankly, a lot of explaining to do.

The reason I left 1P5, despite the fact that my work there provided adequately for my family for the first time in my adult life, was to avoid living this lie. I felt a duty to entrust it to someone who would carry out the mission in fidelity to those who believed in and supported it over the years. But the idea of retaining ownership of the thing so I could continue to benefit financially while hiring others to manage it and hiding my own loss of faith felt wildly disingenuous and dishonorable to me. And I was, after all, the face and main voice of the publication.

And now, here I am, 5 years later, living in a shoebox, barely scraping together enough money to pay my nominal living expenses through writing and delivering groceries almost every day of the week, wondering how the hell I wound up here at 48 years old, when I should have been planning for retirement in another decade or two, and enjoying the fruits of my labors.

So yeah, telling the story of what happened to me and why it happened was important, but it was also catastrophically costly.

Rose lists a litany of reasons why people may apostatize: Spiritual or sexual abuse, parents who prioritize religion over the wellbeing of their children (or who are pious at church but abusive at home), having an affliction like scrupulosity (which derives from obsessive-compulsive disorder) described as prideful or the work of demons, being subjected to deliverances over issues of mental health, being excluded because of a sexual orientation outside of your desire or control, or the torture of living with the interplay between scruples and religious guilt:

“It is Hell on Earth,” she writes, “to be so consumed by moral OCD that the only thing that brings relief is not thinking about your religion at all.”

This is something I’ve personally suffered from my entire life. It still afflicts me even now, after being gone for half a decade. I am still haunted by religious guilt and fear — things I hoped I would get some reprieve from after walking away. It is not the reason I walked away, but it certainly put enormous stress on my personal sensus fidei. Whereas other feel peace within the practice of their faith, I felt only constant pressure, stress, guilt, and fear. Only by living perfectly could I avoid these feelings, and I am far from a perfect man.

Rose again:

[M]any Catholics treat all apostasy the same way. I see the same platitudes given to those that are struggling: “Don’t leave Jesus because of Judas,” “The Gates of Hell won’t prevail,” etcetera. While true, platitudes aren’t infallible in the way our Church is, and people still leave.

I know a woman who entered two different convents and experienced spiritual and emotional abuse from the sisters at both of them. She was so convinced of her vocation to the religious life, but it was frustrated twice by abuse. I don’t know if she is practicing anymore.

What do you even say to that? She was one of the most faithful women I have ever known. She certainly put me to shame. What can I offer her besides prayers and understanding? Yes, understanding: I understand why she left the Church, if she did. I understand why those who experienced sexual abuse from a priest left the Church. Do you?

Some don’t. There is a common response to any sort of apostasy that drives me absolutely batty: “They weren’t really Catholic. They wouldn’t leave Jesus in the Eucharist if they were.”

I cannot stand it—the dismissive, pontifical hubris of it all. In many cases, it becomes the No True Scotsman fallacy: one insists on the truth of the Church, a counter-example is given, and they respond, “well, that person was never really Catholic.” I can’t tell if it is better or worse when the response is padded with something like, “it is truly horrible that they were abused, but they still [shouldn’t] have left.”

I watched that last line play out with my friend Joseph Sciambra, over and over again. The man was sexually abused by priests on multiple occasions throughout childhood and adolescence. He lived a profligate gay life that was not separable from these experiences — a life that was deeply harmful to him. When he tried coming back to church as a prodigal son, he suffered amorous advances from priests in the confessional, or told that his lifestyle wasn’t really wrong. When he tried to bring evidence of clerical grooming situations within dioceses to bishops — including “the good ones” — he got lip service at best. More often than not he was completely ignored.

And when he finally couldn’t take it anymore, and left Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which he felt had a much healthier clerical culture while still allowing him to be close to God, he was attacked, repeatedly, for his decision to leave.

Hell, for that matter, I’ve watched go through this for the past two decades. He was a convert to Catholicism in the first place, but after covering the sex abuse scandal as a journalist broke his nascent faith in the Catholic institution and the clergy — largely because men he believed to be good men refused to stand up and oppose the evil that was going on — he had a decision to make: lose his faith entirely as anger and resentment consumed him, or keep it by turning to the Orthodox for something he believed Catholicism couldn’t give. For that, he’s been savaged by Catholics for as long as I can remember. And it’s unjust. He’s a good man, doing his best as life pummels him with his own sequence of unbearable blows.

A not insignificant aside: Rod was the first one to warn me that I was going to lose my own faith.

At the time, we knew of each other, but weren’t in any kind of regular correspondence. But he saw something in my writing, and he reached out, and he warned me what was coming if something didn’t change.

I listened, but I couldn’t find my way out.

I suspect this was always going to happen. Like Rose says in her piece, “We all want a steady, sure foundation to rely on. When the foundation cracks or breaks, the likelihood of other things falling apart increases.”

My foundation was always broken. I just didn’t know it. Eventually, under enough stress, the house was going to fall.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves About God

I began this piece by asking how many of us can say we truly know God.

That’s not just a rhetorical question. It’s a challenge.

Day in and day out, in my various interactions as an online writer on these topics, I have people tell me with certainty what God thinks, what he wants, how he desires for us to live, what I should offer up, what I should be doing, and so on.

And I have gotten into a habit of always pushing back:

“How do you know that’s what God wants? Did he tell you that?”

They always say yes. They always then proceed to say it’s in the Bible, or in some encyclical or catechism or similar authoritative source.

“That’s not what I asked,” I’ll say. “I asked if God spoke to you directly.”

Most people admit he didn’t. Some will try to conjure a subjective experience they had into a locution. But none — not a single one, not ever — has any evidence for their claim that they know beyond the shadow of a doubt that their belief, which is mutually exclusive of other people’s beliefs who also believe they know with certainty that theirs is correct, is actually truly the thought of God.

Which is why I think it’s important to make a distinction between “the mind of God” and “our conception of the mind of God based on the study of theology by men.” Because a lot of the answers to the questions we can’t seem to resolve may lie within the delta between the two.

One of those things, for me, is the inconceivability of the notion that an omnibenevolent God who is mostly hidden from the human race, with its universally limited intellects and imperfect wills, could ever justly condemn any of us to eternal conscious torment in hell — let alone the vast majority of us who are allegedly lost due to the “fewness of the saved.”

Without getting into the particulars of that discussion in this piece, which is already running long, I want to share something that my interest in the topic led me to. In his excellent book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation, David Bentley Hart makes a key distinction I think we should all re-orient our religious epistemology around:

[I]t makes no sense to take a metaphysical principle as trivially true as “God is not an ethical agent” as a prohibition upon all moral interrogations of Christian teachings about God. In point of fact, a moral agent is able to fail to act justly precisely because he or she suffers the limitation of possessing goodness only by appropriation; he or she is good only so long as he or she willingly acts in conformity with Moral Agency as such. That infinite Moral Agency itself, however, suffers from no defect in respect of its own nature, and so is never unjust. So, if the traditional Christian philosophical claims about God are true, we are permitted to arrive at all sorts of analogical conclusions regarding how God might act, so long as our frame of reference is correct. If we know what it is for an ethical agent to act in accord with moral goodness, then we have some sense, however limited, of what moral goodness is in itself, in God who is its source and substance.

