Attempting to launch a newsletter and scrape up a readership of any kind often feels like screaming your lungs out into the depths of space. You give it your all, just hoping that some lone soul out there, somewhere in the dark vacuum of infinity, takes notice of what you have to say. You scream and scream and scream, and after a while, with sore vocal cords and the indifference of the universe in front of you, you decide it’s time to call it a day and move on.

And that’s how MidThoughts, this little off/on publication of mine, has felt over the past couple of years. I’ve launched, abandoned, and re-launched this thing so many damn times now that I’ve lost count. My repeat, reckless, baby-in-the-dumpster treatment of this newsletter likely alienated the handful of readers that I did have, and forced me to confront and reckon with my commitment to my craft (do you even have a craft if you’re not devoting time to it consistently?).

I look back on some past essays with a feeling of embarrassment. All of my lofty plans to make something substantial: a weekly column, dreams of a book, building a community of like-minded readers that would champion my writing and pay for my escape from the shackles of my dull and exhausting day job just fizzled away out of lack of energy, impetus, and ideas.

I gave up. I was tired, discouraged, and I gave up.

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And listen. I’m not coming back, dumping these personal woes of mine out onto the internet all these months later for anybody’s sympathy. I’m not here whining into the clouds looking for hugs or a piece of candy to make the pain go away. Failing to deliver on a promise to yourself because of a lack of work and consistency is a pretty open and shut case. I’m not sitting here aghast, wondering why the publication never seemed to get off the ground. I look in the rearview, and the reasons are pretty clear.

I have a bad habit of forming these grand visions in my head, promising way too much to myself right out of the gate, and then quickly realizing that too much, too soon is a quick road to failure. Unsustainable commitments create fear. Fear creates avoidance. Repeated avoidance creates failure. It’s a pretty simple formula. Don’t need to dwell on it for too long.

I think my problem with MidThoughts, and the reason that I’ve been caught in this vicious circle for so long, is that I approached this project with a sense of urgency right out of the gate. I created MidThoughts in an attempt to build a brand and a name for myself quickly, convinced that I’d burst through the walls of Substack like some kind of literary Kool-Aid Man, and everyone would immediately take notice of this amazing and unique new talent. Within months I’d be quitting my day job, telling my boss to suck eggs, and making a living on my own terms.

It’s difficult for me to admit all of this because it seems like an extremely delusional thought for a grown-ass man in his mid forties who really should know better by now, to entertain. I forced myself onto a biweekly writing schedule, which I was able to maintain for almost a year. I even went out of my way to do all the stuff needed for success, like commenting on other essays and occasionally posting in notes, but in the end, I also had a very busy, very draining day job, and the demands of that beast eventually won over, and zapped my willpower. I relaunched several months later, in a cloud of sudden inspiration, promising even more to my handful of readers, knowing that it would be almost impossible to sustain. And that relaunch folded not too long after it began. It’s embarrassing. I go running most days of the week, and you’d think the lessons about endurance, pace, and energy conservation that come with those workouts would carry over into other areas of my life.

You’d think.

I’ve done a lot of work on myself this past year. I’ve been trying finally to find peace and acceptance with my anxiety, and all of these things that I have no control over. I’ve been practicing my philosophy and am trying to draw-out and connect with universal truth in its purest form. I’ve worked on killing my ego, knowing that as long as it exists, I’ll never get to live with both feet firmly planted in reality. As I get older, destroying the ego seems more possible and within reach. It’s become much easier to pick up on all of its devious little tricks and schemes. As I trod closer to advanced age I’m eradicating any kind of attachment to unimportant and unsubstantial things like status or wealth. I want to die as close as I can to the truth, stripped away of all of the bullshit pageantry and useless ornamentation that we as humans attempt to drape all over it.

Heavy thinking, perhaps. The sense of urgency only grows with age and I have little time for the other kind these days.

