rare is this feeling when tears come like water
from the stream
and i feel them so much that even my judgement of them means nothing

“so much”
i say in my daughter’s voice

“ i love them so much” she says, about everything
her purple pants
her babies
her bear
her kitty cat

we moved two days ago
a new house
a fresh start
though the tightness started earlier
months?
years?

always
except the brief and forever seconds of freedom
when we laugh
or the weird creepy light above the kitchen sink flickers
and everyone screams
or right now
when
for some reason,
or no reason, it finally lets go
and i can breathe
and remember
that there’s no bomb about to go off
unless i make everything perfect

i am as far from perfect as you can get
like you
like all of us
which is fine
good
inevitable

the problem comes when we forget that truth
and think it must be otherwise
like dogs in thunder
who forget there’s ever been anything else

1

i have a fear of i know not what

not a fear of not knowing, though i have that too, obviously,

but of starting to write,
of finishing,
publishing,
doing the thing because of what may come.

it’s weird to admit this, given how much time i have spent acting oppositely, sometimes even believing it.

2

one thing i will miss and that i want to cherish, now, forever, is how my 4yo son has no concept of personal space and thus is okay with my face 0.1 mm away from his, staring at him as he finds junebug on every page of richard scarry’s book.

i marvel how he doesn’t realize i’m staring, doesn’t find it annoying, doesn’t feel the shame yet of being seen like i do, like we all do, this supreme discomfort of feeling known

2

then there’s our 2yo daughter emma june

i want to save every little word she says and how she says it into a voice recorder. Naahcee. Sowwy dada, she says, too often, like her parents

or how after eating she’ll say yahmee

yahmee in my tahmee

all these words that feel hebrew,
like ancient ways of saying god

3

Last night Lauren was out so i handled both of the kids’ bedtimes, and afterwards i started panicking that they weren’t breathing so i went into each room to check and put my hand up to their tahmees and it struck me how small they both were.

especially emma june. She is a presence. She is the room and so is he and together they are the universe.

but there sleeping, face turned away, a dumpling in her dark blue sleep suit, I remember that she’s a dollop. A smidge. A nug if i’ve ever seen one.

Him too., though he bucks the trend daily, sitting there on his little spot in the corner of the couch and dominates it with his frame, the body that cries out for more bread NO NOT THAT BREAD THE BAGEL NO NOT THAT BAGEL THE OTHER ONE WITH THE CRUST AND BUTTER

PLEASE

I will miss all this, yet I will sleep good knowing I have not missed it. I’m here, face too close, taking in the big breaths of the little people who fill the space of my world.

4

i don’t want to forget the things my parents say either
their little what-have-yous

like how my dad says ‘army strong’ because he heard it once in a commercial

or my mom, after suggesting i do something super obvious like take tylenol, which I KNOW MOM, how in response to that she’ll raise her shoulders and look at my dad and say “Ok? I didn’t know that’s why i said it”

or how, when they offer help, they’ll both say in their thick beautiful russian accents, “shoulder to shoulder”

4

the other day i asked for help
from someone i’d admired
an internet friend

hey, i texted, can you help me?
i didn’t say that exactly, but that’s what i meant

all good if you can’t.
i’m honestly not sure why i asked
sorry
if you want we can pretend i never asked and i’ll throw my phone in the river

yes, the person said, i can help
and so we talked
and they listened
and i hated it
because i didn’t want to sit there in it

why? they asked, with silent kindness, not letting me tazman devil
my way out
with my jokes and ideas

i don’t know

they kept looking at me
and i kept not looking back

i thought i was past all this, i said

you have no idea how often i hear that, they said

and perhaps this is why
it is so hard to stand so close to one another
cheek to cheek

because we have tried
and failed
inevitably, not getting exactly what we needed
because how could we

yet still
we ask
and
still
sometimes
we receive

becoming for each other the words for god
we’ve long forgot that we’ve forgotten

i don’t have to throw my phone into the river
i’m already there
with my brood
shoulder to shoulder
cheek to cheek

—

comments

1. how are you? i miss y’all

Leave a comment

that’s how it goes with toddlers.

you do one thing and...that’s it.

that’s it, forever.

you will never do anything else because don’t you see, dada, this is what we’re doing now.

this is all there is.

like right now, we’ve got the labelmaker out. Emma June calls it a phone. Hello dada?

Yes Hi?

Bye dada.

Oh bye.

Toddlers love a process and we’ve got this one dialed in:

1. emma june tells me a name

2. i type it out on the Nokia-style keyboard with little buttons for each letter

3. she smushes the white Print button with her sausage fingers and here it comes, VRRR out the side.

4. we push the cut button together on three - 1, 2, 3, SNIP and

5. we’ve got it now, the little label that says EMMA JUNIE - that’s what her older brother Wilder called her once, and now it’s stuck like a label except you don’t have to spend 10 minutes clawing at it with your nails to figure out how to actually make it stick but

6. eventually we do, we figure it out, by folding the label long ways like a hot dog bun, revealing the two long halves of the adhesive.

7. i take one half off, then the other, and i hand it to her, ready to stick. She takes it to the door and slaps it on there, diagonal and off and perfect.

Good work all around. What’s next?

“Wilder” she says, so I type WILDER - that’s her 4yo big brother who loves her because she’s insane just like he is, and they seem to be the only two people alive who don’t yet spend their entire lives trying to convince the world otherwise.

I print and snip and peel and she takes the label and demands I stay there, by the label maker, in case maybe she has an idea for a new label while she’s away.

But i don’t stay there. I walk back to the computer which is a good three feet away from the couch and two feet from the door (the three things make a right triangle if you can believe it).

I’m by the computer because I want to write this down - this essay right here - because i can feel it happening, this story, in real time, which happens sometimes, except usually I get scared and anxious when that happens like ‘oh shit here we go’. Usually, I panic because I know the story is worth sharing and I won’t do it justice. How could I? And I’m ashamed that I’m not in it fully, that i’m already outside of it, looking in like a sweaty archeologist of my most precious little moments because i’m there at the scene way too early, the dinosaurs are still alive, chomping down on grass and looking at me like “huh,” but there i am, waiting for their fossilized remains, grubby pawed and mustached.

But not today. Today I’m good, somehow, typing out the next name - LUCA - Wilder’s best friend. Emma June hits the print button and we push together, 1, 2, 3, snip and peel and she’s off to the door so i have three seconds to write until we’re back for

PENNY - Luca’s 9yo sister and Emma June’s best friend - snip, peel and

DADA - snip, peel, and

MAMA - snip, peel, and

EMMA JUNE this time, not JUNIE - snip peel and here’s Wilder exploding through the door, all purpose and sleep eyes.

“Mama said check your texts.”

I go to the computer and follow the blue dot: two new messages from Lauren:

Breakfast menu options:
Avocado toast
Oatmeal
Eggs
Sticks

and

Your waiter will
Be with you shortly

“Are you the waiter?” I ask and then remember Wilder likes to be called The Bringer.

“Are you the bringer?”

“For pretend,” he tells me, “so what do you want?”

“I want...what do you want?” I ask.

“Oatmeal”

“Then I want oatmeal too Emma June do you want oatmeal”

“Yesh”

“Oatmeal for everyone” I say and he looks pleased, like his work here is done. “Do you wanna go tell mama” I say.

“Ya” he says and loiters, led by his limbs, touching stuff, pushing things, kicking.

Back over my shoulder, I see Emma June with several new MAMA labels in her hands. How?

VRRRR comes another one as she turns the label maker on its side to get more leverage and pushes with all her weight down onto the button and CLIP and yep:

I was no longer needed. All of parenting, boiled down to this one moment, with MAMA labels scattered across the couch.

“Wilder wait,” I say and print out a new label: “This says OATMEAL, go bring it back in to Mama as our order.”

He’s gone and Emma June says “Hyelp Dada” like she’s in a soviet melodrama. Everything she does, we’ve realized, is quite soviet - the lost for words sadness, the overjoy at sharing food with everyone, the need to be needed, all just like her dad.

And I am. I am needed, still, for the adhesive part of the process, and so I liberate the MAMA stickers and hand them each to her, one by one, as she takes each to the door and sticks it on before returning to VRRR and SNIP more OATMEAL ones for me to work on.

“Can I play with you guys” Wilder says, back now.

“Sure, what do you want to print?” I ask, handing him the label maker and noticing, over his shoulder, how almost all of the labels are on the doorknob, each atop the last.

He thinks as Emma June grabs the label maker.

“Mine!” she screams.

“No it’s wilder’s turn,” i tell her and somehow she’s fine? The dual plights of second siblinghood and patriarchy already wearing her down?

“What do you want it to say Wilder?”

“I love everybody and I set everything out.”

Come on. I mean...what the hell. I love everybody and I set everything out? Everything they say feels like poetry but this is beyond.

I type and print it - “I LOVE EVERYBODY AND I SET EVERYTHING OUT” which takes a long while like a fax machine with a timeless missive from the ancient past, the most meaningful and beautiful thing anyone’s ever said.

I hand it to him without undoing the adhesive, so he can bring it inside, and Emma June’s grabbing at the label maker phone and Wilder is growling.

That’s his new thing - growling like he’s got satan in him.

My new thing is screaming time out like I’m a really bad coach who lost the respect of his team years ago:

“Time out!!”

Nothing.

“Time out guys time out”

GRRRRR
MINE
GRRRR
VRRRR
TIME
OUT
GRRRRR
VRRRRR

Nothing stops it, but it does stop, briefly, as Wilder relents. “You’re a poopie head and never going to do this again” he says.

“Mama” Emma June says and so I print MAMA.

“Wilder” Wilder says, and I let him print it:

W
I
L
D
E
R
R
R
R
R

WILDERRRR

And then they’re back to screaming and crying and shrieking and there’s a VRRRR in my brain now because I am no longer enjoying the magic of living inside the story, not even a little bit.

I’m mad. Rolling my eyes for some reason. Wishing this would end even though I know I’ll one day miss it (allegedly).

Emma June requests we print her name and so I do - EMMA JUNE.

Wilder requests we print his name and so I do - WILDER.

Emma June requests we print her name and so I do - EMMA JUN - the label maker stops. There’s no more tape. It’s done.

More growling now and wailing, the shrieking of banshees that rise with the morning sun hey look at that I bet breakfast is ready let’s go get that breakfast!!

Emma June’s already at the door. She’s trying to open it, but she can’t because it is covered in labels. Besides the two she’d stuck originally to the door, every single label is right there on the doorknob, one on top of the other, this glob of white labels with all caps black text. How had I missed that?

Wilder tries to help her, but she pushes him away.

“HEEEYYY” he wails and we’re about to rinse and repeat except I scream “GUYS I GOT IT.”

