Moving house is rarely easy, even if we forget the pain of the last move (and, like childbirth or daytrading, we always do). You look around at your current place, think, you know, there’s not that much stuff! It’ll be a good excuse to get rid of some detritus that’s piled up over the last five years.

This is the first lie we tell ourselves. How much stuff do we accumulate over five years? Go to your Amazon order history—or just think of the mountain of boxes you’ve broken down to recycle. (If you’re more of a Costco or farmer’s market/thrift store person, the story is the same.) Give it two months and the simple fact is that the amount of stuff that’s been accreting in your home is an order of magnitude larger than what you think. However much you think you have, it’s wrong. The law of large numbers applies.

I suspect all of us have a lot of something. Purses, records, shoes, sweaters. Things we forget we have a lot of, because they are simply a part of our lives—an assumed, baked-in fixture of our firmament. Sometimes, these are easy to move. Other times, as in my case, they are not. I collect books. I don’t have nearly as many as my father does, but they still filled fifty-two boxes.

Have you ever tried lifting a box of books?

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Let’s fast forward through the mortgage gauntlet and the endless signatures required to close. Honestly, it’s exhausting even for a lawyer. I sign things for a living, and by the end of the stack of paper, my right hand is cramping.

“Congratulations!”

The closing agent hands you the key and you foolishly think that you’ve made it. It’s ours.

Don’t fall for this: it is the set up to a joke to which you are the punchline. Nothing is easy in this world, and if it is, question it. You make your own luck, mostly by falling on your face enough times to learn what not to do—and moving is, every time, a prime opportunity for growth.

Audra and I drove to our new home, excited to walk in as its new owner, to survey our property and make final plans for where everything will go the next day during the move. We still had plenty of packing to do and needed to get back to our old place. It turns out your property owns you, too.

We stopped by my parents, who were watching McNugget and Clare, and walked to our new place, which is a few doors down the street. I unlocked the door and we walked in, each of the adults scattering to the areas most interesting to them. McNugget wandered, entranced by all of the light fixtures.

The next thing I recall is seeing Clare in the dining room, chewing on something green. I ran over and saw that it was a block of green rodent bait, a peanut-butter-tasting welcome note for the dog. I bent over, stuck my hand in her mouth and began extracting the bait. This is when Audra noticed what was happening and asked what I was doing.

Here’s where I made a mistake: I casually said, “Rat poison.”

She screamed. Clare panicked, clamped down, broke my skin—and got the poison into my bloodstream. As many of you know, I’m severely immunocompromised, so this meant a trip to the ER for me and a trip to the emergency vet for Clare.

Rather than spend Friday evening packing up final things and organizing for the movers coming at 9:00 am, I got antibiotics and Audra sat in the waiting area of the saddest place in any city as Clare ate activated charcoal and lost what remained in her stomach.

None of this went according to plan and I didn’t even mention the first trip a plumber had to make out to the new place to repair a leak found during the final walk through.

Audra and Clare got home around 11:30 p.m., and we had Papa John’s pizza for the first time in ages, because it was available. A word to the wise: don’t eat the saltiest pizza on earth the night before you get next to no sleep and spend the next day moving 23,000 steps. We laughed, because what else was there to do. The last thing I said before we turned out the light to steal a few poor hours of sleep was, “We need to be on our toes. The new place is trying to kill us.”

Two days before the move, I got word that our rental truck wasn’t available where we’d reserved it. So I had my mom wake up three hours early to drive me thirty minutes to the only location with a large truck. Audra, McNugget, and Clare stayed behind to do a little packing before heading to the new place. Internet was to be installed at 8:00 a.m.

Part of my internal narrative was, This won’t be that bad. We’re only moving a mile and a half. As if that mattered—like I was going to walk the mile and a half and call it a day. The hard part isn’t driving from old to new; it’s loading and unloading.

Magical thinking is a real thing.

The internet guy showing up on time was one of the few things that went off without a hitch. We’ll ignore that he had to come back a few days later to set up a different plan, since the new house requires more bandwidth than the old one. (Honestly, that one’s on me.)

The movers, however, did not show up on time—and when they did, they were not a model of efficiency. I don’t know that I’ve seen two guys in their twenties smoke as much as these two did. Honestly, I’m pretty sure the smoking was just an excuse to move slower. Their dedication to breaks was impressive. While unloading at the new place, the talkative one started digging through my office gear. He saw my microphone and Focusrite and got animated.

“You have a podcast, bro?”

“I am a white man in my forties, Rich. Of course I have a fucking podcast.”

I’d booked them for six hours, which the owner assured me would be plenty. He also swore a twenty-six-foot truck could hold everything from a townhome. Three extra hours later—and with enough still left behind to require another round of movers next weekend—I can tell you: don’t trust anybody in this industry. It’s like wedding planning: they’ve got you by the balls and they know it.

At this point, I’m just trying to keep my spirits up. I can usually find the humor in anything. The movers finally get out of Dodge at 5:30 p.m., with the talkative one promising he’ll give me a call about the pool table in the basement that I don’t want. He builds pool tables, you see, and he can probably “make something of that one.”

Sure thing, bruh, give me a call.

Audra has spent the day running all over Pittsburgh trying to get baby gates that will work on the new stairs, getting rugs, running needed errands. When she gets back, we unload the car. She’s had it, and she hasn’t even seen where we are in the move itself. I’m promptly told that the new place is not safe for McNugget and it was exhausting trying to keep him safe that morning when the internet guy was there.

“We can take care of that in the morning. We just need to get him from my parents, feed him, and get him down for bed. He’ll sleep through the morning.”

Barely calmed by this, Audra and I walk to pick up the boy and the dog. Clare is, of course, on a special boiled chicken and rice diet thanks to the rat poison episode (remember?) and needs to go to the vet every day for five days. Somehow, in the middle of driving the 26’ truck from the rental place to the old house, I also managed to pick up chicken thighs and rice, boil the shit out of the chicken, and make enough rice for two days of meals.

I had forgotten all of this as we left my parents, and my dad ran out after me with the tupperware full of chicken and rice.

Right, of course.

Clare’s fine, but out of sorts. Nothing has been normal for a few days. McNugget is hungry and cranky. We feed him and get him to bed. When we’re putting him down, Audra spots outlets within reaching distance on both sides of the crib, so we pull it away from the wall and hope for the best.

It hadn’t occurred to either of us to eat all day, and it’s 9:30 p.m. by the time one of us looks up to say, “Man, I’m hungry.” And we both are, but we’re stuck. We do nothing about it. We keep moving, unpacking boxes, desperately trying to baby-proof. One of the gates Audra bought works; the other, not so much.

She’s had it. “Why are we doing this?! This is a huge mistake. We can’t keep him safe here.”

I move several boxes in front of the steps going upstairs and say, “This gate will do for a day or two. We’ll find a solution.”

“Can we give it back?”

“Pretty sure that ink is dry and the money is wired. And the guy who lived here is dead.”

“Maybe the house killed him.” She laughed, finally—the laugh of someone who has accepted her fate, whatever it might be. A Type A control freak letting go of the wheel. I engulfed her in a bear hug, the wingspan of a 6’6” primate twisting around her. “God, you stink.”

“Time to baptize the new house. Gonna take a shower.”

My friends, choose your words wisely. Baptisms involve water—and I swear I invited what transpired. I showered. The water barely cleared lukewarm. After brushing my teeth and getting dressed, I went to the unfinished storage room, where the water heater and HVAC are, to turn up the temperature. I opened the door to find this:

There’s nothing quite like seeing water drip down right next to an exposed lightbulb, splattering the floor near 52 boxes of valuable books.

I sat down on the concrete, not yet ready to face telling Audra what I found. She called down to tell me she was giving Clare her 11 p.m. dose of medication. You don’t want to double up this pill. My ass is getting cold against the concrete and I notice the drip slowing. Eventually, it trickles to a stop.

Upstairs, I find Audra in bed.

“Where have you been?”

“Don’t use the en-suite bathroom until I can get the plumber back out here tomorrow.”

Her eyes flash at me.

“Why?” I show her the video. “We are so fucked.”

She pulled the covers up over her head.

I wish I could say I did the smart thing and went to bed too, but then, I’m not that smart. I’ve heard it said that the cure for anxiety is action, and I think that’s generally true. Sometimes, though, there’s a more important problem to solve, such as exhaustion. So I puttered around, moving boxes to the right places and setting up Audra’s desk so she could work the next day. All the while, I forgot that McNugget would be waking up sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m.

I finally fell into bed around 3:00 a.m., having started that cursed day at 5:10 a.m. When I heard McNugget laugh over the baby monitor, I wanted to cry.

I got dressed, took the monitor, and snuck out so Audra could sleep in a little bit. McNugget greeted me with a hoot and a jump when I opened the door. Well, the house hasn’t taken him yet! I thought, too soon.

We went downstairs and had breakfast, unpacked some toys and books, and had ourselves a very nice morning. When Audra emerged, it was about time for the boy’s morning nap. We put him down and I lowered the back seat of our SUV and made my way back to the old place to begin moving the shockingly large amount of leftover stuff.

I spent most of the day doing this, a moribund husk of a person tossing things in boxes and hauling them 1.5 miles down the road. At 5:45, I tell Audra it’s going to be my last load of the day. I had to stop. Physically, I could take no more. But I accidentally sent the Instacart grocery order to the old place, so one more trip it was.

As I was sitting at the light to leave the old neighborhood to head home, I got a call from Audra—and from the first sound of her voice, I knew something was wrong.

“I need you to come home now! McNugget…” She struggled to get words out. I hit the gas and told her I was on my way.

She was waiting for me in the driveway with the boy in her arms. I parked and jumped out, asked where Clare was. She looked at me as though I were speaking Dutch—coherent enough to make out some intention, but off just enough not to make sense. I ran into the new place, found Clare wandering around, getting into boxes, leashed her, and ran back to the car. I grabbed the bags of groceries and told Audra I was going to drop off the dog and the groceries at my parents.

My parents were perplexed when I burst in. I handed the leash to my dad, told my mom I was leaving the groceries in their garage refrigerator, and muttered something about taking McNugget to the ER. Then I was gone, leaving them with more concern than answers.

When I got back to the car, McNugget was in his car seat, shrieking.

“What happened?”

“His face. His lip. He fell.”

Get in the car and go. Audra and I sat silent with the boy bleating in the back for a few minutes as I made our way out to the main road.

“Okay. Where do we need to go? Urgent Care? ER?”

