On this past Christmas Day NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope. This replacement and a massive upgrade in terms of capabilities to the Hubble Space Telescope will allow scientists across the planet to see further than has ever before. It is hoped that it will reveal habitable exoplanets and insight into the oldest and most distant phenomena in the universe. This week it went online, after a period in which many of us were reflecting on our own past selves as the new year approached. Tonight, a million miles away from the Earth in orbit around the sun, it begins to search the incomprehensible vastness of time as we look ahead at a future that is equally unknowable.

I enjoy the concept of rebirth, of resolving to do and be more than I have been in the past. The past two years have been some of the hardest in my life as they have been for most who’ve been forced to sew their seams of being back together and reconsider what comes next. But I am focused on action, not words. After two years down I have reached a point where I have to either do what I am meant to do seriously or give up to avoid time wasted on dreams of doing. I haven’t written any resolutions. But I have started to make each day a link in a chain.

Last year I rucked, rain or snow, for miles every day in January. It was training to do what I didn’t want to do for which there was no reward or recognition. Spirit training. This month I am doing the CrossFit calisthenics workout Cindy each morning for the same reason. This is the year of the Tiger; a year we all need to grow stronger.

I am also spending less aimless time online. I want to be present and intentional with my time rather than using diversions as an escape from living. Carl Jung in The Undiscovered Self writes about our obsessive distraction with “objects outside ourselves,” which subvert our striving toward our true and inherent callings. None of this is new, but what is most present is most often overlooked, taken for granted, or passed by for the fresh and novel. If Howl was written today Ginsberg might have observed that the best minds of his generation were driven to madness by subtweets and friend counts. We are living through two pandemics. The first is viral. The second, as Jung predicted, is a psychic epidemic wherein mental illness is the norm. Today it’s common for a casual acquaintance to mention their mental diagnosis as casually as the town where they grew up, and with the same matter-of-fact resolution that it can’t be changed. Evolution is always an option as is staring at a cell phone for another sleepless hour.

Anything digital can and will be erased; lost to time. Only the analog, the tangible, has a chance of remaining into the future, if in pieces: tattered scrolls sealed in clay pots, eroded carvings on stone pillars, newsprint entombed in landfills. I write in journals and lose myself in the woods. I want a love affair with reality and the present moment, what is ultimately true.

In The Oracle of the Night: The History and Science of Dreams Sidharta Ribeiro states that we cannot dream without memories which is why we so often dream of ourselves repeating the routines of our life. If this is true then the Shakespearean passage from Act 4 of The Tempest stating “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” suggests that we are our memories; personal catalogs of moments savored or mourned. Therefore as we make our memories we make ourselves.

In this new year may we all tear the suns we’ve swallowed out of our chests and burn bright as William Blake’s tyger in the forests of the night. Each morning is colder than the last now, but every day is longer.   

Pre-order my book:

My new novel Dream Kids will be released in March of this year. I am immensely proud of it and would be humbled if you pre-ordered your copy here. Pre-orders are incredibly important as they in part determine what books are stocked by booksellers. If you follow me on social media you’ve seen the first promotional video for the book. I have a lot more to share in the coming months.

Watch this:

If you want to smile watch what happens when two motorcycle enthusiasts decide to meticulously recreate the dumbest road trip imaginable involving a mini-bike here

Listen to this:
Dream Kids is a punk rock coming-of-age novel that name drops dozens of late 70s and early 80s punk tracks. I will be putting the full novel soundtrack up as a playlist on Spotify in the future. Until then enjoy this song that appears in the book.

My punk rock coming-of-age novel Dream Kids is now available for pre-sale. It’s like your favorite 80s teen movies on Adderall! You can order your copy here

I am sitting in a park as I write. There is a waterfall at my back. In front of me, the white flowerheads of a Crepe Myrtle sway in the evening breeze. The quiet places are best found outside; outside of structures and one’s own self. I depend on these quiet spots to escape being and write more and more. If I were a better writer then there would be no need to say anything at all. No considerate soul should want to be defined by the sum total of their lines written, promises printed or apologies typed too late. At least I don’t. The idea of being a man sitting alone over his journal musing in a late summer field, barely noticed and quickly forgotten, is a much more attractive memorial.

“Eternity is in love with the creations of time.”- William Blake

The last six months have been timestamped by memorials. In that time I have attended four funerals. Two for aunts. One for an uncle. And one for a member of my jiu-jitsu family who took her life. In art, there is the principle of the vanishing point. As space expands into the distance our perception narrows until the horizon, the future, is a singular dot, almost imperceptible but touching all.