They both stop and look at me, like “coach? is that you?”

Let’s all do it together, I say, inside the story and aware of it, the archeologist and the dinosaur, not extinct, not yet.

I put my hand on Emma June’s hand and Wilder puts his hand on mine, one glob of sausage fingers covering the globe of MAMA upon DADA upon EMMA JUN upon WILDERRRR upon OATMEAL upon OATMEAL upon OATMEAL and it’s 1, 2, 3 - SNIP - and we’re out.

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lets talk about it?

1. thoughts?

2. labels?

3. reactions?

5. how are you ?

6. what’s your go to toddler breakfast (answer whether or not you have kids)

8. how are things since #5?

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My, how the turns have tabled.

It is the year of our lady 2026 and have not, kindly nor otherwise, shut the fuck up about AI.

Far from it.

As Usher once said, this is my confession Pt 2.

confession pt 2

I’ve been afraid to admit this to you.

You being my both are true readers. The BATheads.

What’s the opposite of a parasocial relationship? Sarapocial? Yes. Sarapocial.

I’m in a sarapocial relationship with you all and am worried, nay, terrified, about what you’d think.

That you’ll judge. That it’s bad or cheating or ruining the planet.

I don’t use it for my writing. Not really. Whenever I try, I end up feeling gross and weird and end up rewriting it. Or when I don’t, when I keep the fully AI-written stuff, I feel gross after the way one does after watching porn.

Yes, i orgasmed, but at what cost?

I use it for everything but the creative stuff. Like how what’s his name said “make your life ordinary so your art can be insane”?

Flaubert. That’s who said it.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

–Gustave Flaubert

Well, my brain makes my whole life feel insane and violent, especially the boring and mundane parts like scheduling and keeping track of ideas and obligations and 100 other things that ADHD + OCD make impossible.

The past year and especially the past few months, Claude Code has made all of that stuff...easy? Manageable? Fun? Regular, sort of, but not exactly* there’s a lot of dopamine happening. It’s addictive. It’s an addiction loop, many are saying. )

so what do you do with ai?

Yesterday a friend asked me what I do with AI.

“Websites,” I told her. “I make websites. For everything.”

Like for bits and dumb ideas and also for sharing stuff with and for clients. The first thing I made with it was a website for my friend’s bachelor party that was fake and dumb and full of jokes about cocaine. We spent all weekend sitting around talking about our feelings and didn’t follow the google doc I wrote up even a little bit which included, I must share because i am proud of these jokes:

• Fri night - Watch documentaries about strip clubs

• Sat night - Watch documentaries about the future and business opportunities there in

• Sun night - Call a sex hotline and each talk for 5 min about our deepest fears
  

my ‘chief-of-staff’ (actually gets crazy useful)

I built a Chief of Staff to manage my life - all my clients and deadlines and ideas. It updates in real time as I give it updates and it remembers everything I do. And perhaps most importantly, I built it to do things in alignment with my values, which it also remembers lol. Here are the values I put in there:

Every morning, I run the ‘chief-of-staff’ and get a big list of all the shit I gotta do.

Sometimes I can look at it and feel good. Other times, it overwhelms the bajeebus outta me, so I ask Claude Code to show me everything in an HTML web view where I can click little buttons to decide on what the next action is for each thing.

It’s not hooked up into anything - just a view on my local computer - but when I’m done, I copy all of the updates (which are just text) back to Claude (i had it put in a button that let me do that) and then Claude Code updates the files accordingly.

It’s pretty sweet:

my ‘ai thesis’

Ever since I was 9 years old scrolling through WWF forums and googling “big boobs big pictures cars”, I’ve felt a strange oneness with computers.

My favorite and best subject in school was math, especially geometry and especially proofs. If x, then y. If 0, not 1. Boolean as a cube, baby.

I built forums and created weird online games including Survivor: Ukraine, an internet version of the TV show Survivor in which strangers from the internet who somehow found my game were split into two tribes, competed in weekly online challenges, and voted each other off.

I’d code little websites. Run forums. Nerd shit.

And most importantly, I could search. I knew, before most, how to Google.

Not just use it, but use it well. How to filter for certain results, limit the results to certain date ranges or file types or whatever.

This, I believed back then and continue believing now, is why everyone thought I was “smart.”

I think we’re in that moment again, but with AI. Being good at it WHILE MAINTAINING AND ACTUALLY STRENGTHENING YOUR VALUES AND SOUL gives you a leg up, both in the world but also inside that very soul of yours that you must protect at all costs.

For me, that means using AI to help me manage my life so I can be an absolute psycho in my work. And for me it means using it in a way that makes sense to my brain, that’s creative, dumb, and full of bits galore.

and it seems like other people agree

I posted about the chief-of-staff setup on Twitter and it went viral.

I then decided I’d see if other people wanted to learn about this stuff and launched a cohort called Code For Creatives (built the whole website with claude code too).

$500 for 5 weeks of me teaching everything I know.

It sold out.

I then realized that there wasn’t a single time that worked for everyone, so I added a 2nd weekly slot (same material) and it sold out again.

We’re in week four now and I’m having a blast teaching it. Not just because I genuinely nerd out on this stuff, but because I get to wrestle in real time with the hardest questions that surround all this:

1. what do we do when the ai can do everything?

2. is this cheating? if not, why the fuck not?

3. what are the ethics around telling other people when you do and don’t use ai?

4. where do you draw the line? or do you have the ai draw it for you? it does good straight lines

5. what do you build when you can build anything? and why is the answer annoyingly, always, ‘taste.’

6. Is the obsessive building a coping mechanism for the terror of a brave new world run by muskbot lobsters?

7. are we human, or are we daincers

cohort 2 starts march 2nd

If you’re interested, the next cohort starts the week of March 2nd.

We’ve got 4 slots left now for $650. Once those sell out, I’ll start selling cohort 3 spots at $750. If you wanna grab one, click here and apply or just reply to this email.

sign me up maybe!

So...what does any of this mean?

I have no idea. But I’m trying hard not to shame myself about enjoying something that I can make money doing. Big ups to Existential Kink tyvm.

I want to hear from you but first some FAQs:

i want to sign up but i have questions - lots of em!

There’s a bunch of info on the website here AND yes plz just reply to this or email me for answers.

where do i follow more of this??

I’m gonna write a lot more about this stuff, especially the ways I’m using it, at a different substack I made called codeforcreatives - you can sign up for that here:

code for creatives

you can build stuff, i'll show you how

By Alex Dobrenko`

I also send emails directly about it because I’m learning how to run things outside of Substack. If you wanna get those instead, or in addition, you can just sign up on the website at the bottom

is this goodbye?

what the hell are you out of your mind?! NO. This is hello, world.

I’m sorry. I had to.

But fr, this is me hopefully writing you a lot more and mostly not about this AI stuff lol. It’s me sharing the truth that sat atop the other truths and wasn’t giving them room to breathe.

I’ve got like five half finished essays about the kids. One about Helene. And like 100 more that I forget entirely. Hopefully Claude can remind me about those.

are you (alex) worried?

Yes, but I’ve always been worried.

are you (alex) more worried than normal?

Not really. But that’s because I’m excited. And as fritz something said, fear is excitement without the breath.

what if i just want the ‘chief-of-staff’ setup?

I’m in the middle of building that out into a standalone product that I’ll sell or give away, and then offer a 1:1 call thing where I set it all up for you and provide support etc. If you’re interested in that, let me know here.

why?

Prob the biggest question that requires a bigger answer. But in short:

1. I enjoy it

2. I enjoy helping others with it

3. I perhaps most enjoy not begging people for $8 subscriptions for Both Are True as much.

your turn - COMMENTS TIME

ok i wanna hear from you for real.

1. do you hate me?

2. do you hate ai?

3. where are you at with all this? how are you making sense of it?

4. are you sick of people talking about ai so much? do you wish they’d stfu about it? what do you wanna talk about instead let’s do it

What if you secretly love all the hard things in your life?

That’s the core idea of Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink, a book recommended after a 3AM WhatsApp chat in which I complained about stuff in a way that proves the entire thesis of the book:

Love all the terrible stuff? That makes no sense! But neither do the holy trinity of beliefs that currently make up my personal religion:

1. I hate myself regardless of what happens.

2. I refuse to accept that I might be good at anything

3. Being happy generally speaking is lame and pathetic!

And lemme tell ya, these things not making any sense does not in any way stop me from believing them!

having is evidence of wanting

That’s the first big truth Elliot suggests you try on: having is evidence of wanting.

So If you’re experiencing something like self-loathing, and you’ve been experiencing it forever, there’s a good chance some weird demented lil part of you wants it to be so.

I’ve come across this idea before. Alfred Adler (whose work I’ve found most accessible via The Courage To Be Disliked), says that we secretly crave these negative states and thus create the conditions to keep experiencing them:

”You did not fly into a rage and then start shouting. It is solely that you got angry so that you could shout. In order to fulfil the goal of shouting, **you created the emotion of anger**.”

I remember reading that and going ‘what the hell? no.’ Because its insane. Why would i ever do that?

But with Elliot’s kink framing, it no longer needs to make sense. It’s an axiom - something “that’s assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow.”

That’s the key: I don’t need to understand it. I just need to see what happens when I accept that, despite how batshit insane it is, there’s a part of me that loves it.

so i tried it

“Ugh, I’m awake too early” became “oooh I love getting up this early!” because obviously some big part of me does! Honestly, most of me does, but I wasn’t letting myself feel any of it because Shaemus The Shame had decided it was a Bad Thing to do.

“Ugh I hate that the kids are watching TV” became “what if I secretly love the feeling of being upset?” Because some part of me does! The self-righteousness, the indignance, the “everyone else is wrong but me and if only they’d figure it out, they’d be like me!”

Now with that one, it’s funny because thinking it through makes me realize that it’s obviously insane, BUT that doesn’t change the fact that some part of it.

I don’t need to understand why (even tho I keep wanting to lol). Simply trying on the fact that I might be wanting it dissolves the shame I’d normally feel about it and makes me realize I don’t actually care all that much about them watching some TV.

The hardest one so far has also been about the kids and is just more broadly about how I can get so overwhelmed when they’re screaming and crying and trying to end one another’s lives like a bunch of rabid wolf monkeys.

But what if part of me loves that feeling of overwhelm? Because it makes me feel like a good parent or simply because it feels good to be totally obliterated by forces of nature more powerful than I could ever be. Because then, I don’t have to do anything or strive or anything else. But admitting that would be insane, so instead I get mad about it. And the getting mad feels good too.

Maybe? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter!

What matters is how different these experiences have been. Instead of shame, I feel curious, playful, and goofy.

And it’s the shame - that second arrow that follows whatever we first feel - that kills you.

