“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.

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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!”

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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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I had a thought over the weekend that has stuck with me.

I think maybe it’s useful but overly simplistic to say “I lost my faith,” because in a genuine sense I’m still what I’ve always been: a skeptic in search of the transcendent.

An agnostic who prays.

I think people would be surprised how often I attempt communication in the direction of the place where God used to live in my metaphysical awareness. They aren’t exactly hopeful prayers, because I’m so used to being disappointed. But nevertheless, I haven’t gone no-contact.

In general, I’m not a materialist, and though my present circumstances incline me towards a kind of practical nihilism, nihilism writ large scares the crap out of me when I zoom out. It has no answers for anything. And answers are what I want most of all.

I think in a very real sense, I’m still a man of faith, I just stopped being satisfied with the shape of the thing that was given to me. It wasn’t just a container, it was a prison. It was “believe this or else.” And when it stopped having meaningful answers to lived situations, I was pushed to the point where “or else” felt like the only possible alternative to “lie to yourself and everyone by pretending you continue to believe in things you no longer find believable because that’s what you’ve been conditioned to do since you were old enough to understand language.”

I don’t know what to do with this yet, but it seems like it’s probably pretty significant.

And it makes me think of something else.

I never wrote about my last visit to at the end of my Postcards from Exile series for a few reasons.

One was because I was just dealing with a lot. He was my last stop before coming back to Raleigh and facing my post-marriage life in more permanent terms.

Another was because we didn’t really do that much worth talking about. I was there to nurse my wounds, and the Krupp family (and their friends) welcomed me in and made me feel like I had a home outside my home. Unless you count looking for a new tractor to take care of the parish grounds, or the occasional gloom tourism through the devastated ruins of Flint, Michigan, we just co-existed. We ate meals together. I sat in the studio for every one of Father Joe’s podcasts. We ran errands. We watched movies and sports. We smoked cigars. We hung out while the engine on Papa Krupp’s truck was getting rebuilt.

I had a place to belong and co-regulate when the only place I’d ever belonged was taken and I was interiorly freaking the hell out.

I prayed a lot during the weeks I was there, too. Desperation will do that to a man. The interesting thing about staying with a Catholic priest in a big rectory is the opportunity to just walk down the hall and pop into the private chapel whenever you need. Most mornings, I’d go have coffee with Jesus, like I did on my first stopover to the Kingdom of Krupp. I’d pop into Sunday Mass, far in the back, feeling like an outsider the whole time. It was somehow both familiar and alien.

I found myself, for a couple of days near the end of my stay, trying to force a return, thinking maybe I just needed to make a leap of “faith” I couldn’t feel. I pondered making my first confession in five years. I knew if there was any way for me to do this, it was probably the way Fr. Joe was showing me the faith could be lived.

But as I sat there in the chapel one day, working my way through it, I found that there was still a chasm I just couldn’t cross. If I made the move now just because I had the opportunity and a willing priest friend, I didn’t believe I’d stick with it. And if I do a thing that matters, I want to do it right. I don’t want to screw it up.

Father and I had talked about the possibility of me taking a stab at it. When I reached my conclusion, he was out performing his many pastoral duties, so I texted him:

I've been really struggling with the faith thing. You've brought me closer to it than I've been in years, but it's more like I'm teetering on Mere Christianity than full-on Catholicism. Some part of me wants to just bite the bullet, try confession, see what happens. Especially because I'd be more comfortable going to you than to anyone. But I keep feeling that I'm not ready yet. Not ready to believe all the stuff, not ready to profess the creed, not ready to live the obligations. I feel so disconnected from the Church in so many ways...I have a lot still to work out. But I need you to know, you live your faith and your life in a way that makes it all more real than anyone I've known. Don't ever underestimate the power of just being a normal dude who loves God and loves people but still keeps a sense of perspective and humor. It's huge. It's lifechanging. You've planted a seed.

Still, if you would, please talk to the boss about it and tell me what you think. My problem is that I don't feel any conviction. I've had no Damascus moment. Even my dad says he came back because of some miracle change in his heart. I go to the chapel every day and I ask him for SOMETHING. Give me the push, Lord. But for whatever reason, it hasn't come yet. I'm afraid to force it and then screw it up because my heart's not in it…You haven't pushed, and I'm grateful.

He understood. He never gave me a hard time, not even for a second.

See, I know that faith isn’t just having some tingly feeling about God. It requires intellectual assent, it has to be lived, and it requires obligation, duty, and a reasonable degree of certainty.

For me, stepping into a Catholic Church these days is weirdly analogous to going to visit my kids in the house I used to live in. It’s all so familiar, and yet it’s been made totally clear I no longer belong there, and that makes the familiarity off-putting. The feeling that “maybe it could change if a miracle happened” doesn’t move you any closer to that being a reality.

People tell me with some regularity that they’re sure God is doing something big in my life. That he has some plan for me, and the present horribleness is all to some greater purpose.

I neither believe this nor disbelieve it. Either choice has ramifications that are hard to grapple with. Here too, I lack the information necessary for conviction.

But I also know that if I don’t live my life as though everything happens for a reason, then this is all just a random kick in the crotch. I can’t fathom a good enough reason to torture a man who always tried to keep his feet on the right path, even with the winds that kept trying to blow him this way or that. I can’t imagine a good that could come from a shattered family that could ever outweigh the evil of that destruction.

But I know that if I see this as a furnace instead of a forge, soon enough, it’ll all just turn to ash. A furnace destroys. A forge purifies and forms.

More on the forge theme soon. Stay tuned.

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Will it numb us out completely? Will it suppress our desire to know?

We talk attention, boredom, literacy, the classroom, old books, and what remains human when the machines get better at everything else.

Watch now:

Audio only versions available at this link, or your favorite podcast provider.

I used to always joke with friends who became aware of my improbably high incidence of bad luck that I feel like I walk around with an ontological “kick me” sign on my back.

It’s not that I never catch a break; it’s that it’s really rare.

Last week, I thought I’d caught one of those rare breaks.

As mentioned previously, Evie, my car, has been overheating again this month. I finally brought her into the shop last Thursday, and they had it for two whole days trying to figure out what was up. They identified and were able to repair a cracked connector in the coolant system that was causing the engine to overheat. When I saw that the repair was only $600 — I say “only” because in February I spent $1800 on getting the radiator fans replaced for a very similar cooling issue — I thought maybe I’d dodged a bullet.

Mind you, I wasn’t happy about the repair, but I was trying to look at the bright side.

It could have been so much worse, I thought with a smile. I’ll take it.

But then the tech called me and told me that while he was test driving it, he noticed that the car was making “whale sounds,” and he asked me if I’d ever heard anything like that. I said no. He said that he did some additional testing, and he thinks the purge valve went bad on the system. I told him I didn’t know what a purge valve was, so he explained (if I remember correctly) that it was a part of the fuel system that handles combustible vapors; rather than releasing them directly into the atmosphere, they’re stored in some kind of a charcoal filter, then released back into the engine for combustion when the computer decides it needs them.

I’ve had so many issues with the car, I’ve got a saved ChatGPT thread about only this, so I opened it up and told my pet clanker what was happening. It said the symptoms of a bad purge valve include things like rough idling (which I had been dealing with for months) and hard startups after filling the tank (not a problem I’d seen), among others. There was also a vehicle diagnostic code in the scanner about the fuel vacuum system that seemed to link up with this.

But it was 4:30PM on the Friday before a long weekend, and they weren’t going to get to it in time. I don’t have another means of transport, so I couldn’t wait. Chat told me the purge valve probably would be an inexpensive repair when the time came, so with a better-than-expected attitude, I crammed my 6’4” frame into the backseat of a Toyota Corolla masquerading as an Uber and headed to the shop to pick up the car.

The drive home was pleasant. I noticed immediately, via the Bluetooth OBD scanner I bought from Amazon during my road trip last year, that it was finally showing temperatures in a normal operating range. In fact, it was running great. I worked for much of the weekend with no noticeable problems. I started letting the purge valve issue slip from my mind.

But then, on Sunday, I stopped at Costco to fill up the tank, and when I tried to start the car up to leave, the ignition sequence didn’t complete. I tried again, and she started, but sputtered hard, then stalled. On the third try, I pumped the gas pedal when the sputtering started, and the engine roared to life.

Concerning, but there were no more problems after that.

Until today.

Now, let me back up a second.

