“Afraid to lose control, caught up in this world, wasted time, wasted breath, think I’ve thought myself to death.” —Kongos
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I began writing publicly on this site in 2014. At the time, it struck me as a bit over-the-top having a website of my own, but then again, how else would a writer make his presence known? Back then, I didn’t know any magazine editors or other writers to call friends—which now, I’m very lucky to say, is not the case—nor did I have any idea what kind of writer I even wanted to be. I was a Reserve soldier recently discharged from Active Duty going to school with very little money, a pantry full of ramen noodles, and a car that wouldn’t start. I didn’t have the slightest idea of who I was or where I was going. All I knew was that whoever I was going to be, and wherever I was going intellectually, I wanted to take readers with me.
And what a hell of a year to begin a life of commentary!
2014, in retrospect, was the ultimate year of urban arrogance, and a very unideal time for a new writer to try to make sense of anything. A year, looking back, that really saw every terrible and mockable idea—political and social—reach peak popularity. Bullshit terms like “thought leader” and “social media influencer” were having their heyday, trigger warnings were a plague on assigned readings and syllabi, everyone thought TED talks would change the world, and Jon Stewart declared triumphantly on the Daily Show that 2016 would be the year the nation “turned bluer than a smurf’s balls after dry humping a bottle of Windex!” Even pop-philosophical discourse took a very odd turn toward the overly-sensitive and saccharine. Recall, for a moment, Daniell Koepke’s short-lived Internal Acceptance Movement—which galvanized an entire tantrum-throwing generation with derpity-deepities like “You aren’t a rock, immune to the shift and pull of the world around you. You’re the ocean. Always ebbing and flowing; easily affected by the moon and the weather. But immense and deep. Resilient and powerful. Bounding with life”—and you’ll begin to understand why I was momentarily tempted to domecheck myself with my Taurus Judge. You aren’t the ocean, people. You Aren’t… The Damn… Ocean.
But I digress.
Fast forward six years, and it’s good to see that we’ve at least started to acknowledge the repulsiveness of overly-confident liberalism, Woke Culture, and a millennial pseudo-profundity open to astrology being real but not gender. Shifting things back to the personal side, I never could have imagined what my reality would be like in 2020. Nor could I have imagined the incredible people I would meet along the way. Two books, 15 magazine features, and 17 countries later, I remain truly amazed at the dramatic turn a life can take in such a short period of time.
On my own website, as you can see, I was a child whose wonder could not be contained by any one subject… or, for that matter, any reasonable sense of humility or propriety; contending (quite confidently looking back) that Julius Caesar was the father of Brutus, that Thomas Jefferson was polyamorous, and that the Cold War was based on the lies of a Nazi war criminal. A poem was written, enemies were confronted, and so were friends. Random, delightful, informative conversations were had with the escaped wife of an Al-Qaeda fighter and with a Jack the Ripper expert. I endorsed a populist rabblerouser. I defended masculinity, social democracy, and romance. I kissed and told.
Which leads me to what this is all about: I’m burned out, folks. Too burned out to continue writing on here.
Long-form essays take a lot of time and research, and continuing to produce them on top of having a regular job, traveling, and writing books has come at the cost of my personal life. You can’t be a good friend, boyfriend, and family member when your goal is to write all the time, no matter what, in sickness and in health; and oddly, this mentality of always working on essays without a break has caused me to shelve other writing ambitions. In the future I would love to do shorter pieces for magazines with larger audiences (on my “wanted list” are Spiked, The Bellows, Jacobin, and even the right-libertarian Reason), and I also want to invest more time reading and writing fiction.
As far as the future of this website is concerned, the only portion which will become inactive is the Essays tab, while all other tabs will continue to be updated. Whether I’ll resume writing on here one day, or whether I’ll just have the essays which already exist be a kind of “frozen collection” of how I saw the world in my twenties, I’m still not sure. We’ll see.
Finally, knowing the day would eventually come when I would give my activity on here a rest, I never wanted to leave you empty-handed; so for the past seven years, I’ve been gathering articles from around the web by other writers that I feel provide a good snapshot of 2010-2020. Looking over the curation (20 essays in all), I can’t help but notice how the titles gradually became angrier and more activist. Such was the history of the decade I suppose. But while the times have been radical, only more time will reveal the impact recent years have made on the future of the country and world. Which is all the more reason to give this website a break. To let the dust settle.
Happy Holidays.