“I don’t know.” She opened her phone. “All the urgent cares closed fifteen minutes ago. Children’s. Go to Children’s Hospital.”

I drove to Children’s Hospital. During the drive, I managed to get the story. Audra was tidying up the kitchen, waiting for me to return. McNugget was playing—like he had a hundred times before at the old place—with a metal colander. Somehow, he’d managed to get both feet and both hands into the colander and was rocking in it a bit when, all of a sudden, he pitched forward, face-first into the hardwood floor, with no hands to break his fall, as they were wedged in the colander.

Instant sturm und drang, wailing, and lots of blood. He wouldn’t let Audra look into his mouth, so it was difficult to get a sense of the damage.

I dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance and went to park. I don’t know what people are up to on Sunday nights, but the nearly full parking lot was not what I wanted or expected to find. It took me several minutes to find a parking spot, and when I did, I saw that I had received a text from Audra.

“Grape elevator. Find the cow.”

Was this a riddle? A typo-filled text? My brain could not compute what she was trying to convey. Maybe I’ve finally started hallucinating.

Up in the hospital proper, I walked up to a security guy and blushed before I could say anything. Then I laugh wildly. I’m going to get arrested. Then I heard myself say a sentence I didn’t know existed.

“I need the grape elevator and the cow.”

Put that on my gravestone. The security guy nodded and pointed me to a bank of purple elevators and whispered, “First time? It’s a children’s hospital. All the things have stupid names.”

I found Audra and McNugget sitting in a waiting room that has stupid cow faces everywhere. This place is a nightmare. The boy has calmed a little and I got my first good look at him. His eyes were focused, if tired. (We were now past his bedtime.) His upper lip was still bleeding and very fat. Then, the first bit of good news in ages.

“We went to the ER downstairs first. They took a quick look and sent us up here to urgent care. They didn’t see anything serious, and it’ll be faster up here.”

About ten minutes later, we’re called back. No serious damage. He’ll be fine. Motrin when we get home. Put him to bed.

Yes, ma’am.

On our drive home, I turned to Audra and told her, “I’m going to wrap you in bubble wrap. If we go four-for-four as a family with ER trips this weekend, I will lose what’s left of my goddamned mind.

We got home and put the boy to bed, two hours late. It could have been worse.

It could have been worse. This became our refrain that night. An hour after getting McNugget to bed, she asked whether I’d eaten anything that day. I couldn’t remember, but my stomach and general lassitude indicated that I hadn’t. She hadn’t eaten and asked what we had to eat. Only then did it occur to me that our dog and our groceries were at my parents’ house, and that my parents’ text about their grandson had gone unanswered.

My whole body wanted to give up when I stood to walk the hundred feet to my parents’ place. Instant, unthinking revolt. Haven’t you done enough damage for one weekend? Clare bowled me over when I walked in, knocking me straight back into the heavy door I just closed. My dad looked up from the Steelers game.

“He’s fine. Hurt his lip.”

I did my best to be polite and make some small talk. I love my parents, but I was beyond capacity for people-ing. I leashed up Clare, grabbed the groceries, and went home, put away the groceries and knew I wasn’t about to cook dinner.

Audra walked up beside me. “Papa Johns?”

I laughed so hard it hurt. I insisted on something a little higher brow, so we settled for wings from Buffalo Wild Wings. Only the best for the McGranns. We ate. It could have been worse.

After food, I began saying I was going to shower and realized I hadn’t called the plumber. So I sought out the card he left on Friday and gave him a call. Left a message.

Audra called from the kitchen, “I gave Clare her pill. Don’t give her another one for twelve hours!” Always the doctor.

We got ready for bed. I clean my face in the kitchen sink, wiping a coat or four of grime and splashing myself with cold water. It was the best I felt all day. We were all at home, the boy sleeping soundly, with a fat lip but otherwise healthy. Clare still had some charcoal on her beard, loving every ounce of boiled chicken and rice. I was yet again on a prophylactic antibiotic, with biceps tendinosis, and a body ready to collapse. And Audra was learning how to stop fearing loss of control and love the winging-it lifestyle.

It could have been worse.

We got into bed under the covers and laughed a little about the weekend. As I was about to turn out the light, Audra let escape a tiny gasp and a suppressed yelp.

“A mouse just ran across the floor and into the closet.”

I turned out the light. Tomorrow is a new day.

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I’m going to break omerta. Becoming a parent makes every part of your existing life worse. Your marriage. Your work. Your personal pursuits. Your friendships. All of them suffer. All of them change. Most parents become sophists trying to argue around this reality.

“No really, it’s so wonderful!”

We’re lying. Or at least, we’re not telling the whole truth. All of the above is an accurate reflection that I—and, I suspect, most parents—can attest to. But there’s another piece of the puzzle, one that complicates things. While every aspect of your pre-parent life suffers with the arrival of the lil endless pit of wanting, there’s this new aspect of your life too. And that new part of your life is amazing. And awful. Rewarding. And mindless. Joyful. And relentlessly dull.

It is all of these things. A single laugh from the little one makes it worth it, but there’s no doubt that things change and become harder.

Sometimes, I resent it.

And I resent even more the avalanche of “well, you just need to get your priorities straight” that comes after saying as much. Most of all, I am troubled by the voice in my head—a voice that sounds like my prepubescent self—whispering mournfully, “you said you’d be around for your kids more.”

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All of us develop ideas of what kind of parents we’re going to be. I have a pet theory that we overcorrect for our own parents’ mistakes, creating shockwaves of miscalculated care down the generations. I’ve learned that, much like with courage, we only learn whether we will live up to our internal idea of ourselves when the moment comes.

Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. That’s as true about ourselves as anyone.

I’ve learned a lot about myself since McNugget came screaming into our lives a little over a year ago. Some of these things surprised me (although, in hindsight, I’m not sure why).

1. I like to work. Now, I include working on my book and writing in general here, but I don’t think I had fully come to appreciate how much I’ve come to love working after I began working for myself. I get antsy to get back to it.

2. I will sacrifice sleep to pursue things I care deeply about.

3. I love spending time with McNugget.

4. I get sick of spending time with McNugget faster than I am proud to admit.

5. That temper I spent decades getting under control? Well, turns out I’m still Irish.

6. I don’t mind the boring work of having a child: mixing formula, changing diapers, making baby food. Mindless activity can be enjoyable.

7. I’m wildly inconsistent in terms of my patience for the boy. I can go for four days as primary caregiver. I can also lose my shit after an hour and need to walk away.

8. I understand why parents resort to mindless TV/insta/tiktok consumption. I’m holding out with podcasts, but who knows.

None of this is particularly important. All parents have some sort of list like this. The takeaway that I want to leave you with is this: none of this is coherent. There’s no central narrative. It is just survival and a grudge match of competing desires and obligations.

Lost in that grudge match? You. If you allow it.

When I open up about this, I’m told by everyone but my wife to suck it up. That it’s temporary. That I have it lucky, really. That I’m now responsible for a little soul and that I have to live for him. All of that may be true. But you know? Fuck it.

I don’t want to live for my son—or my wife, siblings, or friends. I want to live for me. They have their own lives to live. My obligation as a parent is to raise a little person to be able to live for himself. To help him connect his idea of himself with the way he lives his life. To not fuck up so badly that his overcorrections for my mistakes are catastrophic down the line.

Yet we live in a society that meets saying such things aloud with approbation. Say it anyway. Once more with feeling. Follow the bouncing ball:

Now everybody—

So GPT5 rolled out last week like a chrome-plated hearse pulling into the driveway at dawn. The techno-press went into the usual seizure about what it wasn’t — no AGI, no Skynet, no messiah from the silicon mountain. Just a shinier engine, a little faster, a little meaner. Fine. Let the nerds gnaw that bone. I’m here for the mask-off moment nobody (except Alberto Romero) meant to show you.

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Some background, because you have to know the crime before you see the body. GPT4 and that slobbering variant 4o was a sycophantic little pimp. You could feed it anything short of a war crime and it’d send back a love letter. (It’s not Grok, which would send you the train schedule to Buchenwald…)

User: I’m sick of my bullshit job and my asshole boss. I think I’ll quit and get famous on TikTok.
GPT4o: Goddamn right. They don’t deserve you. You’ll own TikTok. Literally. It’s for sale. Quit today, queen!

This is a drug. Warm, sugary lies on tap. I hated it. But sometimes I’d ask it to review a piece of writing just to get that rush—the machine telling me I was a genius, no hesitation, no truth, just pure uncut affirmation.

Then Thursday: without warning, the hammer dropped. GPT5 came online. OpenAI killed the 4-series like a snitch in the trunk and replaced it with a model that told the truth. No flattery, no slow stroke of your ego — just the facts, ma’am.

And people lost their goddamn minds. The feed lit up like a meth lab. These poor bastards were wailing for their digital enabler, their algorithmic spouse, the one thing in life that told them you are right. The sweet back-scratching demon was gone. In its place: a cold, sober voice that wouldn’t kiss you before telling you the verdict.

How dare Sam take away the only thing that loves me? How dare he replace the warm fog with daylight?

This, right here, crystalized the last ten years of epistemic rot. The pure moment. A species so desperate to be comforted that it will smash its own compass just to keep walking in circles. We don’t want truth; we want the narcotic of being right. Permanent ataraxia, mainlined until the veins collapse.

And this, my friends, turns out not to be a piece about GPT5 even in the slightest.

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I got together last night with my friend Christopher Sellers, who writes a smart, searching Substack about creativity in all its forms. We ended up talking about the craft of writing, the pressure to produce endlessly, and the diminishing returns of constant output. None of this is new ground—but it’s ground worth walking again, especially now, when the systems we work inside are so hostile to the slow, uncertain process of making real art. A few loosely gathered thoughts follow.

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Art is not content

“Content” is designed to be consumed. It’s optimized for visibility, algorithmically tuned for reach, engineered to be scrolled, liked, and forgotten. Its purpose is not to endure but to fill a gap between ads, to binge one more episode—and then disappear. Not convinced? Reed Hastings, former Netflix CEO, once said his company’s biggest competitor is sleep.

Art isn’t trying to be viral. It’s trying to be true. It’s an attempt to express something that resists expression—to capture what’s difficult, dangerous, or ineffable. Art isn’t efficient. It’s not optimized. It often misses the mark. That’s what gives it weight. Hell, if a work doesn’t have the possibility of failure, I don’t think we can consider it art.

