https://opendoors.blog/explorations daily 0.75 2026-03-24 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/fng7fggfyet1f2dymvf05go0k96yvu monthly 0.5 2026-03-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/0dd77f70-eb04-41b4-aa43-29269cf1287b/Radical+Uncertainty%2C+Family+Tables%2C+and+the+Quiet+Honesty+of+not+Pretending.png Explorations - Radical Uncertainty, Family Tables, and the Quiet Honesty of not Pretending - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/somebody-has-to-be-here monthly 0.5 2026-03-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1f722f0f-5821-4423-aa4b-531d36f6fcdf/Somebody+has+to+Be+Here.png Explorations - Somebody has to Be Here - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/i-dont-know-how-to-do-boy-but-im-bringing-snacks monthly 0.5 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/bb0d7865-768d-4eaa-acf0-fa9e8450166a/I+Don%E2%80%99t+Know+how+to+Do+Boy%2C+but+I%E2%80%99m+Bringing+Snacks.png Explorations - I Don’t Know how to Do Boy, but I’m Bringing Snacks - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/i-never-watched-tiger-king-and-that-doesnt-make-me-interesting monthly 0.5 2026-01-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/89907e47-cbcb-4bb9-988e-cf517bd248f9/I+Never+Watched+Tiger+King+%28and+That+Doesn%E2%80%99t+Make+me+Interesting%29.png Explorations - I Never Watched Tiger King (and That Doesn’t Make me Interesting) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/the-second-arrow monthly 0.5 2026-01-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/8f3292ac-f92c-434a-bbc4-668a756ad917/The+Second+Arrow.png Explorations - The Second Arrow - Some teachings don’t arrive as thunder. They arrive as a small, steady click in the mind, like a latch finding its groove. This one showed up for me through Vidyamala Burch’s voice—someone who doesn’t speak about pain as an abstract topic, but as something she’s had to live beside for a long time. Early on, she names the source plainly: the Sallatha Sutta (SN 36.6), often translated as “The Arrow.” There’s a quiet strangeness in how people describe moments like this—how a teaching “lands,” how it “hits,” how it makes an “impact.” The sutta is about what it feels like to be struck, and how we can accidentally make that experience worse. Still, language does what language does. The point is not the phrasing. The point is the clarity it offers when things get hard. The Sallatha Sutta, Told Straight The sutta is blunt on purpose. Imagine a person struck by an arrow. That first arrow already hurts—obviously. Then imagine they’re struck by a second arrow right after. Now they’re dealing with two pains layered together. The Buddha uses this image to describe how pain tends to work for most of us. The first arrow is the unavoidable pain of being human—physical pain, sickness, grief, loss, fatigue, limitation, disappointment. It’s the raw fact of it: sensation, circumstance, the body doing what bodies do. Then comes the second arrow. This one isn’t lodged in flesh. It’s lodged in the mind. The sutta describes the “uninstructed” person who, when touched by pain, doesn’t just feel it—they compound it. They spiral into distress. They fight the experience, resent it, dread what it might mean, replay what led to it, project forward into worse versions of it. The pain becomes pain-plus. Then comes the pivot, which is both simple and quietly radical. A trained person—someone practicing mindfulness and wisdom—still feels the first arrow. This is not a teaching about denying reality. They just don’t automatically add the second arrow. The pain remains painful, yet it isn’t doubled by panic, resistance, and self-attack.r it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/broadcasting-from-a-cracked-dial monthly 0.5 2026-01-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/772337b8-4e7c-468b-83f6-b30e7c406c21/Broadcasting+on+a+Cracked+Dial.png Explorations - Broadcasting From a Cracked Dial - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/eight-writers-at-the-desk monthly 0.5 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/0bbfb38c-1d3d-498e-8cea-08f70cce25a9/Eight+Writers+at+the+Desk.png Explorations - Eight Writers at the Desk - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/the-melting-point-of-existential-dread monthly 0.5 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/32ac1f53-8a6f-4934-a525-5b83f0493657/Frosty.png Explorations - The Melting Point of Existential Dread - I don’t usually turn to a talking snowman for comfort about the end of consciousness, but here we are—running existential diagnostics with a corncob pipe and a silk hat. At the end of Frosty the Snowman, everything is technically a disaster in the way only children’s media can make adorable. The sun is out. The snow is melting. The kids are crying. Frosty is, from a strict materials-science perspective, becoming a damp suggestion of a snowman. And, then Frosty, who should be in a frantic meeting with the laws of thermodynamics, leans in and says, “Don’t you cry, I’ll be back again someday.” That line is doing a lot of work for a character made of weather. The Adult Horror Story We Secretly Tell Ourselves Because if you watch that scene with your “adult realism” settings turned on, you can feel the temptation to say something grimly educational. “Kids, I’m sorry, but Frosty has permanently ceased to exist. There is no more Frosty-experience. Please accept this and eat your feelings in the form of candy canes.” But, the cartoon refuses the modern secular horror story. Frosty doesn’t act like he’s about to be sentenced to eternal blackness. He doesn’t stare into the camera and whisper, “Soon I will be trapped in the void, conscious but empty, floating in a featureless darkness forever.” He says the opposite. He says—relax. This isn’t the kind of ending you think it is. And, weirdly, that’s closer to the philosophical point than the dread version. Because the “eternal blackness” picture that a lot of us carry around is a kind of mental bootleg. We imagine death as a place we go, an environment we inhabit, a room with the lights off where we’ll be stuck forever. But, look at what that image secretly requires: it needs a someone to be there, noticing the absence, enduring the boredom, suffering the nothing. In other words, the fear of “eternal blackness” often sneaks in a tiny surviving observer—the ghost of you—who will be forced to experience the lack of experience. It turns death into an experience. