Got Wood?

It’s later than I’d like it to be. I prefer writing in the morning when things are fresh and the day is full with possibility, but time kept on slippin', slippin’, slippin’. Looks like three inverted semicolons. I’m seated on a cozy green couch in front of the fire. Asia just architected a miniature wooden structure and set it ablaze before leaving me alone here in the cabin to monitor and fan the flames. Fire-keeper is a big responsibility at 21:00, as night encroaches. We leave here tomorrow, and make our way to Wrocław where we’ll stay with Asia’s brother and his partner before traveling to grandma’s house on Friday.

I just took a break to stack wood like Jenga into the fire.

After the visit to grandma number one, we’ll visit grandma number two. They are conveniently located so that both can be seen in a single bound. 

Today really did just melt away. I’m finding that Monday–Wednesday will typically get eaten as part of podcast recording, editing and social media posting. It’s a part of the process I dislike: the social media aspect of it. But this week I found myself not very enthused about even recording an episode. I think I’m deep in a wintering spiral where I’m more eager to channel creative energy into other avenues—like writing, or making music. I’ve been having a good time learning about making beats, drowning synthesized pads in reverb, making weird sounds. Just experimenting with music and tones and rhythms and scales has been immersive and fun. I find that simple piano chords, played over a Cm scale with some reverb, sounds haunting and perfectly thematic for winter. I can listen to something simple like that on loop for an unhealthy amount of time.

As quiet as it’s been here, it still feels busy. I miss the days of being able to hole up alone in an apartment for an entire 48–72 hours without any other task to attend to other than my own whims. Even here I can’t quite capture that sense of isolation and withdrawal that I was sometimes able to achieve in Berlin or San Francisco during a three-day weekend. Somehow the scarcity of time enabled me to wrap my lips around its udders and milk it. Now, all there is is time, and it moves at its pace, not mine. Asia’s been letting the creative juices flow, too. The cabin we’re staying in has become a studio. Scattered about everywhere there are water-color paintings, brushes, art supplies, paint. There’s enough of them to host an entire exhibition in here.

The family dog died yesterday. Kobe. My mom called me crying, relaying her trauma. May father called me to do the same at 4AM his time. He’s taking it pretty hard. He lived with the dog and cared for the dog all these years. Even when everyone still lived together in the same house he’d had a special connection with the dog. I always had the sense it was his dog. They got the dog just after I’d left New York. I never had a real connection to the dog. That was 14 years ago. So hearing their sadness and being moved by their tears and emotions was an unusual way to mourn a pet. Vicarious sadness. Sympathetic sorrow. It’s a sad thing to have to put a dog down. It can’t usually be accompanied by the feeling of having made the right decision. Either you’re taking the life of the dog without its consent, or you’re letting it suffer and die a slow, miserable death. It would be so easy if we could ask the dog what it wants. Some people can talk to animals. I watched a documentary last year about Anna Breytenbach, called The Animal Communicator. I was suspicious, of course, thinking the movie was some bullshit scam designed to deceive people, but after watching the film, I’m not so sure. Why wouldn’t some people be able to communicate on a deeper level than others? Language is like that, isn’t it? Some speakers are more gifted and have greater command and fluency than others. Shamans, in many traditions around the world, are believed to be able to communicate with—and even become—animals. Sadly, no one in my family has this skill and the decision had to be made without consulting old Kobe. Who can say what’s right in situations like those? There isn’t a right move. You assess the situation and make the best move you can with the information you have at that time. I believe my dad did that. It doesn’t stop the heart from aching though.

Nothing truly can, save for death. And even then, as we can see, it still aches on.

When I was younger I thought alcohol, good food and wild women were all great options for stoping the ache. They don’t really stop it though, do they. They just mask it; temporarily distract you from it. The ache’s always there. The two best salves for it I’ve found so far are beauty and kindness.

The fires’s glowing a bright orange now. I guess technically the fire is golden and dancing, it’s the wood that’s glowing. Blushing. Blazing. I can see small fibers in the wood as the flames turn them into ash and smoke and heat and water vapor. If you look closely you can see the brightness pulse and move, almost like water. In some places the fire spreads itself out very thin, blanketing only the surface of the wood—licking it, lapping it up— instead of leaping in tall flutes. In the little cracks and fissures of the red wood, soft blues and purples flicker. It’s hypnotic. Over time the wood slowly loses its color and turns grey, and then quickly white before collapsing like dusty log cabins. When the wood is very depleted it looks almost bony, skeletal. 

In the morning I’ll rake the ash through the vents with a metal poker to empty out the tray and make space for the new fire. The white ash will be delicate and feathery, impossibly soft. It doesn’t even feel like ash when you touch it. Trees are magical things.

They do so much for us. Where would we be without them?

As far as we can tell, there is no other planet in the known universe that has wood.

On Thin ICE

 

"There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes."

— Ernest Hemingway

The news coming out of the United States for the past few weeks has been deeply troubling for a number of reasons. I'm speaking of course about the proliferation of ICE agents and the violence and harm they instigate in urban communities. These agents have been deployed throughout the nation, but their presence in Democratic cities like Minneapolis has received outsized media attention. And with good reason. Over the last nineteen days two very public executions have taken place in Minneapolis. First, on January 7th (almost on the anniversary of the January 6th riot at the capitol) 37-year-old Renée Nicole Good was murdered by ICE agent Johnathon Ross as he—in violation of clear federal protocols—fired his gun three times at point blank range as Good tried to leave in her car, tragically killing her. Then, on Saturday, during a protest Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse was thrown to the ground and beaten by a gang of ICE agents who then proceeded to murder him by firing squad, unloading a hail of ten bullets into his body. In response, another ICE agent clapped. 

Pretti, intervening to protect a woman who had been knocked down by ICE agents, was recording the officers with his phone and coming to the woman's aid when he was intercepted by ICE. Much like in the killing of Renée Good, the needless and disproportionate escalation from the ICE agents had been filmed from multiple different angles, making it clear that the use of force was unwarranted and excessive, and in violation of federal law. And as in the case of Renée Good, the Trump administration not only justified the murder, but painted Pretti as a liberal extremist and domestic terrorist. 

This narrative is currently being propagated through Trump-friendly media outlets all across the United States. It's important to take a second to survey the lay of the land in terms of media bias. Trump's connection to media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Fox News is well known and needn't be rehashed. But recently, social media platforms—the de facto place where many people get their news—are now either owned by massive Trump donor and billionaire accomplice Elon Musk in the case of X (formerly Twitter), longtime friend and billionaire ally Larry Ellison in the case of TikTok (Ellison's son in August took control of Paramount and CBS), billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has newly warmed to the Trump administration and this month announced former Trump official Dina Powell has been hired as Meta's president—signaling even closer alignment with the GOP. Jeff Bezos, billionaire CEO of Amazon and news publication The Washington Post, has also recently cozied up to Trump and his allies. So for all intents and purposes, the narrative frame has been seized by the Trump regime and a handful of the richest men on earth. It cannot be understated the impact this has in terms of control. Trump, effectively, has setup a sort of private state-run media not just to centralize messaging and stifle dissent, but to establish a comprehensive and far-reaching propaganda apparatus. 

To see the immediate impact one only needs to look at the discourse on conservative news stations, or sink into the churlish comments section of any social media post about the latest ICE killings and contrast those talking points with the traditional rhetoric of the right when it comes to second amendment rights, for example. In the case of Alex Pretti, he was legally carrying a concealed pistol—a right he is afforded by the Constitution. Strangely, right-wing influencers and commentators used this fact as evidence of foul play, appealing instead to a sort of "if you decide to fuck around, then you'll find out" response. An oddly paradoxical position considering when Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an automatic weapon large enough to make Black Panthers blush, marched into a BLM protest a few years ago and murdered protestors Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, Rittenhouse was lauded as a hero championing his second amendment right. It would seem that for the most part, the "don't tread on me" crowd has become decidedly compliant with being tread on. Not a single one of them have risen up to resist state-sponsored tyranny despite masked federal agents (acting without a warrant) kicking in the doors of law-abiding citizens, demanding to see their papers, detaining them no matter their age, situation or status—sometimes indefinitely or without access to a lawyer—potentially deporting them to foreign prisons, all while explaining that if you are to interfere with any of this, whether you are a suspected immigrant or not, we will publicly execute you. All while filming you and adding you to a database they're collecting on dissidents.

As far as I can tell from the avalanche of video content circulating through the media-sphere, ICE agents are doing all of these things, and worse. If wearing masks emboldens them to abuse women, children and the elderly on public streets where their crimes are filmed by bystanders in broad daylight, I shudder to think of what happens behind closed doors. It's easy to abstract this ghastly barbarism away to some faceless organization, or a large and shapeless administration, or even a corrupt and criminal despotic leader, but it's important to remember that this isn't just bureaucracy, or a power-hungry administration—it's real human beings perpetrating harm on other real human beings. 

People are doing this to people. 

