I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.

—Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid

October 5, 2024

Who am I?

I’m an American werewolf in Thailand, an endurance writer and runner, and an existential explorer.

What is this?

Symbols & Rituals is a running meditation on life in a mind and society. Here you will find writings that traverse philosophy; spirituality; human nature; our relationship with technology; the relationship between the individual and the group; music, film, literature, and comedy; mental and physical health; the symbols and rituals we use to imbue meaning and structure in our lives; and whatever else attracts and animates me enough to want to capture it in these vital but inadequate words and strings. I aim to write with as much sincerity and nuance as I can. But the writing is the boss, and it is transgressive by nature and sometimes wants to run wild and without reverence. So if it asks me to transmute into my fictional half mid-essay, or to construct a fiction that could just as well be an essay, or to tell a dick joke amid a dirge on modern man's spiritual indigence, I will humbly oblige.

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