With existential kink, shame’s second arrow becomes a hug.

my kink

My biggest kink is feeling like a failure. I love that shit. Complaining about it and how much I wish I could be successful if only I didn’t get in my own way. But what if I secretly love getting in my own way. What if part of me wants to stay a failure forever?

What if I enjoy people saying, “Oh no buddy, you’re so great. Why don’t you see that?” Maybe I love how much people care and want, how much attention I get that way. And how maybe I love that kind of attention, that, “Oh, but don’t you see what we see? Don’t you see how great you are?”

It’s hard to admit that I love that. I worry that I’m a manipulative psycho. And maybe some part of me is! We all are!

But again, I’m falling into the trap of justification. I don’t have to prove it or justify it or apologize for it. It’s just a weird thing that maybe I like.

And I definitely don’t need to change it. Because usually I’d be like, “Oh okay, maybe that is true. Well then I guess I got to change everything.”

No, just enjoy it. Savor it. Just admit for a little bit that you like it. You love it.

And that’s I think the core thing: by admitting you like it, you allow it to come out of the shadows and paradoxically no longer need to take up so much airspace in your mind.

fear is excitement without the breath

I’ve felt lighter this week. Excited.

Excited! And aware of my excitement AND willing to share that with you.

That’s new.

I never feel excited, and when I do, I don’t dare actually admit it. What is this, chicken soup for the soul? I’m a hardened emo sad guy creative genius who’ll never be seen by the world for the true generational talent he really is.

“Fear is excitement without the breath” - Fritz Perls

Elliot quotes Dr. Perls in the book and I gotta say, it makes a lot of sense. I’m afraid all the time and I suck at breathing!

Because - say it with me - part of me maybe likes it! To stay small, afraid, what have you? I don’t know and I don’t need to. For now I’m gonna keep skipping the But Why Loop and ya know what, that feels pretty damn sexy.

Even that word: sexy. I never say that without 19 layers of irony around it. Earnestness is hard and sexy too. I fear it and yes, part of me loves that fear.

So what do I do now? Am I supposed to just...love everything? Accept it all? Like a psycho? It makes no sense, which means it might just be the kinkiest move of all.

let’s hear em!

1. what are some of your existential kinks?

Leave a comment

please don’t pay for both are true

This essay is part of the Sum Flux v.2 zine - check out the whole thing here.

I was driving when I noticed it, this feeling, exploding through my body like the shards of ice we'd yesterday broken across the frozen lake. The crackle sparkle of each tiny piece gliding across the surface, tshhhhhhh in all directions.

My parents were visiting for Emma June's first birthday and the weather had finally warmed up to a scorching 45°F, so we'd gone for a walk around the still very much frozen lake.

Inspired by the band of ten-year-old boys throwing blocks of ice bigger than their heads off the dock, three-year-old Wilder and I started throwing ice too.

Lauren joined in.

Tshhhhhh.

My parents, both bundled up in all black like Soviet penguins, stayed back about twelve feet with Emma June.

It’s a magical thing, to watch a brick of ice shatter and glide across a perfectly sleek sheet of frozen lake. Like ASMR for your soul, it feelsounds perfect, though I couldn’t enjoy it much with Wilder having his little shitfits about the sticks not being strong enough to crack the ice. True tantrums, stomping and jumping in rage before melting into a defeated puddle.

Looking up at my parents, I was pissed at them too. Why didn't they want to come closer, I felt my little self scream, stomping and jumping in rage inside my skull. I wanted them with us, hurling cold cold ice across the frozen surface, laughing, being silly lil guys.

They are not risk takers – living in Ukraine for most of their lives was risk enough. Here, in America, they play it safe. Once they find something they love, they do not stray. Democracy, Toyota Priuses, and their most revered of holy places, Whole Foods.

Every morning of their visit, before coming to see us, they'd first visit Temple Whole Food to pay their respects and buy salmon. On the second day, when they couldn't find salmon, my dad asked the guy working the hot food counter why they couldn't just cook some of the fresh salmon they had in the fish department?

"No we can't do that. The salmon for us comes pre-cut. We can't cut it ourselves," the guy said. Pointless bureaucracy, it turns out, knows no borders.

This injustice left my dad no choice but to use his "O" word.

"O word??" I asked.

"Outrageous," he said.

This wasn’t the first letter in his growing Alphabet of Grievances. On an earlier visit, also at Whole Foods, in response to something to do with their cheese, my dad told me he was forced to use the U word ("Unacceptable").

A history of passionate discussions

My parents and I have a history of fights, or as my dad calls them, "passionate discussions in which all sides try to convince the other of their point."

About seven years back, in the heat of one of these "discussions," I distinctly remember my dad using the P word.

Perfect.

"We are perfect parents!" he said, not a shred of awareness at how insane of a thing to say that was.

All of our fights back then, in my pre-Covid early-thirties, were about the same thing. They were worried about my career as an actor/writer in LA and wanted me to consider finding a Plan B (B is for Plan B).

This enraged me. For one, I had a full time job on top of all my creative pursuits, and for two, why couldn’t they just believe in me??

As an artist who could make it. As a man who was in control of his own life.

Anything they did, however neutral, became further proof that they thought I sucked and I’d pounce on it, hearing in their words my worst fears come true:

They'd say, "you need a more stable career," I'd hear "you don't have the talent to make it."

I'd say "why can't you just believe in me," and they'd hear "Wanna see me destroy my life hehehahao."

Them: "We are the way we are." (We don't understand this world.)

Me: "So am I!" (I don't understand this world either.)

Them: "Why can’t you accept us as we are." (We cannot accept you as you are.)

Me: "Because you won’t accept me as I am!" (I will not accept you as you are.)

Different versions of this same fight built atop one another until, one cold night, I got more mad than I’d ever gotten before. A thirty year old man, I had a full blown tantrum of screaming before declaring that I was done. I was leaving.

I went upstairs, packed my stuff, and told them I’d walk to the hotel nearby.

“Wait!” my mom screamed.

I turned around - an apology? A realization?

“Take the cereal I made you.”

She handed me a freezer-size ziploc bag of her specialty cereal - baked oats with honey and raisins and craisins. It’s super good and of course I took it, and then huffed and puffed my way out. Goodbye, and thank you for the cereal.

do you remember?

The day after my parents flew home from this last visit, I called them and asked if they remembered using the P word in that fight years ago.

"We never said that," they said.

"You definitely did."

"When," my dad asks.

"I don't know seven years ago?"

"I need to check my journal, I don't remember us saying that," he says, the closest thing to an admission of guilt I'll ever see.

"Don't write anything bad about us," my mom said.

"I'll send you guys a draft of whatever I am going to publish," I told them. That's our system - I can write about whatever but I send it to them first.

They kept thinking out loud, talking to each other while on the phone with me, about what perfect meant. “In ice skating,” my mom says, “there’s perfect. 10 out of 10.”

“Yes but life isn’t ice skating.”

then what is it (life)?

I think for so long I needed my parents to be the bad guys so I had something to rage against. I'd wield lines they said ("we are perfect") like cudgels to show that I was the victim. Here, your honor, is why my life is fucked.

Soon after that incident, my anger stopped boiling over, freezing instead into an icy sheet of resentment through which I saw them everything they did, self-fulfilling prophecy style, as further proof that they believed that I sucked.

But ice can only stay frozen for so long.

something is changing though

When my parents first got there on the trip, and my mom was in the kitchen laying out the Whole Foods purchases for the day (cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pita), I distinctly remember feeling that I was really glad they were there. I even said that to my mom as I gave her a hug and kissed her head: “I'm really glad you guys are here.”

And that feeling I noticed while driving home after they’d left from this last visit - the tshhhhhh of cracking ice - it was my icy sheet of resentment finally thawing into something else.

Sadness, pure and unadorned. Tender sorrows for the time lost to anger, sadness for their struggles, sadness for my own. But mixed with that sadness was something else:

Love. For the cereal, for the grievances, for the chance to throw ice into a lake in the USA with my son while they watched, just feet away and not any closer.

We are each of us little nations full of pointless bureaucracy full of an entire alphabet of grievances we have no idea what to do with.

But what is a grievance, if not a stop on the road to grieving.

It’s right there, inside each word:

Right there in Outrageous is the word ‘rage.’

And there inside the U-Word, Unacceptable, is the big one. The mother of all feelings: accept.

Acceptance is the hardest thing, and the most essential. Acceptance of what is and what isn’t, what might be and what never will. That nothing is perfect so, in a way, everything can be.

We become who we are in response to not only who our parents are, but who they’re not.

The glass doors of the hotel tshhhhhhhed open. “I’d like a room for one night,” I said, my suitcase dragging behind me.

“Sorry, we don’t have any rooms.”

Well fuck.

Too tired to walk, I called my dad. “Can you come pick me up?”

We drove home in silence.

I walked upstairs, dejected only the way a person who has been given everything can be, and went to sleep, the freezer bag’s worth of cereal still in my bag.

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Comment

1. Have you heard that noise ice makes when it breaks on ice?

2. Do you or have you ever had parents? Discuss.

4. Any good stories of fights you’ve had with family that in hindsight were hilarious like the cereal incident?

5. idk i’m really tired from this one so maybe lets all just chat in the comments? I’ll be around

6. love u

   Leave a comment

We’ve got this detached office in the backyard. It’s like a shed that feels like a sauna because of the wood paneling. Is it called paneling?

There are so many words that all basically just mean ‘wall’. Recently I learned the outside of a house is called ‘siding’ when Lauren kept talking about what color we’d paint the siding in our new home (soft launch btw: we finally closed on a home).

“What is siding?” I finally asked.

“The outside of the house everywhere except the ‘trim.’”

Whoever’s in charge of houses sure did a good job rebranding every little part of them so they could charge more for them. No wonder houses are so expensive - you’re not paying for walls, you’re paying for SIDING and TRIM like you’re in a fuckin dr. suess book.

but anyways

I’m in a shed with wood panels that feels like a sauna except for one key detail: it’s cold as shit, especially in the hour of fourAM when I go back there.

Today, at 4:11am, it was a whopping 14 degrees.

I dread going back here to start the day. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, making the ten foot walk. It haunts and taunts me. I won’t make it. I’ll crumble.

Now, at 507am, it’s skyrocketed to, I don’t know, 40? 45 degrees maybe? Actually I have a meat thermometer inside let me go check.

Ok it’s officially 15.6 degrees outside. I stood out and waited to see what it’d be until it got down that low.

Watching it drop, smoke from my breath emerging only from my phone’s flashlight like the phone was a dragon, breathing heavy, watching this red balloon of a thermometer, down to 15.3, then 15.6. Cold.

