Back when I was obsessed with craft beer, I homebrewed hundreds of gallons, earned a Certified Cicerone title, and immersed myself in the BJCP style guidelines. I turned every major beer style family into a haiku. This post is a poetic guide for beer geeks, homebrewers, and lovers of well-crafted ale.
Practice Cuts
I didn’t start cutting people out of my life as an adult. I learned it young. This essay explores how childhood divorce, forced self-reliance, and emotional withdrawal slowly morphed into a lifelong habit of distancing I didn’t recognize until much later.
Surviving the Empty
I learned early how to survive absence, how to leave without drama. Quiet, deliberate, and alone, I mastered the art of withdrawing. Rooms emptied. Voices faded. Doors closed. This is a reflection on solitude, early lessons in leaving, and the quiet skill of surviving the empty spaces life leaves behind.
Unrecyclable? Unforgivable. |
The Design Failure of Plastic Lip Balm Tubes and Learned Helplessness
Plastic lip balm tubes—single-use, disposable, destructive. This post exposes why these tiny, innocent-looking objects are a design failure, and how our learned helplessness has allowed a multi-billion-dollar industry to continue to dump trillions of them onto our planet every year.
The Myth of Good Writing |
A Diary of Sentences That Exist Anyway
I wrestle daily with whether my writing is good or shit. Most of the time, I write into a quiet vacuum, unsure if it matters at all. Yet the act itself—struggling, digging, pinning down fleeting thoughts—feels alive. It’s writing for me, for discovery, for sentences that exist anyway.
Anticipatory Disappearance |
On Survival and the Refusal to Grow Old
I’ve lived most of my adult life with the sense that I won’t grow old. At least not in the average sense we’re led to expect. Chronic illness taught me early that bodies fail quietly and often without warning. This isn’t an essay about dying. It’s about surviving, mistrusting the future, and refusing to lie about it.
Survivor’s Guilt Trip |
Ungratitude & Stolen Valor
About 4 years ago, I survived two strokes. But I’m fine—on the outside. Sometimes this survival feels like a burden, a quiet accusation whispered over years, trauma tinnitus. This poem explores what it’s like to live after trauma that leaves no marks, my resistance to gratitude, and the ungrieved self I lost along the way.
Six Strings, Borrowed Air |
Where Sound Becomes Movement
Six strings, borrowed air, and a body that remembers before the mind does. This poem explores how sound turns into movement, how resistance generates music, and how meaning is experienced—quietly, physically, and beyond language or technique.
The Great Blueberry Ballgame |
On Baseball, Blueberries, and Making Do
I don’t remember when I first heard this story—only that by the time I was old enough to question it, it already felt true. A small town, a baseball game, and a solution so wrong it worked.
The Cat—Who Was and Wasn’t—In the Hat |
Or: Why Can't Reality Just Behave Already?
Quantum physics is strange, slippery, and famously unintuitive. I wondered how Dr. Seuss would explain it. Let’s explore particles, waves, and Schrödinger’s cat through memorable rhyme and playful whimsy, so see if we can explain why reality refuses to behave itself.