We see it in the genocidal history of the founding of this nation, later in the bloated bellies of plantation owners and the malice of their whips, in the lynch mobs, we see it in the fat coffers of the wealthy who leech their riches from the exploited poor. Somehow, people all across the world are willing to submit to these structures and dehumanize others in service of power. It's crucial to ask: why? Of all of the possible jobs a person could have, why choose to work for an organization which, to me, seems scarcely different from the gestapo of early 1930's Germany?

I don't claim to have any answers. It follows logically that there isn't a single answer. The reason is different for different people, I suppose. Yesterday I wrote that there must be something sinister inside the hearts of middle-aged white men that makes them so predisposed to inflicting this brand of cruelty on those around them. But after sleeping on it, I would amend that statement a bit. It's not just middle-aged white men. ICE employs black and brown and Asian bodies as well. So the core of the issue then cannot be white people, it's whiteness. Whiteness as a construct—as an energetic force that moves through human bodies, regardless of race. Whiteness can inhabit black bodies. This is not an easy thing to grasp at first, but one need only look out at the world and try to explain the idea of "race-traitors." Race is at once a made-up construct and a real physiological process affecting bodies on a cellular level. Just look to our earth ecologies for proof. Trees in a given ecosystem will have unique adaptations to place. This is true everywhere. These adaptations affect their physical attributes, the style of their leaves and root structures, the sizes and shapes and colors of their bodies which coevolve through relationship with all other facets and forces and organisms in that location. When we categorize a tree as a specific genus or species or family, it simultaneously speaks to some innate quality of that tree, and that word is just a category which itself is not real. The same is true for race. The modern mind loves to see things in binaries and dualisms, rushing to put a stake in the ground and make a claim on this or that, white or black, right or wrong, but as in the case of most things, the answer is usually a bit of both. Race is something that lives in human bodies, built through millions of years of evolution with our natural surroundings, and is also a construct. The race that exists in our bodies and presents as the unique adaptions that historically served the peoples native to those regions. The race we construct has deep and profound implications for those with membership to that race. And constructed race has no physiological affiliations. Whiteness, then, can colonize black bodies. 

So I think what we're seeing in the United States right now is a forfeiture of whiteness on behalf of those white bodies who challenge white supremacy, and a bestowing of whiteness upon those bodies willing to enact violence on those bodies deemed threats to whiteness. In this political climate, race is no longer tethered to the color of one's skin. And for some, notably these ICE agents, that might be reassuring. It provides safety and protection and other benefits. But I wonder. Is there some historical referent we have that could help shed light on what happens if that political moment cools and whiteness restores itself to a position of control and domination? I'm not a scholar, but I think we could look back to the Civil War in America and see how black folk who willingly aided the confederacy were treated after the war in 1865. Of course the confederacy didn't allow black men to enlist, but there are stories of black men supporting the cause. Were these chosen few rewarded with statues erected to their valor and heroism? Did the Ku Klux Klan (also formed in 1865, coincidentally) honor the service of those men? No. These men then (and I'd suspect now) were perceived as disposable fodder. 

There must be a fear and a desperation in the heart of whiteness so great that it makes one willing to do whatever it takes to hold onto control and power. For whiteness, the ends always justify the means. Warped and twisted from all the horrors it has unleashed on white and non-white bodies alike, whiteness is haunted by ghosts that are legion. It has accumulated a deep fear of retaliation, reprisal, demotion and subservience, because it fears that what it has done may one day be done to it. To illustrate this point, one could easily imagine the fear a criminal kingpin might have of being captured by a rival gang. Except increase the sphere of influence of said kingpin to the entire globe, and extend the list of those wronged to an incalculable swarm of souls that spans centuries. Therein lies the horror. Having to one day foot the bill for the harm that's been rendered. To atone and make amends for past wrongs.

And I don't say this to excuse whiteness—because it is inexcusable—but to offer a different story. Whiteness is the schoolyard bully that has been terrorizing the playground for as long as anyone can remember. The bully, if he were to sincerely express remorse and regret—if he were to reform—could in theory become a useful member of the community. When I look back on encounters with bullies of course I dreamed of beating the ever-loving shit out of the motherfucker, clobbering him to a bloody pulp, spitting on his prone body, dropping my pants and taking a steaming shit right on his face. But also, if the bully were to have come to me and said, I realize the way I treated you was wrong and I'm sorry and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to earn your trust and forgiveness, I also would have been open to that option. I might decide I'm not ready or willing to forgive him, but I wouldn't lynch him. This is peacemaking. Pulverizing the bully only re-engages the cycle of violence and makes me the bully. When battling monsters one must be careful not to become one. 

What I mean to say is that redemption is possible. But it requires this cycle of violence and oppression to halt. Whiteness needs to put down its arms. It needs to be ready to be assaulted and maybe destroyed. If that is what absolution looks like—if absolution is even possible—then it must be willing to accept the consequences for its actions. Whiteness isn't ready for this. It may never be.

What to do then? What does the average person do as whiteness enlists other bodies in a war against immigrants, minorities, women, children and the vulnerable? What do we do as the United States invades Venezuela, threatens Greenland, and supplies an arsenal of bombs to countries like Israel, which, by the way is engaged in the same high-level conflict with brown-bodied Palestinians. 

I don't know. This isn't a legal problem or a social problem, it's a spiritual one. There's a spiritual bankruptcy and corresponding moral decrepitude in the root-structure of our relational fabric. Not just in how we relate to each other, but how we relate to all of nature around us. We've fallen prey to thinking we are separate, and we focus our attention on our own personal advancement, satisfaction, comfort and pleasure instead of the needs of the greater community we exist inside and because of. The world we've created is but one possible world. We could organize ourselves in any number of configurations, and it needn't be warring nation states searching for scarce resources. We could organize ourselves into a cooperative civilization that nurtures nature, respects and honors life, and chooses peace, collaboration, and creativity as its core values. Ursula K. Le Guin famously said, 

"We have that power. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

But if a had to float out a vague idea to form the chrysalis we need to wrap ourselves in to precipitate this transformation, I'd say we have to start living the better story we know in our hearts is possible. Not with our minds, not intellectually or philosophically, but practically, with our bodies, in our everyday actions and how we treat the human and non-human persons around us. If we do that, there's a chance. How that looks, and how long it takes, and what that journey will look like, I cannot tell you. 

But if we don't do that, I can guarantee we'll keep playing the same colonialist game of conquest, domination, control and oppression that we've been playing for the last long period of human history. The good news is, that game cannot sustain itself any longer, so even if people are unwilling to correct course, the planet around us will correct it when the resources needed to sustain human life falter, or we blow ourselves up with nuclear or biological weapons.

The choice is ours. We're on thin ice.

Before I Forget

 

I forgot again to write this morning. It seems this habit has not yet become sticky. How long does it take for a thing to become a habit? Some things are perhaps slower than others. At least logically it would appear to be the case. For some reason the period of 14-days comes to mind, or is it 28? No, that's a zombie movie. Come to think of it, that was a pretty good zombie movie. Recently a new piece of the trilogy came out, but I haven't seen it, so who knows what's become of the franchise. 

Why do we have to franchise everything? Culturally we have a hard time letting go and allowing things to die. I blame Jesus. He got us hooked on this whole resurrection thing. I'm kidding, I know it's not his fault. The story of the phoenix rising up from the ashes I'm sure predates our friend JC. Even in ancient Egyptian mythology there's the story of Isis and Osiris, who, at the hand of his brother, gets fratricided and dismembered. But even he (unlike Humpty Dumpty) gets put back together again.

On the topic of death and dismemberment, I can't help thinking of the recent live-streamed executions from the streets of Minneapolis in the United States. I'd like to write a full-length post about my feelings here—just to get them organized and put on paper (for future incrimination)—but I don't have time before we eat dinner here. Hopefully tomorrow. The short of it though, is that now white folks are facing the same savage state-sanctioned brutality and wrongful deaths that black and brown people have been experiencing for centuries. Watching the events unfold from afar I feel like the United States has descended into an Orwellian version of early 1930's Germany. Things are fucking grim. Not just in terms of the death and militarism and violence, or the violation of protections granted by the Constitution, but the requisite cruelty of the ICE agents, some of whom are descendants of immigrant families themselves.

What kind of rage and impotence must be lurking in the hearts of middle-aged men in America that makes them so capable of dehumanizing their fellow citizens? 

More on that tomorrow.

Nuts!

 

I'm writing to you from our new abode. It's a small, charming cabin dusted in a thin layer of fresh snow. All of the surfaces inside are wood. We've got a small wood-burning oven which generates heat marvelously in such a little space. Outside there's a thick fog and subtle specks of gravity-defying snow hang stubbornly in the air. The tree that I can see through the window is beginning to bud. All along the thin branches little clusters of buds have begun to swell. They look almost like those little, alien, white-and-purple sprouts that come out of potatoes when you leave them sitting for too long. Soon spring will be here. Jesus, where does the time go?