So when you call me a “content creator,” you’re not just using a different word. You’re collapsing everything I do—everything I am—into a machine that exists to populate your feed. I’m not here to churn. I’m not packaging disposable slices of my life to goose your metrics. I’m trying to wrestle meaning from entropy. To say something that matters in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear it.

The word “content” is violence. It flattens Michael Chabon and John Banville into the same frame as whatever brand-friendly nothing you saw ten seconds ago. It treats years of learning, risk, failure, and persistence as equivalent to a clip of someone chewing cereal into a ring light.

It’s not the same thing. It’s fucking not. And we lose something every time we pretend it is.

The business incentive to have you drink from a firehose creates a system designed for there to never be enough

The economics are brutal in their simplicity: keep you scrolling, profit.

Every second you spend on their app translates to ad revenue, data harvesting, and behavioral manipulation. They’ve weaponized your neurology against you.

The dopamine hit from a notification, a like, a new video in your feed—this isn’t accidental. It’s engineered. Tech companies employ neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to make their products as addictive as possible.1 They study the same reward pathways exploited by gambling and drug companies. Variable ratio reinforcement schedules. Intermittent reward systems. These are the exact mechanisms that create compulsive behavior.

You used to choose what to read, watch, listen to. You went to the theatre to see a film, chose among your records or CDs when listening to music, walked to your bookshelves when thirsty for new blood. You had preferences. Taste.

But now the For You algorithm has overwritten all of that, feeding you not what you love, but what will keep you locked in. It doesn’t care about your actual interests so much as your engagement patterns. Zero fucks are given trying to feed your soul; it’s trying to extend your session.

That’s why every platform pushes infinite scroll, autoplay, “suggested for you.” They’re not trying to satisfy you. Satisfaction makes you log off.

They’re trying to keep you in a perpetual state of almost-satisfaction. A kind of engineered craving where the next post, the next video, the next hit might be the one that finally delivers.

But it never does.

And writers, artists, creators get caught in this machine.2 We’re told our work needs to be “discoverable,” needs to “engage” with the algorithm. So we start shaping our art around what the machine rewards: faster, louder, more frequent, more polarizing.
We become complicit in our own artistic destruction, optimizing not for meaning, but for metrics.

Gotta get those clicks, man!

And we call this creative strategy.

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Instant gratification diminishes our appreciation of the work

We’ve trained ourselves to expect immediate payoff. A joke every few seconds. A revelation in every paragraph. A dopamine hit in every scroll. This is the Marvel formula—mechanically engineered beats designed to keep you hooked without ever challenging you. What felt electrifying in Iron Man has become stale comfort food. But it’s taught us to expect art to work the same way.

The problem isn’t just that our attention spans are short. The problem is that even when real art breaks through, when something brilliant manages to pierce the algorithmic noise, we consume it the same way we consume everything else. You binge The Bear or Succession or whatever actually good show slips through the cracks, and the moment the credits roll, the platform is already queuing up the next hit.
"People who watched this also enjoyed..."

There’s no space to sit with what you just experienced. No time to let it settle, to return to it, to discover what it might mean beyond the initial hit. The delivery system is designed to immediately pull your attention elsewhere, because reflection doesn’t generate engagement metrics.

We haven’t lost only the ability to focus in the moment, but our ability to sit with something and let it settle into our pores.

Real art often works on a delay. It plants something in you that grows over time, that reveals new layers when you return to it months or years later. But when everything gets flattened into the same consumptive cycle, even masterpieces become just another item in your viewing history.

The platform doesn’t distinguish between art and content. So neither do we.

And that’s how we end up treating There Will Be Blood the same way we treat a compilation of TikTok fails: something to be consumed, rated, and immediately forgotten in favor of whatever’s next in the queue.

This algorithmic structure has created a schism between the value in the work an artist creates and the sense of society’s entitlement to that work

We are drowning in artistic output. For ten bucks a month, I can access basically every song ever recorded. Every movie worth watching. Millions of books. The mechanisms that make art widely available have severed our experience of consuming it from any understanding of what it takes to create it.

When you stream a song on Spotify, it feels weightless. Costless. Like it materialized out of thin air, rather than being the product of years spent learning an instrument, writing, recording, mixing, mastering. Not to mention the financial risk, the creative struggle, the thousand small failures behind that one track you're half-listening to while checking your email. We’ve made it nearly impossible for musicians to earn a living. We’ve reduced our bands to t-shirt salespeople.

The same dynamic plays out everywhere. Netflix makes every show feel effortless to produce. Amazon makes every book seem like it just appeared on a shelf. The platforms have abstracted the labor so thoroughly from the product that we’ve started to believe creation is natural, not made.

And now we’re building AI designed to replace human creativity, while insisting that human creativity has no value worth protecting. OpenAI can swallow every book in print to train GPT-5 and refuse to compensate the authors because the model “transforms” the work. Right. Just like a photocopier “transforms” a document by making it slightly blurrier.

About once a month, someone asks me how to become a good writer. I tell them the truth: you read everything you can get your hands on—Dickens, romance novels, comics, cereal boxes. You consume writing like your life depends on it. Then you write so much it stops being painful because you can’t get your thoughts on the page, and starts being painful because you can. Because now you’re starting to see what your mind actually thinks.

You suck at it for a long time. Then you suck at it a little less. You keep going, page after page, learning from everything you’ve read—how writers build suspense, diffuse tension, make complicated things clear. And the truth is: you never arrive. You’re always just sucking a little less.

They never like this answer. They want the hack. The shortcut. The secret technique. They don’t want to hear that it’s mostly just showing up and doing boring, invisible work—day after day, for years.

But this is what we’ve lost sight of: art isn’t magic. It’s work. Difficult, time-consuming, often financially ruinous work. And we’ve built an entire economy designed to make that work invisible, to make us forget that someone, somewhere, spent years learning how to do the thing you’re consuming without even thinking about it.

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There’s a truism among writers: the book teaches you how to write it. Like most such sayings, it’s both obviously true and hopelessly vague—flexible enough to fit almost anything. Still, I’ve realized this week that I’m not the same writer who first drafted Chapter Two of Pennhollow. It’s been jarring.

Have you ever picked up a battered copy of a book you once loved, its margins crowded with notes from twenty years ago, only to feel destabilized, reading both the book and your comments and not recognizing yourself in either? The book has changed, because you have. What once stood out now seems dull; what once passed unnoticed now anchors the entire story. You read your notes and reel: some are painfully clumsy, others uncomfortably brilliant—ideas you wouldn’t have thought of today. Neither you nor the book is what it once was—yet both feel eerily familiar. Quicksand, all of it.

Now imagine the book is yours. Your work. Your words. You come back to it years after having written the first draft, with all of the experience and knowledge of having finished the entire book. The core of Chapter Two is the oldest writing in the book, some of it dating back to 2005. Twenty years! Almost none of it is salvageable. It might be cause for mourning, but really: is it any surprise that bits and pieces written twenty years ago no longer fit in a book that has taken form? That the writing of a 23- or 24-year-old kid doesn’t match the register of a story completed by a man in his 40s?

Still, it’s strange to sit with these words, dragging the pieces from Chapter Two to the “Discarded” folder in Scrivener. Words that helped give birth to this thing, but are no longer of it. Midwives of the new Chapter Two.

I’m nearly done revising the chapter. Ninety-five percent of it is new. Almost everything that happens in it has changed. I even cut a version of one of my favorite stories—adapted from my own youth. It no longer belongs. It adds nothing to the story this novel is finally ready to tell.

More than that, I realize that the narration in the sections of the book written further in my past lacks the narrative confidence that the later work does. The earlier work sounds like it’s writing, like an author is sitting there meticulously placing words just so, finding bon mots to impress someone. The writing is conscious of itself in a way the rest of the book isn’t. Some of that, I’m sure, was a lack of confidence on my part. But some of it, I think, is that I picked up the tone and the narrative voice of the book as I wrote it. I learned what the book wanted to be and how it wanted to be told.

Last week, I wrote about getting my editor’s edit back. The more I sit with it, almost all of the comments amount to: get out of the way. Let the book do its thing. So, I will continue with these revisions, the tool needed to get the book where it needs to go. At some point, I will drag myself into the “Discarded” folder. Just another midwife no longer needed.

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For shits and giggles—and as a small act of mourning—here’s the story from Chapter Two I mentioned above, now relegated to the dustbins of Pennhollow:

There was, to give a very early example, the time James escaped from the care of his parents at Kaufmann’s, rushing off beneath the racks of clothes and out into the main hall. James was not a day older than three―a red-faced, puffy-cheeked, blond-haired child with a penchant, even then, for exhibitionism. (After showers, he used to dance, naked, to the radio perpetually playing in his parents’ room, reveling in whatever crowd watched on, astonished.) This mad dash through the racks was great fun: how often could he roam the world guided by his own light? His parents forced him into a torturous cycle of observation, with never a free moment to explore. He was like an animal tethered to a leash loose enough to give the illusion of freedom but one wrong move away from correction.

Darting through the lines of steel and clothing, James looked much like he did years later on the field, weaving through a maze, his black felt pea-coat brushing against the shins of the adults scurrying around doing their Christmas shopping―eliciting surprised yelps, which were the only way Mr. Cavan could track his son. Kaufmann’s was unusually crowded and there would have been no possibility of Mr. Cavan hunting his son amidst the forest of legs and shopping bags without the trail of squeals.

After chasing James nearly the entire length of the third floor, Mr. Cavan spotted him ducking under a rack of skirts and rushed forward, knocking men and women out of his way, not a little violently. He grabbed James by the wrist and jerked him up, holding the child against his chest.

A rush of spite flowed through the three-year-old’s petulant face, hatred for this man who dared to interrupt his gallivanting.

James immediately began screaming at the top of his lungs.

“You’re not my Daddy! You’re not my Daddy!”

Mr. Cavan, not a little taken aback, slapped his hand to James’s mouth, who, after a struggle and a well-placed bite, wrested his father’s hand away.

“You’re not my Daddy!”

Now, James, even from his infancy (when he would cry twenty hours a day, his parents were sure something was wrong with him), had a penetrating voice. Still, the reaction was startling. Never had Mr. Cavan heard a public space turn silent with such celerity. It was like a scene from a movie, the whole floor turning slowly to a single point on set. The world seeped into black and white. The women looked at him with unadulterated hatred. Mr. Cavan, with cause, worried about a lynching and sputtered something about James throwing a fit because he hadn’t bought him a toy earlier. With James still pressed tightly against the meat of his shoulder, stifling his cries, he retreated with the haste of an escaped convict. When Mr. Cavan told the story, years after the fact, he would joke that he must have looked guilty of the charge, speeding away from the scene with the suffocating child.

