What is This Place, Exactly?

I’m afraid. Of most things: of eye contact and small talk, of being perceived but also of being invisible, of what you think of me, of personal imperfection, of bobbitt worms (and most undersea creatures), of haunted birthday balloons that never quite deflate, of ballet dancer Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher from 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And of a seemingly inevitable end of the planet. I hate that damn doomsday clock. Surely as a dad, but really as a human, each second closer to midnight brings a new slew of overthoughts (what will it be first: climate [fire, flooding?], technology, general collapse, war?).

I have never had a glass-half-full personality, despite a glass-half-full life, for the most part. But you should know that I also grew up in an ethnoreligious culture obsessed with death, judgment/family separation, and “outer darkness” for the “wicked” (with talk of heaven as a Trojan horse), which did a number on my propensity for obsessive, marathon-running thoughts. I heard multiple times growing up, from people within my culture, about their anticipation of the end of the world. Ultimately—and this is a full post for another time—I left my upbringing behind because it was so focused on that future, on a potpourri of fire for the bad peeps and eternal light for the ones who stayed in line. And the more adult I got, the more I felt pulled to the poetry of the present. In other words, a culture focused on invisible dessert is going to miss the meal. I’d like the whole plate, pretty please.

So what is this Substack for, exactly? What is its purpose for living? All of the above is to say that this space is for me to find life in the present, what ever medium that takes. And that’s not to say I won’t be serious here often—I think diving into the hard topics is life-giving, no matter what emotions rise to the surface. I’m imperfectly fighting for hope, but not because it comes naturally to me. This is a writerly place for me to reject my hopelessness and to see how today’s moments are keeping me alive.

This is a space for me to forage for the honest and the bizarre, to rummage for the absurdities and oddities to delay the end of the world. Or at the very least to remind