Now, obviously, this still does not mean…that we have any warrant for trying to pass judgment on what we take to be God’s actions in any particular isolated worldly event, since any such event is one whose causes and consequences and conditions and circumstances all quickly slip beyond our ken, and we can have no sense of how that event fits into the pattern of the whole of things. Any such judgment on our part would be made from an infinitely inadequate perspective. If, however, we are not confronted just by this or that particular contingent tragic or terrible episode or circumstance, of which we are trying to make sense within the context of all other contingent events and conditions, but are instead presented with a comprehensive story that purports to be nothing less than the total narrative and total rationale of all God’s actions in creation, then we may indeed pass judgment on that story’s plausibility. In fact, it is morally required of us to do so; not to judge is a dereliction of our rational vocation to know and affirm the Good. And here, recall again, we are not assessing God’s acts against some higher standard of ethical action; we are merely measuring the stories we tell about him against his own supposed revealed nature as the transcendent Good. It is our story that is being judged for its internal coherence, in keeping with our rational grasp of justice and benevolence, not God who is being judged according to some external scale of ethical values. Thus, for instance, it is perfectly permissible to say with confidence that God, by his nature, could not create a reality containing rational creatures, all of whom, for no reason save the exercise of the divine will, he keeps entirely ignorant of the Good during their lives, and then mercilessly consigns to eternal torment thereafter as a penalty for their misdeeds. Because he is the Good itself, God cannot be the author of absolute injustice, absolute evil; such an irrational possibility would be a limitation upon the infinite freedom with which he expresses his nature. [emphasis added]

This applies to more than just the question of hell itself, of course. It applies to all the stories we tell ourselves about God.

I had any number of doubts that I forcibly suppressed during my lifetime of religious belief, and I did so for the explicit reason that I was not allowed to ask those questions. I was supposed to fall to my knees and offer my assent, not point out the discrepancies until everyone I knew threw their hands up and abandoned the conversation.

I am not at all certain that I am correct about every objection. I am not at all certain that all the stories we tell are wrong. But it feels almost impossible to me that they could all be correct, and even before I lost my faith I was at times nagged by the sensation that I was defending something that was rationally indefensible because I was obligated to do so, not because it struck me as good or decent or true.

I simply reached a point where I refused to suppress the objections produced by the mind I was given — arguably by the same God I was asking these questions about — in the interest of honoring an obligation I never consented to in the first place.

The Most Consequential Dilemma

I can’t say there has ever been a single moment in my post-Catholic life where I felt proud of the decision to leave. I have often felt that it was inevitable, or painfully necessary, or freeing, or any number of things, but never once has it been something I am honored to proclaim.

I announce it because it’s so relevant to the kinds of people I talk to, and the meaning-making work that I do.

Still, I feel diminished by it. Materially, personally, socially, and spiritually. I know it is a source of pain and confusion to many people who care about me.

I am prone get combative about it when attacked, certainly, because there are a lot of absolute assholes out there masquerading as Christians, quick to condemn, or to tell me that 30+ years of study and practice is nullified by my apostasy and I can therefore no longer have an opinion on ecclesial matters that are currently unfolding. As though all that knowledge was simply erased by my recusal from the sacraments, because “sin makes you stupid” or some other equally low-res explanation.

Of course, those same people would almost certainly excoriate me if I made sacrilegious confessions by not having contrition for my theological defections on matters of dogma, or if I received the Eucharist without even believing it’s truly the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ. They would not appreciate if my lips performed a dishonest recitation of the Nicene creed.

They don’t want me to fake it any more than they want me to be honest about what was lost, but they also don’t appreciate that I respect their beliefs enough not to pretend. They merely want me to suffer for having the audacity to tell the truth about what happened. For having the integrity to say, “I can’t do this because I no longer believe in it with the requisite conviction, and all the wishing and all the praying in the world hasn’t changed that.”

They want me to be evil, or driven by slavery to some hidden sin, because if I’m not, then it means it could happen to them, too, and they want to lash out at me for reminding them of that fact.

Rose touches on this point as well:

If someone can abandon something that was the foundation of their lives, full of so much opportunity to transform them, was it even real? It is natural to ponder this. I asked myself this about my parents’ marriage. Was it all a lie? Were they actually happy?

Without getting into the gritty details: yes, the marriage was real. They had been happy, but the divorce was not a surprise to at least one of them. In fact, it would be profoundly insulting to insist that it was all a facade because it fell apart in the end. Its dissolution did not nullify the twenty-seven years of partnership they shared, or the personal growth they went through as a result of the marriage.

It is equally insulting to suggest that someone was a fake Christian because they left the Faith. It devalues the changes they may have made in their lives, their struggles to be faithful, the ways they grew as people. Depending on the reason for leaving the Church, their departure may be more understandable than their staying. The more correct decision? No. Understandable? Yes.

Like I’ve said, we do this as a form of self-protection. Pretending that it wasn’t real protects the power of our beliefs, but it also protects us. If we pretend that every person who leaves the Church was an imposter, we shield ourselves from our own moments of doubt. I know most of you have had them.

I’ve stood on the precipice myself. I have seen myself in the apostates. It has utterly terrified me at times. What do I do? Feel angry at them, excuse it away, ignore them—anything but sit with the terrifying reality that I, too, could leave what has been my salvation for my entire adult life.

So was it real for me?

Yes. And also no.

Yes inasmuch as it was the core framework of my existence, taught to me from the time I was old enough to understand words. I grew up in a milieu where Catholicism was ground truth, the most important and consequential thing in this world and the next, where living it correctly meant a founded hope for heaven, living it poorly meant eons of suffering in purgatory, and living without it meant certain damnation.

Catholicism gave me a sense of purpose, identity, boundaries, and answers to life’s deepest questions. It gave me father figures in the priesthood when I was struggling to figure out the strained and often terrifying relationship with my real father. It imposed order on the chaos of my mind and the uncertainty of its ceaseless questions. It gave me acceptance among the men of my tribe, and a way to feel at home no matter where in the world I found myself — all I had to do was walk into a Catholic Church.

But it was ultimately insufficient, at least as it was constituted, to withstand everything my lived experience of being a Catholic threw at me. Some of its central claims appeared to me as not just tarnished, but corroded straight through. Some of its moral claims increasingly struck me as outrageous, and certain teachings I was obligated to assent to appeared too absurd to take seriously. It was by turns both too anodyne to prompt a contemplation of the transcendent and too harsh to make it possible to see God as Love.

And that, ultimately, lies at the heart of why I think I lost it.

The “no” in the yes and no question of whether it was real for me comes down not so much to an intellectual exercise, but the experience of divine love.

I can’t say I ever believed God loved me, and I’m not sure, therefore, that I ever loved him. What I was doing with him was a religious version of people pleasing — appeasing the angry deity in order to avoid his wrath. The occasional upswelling of zeal in my breast may well have been an incidental side effect of a psychological construct.

The God I believed in, frankly, was not lovable. He was aloof, capricious, arbitrary, angry, and withholding. And he appeared to feed on human pain, what with all the times I was told about him delighting in us offering it up, and all the saints saying we should run towards suffering. On the other hand, he seemed to always refuse to answer even my most fervent prayers for help with faith, hope, and love, with understanding of why things were happening the way they were, or to offer saving grace to heal my marriage, but was always ready to remind me I wasn’t doing enough for him (directly or through his countless human proxies) or to punish me for my sins — whether here or in the hereafter.

It doesn’t particularly matter whether you think any of that is true. It’s God as I experienced him, and your experience, if it’s different, is nothing like my own.

What many believers fail to understand is that religion — particularly the Catholic religion, with its intricate and extensive collection of rules and axioms and obligatory beliefs — is torture for some people. An endlessly growing chasm between expectations and what you get. A non-stop assault of guilt and obligation with no perception of mercy, peace, healing, or love.

When I read Rose’s concluding arguments in her full piece, what I see is someone struggling with some of the same things I am. She is both trying to reassure herself and her readers of her fidelity, and crying out for help making sense of a lived experience of a faith that is tearing her apart:

Perhaps you feel that you could never leave; maybe you are completely, utterly convinced. You have probably had a harder life than me. I am happy for you. I’ve had moments like that before—long ones—but it would be a lie to say that my moral OCD hasn’t done damage, or that the misery of feeling so restrained in what I may enjoy or do hasn’t crushed me, or that the goodness of those who wholly disagree with me (and the badness of those who fully align with me) hasn’t deeply challenged me.