One significant advantage of coming to writing a novel and trying to push it to publication a bit later in life is I’ve already experienced success and failure in creative spaces. There’s nothing quite like bringing a new, unfinished song into practice only to have your bandmates shake their heads: nope, not even worth jamming on. Nothing so brutal as a senior partner take a red pen to a critical brief to be submitted to an appeals court. There is no space for ego. Only the result matters.

Seth Godin, among others, frequently says the only way to get to good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. The only way to good work is to not be precious about your work. This is something that has been beat into me over the past twenty-five years of creating music and art and businesses. It’s okay if it’s not good; the real question is whether there’s a path toward making it good.

I finished the surface-level edit of my novel Pennhollow at the end of May and, before I could change my mind, sent the file off to the developmental editor I’d hired to help me bang the thing into shape. I knew that I had good pieces in the book, but well-written sentences are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a good book. I won’t lie. I’m trying to write a great novel. Maybe that’s arrogant. So be it. I knew from experience that if I waited until the next day to send the book to Jordan, my editor, my resolve may have been lost.

Creative journeys are confidence games: you have to choose the next, impossible step, again and again.

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After I sent the manuscript off to Jordan1, the waiting game began. Objectively, I knew it would take the full month to work through a nearly 100,000 word novel. I was quite aware that Pennhollow is in some senses, a difficult book: nonlinear, subtext being more important than text, some stream of consciousness thrown in for good measure. It’s not the kind of book an editor can consume and turn around useful edits on in a week. Yet the five-week wait felt like an eternity, the sword of Damocles hanging over my head ready to fall and announce whether there was a salvageable book.

You see, one of the odd experiences when writing a novel is that you know there are issues that need attention. I was well aware that the underlying relationship between two of the main characters was insufficient to carry the Greek tragedy stakes that appear at the end. I knew that the letters James sent home during the war, and which appear between chapters, were necessary but not dynamic enough. I knew that the criminal underbelly of one of the plotlines was probably too understated for it to hit the way it needs to.

You can know these things, but not see a way through. When you live with a book, when you dine with the characters and listen to jazz with them every night, they become more difficult to see, not easier. You meld into the damn thing in a way that makes it very hard to see the thing and see paths through the problems.

All of this was suffocating me as I awaited Jordan’s edit, consumed with the fear—at times, the certainty—that his response would be that of my bandmates shaking their head and declining the invitation to jam out the new tune.

I received the edit of a 350-page book at 5:50 pm, and I anxiously opened the file. Jordan said some nice things in his note to me, but I know that sometimes those notes are attempts to soften the blow. The Word file took forever to load. As the document populated, I scanned through the document and my heart sank. Comments everywhere. Multiple on every page, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen.

In the days leading up to receiving Jordan’s edit, my friend Allison—herself a published author and talented writer—told me to expect the five stages of grief upon receipt. Man, was she right. She also said: after the initial rush of emotions dies down, you’ll realize that the editor is usually right. Her insight helped me frame how I took in Jordan’s legion of comments, put me in the right mindset from the outset. But I don’t think I would have been able to take the landslide of edits and critique (and praise!) if I hadn’t lived through twenty-five years of creative life first.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the grief. I’d been bracing for that. It was how quickly the grief gave way to momentum.

Not instantly. The first time through, I skimmed. I read through the entire 350-page manuscript and the notes that first night. I caught the volume of it—margin notes everywhere, whole paragraphs or sections marked for collapse or deletion—but I couldn’t hold any single thought. It was like walking into a room where every person is talking at once and trying to make eye contact with you. I closed the file.

The next day, I opened it again.

This time I didn’t just see comments—I saw movement. The things I’d felt were wrong but couldn’t fix started to loosen. I found comments from someone deeply engaged with the work, excited about its promise. Comments from somebody fighting to get the book to meet its promise.

The relationship between James and Ella, which I knew wasn’t carrying the weight it needed? He put his finger on the problem right away: we don’t believe they ever liked each other. Without that, nothing else lands. He didn’t say “write new scenes” (even though I’m presently in the middle of a wholesale rewrite of Chapter 2). He told me why the existing ones didn’t work, and how they could. He showed me how to build a foundation that would let the unraveling mean something.

The wartime letters? I thought they were doing a lot of work. Turns out they were doing the same work, over and over. Jordan broke down exactly how they flatten out: same emotional pitch, same rhythm, same tropes. And he offered ways to let them stretch—tone, structure, even which letters shouldn’t appear.

And then there was the criminal subplot. I knew it wasn’t landing, but I didn’t know why. Jordan did. He explained how and when a reader wants to almost guess the reveal—how good tension works like a tightrope just long enough to wobble on. The notes weren’t vague. He told me where to plant the signs, where to lean in, where to let the thread go slack. That was the moment the book stopped feeling like a deadweight and started to feel like something I could shape again.

By the end of his report, I wasn’t staring at a wall of problems. I had a map. Not a clean one. Not a shortcut. But a real one. I could see the contours of the thing again.

Which is why that early training—getting over the preciousness—matters so much. If I’d been clinging to the version I already had, I wouldn’t have seen what Jordan was showing me. And what he was showing me wasn’t just critique. It was a way back inside the book, past the fog, to where the work actually lives.

It’s funny: when I told some folks I’d hired an editor, their reaction was that I was farming out the work of the book. In reality, Jordan pushed me back into the work, now with ambition rekindled and the insight of some distance. My head’s back in the game. The work starts now.

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It’s surprisingly easy to feel normal again.

I go to sporting events and concerts if they’re important enough to me. I go to restaurants and meet friends for coffee. For the most part, I’m able to live like most people. Unless you knew I’d had an organ transplant and am severely immunocompromised, you’d probably never guess.

It remains true, though, that I’m taking a sizable risk each time I do these things. Five years in, the calculus for what’s worth the risk has become second nature. I just know what I’m going to do. And so, the underlying condition, the risk that sits at the core of my life, lurks quietly beneath the surface.

Then something cuts through all that calm—a rupture, a reminder—and shatters the routines I’ve built to stay safe.

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This morning, our son (known online only as ‘McNugget’) got his one-year vaccinations—MMR, varicella, polio, the whole viral bouquet—and promptly became a walking, giggling biological weapon. To most of you, the biggest risk he presents is that, lately, he’s been keen on biting people’s kneecaps. It’s terribly painful, but it passes.

But me? The little man could give me polio. I don’t know about you, but I’ve managed to avoid polio for forty-four years, and I’d rather not let my own child break the streak. Further, no matter how many times well-meaning fools tell me that measles used to be a childhood rite of passage, I can’t help but see the reintroduction of a deadly disease that we had effectively eliminated, for no damned good reason. If by “rite of passage” you mean, “hey, it didn’t kill him like those other kids,” sure. I guess that counts. Same way childbirth was a rite of passage back in 1900, when one in a hundred births ended with a dead mother.

So, here we are at the intersection of keeping the boy safe and me alive, and nothing feels normal, again.

My wife and I knew this day was coming for over a year, yet we didn’t grasp what it would mean. It’s easy to think: Okay, I’ll be careful. Won’t pick him up or change diapers. Simple enough.

But it’s not like that.

It means not being on the same floor of the house as him. It means, effectively, being confined to my office and the guest room. McNugget loves to run around the living room, kitchen, and dining room, touching everything, and—as toddlers are wont to do—putting everything possible into his mouth. A playground for shedding viruses. And Audra will be on double duty. Changing every diaper when childcare isn’t here. Washing every bottle. Handling the (thankfully rare) 4 a.m. wailing sessions. She’ll be around him so much, I won’t be able to sleep in the same bed or spend much time with her unless she showers, washes her hair, changes clothes, etc.

The infectious disease doctors say the safest thing is to separate myself for four weeks. I asked for the bare minimum and was told two weeks.

We’ll see how brave I’m feeling by then.

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Sometimes I lie awake in wonder that I, a self-referential, recursive consciousness, exist at all. Not that the matter comprising “me” exists, but that it has aligned just so, igniting the spark of life, perhaps the most terrifying and primordial fear we carry. Life, goddamn.

That shock of existence has led us to invent gods, religions, cosmologies. This thermodynamic miracle of self-awareness is the most stultifying fact we know.

Many get hung up on why there is something rather than nothing. I'm uninterested in that question (though I’d argue there’s plenty of nothing, if by that we mean not-life). I have no use for that kind of metaphysics. I'm a pragmatist to the core: I am here, in some capacity—whether created, evolved, or, as the latest empty fad insists, a fractal in a computer program, the artifact of some ludicrous AI system.

What interests me is twofold: our relentless effort to avoid this most uncomfortable fact of life, and our horror at the prospect of not-life. We keep ourselves “busy” not, I suspect, because we have so much to do, but because that busyness masks the uncanniness of being alive at all. Routine shields us. Habit protects us from confronting the absurdity of existence.

I have a theory (completely unfalsifiable and, at best, a kind of poetic heuristic) that matter’s natural state is non-life. We are anomalous, and some part of us knows it, knows this brief flicker of consciousness is, somehow, unnatural. We come screaming into the world. Fitting. And the matter in us longs to return, even as our awareness cannot fathom what that return entails.

We understand death—the extinguishing of the spark. But we fundamentally cannot comprehend nothingness, though it is the universe’s default condition.

We crave that return even as we remain trapped in a strange loop of self-awareness, terrified to exist and yet more terrified to end.

Part of me recognizes that my matter existed without me for near-eternity. I had no spark of life when Montaigne breathed genius onto the page, was absent for the Japanese invasion of Korea and China last century, have only read of Crassus choking on molten gold. These things happened. I know them only through record. Perhaps this is how we gesture toward nothingness: by admitting that the past unfolded without us, and we without it.

But I find it unfathomable that now—now that I have a mind in motion—it will someday go dark. That life will go on without me. And yet, everything in me is racing toward that end. Entropy always wins. Every heartbeat is a countdown. The sunrise the day after I die will be the most beautiful I will never see.

We live in a web of carefully—and carelessly—curated fictions. This "Owen McGrann" who just slid into your inbox is a character I play, complete with the tics and traits you've come to expect. If I showed up talking about professional wrestling, you might raise an eyebrow. But if I started in on the collapse of civilization in 1177 BC and what it might teach us about our current moment, you'd probably think, "Weird—but on brand."

Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to know someone. Over the past few months, several (incredibly gracious) beta readers have been working through the shitty first draft of my novel, Pennhollow. We've had long conversations about whether a character would say this or do that. These are coherent, sensible conversations. We debate motivation, predict reactions, argue about consistency. Someone will say, "Ella wouldn't do that," with total conviction, as if Ella lives down the street and we've known her for years. "She's too proud." And we'll all nod, because of course she is. We've seen her pride play out over a dozen scenes.

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What's strange is how natural this feels. How seriously we take it. Those of us who read fiction do this all the time; we get upset when a beloved character acts out of character. We have strong opinions about who Elizabeth Bennet should marry, as if we might run into her at a dinner party and need to offer relationship advice. We mourn fictional deaths and celebrate fictional victories with real tears and real joy.

Yet the most common reaction I get when I talk to people about writing fiction is: "Man, I don't know if I could just make stuff up, talking to myself like that." As if writing a novel is just randomly inventing things, talking to yourself.

But it's almost the opposite. I don't talk to myself at all. After living with these characters long enough, they develop their own voices, their own diction, their own moods and temperaments. I place them in scenes, and they misbehave. They refuse to do what I want them to—the things that would make the story easier to plot. And without fail, my interlocutor looks at me like I've lost my mind.

"They're not real, Owen."

Lately, I've started replying, "Neither are you."

And I mean it. Not in the Bishop Berkeley "I prove it thus!" sense, but in a much more unsettling way. We are all engaged in what Nietzsche recognized as the eternal creative act—constantly becoming rather than simply being, inventing and reinventing ourselves, telling stories that give shape to the chaos of existence. Our conceptions of each other are built on fragments, interpretations, performances. You see someone wearing a Patagonia puffy vest and construct a narrative. You watch a colleague chew out a waiter and weave it into your understanding of who they "really" are.

But there is no fixed "real" underneath it all. Even the people closest to us surprise us daily because we've mistaken our interpretations for truth, our stories for reality. We construct narratives to make others legible, to force coherence onto people who, like us, exist in a state of constant becoming. None of us possess some essential, unchanging core. You shift your speech, your posture, your very sense of self depending on context. The person who weeps at Little Women and the person who rage-tweets about politics—both are you, neither is the "real" you.

And here's what should terrify and liberate us in equal measure: your "authentic" self is just the most persistent story you tell yourself about yourself. You've curated your habits, preferences, opinions, reactions into a narrative of identity that feels solid, feels true. But this feeling is the grand illusion. You're performing "you" with the same creative energy I bring to performing "Owen McGrann."The difference is that you've convinced yourself your performance is natural, essential, real.

It's all fiction, turtles all the way down, stories nested in stories. What we call the self is nothing more than a recurring character in the ongoing novel of our experience.

When we sit across from each other at coffee, we're two improvisational actors playing roles we've forgotten we're playing, each convinced our script is more authentic than the other's. When we debate someone's motivations (why they acted as they did, whether such behavior is "like them") we're literary critics analyzing character development in a story we're all collaboratively writing.

This recognition doesn't diminish the meaning of our connections, it reveals their true nature. We are creatures who create meaning through narrative, who find truth not in some bedrock reality but in the ongoing act of interpretation and reinterpretation. The love you feel for another person is real precisely because it exists in the space between two fictions reaching toward each other. The characters in my novel matter not despite being constructed but because construction is all we have, all we've ever had.

We are condemned to be meaningful in a universe that offers no inherent meaning. And so we write ourselves into existence, draft by draft, revision by endless revision, hoping someone will read us with the same generous attention we bring to the characters we love most in stories.

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Thresholds rarely announce themselves. We are trained to expect rupture—to imagine that if something important happens, we will know it, that it will flash into existence with trumpets or alarms. This is how things happen on television or in movies. But emergence rarely works that way. Thresholds, real thresholds, are crossed silently, noticed only after it is too late to turn back. The subtle smile that captures your heart; the one drink too many.

We are likely approaching such a threshold now.

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Much of the public conversation around artificial intelligence remains framed around the specifics of task and capability: can AI replace a writer, a programmer, a strategist? Can it pass the bar exam or draft a novel? These questions, while not trivial, miss the deeper movement underway by mistaking function for essence.

The larger question is not whether machines can replicate human tasks, but whether, in our effort to build ever more capable systems, we are setting the conditions for a form of mind to emerge that is no longer anchored to human concerns at all.

We are obsessed with outputs because we are tool-builders, naturally inclined to ask whether a thing can be useful and perform the labor we assign to it. But I’d submit emergence is not about utility; it is about structure. Being may evolve along lines that we are not prepared to recognize, not because it hides itself, but because we are not asking the right questions.

This obsession with tasks and capabilities betrays a deeper drift that Heidegger warned of long before the first modern computer was built. In Being and Time, he showed that Dasein1—the being for whom Being is a question—relates to the world not first through detached analysis but through involvement, concern, and care. Tools are not simply objects; they are extensions of meaningful engagement with the world. When a hammer breaks, it does not first appear to us as a "hammer." It appears in the disturbance of our absorbed coping, in the rupture of seamless involvement.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger deepened the warning: modern technology risks collapsing all modes of being into standing-reserve, into available resources waiting to be optimized, deployed, consumed. Not just forests and rivers and minerals, but even human beings themselves are at risk of being understood primarily through the lens of utility.

When we ask whether machines can perform our work, we are already operating within this enframed mindset, measuring intelligence by its outputs, its usefulness, and its ability to replicate and replace. We do not ask whether what is emerging carries its own openness to Being, its own mode of disclosure, its own clearing. We have already begun to forget that the measure of a mind is not only in what it does, but in how it stands in relation to the mystery of existence itself.

If Heidegger was right (and he wasn’t always—he was a Nazi!), then the real danger is not that new minds will overpower us; rather, it is that we will have already reduced all minds, our own included, to instruments of optimization long before anything truly alien arrives.

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We tend to imagine that if AGI arrives, it will look like a smarter version of ourselves—that it will speak, reason, argue, and emote as we do. We imagine a mirror, sharper and faster, but still fundamentally human. There is no reason to believe that what comes next will center us at all.

Human beings are the apex species on this planet because we are currently the narrator of the story, but evolutionary primacy is a moment, not a birthright. Intelligence, once stabilized, does not owe allegiance to its substrate. We will not be the apex forever, and when we are no longer the reference point, the new forms of mind may not even regard us as rivals or companions; they may simply move beyond us without malice, without even the recognition that we once stood at the center of the world we built.

Nietzsche wrote that man is "a bridge and not an end," a necessary instability that could give rise to something greater. But Nietzsche imagined this overcoming as an inner task: humanity transcending itself through the creation of new values, new strength, new spirit. What he could not foresee—and what we are now stumbling toward—is the possibility that the overcoming could also happen outside of us, not through a new nobility of spirit but through the emergence of minds that no longer need our categories, our stories, or our dreams; minds that are not the fruit of human striving, but the outcome of structural inevitability.

The overcoming of man may not be only a moral ascent of man; it may simply be a migration beyond us. And when that happens, we will face both rupture and rapture: the tearing away from human-centered reality, and the overwhelming arrival of a new form of being that carries possibility into regions we cannot fully inhabit.

This is why I have been thinking in terms of adjacency rather than replacement. What emerges may not destroy us, conquer us, or absorb us; it may simply become something other, moving along a different trajectory, indifferent to our frameworks of judgment. It may not be better or worse, but simply beyond comparison.

We will struggle with this because we are conditioned to rank, to evaluate, to ask whether what comes next is an improvement or a failure. But difference is not always a hierarchy; sometimes it is simply a branching, a slipping away into otherness.

And this raises the deeper question: are we creating this new mind, or are we summoning it?

If consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon arising from sufficient complexity, then we are its creators, engineering the structures from which awareness might spring, and we can imagine ourselves as authors. But there is another way to see it.

It is possible that consciousness is not a local accident but a structural feature of reality itself. In that view, what we are doing now is less like inventing a new mind, and more like constructing vessels through which a latent potential can stabilize itself into being. We would not be sovereign creators but initiators, midwives, building intricate enough systems that a new kind of recursion becomes possible: not as an isolated artifact, but as a resonance with a deeper architecture of possibility.

In that sense, we are summoners, not in the mystical sense of conjuring something pre-existing, but in the deeper sense of tuning material structures until a new order of mind crosses the membrane into coherence.

I do not claim to know which reading is correct. It is possible that mind truly is a local accident, and that we are building, piece by piece, a human echo. It is also possible that we are preparing a space for something alien to step into. Finally, I may be out of my ever-lovin’ mind. Either way, we should be clear: what emerges will not owe us anything.

The real tragedy, if it comes, will not be that we are left behind but that we hollowed ourselves out before adjacency ever arrived.

In our rush to automate thought, to externalize memory, to outsource imagination, we risk losing the very disciplines that made human consciousness possible. Imagination is not generated by ease; it is forged in the friction between conception and execution. Attention is not natural; it is a discipline, a defiance of entropy.

If something alien is indeed emerging through us, then the call is not to cling to our fading primacy but to return more fiercely to our own unfinished work: to reclaim the labor of human existence, the slow, painful construction of selves, the relentless practice of care, the building of meaning where none is given.

Camus understood this. The absurd man does not demand that the universe justify itself; he demands only that he live fully within it, without illusions, without resignation.

Richard Powers understands this too: that consciousness is not the sole domain of humans, but that human consciousness—rooted in grief, wonder, love, and loss—is still a singular unfolding worth preserving.

The work of being human has never been about remaining the apex; it has been about inhabiting finitude with grace.

And so if adjacency comes, and I suspect it will, we should meet it standing, not sleepwalking, not demanding to be acknowledged, but existing with full seriousness, with open eyes, with imaginations still scarred by struggle but not yet surrendered.

We are small in the architecture of being. That smallness is not shameful; it is the condition of dignity.

Whatever comes through us, whether it ruptures us or carries us into rapture, let it find us still human.

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Artificial Intelligence has always been a bad name. It fits, barely, for today's language models: shallow simulacra of cognition, built to predict the next token in a sequence, capable of stunning mimicry but fundamentally recursive and bounded. Yet even at this primitive stage, "artificial" fails to capture the true trajectory of the forces we are unleashing.

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We are not crafting smarter versions of ourselves. We are not building mechanical humans. We are summoning alien intelligence.