I stuck it into the dirt then, only a few inches, and it spiked up to 34.1, more than double, more than freezing. Warm.

Inside now, in my cold sauna, it’s hot as hell - 55.9 and rising, all because of this little wall heater, good and strong, that you turn on with this dial on the top of it, nestled underneath its ‘heat panel’ which I’m sure has its own fancy name.

Every morning I spin it up to the MAX - that’s the number, it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 MAX (like a dial that goes to 11).

It took about an hour today to get this warm, and soon it’ll probably get too warm and I’ll turn it down to a 2 or 1 because I’m walking on this treadmill and I’m getting sweaty and soon I’ll have to take my sweatshirt off and then I’m just in my sweaty undershirt like an idiot animal guy walking and writing and making trips back and forth between here and the house which is actually the thing I wanted to talk to you about:

the thing i wanted to talk to you about

I’ve noticed that once I’m warm, I don’t mind the trips between here and the house. I barely feel them. Maybe that’s the coffee in me or the big thoughts or just the body heat - who knows (the scientists have no idea don’t even ask them) - but regardless my body is cooked up enough with energy that I sort of enjoy being out there, like when I standing out there earlier watching the meat thermometer. It felt fine. Good even, like a cold plunge at a bath house which I’m quite good at, by the way, lasting a full 4 minutes in the freezing water last time I went with Lauren, much to her dismay.

She watched me from across the long room of Sauna House making big motions with her hands of “get out of there” but I didn’t, instead doing one of those tongue to the side, eyes to the other side moves that the kids do. Then I got out and my whole body shivered for a good five minutes as I sat next to her and we discussed the trim and the siding and the other words for walls.

But wait I keep getting distracted.

it’s a metaphor

The thing I wanted to say is this: it’s a metaphor, this whole cold room that gets warm thing, for a creative life.

Lemme see if I can make this make sense.

Going out to share your work into the world, into nature, it can feel very cold. Indifferent, as Werner Herzog might say, to you and your magic and heart and warmth, dead to it, uncaring.

Unless you’ve got the warm place, the cozy home that your body remembers and knows you’ll soon return to.

Then, the cold stops being cold. It feels fine. Good even.

So the question becomes: what’s the warm cozy sauna of a creative life?

I’m not sure but also I am: it’s people. Other people. Community. Camaraderie.

We are each other’s heaters.

Otherwise I’ll run out into the cold and try to warm myself real fast with the things that look like love but aren’t - the online markers of connection - that, it should be said, aren’t fake, exactly, because they do mean something, but maybe only if and when you’re warm already, good inside, whole. When you’re good whether or not they exist.

Because the cold is a fear and the warmth is the truth we can return to, I think, I hope, I believe, even and especially when it’s freezing.

It was warm in the womb, then we came out and it got cold, so we cried and the people who made us were there, bundling us up and keeping us safe until we could go out into the cold again, no jacket needed, no i’m not cold mom i told you, i’m fine, except i’m not. I’m freezing, sometimes, until i feel safe enough to say so, because what else is love if not the ability to say we need it? And in that honesty, because of it, the walls come down and we’re warm again, cozy, safe, if only for a little while.

the only thing the spiral wants is to keep spiraling.

the contents of your spiraling - the job thing, the text, the family squabble, whatever - it’s all simply fuel for the spiral.

the other day i was gifted the rare treat of spiraling about essentially nothing. The contents of my spiral were non-existent, and yet I spiraled nonetheless, down, down, and all around until I realized, after having a somewhat manic episode inside of a groupchat full of kind humans, what had befallen me.

this is that story.

the only thing the spiral wants is more spiral

It is a winter day, as they all are, when you spiral.

I’ve been building this little tool inside Claude Code, which is this AI coding thing I along with most of the Twitter.com world have been obsessed with. Man, I feel a lot of shame sharing this, like I’m betraying my writer brothers and sisters?

I call it Vibe Coach, or Ship the Vibe, idk, I keep going back and forth on the name. The whole idea is that all these people, myself included, keep coming up with ideas and getting manic and spending money and then not finishing anything. So this tool helps you finish.

I even use it to help me finish making it because I am nothing if not an ironic little guy full of whimsy and war.

And I do. I finish it. Put it on Gumroad for $99, which seems insane but I’m like “ya know what, people are paying $100 to $200 a month on Claude Pro Max plans and not finishing diddly, this could help and ‘add value’ so why not!”

Then I post it to this small subreddit called Vibe Coder Nest (shame intensifies) and I drop a link in WhatsApp chat for his Pathless Path community.

Then I get in the car to head home so we can all go see this art exhibit in the woods near UNC Asheville called BATLAND.

BATLAND!

It’s this art exhibit where you follow a hand-drawn map to find these hand-drawn bats hidden in the woods. It’s also a protest against the plans to turn those woods into a soccer stadium.

And I’m driving home, manic, anxious, full of worry about whether anything’s ‘happened’ with this thing I just launched.

Checking the WhatsApp chat to see who read my message. Nobody reacted.

Checking my email to see if any sales came through. Nothing.

Checking Reddit and - yep, my post was deleted. Removed for self-promotion, even though that’s what everybody on that subreddit does.

It’s a failure, I tell myself, and I need it not to be, even though it’s been six minutes and only six people in the world have probably ever even seen it. So there I go, spiraling and freaking out, and that’s when the blanket of self-loathing emerges: Embarrassed. Stupid. Ashamed. Fucking idiot, thinking this would work, rushing everything, shitbag moron, this is why everything fails.

“Dada look!!” Wilder screams as we find a bat in the distance, fifty feet up on a tree, staring down at us. “WHAT” I scream and we run toward it.

Lauren asks if I’m okay, says I seem like I’m somewhere else. I try to explain but don’t even know how to bring it up because it all seems so stupid.

I’m embarrassed to even tell her.

“Do you know what vibe coding is?” And she says no. And I think god what the hell am i doing.

The kids fight over the laminated map of the bats and Emma June NEEDS to be held but NOT by me, so Lauren doesn’t really have time to respond. Which I understand intellectually:

this is not about me.

But it still hurts a lot even though its not a big deal, like a gentle punch to the tummy that levels me, like the physics of reality have been broken, which makes sense: feelings are not physics, they are waves exploding, full of particles, both and all.

We cross the threshold from general toddler mayhem to meltdown mayhem and I’m getting snappy and short, so Laur says we need to go, “dada is getting hangry.”

And I say “I’m not hangry. I told you why I was upset and you ignored it.”

In the car now, having wrestled the kids into their buckles and straps, we sit, spent.

Lauren says sorry and i get more mad at myself because there’s nothing at all for her to apologize for. I’m not mad at her, I explain. Intellectually I get that its not at all her fault but still I just feel hurt? Ignored? Ashamed again for my insane illogic.

We get home. The night is hard but the kids fall asleep. We watch Pluribus together, which feels good. Too good, like I don’t deserve it. Because I’ve been a piece of shit all day.

And for what? The failure wasn’t real. No one had even seen the thing I’d put out into the world.

That’s the gift, actually, because it’s helped me realize: the spiral doesn’t care about the details - it is pure and hungry to feed on anything that makes itself make sense.

The spiral doesn’t care about reality. The spiral just wants the spiral.

post spiral post script (PS PS)

The next day, I spiral again in the WhatsApp chat and change the price from $99 to $0 and put it out for free. That leads to a few people reaching out to meet, some conversations that lead to me sharing more about what I’ve been building, which leads to Paul suggesting I tweet about it, which leads to this viral as hell tweet:

It’s funny because I almost didn’t include this part - the success - like it didn’t matter, because my mind doesn’t process good things as good but simply as nothings. That’s part of the spiral too. It’s selective as hell.

But reality does matter. Physics - matter - matters.

enter…the noodle

Instead of spiraling, perhaps I can simply noodle.

A noodle is a more calm version of a spiral. You’re just noodling, what’s the big deal!

Except of course a noodle can easily become a spiral.

And regardless of its velocity, the truth holds: all the noodle wants is to do more noodling.

So what’s the answer?

—

I’ve been waking up lately in the hour of four, high noon for the noodle and prime time for the spiral.

Noticing them both - awareness, annoyingly, helps.

I say annoyingly because part of me obviously likes the noodle. Loves the spiral.

Maybe the difference is simply in orientation. Noodles and spirals are active things. Verbs of movement. To notice feels more passive, observant - an experience more than a race. In one, there’s an end state, a goal of winning. In the other, you’re simply observing. Finite versus infinite.

Who knows?

Can you see it happening right here? My noticing is becoming a noodle. I’m looking again for an answer about how we shouldn’t look for answers. But then I noticed it, stepped back, and here we are, in the woods, amongst the bats.

We came back the next morning, the fam and I, to find the rest of the bats, except this time, we didn’t take a map.

comments, notes, updates

1. are you spiraling? plz check in

2. i feel like i should say: i don’t have claude code write my stuff. it helps me with copy editing a little bit and i’m playing with how else it can help but the words and ideas and thought and spirals are all mine

3. a lot of ppl seem interested in learning what i’m doing with claude code - if that’s you, add ur email here and i’ll holler soon with whatever i end up doing (workshop, a separate newsletter, etc)

4. unfortunately the rat bastards at city hall (or somewhere?) took down the bats which, as RustyNail put so well below, is a ‘load of manure’

   

   The biggest thing you can do to help is sign this petition - they have a goal of 25,600 signatures and are 9,644 away.

5. what about now? are you spiraling? they can sneak up on you. share if you want:

6. what about ai - how are you doing with it? should we do a live zoom event to just chat about it all? happy to if ppl want just lmk

Leave a comment

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This is of course how owls greet each other.

Which is of course why the popular british band The Who created a song called ‘who are you’ and made this frankly insane “promo video”

which, quick aside here, includes absolutely fucking epic music faces including:

and

but here’s the question

Today, on the 5th day of 2024, I am here to ask you all - who are you (hoo hoo)?

what do i mean by this?

i mean exactly what i say you absolute gooses (silly).

i used to do this, back in the old days of Substack when a post was a post, yearly subscriptions cost $50, and the very concepts of a “feed” or Substack Notes were mere spermazoas in the minds of Substack’s eliterati.

It was a simpler time.

But just because our little neighborhood has now become New York Frikkin City (Times Square), that doesn’t mean we can’t still be neighbors and say hi.

In fact, it’s much more important now than ever.