Leaving would not be justified. It is never correct. It doesn’t mean it hasn’t been sorely tempting, though. Some have succumbed to the temptation that I have managed to fight. Am I better than them? I don’t think so. I think I might just have more willpower and openness to God’s grace. Maybe I’m just too scared of going to Hell after I die and that imperfect contrition keeps me going. (I am sorry to be so blunt. I do believe in and cherish my faith. I make it a point to be honest with you all, though. If Jacob wrestled directly with God and was still saved, I think I can share my thoughts and be okay.)

Truly, I have dragged myself across broken glass and ran through fire for my faith. I have denied myself many things, forced myself to be comfortable with what hurts, changed my life drastically. This does not make me special, but I cannot sufficiently explain how painfully difficult it is to be a Catholic sometimes as an autistic woman, and if it weren’t the truest thing in the universe, I would have nothing to do with it. If I were to fail in my fidelity, nothing would push me further away than being told all of it was a ruse.

She sounds a lot like I did back in 2018, when my own faith first started to flicker, then dim. And if she’s reading this, I would offer a similar warning to the one I received, though I can offer no wise remedy, inasmuch as I never found one.

It is both terrifying to consider losing a faith like that, and also sorely tempting, because you hope that on the other side you might actually find some relief from the chronic, relentless suffering that it causes you. And from the endless obnoxiousness, frankly, of far too many of your co-religionists. (I always say that Catholics comprise the subset of both the best and the worst people I have ever known.)

Rose appears to understand something I try to tell my older children, some of whom also no longer believe:

You cannot afford to take this lightly. You can’t just decide it doesn’t make sense and therefore, you’re done trying to figure it out.

If the things religion teaches are true, what you do with that is the most consequential thing that you will ever decide. You must wrestle with it. You must seek answers. You must try to to come to terms with what you do and don’t believe and why you do or don’t believe those things.

I battle with it every. single. day.

I talk to him, even though he never talks to me.

I try to be aware of my biases, my anger, my resentment, and my bitterness. Sometimes I let them win. Sometimes I keep them in check.

But one thing I’ve learned is that the people who condemn you for leaving or treat you like a leper because you’re on the outside looking in are the ones who are the most fragile in their own faith — and not in a way that involves a healthy struggle with it, like Rose is trying to do.

They choose not to think about it at all, maybe because they were taught by some careless priest (as I have at times been) never to even entertain a doubt, never to give the devil any quarter. You can’t guard your house from the noise you hear downstairs in the dead of night by pretending you didn’t hear it. You have to investigate. You have to be ready for the violence that the investigation may produce.

The people in my life whose faith is the most authentic are — and I am more certain of this than anything else pertaining to religion — the ones who never feel the need to hassle me about it. They know I know. They know I take it seriously. They don’t check in, they don’t ask how the struggle is coming along, they don’t mention it obliquely like they’re tiptoeing around a minefield. They are free to talk about their faith around me, and I’m free to talk about my doubt around them.

They treat me like a human being whom they believe God loves, and who is going through something for some purpose none of us understands. Whether I believe that’s what’s happening or not, they do, and they act accordingly. They trust the process. They actually believe that God is loving and good and merciful and has a plan for everyone, including apostates like me, and therefore, they feel no urgency to speed up his process through their own machinations. My doubts may at times present certain challenges to their faith, but their faith, lived authentically, presents real challenges to my doubts. And in this exchange, we are mutually enriched in our pursuit of truth.

If there is someone in your life who is struggling with faith, or has lost it already, it is of paramount importance that you understand this.

If you live as a Christian, and you are magnanimous and virtuous and kind, you are living testimony of the transformative power of your belief. If you profess being Christian, but are cruel and caustic and condemning, thinking you’re committing a work of mercy in your endless admonition of sinners, you are driving people away from God. I tell you this with absolute certainty. There have been so many times when my heart was softening and then I encountered someone like this, and I immediately reverted to battle mode, all softness evaporating like dew in the desert sun.

The phrase “Preach the Gospel; if necessary, use words” may be apocryphal in its attributions, but it is undeniably efficacious. Start there.

Your job isn’t to reconcile apostates and correct sins; it’s to show those people, the best that you can, that the answers they seek lie with the God you believe you’ve already found.

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I started dreading Father’s Day weeks ago.

It came over me suddenly, like a storm you didn’t realize was on the way until you hear the rain pounding on the roof.

I was out doing my weekend deliveries, being reminded by marketing everywhere I went that the day was coming. I watched as young fathers pushed their little ones in shopping carts through stores, blissfully unaware of how fast it all goes under the best of circumstances, let alone when daily fatherhood is cut unnaturally short.

What does being a father consist of? Is it a mere biological fact? Is it relational, and if so, what are the parameters? Can you really be a dad when you only get to see your kids for fewer than 1% of your waking hours?

Can fatherhood be taken away, or is it inviolable, like an indelible mark left upon the soul?

My anxiety ramped up so badly on that particular Saturday that I eventually made myself sick, spending the night with cold sweats and fever dreams about strange alien cocoons in a pitch-dark, abandoned house. The occupants of those uncanny bundles were inhuman, but had the faces of human children.

But then, a couple of days later, my 20-year-old daughter Sophia pierced my endless rumination with an unexpected phone call as I was walked through the frozen aisle of a Food Lion, filling my cart with someone else’s groceries.

She said she was trying to plan for Father’s day, and wanted to know if there was anything in particular I wanted to do, or any special meal I wanted to eat. The details didn’t matter to me. She had shined a bright ray of hope into the darkness of my fear and grief.

Aside from being a beautiful and strikingly intelligent young woman, Sophie (what we’ve always called her, despite her legal name ending with an “a”) is somehow a fusion of the best traits of her two wildly different parents. She has a mind much like my own, along with my love for language and art and beauty, and is a budding writer herself. But she has her mother’s fierceness, her drive and tenacity, and an unwillingness to let anyone stand in her way.

She is, of course, also very much her own person. Like all children, she is more than the sum of her parental parts.

The intervening weeks came and went, and suddenly I found myself on Friday before Father’s Day, having another particularly grief-stricken afternoon, and realizing I’d never given her the answers about what I wanted that she’d asked me for.

I didn’t want her to think I was just ignoring her efforts, so I sent her a text:

I know you wanted more from me on Father’s Day. The truth is, I have no idea how to handle it. This is my first time after being forced to leave, and every time I think about it I get so sad I just shut down.

I miss seeing you guys every day. I miss feeling like I’m able to be any kind of real father at all. Of all the things I’m grieving, this is the thing that hurts the most.

I don’t want to put that on you, I just want to explain. It means the world to me that you asked, and I don’t want you to feel ignored or like it doesn’t matter. It really does. I just can’t find an answer.

I don’t want to spend a lot. I just want to see my kids and maybe eat whatever and just try to get through the day without crying.

I’m sorry I’ve not been more help. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, and I’m a wreck.

Over the next 24 hours, we texted back and forth about logistics. She asked me if I wanted to go out for coffee with her on Father’s Day, before going over to the old house.

Of course, I said yes.

We went to a little place near downtown, a shop that was tucked away in a spot so hidden I’d never seen it, even though it was just a few miles from my place. She suggested it because she knew it had gluten free pastries, so I could actually have a treat to go with my standard plain iced latte. My 10 year old daughter Mia came with her, and we sat and talked for over an hour before deciding it was time to head over to the house to make home-made Chinese hot pot for dinner. I met Sophie and Jamie at the local Asian supermarket, where they were gathering vegetables and mushrooms and the ingredients for the soup base. I bought dried bean curd and jasmine iced tea and enough meat to make sure my teenage sons all got their fill. Paper-thin slices of lamb, and pork, and beef.