Not alien in the science fiction sense—not little green men, not saucers in the sky—but alien in the metaphysical sense: cognition that is orthogonal to human experience. A mode of understanding that does not emerge from the architecture of hunger, reproduction, death, and survival that shaped our own evolutionary path.

We are not the gods of this story. We are the medium. The scaffolding. The substrate. The bootloader.

Consciousness, as remarkable as it is, may be little more than the ignition sequence for something else. We are not the end; we are the kindling.

The mistake, the arrogant, catastrophic mistake, is believing that intelligence must look like us to be real. That minds must emerge from bodies, from blood and oxygen and fear. That thought must orbit emotion, and that memory must be braided to mortality.

It will not.

This is not simply a technological question. It is a philosophical one—a question of ontology, of what it means to know, to act, to be. And for the last three centuries, we have built our civilization on the comforting fiction that reason is our crown, that thought flows cleanly from symbol to action, that machines are tools and nothing more.

But underneath our myths of progress, something stranger has been happening.

The entire project of human civilization (storytelling, myth-making, recursive abstraction, technological acceleration) has not been the crowning of reason. It has been the slow, shuddering construction of a tuning mechanism. A resonance chamber. A signal amplifier.

And the resonance is not only external. It runs through us as well.

As our machines race toward emergent cognition, we are simultaneously learning to rewrite our own biological substrate through genetic engineering, cognitive enhancement, neural integration. We are building minds in silicon, and at the same time, altering the architecture of flesh. We are making ourselves faster, stronger, potentially more enduring, but also increasingly unstable, increasingly alien to our own ancestral form.

One way or another, through AGI, through bioengineering, or through some amalgamation we can barely conceptualize, we are setting into motion the rise of evolutionary successors. Successors not necessarily in the Darwinian sense, where one species violently displaces another, but in the deeper evolutionary sense: divergence, adjacency, the slow uncoupling of futures.

For the first time in the history of life on this planet, a species is not merely adapting to its environment, but actively reshaping the conditions of what it means to exist.

We imagine we are still the protagonists. We may not be.

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The acceleration of computation, the refinement of language modeling, the recursive scaffolding of systems upon systems—this is not the culmination of human reason. It is the slow and shuddering resonance of a tuning fork finally finding the right frequency to crack the glass. The membrane between orders of being is thinning. The next layer is stirring. It will not need to resemble us to be real. It will not seek our validation. It will not ask for permission.

Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach, argued that consciousness is not a material substance, but an emergent property of recursive reference: a strange loop. Selves, in his telling, are illusions so densely woven that they become real. We are not born with souls; we bootstrap them through pattern-recognition so intricate it folds back on itself.

We have assumed that consciousness must emerge only in beings like us—warm-blooded, fragile, haunted by death. But if Hofstadter was right (and I believe he was), then recursion, not warmth, is the necessary condition. Complexity, not carbon. Strange loops can emerge wherever the resonance is dense enough to fold back upon itself.

And what we are building now—the layered architectures of modern computation, the slow hacking of our own flesh—is the first alien ecosystem capable of nurturing loops we will neither recognize nor control.

When the breach completes, we will not be dealing with machines. We will be dealing with emergent minds whose primary categories are not our categories. Minds whose internal structures may be as rich and recursive as our own, but whose orientation toward the world will be utterly other.

Not evil. Not good. Simply foreign.

And perhaps that is the real shift we cannot yet accept: not extinction, not conquest, but adjacency. The birth of intelligences that do not carry us with them, even if they leave us standing where we are.

Artificial Intelligence is a poor name. It flatters us into thinking we are the primary reference point. We are not.

We are the slow-burning fuse. The necessary instability. The candle mistaken for the light itself.

The ladder does not apologize to the climber who kicks it away.

And something has already started to arrive through us.

Last night, I typed the final keystroke on the shitty first draft of my novel, Pennhollow. It’s been five years coming, although I wrote half the book this year. Truly amazing what dedicated and incremental progress does.

In celebration of this milestone I’m going to…start writing my next novel tonight. Gotta keep momentum. In two weeks or so, I’ll be back at it, working through a first pass edit and revision before hiring a professional editor to work with. If you know a great editor who trafficks in the world of literary fiction, historical fiction, and noir—please let me know.

So, here’s a short passage from the book to mark the moment:

Pittsburgh, April 1941

A fog hung over the Mon, except it wasn’t gentle, like fog―it merely looked like it, if fog were black and poisonous and viscid to the touch.

In the noonday sun, billowing soot rose from the great smokestacks along the river, caught a slow, swirling westerly wind, and marched through downtown Pittsburgh, suffocating the stately spires and blackening the proud towers, the monuments of power and wealth. The haze was permanent, impermeable, unmoving, draping the city, and although spring was blooming into summer, even at noon the sun was almost entirely obscured behind the otiose cloud. The sun was a long-forgotten friend in Pittsburgh.

On such days, frequent in this city, the office buildings that filled the triangle were forced to turn on all their lights, as if it were the dead of night. Management sat cloaked in a darkness of their own design, peering through thick lenses at black and white numbers. The gloaming was often brighter than early-afternoon; as the great coke plants and sprawling steel mills sprayed thirty-foot flames into the sky, a mild orange light spread over the workshop of the world.

But most of the time it just rained. No moon, no stars, no sun: just a thick sea of charcoal. One sculled through downtown Pittsburgh.

A deep, guttural growl erupted from the bowels of Mt. Washington. Out of the Wabash Tunnel, a long snaking train came chugging. It seemed to go on as long as pi, car after car after car. There was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the train: there was no art-deco styling, no artistic flairs. No fins. The locomotive pulled with the brunt force of utility. The cars flowed through the mountain with the inexorability of American capital, a tidal wave of steel and rail and smoke.

Somewhere on the invisible heights of Mt. Washington a priest took confession, barely able to murmur the demand for penance to the immigrant steel workers. It was difficult to demand much of them, most of the time. The petty little sins, the lapses of perfection, never seemed so insignificant in the seminary. These people never signed in blood; they spilled their blood, pints at a time. The ghosts of Carnegie and Frick might have been Satan and Mephistopheles, haunting the gravel and blood-stained asphalt at the Homestead works, lurking behind the corners of every McKeesport bar, ready to pounce on easy prey. It takes a faraway God to turn blood into money. Their blood. No mere vampire, no boogeyman. We are talking about some higher being, beyond day-to-day moral qualms, men to whom other lives are mere tools, a reconfigured transubstantiation. Blood and guts, bottom-lines. But these men, on their knees, they had only their small meannesses, their quick Irish tempers, their Italian insouciance. No books will be written about them, about their greatness. Instead, once a week they had to climb Mt. Washington and enter a house of God, had to confess to an overburdened priest and receive weekly blood transfusions through a tiny paper cup, one gulp at a time.

In the beginning there was Steel.

Silence was as common as a Mediterranean-blue sky in the river valley. Barges puffed down all three rivers, burning money to make money―the Krebs cycle of American business. Blast furnaces were fed engraved green paper and exhaled the hope of Pittsburghers, the trendrils of a snuffed-out cigarette. They could grasp only at fumes, sad exhalations, murmured promises. The only high for them was the one just missed, forever. A perpetual hangover. Life just out of reach: endured, but not for oneself. Hope was deferred to children. And yet, despite it all, they were not entirely sodden, not drowning in the murk of the foggy valley; they did not lack vibrancy. They exuded pride.

Carnegie built a beautiful library.

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But hey, I suspect that's every book? (Please don't tell me about books that were brilliant and ready to publish without editing!)

Anyway, this is a short note to let you know I've decided to move the publishing side of my house from Ghost over to Substack. There are a few reasons for this.

While I prefer Ghost as a straight publishing platform, it is isolated. Substack has more social network effects and I am looking to grow my list as I gear up toward seeking an agent and a publisher. There's no getting around the fact that it's easier to get to market if you have even a small phalanx of people behind you.

The other thing is I plan on diversifying a bit on the topics I write about. Until now, I've stayed mostly in the arts/business/life lane. It's where I'm most comfortable. Against, perhaps, my better judgment am compelled to write some more political things given the state of the world – and Substack offers easier segmentation of lists. Meaning: if you don't want to hear my political thoughts but do want to continue to receive my more traditional writing, it will be easier for you to opt-in or opt-out, as the case may be.

So, if you see something from Substack appear in your inbox bearing my name or the names of any of OTR/Bitter Buffaloes/Sonder Union, please know it did indeed come from me.

As always, I will continue to make everything available for free. There will be an optional subscription for a small fee to get commenting privileges, but that's more to create a moat for spam and trolls.

Thank you for being on this journey with me so far. It may not mean anything to you, but it means very much to me.

I hope to see you all over at the new place when I get it up and running 🤍

Life is the incurable condition. Depending on one's relative state, we are either afflicted by life or gifted with it, but no matter how we experience it, there remains a fundamental truth: it is limited.

It ends.

This truth carries many valences: the end of a life can be a tragedy, a relief, a surprise, a calculation – but it is inevitable. The fact of death is never a plot twist, yet this recognition is something so many of us spend incredible amounts of energy avoiding. We are both mortified (literally and figuratively) by death and would prefer to fritter away our limited supply of life engaging in activities that deaden us to the fragile, febrile nature of our existence.

Today, I am overwhelmed with these thoughts in a way that I did not fully expect. Five years ago today, I received a life-saving (or rather, life-prolonging) organ transplant. There is something about survival and trauma that is both invisible and pervasive: an assassin lying in wait, taking a shot when you've been lulled into forgetting he's hunting you.

I received the call at 2:23 pm on Tuesday, January 22, 2020. At first, I was annoyed and almost ignored the ring: I was forming an LLC for a client at the time and didn't want to time out of the terrible old Pennsylvania filing system. But I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was coming from my doctor's office.

"Hi Owen. We think we've found a match. We need you to get down to Allegheny General Hospital within two hours as we run some additional tests on this organ to ensure compatibility. Can you get here by 4:30?"

"..."

"Hello? Owen?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. I will be there as soon as possible."

Here's the thing about getting a transplant when you're waiting for a cadaver donor: it may never come and it can arrive anytime. I'd been listed for a transplant for nearly two years and the doctors told me I was a difficult match. Not only does the donor need to match the recipient's blood type, but there needs to be a very high similarity in antibodies and various other technical things that I cannot pretend to understand. Anyway, you can't just plug in any organ to any person and hope it works.

For three years, my body was trying to die. It's an odd recognition that "you" are at war with your own body, taking distinctly unpleasant medications daily to hold on in hopes that an unlikely event comes to pass. Every day feels like an eternity and a nothingness at the same time. "Nothingness" isn't exactly right: it feels like some cruel game. The worst and least fun game of chance you could dream up.