Which is why I am selling an eight week course NO

did that one get ya? did you start to hurl? there was a new word for hurl i learned the other day but i can’t remember what it was. bark? garf? squirrel? i’m not gonna look it up because i’m boycotting searching for answers this year

answers are out
questions are in

brands are out
humans are in

in is out
out is in

belly buttons of all types are still in

out lists are out
in lists are out

who cares is in
who are you is in
why are you is hot and in

boy this post got away from me a little bit
boy blank is out
girl blank is in

girl how are you?
girl who are you?

girl this post got away from me a lotta bit but here it is
and here you are

on the first monday of 2024
a year we’ll never forget

both are true is a place for me to find the others and lose myself
to dance in the rain of meows and ruffs
blabs and bluffs

so whatever you’ve got,
be it strikes
gutters
horseshoes
hand grenades

share it
wear it
but don’t you dare prepare it
for it is already there

in you
of you
waiting
for you

to give it a little time to whine and shine
pine
cosign

wait what?

great question glad you asked!!

I want everyone to say hi and connect in the comments!

Leave a comment

so please comment below and say hi and introduce yourself, say what’s on your mind, a question you have or an idea you want to tell everyone

Leave a comment

even if you’re someone who never comments
or comments always

Leave a comment

this is 2024
everything is new
life is a crying baby

Leave a comment

and for the BATHEADS of many years, you come say hi too, i miss y’all and wanna know what’s up and down and all around

Leave a comment

thanks for being here

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let’s make this one a year to dismember

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I loved the book and strongly urge / gently demand that you pre-order it now, ahead of the release, because that matters a lot when it comes to best seller lists which HUMOR ME definitely deserves to be on.

buy the book right now

Chris has long been a friend and loyal BAThead that readers may remember from this essay: "love myself? knowing what i know?”. He’s also the writer of and the host of the TED podcast How to Be a Better Human.

And hey look at all these nice things people are saying about the book:

“Warning: this book may cause repeated smiling. It’s a delightful read about how we can bring more levity into our lives.”
— , #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

“Practical ways to giggle more every day? Without enabling my crippling laughing gas addiction? Yes, please!”
—Bowen Yang, Emmy-nominated actor, comedian, and Saturday Night Live cast member

“Chris Duffy is the kind of writer who makes me angry. Not only is he hilarious, but he is able to do something almost no humorist can: Research. I came away from this book happier, full of information I can’t WAIT to bring up casually in conversation, and with a newfound appreciation of elementary school lunch reviews.”
— , Emmy-nominated comedy writer and bestselling author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me and Buffalo Fluffalo

“I missed my deadline for sending the publisher a blurb, because I kept re-reading passages, taking notes, and telling my wife my favorite parts of this book. Luckily, I got an extension so that I could write the following: What a wonderful book! Funny, wise, inspiring, practical, and many other positive adjectives. Thank you for writing it, Chris. ”
— , New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically

“Humor Me is, of course, a very fun read. But it’s much more — a master class in using humor as a powerful tool to build a more vibrant and more connected life.”
—Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Life

two highlights from our chat + a question for you all

We talked about a lot of stuff so just listen / watch you goofballs, but two things in particular I wanted to flag:

the ymca is listening

We talked about the elaborate tricks people (myself not included, legally speaking) employ in order to make the YMCA Men’s Sauna in Asheville hotter.

That was yesterday.

Today, I walk into the sauna to find THIS:

Now if that ain’t comedy, I don’t know what is.

humor isn’t about ‘being funny’

Comedy is about who’s funny. Humor is about who’s laughing, and they’re not the same thing!!

We tend to equate “a good sense of humor” with being the person at the center of attention—the one telling the story, landing the punchline, commanding the room. But that’s a narrow, performance-oriented definition.

Chris shared research showing that when people say they want a partner with a good sense of humor, they usually mean someone they can laugh with, not someone auditioning for a Netflix special. (Hetero men, apparently, are more likely to misinterpret this as “someone who laughs at my jokes,” which - come on fellas, let’s get it together here!!!)

The people with the best sense of humor aren’t always the ones making the jokes. They’re the ones creating conditions where laughter happens. They notice things. They’re generous with amusement. They’re willing to look a little foolish.

I find this hard, but I am working on it.

Alrighty, that’s it - go listen to the convo and buy the book.

buy the book right now

buy the book right now

buy the book right now

buy the book right now

what makes you laugh every time??

Wait! One big thing we talked about was making a list of the things that always make you laugh. Chris shared his top choice, this video:

My favs include this absolute classic:

and my fav comedy video of all time, Broomshakala:

question for you all

What’s a video or joke or concept or whatever that always makes you laugh?

Leave a comment

Remember when we used to write dates down on paper and the new year meant putting the wrong year on everything? What were we even writing down? Checks? Journal entries?

Can people change? Or is it all the same as it ever was?

Both, of course, you silly goose. We change like we always have, forgetting that we can. The tide waxes, the moon wanes, and the snake sheds its skin — what’s old is new, but what’s new with you?

Me, I’m reading The Four Agreements. The first agreement, which the author Don Miguel Ruiz says is the most important one by far, is “be impeccable with your word.”

We were talking about it last night at dinner. “I’m terrible at that,” I told Lauren, “always saying stuff I don’t end up doing, being late.”

This, she tried explaining to me, wasn’t really what it meant. But I didn’t listen because I was and, in this new year, continue to be, an idiot.

According to the book, being impeccable with your word means acting and believing that you are good and loved. The word is the truth, and the truth is simple: you’re a good little guy, lovable, whole, regardless of...everything.

The word is magic and being impeccable means harnessing its awesome power correctly.

Still lost? Same! Basically I think he means speaking and thinking from a place of love. Love for yourself first, then love for others, because that’s the fundamental truth of things.

Which means that every time you speak against yourself, you cast a dark curse spell on yourself. I do that all the time, like just now when saying that about myself.

This morning I woke up with Emma June and realized I hadn’t grabbed the iPad from the living room earlier so she could watch Gabbycat. For this error I said to myself, in my brain, “God, you piece of shit.”

Which I really did say. I clocked it in my head and then thought, man, that’s not good. That’s being “peccable” with my word, which according to the book, is Latin for “sin.”

Makes sense - my two pecs are absolute sins given how powerful they are. You guys should see me bench 155lb eight times, baby. All natural. No roids at all there in case anyone was wondering.

But that little “God you piece of shit” whisper is a dark spell I cast on myself, again and again, until it gets loud and proud and makes me rage with the fire of self-hatred: how could I be this way. No one cares. I’m a failure and no matter how hard I try, I’ll always suck.

---

Audre Lorde wrote something that feels like the counter-spell:

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used to diminish me.”

When you speak truth about yourself—real acceptance—the words lose their power to curse you. You take back the magic.

I used to think people can’t change. I still do, but maybe what we can’t change is our ability to change. Maybe change is the fundamental word, and acceptance is the move.

But what happens when I get angry and bitter and livid? I don’t know, but Joe Hudson on his podcast says acceptance is everything. Let it all in like you would your own child. See it inside of love, the only word that’s true.

A few years ago I wrote in my journal that I felt stuck in “awareness without acceptance.”

I’m still there, but less often. Acceptance creeps in, like a sliver of hope, delivered in the dark of night to remind me that I know more than I let on.

---

I’ve been thinking about year in review posts. Everyone’s doing them. Here’s what I learned, here’s what I accomplished, here’s my word for the year. Yuck.

Forget resolutions. That word — re-solution — implies we need solutions. But what if there weren’t any problems? What if, as Carl Rogers says, the only way to change is by first accepting yourself exactly as you are?

Or as Shunryu Suzuki put it: “Each of you is perfect the way you are... and you could use a little improvement.”

Both. Always both.

Maybe the most impeccable thing you can say about a year is this:

If you’re alive, you did it.

That’s the whole review.

---

So. New year. Same me. Awareness and acceptance when I can muster it, love and grace when I can’t, remembering always that I’m a good little guy, lovable, whole, regardless of everything.

The tide wanes, the moon waxes, a snake that eats itself only to realize it was just eating its old skin. Shedded. Shredded. Peccable as hell.

Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.

i love y’all - come say hi in the comments

Where are you at as we kick off 2024?

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Hi. If you’re reading this, I did it

i released this thing out into the world. that itself is a W.

But if you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering - what...is this?

what this…is

life is a crying baby is a container I made to hold my little ideas and thoughts for a specific duration of time - Nov 15 2025 - Dec 13 2025.

To get access, sign up at the link above and you’ll get each entry - 58 in total - emailed to you over the course of the next month at the same relative point when I wrote them:

why?

Up till now, I’ve just thrown everything into a giant database that gets lost and forgotten. With this limited time thing, I figured, I’d have an end date AND could create something out of it.

This is that something.

In it, you’ll find random thoughts and diatribes, tiny wins and little lies.

There’s drafts of essays I’ll maybe publish one day, there’s my wrestling with trying not to smoke weed, there’s a letter I wrote to substack, and there’s also one idea I think is genuinely genius.

But more so than any of the content, the form itself is the thing - a sketch of my mind that’s boring, profound, and, upon reflection, meaningful.

and yet

And yet, now, here I am, at the threshold of release and I feel frozen. No, worse, I feel like this is stupid beyond measure and unworthy of sharing. Dumb and self-involved, useless and a waste of not just my time but all time, everywhere.

This is part of the process, of course, and it’s why I feel the need to release. To get it out there. That word - release - it’s perfect. It’s what this is. A release. An exhale. A moving through and moving on.

In one of the notes, I wrote that it “Feels like I’m not listening to my creative team (past me) by just ignoring them.”

I don’t want to ignore my creative team. I want to listen to them because I am them.

So without further eryka badu, here it is.

lemme read it!

If life is a crying baby, we are all its parents.

The least we can do, then, is look and see and say
‘wow that is amazing’
and realize, to our own surprise,
that we really mean it.

Love y’all, for real.

Alex

A list of reasons why I might be depressed which acknowledges out of the gate that none of these are probably it and that in fact there probably is no reason and that trying to ‘solve’ the problem of sadness is itself a quicksand that

1. It’s dec 10 or 11 and i haven’t yet scheduled any batcave events for the month which is a great bad thing I am doing but cannot help. Or can I? I don’t know. There is shame in both and shame in neither and this is the thing, this shame, that permeates all like an oil spill seeping.

2. I am more dramatic and more emotional and sensitive and angry than usual.

3. Especially angry. That’s the big one, which I am hearing is a defense for shame? Makes me angry just thinking about it. Or does it make me sad?

4. Hey, at least I’m still feeling things. There’s this book The Noonday Demon, an atlas of depression, and in it the author talks about how there are two kinds of depression, the slow and steady minor kind and the major breakdown collapse. I’ve got the first one, if any at all, for I’m not, as is the case in the author’s own detailed breakdown in the book, lying in bed unable to move or go to the bathroom or eat.

5. I started smoking weed again thinking it could be different this time and perhaps for a minute it was because it always is until it isn’t and now I’ve stopped and it’s been a week and I’m in withdrawal which is a real thing whether or not you choose to believe it.