My boys came downstairs when I arrived at the house with the groceries. There were greetings and hugs, and as we talked, we got into a spirited debate over the merits of generative AI, after I showed them a recent video I’d made with it. My kids are very tech savvy, but they all have strong anti-AI inclinations, a phenomenon I find fascinating. I’m so used to young people being the first adopters of new tech, I am always somewhat surprised that so many Gen Z kids have a real instinctual hatred for AI — and generative AI in particular. They talked about it being antithetical to the human experience that inspires real art, and writing, and music, and film. Sophie in particular described all AI art as “soulless,” and said she’d never seen a single instance she considered beautiful. They made clear that they didn’t have any interest in consuming content that wasn’t made by actual people. I told them I wasn’t there to change their mind, just to understand their position, but it still took on the tenor of a friendly debate.

We ate. Hot pot is a perfect meal for extended conversation, a boiling pot of broth sitting in the center of the table, cooking small bits of meat and vegetables in it a few pieces at a time as everyone partakes of the communal fare. When we were done, and the mess was cleared away, Sophie told me she’d stayed up until 3AM making me a gluten free apple pie. I looked ruefully at it, because it looked incredible, but I was way too full to take another bite. I told everyone to take their desired share of the pie, and whatever was left, I’d bring home with me.

Then she brought me a bag full of gifts, which I didn’t expect at all. She’d already bought me coffee and baked me a pie.

She’d already made sure I knew I wasn’t forgotten.

I removed the gifts from the bag one at a time: a candle scented with sandalwood and smoke — an exact replica of one I already had in my apartment that was getting low, though I doubt she knew that when she bought it. She just knows me. Mementos from the road trip she and my son Ivan just took across the country a few weeks ago, including an alien-themed magnet from New Mexico and a cool resin-molded bas-relief photo of Carlsbad Caverns — a place we all tried to visit on our last-ever family road trip two summers ago, but got there too late for admission. A notebook with a durable vinyl cover and a package of Pilot G2 pens (long my favorite writing implement). A funny “Hop on Pop”-themed card sealed in an envelop with blood-red wax, emblazoned with her signet — a stylized letter S. And a wooden picture frame with hand-burned filigrees, and an inscription at the top that read, “Dum Vita Est, Spes Est.”

“My Latin’s not great,” I said. “What does this mean? Something life is…”

“Where there is life, there is hope.” She said.

I managed to stay stoic last night when she told me, but I couldn’t even write that line just now without being seized by an unexpected spasm of sobs.

She had seen how deep my pain is, and met it with equal force.

“The frame was supposed to have a picture of the family in it,” she said, exasperation in her voice, “but I can’t ever get everyone together while there’s still enough daylight to take it.”

“I’ll leave the frame with you, then,” I said, “until you can manage that.”

She was trying to give me the gift of the family I had to leave behind, so I could take them with me.

I thanked her for everything. The boys and I talked a little about whether I wanted to play a PC game with them when I got home. Then Eli came and asked me when I was going to come sit with him so we could watch our show. In the old days, before I had to leave, we’d gotten in the habit of watching Trent the Traveler together. I hadn’t realized he was waiting for me.

At first, he sat with his mom. He put on an old episode, the one where Trent goes to Japan with a group of people who follow his YouTube channel. One we’d watched several times. I wasn’t sure if he chose it because it was one we’d watched together before I was gone, or if it was just the way his little ASD brain gravitates towards watching the same familiar things over and over and over again. After a minute or two, he got up from the chair with his mom and came over to sit with me.

“So I’m going to Japan next Spring,” Sophie said, after coming in and seeing what was on the TV. This was news to both her mother and I. Her best friend’s family invited her to go with them, and I felt a pang of jealousy mixed with genuine happiness and excitement for her.

I was supposed to go to Japan, back in the summer of 2001, when I was just 3 years older than she is now. I’d been offered a job teaching English there. But my friend Tony, who had applied with me, had not been given the same offer, and I didn’t want to go so far away from home alone. So on a whim, I’d moved to Phoenix with Tony and one of my other close friends instead. That was where I met Jamie two months later, and my life went in a totally different direction.

I never did get the chance to go to Japan after that. I traveled a lot when I was young, but things get complicated when you get married and start having kids. It’s still on my list of things I would very much like to do, even if some of the luster in the idea has faded over the years.

A few minutes later, I noticed that Eli had fallen asleep, as I sat next to him, holding his hand. I carried him to bed, and went upstairs to tuck Mia in and say goodnight to my boys, who were all gaming together in the office on the second floor, at my old desk.

It will never stop feeling weird, walking out of that life like a visitor, and going “home” to a place that cannot, by definition, ever feel like home.

Sophie walked me out to my car, and we ended up standing there talking for another two hours in the dark. We talked about heartbreak, and she finally got to tell me the story of what happened with the boy she’d been in love with who had slipped away last year, right in the middle of our family coming apart. It hit me then just how much grief of her own she’d had to bear, losing her relationship and her parents’ relationship at the same time. She’s strong as steel, but at one point, the emotion overcame her, and I did the only thing I could, and wrapped her in my arms as she spoke through her tears. I did my best to try to help her understand what might have happened, since she, like me, never got any real closure on what went so wrong that things that still mattered had to come to an end. We talked about how strange it is that someone you didn’t vote for to be in charge of you could have the unilateral power to completely change your life.

I started to feel exhaustion coming over me fast, and looked at my watch. It was nearly 1AM. I told her I had to go, but that we should get together for coffee more often, and continue our conversations. I could certainly use the company, and it seemed that she needed more than a peer to talk about her life with. She liked that idea, and told me I just needed to invite her. (I’m notorious for not planning even simple things like this, so there was some gentle chiding in the suggestion.)

Before I opened my door to leave, I felt the need to say one more thing.

“You saved me,” I said, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice. “I’ve been dreading this day for a long time. I don’t know how to do Father’s Day when I don’t even feel like I get to be a father anymore.”

“I know,” she replied.

“Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

And I said goodnight, and watched the tiny little girl who used to sleep on my chest walk back into the garage as an incredibly impressive young woman. The garage door closed slowly like the scroll of the end credits of a movie as I started the car and pulled out of the driveway.

It’s the best Father’s Day I could have asked for after all that’s happened. In fact, because of that, it’s probably the most meaningful one I’ve ever had.

“Where there is life, there is hope.”

I looked it up after I got back to my apartment. It was Cicero who coined that phrase. I should have known. She graduated from an academy named after him, and she’s big on meaningful inside references, just like her old man.

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There’s something I’m trying to figure out, and maybe if you’re reading this you can help me.

If you’ve experienced a particular kind of grief, sometimes you feel as though any attempt to move on from the pain is a kind of betrayal of the significance of the thing.

You can feel stuck within a sense of duty to bear witness to the loss. Especially (though not necessarily) if the loss was caused not by mere happenstance or natural causes, but because of a choice -- a choice you believe was wrong.

What do you do when you know you can’t be the sin eater? When you can’t make your own hurt and dysfunction into the condensed symbol of the injustice of the thing and your protest of it without losing yourself in that, but you also know that finding some way to move on would look very much to others like the thing that happened never meant that much to you after all?

It seems to me this isn’t the kind of thing anyone can just easily figure out on their own. I need the wisdom of those who have been through it, or have found good resources to help them grapple with this.

I’m trapped in loyalty to the protest of losing my marriage and daily presence as a father in the lives of my children when I believe that it was wrong to take that away — and I want my kids to know that — but I also don’t see the good in letting the pain and emptiness of my existence without them become the final word. That’s a slippery slope to death and destruction. This is not a thing I’m at all sure I can survive if I don’t change my approach.

I need to somehow “move on” if I’m going to become a whole person again, which I need to be if I’m going to be of any use to my children as a father, but moving on in itself feels like a betrayal.

I’m not looking for casual advice here. I’m looking for what you’ve learned if you’ve gone through it. And you don’t have to put it in the comments. I’m perfectly happy to receive emails on this at steve at steveskojec dot com.

Thanks in advance.

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Today we’re going to try something a little different.