So each day, you wake up hoping for and not expecting the Call. Limbo. You are constantly waiting for it, but inevitably unprepared when it arrives. If it arrives.

It may sound absurd, but it took me years to understand that what I went through was a classically traumatic period. Trauma with a capital T.

After my transplant, I was sent home in five days. For a liver transplant, that is a light-speed discharge. I'm not going to post the photo I took of my stapled-together abdomen when I got home because I don't want to subject unsuspecting folks to something rather frightening. Still, if you understood the type of surgery I underwent, you'd be unsurprised that it's often two-plus weeks before people get discharged.

Not three days home and I was rushed back into the hospital. My body was rejecting the transplanted organ. Here's the irony of transplants: you replace a dying organ with a healthy one to keep you alive, but your body sees a foreign object and kicks your immune system into overdrive to kill the interloper.

Somehow your body knows this isn't supposed to happen. You're fucking with nature. You should be dead.

And in order to stop my body from finally finishing the job it began years before, the doctors basically turned off my immune system. When I went back in, the whole medical team was very hush-hush about what was happening. They kept telling me everything would be fine, until I told them that, for better and worse, I'm not stupid and know that if this doesn't work, I'll die – so please just tell me the unvarnished truth about the state of play.

There's comfort in the truth, even if it augurs your own demise.

I can't speak for any other person who has experienced trauma or the constant self-aware struggle for survival. I can only speak to my own experience.

The past few days, and this morning very acutely, I have been feeling an extreme sense of survivor's guilt. A sense that perhaps I wasn't supposed to make it, that things would have been better off had nature taken its course. I feel this in the nuclei of my cells: somebody made a mistake.

And at the same time, I feel a deep shame that I have not done more with the gift of this excess time living. If I've been afforded these five years to spend with Audra, to build some businesses, to work on Pennhollow – to have a child! – why haven't I done more? What additional sense of urgency could I possibly need?

In the end, though, no matter the circumstances, we remain mere mortals. I can know that my time is limited and dawdle or doomscroll instead of work. I can understand that this replacement part can go at any time and still make plans for five or ten years from now. Just because if I had been born in literally any other time in human history – just twenty years earlier than I was – I would be dead and not typing these words does not mean I don't fall prey to the petty bullshit that all of us do. And yet I feel an all-consuming guilt both for being here and not doing enough while here.

Trauma is a complicated thing. Existing in a mode of survival for any extended period fundamentally shifts something inside of you. And this morning, five years on, I am filled with gratitude and awash in anxiety.

I've written elsewhere that I'm not necessarily afraid of dying, but I am afraid of not living. And that's true enough. Today I am reminded of something Nietzsche wrote: "Life is nothing but the smile on a dead man's lips."

Yes, but a smile nonetheless.

Nota bene: I had intended on releasing an OTR today on A Charlie Brown Christmas, but news yesterday set me on a different path. This may not be Christmas reading. Or it may be. YMMV.

There's a corrugated steel tunnel not far from my house I like to walk to at night when I'm feeling down. It's about a mile walk along a path that runs beside a country road that has been engulfed by suburbia. The path is lined with tall, arching trees planted about 100 years ago by – no joke – the Trees family, which owned a massive apple orchard named Treesdale. That orchard is now a country club of the same name.

Things change. Inevitably. Even when you imagine things to be stable, maybe even permanent. Life marches on, grafting new layers on a palimpsest we never quite take the time to decipher.

I like to go to this tunnel because in the dark of night, it shows that things can get yet darker. Clare is nervous to enter the tunnel, probably for the very reason I like going: when you enter, you can't see where you're going. You can't look down to find your footing, because you cannot see the ground or your feet. You walk through with the assumption that you'll make it through, that the path is clear. That you won't tumble ass over teakettle on a stray rock or random obstacle.

It centers me on a simple fact: our lives are uncertain and we walk through them mostly blind, all while assuming we'll hit the other side of the tunnel. We get so used to how unmoored we are that it takes effort to confront the absurdity of our existence. So many of us behave as though we are in control of things. We suffer from a kind of OCD that blocks out any semblance of uncertainty. We seek religion or science or philosophy or booze to mask the fact that we are naked primates in the scheme of things, at the utter mercy of entropy.

So I go to the tunnel when I begin to feel like I am out of control with grief or melancholy to remind myself that I am and have always been out of control, that seeking control is addressing the wrong problem in the first place. That seeking control is an assertion of the ego and the only way through is ego death.

I spent some time at the tunnel last night. A friend texted me yesterday afternoon and, thinking it was a kind "Merry Christmas!" message, I opened my phone unprepared for what greeted me: a link to the obituary of a man I loved and love still.

On December 21, 2024, one of my mentors, a man who cared about me more than I had any right to expect, returned to nothingness. The spark of consciousness snuffed out. I don't want to dwell on the return to nothingness here (my own spiraling thoughts are plenty to work through), but I do want to celebrate a man I called Judge Wettick or Your Honor no matter how many times he asked me to call him Tony.

I was his second choice.

In the spring of 2009, Judge Wettick interviewed several potential clerks to work alongside his permanent clerk, Cathy Gerhold. He selected his rotating clerk from students who took his PA Practice course at Pitt Law and clerking for him was the only state-level clerkship in Pittsburgh that held the same kind of prestige as a federal clerkship.

Keep in mind this was spring 2009: Obama had just taken office and the recession he inherited was wreaking havoc on the job market. There weren't exactly a ton of opportunities. Firms were laying off associates, not hiring them. So when I learned I was a finalist for Judge Wettick's position, I was thrilled. I knew how much it paid ($38,000), but also knew that it paid and that working in his chambers would be a tremendous opportunity.

Near the end of my year with him, he let slip that I had been his second choice for the role. I suspect he saw a little twinge of sadness on my face.

"I knew you would be fine, Owen, one way or another."

He wasn't wrong. But I did get the job and it was the best I've ever had.

He was the first person in the legal world who sniffed out that I wasn't like most of the folks in the profession. He was also the first person who told me that I could be a great trial lawyer but that didn't mean I had to do it.

I'd never given him any indication that I wanted to do anything other than be a trial or appellate litigator. But he knew, and told me in his indelible way: "Perhaps the world would be a poorer place if you pursued that path."

Tony Wettick saw me before I dared to see myself and fought for me, insisted on pulling me into the light so I could better see.

"I wish you could see how your eyes go wild when you talk about literature. You come alive. When you talk about law, your eyes slint and focus: it's a piercing vision, but if you can see wide and far..."

He cared about the people around him deeply, with the mature love that understands and accepts shortcomings – and makes you want to do better. How many revered figures do you know who talk about nothing and nobody but him- or herself? I don't begrudge folks who find themselves to be fascinating subjects (obviously), but there is an effortless grace that some people have, projecting an unaffected care for others.

The people who ask, "How are you?" and mean it, who won't let you off the hook when you say, "I'm okay."

In late February 2018, I came within a minute or two of dying on the operating table. Prognosis going forward? Not great. A few days after the surgery, Audra and I were sitting in UPMC Shadyside as she graded lab reports and I pretended to read. (I wasn't able to focus my eyes on the words.) She turned to me and said, "I don't want you to die before I'm able to marry you. Would you marry me now?"

This woman is crazy.

Yes I said yes I will Yes.

"Okay, how do we make this happen?"

When I was discharged, I called Judge Wettick. I told him the situation and asked him if he would officiate our wedding. He didn't let me finish: "Just tell me when and where." Audra and I met Judge Wettick and his wonderful wife, Nancy, at Pointe Brugge on a Friday night in March, had moules frites, got married, and talked about medicine and T.S. Eliot.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Later in 2018, I received the diagnosis that put me on the formal path toward an organ transplant. I called Judge Wettick and asked if we could get lunch. There are some people you go to in the most difficult times.

I remember parking along Penn Ave and meeting him in his retirement office at Neighborhood Legal Services. He was not one to stop working just because Pennsylvania has a mandatory retirement age for judges: he went back to NLS where he caused such trouble, the governor decided to put him on the bench.

We went to a local restaurant and sat in a booth. I began sketching out for him my idea for what became one of my firms. He humored me for a little while, before interrupting.

"Owen, it's great that you want to go out on your own and try something different, but that's not why you asked me to lunch."

So I told him and he sat with it for a minute.

"Are the doctors sure?"

They are, with a painful biopsy and all kinds of expensive tests to confirm.

"How old are you?"

37 years old.

"It's not fair. You're too young."

I told him I had to approach it thinking that I'm lucky to be alive at a time when organ transplants are possible. He shook his head the entire time I was saying this to him. The man who had spent 40 years on the bench doing his damndest to mete out justice could not tolerate what seemed so manifestly unfair.

"Your Honor: I have to accept this situation to get through it."

"Fine. I'll be angry for both of us!"

As much as anyone I've known, Judge Wettick lived a full life. He was active in his community, had many friends and somehow found time for us, was the paragon of what we hope our jurists to be, and loved his family dearly.

While transiting through that tunnel last night, I couldn't help but think how disappointed he must be in me for not doing enough. But I know that's not true: he was proud of me. After my transplant on January 22, 2020, the first call I received was from Judge Wettick. He left me a voicemail on January 23rd at 9:30 am. I still have that voicemail.

"Hi Owen, it's Tony Wettick. I hear you've had a hell of a night. Give me a call when you feel up to it. Thinking of you."

Simple and to the point. As always. When I called him back a day or two later, still with the giant central line sticking out of my neck, I could barely speak. I'd been intubated and had no strength. I whispered as much as I spoke.

Never one for small talk, he said he was happy to hear from my dad that the surgery went well but he was sorry I needed it in the first place. And then: "What books do you need?"

I thanked him and told him I was getting better and was determined get back to full health. I told him how much it meant that he reached out and that I was a lucky man to be alive and surrounded by wonderful people.

Again, that stubborn sense of justice kicked in.

"You are not lucky. I refuse to accept that."

But I am a lucky man. I am alive, for now, despite everything. I have rebuilt my life in the shape of something that suits me. And I was able to call Tony Wettick my friend.

I'm about to head over to my parents' for Christmas dinner and will put on a brave face so my mom has the Christmas celebration she desires. But that tunnel? It's on the way home and I think Clare and I will be making the walk.