I had a personal setback on Sunday that really sent me reeling. I’m not going to get into the specifics of it here, but suffice to say, it was an emotional gut punch. I took Memorial Day off and tried to get my mind right, but it didn’t work. And staring at the walls of my dark little cave of an apartment wasn’t helping, so I spent all day Tuesday out grinding with a twisted gut full of acid butterflies, hoping that doing Instacart orders and just trying to stay moving would help. The whole day, I felt like I was just a half step ahead of some monstrous, lumbering psychological beast, hot on my heels in its need to consume me. I knew I couldn’t sit at home or I’d drown in this whole new wave of grief and upset that was quickly moving towards despair. It was the kind of bad day that makes you act like an ornery bastard, but I got through it, and after a late dinner, I fell asleep in front of the television, re-watching old episodes of Fringe.

This morning, I was up fairly early, but I couldn’t get my rear end in gear. It felt like an emotional hangover. I could not stop procrastinating, and I had no energy to do anything. Something I learned fairly recently, as I was researching the particular eccentricities of my quirky neurotype, is that significant emotional overwhelm can leave a real lingering impact before you return to baseline. Often for several days. Looking back, I think I always experienced those after effects, but didn’t see them as a system out of balance that took a somewhat standard amount of time to reset. But the more I pay attention, the more I see the pattern.

That said, the bill collectors don’t care.

So this afternoon, I forced myself to go out and work. It was slow at first, but my first order was a bit of a unicorn — solid pay and a reasonable distance — and I thought to myself, “Nice. This will help build some momentum to carry me through the evening.” I punched in the customer’s address into the GPS and headed out.

Which is when I heard it.

The whale sound.

It was, in my opinion, less like a whale, and more like the gasping of some Lovecraftian thing. Maybe like a zombie whale, or some other guttural-sounding, undead thing, just couldn’t catch its breath while hanging on to the rear driver’s side door.

And it didn’t stop. It just kept on repeating, this big, loud, wheezing inhalation, like the car itself was suffocating horrifically on a planet without atmosphere.

While I was listening to the ungodly moaning, I hit my first stoplight of the trip. That’s when the whole car started convulsing. I shifted into neutral and fed it some gas, afraid it was going to stall in the middle of a busy intersection. It helped a little, but only if I didn’t let up.

I looked at my GPS. Still 6.7 miles to go.

“GAAAAAASP!”

“Shit.” I spat.

“GAAAAAAAAAAEEEWSP!”

I nursed her down the road, stoplight to stoplight. Evening rush hour traffic was beginning to clog the roads like poorly-maintained arteries. The route was all surface streets. No highways. Too many traffic lights. The car seemed to be running better on stretches when I could keep the speed above 40MPH, but that awful sound never stopped, every few seconds.

“MNGGGAAAAAASP!”

Finally, I arrived at the customer’s house. I parked Evie under a shade tree, just in case she didn’t want to start back up, crossed my fingers, and shut off the engine.

“GNNNNGGGAAAAASP!”

Ok. I thought. It’s still doing this even with the engine off, which means it’s got to be a gas tank pressure issue.

I walked to the back. My fuel port does not have a gas cap, just a little retractable metal shutter that seals the filler hole that leads to the tank. It’s spring-loaded, and moves out of the way when you insert a gas pump, then pops back into place when you remove the nozzle. I decided to try opening it with my finger.

“MMMNGGGAGAAAASSSPP!”

The sound came immediately as I touched the shutter, and it was louder and sharper outside the car than it was when I was driving. I jumped back like a tarantula had come lunging out at my face. I laughed at myself for being startled, and tried it again.

“NNNGaaaassspppppppssssss.”

I flinched this time too, but the sound quickly tapered off to a small hiss, then stopped.

I completed my delivery, got back in, started her up. Worked on the first try. No rough idle, no convulsing, no gasping.

I opened my Ford Fusion Q&A chat and updated the info.

“The system may literally be pulling abnormal vacuum on the tank and EVAP lines,” Chat said, “and when you disturbed the filler neck, you temporarily relieved or changed the condition.”

“Important nuance,” the bot continued. “You did not ‘fix’ it. But you may have temporarily reset the pressure state the car was freaking out about.”

I can’t afford not to get this fixed, I thought. It’s not safe driving it like this.

I switched over to text messaging, and shot a note to my mechanic, requesting the promised estimate.

A few minutes later, he sent it back.

EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHTY DOLLARS.

They have to replace all the EVAP lines. AND, they can’t do it until Friday.

And of course, it means another $1500 in repairs, total, for the second time in 3 months. Over $3K, just since February.

This is why I hate buying used cars.

Bottom line: I’m not willing to risk driving more than necessary until this is fixed, but that means I’ll have lost at least 4 work days to car repairs and repair-related issues in the past week. That’s enough lost income to cover roughly half the bill. It stinks on ice. It’s busy tonight. I forgot to to turn off my app, and it keeps buzzing to let me know about all the new orders coming in.

So instead, here I am, at the time when I’d normally be working, writing this.

Venting this, if I’m being honest. Because what else can you do?

That said, it’s a great time to take this moment to thank those of you who made financial contributions in support of my work last week, whether directly or through subscriptions. Every single dollar helps at a time like this.

I know I’m not operating at 100% yet. I’m probably not even at 80%. To be honest, I had really hoped I’d have made more progress by now getting out of the fugue this whole separation and divorce has dropped on me. It seems like every single time I start to feel like I’m getting real traction, some new giant karmic cartoon hammer appears and bonks me right back into the pit, and I’m left having to climb out again.

Which is why those of you who helped lift this burden might not understand what a big deal it is. Huge. Yuge even.

Again, I can’t thank you enough.

I don’t imagine life will stop throwing curveballs. Someday soon, I hope I can improve my batting average.

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Someone online asked me about my writing process, and if I had any tips to share.

I never think I know how to describe it until I start…writing it down. Probably because I'm weird.

That said, since I have gone and written it down, I’d like to share it. Maybe it will help someone out there.

First, I think the process of writing is different for everyone. That's important. The way you go about it is likely to be as unique as your personality and the particular wiring of your brain.

I'm a very intuitive writer. I would never pass a grammar exam. I didn't even study it in school somehow. I never diagrammed a sentence. Almost nothing about how I approach my work is technical at all. (Feel free to laugh when I spell out nearly a dozen rules later on.)

For me, it's more like channeling something. There's a build up of energy, like static electricity, and when there's enough, it seeks a discharge. Often I know when it's time to write something because it starts writing itself in my head without any conscious effort from me. I just observe my thoughts rushing towards a topic, composing themes and sentences. Just enough to start the momentum. When I sit down, it just flows out of me and I'm often not sure where it came from.

It's the most Zen thing I ever experience.

It sounds weird as hell, but that's how it is whenever I write anything worthwhile.

Now, I can write about something that isn't like that, and when I have to, I usually outline, or at least gather datapoints, etc. I've written plenty of articles that way about topics I wasn't particularly passionate about.

Where I would say I probably get more technical (even though I said I didn't) can be summed up in the following list of fairly-flexible rules:

1. Writing is re-writing. I hate it, but it's true. The first pass almost never captures your thoughts in the best light. I coasted through my entire education turning in first drafts and getting As, and I thought that was how it worked. But when I realized the world is full of great writers, I came to the conclusion that I needed to up my game. Never publish a piece without at least one good editing pass. First drafts are lumps of clay. Subsequent drafts are where you add the fine details.

2. Read whatever you've written aloud. Like, the whole thing. Listen to the cadence. Hear how the words work together. Notice if you stumble because you've got words that are hard to say in a row. A piece that sounds good narrated is almost always a better piece to read. I don't know the inner mechanics of why, I just know it's true.

3. If you don't like what you've written, lower your standards. This advice came from a writing professor I had in college. I hated the advice at the time, but it was correct. You are your own worst critic. You will kill your own work if you let your inner editor have his way. He needs to STFU on the first draft. He gets his time on revisions. But sometimes, if something isn't working, you've got to downshift into a different gear. Let things be a mess on occasion. Do your best to get it there and then let it go.

4. Hemingway's advice to "write drunk and edit sober" was his own way of dealing with #3. But unless you're really good (and sometimes even if you are), drunk writing is almost always shit writing. (I've done some good high writing, but that's a different animal.)

5. Never under-index brute practice. I've been writing since I was about 5 years old. I won my first all-school writing competition in the 5th grade. I've been a professional (as in, paid work) since January, 2008, and I've put literally MILLIONS of words in print since then. At 1P5 alone I published over 1200 pieces in my own name. In 7 years. You will never reach your final form. Just keep working the muscle as often as you can.

6. If you want to write, you've got to live. Writing is a metabolic output of digested experiences. Do things. Anything. Put your phone down and observe. Look for scenes. Look for stories. Take photos. Take notes. Use these as fuel. You also need time to do nothing. Watch movies. Listen to music and podcasts. Play video games. Go for walks. Go for drives. Let your brain have time to churn through the compost you're feeding it.