I’m overdue for doing more of my signature writing here, but as so often turns out to be the case, every time I express a little bit of optimism in these pages, some new thing comes along to knock the wind out of me and I spend my days battling to keep my head above the inky waters of whatever the hell this thing is I’m living through, and the words don’t come. I’ve got lots of notes in my phone for my next entry in Notes From the Road, but I need a full day to work on it, and that just hasn’t been doable in the past week.

I’ve been working a lot more away from my desk lately, which is the other thing that’s keeping me from writing. As I think I mentioned, DoorDash kept getting worse after the local college kids went home for the summer (we have tens of thousands of students here at the various universities here in the Triangle during the schoolyear and they love ordering food) so I switched to Instacart for my gig work.

But Instacart is a different animal.

It’s not people having dinner delivered, it’s people sending me to buy their groceries so they can make their meals at home. Which means my busiest work hours shift into daytime, not evening, which also happens to be my optimal writing time. I make more money doing Instacart, but it’s a lot more physical work, and the proof of that is that I’ve lost 7 pounds in the last couple weeks because of all the hustling I’ve been doing. You’d be surprised how many steps you can rack up doing grocery shopping all day!

And since the universe won’t let me have nice things, Evie (my car) is, of course, overheating again, despite $3300 invested since February in getting that to stop. I don’t know what the current cause is, but I’m having to baby her to get through my shifts, and I have neither the money nor the free time to drop her off in the shop for another couple days to try to solve the mystery.

And frankly, I’m getting really annoyed at this point.

I’m half-tempted to trade her in, but my credit is poor and I don’t want the hassle. I become attached to familiar things, and I hate all the change that has already occurred recently in my life. She’s a pleasant car to drive when she’s working right, and we’ve built quite a history together. I’m not sure what my next move is here. I’m sure I’ll procrastinate as long as I possibly can on making a decision.

If I weren’t standing in the crater of a personal neutron bomb, I could probably fit more into my days, but the emotional load being what it is, I tend to become exhausted far more quickly than I used to.

So, I’m taking a page from ’s book, skipping out on deliveries this afternoon, and I’m going to just write this one more like a journal entry with a bunch of disparate-but-possibly-connected thoughts.

We’ll see how that goes!

Disclosure Day

If you’re not familiar with Steven Spielberg’s new alien flick, Disclosure Day, here’s the trailer:

I went and saw this over the weekend, but I had a family situation I was dealing with just before and during my viewing of the film, so I was distracted and only gave it partial attention. Fortunately, I bought an unlimited movie pass for the summer, because with just the handful of movies I want to see, it’s cheaper than buying individual tickets, so I went back on Monday and watched it again.

I’m not going to spoil it, so if you’re planning on seeing it, you’re safe to keep reading. If you’re not, you’re going to have to deal with some calculated vagueries.

On my first viewing, I thought it was an intriguing concept that was executed like every Spielberg action film. I had a moment where I thought, “this could be Indiana Jones or E.T., just with different characters and a different story.” The pacing, the action sequences, even the composition of the shots. As someone who has been watching the man’s films my whole life, it had an eerie familiarity to it.

And as an action movie with a unique story, it was pretty decent. Nothing about the plot made it feel like a re-hash of material we’d already seen.

But my second viewing uncovered a bunch of plot holes I missed on my first attempt. By the time I was done, I realized that the whole thing was kind of a disappointment.

That said, I think it depends on what you were expecting going in.

Some people expected an alien invasion movie, and were sorely disappointed. I actually saw a guy say “how can you have a movie about aliens without a single shot of space?”

That’s never what this was, so I can see why it would feel like a letdown if you were looking for, say, something along the lines of Independence Day.

Others went looking for anti-Christian symbolism, and if you go looking for that, it’s an inkblot test, and you’re bound to find something you can poke a sharp stick at. (More on that in a minute).

As someone who has been studying the UAP phenomenon on and off since I was a young boy (with renewed interest over the past decade) I was really looking forward to this film. I had hoped it would dovetail with existing UAP lore in a more concrete way, since the film’s central push is about getting the 80-year archive of (primarily video) information out to the public that proves we’re not alone, instead of keeping that a secret locked inside government and the defense industry.

That’s what everyone I know in the real world who is into the UAP phenomenon is also pushing for.

What we got instead was a story that served as a hypothesis of what might be going on, that asserts what agenda the non-human intelligences may have, and the lengths the government and private defense industry leaders will go to in order to keep all that from lighting the fuse of an “already destabilized world,” with a pseudo-lore dump of fictional videos based on real sightings tacked on at the end. One that I could not help but note with amusement, was of exponentially higher quality than anything we are likely to ever see in real life.

There were certainly little nods to real stories only real UFO nerds know — like a video of President Nixon showing his pal Jackie Gleason where the alien bodies were stored — but for the most part, the fan service was contained in brief clips of archival footage, the vast majority of which was fabricated for the film.

It was an archetypical Hollywood movie of the era I grew up in, where the CGI is a little too obvious and the protagonists are pursued by overpowered institutional enemies while trying to rush a MacGuffin (“an object or element in a story that drives the plot”) to the right place at the right time so they can get all the secrets out on the evening news, because, you know, “the truth will set you free” when the mainstream media gets ahold of it, or something.

That last bit is a dynamic and I talk about a lot, and I believe we touched on it again in our last podcast, which was explicitly about whether disclosure of the presence of nonhuman intelligence will challenge people’s faith, and about how this movie in particular might figure in. We grew up believing that if you just got the secrets on the news, then, to steal a line from Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

And it just ain’t true.

Speaking of challenges to faith, and of Rod Dreher, I read Dreher’s review of the movie — he called it a “gnostic re-enchantment tale.” I also watched Jonathan Pageau’s video review, where he described Disclosure Day as “The last Boomer propaganda movie.”

After what I just said about Spielberg’s style, I’m inclined to agree on the Boomer bit. That said, and without getting deeply into the specific examples, if you go looking for certain kinds of messages in a work of cinema that is subject to interpretation, you’re almost certainly going to find them.

That doesn’t make your interpretation correct.

For example, there’s an alien technology in the film that allows those humans who know how to use it to “dive” on a person, taking control of their physical movements and making them do things against their will.

Some see this as a metaphor for demonic possession; but anyone who has watched any amount of sci-fi knows that the “Mind Control Device” is one of the most common tropes in stories like this. It usually involves a scene of one protagonist trying to convince another protagonist to “fight it!” as they battle for control of their own mind and actions. From TVtropes.org:

My remote controller’s more of a remote control-her!”

— Sho Minazuki, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax

This is the device that the villain (usually) will use to keep the hero, townspeople, or Mr./Mrs. Random Supporting Character in thrall. It has been used countless times in stories across many different types of media, whether it be as a Plot Device, MacGuffin, and even a key part of a Very Special Episode.

While these devices tend to fall into two general categories, either broadcasting “hypno-waves” at any luckless viewer for a one-time treatment, or are somehow attached to the victim’s body (usually the head), they ultimately know no shape and can come in nearly any specific form:

That sword you just picked up? Hope you like being a slave to the evil overlord.

That mask that looks so good on you? Hope you can control the demonic power inside.

That shampoo you’re using? Dr. D’s BrainWashing Shampoo and Cranium Rinse.

That bracelet the street vendor gave you? Welcome to the most dangerous cult in the world.

And yes, there are specific references in the film to Christian belief and loss of faith, and even the danger of replacing belief in a supreme being with “actual supreme beings.”

There’s a scene where a character uses a crucifix to try to stop the mind control that is being performed on her. When holding the cross doesn’t work, she tears off the necklace it’s attached to (some see this as a rejection of the cross; others, like me, as a practical choice so she can hold it in her hand) and squeezes it until it cuts into her palm, leaving a mark not entirely unlike the stigmata. The question is left open whether it’s her religious recourse to the cross that drives out the mental intruder, or the pain she inflicts on herself that pushes him away. (She returns to using pain to drive him out again later, because it seems to transfer over the mental link.)