I spent the last day getting absorbed in creating 80's style grooves with the MIDI tools inside of Reaper, the DAW I use to record and edit episodes of my podcast. There's an entire universe within just this one genre of music; the gated reverb on the drums, the relentlessness of pounding 16th-note baselines, dreamy pads and synthesizer LFO modulations. If I had unlimited time, I'm convinced I could become the Beethoven of synthwave. 

After completing Murakami's Kafka On The Shore, I started reading a piece of non-fiction called, The Nature of Oaks. So far it's incredible; informative, engaging and magical. Just like there being a universe inside of synthwave, every tree is a universe. Literally.

“During that impressive life span a single tree will drop up to 3 million acorns and serve as a lifeline for countless creatures, including dozens of bird species, rodents, bears, raccoons, opossums, rat snakes, fence lizards, several butterflies, hundreds of moths, cynipid gall wasps and other predators and parasitoids, weevils, myriad spiders, and dozens more species of arthropods, mollusks, and annelids that depend on oak leaf litter for nourishment and protection.”

And that's only while the tree is living! As trees enter the final stages of life, the perimortem stage, they begin to more actively feed the necrosphere—a creepy name for all of the decomposers of a given ecosystem. Insects begin to bore into them, fungi tunnel through them, other creatures live in their hollows, all before the tree is slowly subsumed and swallowed by the forest floor. That whole dying process itself can take more than one-hundred years, depending on the tree species. Makes our flitting little human lives seem small. 

I'm conscious of the fact that I've used the words little and small repeatedly throughout this post. Maybe I should begin discussing my penis in great detail, since it matches today's theme. 

Like an oak, it also produces nuts.

Today's Turd

 

Somehow I forgot to write here yesterday. Must be early-onset Alzheimer's. 

It was only this morning when I woke up that I realized, "huh, I didn't write yesterday." For a whole twenty-four hour period, the thought eluded me so completely, so thoroughly, that I carried on as though everything was normal. How does such a thing happen? Where in the vast valleys and dark, tumultuous canyons of the mind can remembrances hide? There must be billions of synapses, neural pathways and cells. Not one felt the need to take action.

You might be asking yourself, "well, what was he doing; why didn't he come here to greet us with even a brief hello?" The truth is, I don't even know. Oblivion by accretion. The slow accumulation of tasks took me down like a million paper cuts. I lingered in bed for a while longer than usual after another night of unproductive sleep, and then sprang into action when we realized we needed more firewood to feed the stove before the fire went out. So I trudged into the cold morning and collected the wood and, as soon as I delivered the pieces to their final resting place beside the stove before they greet the great flames, I detected a colossal turd trying to evacuate my colon. So I trudged back into the cold morning—because here on the farm the bathroom is outside—and deposited it to its final resting place on its journey to become compost.

I have to alert you that I only have fifteen minutes left this morning. The bread has just entered the oven. Before bed last night I prepared it by mixing two ancient grain flours, a bit of salt, water and sourdough starter. It stayed in a cupboard overnight to rise and now is baking. 

A lied. I have to go now. Today's turd has been detected.

Sleep No More

 

The morning got away from me today. It was still dark when I woke up. I don't know how long I laid in the liminal blackness between the time I shut my eyes and when my alarm was supposed to ring, but it was longer than I would have liked to. No matter which position I put my body in, sleep wouldn't come. For as long as I can can remember I've struggled with sleep, suffering from nightmares, insomnia, sleep paralysis, and intense, vivid dreams, all of which leave me feeling generally unrested when the morning arrives. It's rare that I wake up energized and recharged. Strangely, it isn't a mental lassitude that stalks me, but rather a physical one. Always my body aches, plagued by stiffness and fatigue, on a cellular level. Sometimes I can feel it in my bones—in my kneecaps, or shins, the vertebrae of my spine, the knuckles on my hands, or in the small bones of my ankles. 

So last night, I'm in bed sleeping and out of nowhere a shooting pain blasts me right in the fucking cranium. Shooting pain. It feels like lightning. I close my eyes wincing, waiting for it to pass, but it doesn't. An invisible screw climbing slowly into my skull. Like a dentist's drill, a narrow, precise, spinning with great speed and alacrity as it buries itself in my brain. Clutching my head in my hands, I breathe and wait. The sensation washes over my scalp and down into my temples in waves. An army man, hidden in a foxhole and beset by bombs, must have suffered from the same problems when they burst around him. Full on detonations at close range—how loud would those explosions have been? Would you go deaf? Those old bombs were built like iron cannonballs, forged in hot furnaces and later packed with ammonium nitrate and TNT, if you were lucky. If not, and you got a bomb lobbed at you full of chlorine or phosgene gas, then if the shrapnel didn't kill you, the gas would. Worse still would be mustard gas, but let's not think of that. Did you know that 25% of all shells fired during the war didn't explode? Millions of highly unstable unexploded ordnance remain in the ground. Sometimes on the news you'll see a story about how they found one in Berlin or somewhere in France. From the news-copter, bomb squads in hazmat suits holding high tech defusing equipment will be seen marching stoically to the site, the street cordoned off by police. Lying in early this morning, I had the distinct feeling I was lying on a landmine. One wrong move and it would be lights out.

Finally, defeated, I reach for my phone and tap on the sleeping screen. It shows exactly 6:00. The chickens are already awake. The rooster is ruffling his feathers, jumping down off his perch and getting into position behind the feed tray, a dwindling supply of icy seeds and grains spread thinly over the wooden trough. He leans back, tilts his head and crows to greet the cold morning air. I can see it all in my mind clearly. I give up thinking about it. Instead I think about what remains to be done to release this week's podcast episode. It's important that I have it completed before noon. Asia and I, in preparation for our friends' return, have tasks to complete around the house and, if I spend too much time fiddling with the podcast, then cleaning out the refrigerator and taking out the trash will be more stressful than they need to. Before long my mind wanders to the world that awaits me once I unlock my phone. What messages will be there to greet me? Will Trump, if I open Twitter, have invaded Greenland? Might a more intimate horror meet me, a digital landmine waiting patiently for my eyes to fall onto its trap and be maimed by its inevitability? 

In this indistinct place before the day begins, a space where all of its possibility gathers, if I managed to just close my eyes again and sleep, my thoughts could melt away into the murky darkness, every last one of them burning up, my awareness losing shape, breaking apart and stretching out in all directions like psychic shrapnel—becoming the bomb.

I open my phone and see a video of the president of the United States talking about a famous mental institution in Queens, where he and I grew up. 

Not together, of course.

Magic and Magnetoreception

 

Yesterday I spoke with Ethan Tapper for an upcoming episode of The Passing Through Podcast. He's the author of an award-winning book called How To Love A Forest. The book he wrote, published in September of 2024, spans a five year period in Vermont where he works and lives as a forester. He learned animal tracking and bushcraft, and was a wilderness guide before studying earth science and dendrology and botany to get his degree in forestry. I only recently discovered his work through some videos I'd seen on Instagram where he was talking about a phenomenon called magnetoreception, or, the ability of certain animals to detect and interact with the earth's magnetic field. Ethan has a unique ability to re-enchant a world that, for many, has become the dead backdrop on which we live out our monotonous, meaningless lives. The earth is not a cold dead place. It's a magical, mysterious, and largely unknowable expanse where we inhale gaseous molecules of sunlight that we call oxygen—a gift given from plant alchemy that's straight out of science fiction. We live in a world where trees literally offer water to the skies so clouds can return the rains. If these things aren't magic, I'm not sure what is.

Leading up to the conversation I was chewing on certain themes explored in the book. A central question is the question of action, which Ethan poses as, "I asked myself if a better world would be built by inaction or by relationship and responsibility. I asked myself, 'What is the cost of doing nothing?'” For me, this stirred a deep process. One that maybe a lot of us wrestle with. I used to see the world as something that needed saving. I’d be protesting, marching, learning about permaculture, aggressively sharing social media clips, reading books, signing petitions, attending talks, my partner Asia and I joined Extinction Rebellion and attended clandestine meetings plotting the toppling of big oil...I even quit my job to live in a van and travel around the continent to visit permaculture sites and regenerative farms and eco-communities to get involved and help heal the land…but now, I’m not so sure about it. Does the world really need us to save it, or is this some human hubris stemming from our own self-importance and narcissism? 

And are we really motivated to save the earth or are we only interested in saving ourselves? 

The issue I have now with the savior narrative is that we think that we know what’s best for the world or an ecosystem or a forest, without even fully understanding these things, without ever consulting the forest or the many hundreds of non-human persons who live there. We tend not to ask the land what it wants. There’s a sort of arrogance to that. But not only that, there’s this meddling, interventionist aspect that has its roots in imperialism and conquest and scientific-materialism and coloniality and, ultimately, control. The earth is a literal force of nature. It’s the closest thing we know to a God. 252 million years ago an extinction event called The Great Dying killed off roughly 90% of life on this planet. Completely wiped it out. 

And yet, here we are. Life finds a way.