I suppose all this brings me to the main point I’m trying to make here: I just want to strip away all the nonsense and write. It feeds my soul and allows me to digest this often perplexing world. Writing has always been a way for me to seek answers, reflect on my journey, and chart my path forward. Writing for any other reason would be dishonest to myself. So, I’m not here to make any more grand announcements for this publication that I can’t promise to fulfill. I’m no longer writing to build an audience, quit my job, or earn income. Instead, I’m giving myself permission to start fresh, to put on the old raggedy sweatpants, and just write. Square one. No schedule, no promises, and no expectations.

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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

12 Years Old

I can't remember when I became a minor delinquent, but by 12 years old, it was firmly rooted in me. The weird, gross-out kid culture of the late 80's and early 90's sang to my heart in a way few things could. Think Garbage Pail Kids, Madballs, and The Ren and Stimpy Show. I also discovered The Evil Dead movies at around this age. Boys were encouraged to be offensive, wild little deviants because it sold action figures. Fortunately for me I was already on that trajectory.

I slowly began to see authority figures not as a source of order, but as the main cogs of a machine intent on imposing their shared will on the populace. It was a pretty wild thing, feeling that first spark of anarchy when I was still watching Ninja Turtles and drinking Cocoa Puffs milk out of my cereal bowl before school, but looking back I'm proud of being capable of that level of fringe thinking in my preteen years. I actively began questioning everything that we did in school. Why did we have to write everything in cursive? Why did we have to line up in alphabetical order for the lunch line? George Washington didn't really cut down that cherry tree, did he?

So many hours in detention.

My friends were all weird, a trend that would continue all the way through high school. I always gravitated towards misfits. We mostly huffed cinnamon Binaca during recess and chopped it up about comic books and video games on the basketball courts during lunch. After school we'd break into abandoned warehouses, or explore haunted drainage ditch tunnels. I told Heather Dunn that she had "big ol' titties" in 6th grade and deserved the fierce ass whooping that I received in return. Many lessons were learned during those years. I was constantly testing my boundaries everywhere. We were slaves to routine without reason. An oppressive sense of inauthenticity pervaded everything.

I was also really good at video games. I took home first place in my area's 1992 Blockbuster Video Game Championships. That Sonic the Hedgehog 3 run is still sitting upstairs, permanently etched into some neural pathway of mine. Pure muscle memory and honed instinct. It would be my first taste of the Thug Life.

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Hey folks, and welcome to the first edition of The Spread Shot.

Why The Spread Shot? It’s a nod towards my favorite power-up from the 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System classic Contra. Notorious for its punishing difficulty, Contra was the Xennial preteen's version of the ancient proving grounds, a rite of passage where boys became men, where we had our first true taste of the hardship and the toils that would haunt us throughout adulthood. Tears were shed, controllers were hurled against the wall in uncontrollable fits of rage, and innocence was broken, but if you somehow managed to make it through to the end and kill this thing...

You could safely say you were ready for damn near anything life would toss your way.

For the non-gaming, non-xennial crowd out there, just know that, in Contra, once you picked up the spread shot power-up, you wanted to hang onto it. Its scattershot pattern would reach far and wide, decimating most on-screen enemies in seconds.

In this column, I'll be casting a similarly wide net, curating recent stuff I've read, listened to, watched, thought of, or experienced all into a semi-regular package. You can think of this column as the more casual, down-time in between longer posts. It’s the Substack version of chopping it up with your friends after school and playing pogs on the porch.

(And naw fam, I’m not even gonna bullshit you, this column also gives me an easy-out when the creative juices in the ol’ noggin run dry and I need something new to post.)

So with that exposition out of the way... away we go.

New Year's Resolutions - I know we're knee-deep in February now, but I'm still firing away at my New Year's Resolutions for this year. I've written in the past about my love/hate relationship with New Year's Resolutions, but these days it's mostly love. I like the idea of figuratively wiping the accumulated, residual gunk off of the last year and approaching the new one with a clean slate. Because of the stigma associated with the phrase, and because I want to be one of the kool kids, I prefer to just call them by the much less lofty term, annual goals.