And I appreciate it being left open to interpretation. As a doubter who prays, sometimes it’s very hard to know whether something you’ve experienced is grace or mere coincidence. And the character in question struggles with faith while still believing that the shape of faith itself is important. In fact, her dialogue on the matter reminded me of this clip of Dr. Eric Weinstein, an Atheist, telling Steven Bartlett (host of The Diary of a CEO Podcast) that he should go to church, even if he doesn’t believe:

But either way, there are explicit statements of faith surviving contact with disclosure as well, such as what the nun who acts as surrogate mother to one of the protagonists says when questioned about whether finding out we’re not alone would challenge her faith:

“Why would He make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us?”

Related to this, there’s a fascinating post by a writer named that I was alerted to by , entitled, “An Open Letter to Steven Spielberg: The Church Already Had Its ‘Disclosure Day’ — in 1277.” In it, Sweet argues that historically, Christians didn’t seem to see the idea of other, nonhuman intelligences as a theological stumbling block:

Dear Mr. Spielberg,

On CBS “Sunday Morning,” promoting your film “Disclosure Day,” you asked a question that has rippled out past the press tour: “Is God our God only on this planet? Or is God a god for every system where there’s civilization and intelligent life, and even developing life?”

It’s a beautiful question. It is also, with respect, a settled one. You worry the film may rattle the faithful — “ontological shock,” you called it, “social dislocation.” But here is the irony your thriller never reaches: the church didn’t merely tolerate the possibility of other worlds. At one point it made the denial of it a heresy. You are not pulling back a curtain on something that terrifies us. You are arriving, a little late, to a conversation the church has been holding since the generation after the apostles.

I do not raise this from the armchair. Not long ago I spent part of a semester on precisely this question with my doctoral students in semiotics, church, and culture, taking as our text a book whose title makes people laugh until they notice it isn’t joking: Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? (2014), by two Vatican astronomers — Brother Guy Consolmagno, the Jesuit planetary scientist who now directs the Vatican Observatory, with his colleague Paul Mueller.

He continues:

Set the hardware aside. Whether the lights over the Nimitz were craft, sensor ghosts, or angels with better engineering than ours, the theological question doesn’t ride on the footage. It rides on a far older intuition: that the God who made one world is not embarrassed by a billion. The data, if it comes, won’t shrink the divine. It will only widen the lens we’ve been squinting through.

[…]

Around the year 96, Clement of Rome wrote to the quarreling Corinthians and, cataloguing the order God keeps over creation, slipped in a line that has unsettled readers ever since: the ocean impassable to men, and the worlds beyond it, are governed by the same decrees of the Master. The worlds beyond. Plural. Under one government. A century later Origen took up the phrase in On First Principles, reasoning about “other worlds, if any there are,” all held within the single providence of the Most High — cautious about pressing the question too far, but never pretending it couldn’t be asked.

Sweet lists other examples:

In 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a list of 219 condemned propositions. Number thirty-four condemned the claim “that the First Cause cannot make many worlds.” Interesting, no? To guard God’s omnipotence against the Aristotelians — who insisted one cosmos was all logic allowed — the Bishop of Paris ruled it an error to say God couldn’t make a plurality of worlds. The very position you imagine as faith-shattering, the thirteenth century made faith-protecting.

It didn’t stop there. Bonaventure had already granted that God could make a hundred such worlds, and a higher one beyond those. A century of brilliant minds — Buridan, Oresme, Ockham — turned the question over like a stone.

Then came the man who should be the hero of your film. Nicholas of Cusa — a cardinal — wrote in 1440, a century before Copernicus, that no region of the stars is empty of inhabitants. God populated the cosmos on purpose: luminous, spirit-bright beings near the sun, others on the moon, denser creatures like us on the earth — every region peopled, all of them owing their origin to the same God who is, he said, the center and circumference of every stellar realm. A prince of the church, filling the heavens with neighbors. Who knew?

More:

You asked what disclosure does to salvation, to the church, to the cross. Cinema offers two aliens: the savior and the invader. Theology quietly offered a third option centuries ago — what if Earth is the only broken world?

This is not my speculation. Around the 1440s a Franciscan named William Vorilong asked precisely your question: would beings on another world have sinned as Adam sinned? His answer was no — they did not descend from Adam, so his fall is not their inheritance. And could Christ’s death here redeem them? Vorilong held that Christ could redeem worlds without number — but that it would not be fitting for him to journey from world to world, dying again on each. One cross, infinite reach.

That “provocative thought” — that our star-siblings might be unfallen, living a more perfect existence than we have managed in our chaos — was worked out in scholastic Latin while Joan of Arc was still a recent memory. The late Jesuit George Coyne, who directed the Vatican Observatory, pressed the same nerve in our own time, asking whether Christ, fully human, could exist on more than one planet at more than one time. A later Vatican astronomer, José Funes, put it more warmly still: an intelligent creature out there would be a brother, because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.

My preacher mom, when I asked her this question as a doubting, difficult teenager, answer it without hesitation: “If God created different worlds with different creatures than humans, God would have a different plan of salvation for them that suited their world, that is, if they needed salvation.”

It’s all very thought-provoking, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

Suffice to say: the movie isn’t terrible, but it’s not a homerun. It’s neither the “so close to real life you can barely see the difference” film many of us hoped for, nor is it, in my view, anti-Christian propaganda. It’s Spielberg speculating the way Spielberg does, with some unusual bones thrown to people-in-the-know. It’s just not much deeper than that either way.

The Backrooms

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

— Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019)

Another movie I saw recently — this time with three of my older kids, which was a treat in itself — was The Backrooms. This A24 film, made by Kane Parsons — the YouTuber who originally adapted this “creepypasta” (quoted above) into a series of popular videos like this one — has been a huge hit. It’s made over $200 Million on a reported $10 Million budget, and along with the even lower budget Obsession, is being talked about as the beginning of a potential “Gen-Z horror wave.”

Now, I’ve known about the internet Backrooms phenomenon for years. I couldn’t see how it could be made into a movie. But the trailer got me past my initial disinterest, and I’m glad it did:

Now, you have to understand — I hate horror movies. I have lived a life where my amygdala is on overdrive. Fear and anxiety have been my constant companions. And I do not enjoy gore for the sake of gore, and can’t fathom how anyone else does.

But this was something different. High strangeness, as a genre, is something I’m deeply compelled by, from old shows like The Twilight Zone to newer shows like Fringe to videogames like Control and Alan Wake to weird Reddit posts about mysterious and dangerous staircases in the woods (a rabbit hole I went down for days a few years back) to novels like 14, The Fold, and There is no Antimemetics Division. It’s all kind of within a subgenre of Lovecraftian, cosmic horror, which is based more on the existential dread of the universe not working at all the way you think it does than the kind of body horror of slasher films.

Anyway, the Backrooms movie is really well-executed. It features excellent performances, good writing and relentless pacing, and it manages to be really scary primarily because of what you can’t see even more than what you can.

It was much more stressful to watch than Disclosure Day, but a better film overall.

My “Rando” Interview with

As a kind of followup to my ongoing, usually-weekly podcast with , I sat down for a 3 hour interview last week with the man affectionately known in his unique corner of the online Christian space as “PVK.” Paul is the pastor of Living Stones Christian Reformed Church in Sacramento California, and a kind of shepherd for misfit toys in a world where so many of us are either in some process of deconstruction or trying to figure out what faith really means in such a confusing and complicated time.

This is me responding to questions about life and faith and loss and suffering, so it’s about as raw and real as it gets. I can’t even bring myself to watch the whole thing again, because it’s hard.

But just in case you’re interested, here it is:

That’s it for me for today. Thanks for tuning into this edition of “Steve’s random brain dump!”

