ARCHIVE
FICTION
Sarande
Sarande - 1. Vitok
Some things every man knows. Like if she has highlights, she will be high-maintenance. Some things not every man knows. Like how Miss high-maintenance will rock your world.
Sarande - 2. Tacos
“Everyone goes.” She found the wine opener before I knew she was looking for it. “Athens, London, Milan. They all go. This is Albania’s tragedy and also its secret.” She pulled the cork. “The ones who stay are the interesting ones.” I found two glasses.
Sarande - 3. Given. Worn Carelessly.
Being chosen without choosing back with the same quality of attention — that was its own kind of damage. Less cruelty or indifference than the carelessness of a man who received what was given and kept looking for the next thing. Who wore the crown without knowing it was a crown.
Sarande - 4. Blossom
Things arrive before they’re understood. This is the grammar of it — the result before the cause, the knowledge before the event. I know my mother chose me before I see the moment of choosing. The seeing is confirmation.
Justice Comes on Wednesday
Justice Comes on Wednesday: Don
Follow the bend by the river and there's the old train station, the one folks would rather forget about.
Justice Comes on Wednesday: Edna
Edna Rollins Kite never did remarry. Some women wear widowhood like a Sunday hat. Edna wore hers like a locked door. She kept the house on Sycamore Hollow Road exactly as it had been the day they carried Tom home in a box
Drama
Absolution
When he considered all of his paths to absolution, he took the long odds on the pretty one in the sky blue sundress.
The Fig Tree
He poured a glass of water. If you ain't driving, bed's made in the back. Might be spiders. You always did know how to charm.
Nectarine Apartheid in the Cubicle of Doubt
She used to write poems in the margins of receipts. Kiss strangers to feel something answer back. Now she has a drawer full of unopened serums and a man who knows how to load the dishwasher, mostly.
Buffalo Jump
"I accept your terms," New Needle said. "I do not accept your hand." This story was originally published on the Southern Writers Guild substack and website - https://www.southernwritersguild.com/
No Mercy
The ferry from Karaköy to Üsküdar still costs next to nothing, still smells faintly of diesel and someone’s forgotten simit, still slices the Bosphorus like a dull knife through silk.
The Key of E
“Play it again, Sam,” she said, sliding onto the bench beside him, hip checking him half an inch left. “But skip the missing note. We’ll call it avant-garde.”
Promenade
Cindy Lou woke with a flicker of premonition nipping at her chest. Something unusual might happen today, she felt it. She shook it off with a stretch, dressed for the wind and sun, and headed to the m
Oliver
Oliver walked the familiar path, one foot after the other, his pace slow and measured. It wasn’t the park that drew him out every afternoon, not the trees or the air or even the routine. It was her. S
Absurdist
Nietzsche's Itch and the Diva's Fever
Modern hygiene doesn’t stand a chance in a place like this. I mean, that monkey up in the tree is literally scratching its ass right now. The other day, I saw one that had arranged a pile of grass and
KFC Mashed Potatoes
I finish my drumstick. It’s good. Real good. Then I stand up, brush crumbs off my shirt, walk outside.
Too Much Cheese
The bar in Papeete was the kind that time forgot. Dim amber light leaking from fixtures shaped like hibiscus blossoms, ceiling fans churning the same warm, boozy air since the nuclear atolls moment. Then Burt arrived.
Potato Bisque
So that is Victoria’s secret. She’s starving.
Legend
Lane Connor stares at the screen, an immaculate reflection of his own glory staring back at him, neatly packaged in HD for millions to see. He’s fifty-one, though the chiseled features of his youth re
Five Cards Down
Not 24 hours after swearing I wouldn't do it, out pops a horror story. WTF is wrong with me?
Southern Gothic
The Rooster
I wasn't there the night Grant killed the rooster, nor the morning after when Connor carried the body to the big house like a preacher carrying a dead child to the altar.
George's Diner
It made her feel watched in the best way. Not judged. Seen. Like someone had waited a very long time just to notice she was tired.
The Bridge
You find yourself in a different timeline. One where you have died, and the world has moved on without you.
Venison
The fog in Hollywood Cemetery that February evening in 2017 draped itself over the James River like a gambler’s last bluff, as if the dead were exhaling into the Richmond night.
Sci-fi
Anastasia
I don't need to say a thing to dear Ms Counselor. You know what you did, you slutty little bad bad girl.
Unresolved Variable
Unresolved Variable
Vast
I’ve been measuring time by rot.