7. Related to #6 - treat every piece of writing as a story. Stories are the most potent technology human beings have for conveying meaning. You're describing, relating, analogizing, painting mental images — even if you're writing non-fiction. You want people to feel like they're in the scene whenever possible. When a piece of writing offers people an experience, not just information, it stays with them.

8. Writers should be avid readers. I'm bad at this. My ADHD has gotten the best of me. I only get through books if I listen to them on audio versions these days. I need to change that, but it's hard. But even listening helps. I do read a lot of text every day, just not as many books as I should. Read in your genre of writing, but also read fiction. Never trust anyone who doesn't read fiction. I'm convinced they're all sociopaths. Fiction teaches us how to tell stories that others can inhabit. It teaches us how to describe worlds, but more importantly, it teaches us to observe and depict the subtlest aspects of human nature and interaction.

9. Write for yourself first, and the audience last. I'll let Rick Rubin explain that below, but where I would diverge from him is that I still keep the audience in mind. I would write things in my diary I would never write in public, but I write things in public a lot of people would never even trust to their diary. Find your comfort level on how much you're willing to bleed for your readers.

10. Be honest. There's a saying that goes something like, "There are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say anything I do not believe." That's a good rule.

11. Read Orwell's rules for writing. Keep or discard as necessary. Never worry about the rules they taught you in school. End sentences in prepositions. Start sentences with "but" and "and." F*** rules. Writing is art. Develop your voice, and then treat that as your gospel.

12. Here’s legendary music producer and author of one of the best books I’ve ever read on creativity, Rick Rubin, who I mentioned in #9. This is actually really good advice that will help you get over a lot of mental blocks and fears of insufficiency:

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And it happened just hours after the latest Pentagon UFO files drop, so we talk a bit more about those, and about…well, a whole bunch of other things.

From the episode description:

A new round of UFO/UAP files, Eric Weinstein’s recent comments on Joe Rogan, alleged CIA whistleblower claims, Skinwalker Ranch, White Sands, Epstein, string theory, AI, Mars, and the deeper question underneath all of it: who is actually in control?

In Episode 10 of Monitoring the Situation, Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden follow the convergences between government secrecy, scientific gatekeeping, media silence, technological acceleration, and the strange breakdown of the modern story about reality.

This is not just a conversation about UFOs. It is a conversation about evidence, trust, power, disclosure, and what happens when the institutions that claim to explain the world no longer seem capable of explaining what is happening inside it.

Subscribe for more conversations from Steve Skojec and Kale Zelden.

This is a video-first podcast, but if you prefer the audio-only version, you can grab that (and all of our previous episodes) right here, or on your favorite podcast provider.

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Memory is a funny thing.

I take notes while I drive, voice-dictated breadcrumbs to help me find my way back to the people and places and things that I saw.

I could be like little Marco, I guess, embellishing my visions of Mulberry Street under the withering gaze of my too-serious father, or father-surrogates in my imaginary audience. Why settle for the banality of commonplace things when your imagination can soar?

But the real world is full of texture and grit, color and sound, and viewed correctly, there can be something masterful in the mundane.

Unless I take too long.

Unless the notes sit out on the counter like last Tuesday’s leftovers, untouched, until fermentation and fungi have their way.

“Neighbor description,” it says on the first line. I have no idea what this means. Which neighbor? Why would I describe them? Was this supposed to trigger a recollection?

“$37.52 worth of gas.” Again, I don’t even know what that is supposed to make me think of.

I used to be better at this.

In college, I only took the notes that seemed most important. After freshman year, I stopped buying the books for my classes. They were overpriced, I was broke, my ability to focus on the reading was badly compromised, and I got by on the lectures just fine anyway. The looseleaf notepaper that filled my three-ring binders bore the evidence of my distracted attention. Sinewy lines in black ink that started as random shapes and curves would become elaborate spaceships, or aliens, or robots.

I actually went back years later and saved many of them, even though I threw the class notes they were drawn on away.

Some teachers don’t like it when students doodle. They don’t understand that far from being a sign of disrespect, it means they have our full attention, the distraction-magic being warded off by channeling it into innocuous forms.

My friends would give me puzzled looks as I screwed around while they all got together to prep for the latest test.

“Aren’t you going to study?” my friend Joe asks, in a memory that’s almost 30 years old. It’s not the first time he’s said this to me, and a frantic edge creeps into his voice that sounds like a mixture of incredulity and amusement.

“I don’t need to.” I replied with what I’m certain looked like an annoying smirk. “I’ll brush up on my notes a little bit later.”

And when it was over, and we all got our grades, and mine were as good or better than those who’d spent stressed-out nights with their heads down over flash cards and books, a second wave of friendly admonishments would come. I was an unserious enigma. A bad student who happened to get a lot of As. And it was annoying to everyone who wasn’t me.

But my memory was something I couldn’t switch off any more than my attention span was something I could switch on. My brain just worked the way it did, and I had learned to ride that wave rather than fighting it. It got me through a double major, a half dozen or so tours through the Dean’s List, and just a fraction of a GPA point below Magna Cum Laude at graduation.

I thought everything in life would be that easy. I had no idea how anything worked.

A couple years later, I’d be diagnosed with OCD and ADHD, and handed a bottle of SSRIs. I took them until they made me a zombie, then quit cold turkey, because nobody ever told me not to.

The room spun for days.

These days, I have no way of knowing what I’ll remember. What will stay and what will go. I’ll recall, in detail, some obscure list of facts I learned years ago, but forget something I was sure I didn’t need to write down until all I remember was thinking that I didn’t think I needed to write it down. And sometimes, even when I do write it down, I trust far too much in my pattern matching ability to tease out the full context of a fragmented phrase.

“Haruki Murakami quote and need for book,” the next note says.

Hmm. I remember liking a quote from him. I remember thinking I needed to try reading Murakami again after an initial failed attempt, 15 years ago, at tackling 1Q84. But what was the quote? Did I save it? I open my Google photos app, and begin scrolling through all the scraps and fragments of my visual storage system.

It’s not there. Or at least, I don’t see it between all the screenshots of inspirational quotes and photos of random things and funny little memes and menu snapshots from restaurants I visit for work but never go back and order from. I look through my downloads folder. I search Substack and X.

Whatever it was, it was so profound that I somehow utterly failed to save it anywhere. I must have thought it would stay with me, or got distracted before I finished acquiring a record of it for later use.

In any case, it’s time to go work.

My hair is a mess, which is an ironic thing, considering how little of it is left on the top of my head. I grab my baseball cap and throw it on. The hat says, “Trevor’s - Scottsdale.” I got it from a bougie liquor store I used to go to on occasion when I still lived out that way. I’m not a hat guy, but I like the look of it. It’s distressed, with a weathered-looking mesh back, and a cool logo patch on the front that makes it look almost like vintage gear. I still need a haircut every few weeks for the parts that still grow, and I wonder for the hundredth time whether I should just shave the whole thing. Go for the bald guy with a beard look.

But then I’d still probably end up wearing a hat a lot of the time, because my Irish/Slovak scalp will just burn in the sun. And wearing a hat is the thing I don’t like doing. I don’t like having things on my head, or in my mouth, or in my ears. Drives me crazy. My mom told me that when I was a kid, if the seams in my socks weren’t oriented just right, I would tell her they were full of “crumbs.” I’ve already given up on CPAP and I’m close to doing the same with my Invisaligns.

I finally found some earbuds I like, though. Lightweight, open ear, sound transmitted through bone conduction. You can still hear everything going on around you, but they can’t hear your music or your book. Perfect for when I’m working. I thought I lost them the day they arrived, before I ever got to try them, but it turns out I just forgot them on my desk at home.

I’d have bet money that I’d slipped them into my pocket and they’d fallen out somewhere. “I could’ve sworn…” are becoming my famous last words.

What will I be like when I’m old? Will I tell stories from decades before, but be unable to remember what I had for breakfast? Will I remember the people I love?

Will I die alone?

I felt that fear, sharp as a knife, late last night, as I was lying in bed, re-watching an old TV show I used to love, and am learning to love again.

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This week marks 8 months since I was forced to leave my family and home.

A lot has transpired since then, and I thought I’d offer a quick update on things.

First, there was the road trip that helped me hold onto my sanity and get some perspective as my world was imploding. Time to think on the road. Troubles to overcome on the journey. Friends who helped me get a better view of myself from a perspective that isn’t as adversarial as the one I’m used to — and had largely accepted, despite being a harshly self-critical view.

And a lot of searching for God. That quest is still ongoing.

Then, a return to Raleigh, where my soon-to-be-ex and kids live. Where I don’t have a community, or even any close friends or family, leaving me to process all of this alone.

