It was a little bit of hell packed into a month. After years of that thing growing in my face, all the trouble providence lobbed upon me, I can say that this chapter is closed. No more waking up in the middle of the night in a puddle of cold sweat. No more mental images […]

I went into the woods. Here I am with the swamp maples and towering pines growing defiantly out of the sandy soil. I know these forests and the roads that take me here. I’ve known them all my life. In my memory they were dark green and haunting. Some strange juxtaposition of comfort and peril […]

Out on the street, I know how to hide. I move quick, flickering from pub to traffic signal under the yellow glow of streetlights and the muffled sounds of bass pulsating out of salt-caked Honda Civics and Ford Explorers. A blast of icy winter air whipping my face. Stress and anxiety is soldered into this […]

Our classics and great traditions are a corpse that we resurrect every time we engage with them. If neglected, they remain a corpse—rotten, dead, forgotten—to our eternal detriment. The collected wisdom of the ages, disposed with like so much refuse. When engaged with properly, they are made new and live once more to illuminate the […]

I’ve been taking my health for granted. I’m well into my thirties now and I’ve yet to have been hospitalized for any illness. On the rare occasion I do fall ill, it’s most likely a quick flu that lingers around for a day or two. Even then, it’s an event that seems to happen around […]

Modern humans have been on the planet for about 200,000 years. Civilization is only about 6,000 years old. We are still very much a product of that 194,000 years. We’ve adapted to our new surroundings surprisingly well given how rapidly our environment continues to change, yet we often and inevitably fail ourselves—or at least the version of ourselves we’re trying to be –because we are still subject to crushing biological law that has been part of our genetic makeup since before we were even the species we know ourselves to be today.

I’ve been fascinated with complicated surgeries and the surgeons who are capable of doing them since I was a kid — especially neurosurgeons, cardiovascular surgeons and transplant surgeons. I scour the internet for videos of brain surgery with some regularity. I enjoy watching them for the same reason I enjoy watching a symphony or a […]

I’ve been spread thin these past few months. I slipped away a bit from my intellectual pursuits. When that happens, I can always feel a part of myself being dragged away. It’s like watching someone you love drift off on a boat whilst standing on shore, belting out a tearful goodbye. There I go. This kind of stuff […]

Life is terrifying in its brevity. The sheer vastness of the world — the fact that there is just so much to take in and make sense of and then find something to dedicate your life to — is overwhelming. And what you choose better be the right thing. There isn’t really a whole lot of […]