But the future remains the garden from which we reap. An anthology featuring a story I wrote last year was covered by The Times of London and the BBC. After months of serious revisions, I submitted the final draft of my novel Dream Kids which will be released in March next year.

Oliver Sacks in his engrossing book Hallucinations attempts to provide a taxonomy for the same. In his work, he details Charles Bonnet syndrome, considers whether religious revelations such as Joan of Arc’s can be attributed to front lobe epilepsy, mines near-death experience, and psychedelic states. One of the conditions he details is autoscopy in which the afflicted see a copy of themselves, an identical twin. Though most often they realize that this immaterial doppelganger isn’t real, is not them, they frequently continue to interact with it. They pull out chairs for their double. They order it a drink. This is the best metaphor I have found to illustrate what it is like to edit a novel you finished for the first time six years ago. It is you. You can see it vividly. And it is not you.

“…But if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection but are utterly eclipsed by the performance of the inspired madman.”- Socrates, quoted in Plato’s Phaedrus

Now while the sun sinks I am sowing different seeds. I spent most of the spring and summer working on a new novel, one I am proud of and will finish, but I began to stall. I wasn’t burned out, but more experiencing a diminished sense of wonder. I wanted to play, and surprise myself. That’s the project I’m deeply invested in now.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

If you read this I hope you are well, and able to steal away into your own quiet places. I also hope you are taking risks. Even if you fail, cradle your failures and appreciate we are most human when we fall. Everyone looks better with bruises.

Read this:

Oliver Sacks Hallucinations

Listen to this:

Lul Kadhim “Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet” from Lightspeed Magazine

Watch this:

I’m stoked to be training with the Dasiy Fresh crew from Pedigo Submission Fighting in Kentucky next month. If you don’t know their story you can check it out here.

The BBC published an article today regarding the latest anthology to feature my work that explores the cultural and artistic questions the collection as a whole explores. It’s incredibly thoughtful, and you can read it here.

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination.”- John Keats

The creation of art is an ecstatic practice that is strongest when it is born from the eternal mystery bound within us from Newton’s limitless universe. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi terms these ecstatic states as “Flow.” Scientists term them as hypofrontality, a slowing of the prefrontal cortex resulting in a loss of ego. Artists speak of them mystically as when the muse takes over. No matter the definition applied, these selfless and timeless states allow artists to do their best work. In these waking dreams, there is no self to judge or interfere with. As writers, we are only taking dictation and trying to keep up. For the last few years, I have been studying practices to cultivate these periods of rich not-being. But this search is as old as humankind.

 In the twelfth century, Suffi Muslims practiced reciting divine names and prescribed breathing methods and body postures to transcend to higher states. The same practices can be found in some Kabbalistic Jewish sects of that time, Gnostic Christians, Zen Buddhists, Yogic mystics, and beyond. Each is a method to leave the ego to reach the unseen. We all should find a practice to set our conscious minds aside for the divine. Cold exposure, trail running, and yin yoga have helped me immensely.

 Karen Armstrong in her work A History of God relates that the words “myth,” “mysticism,” and “mystery,” all derive from the Greek verb “musteion” which means to shut one’s eyes or mouth. The senses that focus on the present are barriers. Therefore I meditate before I write to silence everything that isn’t this now.

Csikszentmihalyi found creative consciousness is not either/or, but both/and. Steven Kotler condenses this into the formal: creativity equals pattern recognition (linking of ideas) plus risk-taking (courage to bring the novel into being). Both of these mind states create dopamine in the brain, the hormone that creates a sense of well-being in expectation of reward.

The Flow Collective through fMRIs found that Flow exists on the border of alpha and beta brainwaves. But Flow also requires gamma waves which are fast-moving, make connections and drive binding neurons which are literally physical connections between two ideas. And gamma waves depend on theta brainwaves which appear when we meditate, practice yoga, or walk in nature.

To create one has to make space for that hypnagogic state between dreams and waking to arise. The richest ideas arise when our minds are free of surface concerns. When we cultivate these spaces we allow our brains to rejuvenate with oxytocin and dopamine. We also experience an uptake in anandamide (from the Sanskrit “ananda” meaning blessed) that binds to the same neural connectors as THC and promotes openness and relaxation. This better enables us to overcome the innate resistance we feel when it comes to doing the work.

Romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth understood the necessity of submission to the natural world, of feeling rather than knowing, and leaving the logical deliberate mind behind. Even pessimistic philosophers like Schopenhauer felt that salvation could still be found in nature and art.

Transcendence is a fundamental need not only to be an artist but to simply be. In an unpublished paper found after his death psychologist, Abraham Maslow listed transcendence as the sixth, and therefore highest, a human necessity on his revised Hierarchy of Needs.

I offer this to encourage you to step outside yourself, make room for the muse, and find your own practice to better not-be. When we are better able to escape ourselves we can do more than we reasoned possible. It is science and mystery; something we have always sought.

Read this:

Williams Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”

Steven Kotler The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

Listen to this:

Tia Blake “Plastic Jesus”

The anthology Sending Nudes, which features my story “Sex for the Quarantined” just got a wonderful write up in The Guardian. You can read it here.

My Own Private Antarctica

“You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.”- Thomas Pynchon, V.

The depths of winter used to remind me of the last lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” In it, the narrator states, “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” That refrain resonated across snowbanks, rang in the hollow spaces between icicles, and murmured in the wake of the metallic rattle of salt trucks. But after almost a year of quarantine, I feel disconnected from the poetic longings of the Modernists. Instead, I have contemplated the aching of the Romantics. Out my window, it is easy to picture the expanse of Antarctica forcing a singularity of being. Its gales cut the dreaming strands of connection. Sheets of snow stacks onto sheets of snow in the night.

 “Be so good that they can’t ignore you.” – Steve Martin

Victor Hugo published five volumes of poetry before The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He so badly missed his deadline that he gave his assistant all his clothes, wore only a smock, locked himself away, and wrote until the work was done. He tore himself apart in isolation, loving an image, and lived as his as Quasimodo.

I write every day and make progress. I am not driven by desire or desperation but miss both. I move ahead hitting keys to avoid the sense of erasure. There is hope still. I haven’t woken up. 

“Dreams are what you wake up from.”- Raymond Carver 

Thomas Pynchon wrote in his debut novel V. that everyone has an Antarctic, a barren expanse that must be suffered if one is to reach themself at last. Progress is reduction. Explorers like Shackleton and Amundsen made peace with what they abandoned. Survival, like holy enlightenment, results from stripping away.

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

In 1770 the seventeen-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton committed suicide alone in an attic apartment. After his death, he became an emblem of the Romantic Hero: sensitive, misunderstood, and doomed. It is an easy archetype to love: youth, beauty, and sacrifice. The trouble is that no one long grieves the vanished. Martyrdom does not engender reverence. The hero of the Romantics was doomed and heartbroken, but in a world where most are, their sacrifice falls mute. So we trudge on against the ice and winds, learn to empty our hearts and minds to transverse the glaciers that split under our feet. Writers return to words. Musicians to movements. The horizon darkens and narrows, but we steel ourselves to relate undying love as best we misunderstand each other.

The Dry Valley in Antarctica hasn’t seen snow or rain in two-million years. It is often colder there than the surface of Mars. NASA used it to test its Viking spacecraft. Later these landed on Mars and found proof that waters once covered its face. Buried miles beneath the Antarctic ice are over 300 lakes. They are rescued from freezing from the heat of the Earth’s core. Half the world is covered by waters over a mile deep that have never know the sun. In the depths of our souls, we hold bodies that reach for the sun, that wait to be revealed.

The future is as impossible as tomorrow. After a year of crystalized solitude are we hopeless romantic strays, or explorers breaking our bodies to reach a world we hardly recall?  When I write late at night I try to find the fire of ambition. In the night sky, ancient heroes burn in constellations. On winter nights, I search for the North Star. My breath is fog. There are no questions. The ice will melt in the rain soon. I am restless, but I move ahead.

Publishing news:

My book review of Elle Nash’s new collection Nudes from Short Flight/Long Drive books will be published by Entropy on February 22^nd. You can read it next Monday at Entropymag.org.

An anthology that includes my flash fiction has an upcoming review in The Guardian in the UK. I will share the link when it is up.

Read this:

Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. His novella “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” included is worth reading the book alone.

Listen to this:

Marianne Faithfull “Plaisir d’amour”

Billy Strings “Enough to Leave”

“The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.” – Stephen Hawking, A Brief of History of Time

Recently the concept of time has been on my mind, both the mechanics we measure it with and the philosophical leaps it engenders. A year passes into the next, and we sense revival. We buzz with the static of another shot for the world turned kind again. It is easy to forget that all the demarcations on time are only dreams agreed upon. Still I prefer to dream. But lately I have become an observer of myself in time.