So back in December, I got a little studio apartment, about twice the size of a nice walk-in closet. It’s an OK place, all things considered, but more often than I care to admit, it feels like a solitary confinement cell. I’ve gone days, sometimes over a week, without in-person human contact. And when I do have contact, it’s a cashier at the grocery store register, or a quick conversation with the maintenance guy about the leak in my bathroom. The regulating effects of spending time with people I know and like and am comfortable with, which I thankfully experienced on the road, is just not accessible from here.

The first couple weeks in the apartment were all about getting things set up and trying to see my kids again. I’ve got that first-visit memory locked down in a place where it can’t hurt as much as it should. Subsequent visits have been a mixed bag, emotionally. I just don’t know how to process going from daily fatherhood where I talked to all my kids every day to seeing them once every 1-3 weeks, depending on what’s going on. I don’t think I’m supposed to get into the specifics on custody arrangements in public, so I won’t, but this has been the hardest transition by far. There were moments where I saw how it affected the kids that didn’t just break my heart, they curb stomped it.

I’m learning to keep that stuff locked away. I have no idea if it’s healthy, but it’s the only way to keep going. I cannot tell you how many times thinking about it has snuck up on me and just absolutely taken me out of commission. I don’t know how you can go from being a daily Dad one day to whatever this is, overnight, and not have it gut you.

And I can’t afford that right now.

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January and February were bad. I was barely functional. I could show up for a podcast or write a post here and there, but otherwise, I was just lost. In March, I started taking some supplements that were recommended to me, and some of my energy and mental clarity came back. I started doing gig delivery work again — sporadically at first, because I associate it with humiliation, criticism, and insufficiency — but I found that it helped me to get out of the apartment, have more in-person interactions with people, even if they were purely transactional, and brought in a little cash.

And it’s been great grist for the mill of my ongoing Notes From the Road series, which has been very satisfying to write, and has gotten a lot of positive feedback.

I picked up a bunch of new paid subscribers to this Substack in the beginning of this unwanted journey, but attrition has kicked in, and I’ve lost quite a few since then. Despite the fact that I’ve been doing some of the best writing I’ve ever done, it’s just hard to grow. I’m sure there are strategies I’m missing, but I live in a weird, liminal mental state, and website strategies are so far down the list of things I’m thinking about it’s not even funny. My approach has always been, “Write what’s true, even when it’s hard, and it’ll reach who it needs to.”

Still, it’s been almost impossible to stay ahead. I put in a lot of hours of work each week on stuff that’s not paying much, if anything, in the hopes it will later. Every podcast episode requires about 3 days of effort on my part, but that’s the game if you want to grow. Most of my posts here aren’t paywalled, because I don’t like paywalling things and the gurus always tell you to keep your best content free.

Well, I try not to ever write anything that isn’t my best, so how the hell do I decide?

Delivery work is inconsistent at best, and the cost of gas has skyrocketed, cutting into my take home pay. I like the flexible hours so I can prioritize working on the stuff I really care about and give myself a break on the bad days where I just can’t keep it together, but there are nights when I’m out hustling for hours after a full day at my desk and I only make 50 or 60 bucks for my trouble. (There are nights when I make 160 bucks too. It really just depends. The good nights are the exception, though.)

I got in this bad habit of doing AI therapy sessions while I was driving orders, too, because I was bored. I thought I could zero in on this or that thing that was bugging me, talk it out, make some progress, move on. But instead, it started feeding my hopelessness. Even the smarty-pants AI told me my situation was really bad, and that there were no good answers. And then it obsessively tried to talk me out of driving my car off a bridge, because if you talk at all with a damn clanker about the dark thoughts that come when you’re going through something like this, it goes into full liability-mitigation-mode.

I decided I had to put a stop to that. Ended badly every time.

So basically, life’s been a rollercoaster. The grief comes whenever it wants. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t care if it’s a good time. There was a night I was driving and some thought or song or something struck me a certain way and I started crying so hard I was almost hyperventilating, which is not the optimal condition for operating a motor vehicle. The number of times I’ve had to furiously conceal the telltale sign of tears before I go into a store or a restaurant to pick up an order is a little embarrassing.

Then, last week happened.

For several reasons, not all of which I’m fully conscious of, things got really dark, really fast.

I felt cornered with no way out. I felt increasingly certain that there was just no version of the future I could tolerate. I was really grappling with the fact that I will never get real closure on what happened, why it happened the way it did, and how myself and my kids are ever supposed to pretend it’s OK. My autistic sense of justice was in full “I NEED RESOLUTION” mode and my rational mind was like, “but you’re NOT GOING TO GET IT” and they were fighting it out like a couple of toothless street thugs on super-meth.

And then I wrote a couple of dark little notes, culminating with the post entitled, “Annihilation.” And that did something, somehow, that I desperately needed. I’m still not even sure what it was. It felt honest in a way that even I try to avoid. There was catharsis in it, for sure, but somehow even more than that. I felt like I broke through some interior barrier and found a whole sub-basement, a deeper layer of contact with myself, and my ability to utilize the pain as fuel for good art.

It also scared some people.

Some of you reached out to say so. One person told me, “You are so fucking talented. You have so much to give. Hold on.” Another one said they’d get on the next plane and fly out to see me if they had to — and that person is an ocean away. Someone else offered to come into town from hundreds of miles away just to take me out for dinner.

I got a handful of concerned DMs and emails from different folks.

It means a lot. Thank you all.

I wish all my people who cared didn’t live so far away. I miss just hanging out with and his dad watching sports and movies, or having late night conversation sessions over bourbon with Fr. Michael, or sitting with talking about whatever the theme of the day was over a meal.

That road trip probably helped to save my life.

They say that for most of human history, losing one’s spouse — one’s primary attachment bond — was tantamount to dying. It greatly reduced survival odds, and that was deeply imprinted in our psychology. These days, the physical risk from losing your mate is less, but our nervous systems can’t tell the difference between that and dying any more than they could a thousand years ago.

I was with my wife longer than I lived without her. I believed we’d be together until death. It doesn’t matter that things were hard, or how much we screwed it up, or even if we were a bad match. I just had it in my head that we’d keep going, keep fighting for it, keep trying to get it right until we finally did or died trying.

Getting married, having kids, watching them grow up and have kids of their own and coming home to visit was always the life I wanted, the one I felt like I belonged in, the thing that would anchor everything else. Like most men, I cared a lot about the work I do — sometimes maybe even too much — but none of it matters without the dream. Even to toil at something deeply important feels pointless if you have nobody to share the trials, tribulations, and triumphs with.

A shared life is the only kind that feels real.

Accepting that vision of life is now gone — taken without my consent — and cannot be replaced, has been such a bitter pill. I don’t know why I’m here if that’s not it. I never had a big bucket list even before, but now any goal I might have had seems so trivial in comparison to what was lost that I don’t really care anymore. If I finish a novel, or travel to Japan, or see the Northern Lights in Iceland, or whatever else, what does that restore to me? Those have just become to-do items on a paper that has turned to ash.

Do you ever think about how many times a day you share some triviality with your spouse? A new business you saw being built, the realization that this street turns into that one and runs behind the university in a way you never knew, a sale you saw at the store on something you know they might like? These little moments are the paving stones of a life that is lived in. We see, we process, we relate.

So when you spend every day having to face the fact that nothing you do may ever actually matter again, it’s hard not to think about dying with a certain kind of wistfulness.

It feels, at times, like an eject button from the burning plane that is currently spiraling towards the earth. A way out of the grinding, endless pain of quotidian existence. I’ve talked to other guys who have gone through this who say they think about dying, sometimes yearning for it every day.

It’s one thing to hear people say it. It’s a weird thing to stare at, up close and personal.

It’s like seeing some exotic, terrifying creature you’ve only ever heard about, but with your own eyes in your own room.

So here’s the deal:

I have zero enthusiasm for continuing to live with the level of heartache I have been for the past couple of years since the “divorce” word started making a regular appearance in my vicinity, but for some strange reason I don’t want to die. Sure, I’ve thought about it plenty, I’ve said I want it out loud more than a few times, I’ve even screamed it at the place where God used to be, but whether it’s fear or curiosity or some unkillable seed of hope, something in the back of my mind always shakes its head at me and says, “You know that isn’t really true.”

Sometimes I hate that little voice. Sometimes I wish that it were wrong.

But a lie is a lie, even if you tell it to yourself.

I’ve got this axiom I keep coming back to — something that popped into my head like it should have been an old saying: “grief is an exorcism.”

It’s an analogy, but only barely. You have this awful, ugly, nasty, dark think writhing around inside of you, all claws and teeth and sharp elbows, threatening to tear you apart, and you can’t fight it into submission or it regroups and regains its strength and comes for you again.

You have to purge it. You have to say its name. When you’re on the highway at 70 miles an hour and it comes bursting through you in waves of unmitigated sobs, you have to pull over if that’s what it takes, but you let that sucker out. You do not want it to stay inside you.