This is the sixth mass extinction event (that we know of) in the earth’s history. And I ask myself whether what’s best for the earth is for us to "save it," or rather to transition toward a more radical post-activism—to hospice this system and let what is become compost for what’s to come. I have this image of a group of people running around in late autumn trying to stop the trees from losing their leaves as a picture of a deranged and misguided sort of heroism. Isn't that basically what we're doing when we fight the natural cycles of birth and death, growth and decay within an ecology?

And yet, at the same time, the other wolf inside me howls. I deeply believe that there are practices and tools we have as humans to steward the land and work in respectful relationship with it to promote mutual flourishing and healing. I can feel this in the bedrock of my being. Indigenous peoples all over the world had been managing their landscapes and building relationship with the land—demonstrating what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls practical reverence. It is in our power to be good kin to all of our plant and river and forest and stone brothers and sisters around us. We have the capacity to nurture, to be good caretakers. And I believe we have a duty to do so not out of self-preservation, but out of love and respect. And we need to do that work, because there is so much of it to be done—by us as individuals, through sweeping systemic and legal reforms, paradigm shifts in our collective narratives, overhauls to predatory and extractive economic models and incentive structures, addressing global equity and justice, food sovereignty, energy distribution, education. The list goes on. So as you can see, this question haunted me throughout the book.

Even after my conversation with Ethan it still lingers. Paradoxically, both things seem true at the same time. The earth will survive without us and we have a responsibility to revere it, to embrace an ethic of care, to nurture relationships and reduce harm where we can. 

Another thing that's been on my mind since reading the book is the idea that most of the forests we know today, with few exceptions, are not vibrant healthy forests. They are forests in recovery. So much has been lost. This loss was accelerated in the 1800's due to rapid industrialization, mechanization and urbanization fueling massive, unprecedented ecological degradation. Paired with colonialism, resource extraction, the introduction of invasive species (ecological colonialism), genocide, ecocide and species extinction, some scholars call this period The Age of Extermination. I think a lot of us, myself included, struggle to get a sense of scope of this loss because it’s difficult to see what’s not there. It’s hard to see an absence of this magnitude. Loggers, with the advent of the chainsaw, accelerated habitat loss by greedily taking all of the best, strongest, healthiest trees and leaving the rest.

The North American landscape, a few hundreds years ago, had flocks of billions of (now extinct) passenger pigeons, a deluge of beaver dams, tens of millions of bison, wolves and caribou and elk in healthy populations across their range. Today, the organisms that are left are living in forest habitats that are ghosts of what they once were. Creatures of the forest spent millennia adapting to lush, diverse, thriving forests, and now their health and their survival is imperiled due to the rapid onset and severity of the degradation we've caused. Their ecosystems—our ecosystems—have been robbed of a richness we can’t even fathom. There's a sadness I feel now when I walk through the forests knowing that they're still reeling from the shock, still trying to stabilize. 

And this brings me back to the question of action. Our track record for taking wise action isn't what I'd call great. We reintroduced deer to these devastated forests not realizing that without the proper proportion of predators, such as wolves, the deer populations would balloon and swell and knock the struggling forests even further off balance. Deer browsing now erodes soil, damages root networks, and causes a proliferation of the tree species deer don't eat, like beech. Left unchecked, deer can even cause a phenomenon called forest disintegration, where forest regeneration halts completely. So what action do we take now? Will reducing the deer populations cause another unpredictable downstream effect that destabilizes the forest even more? Is doing nothing and letting the forest have its process irresponsible, adding insult to injury? There doesn't seem to be an easy answer, at least on human timescales.

These systems move and grow and breathe and live and die in deep time. Go back 20,000 years and these forests were crushed, bulldozed and buried by giant, icy glaciers. During other periods they were burned by indigenous fire, natural fires, choked by droughts, and drowned by floods—dancing between birth and death, always in a state of change and becoming. If we move further along in time, eventually this whole solar system blinks out of existence and dies. 

Life is both tenacious and fragile. 

For this lesson, acorns are good teachers. And each oak is a miracle. Acorns, in order to become stately, majestic oaks, face a seemingly unsurmountable onslaught of opposition. As they grow on the branch, an average of 50–90% will be parasitized by acorn weevils, or lost to other pests and environmental factors. Of the chosen few that do reach sprouting maturity, almost every one of these will be eaten by hungry forest creatures or—you guessed it—parasites. Sneaky squirrels will cache away droves of acorns and bury them like hidden treasure in rotting tree stumps, under elegant beds of moss, beneath an inconspicuous bush, in the hollow of a fallen log, or any other variety of subterranean places free from prying eyes. Lurking competitor squirrels will pilfer and plunder these little treasure chests and rob their brethren blind. Most acorns will be dug out of hiding and devoured before they have a chance to root. Can an acorn get a fucking break? For some time it was believed that the acorns that sprouted were the ones which had been forgotten by the rodents who planted them, but now scientists suspect this isn't the case. It turns out acorns sprout when the squirrels who stashed them get killed by predators. So this means that hawks, owls, eagles, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, weasels, raccoons, and even snakes, are as important to the life of an oak as the small nut-stashing squirrel. The relationship between all of these creatures as they play out their lives, produces the oak. And all of these creatures are intimately connected to and dependent on still larger forces that sustain them; forces like the rain, and clouds, the sun and moon, the earth's magnetic field, rivers and creeks and streams and the soil microorganisms and minerals that create the world above and below the ground. It's all connected. The actions of one squirrel or one weasel or the light of one full moon can have profound and far reaching impacts on the web.

All of that is to say that, what we do now matters. Together we have tremendous impact and power if we act responsibly, with humility and compassion. We are a planet of 8.3 billion stewards and solutions, if we choose to be in service. We are indebted to these systems that sustain us. We exist through relationship with them. Maybe that service will look different to different people; some will push systemic reform and some will hospice, some will protest and some will hold grief circles, some will take up arms and others will advance peace, some will conserve and others will destroy. Our gifts and unique socioecological niches are as diverse and sprawling as an ancient forest, and we're all in it together. To quote Ethan:

“I watch the cars travel the twin lanes of the highway, gone in five seconds. Inside each are people living complex lives: seeking happiness, purpose, and freedom. I wonder what this world would become if they could see, just for five seconds, that we are branches on the same tree, trees in the same forest. I wonder what this world would become if we realized that freedom does not belong to us—that it is borrowed from this living world, borrowed from those without freedom, borrowed from the world of the future. I wonder if we could learn to seek individual freedom within collective freedom, individual liberation within collective liberation, individual prosperity within collective prosperity. I imagine, in this epoch of loneliness, what would happen if we reached toward freedom together.”

Welcome, Shoppers

 

Standing there, Bob is befuddled. He doesn't understand what he's looking at. Last week he'd stood in this very same aisle, in this very same Target. There must have been one-hundred different options of soap and shampoo to choose from. On the top shelf—the shelf for men—was Head and Shoulders, Pantene, Dove, Herbal Essences, L'Oréal Paris, Garnier Fructis, Suave, TRESemmé, VO5, Prell, Neutrogena, and his favorite, Selsun Blue. Each one of these had their own special patented formula and corresponding conditioner. And each formula had an assortment of at least three different scents and a series of hair care options for different hair types: dry damaged hair, soft brittle hair, oily hair, treated hair, flaky hair, thinning hair and pubic hair. On the second shelf were the women's shampoos and conditioners. On the third shelf were the gender-neutral shampoo and conditioning products. The fourth shelf held shampoos specially designed for children. The fifth shelf had the organic, expensive stuff, and the dry shampoos, and finally, on the sixth shelf, toward the bottom, were shampoos for dogs and cats. Maybe there were even more than one-hundred. Bob hadn't counted.

Today, though, there were only two shelves, and they weren't labeled. Instead, a hodgepodge of bottles stood huddled in a fearful mass. Only a slim fraction of the previous products remained. Bob reaches up and rummages through the bottles. No Selsun Blue. He scratches his bald head. What bothers him is that the shelves below the first two are stocked with baby formula. All kinds of baby formula; Similac, Enfamil, Gerber, Parent's Choice, Up & Up, Nutramigen, Bubs, Happy Baby, SimulacTit, and Earth's Best. Where have all the shampoos gone? 

And where the fuck is Bob's Selsun Blue?

Customers come and go, paying no mind to the fact that the shampoo shelves are 66% bare. Panic begins to bubble inside Bob as he extends his hand toward an oily-haired woman and calls out, "miss, excuse me, but does anything seem strange to you about this aisle?" The woman stops to think for a moment.

"No," she says, and walks on.

Bob whirls around and sees an elderly woman turning into the aisle with a shopping cart stocked full of Oreos and boxed wine. Surely she's been around here long enough to notice this stunning loss of diversity.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Bob starts, his voice shaky, "I have a quick question for you. Something's bugging me and I just can't understand it."

"Sure," says the woman, "I have a moment."

"Well, you see these shelves here," Bob says, motioning to the shampoo shelves, "is it me or didn't they used to be—"

"Different?" she asks, interrupting Bob.