As early as 1,500 B.C. the Egyptians used sundials to divide the day into two twelve-hour cycles. Later the  Romans would calibrate clepsydras (water clocks) using sundials to tell time when there was no sun. The seven day week was firmly established in the 4th century by Roman Emperor Constantine. The early divisions between was, now, and will be were in place.

“The two most powerful warriors are patience, and time.” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Seek pain. That is the theme of this month’s Go Ruck challenge I have signed up for.  Go Ruck is a training program developed by former Special Forces officers based on rucking (hiking with a weighted backpack) and CrossFit. Since January 1st I have hefted a thirty-pound sandbag onto my back, and moved out regardless of the weather. It is satisfying to endure and do. The stoic philosopher Seneca said, “The obstacle is the way.” The more I suffer the more stillness I find inside. 

The pendulum clock was improved by Galellio. The wristwatch appeared in World War I. In 1950 the National Physical Laboratory developed the atomic clock with the second as its prime unit of measure. In the 1960s the invention of the laser allowed time to be measured to the attosecond (10¹⁸) which became the standard for international time. 

“The trouble is, you think you have time.”- Jack Kornfield, Buddhist teacher

I bought an Ink+Volt planner for this year. In it I note my goals with their timeframes, and track how my time spent aligns with them. It is a North Star to guide myself through the fog of days passing. 

The scientific standard for measuring time is called the “caesium standard”. This measures the exact number of cycles of radiation – 9,192 631,770 – that it takes for a caesium 133 atom to transition from one state of energy into another. We have reduced our markers for time from the Sun to the atom.

But time may be as much a dream as the dream of newborn grace on the horizon. Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time posits the mechanics of the universe exist outside of time. He argues events are the only true measure of time. Time is what we remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Time is what we hold in the afterwards, and what we do now. It is what we are mindful of rather than when. Even in our cherry blossom lives we can warp time with a memory or a single line written.

Read this

“The Illusion of Time” Andrew Jaffe, Nature

Atomic Habits James Clear

Listen to this

Irma Thomas “Time is On My Side”

When Paul Gauguin was my age he arrived in Tahiti after cutting his prior life adrift. The previous year, 1891, he had lost his job as a stockbroker after a market collapse and faced a choice. He had to decide whether to chase the security and respectability of a professional track, or give up all he had built to paint. Either decision meant surrender. In the end he elected to live as an artist, and sailed to Tahiti in search of the primal life he imagined there. Though personal desolation was likely he vowed to end what he saw as a cycle of generational submission to a prescribed being.

“The work is to become native to one’s own heart.”- Gary Snyder

I have been studying the lives of artists for next year’s project, and appreciate the sacrifice Gauguin made. Admire is the wrong word. The impressionists only had eight showings, and his paintings had not ignited the public fervor that others had. Gauguin understood how terribly chasing his passion could. His close friend Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting in his life even though his brother was an art dealer in Paris and promoted his work. Still Gauguin left the mooring of respectable existence to follow sirens’ song innate in an artist’s heart.

This year (by fortune, forfeit, or failure) I have followed Gauguin’s model. For a while I wavered on the line of commitment that he did, and we all must. I considered a position in Texas, and turned down another in Michigan which I dreamt romantic but felt stranded. I moved away from the angry, contracting world, from social media and the news cycles, and retreated into the wild where no howl or birdsongs can break the peace I find there. I surrendered to my writing completely for the first time in my life. There is no chart to follow, no shore on the horizon, but I am sailing.

“Suffering is not enough.” – Thich Nhat Hahn

And I stay busy. At times I feel like a prisoner who dreads his release because he has so much left to do in his private world. My French is gradually improving from daily study. My trail runs are quicker. A few weeks ago I refurbished a mid-90s Giant Boulder 500 hardtail mountain bike, and can ride rock falls and jumps I would never have tried before. Every bruise a lesson.

“Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.” – Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing

The novelist Richard Ford says that every novel has to make its own place in the world. They are not needful things. I like to think that every novel is a love letter, and keep faith without signs that if you love hard enough then others will too. Though I am careful to adopt any story I tell myself a fact or a guiding star for now it is enough to dream of beautiful islands offering refuge somewhere on the other side of the words I leave in my wake as I cut ahead through the headwinds of this stormy year.

Read this:

Vincent van Gogh The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Listen to this:

Philip Glass Glassworks

Amyl and the Sniffers “Some Mutts”