Grief is the pain leaving your body to make space for your soul to stay.

And it never comes out in one solid piece. It’s like an iceberg, broken up into tiny chunks, all floating to the surface one at a time on their own schedule. Often at wildly inconvenient times, and never as fast as you would like to be done with them.

Sometimes, I feel like I write excessively about it here. I’ve seen people refer to what I’m doing as “trauma dumping,” or narcissism, or whatever else. They can think whatever they want. This space, these words, this is necessary bloodletting for me. And the piece I wrote about Annihilation last week? Like I said, that did something for me I still don’t understand. I’ve felt different ever since. Calmer. More grounded. More like myself.

It was a ritual of grief. Almost a liturgy. And it accomplished something I don’t even consciously know how to do. It’s early yet, so I’m not sure if I can trust it, but I’ve been off the rollercoaster for days.

The isolation stopped bothering me quite as much. I’m using it to work on things. I’m learning how to relax sometimes. I decided to force myself to take Mondays off (my weekends are usually crazy busy) and just…rest. I still feel like I’m spinning my wheels too much, but I get this feeling (admittedly, it comes and goes) that somehow, maybe my efforts will not be in vain. Even if I can’t see how or why right now.

Maybe God is some cosmic Miyagi, making me wax the car and sand the floor, and it all feels so stupid and disconnected in my mind that I get lippy like Daniel-San, so I can’t see the strategy for what it is until I’m in the middle of some situation I don’t expect and it all comes together and I’m perched there like a land manatee doing whatever the land manatee version of a crane kick looks like.

But to find out, I have to wait. And to wait, I have to endure the cesspool I’m treading water in, hoping to find the shore.

Which brings me to the part of this post where I make a request.

Poor little Evie, my stupid but lovable car, is having issues again. She is my lifeline. The only way I can work, or see my kids, or get out of this damned apartment complex to do anything worthwhile.

She is overheating again, despite me putting about $1800 into getting the radiator fans and their electrical assembly repaired back in February. I was trying to nurse her along until I could afford to get her looked at, but my engine temps spiked to a new high today while I was out working, and I can’t risk blowing the head gasket or warping anything, so I quit for the night, bit the bullet and made an appointment to go back and have them look at it tomorrow.

And I’m not going to lie, I’m freaking out. Because I’m about a month from being totally broke, and I’m still cashflow negative for now.

The robot utopia with all the free stuff we’ve been promised is still years away, I have no career to go back to even if I were not all over the internet as an eminently cancellable conservative, Christian (or Christian-adjacent) middle-aged white male who is rather loud about his opinions, and my small savings buffer is dangerously close to being wiped out while I’m slinging groceries and pizzas and fried chicken for peanuts.

So I’m asking for some help in any of the following ways:

1. If you read this Substack but don’t have a paid subscription, would you consider one? It’s my primary source of income, and I’m sure I’m doing it wrong, but subscriber numbers keep going in the wrong direction, and I’d love to turn that around. If you’re interested, you can hit the little red button below:

   Subscribe now

2. If you or anyone you know needs voiceover work, I’ve been doing that periodically (thanks to Thomas, one of our readers, who referred me to an agency he worked with) and it’s work I really enjoy. I set up a page for this on my website, with a demo reel. I’d love to do this more, but I have no idea how to break into this market for anything regular.

3. If you or anyone you know needs help setting up a website, I’ve begun working with an old friend on that for a project she’s starting. And come to think of it, I’ve been designing sites like this one and this one and this one and this one for many years. I don’t have a formal business structure nailed down for this, but I work freelance and I can figure it out.

4. If you’re willing to support me/my work here through direct patronage, the usual links are all operative: (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/BuyACoffee)

5. If all else fails, I will gratefully accept your prayers, and yes, even your positive vibes. (And yes, I know many of you pray for me all the time, and I am so thankful for that.)

If you’re interested in reaching me on any of this, you can hit me at steve at steveskojec dot com.

There’s more work I already want to take on, but I’ve got to pace myself. I have several book projects in mind (including a Notes From the Road essay collection and the Global Storm series I started on TSF), I’m thinking about possible courses I could teach online, and after nearly 10 episodes my podcast with Kale is finally eligible for monetization (I don’t expect much, but we’ll see). And that’s before I get to the collection of artistic endeavors and hobbies I’d finally have time for if I could stop flailing around.

I know I’m supposed to be doing more with my gifts than delivering food or bagging groceries. I never thrived in the 9 to 5 world. Both of those things are honest work, but if you’re not meant for something, it’ll always eat away at you. I believe finding whatever project I’m supposed to be doing next is probably my only path back to any kind of real wellness.

Meaning-making is what I do. Even at the worst of times, my compass is always trying to point north.

Becoming a functional human being again after your life was exploded from the inside out is a process, and not a quick one. Having to try to re-start your whole life at 48 from nothing while going through the worst thing you’ve ever experienced with no local support network and a flatlined faith is not something I would recommend to anyone.

I will be walking wounded until the day I leave this earth. I know that. Some days it feels like I was torn in half, and my body just can’t understand where the rest of me is.

But I’m not quitting, so the only way out is through.

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Note: I’m trying to stretch my fiction muscles, so I got a writing prompt and banged this out. This is just practice for other projects, but it came out kind of fun, so I thought I’d share.

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It’s cold inside the station.

I should be used to that by now, after all these years working the graveyard shift at A34, but somehow it always surprises me.

It’s got something to do with the desert, I think. Deceptively hot and sunny during the day, so when I leave the barracks for the station, the air is soft and pleasant, the dry heat wicking away sweat on the persistent breeze.

But by the time two or three in the morning rolls around, the sand dunes, which act like heat sinks, have already surrendered their thermal energy to the night. Grady calls it a convection effect, but I don’t even know if that’s the right term. All I know is that after sundown, that gentle breeze turns into a howling beast, throwing icy daggers. After dark, you really shouldn’t risk going out even as far as Big Betty -- that’s what we call the hulking radio telescope out back -- without wearing goggles and a mask. The way that sand blows around sometimes, it can blind you or choke you or both in a matter of seconds. Pretty much everyone who has ever worked the station has made that mistake once. Few ever make it twice.

I start out most shifts with my corporate BDU sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and finish most of them in my parka. I don’t know why they bother with the fake military uniform, but it’s durable and comfortable, just not particularly warm. The whole installation has shit for insulation. Everything is covered in a fine grit of dust, and the base is almost as old as the sand it sits on. There aren’t really any records anymore on how this operation got started. Those got wiped in the Carrington Erasure Event of ‘47.

Or at least, that’s what they told us.

Grady says the old-timers told him they used to have bookshelves full of physical records on site, printed on actual paper, but they’ve long-since turned to dust. Even now, there are some old, cracked and yellowed PVC binders from back in the day when the American Army ran this outpost, back before the dissolution. They had this technique where they’d coat the paper in a kind of clear plastic that held up fairly well. But they seemed to only use that technique on critical documents, like process and procedure instructions for the station equipment. How to check the bands, remote thrust vector adjustment calculations, that kind of thing. Kind of stuff that belongs in a museum, if we didn’t still need it here.

It’s still the part of the night where I can hold off the chill with a hot coffee and a generous helping of the ‘shine from Grady’s still. The coffee keeps me awake and the hooch puts me to sleep, so I do a little balancing act between the two. I’m not saying I’ve never fallen asleep at the wheel, but then again, it’s not like anyone has ever been around to catch me napping on the job.

Grady works days, I work nights. We split the day right down the middle. We meet for breakfast most days, me coming off the clock, him punching in. It’s the only time we ever see another human being, and I’m mostly fine with that. I took the job to get away from other humans, and I haven’t regretted that part yet. But there’s something that total isolation does to a man. Changes you in ways you don’t even realize until someone else points it out to you. Human beings weren’t meant for total solitude. So Grady and me, we get together in the mess hall if I’m not too tired, and we eat.

The rotation is supposed to have more redundancy built in. In the old days, the watch was broken into three eight-hour shifts instead of two twelves. A crew of six could do the rotation with days off in-between.

That would be nice, but they haven’t sent us any relief for over a year now. Not since O’Malley died from Valley Fever last October. Horrible way to go. Grady says that should have been treatable, says we used to have antifungals in the med bay for dealing with that kind of disease. Grady says a lot of things. I’ve got no reason to suspect that he’s lying, but he sure does run his mouth a lot. I guess that’s to be expected when you’ve been holed up, mostly alone, at the ass end of the world for the better part of two decades.

