“Everything you own, ends up owning you.” – Fight Club I spent a few hours yesterday rampaging through my yard with a mini-chainsaw and some Felco shears, savagely cutting back the verdant jungle that had sprung up in my yard during the heat, constant rain, and humidity of the last few weeks. I’d been getting […]
Everything You Own Ends Up Owning You: A Short Meditation On Battling Entropy Read More »
Why is a copy insufficient? I remember in Star Trek: First Contact, that moment when Picard places his hand on the prototype of the rocket equiped with the first warp drive: his expression one of awe, reverence, almost disbelief, that he is finally able to touch an object that means so much to him,
Why A Copy is Insufficient Read More »
What happens when you start beliveing your own bullshit? When you’re still trying to write under the guise of who you were, of who others think you were, instead of who you are? This is a champagne problem, I know, but something I’ve been thinking about a lot here at middle age/mid-career. Having 30+ years
Who We Were in the Old World Read More »
There’s a lot of body horror in my work, and that’s because… there’s a lot of body horror in my life. Messy bodies, broken bodies, gooey bodies, malfunctioning bodies, crazy bodies. I’m fascinated at how fragile it all is, how many things can and do go wrong, and how it’s a miracle that any of
The Wild Horror of the Body Read More »
One frustration with severe anxiety is that at some point, you realize you can no longer “trust your gut” on a lot of issues. I remember getting on a plane for the first time since COVID and being ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED I was going to die on the first leg of the flight, just falling out
Anxiety Doesn’t Know the Difference Between Difficulty and Dying Read More »
Found this old essay from February of 2022. This was previously locked to Patreon subscibers, but when I unearthed it I realized it captured a turning point in my life that felt deeply relevant to the current time period, too. This was about the time I quit drinking and started changing a number of inputs
The Last Few Years Broke Our Sense of Time. Here’s How I Started Rebuilding It. Read More »
I recently watched a documentary about that reaffirmed many changes I made last few years to my mental outlook (I read a LOT of brain books the last few years). Brains are hallucination engines. If the story is the world is shit, everything is fucked, our brains reframes every interaction. It sucks up all the
“We’re Fucked” Feels Like a Profound Insight. It’s Actually a Trap. Read More »
CONTENT CAUTION: Contains spoilers for Stranger Things season 5 and discusses childhood emotional and physical abuse. When I was a child, I lived with a monster. He slept in the big room at the back of my grandmother’s house during the day and only came out at night. Unless you woke him up. Unless
We Are the Stranger Things Read More »
This update went out in my most recent newsletter. If you’d like to get updates like this, sign up for The Hurley Cut: Story & Power. Somewhere between 2011 and 2020, I lost my way. I’ve been trying to untangle exactly what happened: mistakes made, near-misses, lucky breaks lost, poor choices. I was building a
I Broke Apart. I Came Back Better. Read More »
Once you start reading Stranger Things as one big allegory for child abuse, the whole thing hits real different. I have my snark about the slog of the editing and endless two-up talking scenes, but as a single piece of work, looking back on the whole thing, it’s a really ambitious show. With that kind
Imperfect Ambition Over Grinding Perfection Read More »