Writers everywhere (especially on social media) insist they can identify AI writing immediately. That we recognize it by its clarity, structure, and polish. But haven’t those always been the hallmarks of competent prose. This essay explores the panic over AI and how it says more about our myths around writing than it does about the writing itself.
Date Archives January 2026
Seventeen Syllables per Beer |
A Haiku Journey Through Every Major Craft Beer Style
Back when I was obsessed with craft beer, I homebrewed hundreds of gallons, earned a Certified Cicerone title, and immersed myself in the BJCP style guidelines. I turned every major beer style family into a haiku. This post is a poetic guide for beer geeks, homebrewers, and lovers of well-crafted ale.
Practice Cuts
I didn’t start cutting people out of my life as an adult. I learned it young. This essay explores how childhood divorce, forced self-reliance, and emotional withdrawal slowly morphed into a lifelong habit of distancing I didn’t recognize until much later.
Surviving the Empty
I learned early how to survive absence, how to leave without drama. Quiet, deliberate, and alone, I mastered the art of withdrawing. Rooms emptied. Voices faded. Doors closed. This is a reflection on solitude, early lessons in leaving, and the quiet skill of surviving the empty spaces life leaves behind.
Unrecyclable? Unforgivable. |
The Design Failure of Plastic Lip Balm Tubes and Learned Helplessness
Plastic lip balm tubes—single-use, disposable, destructive. This post exposes why these tiny, innocent-looking objects are a design failure, and how our learned helplessness has allowed a multi-billion-dollar industry to continue to dump trillions of them onto our planet every year.
The Myth of Good Writing |
A Diary of Sentences That Exist Anyway
I wrestle daily with whether my writing is good or shit. Most of the time, I write into a quiet vacuum, unsure if it matters at all. Yet the act itself—struggling, digging, pinning down fleeting thoughts—feels alive. It’s writing for me, for discovery, for sentences that exist anyway.
Anticipatory Disappearance |
On Survival and the Refusal to Grow Old
I’ve lived most of my adult life with the sense that I won’t grow old. At least not in the average sense we’re led to expect. Chronic illness taught me early that bodies fail quietly and often without warning. This isn’t an essay about dying. It’s about surviving, mistrusting the future, and refusing to lie about it.