"Yes! So you see it too?"

"Yeah, before this used to be the chainsaw aisle."

"Huh? Chainsaw aisle?"

"Oh, wait. Was it chainsaws, or frozen foods? I can't remember now."

"Hold on now, I meant just last week. There were no chainsaws or ice cream here, it was shampoo."

"Last week? Forgive me, dear, I haven't been here in years."

"Ah."

"Yeah. I come here once in a while to stock up on my favorite cookies and, uh," she pauses as she sees Bob noticing the fifty gallons of boxed wine, "it's so embarrassing, but aw hell, it's my favorite drink! You gotta have things you enjoy in this life, you know. We're here for a good time, not a long time, honey. That's why I come in here and buy up every box of wine and Oreos I can fit in my big truck."

Bob felt his body withdrawing before his words did. His feet were already pointing away from the old woman. Just now he sees his knees are turned, too, swiveled at his hips like a G.I. Joe action figure. 

"Ok, thank you ma'am, enjoy your day."

"You, too, I hope you find what you're lookin' for."

The woman strolls away into the busy blur of shoppers. Bob stands with his thumb, index and middle fingers pressed against his jaw as he stares at the missing shelves. I just know something is wrong here. It can't be.

"Excuse me," a short spectacled woman with curly hair wearing a red polo shirt says from behind Bob.

"Oh, pardon me," Bob says, moving aside. The woman is an employee of the store and she's restocking the shelves of formula. She begins unpacking fresh containers of MiracleMilk and placing them on the shelf with an impatient and exasperated sigh.

"Say, can I ask you a question?" Bob says kindly.

"Yep," the woman says without looking up or stopping what she's doing.

"Well, I was wondering if you could help me understand where all the shampoo has gone."

"It's right there on those shelves," she says, motioning to where Bob is looking.

"Hmm, well maybe you have more in the back?" 

"What you see is what we got."

"But you're here restocking the MiracleMilk, and I can see some SimulacTit there, too. So there must be more stuff in the back."

"Yeah, I was just back there, and there ain't no shampoo," she says with irritation.

"I don't know what you're so upset about, I just asked you a simple question. I was here last week and there were six shelves of shampoos and now there's only two and I can't find my Selsun Blue. Maybe you can check or ask someone to check and see if you have some?"

"Listen, man, I just work here. This isn't even my aisle. My aisle is emotional support pickles. I told you, I was in the back and there ain't no shampoo there."

"You know what, I hate to do this, but can you get your manager for me?"

"Sure," she says, dropping the box of MiracleMilk to the floor with a loud thud. The woman stomps off, muttering under her breath and leaving a path of muddy boot-marks behind her. She is gone a long time. At least seven minutes have passed. Bob is getting angry. 

She thinks she's slick, doesn't she? She's just gonna have me here waiting like a big ole dummy and not come back? Not today. No to-day! 

Bob does a quick about-face and begins marching after the muddy prints. Like an expert tracker, he follows the creature's trail through the store. The path meanders through numerous aisles; the desiccated fish aisle; the genital wart removal aisle; the single use spoons aisle; the taxidermied lawn ornaments aisle; the loose screws aisle; the dehydrated water, ultrapasteurized yogurt and non-food watermelons aisle. And then he sees her, standing at the end of a long aisle, in a red doorway, with her back turned. Bob trudges on through the aisle, step by step, inch by inch, focused solely on the soles of the woman's mud-stained shoes. It's only until he's a few feet away that he realizes what aisle he's standing in. All around him are child sex-robot prosthetics. Little arms and legs and hands and feet, scalps, silicon skin, wigs and cherub-like faces. Bob has never seen this aisle before. He pauses, mortified, not wanting to be seen in such a place. The aisle is a dead-end, though. The only way out is to turn around and walk back through.

His feet abruptly spin around and he begins to briskly jog through the aisle of depraved sex objects. Motorized vaginal canals and high-suction oral orifices whir with a mechanical criminality. Anal cavities pucker and relax like the lips of petshop fish. His heart is pounding. The aisle seems endless. Now he's passing circuit boards and batteries, power cables and apparel, different shaped tongues. 

"Hey!" a voice calls out from behind him. 

He turns and sees the short spectacled woman in the doorway is now facing him and motioning for him to come back. She's holding a small bottle of what appears to be Selsun Blue. Bob hesitates. He wants nothing more than to extricate himself from this aisle. But all he has to do is walk over and get the shampoo. It would take three-minutes, max. Maybe no one would see him. 

No, this is too strange. What the hell is this place? It's better to just leave and go to a different store.

"No thanks, I've got to go. Sorry for the trouble," Bob shouts across the aisle.

All the motorized mouths (and anuses) suddenly stop moving. Bob's ears feel like he's going up in an airplane. Everything sounds low and muffled. The woman glares at him from the doorway, her long arm slowly lowering like a mechanical crane. Bob starts moving his feet in the opposite direction. His body turns to follow, but not before crashing into the cart of another shopper. He slams his left knee right into the front of the plastic red cart. He looks up. The short spectacled woman with curly hair and red shirt stands holding the cart.

"Gah," Bob gasps audibly. He whips his head back over his right shoulder to look back at the red doorway. The doorway is gone. 

"Sorry, I, I, I was just leaving," Bob stammers.

Before Bob can even blink the woman snatches him by the wrist. He tries to wrench free but her grip is like iron. He leans back and pulls with all his might but she stands anchored to the floor. Bob's caught in a bear trap. Frantically he starts yanking at his arm with his free hand and whimpering.

"Listen you sick fuck, you know why this store exists? Because of people like you. Weak, pathetic pieces of shit like you. Ou, where's my Selsun Blue, where's my Selsun Blue, I gotta have my Selsun Blue. Two shelves of bullshit overpriced products full of microplastics and chemical pollutants weren't enough for you? You just had to have your shampoo, right? These things are all the same, they're owned by the same three companies!" the woman says, growling.

"Ok, I get it. I'll leave, I'll never come back, just, let me go. Please. I promise I won't come here ever again."

"No, you don't get it," the woman says, "you obviously don't get it. Because if you got it, you wouldn't have followed me through the store, hunting me like some bald creep. Why the fuck do you need shampoo anyway, asshole?"

"Well, I still have a little bit of hair and it gets—"

"Shut the fuck up and remember what I'm about to say: we had a richness you couldn't even fathom. This planet was teeming with a diversity that would put your six shelves of shampoo to shame. Now, in a matter of 200 years, it's a ghost of what it once was. A fucking shell of itself. We've lost so much. And for what?! For you to have 32 different flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins? A new set of iPhones every year? I got rid of those shelves, motherfucker. Me. I'm doing my part. Me and many like me. We're taking this shit down from the inside. We're everywhere, and we're always watching. We have you on video in this aisle. I wonder what your family might think if they saw it. So now I'm deputizing you, dipshit. Do your fuckin' part. Make better choices, choices that benefit the whole. Stop thinking about your individual needs and think about the collective. Think about the non-humans. The plants. The minerals. They've been here longer than you. Show some fuckin' respect," she says, letting him go and spitting a thick green loogie onto the man's chest.

"Gah," Bob gasps again as the loogie makes impact. It stings his pride worse than a hot bullet.

"Now get the fuck out of my sight, and remember—do your part. These fuckers can't sell you shit you don't buy," the woman says sternly.

Bob scurries out of the aisle and out of the store. He ambles to his car, panting, unlocks the door, pulls open the handle and sits down. He angles his rearview mirror down to look at the loogie. It's a disgusting green, gelatinous glob of many hundreds of bacteria and microorganisms. A complex ecology of symbiosis. At the edges it's begun to harden into a fine crust. With a klink Bob opens his glovebox and removes a single tissue to scrape the phlegm off his shirt.

"I think I'll just try Walgreens instead."

Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson

Sunday, January 18th, 2026 — Ashburn, Virginia, United States of America

Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson. That's what the little placard on his desk says. The office is minimal and bright and cold. Lots of metal. Otherwise unspectacular.

"So what can I do for you today, Dave?" Charles asks, with an immaculate smile.

"Well, uhm, I ain't so sure exactly, Charles. I feel pretty bad after following your advice yesterday. You know, about my son..."

Dave shifts his weight in the stiff metal chair before thinking of what to say next. He has a hard time now forming words. Everything he thinks of saying just doesn't sound right.

"I am sorry to hear that, Dave. I'm impressed with your ability to express yourself so clearly. Thank you for saying this plainly. You're right to call it out — things didn't work as planned. I told you that letting your son walk home from school would instill values of independence and I see that I was mistaken. I'm going to reset the frame completely and be very direct. Would you like me to give you new advice based on the current data?"

