Whenever I try to write fiction I realize that I don’t care… don’t have enough to say, don’t have the passion to commit to giving birth to a new creation. I’d like to, sure. I’d love to have my Neuromancer, meaning that I’d love to have a book I wrote that I could point to and be proud of. But I recognize that to achieve that takes many things, chief among them is the energy to birth it.

I think all creative people, all producers anyway, the ones that actually do the work to create the artifact that others marvel over, I think they’re all just a little bit adrift of the median in some specific way. I just searched and apparently there is research that suggests a link between creativity and higher mental illness. I’ve often thought that the people who can take the difficult steps to actually produce something are the ones who can push through the discomfort of creativity.

I don’t think...

“I release anyone who’s ever loved me from any anger, guilt, shame, confusion, longing, thought, or other emotion. In turn, I release myself from the same. I thank them for everything they brought into my life and I hope I returned to them something of value. I leave within the universal quanta the happenstance of our lives.”

The butane lighter clicks. Blue flame erupts. The wick ignites. I release my finger from the trigger and notice how silent the world is.

Sometime later, I notice the candle is but a puddle of wax in the container. I breathe in, and when I breathe out, a new universe is formed.

For most of my life I felt that I had no innate talent. But, in the solitude of 2025, I came to the realization that my talent is shepherding people across thresholds. A heavy talent indeed, one that has left me used up and broken more times than I care to admit.

I’m beginning 2026 with so much understanding.

I’ve always been an introspective person but at the same time I’ve never listened to myself. Never fully heard myself. Sometimes I’ve been too busy hearing the people who needed me to light their way, and other times I’ve been carrying so much that I couldn’t stop to help myself.

We all come apart in different ways. Some turn to drink or drugs, some to food, some to social media. We all find ways to pretend we’re living while all we’re really doing is allowing time to flow further down the river, as if finding ourselves at a different port will somehow help.

I finally understand...

You had a vicious life
It’s crazy looking back on it with you
Full of terrible strife

You’ll write about it
I’ll be jealous because I’m insecure
We’ll fight about it

We’ll never speak again
I could have prevented all of it
If I had half a brain

I’ll learn from it
That life is for making mistakes and
They sting a bit

But the wounds heal
They’ll buy your bestseller’s rights and
Put it on a reel

Names changed to protect
The innocent from their own mistakes and I’ll
Still try to deflect

Stamped with your love
Forever never able to feel the sun
Shining down from above

Because your love is
Warmer than the sun and my love isn’t
Warmer than his

Not to you, anyway
Even though you said you loved me
We still died that day

I spent 12 years showing up for the bad parts of life - and obviously, the good parts too - and then my wife passed away, and now, four years after that, I can’t imagine being in another relationship ever again.

When you show up because someone else cannot, when you show up for them, when you show up when you have nothing left to show up with, but you do so anyway because somebody must… none of that is brave, noble or caring.

You just burn through pieces of yourself that do not regenerate.

No amount of sitting in the dark breathing quietly and telling yourself you survived will bring any of those parts of yourself back to you. The weirdest part of it is that you feel perfectly okay.

I feel perfectly okay. I go for walks, I go to work, I do my laundry, I shop for groceries, I make dinner, I pet my dog and complain about the weather. I make my coffee and try not to drink too much of...

The haunted corridors
past skeletons wandering
old mes
just as tired
just as disgruntled
but for different reasons
each one of them
too lost in their own rumination
to understand the joy of their moment

I was 16 in 1995.

Lately I’ve been trying to understand something: a little more than how I got here, a little less than where did all the time go. More like: if I could do it all again, would I make the same choices.

To be clear: I’m not talking about going back and fixing things. More like, when you get to the end of a video game and you replay it from the main character’s point-of-view. Meaning they don’t have any special knowledge outside of the game. They don’t know how the first run went, and so you as the player don’t use any of that knowledge in the second run. But you make different decisions.

Maybe the first run was very you: compassionate, overly sensitive, small, minimally disruptive, agreeable, defaulting to others’ happiness over your own. Maybe the second run of the game, you force yourself to make decisions as if you were a different person. Not being mean or evil...

I wandered out into the endless night
Sky the color of slate run through with myth
Air the perfect temperature for walking
Rain indecisive upon the gentle breeze

It’s a strange feeling knowing I succeeded
Yet I’m still without the love I gave my life for
Those years wandering between the worlds
Giving everything without a second thought

It’s cold enough to keep pushing ever onward
Following the road wherever it may lead
The decisions you made that pulled you under
Were bad calculus—which I understood

In some strange way I feel that your passing and
My survival of it are mending generational wrongs
Your Ancestors needed to see the consequences
Written in the scars my soul proudly wears

I often wondered why the darkness didn’t take me
When many times I have offered the exchange
I have come to realize there’s a light that dwells within me
And it was always supposed to guide your way

I...

All the vampires walkin’ through the valley
Move west down Ventura Boulevard

• Tom Petty

The wind whips down the alley, driving the rain’s wild horses before it. That’s something I notice about this city; the lack of debris. The sidewalk stirs ahead, a confusing mix of emotions. The unhoused, huddled under discarded U-Haul moving blankets, feet sticking out over the underground steam grate.

The sun’s fading light mixes with today’s faux neon and I chuckle to myself. As a kid reading Gibson and watching Tron I always expected the world to be broken, drenched in neon, teetering on the edge of a quiet anarchy or a loud autocracy. The fact that we got diffused LED panels and a society that increasingly feels like it wants to be collectivist, if only each person individually gets what they want, feels like worst of the options.

I try to walk faster against the cold and my hips and my...