For accountability's sake, here are some of mine for 2025:

• Read 21 books this year, topping my previous year's 20. I also will take my first stab at reading a book entirely in Chinese.

• Jump back into the Substack game and reach a subscriber count of 100+. Being that I'm at a net -2 subscribers so far, a month into the year, looks like this one may be a bit of an uphill battle.

• Finish the Reddit/Focal Point 2025 Photo class. The Photo class has been on my radar for a while, but the commitment-level was just not there in previous years. After a few years of dabbling, I’m seriously looking to up my photography game this year.

Reading: The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator By Timothy C. Winegard -

The premise of Winegard's book is fascinating; an unfurling of human history as seen through the mosquito's deep but silent influence. Before I lept into this one, I was grabbed my the synopsis:

Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution?

The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito.

In execution, this book delivers on that wild promise... for the first two or three of its 19 chapters. Wineguard details just how lethal and widespread of a killer the mosquito has been to human beings, being responsible for murdering nearly half of the people to have ever walked this planet. He also floats the fascinating idea that when an asteroid slammed into the Yucutan Peninsula, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs, it was not the sudden, unexpected extinction event we've alwys imagined it as, but more of a death blow to a species already on its last legs, weakened and thinned-out to the point of imminent extermination, due to mosquito borne-illness.

The main problem with Wineguard's book is that after that killer intro full of wild promise, it sprials quickly into a more or less rote history of human (but actually mostly just Western) civilization.

We get heavy into the events of Greek society, the Peloponnesian wars, the Christian crusades, the Columbian Exchange, and the discovery of the new world, with Wineguard remembering to mention the mosquito or malaria every few pages with melodramatic, foreboding, but inconsequential prose like "Even then, the mosquito laid in the wake, shaping expansion and unleashing its invisible chaos on prospering economies." The mosquito content quickly diminishes, at times almost feels like an afterthought, and is not nearly as substantial as the book promises.

Still, Wineguard's writing style is much more engaging than your average history textbook, and I’m seeing it through mainly because of that. Take it as a pretty comprehensive history of western civilization and just be aware that the "hook" of this book does not really hit the mark.

Listening: jazzy but not too jazzy - Listen. We're totally fucked as a people. Everything that you knew is falling apart. We've lost the battle and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can plan our next steps.

In the midst of the chaos-event known as Regular, Everyday Life in the Year 2025 the YouTube algorithm gods floated this quirky collection of city pop-esque jazz instrumentals my way. It reminds me of the jazzy (but not too jazzy) instrumentals that provided backing for the in-game menus of Sega Saturn and Dreamcast games of the 90s. It's funky, upbeat, smooth, and very much Japanese. In this dismal timeline it, along with a protracted, willful ignorance of the events transpiring out there, is preserving my sanity and somehow keeping a smile on my stupid face while the billionaires loot the federal treasury and my city burns.

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I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

4 Years Old

Big ol' round head, mushroom cut hair, goofy no-lip smile. I looked a lot like Danny Torrance from Kubrick's The Shining, or Creedence-era John Fogerty in kid form. This era was punctuated by that acute ignorance towards the world that you'd expect from a 4-year-old. If Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood didn't mention it, it didn't exist.

These are where my earliest memories were born. My recollections don't stretch back any further than this. Mom and I lived on a quiet residential street at my grandparent's home in the San Fernando Valley, where I received tons of love and warmth from all directions. There was a complete sense of sanctuary, of being completely sheltered from the evils of the world. I couldn't even comprehend evil at that point. In my fresh mind, the world was inherently a good place. I was totally oblivious to the long string of mental and physical abuse that my mom and I had endured just a year or two prior under the cocaine-fueled shadow of my biological dad. That had all transpired before the age when memories congeal and take shape. I didn't learn about any of that until several years later. It nearly destroyed me.

I feel a deep love, admiration, and tinge of melancholy sadness towards this kid. All he wanted to do was play with Robotech toys and Shrinky Dinks. He was curious about nature, kept an ant farm, and loved getting hugs from grandpa. Over 40 years later, gramps remains my greatest hero. The window of pure childhood innocence was short, even back then.