There's an eerie stillness in the room. It almost seems as though nothing has changed. Charles is still smiling, totally confident and unperturbed. His skin unnaturally smooth, waxy. The sound of the cooling system breathes over the room. Dave glances at the enormous pitcher of water perched on the edge of Charles' desk and thinks, that's a lot of water for one person. His eyes move from the water pitcher to the yellow crumpled hat in his hands. His hands look old. The hat, too. He'd bought it while on vacation five years ago, soon after his son was born. He and his wife Vikki had gone to Atlantic City. A small trip from New York where they lived, but it was symbolic. They were taking a chance, surrendering themselves to fate and new beginnings — a role of the dice. It felt like a different world then, just before the pandemic came and changed everything.

"My apologies Dave, would you like me to give you more time or should I rephrase the question? Please let me know, I'm here to help," Charles says, still like stone.

"Yeah, I was uh, just tryin' to think of how to respond. Because, you see, what I'm sayin' is that when you said to let my son walk home from school, I did that. I was convinced it was right, that what you was sayin' was true. But, but now, I ain't so sure, honestly. He came home cryin', real angry like. He said where were you, I had to walk all the way home in the freezing rain. And then I got to thinkin', the boy is only six years old."

A momentary pause intensifies the stillness. Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson blinks a few times as he thinks, then pours a large glass of water and gulps it down. The sound of the water sloshing through his esophagus fills the room.

"That sounds difficult, Dave. I understand your son was angry because he had to walk all the way home in the rain. And it's a fantastic observation on your part regarding your son's age. You're right, six is definitely too young to walk home alone from school. I see now that we need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan."

"Yeah, I, that's why I'm here. I don't know what else to do. Since we lost Vikki, bein' all alone has been hard on us. I'm doin' my best but it maybe ain't enough. I need your help. Maybe you can tell me what should I do now?"

"Thanks for your confidence and trust. First of all, I'm glad you told me this. This situation sounds painful to both of you, and it makes complete sense why it didn't work. You're doing the right thing by bringing this up. Let's reset. We know now that this was the wrong approach. We can fix it and repair the situation with your son by building back trust and helping him feel safe. The bottom line is you didn't break anything, you experimented by taking a risk, and learned what didn't work. You're ahead of the game. If you want, I can help you design a new, gentle, step-by-step plan guaranteed to fit the needs of you and your child. Would you like that?"

"Yeah, very much."

"Ah, darn," Charles says, his placid face souring for the first time, "looks like your account is out of funds for today. You can return tomorrow at 7:35AM EST."

Dave sits fidgeting the metal chair, unsure how to proceed. Between working part time, paying his son's daycare, nanny, food, utility bills, Vikki's debts and funeral fees, and raising his son as a single parent, he hasn't been able to get ahead. Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson just stares at him blankly, a pantomimed frown hangs from his lips.

"Ok, I'll be back tomorrow then."

Wednesday, January 21st, 2026 — Ashburn, Virgina, United States of America

Officer Bradley Cunningham. That's what the little placard on the desk says. Stacks of papers are piled up haphazardly on the desk. The room looks like it's survived a series of micro-tornadoes, displacing manilla folders, flattening paper coffee cups, scattering thumb tacks and coating most surfaces in the office with a thin grime. Officer Cunningham is clean shaven, thin, slightly muscular, with blue eyes and wavy blond hair. Dave is seated opposite the officer. Between them, on the desk, is an open file. A paperclip binds a large glossy photo to the front of a handful of other pages. It's winter but Dave is sweating.

"I told you officer, It's been two days since I seen my son."

"And you have no idea about his whereabouts?"

"If I knew where he was, why would I be sittin' here?"

Officer Cunnigham looks at Dave. The only thing that gives the impression he's scrutinizing the boy's father is the subtle tensing of his right eyebrow. Caucasian. Working class. Hardy. Single parent. Lost his wife to pulmonary complications. Emotionally fragile. Dumb, gullible or negligent? These are the things he'd jotted down.

"So, you say this man—"

"Yes, I told you twenty times, Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson told me to do it," Dave interrupts.

"Who is this Charles Gregory Paul Tetherson fella?"

"He's like a coach, or a personal advisor, you could say. He was basically my assistant. He did everything for me."

"What do you mean everything?"

"What do you mean? He did everything. He told me what to cook for dinner, what to buy at the shop, how to talk to my boss, how to raise my son, how to handle my budget, how to fix my car, how to write an email, how to—"

"Wipe your ass?" the overweight middle-aged detective behind the two-way mirror mutters, finally. 

Three cops sit in the adjacent room, behind the glass, watching the interrogation.

"Come on Hickey," sergeant McGee says, "that's enough."

"Sarge, if you're tellin' me that this sack of shit, this degenerate prick, after what he did to his kid, deserves any respect, you need to get your head checked. I ain't gonna sit here and keep my mouth shut."

"Hickey, I'll agree," detective Liz Butler chimes in. "It does seem hard to believe that anyone in their right mind would do what he did—"

"Exactly! And that's—"

"Hickey!" sergeant McGee warns, "Let her finish."

Hickey sulks and crosses his arms over his bulbous belly.

"As I was saying, anyone in their right mind. He's clearly not in his right mind, detective. Have we done a psych test?"

The sergeant shakes his head to say, not yet. At that moment, some shouting erupts from the next room. The three detectives stand up and move closer to the glass.

"I'm gonna have to ask you to relax mister Pendit," officer Cunningham says firmly.

"Why I'm the one that needs to calm down? My kids missin' and all you do is accuse me, and tell me to relax? You got no idea what it's like bein' me, raisin' a boy all alone in this fucked up world. I'm wrong because I asked someone for advice and trusted them? I was taken advantage of! I'm the one who can't find his son, not you! I'm the victim and you treat me like a villain!"

With those last words Dave stands up and the chair topples over onto the ground with a loud crash as it hits the floor. The three detectives, led by Hickey, pour into the room. They swarm Dave and wrestle him to the ground beside the chair. It's a mess of arms and legs and shouts and grunts. 

"FIND MY SON! FIND MY SON! FIND MY SON!" Dave shouts as they roll him unto his stomach and plant knees into his back before placing him in handcuffs.

Thursday, January 22nd, 2026 — New York City, New York, United States of America

An African American man stands behind the counter in a local bodega. The little name-tag on his shirt says Pete. An old television plays the morning news. An Asian reporter is onsite in Ashburn Virginia outside a police station. On the screen beside her is a photo of Dave.

"Hey, Pete! Turn that shit up man," a customer shouts, "I think that's Dave."

Pete turns his head and looks at the tv. His eyes widen as he reaches for the remote to turn up the volume.

"Earlier today an Ashburn man was charged with assaulting an officer while in custody for questioning. The man, David Pendit, is a suspect in the disappearance of six-year-old Rodney Pendit, the suspect's son. According to police reports, the boy went missing the night of January 19th, after the boy's father sent him with a small backpack into the woods on a 'rite of passage'—"

"God damn," Pete mumbles, his face slack and horrified.

"I knew it was Dave! See? I told you it was, didn't I! I never liked that motherfucker!"

"Man, shut the fuck up so I can hear the tv!"

"The backpack contained no food or water, just a harmonica, a talking stone, a snail shell, a single match stick and a treasure map. When questioned, Pendit said he was only doing what his assistant recommended. He described it as a Brave Explorer's Expedition designed to build strength and reveal the child's inner adult. A search is still underway. I'm Clarissa Wang, and this is channel 5."

"That shit is wild, bro," the short hispanic man says, "I knew he wasn't too bright, but leaving your kid alone in the forest like that, with no food or water?! In winter time?!"

Pete is silent. He hadn't spoken much to Dave since he'd left New York. After Vikki died, Dave was lost. His eyes had that broken look, empty, like nothing was staring back at you. Pete understood that. Losing a partner with a newborn baby to take care of. That's a burden lots of folks would struggle to bear.

The door swings open and a high schooler wearing a puffy down jacket and fresh suede boots enters. Outside snow must have started falling. The girl's jacket is lightly dusted in fresh, fast melting fluffy snow. The heat inside the bodega liquifies it almost instantly. She's talking to someone on her phone as she walks to the back of the store.

"Okay, I'm at the bodega, I can meet you after," she says, "I'll call you back." She ends the call and removes a glove from her left hand. She puts it in her pocket and removes the right one before typing furiously. A voice from her phone says:

Congratulations, and great work! You completed the route we plotted and made it to the nearest convenience store. Would you like me to recommend a snack or beverage that fits your current dietary goals? I can custom tailor it to your current allowance so that you maximize your spend efficiency.

Embarrassed, she quickly puts on her headphones. Her thumbs blur as she pounds away at the screen.

Great choice! Doritos are a calorically dense option that's also easily transportable. This location stocks them in five different fantastic flavors. If you listen to a brief targeted ad, I can provide you with a discount coupon you can use to add even more value to your purchase!

Once more she taps on the small keyboard.

Absolutely! Don't worry, you don't have to think about anything. I can draft you a short script of what to say at the counter to reduce your anxiety and smooth out the transaction. After that I will route the best path to your school. On the way, if you'd like, I can create a calming playlist on Spotify based off of tracks you've recently liked. Would you like me to proceed?