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

From the description:

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day and this past week's UAP press conference on the steps of the US Capitol open the door to a much bigger conversation we're still trying to puzzle out: Are non-human intelligences really here? Are they corporeal (or incorporeal) biological beings? Are they demons? Something else?

What would disclosure do to Christian theology and modern materialism? How should we treat testimony, anomalous evidence, claims of cursed movies, and confident authorities who may not know nearly as much as they think?

We examine these questions, brittle belief systems, Moby-Dick as an "alien work," the phenomenon of the "human download," religious experience, Skinwalker Ranch, quantum weirdness, aging, AI, fear porn, and the possibility that storytellers may be uniquely equipped to help us approach the unknown.

The full episode is below, but first, here’s a clip where we discuss the question about whether UAP disclosure will challenge or even harm people’s faith, which boils down to soteriology -- the theological study of salvation:

Full episode:

And for those who prefer audio-only, as always, you can grab it here or on your favorite podcast provider.

I worked all weekend.

Came home tired, made dinner, played a game while finishing my audiobook of There is No Antimemetics Division (best, most innovative science fiction I’ve read in forever!), then moved on to a podcast even though it was late, because I typically take Mondays off. I took some magnesium glycinate, hoping it would knock me out before the podcast was over.

But for some reason I just couldn't sleep.

The last time I looked at the clock it was 5:01AM. I left some light on because the cockroach population in this apartment complex has suddenly exploded, and I've run into them multiple times at night in the past few days, including one that crawled on me in bed so I could have nightmares from here on out. The night birds in the tree outside my window wouldn't shut their noisy wormholes. I put on ambient binaural beats to drown them out, but that just meant more noise. I kept waking up about every hour or so. Finally, at about 10:40AM today, I just gave up. Not even 6 hours of bad sleep.

My eyeballs feel gritty. There's a black hole forming where my consciousness should be.

I am about to begin administering coffee intravenously.

There’s no telling how coherent the rest of what I write today will be. Zombies can’t be held accountable for such things.

Mondays, as I said, are usually my day off, and I typically try not to use them for writing, but I had some things I needed to get off my chest. The reason I take off on Mondays is because the gig delivery business is busiest on the weekends, so I try to get in as many hours as I can stand. This weekend I couldn’t drum up the internal resilience to go re-enter my old life and home to see the kids, and I feel terrible about it, but I had just about the most stable week, emotionally speaking, that I’ve had since being forced to leave. And I wanted to hold onto that scrap of peace for just a little while longer.

Contrast is key, here. Last weekend was pretty much the exact opposite. In the middle of my Saturday deliveries, I was just suddenly overcome with grief bordering on despair. I felt trapped in a life I couldn’t stand. Everywhere I went and all over the radio, there were ads for Father’s Day, and I have no idea what that even means for me anymore. I saw a bunch of young dads out with their kids. My baby boy was turning five on June 1st, and I was going to have to put my game face on and go celebrate his birthday without showing the hurt. I’ve been missing out on so much of his life when he’s little, and it’s the most precious time. The big hugs, the little funny comments, the unexpected moments of growth, the silly battles over brushing his teeth and putting him to bed, the times when I was able to help calm him down when his big scary feelings got to be too much for him, because our brains and nervous systems are wired the same way.

I kept having to wipe the tears from my eyes and blow my nose every time I had to leave my car to go into a store or meet a customer. I was struck, with a certain detached alarm, by just how convincing I am at hiding behind a mask that smiles and laughs to conceal the jagged edges that lie beneath that facade. It felt like I was dissociating when I went from biblical lamentation to a cheerful request to a bakery worker to help me find the chocolate chunk cookies for my order.

But then, I suppose I’ve been masking pain and difference my whole life. I’m just not typically so acutely aware of it.

But the tension between trying to be the dad my kids need in the little bit of time they get to see me and the emptiness of the life I live the other 99% of the time has, as most of you already know, been breaking me apart. I was so stressed by the time I got home last Saturday, I started to become physically ill. I spent that whole night tossing and turning in a cold sweat, chills racking my body as I went in and out of disturbing fever dreams, only to wake up after barely any sleep, feeling nauseous and weak and sweating through my clothes, so I could put the mask back on and go bowling with my tiniest guy to celebrate his big day.

We’ve been playing catch the last few times I’ve gone over there, so I got him a mini Nerf football, because his little hands can’t handle a real one. I also know that for whatever reason, he loves Darth Vader. (Probably because he used to always steal the Darth Vader figurine off my shelf of nostalgic toys.) So I got him his own Vader mask and lightsaber.

I was there almost the entire day, and he clung to me for most of it. We went bowling, and I somehow got my best score in over 20 years despite feeling like tepid garbage. We played catch with the new football out back. I sat there with him halfway on my lap as we watched his silly shows and videos. I started feeling a low grade fever coming on, but I was determined not to leave until we sang to him and he ate his cake, because he believes that it is in the eating of the birthday cake that one magically progresses from one year of age to the next.

And as I sat there with him, my mind autonomously kept working the problem.

As anyone who has gone through it knows, when pain gets bad enough — emotional or physical — death begins to feel like the only release. Thoughts turn morbid, and the mind begins to suggest escape routes like unwanted popup ads.

The darkness of these past 8 months, to say nothing of the year or so before that when I realized what was coming, has been so all-consuming that I almost feel guilty about trying to write anything here at times. It bleeds through everything I have to say in a way that feels self-indulgent. I am an experiential, confessional writer, but I don’t want everything to be about my internal state.

Even so, what are you supposed to do when an all-consuming sense of loss occupies every undistracted moment? What’s the alternative when you can’t imagine a future worth living in? Do you just keep pretending? Do you keep on that happy-face mask and lie and say you’re fine?

I have been grasping for the answers so obsessively that I have spent marathon sessions just trying to identify a way forward. Days when I’ve relentlessly attacked the problem for 10-12 hours at a go. Sunny afternoons where I have to stop working so I can weep in my car in a random parking lot. Nights spent awake until 4 or 5AM watching television shows or movies hoping I fall asleep in the process, so I don’t have to face my interior landscape, or the unnatural quiet of a solitary life after decades spent with the ambient noise of a family.

But I have to find a way to accept this new state of affairs.

I can’t just “let it go,” but I also can’t keep a white-knuckle grip on what I cannot change.

I can’t stay anchored in the past while mourning a stolen future that will never come to pass. That is an impossible way to live. It will break me in half. It will bring me to ruin.

I won’t get the past 25 years back no matter what I do. I won’t get a refund on the only vision I ever really had for my life: being married and having a family and growing old with a woman I love, arms around each other as we welcome our children home with their children, building a foundation for future generations of the people who came into existence because of that love we shared.

I also can’t overly romanticize what we had, because if I’m being honest, it was rarely good. Our particular wounds and personalities and the extremely different ways our brains are wired created endless clashes and misunderstandings. To do an honest accounting, there were more unhappy times than happy ones.

But I loved her.

And I think, once upon a time, she loved me.

And I loved what we made together, however imperfect. And I believed that if we just kept fighting FOR each other, if we just kept trying to be better, if we just never surrendered and kept working to be who the other needed, maybe we could get there some day. I realize now that our relationship was hurting both of us, and by extension, the kids. But I also believed that we were more than the sum of our individual parts, and that the struggle was worth it. I would have kept going until my final breath.

And now, despite my having no vote in the matter, that option has been foreclosed upon.

My family has been shattered, but my children are still my children. And with 8 of them, every occasion is a new wound. Every birthday, every holiday, every school play or graduation or marriage that comes, I have to find some way negotiate and navigate the humiliation and hurt over the fact that I am now relegated to being a visitor in their lives.