Model 7-B
All very tasteful, very avant-garde, very much against at least seventeen subsections of the Appearance of Natural Order Act.
The Veil
“Later, Dad,” he waved to the still figure in the otherwise empty room. “Thanks for the origin story. Kinda heavy, but... far out.”
Quantum Regret
the next gate, the next stamp, the vertigo of waking up in a city that doesn’t know my name.
VERSE
Valence
He keeps the poem in his mouth like a communion wafer,
invisible
The Great Way
preference itself is the koan
Dear H
On Leaving Sao Miguel
You did not invent the volcano.
leftover lasagna
everything ends in leftover lasagna
Voltage
Some distances can’t be closed.
Plan B
I have an idea.
Myths of Becoming
Some things cradle you just long enough to teach you how to walk again. Some things are only there to steady your step until the road shows up again.
Field Notes from the Mustang Cafe
just off the main road, camouflaged by time and biscuits.
Controlled Burn
dog-eared copy of being and nothingness on her milk thighed too decent to sully, but i want what i see,
Data
they orbit one another
SubText
The eclipse is leaking.
Dust
rude, perhaps, but honest
Shakerag
the experience is bigger than the phenomenon
New Leaf
It’s time for me to embrace:
Math Demands
We're all rogue planets
Entanglement
we're all rogue planets
Requirement
emptiness and form consummated their illegal marriage
Witching Hour
At times the universe works in your favor, At times against.
a lover's prayer
it must weave dark promise with inchoate angst, in strands. like dna. like hair of the madonna.
The Myth of the Completed Self
We were told a story.
exile
memory is a cruel architect.
Juxta
the echo of desire
Black
you used to wear black on nights you debated the moon
Calliope
watching me change colors
light bends
gate, gate, paragate om.
I Am Not Here
something inside me refuses to die.
Soup Can
Questions linger as the circus ends.
Tower
you can’t punch a wave, kiddo
Polite Apocalypse
She is the ellipsis that lingers after the last text you didn’t send
Apolonia Station
Indecision is a soggy trail blanket.
Between C-Sharp and D-Flat
Anna listens with her elbows.
Cindy Lou
You wanna know why I crawl through other people’s trash?
Athena At Sunset
magic is wizard’s work.
Substrate Two
Before words There is being.
Thanksgiving Morning (2022)
I am overcome with sweet surrender, with my brimming cup of laughs and tears. with my imprecise memory. with my addled understanding.
Twirl
blame the singularity
Return
she has a patience that terrifies me
ESSAYS
Recursion and Coherence
Orchid
The orchid doesn't explain itself. Which is probably its best feature.
Competitive Coherence
Modern society is not failing because it lacks order. It is failing because it contains too many competing forms of order operating at the same time.
So What?
If everything matters, nothing matters.
The Folded Continuum
Historically, civilizations have learned by fire. Empires topple, markets crash, ecologies fail, and only afterward do we trace the pattern back to mismanaged substrates: trust eroded, attention deple
Toward a Self-Correcting Civilization
All systems ultimately depend on something quieter than the outputs they measure.
Optimization
Every age believes it wrestles with moral crisis. Ours is wrestling with a mathematical one.
The Field Doesn’t Answer to Hustle
The Field Doesn’t Answer to Hustle
What’s Scarce Is Coherence
You open your phone. Three notifications. A headline, a tweet, a flash sale. Your gaze flickers across them; your thumb scrolls. Attention has been won, harvested, packaged, sold back to you. But in t
What the Algorithm Can’t Touch
A piece of writing produced to satisfy a metric is content, which is what writing becomes when the audience is an algorithm.
Strange Attractors
Recursion is the engine of emergence. Patterns feed on themselves, each iteration shaping the next, building complexity out of repetition-with-variation.
Indra’s Net and ChatGPT
There’s an old image from Buddhist philosophy that feels strangely modern — Indra’s Net. Imagine the universe as an infinite web, each knot holding a jewel, and every jewel reflecting every other.
Nobody's Man
There’s a specific loneliness that comes with being useful across a border.
What Falls Out the Bottom
My father worked in the space program. Walked away from it just as it hit its peak. Traded the Space Coast for the hills of western North Carolina — the cool air, the French Broad, the silence that a
Systems and Design
Spray Painting Reality
I used to see progress as real enough to trip over. A plow, a steam engine, a child who lived to see twenty. Real things, built by people who saved before they spent and measured twice before they cut
The Show That Eats Itself
The message is simple: might doesn’t just make right anymore, it makes reality.