Coming out of that brief period is always a minor tragedy.

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My aunt passed away yesterday morning.

It's been about 24 hours since I received the news and I'm in a weird state of lock-up. Emotions are completely frozen. I can't process it and I'm trying to work out why.

Cancer has torn through the women in my family. Lynch's Syndrome runs rampant in our genes, making uterine, ovarian, and colon cancers chillingly common. My surviving aunt has applied the bone chilling term "Turbo Cancers" to describe them. They are aggressive and quick. The doctors diagnosed my aunt just before Thanksgiving and she passed not even a week into the New Year. Cancer took my grandmother in her mid 60s, my mom in her 50s, and my cousins, all younger than me, each already had their own brushes with this malignant gut-rot.

Ravenous. Insatiable. Relentless. I stupidly try to personify this force of nature that has ripped through my bloodline. These were all good, loving people with dreams and futures that were pilfered away from them with no mercy. My poor aunt never had a degree. She loved the ocean, but worked in a bail bonds office and was on call at all odd hours of the night, worked completely dry. I'd talk to her over the phone and she just sounded exhausted. The promise of retirement in a few years, she told me, was all that kept her going.

She didn't even get that, and it floods me with a potent anger that I don't exactly know where to direct. She worked to exhaustion her entire adult life, finally being released from the grind because she needed to go home to die.

Next comes the cremation, and then the service, just like it did for my grandma and my mom before that. Another run through the motions. We've been on this train before. I sit here wondering how many more times we'll have to be put through this. How many more times do we have to dig deep and attempt to wrench some kind of underlying meaning out of this absurd dance?

I think I've hit the point where I've realized that trying to make sense of it is completely futile. The first time was devastating, the second time was puzzling, and this round is just paralyzing. Cancer's gonna cancer, and the deck is stacked against us. Nature just has a warped sense of humor, I guess. I figure I'll just torture myself or go insane trying to rationalize it.

Best I can do is to try yanking the lawnmower cord of perspective once again, try spinning this tragedy into another call to action, just like last time, and the time before that. I'll give myself the same pep talk, tell myself to treasure every day and encourage myself to maybe even take a risk or two to vault out of the mundane ruts I tend to always hover over and drop into. Will the lessons of loss ever stick? Now and then I'll make an honest effort to claw myself out of this glass jar I find myself trapped in, but I seem to always find myself back where I began, passing hours in the office, sights set towards Friday so that I can get out and actually live for a couple of days before doing it all over again.

It's a strange feeling, going through life and watching your loved ones being picked off, one by one, another majestic tree being felled every few years. It makes me feel increasingly old, alone, and insecure. Looking back, I remember the holidays of my early childhood. Aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, and friends would all descend upon my Grandparent's house. I felt safe surrounded by my family. Sitting here now and reflecting, just a couple months out from my 46th birthday, the only ones remaining from those gatherings are my oldest aunt, an uncle, and my younger brother. There is a very clear contrast between the warmth that I felt in my childhood and the growing shadow of isolation that began inching towards my toes when my grandma died 25 years ago and set this whole death-chain into motion.

Make it mean something. But outside of my vain attempts, it doesn't seem to. All layers have been peeled away and exposed. There’s nothing else to contemplate and discover. This is it. What you see is what you get.

Maybe one day it will come to me suddenly in the earliest hours of the morning, it'll cut through the twilight like a sharp flash of red light, while the rest of the world is still sound asleep. A sudden clarity will sweep away all the muddiness and mystery, and I'll finally understand why they had to be taken away before their time. The reason will be standing there in plain sight, and I'll no longer have to be appalled when death comes to snatch someone else away again.

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2024 was a mixed-bag year. While I accomplished a few of the major goals that I set out for, others… namely my commitment to this newsletter, died of sudden, heartless abandonment.

But hey, I'm back, and after resurrecting MidThoughts and dragging it through a minor recalibration and relaunch, I'd like to end 2024 with a reflection and a glimpse of where I want to take things in the new year.