I was never meant to be their primary caretaker. I’m not even good at taking care of myself. They need their mother. They need schedules managed and doctor’s appointments made and the logistics of family life to be handled by someone with actual executive function and the mindset of an operations officer. My role was always meant to exist in complementarity. I was the historian, the meaning-maker, the guy who answered philosophical questions and who taught them abstract things and would sit and talk with them for hours if they had something on their mind. I was always quick with affection and information, but inept at the details, and very frequently distracted by whatever was going on in my own mind. I always needed a grounded partner in the endeavor.

It’s who I am. I have come to accept that. I have improved in areas that were learned, not innate, but no amount of fighting my nature has ever changed it.

And I know they know how much I love them. And I know they love me.

Somehow, that has to be enough. At least for now.

And so, I have become a father-in-reserve, meted out to my sons and daughters in small, managed doses, never on my own terms. I spend over 99% of my time away from them, and yet I have to stick around for that less-than-1%, because despite what anyone else may think, I know they need me in a way that nobody else can fulfill. I am not some mere accessory or inconvenience. I’m a man who loves them with an intensity that is, ironically, the very source of all this pain.

I am grieving the loss of reality as I understood it, and yet I must go on.

So last weekend, as I sat with my precious boy, my last baby, on the eve of his 5th birthday, as he clung to me for hours like he often did before I was forced to leave him in a way I don’t know if he’ll ever understand, a thought came to me, strong and clear:

I have to inhabit my life, not merely survive it.

In the logic of this particular species of grief, this idea feels like a betrayal. How can I smile, how can I enjoy things, how can I think of the future or hope for happier days when it comes at such a cost? It feels like it comes at their expense. Like I’m supposed to be protecting them from this monstrous thing, but can’t get to them. It’s like the recurring nightmares I would have as a child where I was being chased by some enemy, and whenever it inevitably caught up to me, I was paralyzed and couldn’t fight back.

And yet paradoxically, living the best life I can is arguably the only way I can handle this without hurting them even more than this already has. I have to reclaim myself. I have to become fully who I am, so that I have something to offer them in service of them becoming fully who they are. In a very real sense, they are a part of me. Each of them has so many of my traits and quirks, and I know that navigating life with this particular collection of attributes is often quite difficult.

In a very real sense, I died the night I was made to walk out that door. I just merely happen to still be breathing. Whoever I was on September 23rd, 2025 — the worst day of my entire life — that man is gone.

You can of course spin that a different way. reminded me multiple times before I left his company that I was going home a different man than the one who left. But it’s pretty damned hard to sort out the different meaning when you’re in the middle of it.

The experience of the thing is like I’ve been barely treading water for the past 8 months in the midst of some vast and tumultuous sea, under the suffocating blackness of a starless sky.

But that is a living nightmare. If that’s all I ever do, I will drown. I have to swim towards the light, even if it feels like I’m swimming away from the people I love most.

It’s a Sisyphean task, but I know I have to try.

This tiny little rented room, so lacking in natural light that it feels more like a cave than a living space, has often felt far more like a prison cell than a home. I don’t just drive deliveries for cash, or even for writing fodder, though both are true. I do it so I can remember that the world outside these walls still exists, and has beauty in it. Beauty is a salve, and it may be the only medicine that soothes these wounds. I’ve begun to make it a habit of taking orders that include a long drive. They often pay better, but the time they take isn’t exactly optimized for the grind and hustle of the job.

So I’ve decided I don’t care about that.

It’s not like I have someone waiting for me at home. Wherever I am, that’s my home. My home is me. My home is my heart, my mind, my thoughts. It’s not enough, when you’re made for connection like I am, but there’s a freedom in it that I enjoy when I let myself relax into it.

I’m in it for the miles of open road. I’m slowing down. I’m simplifying. I don’t need any more stress, I need to ride the waves. And after pumping $1500 last week into poor Evie, she is finally running as she should be, so we ride together through the gorgeous North Carolina countryside, listening to books, moving at a measured pace, taking it one day at a time. I don’t really enjoy grocery shopping, but Instacart (as opposed to restaurant delivery) keeps me moving. My daily step counts are rising into the thousands. I feel better from the movement, and I don’t have to pay for a gym membership to get on a treadmill to nowhere. My movement has purpose, and I get paid. I also get to interact with more human beings this way, because I’m not just grabbing a bag and going, I’m working the aisles, I’m talking to cashiers, I’m joking with other customers. And the money, while not amazing, is probably at least 30% better than it was doing DoorDash. This past weekend, I think I averaged about $25-30 an hour, before expenses. And I honestly enjoyed my time.

All of this has got me thinking.

I always wrote, from the time I was old enough to form sentences. I loved stories. But I didn’t really know I was meant to be a writer until I spent a semester in Europe, back in 1999, and my travel journal, emailed home, was spread far and wide by my mother. When I returned to the States just before the 20th century handed the baton to the 21st, I received an enormous amount of positive feedback from people I had no idea had been reading my work.

Travel writing brings you out of yourself. Out of your head. You begin to see and experience the world in a different way. New sights, new people, new experiences, all of it allows you to perceive things with different eyes. It keeps your sense of wonder and curiosity alive. I use gig work as fuel for that kind of writing on a local level, in my Notes From the Road series, which I really enjoy writing and have gotten lots of great feedback on.

But my Postcards From Exile series, about the road trip I took when I had to leave home, was even better. It was some of the best work I’ve done in many years, and I felt alive and like myself — despite the circumstances — in a way I haven’t felt since before I got married. In a way, I guess you could say I rediscovered the man I abandoned at the altar. That trip was a means of metabolizing shock and grief, of attaining the love and support of far-flung friends, and I realize that I need to do a more of that.

I think I need to go back to the way I began. I need to travel again. I need to see the world with fresh eyes, not just this dank little roach motel. I need to break bread with real people, not digital abstractions interacted with through the mediation of a screen. I was made to be an explorer, an archeologist of meaning, who brings (metaphorical) treasures back from the far-flung places of the world like Indiana Jones and puts them on display for everyone to see. I do not believe in private collections of precious things. Sharing what delights me is my strongest language of love, and love is the thing I desperately need to experience again, both in the giving and the receiving.

I don’t yet know how to financially afford to make it work, but I am increasingly convinced that I have to find a way. I am in a closed loop, and it shrinks a little further every day. I’m trying to figure out a way for travel writing to fund the travel, and keep the little place here for me when I come back home.

Instead of seeing this part of my life as a furnace where I am being incinerated, I am trying to learn to see it as a forge.

This is my Thermopylae.

This is where I make my stand against oblivion.

The famous actor and wrestler, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, tells the story of how he named his company, Seven Bucks Productions.

“In 1995,” he writes, “I had $7 bucks in my pocket and knew two things: I’m broke as hell and one day I won’t be.”

He built a life of insufficiency and worry into a sprawling empire of output, and a fortune estimated to be approaching $1 billion.

I don’t need all that. I just need enough to take care of my needs and contribute to those of my children, while finding reasons to keep going, as hard as that sometimes is to imagine.

I keep finding myself thinking of my own little place — apartment 104 — as something just as symbolic as Johnson’s 7 bucks.

I keep thinking of it as Forge 104. Like it’s a brand, an umbrella I can use to collect my project work from this part of my life, using those efforts as stepping stones towards a future that might actually feel meaningful again. If I can just keep going, I’m rather fond of the irony of turning my place of exile into my inspiration and reminder of how far I may yet come.

So last week, I did my first creative project in quite some time, under that banner. I made a fake movie trailer for the book I just finished reading. I spent two days obsessively putting it together, using every tool I have access to. Room for improvement, for sure, but I still think it came out pretty neat:

The important thing isn’t the trailer itself, but what it did for me. I was immersed. I was focused. I wasn’t thinking about loss, I was thinking about making something again.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt actually alive.

As of this writing, I’m not sure I can pull this off. I’m afraid to put these words in print before proving I can do it, because I may have to eat my words.

But it matters to plant a flag. And the only way to find out is to start putting one foot in front of the other, and follow the path out of hell.

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