The Clumsy Interloper

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  • Kota the Friend

    Speaking on behalf of all elder Millennials out there: If you have contravening evidence, please see the comments section below but be warned I’ll be over here like Juror 12 with my arms crossed and nothing but a glower for your efforts. Hip-hop used to have an outsized impact on my life. It was this…

  • Meditation Recommendation #1: Just Be

    My meditation practice is like a smoldering fire. The frenzied dance of modernity dampens the spark and that ember dwindles over time. Then, with a gust of inspiration, it can catch hold and drive my life for a few months, burning bright. The fickle flame speaks to my frenetic mind and my unconscious need to…

  • Cold Comfort

    Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter has penetrated my daily thoughts and made me critically examine my relationship with comfort and hunger. Consider the spoils of modern living – the climate controlled dwellings, the vehicles that transport us anywhere we wish, the array of food delivered to our doorstep, the handheld devices that contain the entirety…

  • Creative Biting

    Let’s face it: AI is everywhere. From your smartphone suggesting what you’ll type next to your car reminding you that it’s time for an oil change, there’s no escaping it. But when the WGA went on strike last year to defend creative writing as a profession from the digital creep of AI “authors” – that’s…

  • Guilty by Procreation

    The following is an excerpt from Glennon Doyle’s book “Untamed” poking fun at the societal expectations of parental responsibility throughout the last few generations: My grandmothers’ memo: Here is the baby. Take it home and let it grow. Let it speak when spoken to. Carry on with your lives. My mother’s memo: Here is your…

  • 🔥 & 🧊

    I change into my swim trunks and enter the sauna. An unforgiving wall of heat hits me as I gingerly sit upon the long wooden bench and cast a furtive glance at the thermometer – 220 degrees. My body is supple and my nostrils sting with each nose breath. I make pleasantries with my five…

  • Sober Curious: The Naked Mind (Part IV)

    When I came across a non-drinker in the wild, especially in a social setting where everyone was drinking, my mind instantly started churning out assumptions. Recovering alcoholic. Religious. Pregnant. Raised by Alcoholics. Designated Driver. Uptight. After all, these were the only possible reasons why a person would abstain. I had a highly ingrained narrative about…

  • Sober Curious: The Insidious Creep (Part III)

    Your Thirties. They sound so official. You have a partner, a mortgage, a child, a job with responsibility, a nice outfit for every occasion, a savings plan… finally, you have your shit together. However, this perceived arrival into adulthood is imbued with the angst of the dog who caught the car and now must decide…

  • Sober Curious: The Middle Way (Part II)

    “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life…

  • Sober Curious: The Inception (Part I)

    My relationship with alcohol started in the summer of 1998 while living in the Delta Upsilon fraternity house at the University of Virginia. It was the summer before my junior year of high school and the totality of my drinking career up until that point was having two screwdrivers at a sleepover freshman year while…

  • Ikigai

    I recently read Rob Bell’s How To Be Here and he highlighted the Japanese concept of Ikigai, pronounced “ee-kee-guy,” which integrates the joy and purpose we seek in our daily life. The term is a combination of the Japanese words ‘iki’ (to live) and ‘gai’ (reason), which together signify “a reason to live.” We’ve all…

  • Keys to the Prison

    Dialogue between two former prisoners of war: “Have you forgiven your captors yet?” “No, never!” “Well, then, they still have you in prison, don’t they?” Previously, when presented with idea of Forgiveness my literal brain was satisfied with the basic definition of the term and I pressed forward. My mind instinctively skipped ahead, assigning a…

  • Don’t Hassle Wim Hof

    Wim Hof is a Dutch motivational speaker and extreme athlete noted for his prolonged swimming in frigidly cold water and running half marathons in bare feet on ice and snow. His Wim Hof Method (WHM) involves willpower, exposure to cold water and breathing techniques. I will delve into my thoughts on cold therapy in another…

  • 256 Shades of Gray

    Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters > Grayscale If you already know where I’m going with this I want to offer an earnest, “Hear me out. I’m not a nut, I promise.” If you don’t have the foggiest notion of what this means then I have a modest proposal for…

  • My Mind-Body is a Temple

    The Ise Jingu of Japan, originally built 2,000 years ago, is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the solar goddess Amaterasu. I say originally built because every 20 years it is dismantled and rebuilt on an adjacent site to the same exacting specifications. The basis for this practice is the Shinto belief of tokowaka which emphasizes the renewal of…