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/the-bureau-of-things-that-actually-happened monthly 0.5 2025-12-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/4f5842e0-ca8b-430f-8075-902095bcc50f/Bureau+of+Things+That+Actually+Happened.png Explorations - The Bureau of Things That Actually Happened - There are couples who fight about money. Or in-laws. Or big existential questions like where to live, how to raise kids. We have those too, of course. But, our most reliable, most repeatable conflict is smaller and weirder – a steady drip of micro-debates about reality itself. Not the nature of reality. Just… the facts on the ground. Did that slogan exist? Was that product ever real? Is that memory legitimate or is it one of those brain-mirages that feels true because it’s wearing the right texture? I tend to come into these arguments with full confidence and a perfectly reasonable vibe. Christa comes in like an undercover auditor from the Bureau of Things That Actually Happened. And, maddeningly, she wins a lot. Enjoy The Go, Unfortunately Take the Charmin bears. I still can’t believe a company looked at the human condition and said, “Yes. The best way to sell toilet paper is to tell everyone to enjoy the go,” as if bathroom time is a curated experience you can pair with a nice candle and a little playlist called Lavender Relief. In my head, it’s too absurd to be real. Like a line someone wrote to make fun of marketing. Christa, however, had that calm certainty. Not loud certainty. The more dangerous kind. The “I don’t need to argue because I remember this with my whole nervous system” kind. She remembered the bears. She remembered the tone. She remembered the world as it was. And, then reality, on cue, bent in her direction. So, fine. She was right. “Enjoy the go” is real. The bears are real. My disbelief was not evidence. It was just… vibes.ay you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/the-texture-of-sound monthly 0.5 2025-12-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/c96f20a7-83b4-4d85-88e1-18a9d6397778/Sound+as+Texture.png Explorations - The Texture of Sound - A few weeks ago, my right ear went strangely quiet. Not dramatic-quiet. Not the Hollywood kind where the soundtrack drops and you hear your own heartbeat like a bass drum. This was smaller, sneakier. A dulling. A soft muting on one side of the room, like someone draped a towel over half the world. At first I tried to treat it like nothing. I’ve learned that my body loves to toss out little mysteries. Maybe it was a shower thing. Maybe it was congestion. Maybe I slept wrong. Maybe it would vanish the way so many odd sensations do—here for a day, gone by dinner, replaced by something else entirely. But, it didn’t vanish. The imbalance started to show itself in ordinary moments. I’d turn my head toward a sound and feel the lag—like the room had slightly different physics on the right. I was in the kitchen and Christa was working in the recliner, and when she said something from across the room I’d catch only the ends of the sentence, the way you catch a conversation through a wall when you weren’t invited to it. The baby monitor on the counter suddenly sounded thinner too—like it was broadcasting from the next apartment over, even though it was right there, inches from my hand. I don’t scare easily. That’s not bravado; it’s adaptation. When you’ve already watched parts of your body drift away from the version you assumed you’d keep, you learn to live with the floating question marks. You make room for them. You keep moving. Still, this hit differently. Because I rely on my ears the way some people rely on their eyes. Not in a poetic sense. In a literal, daily, practical sense. My hearing is how I orient. It’s how I catch small things before they become big things. It’s how I do a decent impression of seamlessness in a world built for sight. A quick clarification, because people always ask and I never know how to answer cleanly – I’m not totally blind. I’m legally blind, and my vision is hard to describe in a way that actually lands for someone who hasn’t lived inside it. I’m not going to try to render it here. I’ll just say that sight is unreliable enough now that hearing has become my main way of staying stitched into the room. In the days between “this feels off” and “a doctor confirmed it’s not permanent,” my mind did what minds do when they sniff danger. It ran the worst-case scenario like a rehearsal. If I lose more vision, okay—terrifying, yes, but my life is already arranged around that reality. If my speech slows further, I adapt. If my legs don’t cooperate, I learn new routes through the day. But, hearing? https://opendoors.blog/explorations/radical-lullabies monthly 0.5 2025-12-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/3c3c7d89-b4ad-4f5d-9488-051763a394d8/Radical+Lullabies.png Explorations - Radical Lullabies - Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Christa was out, the house, and I was home alone with this brand-new human who didn’t know what a day was yet. Charlotte was still in that newborn phase where time feels like someone has shaken the snow globe of your life and just left it swirling. Days, nights, naps, feedings—it all smears together. She was just lying on a playmat, small and warm and impossibly light, her breathing that soft, hitching rhythm newborns have when their bodies are still figuring out how to be here. I remember looking at the speakers. It’s such a small decision, but it stands out more clearly in my memory than a lot of bigger moments. Christa was gone for a few hours. The house was mine, in theory. I could’ve put on something gentle and predictable—piano playlists, ambient, the kind of calm music you picture when you imagine parenting done “right.” Instead, I put on Radical by Every Time I Die. I didn’t crank it. I’ve made it far enough into adulthood to know volume and baby eardrums matter. But still, I hit play, and that first wave of sound came out—riffs, drums, Keith Buckley’s voice like someone yelling through a storm—and I just sat there with Charlotte in the room, waiting to see what she did. She did absolutely nothing. No flinch. No squirming. No tiny hands shooting up in protest. Her breathing didn’t even change. She just stayed draped against me, asleep or close to it, like this was the most normal soundtrack in the world. There was something almost funny about it. Here’s this fragile, bird-boned little person who still looks vaguely surprised to be outside the womb, and I’m playing her one of the loudest, most chaotic records I know. Part of me wondered if this how you accidentally raise a hardcore kid. Another part of me, the quieter one underneath the joke, just felt this weird surge of relief. Because the truth is, I don’t know who she’s going to be. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/branching-and-selfing monthly 0.5 2025-12-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/f89cff40-a85b-4aff-b198-df70aa58f83f/Branching+and+Selfing.png Explorations - Branching and Selfing - One disclaimer before we dive in: throughout this essay I lean heavily on the word could—as if you could have chosen differently, or could branch into another version of yourself. That brushes against free will, determinism, and the very idea of a “self” (I don’t think we actually have one). I’m not arguing those points here; I’ll handle them in a separate essay. For now, I’m keeping the language as-is for the sake of clarity and narrative flow. Over the summer, OpenAI added a feature called Branch Conversation to ChatGPT, which got me thinking. If you haven’t used it yet, here’s the basic idea. You’re in a chat, you get a response, and you think, “Okay, now I kind of want to take this in a completely different direction… but I don’t want to lose this thread.” Now you can: Tap or click the three dots at the end of a response Choose Branch Conversation Keep talking like normal in your new branch You still have your original thread, but you also have this alternate line of reality where you ask different follow-ups, change your mind, or push the topic somewhere weird. It sounds like a simple productivity tool. But if you sit with it for a minute—especially if you already like thinking about consciousness—you start to notice something almost unsettling. Branching doesn’t just duplicate chats. It throws a spotlight on how strange our everyday sense of self already is. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/understanding-pain-part-1-before-it-had-a-name monthly 0.5 2025-11-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/35d3f8b4-e013-4908-85e4-194008b94815/Lotus+for+Understanding+Pain.png Explorations - Understanding Pain (Part 1) – Before it had a Name - MThe first time I realized something was wrong with me, I was reading an essay about fear, terror, and dread. It was 2016, my last year in an MFA program. I was sitting in a fiction theory class, holding a printed copy of “Initial Thoughts on the Horrific,” an essay I’d written about how stories use different shades of fear to move us. I’d spent weeks on it. I knew every turn of the argument. But when it was my turn to read aloud, the words wouldn’t stay still. The lines blurred. Letters slid into each other. My classmates and professor were soft shapes at the edge of my vision. I stumbled over my own sentences, guessing at what I’d written, pretending this was just nerves or lack of sleep. The moment passed, the discussion moved on, and I did what a lot of people do the first time their body betrays them: I pretended it wasn’t happening. At the end of the school year, at my program’s graduation reading, I read a story to a room of people I respected. Again, the page turned into static. Again, I faked it. If you’ve ever had a moment where your body suddenly feels untrustworthy, you know that quiet, private terror. One second, you’re a person who reads and writes for a living; the next, you’re a person hoping no one notices that you can’t quite see the page. Back then, I didn’t have a name for any of this. I didn’t have a diagnosis. I just had a growing sense—the kind of dread I’d once treated as a literary concept—that something was shifting under my feet. This essay is an attempt to understand that shift from the inside. It’s not a catalog of symptoms or a plea for pity. I’m not interested in ranking pain on some moral scoreboard. I want to lay out, as honestly as I can, what it’s like to live in a body shaped by multiple sclerosis: the physical pain, the emotional fallout, the mental loops that show up at three in the morning. I want to say clearly that your pain counts, whatever it looks like—and, also, that when other people in a similar boat talk about despair or exhaustion, I fucking get it in a way I didn’t before. And, I want to end this first part where I actually live most days: somewhere between dread and gratitude, betting that science and medicine—very likely with AI in the mix—will crack at least some of this open in my lifetime.ake it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/how-i-write-with-ai monthly 0.5 2025-12-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/96832dcd-5eab-42e3-949a-9d19017e9826/Writing+With+AI+Header+Image.png Explorations - How I Write With AI (and why it’s Still my Voice) - I don’t sit alone in a cabin with a typewriter. I don’t bleed onto the page, one key at a time, chain-smoking and glaring at a blank sheet like it’s a personal enemy. I write in a chat box. On my good days, that still feels faintly scandalous like I’ve snuck into some forbidden wing of the library where the books write back. On my bad days, I hear the chorus: “That’s not real writing.” Here’s the thing, though. Every sentence you’re reading started as my idea. My questions. My weird little obsessions. AI is in the room with me, sure, but it’s not the author. I am. The Collaboration The basic rhythm goes like this. I open ChatGPT (just Chat to me—easier to say and type) and say something like: “I want to write about how I actually use AI to write. I want to talk about disability, access, the myth of ‘AI detectors,’ and the fact that these are still my ideas. Let’s aim for around a thousand words.” Then, it responds with a draft. Sometimes rough, sometimes surprisingly sharp. From there, the real writing begins. I cut whole paragraphs. I reframe sections. I add stories from my life; I strip out anything that sounds too slick or generic. I tweak phrasing until it sounds like me: the same cadences that show up when I talk to my wife in the kitchen or leave a voice memo for a friend. What AI gives me is motion. It breaks the inertia of the blank page. Instead of staring at nothing, I get to argue with something. I can say: “This part is close. Push it more.” “This sounds like a brochure; try again, but more essay, less pitch.” “You skipped the hard part. Go into that.” I’m not outsourcing my voice. I’m drafting with a tool that happens to write back fast. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/trying-again monthly 0.5 2023-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/5ad7ab56-70d1-4cf7-a728-e30c94d1b501/AdobeStock_4466844.jpeg Explorations - Trying Again… - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/how-my-mind-changed monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633227026440-1YZ722ZSLEX5W9LUYVYL/AdobeStock_136133877.jpeg Explorations - How My Mind Changed - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Gratitude monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Parenting monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Lame monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Conversation monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Self monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Difference monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Information monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Nothing monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Disability monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Pain monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Buddhism monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Language monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Christa monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Marriage monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Belief monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Melting monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Horror monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/MS monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Attention monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/AI monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Sound monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Fear monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Experience monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Sleep monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Music monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Vision monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Love monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Writing monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Death monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Influence monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Family monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Taste monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/explorations/tag/Snowmen monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections daily 0.75 2026-01-28 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/four-essays-one-dimmer-switch monthly 0.5 2026-01-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/4001df96-8a9f-491b-96ed-f4bf7b4294cd/Four+Essays%2C+One+Dimmer+Switch.png Reflections - Four Essays, One Dimmer Switch - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/e7e6d6e3-591f-47f9-8f80-34b665ea144c/This+Can%E2%80%99t+Go+on%2C+and+yet+it+Does.png Reflections - Four Essays, One Dimmer Switch - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/829a8dbc-4cd2-40a3-a8bc-86f3b2540d92/Hope%2C+Optimism%2C+and+the+Words+I+Keep+Not+Using.png Reflections - Four Essays, One Dimmer Switch - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/ae871f74-9edc-4e07-8c78-c03945a707b4/Gratitude%2C+Without+the+Sermon.png Reflections - Four Essays, One Dimmer Switch - 3. Gratitude, Without the Sermon There’s a version of me you could assemble from my writing, a paper person made of sentences and small scenes. He talks about my kids, Christa, the way a morning can be stitched together by something as ordinary as coffee and the right kind of quiet. He notes how tools—AI, accessibility tech, whatever helps—can tilt the day a few degrees toward doable. He returns, again and again, to gratitude, like it’s a familiar porch light. If you only met that version, you might think I live in a steady glow. Like I wake up grateful the way some people wake up hungry. That’s not the life behind the paper. I’ve touched the nadirs of despair. Not the cinematic kind with a clean monologue and a swelling score, but the slow kind—days that drag, hope that frays, the sense that your own body is an argument you didn’t want to have. There have been mornings when the future looked like a narrowing hallway, and I couldn’t find any angle from which it felt generous. In those places, gratitude isn’t a warm practice. It’s a rumor. A distant thing other people talk about, like a city you used to live in. I also know the branded version of gratitude—the greeting-card voice, the tidy “practice,” the soft-focus promise that three bullet points a day can turn pain into wisdom. That version makes me wary. It can flatten suffering into a lesson and treat every wound like an opportunity for better posture. Sometimes it feels less like comfort and more like an eviction notice: please leave your grief at the door. So, when I talk about gratitude, I’m not trying to preach it. I’m not trying to sell it. I’m not pretending I’m cured of bitterness or fear or the occasional sharp, stupid rage at circumstances. I’m trying to name something more modest and more honest: gratitude as a direction, not a destination. Some mornings everything is heavy—the legs, the eyes, the mind. The simple tasks line up like they’ve been given weight vests. On those days, the sentence I’m so grateful to be alive can feel like a lie I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. But, sometimes I can say a smaller true thing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1cbe1d2b-0cc5-4046-85fa-b589aee19266/Karma+Chameleon%2C+Ears%2C+and+the+Mood+Swing+I+Didn%E2%80%99t+Order.png Reflections - Four Essays, One Dimmer Switch - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/three-ways-to-lose-control-and-why-thats-fine monthly 0.5 2026-01-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/9914b76d-1112-46be-8cf0-c0b57c567af1/%E2%80%93+Three+Ways+To+Lose+Control+%28and+why+That%E2%80%99s+Fine%29.png Reflections - Three Ways to Lose Control (and why That’s Fine) - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/a4558cc1-8364-4752-9568-374701861570/The+Moment+Your+Words+Stop+Being+Yours.png Reflections - Three Ways to Lose Control (and why That’s Fine) - 1. The Moment Your Words Stop Being Yours The instant you publish something—post it, print it, release it into the wild—you’re not the owner anymore. Not in the way writers secretly want to be. You’re the source, sure. You’re the person who made the thing. But once it’s public, it stops being private property and becomes a shared object that other minds get to pick up and handle however they like. This is the part where writers nod solemnly about “reader response” and “the death of the author” and pretend they’re fine with it. Most of us are not fine with it. We want to be fine with it in the way people want to be fine with flossing and taxes, but deep down we still crave the fantasy that the audience will absorb the work exactly as intended, like a clean data transfer with no distortion. That is not what reading is. Reading is vandalism with permission. Readers interpret. Readers project. Readers bring their own history, their own grief, their own obsessions, their own insomnia, and they smear it across the text like fingerprints on glass. Sometimes they do it brilliantly. Sometimes they do it stupidly. Either way, they’re doing it. That’s the deal. And, once the work is out there, you—the author—become another reader too. You are demoted. Welcome to the crowd. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/d7da7a68-009d-4653-8351-6c981bf0f403/Yes%2C+Brad%2C+I+Read+The+Book.png Reflections - Three Ways to Lose Control (and why That’s Fine) - 2. Yes, Brad, I Read The Book The Tap-Water Sommelier Take The phrase “the book is better than the movie” has the same energy as someone leaning back at a party and announcing they can taste the difference between tap water brands. It’s not always wrong. It’s just… rarely useful. And, it’s delivered, nine times out of ten, like a tiny moral verdict. The book is the pure thing. The movie is the compromised thing. Congratulations, you have correctly identified that two different art forms do different things. What bugs me isn’t the opinion. It’s the lazy little power move inside the opinion. “I read the book” becomes shorthand for “I am Serious.” It’s cultural flossing. And, it’s also a convenient way to skip actually talking about what worked, what didn’t, and why. Books have time. Movies have velocity. Books can spend five pages letting you live inside a character’s inner life. Movies get two seconds of a look, a cut, a hand hovering over a doorknob, and if it lands, it lands. Neither one is inherently superior. They’re built for different kinds of attention. Also, some books are… not begging to be defended. They’re begging to be edited. Which brings me to The Count of Monte Cristo. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/17bea647-4a65-4f61-8ea0-1513f4461103/Reading+With+my+Ears%2C+not+my+Ego.png Reflections - Three Ways to Lose Control (and why That’s Fine) - 3. Reading With my Ears, not my Ego The Old Religion of Paper In grad school, “reading” was a prop as much as it was an act. You brought the book. You underlined it. You dog-eared it like you were leaving little flags for your future self, proof that you’d been there. You could set it on the table in workshop with a casual thud and let the cover do a little work for you. A copy of Moby-Dick looked like effort. A paperback that had been through three moves looked like devotion. A stack in your tote bag looked like identity. There was also a quiet suspicion that if you weren’t holding paper, you weren’t doing the real thing. Audiobooks were for commuters. E-books were for people in a hurry. Listening was adjacent to reading the way a movie is adjacent to a novel: related, but not the same. That was the vibe. I didn’t invent it. I inhaled it. I shared the opinion, too, which is the part that matters. I liked the gate. I liked being on the right side of it. I liked the feeling that I was doing something purer than everyone else doing it the “easy” way. It’s embarrassing to admit, mostly because it was never about literature. It was about status. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/the-pit-with-running-water monthly 0.5 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/89f9c749-8901-4dd5-884e-5641d227bc49/The+Pit%2C+With+Running+Water.png Reflections - The Pit, With Running Water - There’s a kind of down that doesn’t feel dramatic. It doesn’t feel like a crisis with sharp edges. It feels like a low-ceiling room you’ve lived in long enough to know where you’ll bump your head. A few weeks ago, I landed in one of those nights. Christa was exhausted. I was exhausted. I can’t speak for her internal weather, but I could see the weight: the work, the constant problem-solving, the way “done” never really arrives. I’m wrestling with my own body like it’s an argument that keeps changing rules mid-sentence. My mouth still wasn’t healing the way it should, which was such a petty, infuriating add-on that I almost laughed at it. My immune system, my nerves, my fatigue, my eyes, my mobility—all of it felt like a committee that never votes yes. We rarely go to bed before midnight. Not because we’re out doing something fun. Because the day doesn’t end when the kids go down. It just gets quieter. Quieter doesn’t mean finished. I still had dishes to do. I still had to take a shower, which had become this stupid, looming thing. I hadn’t taken one in like four damn days—not because I didn’t want to feel clean, but because getting up, getting into the bathroom, stepping in, doing the whole choreography of it… it’s a pain. Literally. It’s effort I kept not having at the end of the day. Then the longer it went, the heavier it got. It wasn’t just “I should shower.” It became “why can’t I do something this basic,” which is the kind of thought that turns the pit into a pit with a trapdoor. So, yes, I needed to take one. I needed the hot water. I needed the reset. I needed to stop letting the avoidance pile up into its own quiet shame. Rage Is for the Good Days I was too tired to be angry. That’s the part that hit me with a weird kind of recognition, because it reminded me of something from The Sunset Limited—White talking about rage like it’s a privilege, like it belongs to people who still have fuel in the tank. I’m not going to pretend I can quote it perfectly. I can’t. I just remember the feeling of it: rage as a sign you still have extra energy lying around, energy you can afford to burn. That night I didn’t. I wasn’t raging. I was just… buried. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/two-kinds-of-pain-two-kinds-of-time monthly 0.5 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/e484196f-eb4a-458a-849c-fc296c8a0fef/Two+Kinds+of+Pain%2C+Two+Kinds+of+Time.png Reflections - Two Kinds of Pain, Two Kinds of Time - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/the-mug-that-kept-coming-back monthly 0.5 2026-01-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/9f37dc9d-cf1c-46fa-9762-6a29c1deaa81/The+Mug+That+Kept+Coming+Back.png Reflections - The Mug That Kept Coming Back - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/the-bins monthly 0.5 2026-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/9a96a55f-f8e6-4a6b-9e6a-f064350f528a/The+Bins.png Reflections - The Bins… - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/over-under-and-the-quiet-war-in-the-bathroom monthly 0.5 2026-01-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/e2dee041-2752-45a1-834f-90ad3d54aaff/Over%2C+Under%2C+and+the+Quiet+War+in+the+Bathroom.png Reflections - Over, Under, and the Quiet War in the Bathroom - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/normal-speed-after-bedtime monthly 0.5 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/3f91b97c-58a0-4db6-89f5-29bc38ee85f3/Normal+Speed+After+Gedtime.png Reflections - Normal Speed After Bedtime - I wrote the first pass of this a couple weeks ago, while we were still in Delray—late at night, in that travel-limbo where everything is unfamiliar and your body has to re-learn tiny routes and thresholds. Now we’re home, and I’m reading it back with the benefit of distance. And, what’s surprising is how little the location matters once you get to the real center of it. Because the core of it wasn’t Delray. Bedtime Is the Center It was bedtime. It was the way the world changes when the girls are asleep and the day stops asking so much of my body. No more constant recalibration. No more scanning, guessing, compensating—at least not at the same intensity. Just a quieter house and a quieter nervous system. That sentence—“the girls are asleep”—still lands like a kind of blessing. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/the-stall-that-isnt-extra monthly 0.5 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/6ef2b1f0-203b-41cd-8d7d-523e06bf02ac/The+Stall+That+Isn%27t+Extra.png Reflections - The Stall That Isn’t Extra - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/curtains-questions-and-the-truth monthly 0.5 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/7c99f8b3-458c-4854-92b2-2e1451328fe4/Curious+Questionsf%2C+and+the+Treuth.png Reflections - Curtains, Questions, and the Truth - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/the-apostrophe-hill-i-chose-to-die-on monthly 0.5 2025-12-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/f4034bb6-651b-4913-a754-60da4ec5c8db/Prescriptivist+Swine.png Reflections - The Apostrophe Hill I Chose to Die On - There are many hills a person could choose to die on. Climate policy. Electoral reform. Whether free will is a comforting myth we tell ourselves to sleep at night. Me? I apparently chose the hill shaped like an apostrophe. Specifically: how to punctuate possessive plural nouns that already end in s. At some point—time is foggy, because my brain refuses to store “people I love” and “grammar arguments” in separate folders—I had a friendly disagreement with a few copy editor friends. It was friendly in the way a bar fight is friendly if everyone keeps saying “no, yeah, totally” while quietly tightening their fists. The issue was simple. You’ve got plural nouns like cats and Joneses and editors. You want to make them possessive. My position then, now, and forever was: If it’s already plural and ends in s, you add only an apostrophe after the s. The cats’ toys. The Joneses’ house. The editors’ patience. Clean. Legible. Minimalist. A tiny typographical bow and then you move on with your life. My friends, however—my beloved, brilliant, prescriptivist swine—argued something else entirely. They claimed that because you often pronounce an extra “s” sound, the writing should reflect that. So, instead of cats’, you’d write cats’s. Which looks, to my eye, like the word is sweating. It looks like the cats are anxious. Like they’ve brought receipts. Like their toys aren’t merely owned, they’re owned under protest. Naturally, I tried to explain that this was not how written language works. Our meme for the day became my rallying cry: the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/sticky-fingers-on-my-screen-broadway-in-my-ears monthly 0.5 2025-12-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/c2d46eba-1504-4211-b550-0c754f8878f6/Sticky+Fingers+on+My+Screen%2C+Broadway+in+My+Ears.png Reflections - Sticky Fingers on my Screen, Broadway in my Ears - This year’s Spotify Wrapped arrived like a performance review from a boss I don’t remember hiring. 90% of my top songs are things Charlotte played on my phone. Christa’s, too. According to Spotify, our household is powered almost entirely by Disney soundtracks and animated musical numbers. Apparently, I have spent a shocking amount of time vibing to “Let It Go,” “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” and whatever Moana track is always at 1% volume when I put my phone in my pocket and then suddenly at 120% the second I sit down. Wrapped makes it look like I’ve abandoned all adult taste. Buried somewhere down the list is the stuff I actually picked—the heavy bands, the weird experimental albums, the things I used to imagine would define my personality. But the algorithm is honest in a way I didn’t expect. It doesn’t care about my self-image or the story I’d like to tell about my taste. It just tallies what actually happened. And, what actually happened is this. Earlier this year, Charlotte and I got hooked on “What Do You Know About Love” from the Frozen Broadway soundtrack. We listened to it on loop at bedtime, the two of us doing the back-and-forth parts, kind of singing, kind of whispering. At some point I realized I knew every single word, every tiny pause and inflection. I don’t know if the last time we sang it together was actually the last time—but it might have been, and I didn’t get a notification. So my Wrapped doesn’t really reflect “me” this year. It reflects the life I’m in the middle of living. It’s less a portrait of an individual and more a family snapshot; a record of sticky fingers on my screen, tiny voice singing off-key in the dark, a grown man accidentally memorizing a Broadway duet meant for kids. Tell me you have a three-year-old without telling me you have a three-year-old. Just show me your Spotify Wrapped. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/borrowed-mug-borrowed-time monthly 0.5 2025-12-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/0127d7ec-9891-4a5a-932a-c3333b4c14f5/Borrowed+Mug%2C+Borrowed+Time.png Reflections - Borrowed Mug, Borrowed Time - A week or so ago, one of the only mugs I can drink from without spilling shattered in our kitchen sink. It didn’t explode in slow motion or anything. There was just the clink of dishes, a quick sharp crack, and then Charlotte’s small voice: “Daddy, I’m sorry.” She was “helping” with the dishes, which really means moving things toward the sink in a chaotic but enthusiastic choreography. The mug was too close to the edge. She bumped another plate into it, it slipped, and gravity did the rest. I knew immediately which one it was. I always know where that mug is. When you can’t drink easily from most cups without wearing half your coffee, you develop a kind of radar for the ones that work. The handle on this one was big enough, the lip gentle enough, the weight just right, the way it curved inward so the contents wouldn’t spill (I never noticed that before, but, when you need something, you feel it). It was a tiny piece of adaptive equipment masquerading as a souvenir. For half a second my stomach tightened. Not at Charlotte—at the bare fact of it. One more small thing getting harder. Then another thought landed right behind it, just as fast: this was kind of my fault. I’d put the mug right there, practically begging to be sacrificed to the gods of the sink. I’d also, if I’m honest, stolen the thing about fifteen years ago. The way you tell your story online can make all the difference. “Stolen” might be a little dramatic, but I definitely liberated it. It was sitting on a teacher’s desk back in high school, full of pens, not coffee. One afternoon when no one was around, I slipped it into my backpack. I don’t remember why. Maybe I liked the shape. Maybe I liked the idea of owning something from a grown-up’s desk, like I was borrowing adulthood early. Either way, the mug was never really mine in any clean, moral sense. It lived with me, followed me through apartments and jobs and moves, quietly doing its job while I grew up around it. I made coffee, tea, late-night hot chocolate in college. I held it during long phone calls and longer writing sessions. At some point it became my favorite by default, just because it had been there the longest. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/life-interrupted-by-an-office monthly 0.5 2025-12-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1965fd98-31fa-4f07-a43c-348328cf7e5a/Life+Interrupted+by%5Dy+an+Office.png Reflections - Life Interrupted by an Office - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/cool-grass monthly 0.5 2023-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/5ad7ab56-70d1-4cf7-a728-e30c94d1b501/AdobeStock_4466844.jpeg Reflections - Cool Grass - Shivering Never Felt This Good Sound. Countless singing birds, breeze through trees, wind chimes, a faraway child.. Smell. Grass, sage meer feet away, outdoor air. Sight. A blue sky with passing clouds, towering trees, a green lawn dotted with brown and purple. Touch. Hard, uneven earth, the shade of a large tree, soft, cool grass. And, a shiver so slight I could relax it away if I wanted. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/stuck-to-the-ground monthly 0.5 2023-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1682270102255-0U531WHLR666UHW53U4P/AdobeStock_65888740.jpg Reflections - Stuck to the Ground - A Reflection on Gratitude A week or so ago, I had the thought that it’d be nice to lay outside on a blanket in the grass, meditate, and take a nap before returning to work. I got out of my wheelchair, laid on the ground, and covered my face with a sleep mask. I woke up 45 minutes later and realized I had made a series of mistakes. I did not lie in the shade. I left water inside. My chair was sitting up an almost imperceptible grade. I was wearing socks. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/consciousness-without-sensation monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1634425059517-SUG7K6WFNPAN6WDIIQTL/640px-Grey_headed_flying_fox_-_AndrewMercer_IMG41848.jpg Reflections - Consciousness Without Sensation - Mental Life in a Void In the paper, published in Duke University Press in 1974, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel, we get what is perhaps the most elegant definition of consciousness to date. That is, the subjective experience of being in the world. Presumably, it is “like” something to be my wife, and it is (probably) not “like” anything to be a pocket calculator. That “being like something” is what we mean by consciousness. As Sam Harris routinely puts it (first, I think, in his book Waking Up) this way, and I’m paraphrasing: “Even if we’re radically confused about everything—brains in vats living in a simulation—it is still ‘like’ something to have experience. Consciousness is the one thing that cannot be an illusion.” https://opendoors.blog/reflections/little-opportunity-for-change monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1634409992398-6NAZSMWQ7MJJCZA7PQC1/640px-Purekkari_neemel.jpg Reflections - Little Opportunity for Change - Changing Your Mind at This Moment in History In “How My Mind Changed,” I describe how my MS diagnosis was actually, on balance, a lucky event because it led to me being exposed to new, healthier content. However, there’s some nuance in this situation worth considering. At literally any other time in history, being afflicted with MS could be, at least potentially, disastrous. Leaving the lack of internet or ubiquitous audio content aside for a moment, I wouldn’t have access to diagnostics, treatment, physical therapy, assistive technology, or the ability to work from home—at least, not like I can today. So, it is true to say that the luck is in the timing. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/no-one-is-actually-talking-about-generations monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1682270346568-QG78Y0V5YF8XXD013GL7/Avocado%252525252BToast.jpg Reflections - No One Is Actually Talking About "Generations" - It’s Essentially Slang. Chill. “The boomers bought their first house for like $40k.” “Gen X doesn’t care about anything.” “All millennials want is free college.” “Why are gen Z kids always glued to their phones?” In Louis Menand’s article for The New Yorker, “It’s Time to Stop Talking About ‘Generations,’” we get a picture of the general public and academics alike sincerely discussing generational age cohorts—their differences in culture, style, and attitude. Mostly a criticism of the book Gen Z, Explained, by Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—which I haven’t read, to be fair—Menand disagrees with the premise that people can actually be judged based on their generational cohort. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/blog-post-title-one-73cfy monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1682270653623-IQSVWWEACYF336HTUVIX/Cogs.jpg Reflections - Find Your Passion… at Work - Making the Donuts—That’s not Passion My dad sent me a video several months back where NYU marketing professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway tells an audience that some of the worst advice young people ever receive—relating to work, at least—is to “follow your passion.” He then goes on to call this advice, “utter bullshit.” “Your job is to find something you’re good at and then spend the thousands of hours, and apply the grit, and the perseverance, and the sacrifice, and the willingness to break through hard things to become great at it. Because, once you’re great at something, the economic accoutrements of being great at something: the prestige, the relevance, the camaraderie, the self-worth of being great, will make you passionate about whatever it is” https://opendoors.blog/reflections/blog-post-title-two-najjy monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1682270726937-MW4GRBSFSEX2KSJM5Q0M/5f47134fcd2fec00296a4748.jpg Reflections - Disability As Political Performance Art - What’s Your Excuse? Eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was losing my ability to walk. My walking has slowly degraded since before my MS diagnosis, but being homebound and less active was beginning to take its toll. To be clear, MRIs have shown little to no physiological progression of my disease, but my day-to-day reality was changing nonetheless. My parents must have noticed too—not to mention hearing my many complaints—and gifted me a rowing machine as a two-month-early Christmas present. The rower is by no means a cure-all (nor has it turned me into a runner), but physical, quasi-athletic progress has worked wonders for my well-being. https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Culture monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Experience monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Parenting monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Disability monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Music monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Narrative monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/category/On+Work monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Well-Being monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Rigidity+Vs.