Sorry I'm a Dumpster Fire

Progress is exceedingly slow of late

Hey there, gentle reader!

Looks like I haven’t posted since February. And that was supposed to be a multi-parter. Yikes!

I can explain. Sort of.

Let me give some back story for the new folks (thanks for subscribing!): See, when I knew I couldn’t do the Catholic media thing anymore, I figured I’d take a little time off, focus on sorting through some things, and start up a new venture. I already had this Substack, and I wanted to branch out and do some additional things.

We sold our Arizona house in 2021, handed off my business to the new owners, moved to freaking New Hampshire of all places, and just…stopped.

I spent a year in what felt like some kind of shell shock. During that year, I spent a lot of time grieving over lost faith/career/decades of my life spent in service of said faith, trying to heal, grasping for a way to just come out of the catatonic trance I had fallen into. Our family went through more difficulties as this was happening. A big fallout over some specific events that lead to estrangement from a number of close family members. More grieving because of this new development. But also more healing, because I finally put my foot down about some things that needed to be confronted. We closed on our New Hampshire house in November of 2021, and headed straight into a long winter. By late spring of 2022, we realized that we’d moved to a beautiful state with very few people and nothing to do. We missed our city life. We missed our ethnic food and the more abundant options of Stuff To Do. We didn’t know anyone. Homeschool wasn’t working out because we were too burned out to really do it. It was great to be able to drive to the coast in under half an hour, and to see winter again, and fall, but as magical as the return to New England was for me (I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Northern Connecticut), we were lonely, bored, and kind of miserable. It was a nice place that turned out to be a bad fit; the fruit of a decision made at a time when I was in crisis and wanting to escape. I had bad memories associated with the house we’d been living in, a trad Catholic community that had turned on me for openly criticizing the petty actions of their precious pastor, and a social sphere that was 100% religious as my antipathy towards that religion was growing in uncontrollable leaps. I was not thinking clearly. My lovely wife was trying to find something that might ease my pain. Leaving might actually have been necessary to gain some perspective, but pragmatically speaking, it turned out to be a rather costly mistake.

So we reversed course. We sold the new house, said goodbye to New Hampshire, and came back to Arizona last August just in time to get the kids back in their old school. Life resumed something like a normal rhythm, which helped to pull me out of my funk. But I still didn’t know what was next, and our savings were finite. My wife was ahead of me on the “pulling out of malaise” train, so she took point, and began doing what she does best: working real estate investments. I’m incredibly grateful that I’m married to someone who can do this while I’m shifting gears. But this has left me, since I’m still trying to figure out my next business move, in the hot seat on shuttling kids to and from school, talking them through their adolescent dramas, watching the toddler during business hours, making fewer dinners than I should, and doing a terrible job at most things domestic. Getting me out of my own head is like trying to escape a black hole, so I’m not going to be winning any awards on the homefront.

What this has turned into, though, is a real shortage of quality creative time. Too many interruptions, too many episodes of Bluey (which I love) or toddler Youtube videos (which I don’t). 2-3 hours a day, depending on what’s happening, on the various school commutes. The baby is very physical closeness-dependent, and thus, doesn’t do much solo playing while I work, and isn’t a good napper if I’m not lying with him. All of this means there’s too much chaos in my environment for me to commit to anything like a consistent schedule of producing content. And without consistency in this business, you’re dead in the water.

Writing with any frequency, I’ve learned in my years as a “professional,” means consuming huge amounts of often seemingly-random information which is then digested and distilled into valuable insights and subsequent new content. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is a professional musician, and we were lamenting the fact that much of our work process looks a lot like we’re doing nothing at all. Reading actual books along with other random things all day, watching videos, listening to podcasts, consuming whatever it takes to find the ideas we want to hone into new expressions. Pieper said that “Leisure is the Basis of Culture.” I didn’t read the book, because I’m lazy AF, but I agree with him. But that means real leisure time, dedicated to the pursuit of education and enlightenment, not clicking away at a video game while your 22 month old demands loudly that you be his veejay every minute and a half. That’s the kind of time-wasting that produces nothing at all. And it’s where I’ve been stuck for a while. I had to resign myself to the fact that, for now, until the real estate projects yield financial fruit that pays the bills in the short term, my development of long-term content creation is just on hiatus. It’s too frustrating to start and stop and start and stop again. Every time you think you’re going to have a couple hours to do something, something else comes up. As I was writing this for just the past fifteen minutes or so I’ve had two such interruptions that demand my attention, and now I am distracted by the need to go attend to them.

For a writer to write, he needs great gobs of uninterrupted time. And the older I get, the more demanding I am that my own work be of a certain quality, which means more hours spent refining it.

It is what it is.

The second piece in all of this is my ongoing attempt to figure out who I am now, what I’m for, and what the next phase for my work is about. So many interests, all over the place, with a desire to unify them in a search for meaning, makes it difficult to focus on a niche. Every post, rather than being thematic, feels like a one-off. There’s a lack of cohesiveness that’s bugging the crap out of me. I want to get a podcast going, too — really looking forward to having deep conversations about things with interesting people — but that is a layer I can’t even really think about right now. If writing is hard with toddler-esque interruptions, recording a show is absurd.

My existential angst also keeps shoving me back towards the topic of deconstructing religion. I’m not at all convinced that people want to hear me keep working through my problems out loud, so I tend to inflict them on the Twitterverse instead of on all of you, for whom I have much more affection than the unwashed masses of trolls and sophists I like to spar with on the Big Blue Bird. I have a lot of work to do to get unstuck, and I’ve realized, with a heavy heart, that I need to start studying philosophy. That I never got even a basic training in it as a foundation for my theology degree, and why that’s really a problem.

Thing is, I find philosophy unbelievably boring. But I can’t hold positions I can’t articulately defend, and I can’t reject positions I can’t articulately refute. I need a better grounding in the language and concepts that undergird this religion/anti-religion discourse.

In other words: I have a lot of work to do. I have a desire to produce, but need gas for the tank. A lot more gas. (I promise, I’m not going to transition to fart jokes.)

So this is me just checking in. Thanks to those of you who are still here, still supporting this sporadic fledgling publication of mine. I hope I will be able to reward you with greater value in the future, but it’s going to be a while yet before all cylinders are firing.

For now, I need to go buy cough drops for those who are coming down with our umpteenth cold/flu over the past 8 months (what is even up with that??) and probably see about some blue animated dogs from Australia peddling wholesome family values.

I hear my little one crying. I must depart.