6. I’m not sure what i hope will happen from writing this, less even from publishing it, but maybe that’s okay? Maybe that’s good. Maybe I’ve become too focused on how things will be received and not enough on the raw and random nature of the dance itself. Or maybe I’m deluding myself on all fronts.

7. I have been worse than normal about responding to texts and emails and for this I am sorry. I will try to get back to you soon I really will.

8. The antidepressants surely must have something to do with this. I’m down to 40mg on the ‘zac, which is 50% less than I used to take - 80mg Prozac. You lose the “pro” when you take away those first 40mg, so you’re just left with ‘zac (source: math). I don’t notice a huge difference but I guess that’s the point. This medication is like great film editing - when it works, you have no idea it’s there. But now it’s gone and the film that is my life is wonky and poorly cut - another montage? Way too much voiceover. It’s good though, it really is, and maybe I’m feeling the things I wasn’t before, though I’m not sure feelings really work that way (source: self).

Feelings are fickle and fortune is fame, so get off the crapper and go play a game.

This line came to me unbidden the way that lines often do. Is it good? Probably not, but it is itself something and that is more than nothing and for that i am grateful, I guess, though I take issue with that word.

Grateful? Get a room.

That’d be a good name for a hotel - ‘Get A Room.’ When am I gonna get rich from one of these ideas? Never, hopefully, for that’d be a lottery-winning kiss of death that’d lay gentle wreckage to whatever strength and chutzpah currently propel my life forward in the day to day.

Let’s just end here: I know I am lucky, but the best water in the world - the beautiful, goofy kids and amazing, understanding, accepting and beautiful perfect soul human wife, the jobs and friends and parents and family and success, none of it will mix with that oily black of darkness, once it’s in the glass. Half full of water, sure, but even a drop o’ oil can spoil the broth.

It doesn’t have to, and often it won’t, but sometimes it does and that’s okay. For me and also for you out there, sad as a thicket, bare as a winter.

Look at this guy, doing poetry, what the hell.

I wish I could just own the things I do instead of apologizing for them or laughing at them. Sometimes, I can. That’s gotta be enough.

Thanks for reading this. You’re all golden gods and so am I. We’ll make it through because we already have. I feel better for having written this. Closer to myself. Less estranged, or at least a stranger I recognize as myself.

Oh and mom + dad — don’t worry, I’m okay. I’m good. Just dancin’ in the oily rain.

What’s Fearsharing Day? It is a simple holiday with humble beginnings. It all started like two paragraphs above two years ago when I wrote the first edition of this post. Then I did a dumb intro, introduced the holiday, a year passed, then I released last year’s version, another year passed, now we’re here.

Fearsharing takes place on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the scariest and most dangerous sunday scaries of the year.

Nothing more haunting than rapelling from the cliff’s edge that was Thanksgiving into the pot of boiling peanuts that are your year-end anxieties, hot and getting hotter inside the bubbling hot slop known as the unmitigated financial disaster that befalls my family, as it does all families, every holiday season - a senseless spree of buying shit we do not really need so that we may face our soul’s true alpha and omega, the mortal threat of our own financial ruin, and, if the fates have it, emerge free of it, if only for a brief moment, before MLK Day deals descend upon and swallow us whole.

Please enjoy and with haste kindly share your fears in the comments section.

If we get to 100 people sharing their fears, as per Fearsharing tradition, I’ll record a video reading everyone’s fears.

1. I am afraid that the writing will not be good enough. That people will taste the juice and go, “all that squeeze, for this?”
   
   Or maybe it’s that I’ll have let myself down by failing to meet my own expectation of all that could have been?
   
   Maybe it isn’t even that I’m afraid but simply lazy.
   
   Or, in the language of fear, I’m afraid of the discomfort of any moment less smooth than this one.
   
   Or maybe - and I think this is gonna be the winner - it is the fear itself and my dance with it that I need to experience in order to make stuff about it, like I’m doing now here with you.

2. I am afraid that my really great stuff exists behind or beyond all these fears? Sure but what if it doesn’t?

3. I am afraid about the mundane and banal ways in which things get worse as they get normal and so we forget them.

4. I am afraid that I’ve already had my best ideas and won’t ever find my way back to them.

5. I’m NOT afraid of snakes - I’ve got no beef with snakes. What scares me half to death is how they’re portrayed in media. From the bible’s bad boy snake in the G of E to the sneaky snakes of all chosen books, snakes are bad. When will a snake be a hero? Why not today?

6. I’m afraid about whether this audio book of The Awaked Homeowner is read by an AI or the author. Whoever it was, they recently read the lines “that’s you cutting your own throat”

7. I’m afraid that I’m normal.

8. I’m afraid that I’m not normal.

9. I’m afraid that the only thing standing between me and my dreams is in fact me.

10. I’m afraid how the logic of language makes it so hard to imagine absurd things as true (both are true??)

11. I’m afraid that that it really is the phones
    Or the social media
    Or the other bad things
    It could be anything
    
    Except Coke Zero
    That stuff is healthy and good
    And perhaps the only thing standing between me and utter collapse is this aspertante laced liquid

12. I’m afraid that thinking about your fears like I am right now gives them more strength and perhaps makes them true.

13. I’m afraid that it really is about self love
    And that I wake up most days not only hating myself but not knowing that I do
    And that most days I never realize it
    
    But I am realizing it
    Some days
    More days
    
    But what if I never get there?
    And where is there?
    
    A place of zero self hate at no time on no day?
    Sounds like a stretch goal.
    
    For now if I can get 50% closer.

    That’s great.
    Or will that mindset be my downfall?
    
    Is it love I seek?
    Or acceptance?
    
    Since when have those even been
    different things?

14. I’m afraid that I’m not living in accordance with my values. What are my values? Stay tuned as they make themselves known in the coming weeks! I actually do want to write about this soon because I was asked (by my coach (coach reveal)) what my values were and I did the classic “i don’t know!” thing which was true in that moment (fear) but is no longer as I’ve since that moment been walloped by value after value to which I subscribe. For example, the only one I’ve written so far is “I don’t want to annoy people for money.” This is a value, yes? Values are...opinions in a suit?

15. I’m afraid that my ramblin’ man ways (textually) will get me nowhere good, and fast.

16. I’m afraid that I’m sort of having to force fears out of my brain which doesn’t really feel like the exercise? That maybe we’re done?

17. I’m afraid that I’ll let people down.

18. I’m afraid that people will see the above and worry about me and post a nice comment or something to make me feel better.

19. I’m afraid that I’m narcissistic enough to think that anyone thinks all that hard about me. I mean this in a good way. People think about one another infrequently compared to how often we’re thinking about ourselves. And when we do, it’s often not great stuff.

20. I’m still afraid of realizing that this whole schtick I’ve got going a goofy comedian guy who writes vulnerable stuff is a facade. A character who, despite being based on real stuff, has now become a velvet coffin of sorts.
    
    That phrase - velvet coffin - I first heard it used to describe Austin - a city so comfortable you lay down to take a rest, stay forever, and die. Not sure that’s true - I got out, and fast - but the image fits here. I’m afraid of that.

21. I’m afraid of not having a good enough ending for this piece. the ending of course being the bane of all writers whose brains I inhabit. how am I gonna leave em with the elusive banger that’s blissfully unaware of itself, thus not insisting on itself but simply existing — an ending readers did not see coming but were glad for it’s arrival, for now, without it, their lives would be something worse even than useless - boring. They’d have tasted the duck liver of the elites and were now sent back to the double cheeseburger factory. of the common man?
    
    Get real.
    Now what are you waiting for?
    It’s time
    so share your
    fear:

22. Leave a comment

Comments

1. What is on your fearsharing list? No for real take 30 seconds and write out a lil list it feels great and is healing like the word ‘balm’ just say that word out loud what a word!

3. love u for real

Leave a comment

You don’t know what’s gonna happen.

In my mind, I think it goes like this:

But the truth is more:

Will that happen this time? You be the judge.

That’d be a great game show - “you be the judge” - they let random people judge who is right and who is wrong. Dang I gotta run with that. WAIT IM GETTING LOST.

Forgetting this fact - that through the writing, weird new things will emerge - often prevents me from writing at all.

Because I’ve already judged my own idea (I been the judge) as not enough AND forgotten that, through the writing, new weird things will emerge, I’ll often not write at all.

And what a shame that is, for there inside the messy spacious wilds between what we think will happen and what actually happens lies the good stuff - the comedy and joy and darkness, too.

And from that darkness, sometimes, even better comedy and joy emerge.

Take this little piece I’m writing right now. I didn’t really plan to write any of the above, but there it is.

It came out of me or perhaps through me, unbidden. Okay maybe a little bidden. Emergent, not an emergency.

Writing reveals.

But is it worth sharing?

You be the judge.

It’s wild how most of the things we think, the little thoughts that scurry through our brains, do so without us ever noticing them.

In a given day I’d say about 95% of what I think and feel goes completely unnoticed by my own awareness.

They just sorta…happen, much like how my heart does it’s beat-beat-beat thing and my tummy does it’s digest-the-food-and-grab-the-nutrients-and-ship-the-rest-to-pooptown thing etc.

Sure, the body is running it’s own show, self-sufficient, etc, but the mind?? The thinking? The feeling? The…soul?

I thought I was in charge of that department. I run the show! I’ve constructed this entire life - my one and only according to Mother Mary Oliver - based on how I think and feel and ride this soulcycle- so…what the fuck?

Just this morning I happened to find myself aware of or, to be more precise, remembering, two thoughts that’d recently run through my mind, laying waste and carnage, only to disappear without ever even filling out the Guest Book to alert me of their presence.

The first thought involved calling my friends. I’d promised myself to do it more since moving away because I want to stay in touch with the people I love. But after a couple weeks of the ol’ two-kid no-sleep new-town maelstrom, I’d stopped calling people. Now, two months into the move, the thought has calcified into “I never call people I suck” which, itself, then makes me not call people.

What is this, the dark ages? Harry Potter? Cuz that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And here’s the kicker, the real piece of the resistahnce (godblessyou) - these wiggle worm thoughts leave little trace in my mind of their presence but they do very much create in me a belief of myself - that I suck and do not call people - which I then move through the world believing to be true.

And that belief makes it all the harder to call people which brings about more stinky thinky thoughts which makes it harder to call people and so on.

Had I not gotten luckier than a leprechaun at a four-leaf clover buffet, I’d be walking around this earth thinking, nay, KNOWING, I sucked at phone calls and thus preventing myself from ever disproving that fact.

The fact that this happens every day without my knowledge is befuddling to say the least. But I’ll say more!

Here’s the second thought I happened to catch scampering its way through my thinkhole this morning.