I’m just about to celebrate my own 7th anniversary here. Although “celebrate” is probably the wrong word. I’ve had worse jobs, to be sure. There was this one I had, right out of high school, back in the 60s, cleaning out the grease traps from behind restaurants. Smelled godawful. We’d slurp it up through a hose into a big tanker truck, haul it all to an old warehouse out at Three Points, then pump it into a holding tank. The boys that worked the warehouse would then run it through a bunch of machines. By some alchemical process I never really understood, it’d come out the other end as biofuel, which they’d sell at a tidy profit.

Growing up, I’d have bet money a job like that would have been done by clankers, but then again, when I was growing up they told us the damn bots were going to do all the work and give us everything for free. So then they built a few billion of the rust buckets, started mining all the precious metals and rare earths out of the solar system, and the great corporate houses moved their operations to low earth orbit, or to the Moon, because I guess it was more efficient that way. And so it should have been no surprise when they stopped making free stuff for Earthsiders. Too much of a pain, I guess, to ship stuff down the gravity well for people who are of no practical use and can’t even pay. We were left to fend for ourselves in the ruins of whatever was left behind. These days, most of the terrestrial bots are old salvage models. We’ve gotten pretty good at keeping them going until they’re worn clean through, but despite the stars being full of them, Earthside there just aren’t enough to go around.

Other than scarcity, there’s no reason one of the ‘noids couldn’t do this gig. They don’t need to eat, they don’t need to sleep, and even with the antique solar array at A34, they’d never run out of power. Turning knobs and filling out e-forms seems pretty low-effort for a machine with a brain, but what do I know?

Anyhow, Corporate wants human contractors on this gig for some reason. The work itself isn’t hard, unless boring counts as hard. They say this old facility requires a human touch, though I’m really not sure why. Still, if they think that, it’d be nice if they showed some appreciation. The supply drones come less and less often, and we’ve been understaffed the whole time I’ve been stationed here. Hell, if they were still sending medical supplies on a semi-regular basis, maybe Grady is right. O’Malley might still be alive, instead of in a shallow grave out behind the composter.

Speaking of the composter, there’s an unofficial part of the job we’ve been forced to take on in our downtime, when we’re not playing satellite babysitter. We’re so far from civilization, we have to grow most of our own food. The old manuals say there used to be a staff agriculturalist, but even in Grady’s time, that was never a thing. So he and I each take some of our time off-shift to tend the hydroponics, the little mushroom farm, and the meat cultivator. When the supply drops do come, they’re filled mostly with big plastic bags of amino acids and carbohydrates to feed the cell cultures. Meat’s about 70% water, and despite our arid location, we’ve got a deep well that still produces, and some half-decent reclamation systems designed for three times as many people as are actually on base. Water is one thing we’ve got a surprising amount of. I take ridiculously long showers, just because I can.

It’s the top of the hour, so I shake myself from my thoughts, crack my back, down the last of my now-lukewarm coffee in a single gulp, and start the signal rotation. The way it works is this: I go down the full list, checking each of a dozen satellites to make sure all systems are nominal, no degrading orbits, still sending and receiving pings, all that jazz. Every once in a while we have to make a slight orbital adjustment, but for the most part our whole job is just babysitting a bunch of machines up in space that have been there since before either of us were born.

The weird thing is, I have no idea what the damn things do. Sometimes I wonder if anyone is left who remembers why we bother at all. But I’m saving for retirement, and the pay isn’t bad. Because I live on station, my expenses are all covered, and there’s nowhere to spend any money if I wanted to, so I just accumulate the credits. Best of all, I don’t have to deal with trying to stay on the hamster wheel long enough to maintain a coffin unit in one of the shantytowns. I’ve got fresh air, peace and quiet, room to stretch my legs, and I get to spend every night looking at the stars.

Not a bad deal, all in all.

I cycle through each of the units, labeled S1 through S12, sending a ping, waiting for a status report. I’ve got a checklist I work through for each, punching the orbital determination data and ping responses into an old tablet with cracked glass and a battery so worn out it has to stay plugged in at all times or it immediately shuts down. You’d think important work would require well-maintained equipment, but what do I know? Altitude, inclination, ground track, data transmission. I fill out the forms for each satellite without even having to think. Every night is the same. There are never any surprises.

Which is why I almost miss the anomaly on S9.

There’s extra juice in the carrier wave, but I’m not expecting it so I don’t even see it. I’m checking boxes from muscle memory, except when I enter the signal value the tablet flags it with a little red triangle symbol with a white exclamation point and won’t let me proceed without annotating.

“Huh,” I say to the empty room, taking a swig of shine. “That’s new.” I chew on my thumb as I study the readouts.

Now that I’m looking at the instrument cluster, I can see the fluctuation. The needle, usually steady, is bouncing like it’s at a high school dance. I flip the rocker switch for the transducer and crank the volume knob. There’s a deep hum and a bit of static at first, but it resolves as I rotate the tuning knob, and then...is that music?

A piano plays in jaunty staccato. The sound is old and tinny, all mids and highs and practically no bass. It sounds jazzy, old-fashioned in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. I feel like maybe I’ve heard something like this in an old reel somewhere.

Then a man’s voice cuts in, just as tinny, and with a strange accent:

“Did a headache spoil a day for you? Are you still feeling a little miserable and upset? Well, of course, it would have been wise to take Alka-Seltzer earlier in the day, but don’t wait now. Take it right away!”

“Alka-Seltzer?” I ask the equipment. “What the hell is Alka-Seltzer?”

The equipment doesn’t answer, but the needle keeps swaying to the music when it comes back on.

I tap the little red triangle, make a note of the required field, then press “submit.” The screen refreshes, and the form for S10 comes up. I guess I’m supposed to continue the rotation.

I just stare at the screen, my eyes unfocused. I’m lost in my thoughts. It sounded like a radio broadcast, but there’s not a broadcast tower for hundreds of miles, and even if they were, the station is tuned to frequencies in a part of the spectrum that’s reserved for space-based communication.

“That broadcast had to be coming from S9,” I say. “But how?”

The tablet flashes a warning at me. I’m supposed to be entering data. I continue the rotation.

S10: Nominal.

S11: Nominal.

When I get to S12, the transducer, which I’d left on just in case, immediately starts outputting sound. My brain fumbles with it for a moment, before it resolves into something I can recognize.

It’s a woman’s voice, softly singing what sounds like a lullaby. It’s...familiar somehow, but I can’t place it. I sit and listen, and there’s a sweetness to it. I feel sad for some reason I can’t explain, and I can feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. I’ve got goosebumps running up and down my arms. I rub them with my hands, then enter the data, notating when I get another little red warning triangle.

What the hell is going on?

I’ve finished the rotation, so I decide to get up and get my blood moving. The winds are fairly calm tonight, so I decide to empty my bladder outside before refilling it at the coffee pot. As I do my business, I look at Big Betty, her singular red light flashing in a slow, steady heartbeat, and beyond her, at the stars. A small green meteorite streaks across the sky, and I notice that I can see my breath as I watch it pass. Not windy tonight, but still cold.

Back inside, I top off my mug and breathe the steam in through my nose. The coffee smells slightly burnt from sitting on the hot pad, but that’s not what I’m after. The air is so dry out here that I sometimes wake up with nosebleeds. A little humidity in the nasal passages offers some relief. I’m looking, I realize, for small, comforting normalcies. I’ve been working this station for the better part of a decade, and the array has never returned so much as a beep. What am I dealing with here?

I sit back down and look at the system clock. Next round of checks in 20 minutes. Twice every hour. It strikes me, not for the first time, how odd it is that this system isn’t automated. We’ve got AI systems running all the orbital arcologies of the great houses, performing complex system management and life support and manufacturing tasks, coordinating remote space-based mining operations on asteroids flying through space at eye-popping speeds, but they need a couple of old washout skinjobs here manually cranking the dials and making orbital micro-adjustments?

It just doesn’t make any sense.

I watch the system clock anxiously, feeling anticipation build in my gut as the display ticks towards the bottom of the hour. I’d run the checks early, but the tablet will just lock me out. Safeguard against someone entering all the data for a shift up front and then quitting early.

Finally, the clock hits half-past, and I begin working through the checks, transducer on.

Right out of the gate, S1 is broadcasting a man’s voice, in what sounds like French -- a language I actually do recognize. I was raised by my grandfather, and he spoke a little. He liked to say random phrases in it just for fun, because it sounded funny to me as a kid, and he would make wild expressions to go with it, making me laugh. Sounds kind of like him, actually. Creepy.

S2 has a news broadcast of some kind, talking about people who were very excited about the demolition of some kind of wall. S3 sounded like a sporting event. The audio was compressed, staticky, and I had to turn it up to make out the words.

“Babe Ruth will be at his old right field stand for the Americans, the man with the all-time record of 699 home runs in his major league career, and who probably has been given more intentional passes than any other man ever in baseball. For the bid his batting average is very puny this year 191...”