A Swirlie of Ideas
We live inside containers of our own invention. Banners, roles, affiliations, flags, stories — all frameworks that let us imagine a shape to our lives. They are porous, provisional, and often absurd.
Selective Resonance and the Art of Fiction
Lao Tzu once suggested that ruling a large kingdom is like cooking a small fish. The same logic applies to storytelling.
Geopolitics
Roman Carnival
Imagine, if you will, a moment in time when an American president takes to the airwaves to reassure the public that the government is in fact not producing massive hurricanes and flinging them at its
Markets, Allies, and the Quiet Death of Truth
The digital age, for all its connectivity, has made it easier than ever to curate belief bubbles. Algorithms don’t care if something is true. They care if it’s sticky.
The American Industrial Surge
The American Industrial Surge: Growth, Structural Constraints, and Systemic Fragility
Bitcoin, GPT-5, and the Russian Bear: A Dance Tune
The world is changing, which is exactly what the world has always done when the adults aren’t looking.
The Tollbooth Society
The tollbooth is now the governing economic model of the West. Democracy, environment, and trust are not being attacked by outsiders. They are being quietly metered, monetised, and degraded from within.
Roman Circus
The American digital asset world is having a moment — the kind of moment where Wall Street, Washington, and Crypto Twitter all stumble into the same dive bar and drunkenly pretend
Previously On: The United States of Bullshit
You thought we’d wrapped up the Epstein arc. You thought Russiagate was cancelled mid-season. You thought the Democrats would fake party unity for at least one election cycle. Adorable.
What If the Flamingos Win?
I have a rule for traveling: don’t discuss the host country’s politics. In Istanbul I kept it without effort, because I had nothing to offer a country living under a regime I’d never had to survive. I
Flamingo Update
the question is whether Albania’s institutions serve the public or a rotating cast of foreign oligarchs and their local enablers. The pink flamingo stands as a symbol of refusal
Rewiring Global Defense
This is a compendium of articles and analyses that I have run through NotebookLLM. See the bibliography below.
Spyware: Making Assassination Cool Again
The U.S. used to frown on assassination, back when we thought “international law” was a thing. Then 9/11 happened...
It's All About the Minerals
Forget oil, forget AI. The future of power is rocks. Shiny rocks, gray rocks, even billion-ton rocks in space. The names alone tell the story: U.S. Antimony. 16 Psyche. TransAstra. It’s geopolitics by
Culture
Mango Is A Verb
Dreams flood. Birds notice. The mango decides. And somebody keeps showing up to make some semblance of sense from it.
Lacing the Kultural Kool-aid
I decided a few weeks ago to start communicating through Substack and YouTube. When I made that decision, I agreed with myself to remain apolitical. I stand by that. I'm not going to get into left/ri
Softness Is the Enemy
Oh, for the love of everything once sacred—before “sacred” became a wellness hashtag and a candle scent—let’s stop pretending the world makes sense. It doesn’t. It’s not a novel, it’s not a simulation. There is no plot, just vibes.
Snake Handlers and Footnote 47b
The Snake Handler’s Church: A Field Report in Two Services
The Great American Traffic Jam
America’s highways are more metaphor than transportation. Asphalt prayer wheels.
Good Hedges Make Good Neighbors
It starts with the hedges.
The Garden In Autumn
The front yard has come alive again. The air is cooler now, the heavy blanket of summer heat lifting, and with it, the flowers—daisies, asters, coneflowers, zinnias, salvia—have shaken off the long sl
The World Came To Visit While I Was Away
I grew up around Atlanta when we had three sports and an attitude about it. Football, baseball, basketball — the holy trinity, non-negotiable. Soccer existed the way certain cousins exist: you were ok
The Manly Manliness of 60s TV
I watched Bonanza on a black-and-white set that buzzed like static electricity.
The Beam is Not the Lighthouse
They say they want a man who stands his ground. A tidy, unflinching private lighthouse you can swear by when the weather turns ugly. Until he actually shows up. Cute in theory, less so when the beam w
Sixties Cool
Back before the world got loud about everything, before comedy came with disclaimers and punchlines had paperwork,
Personal Growth
Post-Doom Redux
when the circumstances of your life are so anti-fragile that not even the apocalypse can hurt you
The Thing Before the Thing
People come to the cushion expecting calm. That’s the retail version. You sit down and you are a swirling mass of crazy inside a swirling mass of crazy, and the practice is not to still it. The practice is to stop pretending there’s a version of you that stands outside it.