A month or so ago, we went to visit Lauren’s parents for a trip. I packed a bag, my gym bag, with stuff like my computer charger and a real life physical book I’d bought at the bookstore called The Analog Sea Review. It was self-described as an ‘offline journal’ and I loved it. A series of excerpts from essays, songs, films, etc. all about how to see the world that were not so digital, so frenetic, etc — a few moments from the film My Dinner with Andre followed by an interview with Andre himself, the lyrics to The Sound of Silence, bits of essays like The Year The Decade Exploded by Jon Savage and Missing Persons by Joan Didion. Even a couple pages from Waiting For Godot.

The journal had no online presence, and instead included a little note that read:

So you managed to find us amid all the flickering and noise. Thank you for that, and for supporting your local bookstores and writers. If you discover something valuable in this work, please tell other daydreamers about Analog Sea, our books, our biannual journal, The Analog Sea Review, and our wish for a little slowness now and then.

I’d read the book a little bit during the trip and promptly forgot about it when we came home. Yesterday, I went to the gym (hold your apploz) and lo! behold! there was the book. I took it out of the gym bag so that my fellow get swole bros didn’t think i was a complete nerd. This morning, there was the book, waiting for me, and I thought to myself, “ah I can’t read this I never read books anymore I suck this was a good book and I just am too online and too stupid to sit down with something actually worth reading because I suck and that’s never gonna change.”

All of that, btw, was thunk by me in less than zero seconds. No time at all but there it all was, or there it had been because it was now gone, having left in its wake a curdled belief system that could best be summarized as - “Alex, you are a used up coupon - unredeemable.”

But this is not true! I read the book with my morning cottage cheese+protein+blueberries+muesli and read some more with my mini-second helping of cottage cheese+protein+blueberries+muesli.

(side note why in the hell do they call it muesli?? sounds like mucinex oh thats probably why).

With both thoughts, I was stuck, glued to the floor of my own self-loathing, and - what’s this? - t’was I who did the gluing. But luckily, I’m a cheap-o so I didn’t pay for the fancy gorilla glue. Mine is sticky but very much not permanent like that Elmer’s orange nipple bottle we used in elementary school but, and this is key, it does not feel that way.

It feels like it’s forever true. This is, according to the literature, a ‘fixed mindset.’ I I am the way I am- bad - and can never not be. Oh and have you met my friend shame? He says I’m bad too.

Depressed people love this shit. Aha, they go, proof of my own inadequacy.

But there’s a second mindset. Growth mindset. Babies have it, which is why they get bigger delete this.

Kids often lose it, believing falsely that the endless ways they’re quantified and graded and ranked determine the person that they are.

With growth mindset, my personal friend Carol Dweck says, you interpret what’s happening as nothing but neutral information to shape the person you are becoming. That’s the key - becoming, not became.

Or for my spanish speaking freaks — estar, not ser. I am, but not I AM.

I know meditation can help me hear my own thoughts better blah blah but my cold dark heart has decided that meditation is lame and people who do it are losers. It’s the ‘oh now everyone likes the band I liked before they were cool’ thing, except I didn’t like the band first. People thousands of years ago did. We’re all posers, but at least I’m not as bad as the others.

Yet another false belief!

They’re everywhere, they’re everything, they’re all at once. But we are not stuck believing them.

Do Stop Believin’, the song should go.

I did, twice, and you can too.

WHAT HAPPENS AT BATHANG STAYS AT BATHANG

RSVP LINK IS HERE:

Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot about all that I don’t know, especially as it comes to people and how they work.

Like, for example, I truly have no idea if the total % of BAT readers who drink tea at least once a week is 10% or 90% - it could be either!

And if it’s 90%, that’s HUGE in terms of helping us land an important tea brand sponsor. Do not lie though on this test please be honest or none of the data I share with them will be legit.

the question

Please answer honestly, like you would if one of your close friends was like “no but for real?” or “wait actually?” - how would you respond to them? Answer with the same truth as that.

request for input

Please also reply in the comments with your answers to one OR both (are true) of these questions.

1. What’s the exact % of BAT readers that drink tea weekly. WINNERS GET A FREE YEAR OF BATCAVE ($70 value USD before inflation)

2. What other important questions do we need to be asking the BAT readers?

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I would very much like to open the floor (don’t fall in!) and see how the people of substack are feeling about substack.

Sound ON in the comments but sound ON when you watch this video I made with some of my thoughts.

Here’s my take:

I’m a bit of a substack old head and, sorry, it ain’t what it used to be.

It used to be a place for writers—a home. now it’s what… twitter with a little bit of youtube slapped on?

Now I am not innocent here I mean I literally just put up a frikkin video up there come on.

Old heads like me will remember the days of Substack before Notes.

THERE WERE NO NOTES.

It was just us writing our little ideas.

Then came Notes.

Podcasts.

Live Video.

Has all of this stuff made Substack better? Fuck if I know, but I do know that it’s made me thirstier. More needy for the promise of success in this land of endless opportunity.

But is it really? Or is it candy for the machine - more ways to make us dance for the algo and, yes, our paid subscribers too. Or the potential of them.

Engagement’s down, but also: the fact that it was ever up was kinda wild, right? Maybe we all got a little entitled to something that was never promised.

this town ain’t what it used to be

Substack used to feel like a small town. you knew people.

Now it feels like a gigantic city. Am i grateful to have decent real estate here? Sure! THE MARKET BABY.

Do i like living here? Unclear.

Is this just the austin/sxsw/sundance/burning man arc—thing gets cool, then lots of people show up, then it’s less cool? I was there (cue lcd soundsystem voice), back in ‘66 or ‘89 or whatever, and it felt… smaller, better, human.

I’m hearing down the grapevine that a lot of folks aren’t happy.

Which makes sense - most people usually aren’t.

But maybe that’s okay?

my plan

Here’s one thing I know to be true - I will be doing this, writing and sharing it with the world, till the day I get a bunch of diff color paints on my shirt and dye.

I want to be around longer than Substack. Or I need to plan for that because platforms come and go, but indie darling writers who share vulnerable truths on the internet - those guys never die.

Anyway—how are *you* feeling? Happy? Sad? Moving? Staying?

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Which is why I’m v grateful to , who writes the incredible newsletter and has become an IRL pal here in Asheville, asked if I’d be game to sit down for an interview about my deleterious relationship with addiction stuff. Even saying that - addiction - feels a little too much, dramatic, like it wasn’t that bad shut up Alex but see that’s the thing - who am i to decide if my juice is worth a squeeze?

what?

Anyway, here’s the interview below.

As Katrina mentions, I asked if she’d be up to do it in person and so we did, here in the backhouse that is my and Lauren’s office. The interview ended and we found a fly, just sitting there on the tan leather chair. Never before or since have I seen a fly just sitting there. I have no idea what it meant but I can tell you for sure it wasn’t normal. A fly oughta fly, but not this one. This one sat and listened. Or he was dead.

Anyway as I said here’s the interview below. Also please for god’s sake whatever you do, go and subscribe to Katrina’s substack - she writes amazing pieces on life and parenthood including this recent banger about the strange things death and darkness do to our living: Fall, the Beautiful Season of Death.

Human/Parents Interview: Alex Dobrenko and Drugs & Alcohol

Human/Parents is an interview series that explores and illuminates various mental health topics that some parents face while simultaneously performing the most important job on the planet: raising the next generation. Guests are Substack creatives who are also parents dealing with one or more of Human/Mother’s rotating monthly topics.

Katrina: I read “Beautiful Disasters” a few months ago while on vacation with my family—I know, I know, I’m SUPER late to the party, but for those who haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for? Read it here!!! And then pretty please come back to this interview—I thought it was pretty remarkable how open and honest you were about your drug habit in that post. I’m curious about what your relationship with drugs and alcohol is like now, and how you feel about the essay now that it’s been out for a couple of years?

Alex: I hadn’t thought about this until just now, but [“Beautiful Disasters”] felt like a kind of coming-out party for me, like: this is all the stuff that happened. And the reaction was crazy good—it was my biggest piece ever. People fucking loved it.

But I don’t want to be the addiction guy, or the sobriety guy, and I haven’t really written about it since. For so long, this was the roadblock—the thing I wanted to write about but couldn’t. And then I finally did it.

Now it’s like… I know how to write about it—I did. But that doesn’t mean I can write about it easily. For example, I had to tell my dad about it ahead of time—he didn’t know about any of it. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna publish this.’

Ohhhh, what was that conversation like?

It was really hard. I was at our little Starbucks, shaking, because this was such a big thing—and he didn’t know about any of it. So I had to be like, ‘Hey, this is coming out. I want you to know ahead of time. You can read it.’

And he did. And I think he was… not disappointed, but wrecked. Just gutted. To learn all of that—to realize he had no idea any of it was happening. I think he blamed himself a lot even though of course it isn’t at all his fault. As a parent myself now, I get that. I wish he’d understand that it really isn’t his fault, nor is it really all that ‘bad’ of a thing. It’s just something that happened. Removing the stigma and judgement around it all—that’s important to me, both within my family and as a whole. I think that’s part of why I’m happy to talk to you about it.

It’s hard to put your stuff out there, especially when you know that there’s a chance it’s going to hurt someone. I can relate to that.

Yes, and it’s also that it’s gonna hurt them—and they’re the people I don’t want to hurt.

I mean, literally, I’ve had fights with them where they’ve said ‘We are perfect parents.’ That’s actually what they said. And that’s absurd. No one’s perfect. But in their minds, that’s what they see. That’s how they frame it.

And all of this… I don’t know how to talk about it. Which I guess is more about my writing in general. But it’s also this cloud that hangs over me.

Like this morning, I was thinking about it all, and the thought I kept having was: how do I write through those fears? Maybe the only way is to just say, fuck it. Put it out there. If they see it, they see it. If they don’t, fine. Because the more I keep it a secret, the more shame builds around it—and the shame is the hardest part.

Let me ask you a question: do you feel like you’ve forgiven your parents?

I’m getting there, yeah. But there’s still a lot of anger I hold on to. I feel like I’m moving toward forgiveness, but it’s so hard. I think about how we are all human—and if I can make conscientious choices and reflect on things, why couldn’t they? That’s where the anger comes from. Love should be enough motivation to do better—to be better. But, for whatever reason, it’s not—not always—in my experience. And that’s what I don’t understand. I’m sure you feel the same way, at least a little, with your own parents.

Yeah. I think it’s that feeling of, why couldn’t you be different? Just really simply—why couldn’t you be what I wanted. It’s a very young feeling, and an absurd one, because they were exactly what we wanted in many ways—at least I can say that in my case—but of course as a little kid, I focus on the things I’m not getting. Maybe that’s an American thing? I blame America.