The tablet blinked its warning at me, but I just stared.

I know that name. Professional sporting events were a distant memory Earthside, and what the Orbiters did was not something we had access to. Private, encrypted networks. Impossible to pirate without the help of a strong AI system. The kind they didn’t let us have.

But grandpa had been a baseball fanatic when was a kid. Back before the dissolution, the Carrington erasure, when the Orbiters were just beginning to build their space-based world on the backs of great gleaming rocket ships launching millions of tons of resources into space. His own grandfather had watched Babe Ruth as a young boy. Had told him stories he’d passed down to me. When had that been? At least 150 years ago now.

Every satellite is broadcasting. I go through them one by one, trying to pick out recognizable things. The transmissions all sound old, like the trick we’d learned as kids where you talk through two empty tin cans connected by a piece of string. I’m half-tempted to go wake Grady up and drag him in here to make sure I’m not going crazy, but I can’t pull myself away.

I make it all the way back to S12, and then something catches in the back of my throat.

It’s the woman singing the lullaby again, only this time, I realize why it sounds familiar.

“Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side. The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling, It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.”

This time, I know the voice.

Tears well up in my eyes, spilling down my cheeks. I wipe them away with the backs of my hands, but they won’t stop coming.

My mother’s voice.

My mother died when I was 9. I never knew my father. Grandpa sold just about everything he had, scraping together the money to take her to one of the few corporate medbots still available earthside. They said it was cancer. Hard to say why. So much toxic junk was left Earthside when the Corporate aristocracy went orbital that it could have been almost anything. There was no one to really blame. Just another tragic moment in another insignificant life.

I have no recordings of my mother. My grandfather passed twenty-two years ago this summer. But that is her voice. That was her song, the one she always sang to me to calm me down when I was worried or anxious or just riled up from a crazy day. I haven’t heard that voice or that song in so long I don’t even know how I recognized it. It’s unlocked a memory I forgot I even had.

But how was the voice of my dead mother being broadcast from 250 miles above the surface of the earth, on an old military satellite only monitored by this particular station, the one where I work?

The singing stops. The tablet is flashing angrily at me, but I’m too busy listening for what might come next to notice, let alone care.

“Daniel?” my mother’s voice asks.

I’m crying again, hot tears streaming down my face, leaving droplet marks in the patina of dust on scratched and battered surface of the old steel desk.

Is she talking to me?

“Daniel, can you hear me?” the voice asks.

I try to speak, but nothing emerges, just a jagged croak. I cough, try to clear my throat, but before I can try again, a new panel lights up on the instruments, one I’ve never seen go active before. The one that indicates we’re not just receiving.

A34 is broadcasting now, from Earth back to space.

“Yes momma,” a voice says, and it’s my voice, but it’s not coming from my mouth. It sounds just like I did as a child.

“I just wanted to tell you that I love you very much, and I’ll always be with you, even when, some day, I have to leave this earth.”

“I know that, momma,” the voice that is mine but not-mine says, “but don’t be silly. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Not now, baby boy, but a time will come, and I want you to never forget. Now, it’s time to get ready for bed.”

“Yes, momma.”

I suddenly remember this conversation. I can see her, sitting there on that old, worn out brown leather sofa in grandpa’s living room, back before that stopped being a place where people could live. I can smell the old wood smoke from the cold fireplace, see the orange-and-brown afghan draped over the back of Grandpa’s chair, hear the creak of the floorboards as I shift my feet while we talk. I put my weight on my left foot, then my right, then left, then right. If I do it with just the right rythm, it makes a sound that reminds me of a donkey.

Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw.

“Danny boy!” my mother says with a laugh, a crackle of static punctuating the musical sound. “Stop making that silly noise and go brush your teeth!”

A giggle, and the sound of running feet.

Just then, Grady bursts into the station.

“Danny, what the hell did you do?” he asks, wide-eyed, his remaining hair wild. He’s out of breath. He stands on the other side of the room, but I can smell the hooch on him from here.

“What do you mean ‘what did I do?’” I ask, half-growling, irritated at the interruption of the first moment that felt special in as long as I can remember.

“They’re coming!” He exclaims, pointing back behind him.

“Who’s coming?” I ask, my anger turning to confusion and alarm.

But that’s when I hear it. The sound of rotor blades. The buzzing of giant, angry bees. The desert outside the window lights up as two large quad copters come in for a landing outside, disgorging a half dozen of those weird insectoid-looking orbital security bots and three men in some kind of hazmat suits. The clankers methodically clear each of the buildings, then take positions both inside and outside the station.

The men in hazmat suits follow, once Grady and I are under the watchful, bulbous eyes, an unblinking multi-spectral camera array that never misses a thing.

“Well done, Mr. Devereaux,” the one who appears to be in charge says.

“What did I do?” I ask. “And who are you anyway?”

“Who I am is of no concern. What you’ve done is to complete an experiment that has been running for over a hundred years. A most unusual experiment indeed.”

“What experiment?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

“Sadly, your services are no longer needed.”

“I love you, Danny boy,” the transducer says, in my mother’s voice.

“I love you too, momma,” the station says, in my childhood voice.

The clankers raise their weapons and fire.

“I’m coming for you, Danny boy,” her voice says, as the room fades to black. “I’m coming for you all.”

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“Did you ever love me? Was any of it ever real?”

I ask, but there is never any answer.

I am no longer a man. I am a husk-shaped container of grief.

An ocean of sorrow, of longing, of self-recrimination.

Sometimes, when the stars align, I even manage to muster up some fury at the casual cruelty of the thing.

The world collapses. There is no future, and the present is purgatorial.

There is only an endlessly re-examined past.

A false life, full of false beliefs.

Squandered trust.

Abandoned vows.

“It’s a total loss,” the ontological adjuster says, in an imaginary voice only I can hear. “You don’t have the coverage for this.”

I have long-since inventoried my extensive catalog of faults. I have long since exhausted my supply of inward-focused blame. I did my share of wrongs, but the expenses aren’t all mine. Not even close.

The ledger does not balance by my accounting alone.

It was never good, except when it was. We fought like Montagues and Capulets, except for when we played Romeo and Juliet.

I don’t mourn the conflict, the difficulties, the tension or the cutting words. I mourn the truer, deeper thing I always believed lived beneath. The thing I was always reaching for. The one I thought, if we just focused our efforts the right way, could win.

A love worth fighting for, not about.

It’s been almost eight months now, since the worst night of my life. Eight months since I had to walk out that door, my babies crying, you angry, me feeling things I don’t even know how to put into words. It’s like a crime scene too horrible to look upon. Just the memory streaks my face with tears.

Nothing has been the same since. Life has lost any hint of promise. Despite the condolences and compassion of strangers from far away, there is no one here, in the real world, to ask for comfort. No shoulder nearby to cry upon. No trusted presence over coffee. No embrace from a warm body as they lie to me and tell me it will be OK.

The only life I ever hoped for is already dead and buried. I merely happen to continue breathing.

It’s like my body hasn’t fully accepted the news.

Memories come in a jumble. Images flash, faces and scenes, too elusive to view in detail. But some things stand out in the haze.

Your smile. You always complained that it was crooked, but it never failed to dazzle me.

The intensity of your eyes, as we stood entranced, gazing at each other in the golden light of evening in the parking lot, smiling like idiots, me refusing to get in my dark blue Pontiac station wagon, you hovering just beyond your cherry red Toyota convertible.

The smell of you on my shirt. The feeling of you jumping into my arms, squealing with delight. Your eager, hungry kiss, back in the days when affection wasn’t something I had to request and only begrudgingly receive…until there just wasn’t any at all.

You would look straight through me sometimes, shifting your tone into something like a melody when you would say my name. The sound of it, back when your mouth was soft and warm, not hard edged and sharp, dripping with contempt.

“I’m your ride or die,” you say, in another life not so long ago — a life where I was fool enough to believe it.

Numb, looking for something halfway productive to do, I organize old files on my computer, deleting, shifting folders, re-arranging the deck chairs on the sunken vessel of my life.

A video I don’t remember sits in a folder full of images of the children.

You and I, sitting together on a couch, me with a beard still more brown than gray, you with your hair cropped short. I lean back against your chest, smiling up at you, and you look down, smiling back at me. A moment of tenderness, trapped in amber.

The smile looks like you mean it.

“Was any of it ever real?” comes again. But who can answer?

And what if it was?

And what if it wasn’t?

Will anything change?

I pull on my hoodie against an unexpectedly chilly evening, slip outside to the concrete steps just beyond my door. I flip open a small slab of plastic and light up a smoke, the last cigarette from a pack I had no business buying, lungs burning as I flail towards yet another possibility of momentary relief.

