I don’t always wrap things up neatly; I just write what’s on my mind. This has been me, thinking out loud, the sound of someone trying to figure out how to say something true.
The book is a memoir, told the way memory works, or the way my memory works at least. It’s not a clean chronological order, not with all the answers, but in fragments and flashes of brutal honesty that’ has not been easy to put on a paper or say out loud.
It starts in 1996, in a music history class, when a kid who hadn’t slept for three days finally crashed. And it ends somewhere around right now, in a house full of noise and people and a life that took the longest possible route to arrive. In between, the places I’ve never really talked about until now, a lot of ground is covered.
Loss that doesn’t announce itself before it arrives. Fourteen years in a fog. Divorce, courtrooms, kids, jail, and the slow, unglamorous business of learning to be a person again.
There are no villains and no heroes, I stopped taking score a long time ago. Just a man trying to figure out how much a mind can take before the lights go out, and learning, much later than he should have, that the lights don’t have to stay out.
Rumi said, “The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you”. I saw that reflection everywhere, even when I was in no shape to appreciate it.
“I died with you on January 6, 2004 — only no one told my body. I broke down because, for the first time since that cold January morning , I realized it wasn’t 2004. I had lost fourteen years — and I did it all while still tangled up in you. I missed the whole ride.”
— from The Existential Diatribe
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I don’t know exactly when I stopped talking. I know why. But somewhere along the way, the words went internally, and they stayed there for a long time. I write because I have an insatiable desire to create, even when I was silent, I had a drive to connect. This blog has been that connection, a place to put things that needed to be said, a way of testing whether the words still worked. Some of those words became chapters.
If you’ve ever stared into the void waiting to be swallowed or If you’re just trying to figure out how to move, I’m glad you’re here. If you’ve buried someone and then had to figure out how to keep breathing in the same world that just took them, I wrote this for you. I also wrote it for the version of me that was sitting in a police interrogation room in Englewood, Colorado, at twenty-five years old, making phone calls I never thought I’d have to make. I wrote it for the version of me who walked out of a jail cell barefoot at 1:00 AM in fifteen-below-zero weather and thought: now what?
The answer, it turned out, was we just keep moving.
The Podcast
While the book is in progress, the conversation has already started. Each episode pairs a reading from the memoir with a guest and conversation.
Coming soon.
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