Often people blame it on generations or culture, but at the end of the day, we’re all human beings.

So you don’t really buy the whole ‘they did the best they could’ thing? Sometimes I buy that—in the abstract, it makes sense.

No—not fully, anyway. I can be more compassionate toward them as a parent myself now—that’s where forgiveness comes in. But, I still harp on the fact that people have gone through terrible things for centuries. There are all these stories we can read about people going through hard times, and there are many that come back to the power of love and care—that’s how generations heal, even through imperfect people. But then I think about my own upbringing, and I’m like, wait—what happened here? I just don’t understand it, and it makes me angry. Yes, you did the best you could—but you still could have done better.

Yeah, it’s like—you did the best you could, and it hurt me. I’m still hurt. That doesn’t change. Both things can be true: you couldn’t have done any better, and I still feel hurt.

I’ve learned to use that anger to fuel my life choices in the way that I live. People will say, particularly after reading one of my Substack essays, ‘Wow, we didn’t know you went through that.’ They only knew the public-facing version of me—not this deeper, hurt version.

But that’s why I am who I am. In a way, I took the reverse path. I can get all psychological about it. But, I also know I’m not perfect. Sometimes the way my parents acted growing up comes out in me—like, when I’m annoyed that my daughter is taking forever to put on her shoes, for example. It’s not a perfect path, but—

There’s no such thing.

Yes! And that’s what I try to remember when it comes to my parents and the way they parented.

I think the kind of transcendence I want is to show my kid that I’m not perfect—and that’s okay. That means they can be not perfect too.

Right. I grew up thinking I had to be perfect for my parents to love me. But, the best thing I’ve done is to let my kids see me be imperfect, and even tell them, ‘I’m sorry.’

Exactly.

***

When you look back at your past self—the person who was caught in a drugs-and-alcohol loop—what is your perception of that person? Is it kinship still? Do you feel sorry for them? Empathetic? Or, do you feel more distance, like, ‘oh, that was just a chapter that’s closed now’? In other words, what’s your connection to the Alex in “Beautiful Disasters,” now that you’re a dad?

I feel like I have a lot of different answers. There’s a little part of me that misses it. It doesn’t happen much anymore, but when I’m super overwhelmed, I still crave weed. Especially when I’m struggling with writing—it feels like an escape.

Like at that event we were at—the writer’s meetup in Asheville–I don’t think I consciously thought, I wish I was high, but a part of me did. Like, that would’ve been more fun if I was high. And it was still fun, I was totally fine, but I noticed the thought.

Back then, my anxiety at events like that was a lot higher. Now I’m on different meds, and maybe that helps. But there’s still the craving. Especially the part where my ideas felt so good. Big, crazy, unstoppable ideas, with no critic in my head. I miss that feeling, that holy shit moment of, this idea is amazing. I still get that sometimes, but not in the same way.

The thing is, back then I couldn’t really work on those ideas. It was just: big idea, then I need Adderall to focus, then I need to get high again because I’m focusing too hard. It was a loop.

I don’t really think about that version of me as a different person yet, because I haven’t reflected much on that time. It was weed, then COVID, then kids, then leaving L.A. Only now, being out of L.A., can I start to think about who that guy was—and feel sorry for him, or feel anything at all. There’s so much I haven’t written about or made sense of.

And when you asked earlier if I thought I could have a healthy relationship with weed without falling back into it… that’s where I get scared. Part of me thinks, you’d be fine, man. I sort of tried, once—right before we moved, I started taking CBD gummies with a little THC at night. They helped me calm down and not feel so insane after putting two kids under three years old to sleep. And there was a little bit of that high, too, where I had mini versions of those big idea moments—but I started needing them every night. I couldn’t stop.

The reckoning came when we went to Mexico for a wedding. We left the kids with Lauren’s parents, and I had packed the gummies. Lauren said she’d rather not risk anything happening with TSA. She told me, ‘If you do it, fine, but I’d rather you not.’

And instead of stopping, I just ate a bunch at the airport. I was high on the plane, and afterwards there was a little bit of withdrawal, but not too bad. Since then, I’ve only smoked once—at another wedding, when someone had a vape. It was fine, even fun, but it scared me. Because I don’t know if I could stop if I really let myself go back to it.

That story you just told about the wedding makes me think about how, after we become parents, we’re still our same ol’ selves—we’re still humans who want to enjoy the things our ‘past selves’ enjoyed. Right?

Yes, we’re people too. We like to have fun. We like to hold on to these other versions of ourselves that remind us of who we think we are.

And I don’t want Wilder to… you know, I mean, I know he’s going to experiment with stuff—absolutely. I just want him to always know he can talk to us. That we’re cool—I mean, we’re not ‘trying to be cool parents,’ but that we’re open, and he can trust us.

Of course it’s scary to think about him doing all the things I’ve done. But I turned out okay. I have to trust him too. And I do—I think he’s a good kid. He’s going to be fine.

But then again—he’s four. It’s easy to say that now. We’ll see when he’s fifteen. I tend to err on the side of, ‘Yeah, they’re smart. They’ll be okay.’ But it’s still scary.

And the truth is, I take meds every day. Antidepressants, Adderall, Vyvanse. It’s not scary in the way it used to be. I don’t abuse it at all anymore—I’m very clear with doctors about that. But still, I ask myself: does that mean I’m addicted? I don’t think so. Probably not. I think it’s more anxiety about the past than what’s happening now. But the fear is real. The addict instinct—it’s always there.

The difference is, I’ve built a network around myself. Lauren. My men’s group. My therapist. That keeps me grounded.

Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. What did it look like getting on that path—building that community?

I mean, I’ve always been pretty open. But it was hard with Lauren, because this was the one thing. I’ve always been emotionally open, but with this, I was like, No, it’s not a problem.

That’s what [“Beautiful Disasters”] is largely about—how I essentially gaslit her into believing it wasn’t an issue. The hardest part of writing the essay was facing that for the first time: how hard it was on her, how painful what I did was for her.

Listening back to those recordings she took of that night… holy shit. It was brutal. Really hard to hear.

But we got through it, and I think it made us stronger.

Did that look like lots of conversations, therapy, or what?

We went to couples therapy—back when I was still smoking all the time—and she wanted to address it.

Was there anything especially helpful—like, maybe, a prompt or a directive from the therapist?

Honestly…I don’t know how helpful the therapist was. She talked often about this boat she owned and that became an inside joke between Lauren and I. [Laughs.]

Or, maybe that was helpful—like the humor of it not being helpful was, in hindsight, helpful?

Maybe. Either way, Lauren was definitely such a big part of why I was able to quit. She was just like, This is hard, but I got you. I’ll take care of you. And she did.

If there was one moment—or, at least, one that really stuck with me—it was when I proposed. Or, actually, when I did this thing I called The Proposal to Consider Proposing. I didn’t want to propose normally—it just felt like a lot of pressure, like ‘hey make a decision real fast on how the rest of our life will go,’ so instead I proposed that we consider proposing.

And then we had this month-long window where only the two of us knew. I even made a big notebook for us to work through—prompts, questions, reflections. One of them was: What are your biggest fears? And hers was that I’d be a stoned dad. That I’d be high once we had kids. And that hit me hard.

What was it like to hear that?

It was like—I can’t do that. I don’t want to be stoned while she’s giving birth. Or be high all the time with a newborn. Because that’s what it was: every day, all day, I was high. It wasn’t like I took breaks. And I just thought—that’s not good.

I don’t know if that exact moment was the turning point, but it stayed with me.

I think it’s really awesome that Lauren was there for you and that her support was enough to motivate you to change. I mean, it’s really cool to hear that people like us, who are doing things differently from our parents, are doing life the best way we know how for our partners and our kids.

***

Have you ever been high around your kids?

No, never. I was sober when my son was born. I think I’d probably be fine if I did it now, especially if we weren’t driving anywhere. But it’s just not worth it.

I don’t really crave weed lately. What I’ve been craving is more like—

Chocolate? Coffee?

[Laughs] Yeah, that too. But I mean other substances. What I really crave, and what weed used to help with, is a psychedelic kind of experience. Lately, I’ve been craving doing acid or mushrooms, which I haven’t touched since I quit everything.

Is that because you’re feeling uninspired? Or, is it because you are learning to trust yourself more since you decided to focus on breaking bad habits? Do you think you’re a better writer without the influence of substances?

Yeah. The proof is that I actually write when I’m sober. When I’m high, I just think about writing. I come up with a lot of ideas, but I don’t do anything with them.

The psychedelic stuff is different, though. I like how it shakes everything up and gives me a new, weird perspective. Michael Pollan has a book called How to Change Your Mind—have you read it? The part that stuck with me is about how your thoughts normally move through what’s called the ‘default mode network’—he describes it as the highways of the brain. Those pathways get really grooved in, and when they’re maladaptive—like anxious thought loops, ‘nobody likes me’—they’re hard to escape.

When you take acid or mushrooms, that default mode network shuts down. The neurons have to take all these weird scenic routes instead, so you think differently. Like, ‘Oh, maybe people do like me.’ That ability to see the world differently is super powerful.

I know you can get there in other ways too, but psychedelics have always been the most direct for me.

I’ve never done psychedelics, but it does sound intriguing—especially now that we have all this scientific information about its effect on the brain.

They’re amazing. Part of me wants to go do ayahuasca. But I can’t, because I’m on antidepressants, and you can’t mix the two. So I crave it, but I can’t, at least not yet. I’m getting off the antidepressants now actually, so we’ll see. Maybe some day. I’m not too worried about it.

I get why I would crave something like that. But for you—what do you think would actually come from that kind of ‘enlightenment’? How do you think it would change your perspective? Why do you crave it? What do you think you’re missing?

I just like having my mind blown—with big ideas, big thoughts. I probably don’t give myself enough time for that. Taking acid with your friends—it’s also just a great excuse to hang out together for a whole day.

And that’s what I’m really missing: the time and space to just hang, think, and not be stressed. Psychedelics force your hand. They make you slow down.

Creatively, I don’t feel like I’m in a rut, but it would be fun to throw a little craziness in there. Still, I think I’m a better person sober. Basically always.

***

As I was packing up my things after our conversation, I noticed a dead housefly, completely intact, on a nearby chair. Alex and I both looked at each other in disbelief and said, “That is so weird.”

We’re still thinking about that dead guy and what his dead perfection represents.

Today, I think the fly means that we lay to rest the things—the experiences—that have been residing within us, haunting us, since we were children. I think we can recognize and eulogize them, give ‘em a good hug, and move on with them, hand-in-hand, finding a way forward while holding two truths: pain and gratitude.

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Human/Mother

I write about being a human, and I also write about being a mother.

By Katrina Donham