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June 14 - June 21, 2025
but if you are resolutely unwilling to question your own beliefs, if you just accept your habitual thought patterns, prejudices, and beliefs at face value without rigorous analysis simply because it is uncomfortable to do so… then you are driven by fear.
When I seek the counsel of others, reliable and experienced people I know and trust, my perspective shifts in a healthy way.
To strive for a rational, healthy perspective on life without blissfully ignoring reality or being consumed by anger and nihilism—this is the struggle, the war inside my head.
For a day or two, this fear overwhelmed me until I realized that (just as with virtually all cases of fear I experience) I was really just thinking about myself. I was obsessing over my own emotions, my feelings of discomfort, my desire to not look bad or stupid or ineffective.
I can only use the tools at my disposal to try to help others to the best of my ability, then hope for the best.
Stories have power if we use them well.
Fear is a real motherfucker, a top-shelf, Grade A son of a bitch that will ruin your whole week if you let it run the show.
Although traveling up and down the East Coast in a series of constantly breaking-down vans while drinking cheap beer and playing music for fifteen people in some kid’s basement is undeniably fun, it doesn’t keep a roof over your head.
To my knowledge, telling your power-tripping boss at your sketchy minimum-wage telemarketing job to go fuck herself as you ride off into the sunset in search of a better job hasn’t gotten anyone executed lately, so why on earth do people stay working gigs that make them miserable?
Remaining calm when we get scared or encounter a stressful situation is good. Freaking out, no matter what is happening, is bad.
I’m not a caveman clawing my way through a brutal existence while hoping to survive to the ripe old age of thirty-five, those situations are quite rare and aren’t really my problem—the situations I create inside my head are. On a daily basis, even though I know better, goddammit, if I don’t watch it, I can become completely riddled with fear and anxiety over the dumbest things.
a battle between hope and despair for the character of my soul.
Drop the bomb now—NOW!—and wipe ’em all out. Maybe something that deserves to live will evolve next.”
experience has shown me that if I isolate myself too much, things get weird. And yes, it’s true, many, many people suck—but I can’t maintain a healthy existence without them.
apathy is the refuge of the intellectual coward, and outrage without action is self-righteous masturbation.
my alcoholism doesn’t in any way excuse any of my shitty behavior, but it explains it (well, at least a very large portion of it). I didn’t like the way the world behaved, so to blot it from my consciousness, I drank so much that I had no control over the only thing any individual has control over: myself.
Once I got some help and got sober, I started to regain control over myself, my thoughts and emotions. And during that process, I was told to worry about just one person—myself. I needed to fix my own bullshit and let the rest of the world take care of itself.
there’s always someone much, much smarter than you.
Grandma could not remember what she had for lunch two hours earlier, but she could still dig out names from ninety years ago.
She kept it to what truly mattered most, on an individual human level.
Do not be scared. Do not look away. Help them to die well. This is how you help an elderly loved one die: sit beside them and hold their hand. Tell them that you love them and are grateful for all they have done for you. Speak softly, telling them that you and all the rest of their family are okay. With gentle words, tell them that it is okay for them to leave, that they can go be at peace whenever they are ready. Let them know that you are there, that they are not alone, and that you will not leave them.
Be patient, be kind, be present. Sit and wait. You will not regret it.
A positive perspective makes me a better person, and surfing consistently provides that. It’s also just fun as hell.
when I do act out now, particularly in anger, I get emotional hangovers.
we don’t wait for someone else, we do it ourselves. If we don’t, who will?
I’m not actually surrounded by “all these people,” and I don’t “belong” anywhere on the internet. I belong here, in the physical world, where there are actual people, friends and family I can hug and smell and look in the eye and laugh with until my sides ache after they make a hilarious joke at my expense (my favorite variety of joke).
I’m feeling isolated because I am isolating myself, not actually experiencing life; in reality, I’m just sitting here looking at my phone.
I don’t let my anger consume me like I did as a young man. I can process my emotions, filter them through the rational part of my brain, and even refocus that negative energy into something positive, using it as fuel to do something good with my life.
“It’s perfectly okay to be different, to be yourself, but know that there is a price tag attached.”
I can’t live as anything other than myself—I just can’t. I’ve got to be me, warts and all. And despite the fact that I’ve often felt out of step with the world, and that even now I still have days when I feel like a goddamned space alien, well, I’m the only me I’ve got, so I might as well get used to it. If anyone else doesn’t like my nerdy, skinny, glasses-wearing, strange-ass goofball weirdo self or the way I choose to live, if they are offended that I don’t fit their definition of “normal” or “cool,” well, that’s not my issue, so fuck ’em. Because I know I’m a good and decent person, and
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You can choose to respond with dignity, not react with stupidity. Because that is what letting what other people think of you determine how you view yourself or how you conduct yourself is—stupid.
People have always experienced anger, but the finest of them have tried to conquer their rage. Those who do conquer it tend to enjoy much more fulfilling lives than those who stay angry over things from their past that they had zero control over. Folks who fail to control their anger, who don’t learn how to channel it into something positive and move forward, who just sit and stew and dwell in the unfairness of it all… well, they usually die alone and miserable.
That, my friend, is the key to finding your place in the world—staying true to yourself.
Eventually, if you are patient and keep your eyes and heart open, you will meet your people.
You have to stay patient, remain in control of yourself, and stay focused on moving forward.
We wouldn’t have it any other way, and we’re waiting for you to come join us, so start marching, kid. You just gotta keep putting one foot in front of the other, because there is a better life waiting for you, but there is no express train to salvation.
Hippocrates said, “Life is short, but art is long,”
Signs that your substance intake is problematic are popping up more and more frequently, yet you ignore them and continue on because you cannot function without whatever your particular poison is. But in those rare moments that you are honest with yourself, you know that you aren’t functioning all that well with it, now are you?
My creativity had been dulled along with every other aspect of my true self, and the new ideas I did manage to come up with were really just dark and tiresome refrains of things I had already said to death. But very soon after I quit drinking, the ideas started coming, and they came so fast I could barely keep up.
I look at every single situation that occurs in my life, everything that happens in the world around me, everything that enters my consciousness as creative building blocks for a potential song, a potential story, a potential picture.
That is what the artist sees in the totality of life: the possibility for expression.
Art is the outwardly manifested expression of the artist’s search for meaning.
art is an expression of imagination perceptible via our senses that conveys a truth of some sort about the human experience as interpreted through the eyes of the creator.
engaging in the process is the only way to get better. This is the same with any artistic pursuit. There are no shortcuts, there are no exceptions. You have to engage in the creative process to become an artist, and to do that, you have to have the guts and be willing to put a huge chunk of yourself into the work if you want to create something new—this is the only way.
If you hold back from putting yourself into your art, your entire self, your art is going to be bland, pedestrian, and forgettable.
Things get broken in this life. Use them.
When you begin engaging in the creative process, you will be absolutely terrible at it. Accept that, and keep going. You will be filled with doubt, insecurity, and probably a healthy dose of self-loathing—this is good medicine, so swallow it and keep going. You will see other art, read other books, hear other music, and you will think, My God, what I am doing is absolute trash compared to that painter, that writer, that drummer. I will never be that good. Guess what? You’re probably right, but that also means you are paying attention to the artists worth learning from—high-quality ones. Deal
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You may start off weak and soft, but if you have even a smidgen of talent and you keep at it, the creative muscle will grow stronger.
If you want to be an artist, or follow any other nonstandard path in life, for that matter, you must be cunning, self-sufficient, and willing to suffer.
I actually felt high and floated around on a cloud of gratitude for days.