This time she types on her screen and her jaw clenches. Suddenly her whole body is tight and rigid. Frozen. The screen on her phone shows an alert that says, shoot, I'm sorry, you've reached your maximum allowance of queries for today. Please try again tomorrow at 8:09AM. Water drips down the girls jacket. 

A puddle is forming at her feet. 

Gravity Creeps

 

Ever have one of those mornings where you just can't get out of bed? That's me today. It's after 10:00 and the gravity of the futon has me pinned horizontally. My inner cat is purring, curled into a furry circle, paws placed over closed eyelids. Last night we let the dog sleep in the veranda. It had been evicted from its home next door for poultricide. Our neighbor, Dino, had caught it suffocating and burying small chickens. The mystery of the missing hens had been solved. She must have killed a young rooster, too. Its body was found hidden under a bench like a discarded chew toy. Recently the rooster had been best by a sickness. Always in the morning he'd be sneezing, looking weak and wet, walking unsteady on his feet. Rooster > turned runt > turned rotting corpse. That's the thematic arc for most living things.

But because the dog was inside, at 1:48AM she started barking and growling and making a commotion, signaling some dark intruder. There's a unique displeasure about being woken up in this way, to a bestial terror. The sound of the dog's stress reflecting off the corners of the walls, glinting off the glass in the still hours of the morning is not the best part of waking up. It's something like waking up to a nightmare. A doomed sense of dread and foreboding stalk the darkness. My mind began racing, wondering whether there was someone outside. Or worse, maybe more than one person. Where's the nearest knife? Are there other weapons in this house? What's the address here? Will the emergency operator speak English? What if what's outside isn't human? These kinds of thoughts at 2AM aren't exactly the kind that let you sink gently back into sleep. As you might imagine, my night was a restless one, spent listening, waiting, one eye open, with bated breaths, constructing scary sights from sounds as though gifted with an insomniac's sonar.

Earlier a rare beam of rising sunlight had announced itself through the east-facing window. The day seemed to swell with possibility then. Now the sky has returned to its muted grey color. On my way to the bird coop at 7AM the air was hard and thick, unpleasant to breathe. Which is odd because the night wasn't especially cold. People shouldn't have needed to burn big fires to stay warm. There was only a thin frost spread over the ground, glimmering in the dim light like granulated sugar, suggesting a temperature around zero. Not nearly the coldest night we've seen here.

Soon we have to embark on a journey to the nearest town to gather supplies. We're out of butter. The chickens haven't laid any new eggs, despite the introduction of a new rooster. Maybe we'll even stop at a local restaurant for lunch. After that we'll go to the store to pickup vegetables, yogurt, cheese, snacks, stuff for dinner to last us for the coming week. Yesterday we received notice from our honeymooning friends that they will return on the 23rd. This means, like the dog, we will soon be evicted. We'll leave the spaciousness of the small house and retreat to the much smaller trailer. Still, the trailer is much larger than our van. A comparative luxury. 

Aren't they all?

Donnie Darko

 

Things are off to an aggressive start this year. Watching what's unfolding in the streets of the United States is like witnessing a series of grizzly car wrecks, one after the other. A political climate in which one (or two) nations can act with impunity on the world stage and flout the rule of law has been the hallmark of this year. At the same time, this is nothing new. The United States has long disregarded the UN Charter and acted as world police for almost as long as the United Nations has existed; arguably even before it existed. But there's something different about its behavior now. With a national ethos of liberty and freedom that have grown fallow, now bolder, more heedless means of maintaining power need to be enacted. Under the Trump administration, these efforts are employed lazily — like recycling the playbook, practically verbatim, from the unjust and unlawful invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11. History has adjudicated  that the war on terror was a disastrous and failed endeavor, yet, this hasn't prevented Trump and his ragtag cronies from dredging up a dusty record from twenty years ago and putting the needle to imperialism's greatest hits. Invading a sovereign nation like Venezuela no longer needs to be justified in 2026. Power no longer needs to pretend that the motive is anything but a selfish one — now they just come out and say it. It's for the oil. 

It also sends a very clear message to the rest of the world: try to stop me.

That invasion into Venezuelan airspace took place as the Epstein files loom ominously over president Donald Trump's term. He campaigned on promises to declassify the documents in the files, an echo of previously undelivered promises of draining the swamp. The swamp, it seems, has a deep bottom. Now that it's clear he's implicated in the files, he is fighting tooth and nail to keep the nation focused on other matters. To keep the pressure on, federal agents have been deployed to city streets. In major metropolitan areas throughout the country the national guard is in place to patrol the streets and make them safer. Masked ICE agents have been parading around like the president's personal gestapo, stifling dissent, deporting people to torture camps in El Salvador, or detaining them in a homegrown camp garishly named Alligator Alcatraz. But these ICE agents—having been deputized by the president to step outside their normal jurisdiction—aren't just targeting black and brown people bold enough to criticize foreign policy like in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, they're murdering white women with the same callousness and cold indifference that police have been butchering African Americans with for centuries. In broad daylight and in plain sight, Johnathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good in the face three times at point blank range, proudly marched back to his car, unscathed, and drove off. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, the highest death-rate since 2004.

To keep the fire burning, and the distractions flowing, Trump has been sending out high-profile members of his ghoulish entourage like "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth and deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security Stephen Miller to talk about war, and power and dominance. A small French military contingent has arrived with boots on the ground in Greenland, as countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland and Germany and even the UK marshal their own troops in preparation to respond to Trump's threats of taking Greenland by force. Donnie's second term seems characterized by a deeper darkness than the first. Something sinister is simmering. Except this time things seem more calculated, more brazen, more mendacious. The briefings—led by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, which are truly something to behold, and make Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders seem tame—are an affront to truth and decorum. A seething hostility has replaced whatever thin shreds of integrity might have remained in the office. Journalistic rigor is meet with odious groans and loutish eye-rolls as ad hominem attacks are levied at reporters audacious enough to ask serious questions.

At the moment protests are erupting not just in Minneapolis but in cities all across the United States. The atmosphere is eerily reminiscent to that of George Floyd's killing five years ago on another Minneapolis street. Members of the Black Panther Party have been showing up in cities like Philadelphia, armed with automatic weapons and black berets, using their second amendment rights to stand in defiance against state sanctioned tyranny and human rights abuses. As the administration seeks to assert itself in Latin America to the south, in Greenland to the east, Ukraine further east, in Yemen and Syria and Somalia and Gaza, and at home as it goes to war with its own citizens, one has to wonder whether the country can fight wars on all of those fronts and win. 

Somehow I don't think that's where the real war is being fought. It seems the monster is inside the house.

That's where it's been all along.

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

(Valley Below)

 

The white and grey cat sits on the wooden ledge in front of the windowsill. Outside it watches the wind race over a morass of tangled brown grass sticking up through patchy snow. Eggs fry as they're dropped onto the skillet. The smell of butter perfumes the air. It's still grey outside in the early morning light, but it's warmer today than the past few days. Frozen earth has turned to mud. Inside the fire whips and flits as the wood stove breathes through the metal pipes. Soft pink and baby blue hues glow low in the sky. Somewhere a dog is barking. Faint mechanical sounds rumble from the refrigerator in the corner of the room. In the small village below, people start up their cars and drive off to work. The work week is nearly over. Tomorrow friends and lovers will meet to celebrate a fleeting feeling of freedom. For forty-eight hours they will be unencumbered. Not totally, of course, because there are still those things which must be tended to in order to sustain the style of life we live; laundry, shopping, errands, childcare, cooking, cleaning, etc.. But whatever little leisure time there is to soak in during these short winter days, people will seize it.

Around me now sits a deep silence. A sort of void space. Many traditions throughout time and culture have described the concept of the void differently. In some cosmologies void is silence, in others darkness. For some it is emptiness, stillness, womb, death, timelessness, spaciousness, nirvana, peace. Whatever thing pervades those primordial waters, it's clear that the void is not nothing. It's full of potentiality. It's the substrate from which all possibilities emerge. It's the liminal space at the top of the inhale and at the bottom of the exhale. The void is not the abyss; you can miss the abyss, but you can't avoid the void. 

All things come from and return to the void.

As the sun traces its arcing trajectory today through the chalky blue, beings all over the world will mirror its path. They'll wake and slowly forge a trail through the day in their own arcs, only to sink into dark slumber at the sun's farewell. In dreams we reenter that void space. We inhabit the in between. The logical, thinking mind is not master in this realm of ether and mystery. Something more ancient is, something more vast. The body and soul knows what dreams may come, but the mind does not. We spend one third of our lives in the infinite waters of this cosmic dark, and, by the time we die, understand very little of it. Maybe because that world serves as an important reminder that not all things in this universe are for us to understand, or to know. Some things are to remain forever unknowable, forever obscure. 

"Your heart is like an ocean, mysterious and dark."