Genius, Then and Now
I saw this quote in a comments section the other day.
Square One
Sometimes people drift apart. That’s the surface tale. Two bodies in one space, air thinning, nothing dramatic—just distance settling like dust.
Mind the Gap
I’ve never been good at belonging. Even as a kid I would sit in class and feel the distance. Like everyone else was in on a big secret. That feeling never really left. There’s always been a thin pane
Testing the Field
I decided to test the field.
Post-Doom
I'm post-doom. I doom-spent until the credit dried up and blew away. I doom-scrolled until I learned more than I ever wanted to know. I doom-worked in a doom industry that made me feel like doom, unti
And Then One Day
There are some things an older guy just shouldn’t do—unless he’s prepared to pay the price. Don't play ball with younger men—you'll break things. Don't chase younger women—they will break things.
Rebuilding My Life At 68
In my prior couple posts I have detailed how I find myself back at the starting line at age 68. Partly by happenstance, mostly by choice, I'm in the throes of a great transition. I won’t rehash the st
70
I have been around for a while now, done a lot of things, lived a lot of lives, to be honest. But one thing that I became caught me by surprise. A thing that I never expected. Or planned for. I have
Stuff
2025, for me, has been the year of letting go. One object after another, what once seemed essential, has slipped into the simpler category of stuff. If you immediately jump to the George Carlin comedy
Lord Byron in the 21st Century
There's something mystical and alluring about romantic love. You know that kind of love. It's not about lust but about the bliss and awe we experience just from being in the presence of that one wonde
After the War
From Dollar Store ramen to Michelin stars. Signed the contracts, signed the divorce papers, performed the human repertoire. I did the performance nobody claps for, dragging every ugly, frightened, pompous, wounded piece of me onto the stage and making them take a bow too. Kept it there until the whole cast could stand there without a knife fight.
Oracles of the Bard
I’m building an oracle deck that doesn’t behave like the ones you’ve seen before. It isn’t based on tarot, or any other standard platform. It is an 88-card study of recursion and coherence. Curious to
Relearning
My story is a microcosm of the story of modern America. You can follow my story in prior posts or over on YouTube, so I won't go into it here. Suffice to say I have lived well beyond my means for most
Lopsided Love
Some distances cannot be closed. Some people will move at a speed you were never meant to match. Some people will slip through your fingers no matter how tightly you hold. Some people can care deeply
Music
Why is primalbeet?
2003. I am in my home office in an unnecessarily large house in suburban Atlanta. Outwardly successful. My kids are hanging in the room with me, the way they did back then — ambient presence, half-pay
Lost Inside the Sound
The third album
Songs About Leavin' and Trains
My second album release is out on Spotify and some 20 other channels on July 28, a compilation of seven new songs. The title is a tribute to my writing partner back in the 1990s in Nashville. It was t
AI
The Big Engine That Possibly Can
Since November 2022, AI stopped being a nerdy dinner‐table argument and started showing up in your Zoom calls, your inbox, and probably your fridge. By 2025, it is no longer a concept. It is a lifesty
Singularity BBQ
We were parked at a pitstop in the dusty sprawl of Tulsa, straddling the razor’s edge of a midlife pivot gone rogue, when my smart blender—$129.99 on Black Friday, voice-activated, blockchain-certifie
AI’s Three-Body Problem
Policy, platforms, and power infrastructure are pulling against each other like tectonic plates, and the friction is starting to throw off heat.
Signal Sovereignty: Tactics for the Frequency War
I. The Machine and the Frequency War
The Algorithm Will See You Now
Somewhere between the Hollywood strike and the ChatGPT update, humanity quietly lost its job. It’s 2025, and apparently nobody’s safe from being replaced — not actors, not athletes, not even the chatb
Travel
Sarande Local
The furgon (van) is already full when it arrives, but then full is not a number here. Full is a mood, a negotiation, a flexible philosophy shaped by heat, proximity, and the driver’s private sense of
Istanbul - A Study in Contradiction
I keep staring at the math, and then I walk outside, and the math laughs at me.
“Big Brother” on Galata Hill
I’m in the fourth week of a one-month stay in Istanbul, living a short uphill slog from Galata Tower — that medieval exclamation point in the skyline, now supervising a daily parade of selfie sticks a
Monuments and Cotton Candy
The boats are coming in.
Adam's Housecat
The trail went up for three hours and we all stopped pretending we were enjoying it somewhere around the second. Twenty of us, more or less — expats, a couple of long-term tourists like me, the loose