I see you standing there, outside the tan door of the old brick rambler that was your mom’s place before they killed her, the vinyl window frames cracked and peeling from the relentless Arizona sun, taking a drag of your own, spitting your disgust into the dust.

You were like that sometimes. Choosing freely to do things you hated. Loving things you didn’t. You were always temperamental like a storm. I was drawn to your ferocity like a moth to a flame.

We stood there in the washed-out landscape, in a place we never wanted to be, a place you kept trying to leave, smoking, staring, poking the loose cinderblocks through the weeds with the toes of our shoes. It was one of a thousand hard times we’ve gone through, and we endured them however we could — together. The ritual of smoke pushed the desert back just a little, under the relentless heat and harsh light of a cloudless sky, blue so pale it almost bordered on white.

I want to go back, talk to the version of you who wanted me so much you couldn’t wait for me to put a ring on your finger. The one who convinced me to let down my guard. The one who hadn’t grown to loathe the man she swore she loved. The one who walked down that aisle, eyes brighter than your beautiful white dress, as we started something new.

Something I thought was as permanent as things in this life could ever be.

I knew in that moment, as you met me at the altar, that I was exactly where I belonged. I wasn’t afraid. I, the man who could second-guess the sunrise, had not even a trace of doubt. And that knowing, that certainty, turned out to be a lie.

How can I ever know anything again?

What is truth if it can be upended, worn through, or left with nowhere to land?

Where is the version of me who drove to the church that day, sweating in the July Virginia sun, dragging catering and just-altered tux to the parish hall to start a whole new life? Does he still exist? Did I abandon him there?

The silence closes in, and my own cigarette has burned down to the filter. There’s no reason to stay outside.

There’s no reason to do anything at all. It’s all just going through the motions. Wake. Cook. Eat. Work. Shower. Work. Clean. Cook. Eat. Drink. Watch television. Cry. Sleep. Repeat.

It’s been weeks since I’ve interacted with an actual flesh-and-blood human being in any way that was not transactional. A cash register here. A gas pump there. A repairman fixing a leak.

Am I still real?

If a man crushed under the weight of an amputated life falls in an empty room, does he make a sound?

“I’m already dead,” I say again, to no one. The walls don’t answer. The floor remains quiet as stone. “I don’t exist.”

Their silence gives consent.

Nobody calls to check on me except the debtors who remain unpaid. Not one person has visited in all this time. I wonder, like a forensic analyst, how long it would take for anyone to know if I died in my sleep, or slipped in the tub and cracked my head. One week? Two? Would it only happen when the neighbors notice the smell?

I keep shambling like a zombie through this world of desolation. I am immolated, but though I move crowds, no one ever sees the flame.

No one sees me at all.

I think often of my little ones — they were all little once, even the ones who no longer are — their bright eyes and soft faces and round cheeks, tiny bodies I can hoist easily into my big arms.

Arms that are empty now. Arms that ache from their absence.

They will bear the untold costs of this unchosen life, of a broken family and a father rarely ever seen, and I am shackled. I can offer no protection from what I do not control.

I am as powerless as they are. I would never have chosen to leave them this inheritance of broken dreams. How does a man come to terms with such unspeakable things? How does he write off the unjust suffering that afflicts those he’s supposed to shield?

Must I keep wandering in exile, knowing the futility of hoped-for recompense?

Must I keep waiting for the latent power of a missing God? A God who never once answered, in almost 23 years of “sacramental” marriage, after all the times we called upon him to save us from ourselves? And what power does he have, anyway? What could he fix, if he decided to break his infuriating silence? What would he do if he answered my unworthy prayers?

Some wounds cannot be mended. Some bones cannot be set. If God cannot make a rock so big that it cannot be moved, by the same logic, he cannot create love in a place where love has gone to die.

I wonder how far I am from the place where madness lies. Is there a map for that territory? Will I know when I have at last stumbled into its waiting arms?

Would it even matter if I did?

I have been unmade. There will be no kintsugi-comeback, no jagged cracks made whole with gold. I will live out my days as a mere handful of shards.

I would abandon myself to something, if there were somewhere true for my offering to be received.

But there are only ruins.

There are only ashes.

Not even embers yet remain.

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Sometimes, the best writing you do isn't fit for public consumption.

Too much you have to sanitize and redact when it comes to that. Can't talk about other people the way you actually feel about them, or the way they make you feel.

Can't talk about your coping mechanisms without people judging you — or worse, moralizing to you about them.

Can't talk about struggles with money or work without them telling you how they think you're falling short or what job you should be doing instead.

Or your struggles without belief without them telling you how you're praying all wrong.

And while it's true that most of us are short on exogenous wisdom, we need unsolicited, unconsidered advice from strangers like we need a railroad spike to the forehead.

If we could write the way we think, if we could say it all, raw and unadulterated and pure as fresh blood, I like to think those folks would be quiet.

But we all know better.

Most people aren't here to listen. Precious few want to hear any voice that isn't their own. And nobody, drowning in the ocean of their own problems, wants to hear about someone else's pain.

Except the voyeurs. The voyeurs come for the train wreck, the dumpster fire, then take off if it ever goes out. They don't want to see you do better, because better is boring.

Writhing in agony? Now that's entertainment.

There are always a few real ones, the ones who care, or send a quiet email, or light up the notification on your DMs. They're mostly the ones who know real suffering from the inside out, and they offer what they can like they're inviting you to huddle under their broken umbrella in a downpour, barely big enough for two.

And you still can't take the shackles off. You still can't write it all out for them.

Bukowski's genius, if you want to call it that, was that he didn't care. He didn't mind looking bad, and he didn't trouble himself with whether the other people he wrote about looked bad either. He coughed up his raw, drunken, sex-fueled, tobacco-driven humanity and displayed it on a cheap folding table like some kind of lowlife trading cards.

But it was real, anyway. It was ugly in the way things are. And that's something.

Real is a rare commodity these days.

Real is the last taboo.

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There was a palpable buildup on the UFO/UAP issue this week, so and I got our fancy selves into the studio and recorded our most in-depth episode ever on the topic.

We start with a history of the UFO phenomenon — including the famous Nuremberg UFO incident of 1561 (more on that below) — and then move into the modern era, which begins in the 1930s with the UFO crash in Magenta, Italy, which was (allegedly) recovered by Mussolini’s forces, and then, at the end of the war, retrieved by the American OSS after a “heads-up” phone call from Pope Pius XII.

We talk through key players, government factions at cross purposes, the architecture of keeping secrets, and finally, what led to the moment where today, for the first time in history, the Department of War released the first batch of declassified UFO files under the direction of President Trump. (Announcement here. UFO files website here.)

This is is a free post made possible by paid subscribers.

Writing is my profession. If you find value in my work, please consider becoming a subscriber to support it.

Subscribe now

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Thank you for reading, and for your support!

Kale and I did not know, when we recorded this episode, that this was going to happen. But we had reason to suspect that something was. Because a group of evangelical pastors were called to a strange meeting at an Airbnb in Tennessee back in February to warn them that this was coming, and they all started talking about it this week.

In their minds, this is the coming of the Great Deception. An apocalyptic event that will bring about the coming of the Antichrist.

We go into ALL of it, right here:

True story: I didn’t love that YouTube thumbnail, I was tired from all the editing that went into this episode, and so I asked Grok Imagine to take the thumbnail and make it more fun. I could not have guessed the two options it would give me in a million years. I could NOT stop laughing.

Oh, we were supposed to talk about Nuremberg. OK, well, here’s the story:

On April 14, 1561, in the town of Nuremberg — then a Free Imperial City within the Holy Roman Empire, now a part of Germany — a remarkable event was documented by letter-painter Hanns Glaser.

Known as the "Nuremberg Celestial Event," it's considered by many to be one of the first mass UFO sightings.

For the latest episode of the MTS Podcast, I attempted to imagine, based on Glaser's detailed descriptions, what that event may have looked like. The result is the video below.

But first, so you know what you’re looking at, here is Glaser’s full description of the event:

In the morning of April 14, 1561, at daybreak, between 4 and 5 on the small clock, a dreadful apparition occurred on the sun, and then this was seen in Nuremberg in the city, before the gates and in the country – by many men and women.

At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter.

And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color.

Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone.

In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.

These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun.

Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour.

And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke.

After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west.

Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows. Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness.

After all, the God-fearing will by no means discard these signs, but will take it to heart as a warning of their merciful Father in heaven, will mend their lives and faithfully beg God, that He may avert His wrath, including the well-deserved punishment, on us, so that we may temporarily here and perpetually there, live as his children.

For it, may God grant us his help, Amen.
By Hanns Glaser, letter-painter of Nurnberg.

Without further ado…I think this came out pretty well:

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