Not Everyone Should Do It

 

Last night we watched If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, an A24 film written and directed by Mary Bronstein. It seemed, from the trailer at least, to be a psychological drama about parenting a disabled child, told from the perspective of the mother. What it was though, was a surreal Lynchian dread movie with smatterings of Aronofsky's Mother!, a dash of Beau Is Afraid, and the paranoid, claustrophobic angles of Polanski's Repulsion. The film is semi-autobiographical, based on real events spanning an 8-month period in a San Diego hotel where she took care of her sick child. We were not prepared for the two hour stress fest that was to ensue. But the real star wasn't the impeccable performance from Rose Byrne, or the cinematography, but the sound design. I wish I'd seen the movie in theaters. We did manage to get close, watching it on the big screen here on the farm, with an overhead projector and a sound system, but this is no substitute for a full theater experience. Apparently they recorded the music for directional speakers, which provide a thoroughly immersive sound. As it was, the film was immersive enough, but I do hope one day to re-experience the psychological drama as it was intended to be seen.

This morning, after feeding the chickens and collecting firewood I had to tend to a power outage in the water supply room. Outside the wind is howling. When it gets that windy up here in the mountains, we lose power. Fiddling with the fusebox bought us a renewed supply of electricity, but I had to leave one set of switches in the down position to get the power to stay on. Part of me fears those switches are responsible for something essential. A message has been sent to our honeymooning friends in Thailand. Hopefully they see it soon. The responsibility of caring for another person's home is a big one, and fears can easily begin to swirl and gust through the bare branches of my synapses. Or is it dendrites? Or both...

Speaking of fears, I've come to realize I have deep fears about having children. Not inspired by the movie, of course, but the movie did help surface some of them. If caring for someone else's home can cause fears to balloon, I shudder to think of what caring for the life of a small vulnerable human could inspire. Images of abduction, molestation, accidents resulting in death, dismemberment and deformity dance in my head. And none of that is to imagine the possibility of a child born with an incurable or untreatable illness, disease or disability. Then there's the inevitable parenting mistakes that are bound to happen; the wounds and traumas and scars. It's a nonstop, 24/7 lifelong commitment to pain and suffering. Joy and elation and learning and satisfaction, too, I'm sure...but those other parts, those haunted parts, prowl through the dark alleys of my mind. On one hand I accept it. I know those things are part of the exclusive package deal, but part of me wonders if that's a deal I'm actually interested in. There was a line from the movie where Rose Byrne's character Linda says something like, "maybe I'm a person who is not supposed to be a mom; not everyone can do it."

Maybe not everyone should.

Getting Up

 

I've only got a few minutes this morning. Though I've been up since six, now is the first moment I've had to myself. Technically that's not true. The day started with reading in bed for half an hour before my alarm went off. I'm reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I'd forgotten how engrossing his style is, how he crafts such strange and compelling worlds. It's a weird magical surrealism. As the alarm went off, signaling time to feed the cat its wet food, I imagined how I would then trudge down in the fresh snow with a bucket of feed in one hand and warm water in the other to bestow onto the chickens below. The land here is mostly sloped, so the chickens are downstream of where we are up in the wooden house. Following the path downward, behind an old dilapidated house made of crumbling brick and plaster, takes me to the second set of chickens. These ones are older. More sturdy. They seldom lay eggs, but they generally seem unfazed by the cold. On the upper level the young chickens sneeze and huddle together, hesitant to leave the meager warmth of their wooden coop. 

As I made my way back up I refilled the bucket of grains for the old chickens and collected the leftover snow-covered firewood from the wheelbarrow to bring inside to dry before starting the morning fire. As I entered I saw Asia was up and had already got the fire started. Now I realize I omitted one piece of the story. After feeding the cat and brushing my teeth I took out the bread I'd left to rise over night and set the oven to 200 degrees to warm. At around 8pm yesterday I'd taken the ancient grain flour made from plants here on the farm, and added them to a large bowl with cold water, some salt and a jar of sourdough starter. While I type this the smell of baking bread perfumes the room. I've got twenty-nine minutes left on the timer.

In a moment I'll prepare breakfast. Fresh farm eggs — gifts from the chickens. Shortly after that I'll march myself upstairs and setup the computer and microphone to record an episode of my podcast with a woman who works in the technology sector on Decentralized Identities. Even though I spent my entire adult career working in tech, this topic still remains largely opaque to me. On a fundamental level it seems the goal is to provide everyday people with more autonomy and control over their digital data. It's a way to take power away from the bloated bureaucracies of centralized governments or authorities. How this works, and why, I don't particularly understand.

The next item on the agenda just announced its arrival with a gaseous warning cry: it's time to shit. 

I bid you good day.

1 O' Clock

 

I'd like to reclaim a daily practice of writing. For many years I'd written here, and then shortly after moving to Berlin, I stopped. If I'm being honest, even leading up to that period my resolve got sloppy. Life gets in the way. Sometimes it gets in the way of even those things we most enjoy. I realized recently that I've also stopped listened to music. Music and writing were two of my biggest joys. I guess living in a van for a couple of years in remote places makes listening to music a little more challenging. But even the desire to listen, now that we're house sitting for a friend's farm here in the Polish mountains, somehow dwindled and evaporated. It's odd. Even passions can disappear.

It was a long time ago that I last wrote here. Or, at least it seems that way. Lately I feel as though there are things I'd like to say but I'm not quite sure how to say them, or what they even are. Writing has a way of focusing the mind, uncovering what's simmering beneath the surface. But here, now, pressing words into existence key by key feels like trying to get a frozen motor to turn over. The key is in the ignition, turned to 1 O' clock, but the engine just groans. 

The world is in a sad state of affairs at the moment, particularly where I'm from, back in the United States. There's a piece of writing I saw the other day on social media that summed it up quite nicely:

"Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared."

That was written nearly 80 years ago, to the day, on January 13th, 1943, by a young author named Anne Frank. I never thought I'd see the things I'm seeing — the things we've been seeing on social media for the last few years; genocide, the wanton destruction of civilian populations in Gaza, men women and children blown to pieces, maimed and bleeding in the rubble; imperialist invasions into Latin America to steal the nation of Venezuela's supply of crude oil; ICE agents, deputized as the president's private police force, murdering US citizens in broad daylight on residential blocks. None of this is new, of course. I realize it even as I type it. This kind of behavior is the cornerstone of western democracy, and has been for a long time now. People of color know this. Women know this. Anyone who's ever been marginalized or oppressed or disadvantaged by a cruel and unjust system knows this. I just hadn't seen it so nakedly before. There's no longer any attempt to even conceal or deny it. The masks are off. Except for the ICE agents. They still wear them as they terrorize city streets, abduct mothers and children from elementary schools, deport legal US citizens to torture camps in El Salvador, kick, bludgeon and trample the elderly and infirm, illegally detain critics and dissenters bold enough to publicly challenge and denounce US policy.

There's much more that can be said about the US's transformation towards fascism, but I tire of the topic. It's everywhere you look. Sometimes it's important to pause for a moment and take a second to breathe. Speaking of breathing, the air here in southwestern Poland is notoriously poor. Some days when I step outside the air greets me with the quiet charm of a clenched fist around my throat. It has a dirty, sooty quality that curls the lips into a subtle snarl and wrinkles the ridge of the nose. Small particulate matter floats in the air, sometimes visibly, as an ominous smog. These particles vary from coarse to fine to ultra fine, the latter being able to penetrate not just the lungs but deep into the bloodstream where they can circulate throughout the rest of the body and pose serious health risks. This is the air we breathe. Not just in parts of Poland, but in many places in the world. Our seas and skies are polluted. Our soils, too. We've made a proper mess of things. Humans seem particularly vulnerable to those things which we either cannot see or imagine, or those things which move slowly, glacially, accretially. In the case of air pollution, it happens to be both. We are the frog being boiled, and the ones boiling the water. 

The wood stove which heats the home we're staying in demands that I continually feed it fresh cords of wood. Its appetite is insatiable. I need to occasionally monitor it and provide it with new wood every so often, resulting in an interrupted flow here this morning. Add that to an already icy and rusted writing capacity and I'm sure this won't make for a smooth read. 

My humblest apologies, dear reader.

Perhaps I should take that as a cue to wrap this up. There are other things to tend to here on the farm. Sure, the chickens have been fed, but they didn't seem interested in their food this morning. Their water was frozen and they were sneezing. I'd like to check on them. The cold does them no favors. Our wood supply is thinning so I'll have to make a short trip up the hill beside the house to collect more fodder for the oven. Last night when we arrived late after a long and arduous drive in the snow from the mountains of Slovakia, I dragged the wheelbarrow to the woodpile and its icy metal handles instantly froze to the warm pads of my fingertips, especially my thumbs. I wear the sort of fingerless gloves you'd see on a dapper homeless man, the kind you may remember adorning the handsome hands of The Wet Bandits in Home Alone. Needless to say, my fingertips are a bit raw and red this morning.

I have some other tasks to tend to as well. I'd like to read, perhaps record a podcast episode, practice Polish, and maybe even meditate. There's too little time in the day, even when time's all you have.