I’m up at 3:30 AM on Saturday, November the First, year 2025. No longer are these notes preceded by any identifier other than the date in year, month, and day format. I don’t believe anything else is necessary, since these are but brain dumps to organize ideas and brainstorm concepts for serious writing work going forward.

The emotion I feel right now is not so much excitement as it is a sort of relief. Many things went wrong this year as I tried to move forward from so much that’s happened. Over the past five years, I’ve been trying to reconcile everything that came before in life, love, and writing and everything that’s come to pass within this half decade. Two days ago I finally decided that I was done with messing about with my archive and restarting two websites multiple times. I needed to draw a line in the sand and step into a new era of my writing, one that is much more streamlined and doesn’t involve the creation of content for its own sake.

My relationship with the internet and the online culture in general has deteriorated to a point where I no longer believe that blogging is a viable creative outlet for me. I bandied about doing podcasts and even video content. I even almost committed to redirecting my efforts entirely in the direction of promoting independent artists of various ilks. But all this was abandoned in favor of deeper introspection and rededicating myself to a more intense focus on the ideas and concepts that I believe are being overlooked by content creation more generally. 

So much of what I read, watch, and hear are stopgap measures, diversions, and dangerous fictions curated by algorithms to either keep us complacent, stuck in feedback loops, or both. The online world has become progressively much more toxic, tribal, and insular. The cancer hasn’t spread everywhere quite yet, but it’s already bad enough where my more intellectual and deep-sought takes are either entirely ignored or lambasted for their verbose and often sweeping qualities. 

So, rather than continue to shout into the void or give into the toxic side of “community building,” I decided to move onto more incoherent and long-form writing projects. Some of these efforts will still appear on one or both of my websites. But as deriving income from my writing is no longer necessary for me, and commercial interests only a consistent distraction from my composition’s true aims, I’m in no rush to publish much of anything.

What I choose to write now is still a sort of essay form, but in such a longer form that it may become too unwieldy to create daily weblog posts. Instead, I will be curating the more important private musings along with far more structured dissertations on various subjects, with as I have previously promised but rarely delivered, a lot of source material that I have drawn from and feel is worthy of being perused. I’m unafraid of archiving the best of what I find that was previously available for free, although I will be careful to make sure I’m not publicly releasing original texts and content that is now intentionally behind paywalls or meant to no longer be available for public consumption. But as I’ve watched so much useful material evaporate over the past five years, I at least am going to maintain some level of provenance over the sources and individual outputs involved in my studies. Whether or not those sources remain public isn’t as important as I acknowledge them and keep some private record of what future use they maintain.

However, my writing goals are not so much ordered around a sort of compulsive curation that has bogged me down the past few years. Instead, I have four core ideas that I’m building around. I affectionately call these the CRAP framework. That acronym stands for Criticism, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Philosophy. I’ve since gone more in depth about why I chose these specific terms, and I will admit that Rhetoric was a late addition to the framework just because I couldn’t pass up the chance to build around such a silly acronym out of my love for lambasting the pure absurdities of modern society and humanity in general. 

In the most bare terms, Criticism is something that seems to be greatly misunderstood by the general public. It doesn’t mean being negative. Rather it means refusing to accept surface level judgments and opinions, no matter how well educated and regarded, never at face value. Rhetoric is sort of a necessary extension of my critical work behind the scenes, regarding how things are said and presented as much as the content, if not more so. Aesthetics deals with the optics of subjects and just considering the form and shape of things in general and how we humans have such wildly different perceptions of art and reality generally. Lastly, philosophy is self explanatory. I have many disagreements with classical philosophy and modern philosophy is a vast hellscape of derivation and “hot takes” often preoccupied with postmodern nihilism and doom-mongering, for lack of a better terminology. I’m seeking better language to define and expand on my own disillusionment with how education and intellectual life, especially in Autodidactic realms, could be improved substantially without too much complaint or misguided ranting to drag down the course of progressive and useful argument. 

Previously, I got so caught up in this feedback loop of providing labels for all these ultimately interconnected and wildly different expressions of ideas that have been with me for over a decade or more. As is often the case with long-suffering writers, we tend to write the same things in new terms and ways all the time. I continue to dabble in fiction, although I believe the best form of fiction I create at this point, and I don’t know why I failed to take this route before, is creating Socratic dialogues to help me work out my more messy ideas. It’s a proven format that I haven’t mimicked nearly as much as I should have in the past. 

Since putting out Tunes and Tails Volume One, I’ve refrained from publishing more than a singular novel for now. Frankly, being a novelist is something I should leave in my past. It doesn’t mean I won’t produce some works of fiction in the future, but my dreams and plans for sweeping fantasy series is something that I need to put in the grave and move onto more satisfying and interesting projects. I greatly hesitate to use the word productive as an adjective here, as productivity itself has become a greatly contested and highly toxic arena of debate. I would say efficiency and productivity are buzzwords we should probably throw out of the modern lexicon because their meanings have been twisted so dramatically over the last few decades that they have become meaningless except as excuses to ruin perfectly good people in their primes, myself included.

Now that I have gone on a bit of a ramble for over half an hour, I should try to get some more rest. Clearly I had too much on my mind to return to a restful state. At least it was concerning matters that I could rather easily express, compared to some of the more private and convoluted ones I’ve been dealing with over the past twelve months. Current events have somewhat forced me to take a more passive approach with news in general. My extremely limited outreach to any sort of media outlet at the current time is to maintain any semblance of mental health in what are easily looking to be brutal times ahead. But for both my sanity, and yours as the reader, I need to refrain from being as negative as possible and be as pragmatic and forward facing as is necessary and practical.

P.S. I wanted to note that the Sublime App newsletter today was titled ‘Every Job Must Become an Art or Die.’ And I have to say. I’ve been thinking that would be the case eventually. Interesting to see others finally come to the same conclusion!