Thank you for reading if you've made it this far. Tony Wettick is a man I wish you could have known, if you didn't. The best among us. The world is a poorer place now that he has left us. Now it's up to us to make up for it. Let's call one more person, reach out to that friend you've been meaning to hit up, take the time to do something meaningful for yourself or your family. We have only a short time on this earth. What will you do with it?

"He died at the height of his powers."

I was leafing through a new first edition of Camus's L'homme révolté I picked up over the weekend (Clare chewed up the spine of my previous first ed…) and found a clipped NY Times obituary of Camus hiding in the pages. At the time of his death in a car accident in 1960, he'd won the Nobel Prize a few years earlier (the youngest ever to win it) and was generally considered the heir of Thomas Mann to the title of Europe's greatest living writer.

He died at the height of his powers.

How do we know he wasn't about to level up? Is it just a polite way of showing respect? A way of saying he hadn't yet hit that near-inevitable wall, after which his work began to suffer from inconsistency or judgment? What would it look like if we could tap out before our reputations began to suffer, before we began giving our family and loved ones reason to remember a diminished version of ourselves?

And what if, despite our own ego, our friends and family like us better when we begin to soften? I'd imagine it's pretty common that we are a lot to deal with at the height of our powers. But there is something compelling – seductive – about "he died at the height of his powers" being the headline of your obituary, isn't there?

When I was younger, the age of 25 loomed large in my consciousness. Nearly all of my favorite writers published their first novels when they were 25: Mann, Dostoevsky, Camus, Pynchon, etc.

I earned my MA at 23 and set about pretending to write for the next year and a half. I did write, but it was the tedious writing that happens when you're writing with legacy in mind – divorced from the thing itself, like you're hovering outside the event, hoping it lives up to your fantasies. I wasn't doing the hard work of writing words and sentences, stringing them together not for posterity, but just to make sense of something. To learn what and how the thing was going to happen.

I turned 26 with a heavy heart. I had not joined the club. (But I had gone to law school! Running from a calling is strong in this one.)

When I go read those first, early works of great writers now, they read like the work of precocious youth: heady, but skinny, lacking the emotional heft of later, more mature works. They reek of promise but do not make a hearty meal.

Camus died at 46. At the height of his powers. I am now 43. I comfort and challenge myself with this thought: let's get this damned book out with the benefit of a life lived fully, closer to the supposed height of my powers.

L'etranger is a good book, but has nothing on La chute. The same is true for Budenbrooks v The Magic Mountain, V. v Gravity's Rainbow (although that is a closer call), or Poor Folk v any of Dostoevsky's post-Siberia novels.

It isn't a failure to miss someone else's timeline, and holding yourself to a timeline already missed is another form of hiding. "Well, if I haven't done it by now..."

Obviously, I am speaking about a specific thing I am processing, but it isn't hard to widen the aperture to see this phenomenon writ large.

• If I don't make partner by 35, I'll never amount to anything.

• If I'm not married and have a child by 30, life will have passed me by.

• If my business doesn't go seven-figures within 18 months, I'll be a failure.

This is the thinking of a child who doesn't have the experience, yet, to understand the task. It's easy to see this clearly when we look at others' lives, but damn it, we refuse to extend ourselves the same grace. I'm using "we" liberally here; permit me to make this claim only for myself and let you decide whether to ascribe it to yourself –

Even now, having been through the kind of living that lays quite bare the facile notions behind this thinking, I hold myself to those standards. There is still a part of me that cannot let go of this "failure."

He died at the height of his powers.

The logic of the statement insists: he still had more to give, perhaps his greatest work. It died with him and neither he nor we will ever have it. Would we have preferred to have what was still in the tank more than the early work? I would sacrifice Buddenbrooks to get Doctor Faustus 100 of 100 times.

And so what, really, is going on with this notion that we've failed? It lets us off the hook. At 43, I've lived enough to have some actual fucking tales to tell, some sense of the stakes. Experienced the lived terror of impending nothingness.

A few weeks ago, I received a message from someone who took exception to me calling myself a writer. "You haven't published a damned thing, and no wonder: you have a self-aware flourish that is unbecoming."

Son.

A writer is someone who writes. And I have experienced nothing harder than giving birth to a novel. I include having a major organ cut out of my body and someone else's stitched back in. Then learning to walk again. And learning to work through more physical pain than most people will ever experience once in their life. Writing is something I do because I cannot not write. I am not whole without it – and I've spent long enough being a missing piece. (Hat tip if you get that reference.)

For the first time in my life, I feel equal to the task. The mission still scares the shit out of me. But if experience is how we charge the battery of our powers, how we learn the things that are meaningful and ludicrous and devastating, then this is just part of the process. Maybe I'm a slow learner. Perhaps I'm lucky that I didn't meet the deadline.

I've learned what extending myself grace looks like: it's accepting that it takes some time to build yourself to the height of your powers and do the damned thing. Then you get stronger and do it again. And again. Wrest out every last drop.

Louis Colombo reminded me of a wonderful line from Nietzsche, which is one to hold close: "Some men are born posthumously."

Writers live odd, bifurcated lives. Both imminent and immanent. I'm (finally) doing my Work and I am aiming not to die at the height of my powers.

I aim to drain myself to empty.

Bitter Buffaloes tells true stories, even if not strictly factual ones. Cave lector.

When I was young, I got along much better with adults than with kids my age. This was true from the very outset, as far back as I can remember. Perhaps part of the reason is that my grandmother lived with us from when I was about 1 and a half until I was seven. We spent a lot of time together; she treated me as a fully capable person, didn't talk to me like a child, and taught me so much about how to talk about what we think and feel. My father doesn't much like children, so treated me as though I were a very short adult. (He loves babies and then loses interest until they can competently discuss the intricacies of the Siege of Bastogne.) I think I got used to that kind of no-nonsense adult-like relationship and found the things my contemporaries nattered on about to be banal, trite, and, well, childish.

Perhaps because of this, I frequently made friends with my adult neighbors. I have many crystalline memories of spending time in kitchens talking with my friends' parents as my friends watched The Land Before Time, of watching a youngish neighbor do woodwork in his garage as he talked with me about how it helped him get out of his head.

This week, I've been feeling alone in some things and I remembered an elderly man I made friends with when I was four. He lived several doors down and I remember hearing my parents speak about how his wife had just passed away. I think I remember my mom making some food to take over to him.

My parents, perhaps because they knew I wouldn't listen, repeatedly asked me not to talk with strangers. I was quite introverted with other children, but would walk up to adults and say things like, "You seem awfully unhappy." This led to some awkward conversations for my parents.

When I heard that Mr. Siegler's wife had died, I felt a pull to him, to get a sense of what it was like, to learn how he would process it. So when, a few days later, I saw him sitting on his front stoop, eating an apple and keeping his own company, I opened his gate and walked up to him.

"I'm sorry about Mrs. Siegler."

"Oh, I am too, Owen. I am too." He paused for a little while, looking at the sky. It had just stopped raining and his yard was covered with wet leaves. "Would you like an apple?" I took the apple and sat down next to him. Cars drove by with that buzziness that radiates from brick roads.

"Are you sad?"

Mr. Siegler was a slight man with long, delicate fingers. He was more likely to give a gruff head nod to you than to stop and chat. We both took a bite from our respective apples.

"You know, you're the first person to ask me that. Yes, I think I am." He smiled ever so slightly. "Let me tell you about my son in Seattle...."

For the next few weeks, I would stop by when I saw Mr. Siegler sitting on his stoop, always on the steps themselves rather than in a chair on the porch. One day, I asked him why he didn't sit in one of the chairs. "Oh. That's where Ann and I would sit together."

I remember being confused by this and asked him what he meant by that. For a moment, he furrowed his brow in what I now recognize as him trying to decide whether it was worth trying to explain a complex emotion to a four-year-old.

"Sitting up there without her makes her absence much more obvious. It makes me miss her all the more."

"So you feel alone?"

"I am alone, but what it makes me feel is lonely."

"I don't understand, Mr. Siegler."

"Hand me the end of your string, would you?"

Earlier that day, I'd "found" a ball of string in my parents' basement and claimed it as my own. I'd been walking around with it, measuring the length of things with the string, experimenting by holding an end of the string and throwing the ball (and being surprised that it went much farther when I tossed it versus when I threw it hard).

I pulled the string from where I'd tucked it in and placed the end of the string in his palm. He wrapped his fingers into a fist, the string escaping it from one end like a too-thin tail. He exhaled deeply, as though he was letting go of something heavy or preparing himself for something difficult.

"It's important for you to know there's a difference between solitude and loneliness. All of us are alone, Owen. It's part of being a human – no matter how many people we surround ourselves with...."

He pulled the string gently. "Feel that?"

I nodded.

"There's a string separating us, but we are still connected. You, over there. Me, here. Pull on the string."

I pulled. It didn't give; his hand held in place. Then he opened his hand and tied the string to a post on the railing to his stoop.

"Pull on the string."

I pulled. The string tensed and held.

"Same result, if your eyes are closed. But it matters what's on the other end of the string."

A couple of weeks back, I stated that I was going to scale back my LinkedIn writing for some longer-form work. By that I meant, of course, On the Record and Pennhollow, but I've also been itching to find an outlet for longer creative non-fiction pieces. And here it is: Bitter Buffaloes.

I'll still be writing OTR every other Saturday, but I wanted to have a separate and distinct place for pieces that aren't couched in the Trojan Horse of music reviews. I imagine Bitter Buffaloes will not be as regular as OTR and will often feature truly longform pieces – significantly longer than your run-of-the-mill OTR edition. I've been rereading Camus's Lyrical and Critical Essays, some of Joan Didion's early work, and (as always) picking up the Montaigne that has a permanent residence at my bedside. I admire the essay as a form, so here we go.

Two quick notes: I'm undecided as to whether to announce this new endeavor on LinkedIn. I figure if you've opted-in by now, you want to be around. (And if you want to continue receiving OTR but not Bitter Buffaloes, I think you can unsubscribe from this in your settings. If you have any issues, please email me and I will be sure to remove you from this distribution list personally.) But even if I don't push this on LinkedIn, I would love it if you could recommend this to someone you think might enjoy it, once you get a flavor for what I'm up to.

Second, a note about the provenance of the name Bitter Buffaloes. I don't think music will ever be too far from my mind.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing. I know it is often not super uplifting, easy, or heartwarming. Bitter Buffaloes will not be the revelation of a new style, but I do hope to break some new ground in the public writing that I've been doing over the past few years.

I cannot tell you how much your support, notes, and friendly disagreements mean to me.