Category: Life and Times
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Even in elementary school, I felt that reading comprehension tests were little more than exercises in restating the obvious. These tests often seemed to measure little more than our ability to regurgitate facts and details rather than allowing us to truly engage with the material. For me, the sign of good writing is if you…
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I was going through my archive of poetry scraps recently, and I stumbled across the idea I’ve had that revolution might be the only solution for our modern ills. It sounds overdramatic, maybe even defeatist, but I didn’t mean it in a warlike sense. I’ve never believed in violence as an answer. What I wanted…
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When will people begin to value their time properly? Time is the most valuable resource of all. It’s the one unrenewable resource every single one of us has, and none of us can gain it back once it’s passed. On this earth, we each have twenty-four hours in a day, but how we choose to…
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I’ve spent most of my life dancing in shadows. I don’t mean the ones cast by light, but the ones that settle into your bones and stretch behind your eyes. Melancholy isn’t sadness; it’s more like a lingering fog, much like a silent ghost that clings to my soul like dew on early morning grass.…
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Self-motivation is a strange creature. People love to preach about building good habits, as if stacking enough of them together will build you a better life. Sure, routines have their place. But no habit will save you if you don’t know why you’re doing the thing in the first place. More than anything, I’ve always…
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Fellow creatives, if what you create pisses people off, you’re probably onto something. You know the kind of hate I mean, that shows up with passive-aggressive silence, unprompted criticism, or your former friends whispering that you’ve “changed.” Well, good, because the writing process should change you for the better. Whether readers are changed by what…
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Letter writing allows me to be a better version of myself — not cleverer, but more honest. That’s the idea that circles in my mind every time I sit down and wonder why the old ways of communication still appeal to me more than the breathless immediacy of the digital world. I’ve thought about finding…
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There’s a line from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 classic “The Only Living Boy in New York” that occasionally thumps me on the forehead like a passive-aggressive post-it note: “I get all the news I need from the weather report.” That’s either poetic detachment or the kind of deadpan wisdom only a man in a corduroy…
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If there’s one literary genre that’s been overfed, underappreciated, and then revived like a phoenix in Doc Martens, it’s dystopian fiction. These tales of ruin, repression, and revolutions have long fascinated readers who suspect that somewhere between Big Brother’s all-seeing gaze and Gilead’s uterus-as-property policy, there’s a mirror held up to our own troubled world.…
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I’m turning 38 today, and I’m officially fresh out of patience for nonsense and performative pleasantries. The training wheels are off, my gloves are gone, and so is the leash I once wore to make other people comfortable. If you’ve read my work before, you already know I don’t suffer fools. As a Phoenix, I…