+Malleability monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Madison+Cawthorn monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Consciousness monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Local+News monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/MS monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Boomer monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Millennial monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Bret+Easton+Ellis monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Politics monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Galloway monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/reflections/tag/Generations monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/fiction-and-poetry daily 0.75 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633281444523-U45A55ES1UH5AONJA72C/AdobeStock_36892186.jpeg Fiction & Poetry - Fiction & Poetry Speculative | Horrific | Surreal | Hallucinatory https://opendoors.blog/fiction-and-poetry/lifting-the-veil monthly 0.5 2023-04-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633904914254-MC41OEAL1S7NIYCK4F81/LiftingTheVeilLessGrain.jpg Fiction & Poetry - Lifting the Veil With the serum, you can feel as if you’ve climbed Everest, even if that were impossible. That was the claim. The most intimate of acts, to share the serum. This was Austin’s reasoning when he proposed it to Jackie. “We’re not gonna get sick,” he says, “I just want to get a little closer. Get to know you better. See what makes you tick.” They’d been friends for three months when he made the suggestion. “Just a little blood is all it takes,” he’d said. https://opendoors.blog/fiction-and-poetry/category/Where+They+Wander monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/fiction-and-poetry/category/Fiction monthly 0.5 https://opendoors.blog/tests daily 0.75 2021-04-08 https://opendoors.blog/home daily 1.0 2026-01-16 https://opendoors.blog/about daily 0.75 2026-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/e4ee7803-8853-4793-8ac1-57c2f6146c14/What+Is+Open+Doors.png What Is Open Doors? - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://opendoors.blog/what-im-hearing daily 0.75 2025-12-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633286586255-GEIFJPH7HT3Z3BG0Q83G/AdobeStock_76853826.jpeg What I'm Hearing - Fiction In the last few weeks, I’ve finished two works of fiction. First was the very good, great even, The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe: the first book in the Book of the New Sun Quartet. I won’t go much into the plot here except to say that it’s essentially a fantasy/sci-fi bildungsroman of the character Severian—an apprentice turned journeyman “torturer” who is writing in the narrative in the past tense as, I think, the “autarch:” something like a monarch in the fictional world. The story is great because it is, well, fun while also doing what the genre can do best: dig into or at least ask good philosophical questions. I also finished Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I thought I’d love the collection as I loved the HBO miniseries based on the stories. The stories aren’t not good (forgive the double negative. I think it matters here) but they’re just kind of upsetting in an unappealing way. That may be a strange way of putting it, but I can hold it in contrast with a novel like No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy—very (very) different subject matter, but also upsetting in an appealing way. I’m not one to say characters have to be likable for stories to be good—a silly concept—but Olive, in the book at least, was just something of a pain to read about. Maybe it was Frances McDormand playing Olive (as well as the rest of the cast) that made me love the miniseries. I will forever cite this as the perfect example of when the film/show was better than the book (contrary to what people always seem to claim). The last thing I’ll say, because this really is getting too long, is that maybe the best part of the collection is the depiction of Crosby, Maine. The town really is a character all its own: a lovely one, too. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633288253497-GBOH2WXJVXH9SX25G3UL/AdobeStock_8404822.jpg What I'm Hearing - Nonfiction I just finished The Iron Flute, a collection of Zen koans compiled by Genrō Ōryū in the 18th century and commented on by him, his disciple, Fugai, and 20th-century Zen master, Nyogen Senzaki. Zen koans are often thought of by laypeople as something like riddles to be solved, but this is a mistake. I’m not a student of Zen, but my understanding after hearing commentary from those listed as well as other figures in Zen like Henry Shukman and Zen master, Thích Nhất Hạnh, that koans, in a way, represent realization in themselves. They aren’t to be puzzled over but rather to be absorbed, as it were. Koans are to be meditated on—not as something like a mantra but as more of a window to the nature of self, experience, or reality. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633288291576-MRE0AMVCV40V0I0W0BNZ/AdobeStock_64135161.jpeg What I'm Hearing - Journalism, Essay, and Research One of the main ways I’ve listened to long-form journalism was the Audm app. Professional readers would read pieces from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and others. A couple of years ago, The New York Times purchased Audm, and it has long been the intention to migrate these features over to the new The New York Times Audio app. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that it turns out they’ve only created an app for iPhone, and Android users are effectively left in the dark. For the visually impaired interested in good journalism, this fact is disappointing, to say the least. That being said, I’m also aware that, in recent months, I’ve commented here several times about my disappointment in what I’m hearing. Still, it’s an odd feeling. The switch comes in just a few days which means, among other things, I’m really going to have to rethink what I’m writing here. Oh well—more time for books. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603047312c8e1b45642b52ea/1633289016795-N9RCT1OXT8OTTMAHDPYR/AdobeStock_306530268.jpeg What I'm Hearing - Podcast I’ll keep this short: partly because Fiction went so long, partly because I’m exhausted, partly because I almost just forgot about Wordle, and mostly because my wife is going to be quite upset if I crawl into bed too late and wake her up—God help us all. Anyway, I’m sure I’ve written about it here before, but I’ve been on a streak of listening to The Best of Car Talk. Without exaggerating, I think it’s fair to say that it’s one of the best podcasts out there—and this is coming from someone who voraciously consumes almost nothing but audio content. It was a tragedy when the show stopped running, but NPR airing re-runs, in order, and then continuing with the podcast is saintly indeed. I’m currently in 1994 and all I can say is I’m glad I never had to drive those heaps (though my first car was a ‘96, I think, Bonneville and that was alright. A boat, but alright). However, Tom and Ray Magliozzi are surely two of the most wonderful people to have walked the Earth (or, at least, talked on the radio). It’s a shame I can’t listen to an episode tonight while I lay in bed: I’d just be laughing and wake up my wife. Maybe I’ll try anyway. 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