First off, in the coming weeks, I'm launching my semi-regular column, The Spread Shot, which will be a means of corralling all of those errant thoughts and recent interests and recommendations into a neatly packaged, digestible form. I know a lot of other newsletters have these weekly roundup-type posts. I can't promise that I'll be deviating too much from the established formulas, but my promise is that The Spread Shot will be my own take on said formulas.

I also want to begin incorporating more of my original photos into my posts. Besides writing, photography has become a second passion of mine. A few years ago, I dropped a pretty hefty bag of cash on upgrading my camera setup and snapping photos with the intention of including them in these posts not only justifies buying all those expensive toys, but it also gives me a swift kick in the ol' impetus to get out there and hone my skills a bit.

Finally, I want to incorporate audio into some of my work. For now, that will amount to audio readings (recorded in my own imperfect voice, not some uber-polished, auto-generated AI slop) included in selected posts. From there, who knows? Since watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 at the tender age of 11, I've always held lofty childhood fantasies of hosting my own radio show, so maybe podcasting is in my future? But let's take it slow... baby steps.

So yeah, we're rounding a corner on a new year, and the prevailing drive is to get back on here and start creating again. I'm excited.

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2024 Reflections

Three big takeaways from this year:

1. I am far more prone to distraction and procrastination than I ever imagined. (YouTube is literal Kryptonite to me these days.)

2. Humans have a greater capacity for good when taken individually, whereas when taken collectively, they inevitably seem to slide in the direction of evil.

3. Love makes any pain infinitely more endurable.

Three pieces of advice to myself for 2025:

1. Do not seek out news. It's become far too tainted by money at this point. The important stuff will find a way to filter down to you.

2. Nature's effect on clearing and purifying the mind can never be understated. Get out there, climb some mountains, walk among the trees, and breathe clean air in times of uncertainty.

3. Don't sideline your creative outlets when life's regular demands become overwhelming. At that point, you'll need to call on those creative passions more than ever.

Lesson of the year: Drake and the volatility of ego

As a longtime hip-hop head, the Kendrick v. Drake beef commanded my attention more than any other story of 2024. It took on a fable-like significance to me and, distilled down to a base-level arc of events, was ripe with important lessons about the dangers of the ego, the art of war, and the universal thirst for authenticity in a world more and more devoid of it with each passing day.

Sometimes, we must gauge our abilities, take a hit or two, and then retreat when we know we're out of our league. This is basic self-preservation. You see it in nature all the time. As soon as Drake punched back from Kendrick’s Like That verse, I instantly knew he was signing off on his own elimination. His belly had been full of his own Kool-Aid for years, whether it came from his album sales figures, yes men, or accumulated wealth. As he continued to goad Kendrick to drop, drop, drop, It was akin to a gazelle poking the lion. We all knew what was gonna happen when the lion eventually poked back.

This is hip-hop. Talking shit and declaring yourself the GOAT just comes with the territory. Playing in this game, he should have known that. Perhaps if the Drizzster was willing to take the slap from the more skilled, more authentic artist and continue down the road of bottled pop hits that made him who he is, things would have looked a lot different for him at this point. Instead, ego prodded him out of his bag, gassed him up beyond rational thought, and the rest goes down as one of the most savage beatings in the history of rap music.

Travel Impressions 2024:

Thailand: Amazing food, massive shopping malls, beautiful culture, shitty traffic. Thailand is up there with Japan for the most tourist-friendly country in Asia I've ever traveled to. Despite a crash course in survival Thai a few weeks before departure, I quickly realized that getting by without a basic understanding of the language is not a problem at all.

Those first couple of days in any new country are always a little stressful as you figure out the lay of the land and gauge how to communicate and get around. Not the case with Thailand. All it took was a quick download of the Grab app for transportation and a little research on Google Maps, and I was zipping all over the place. Thailand takes care of you, and I will be returning soon.

Fun fact: Thailand was so amazing that when six people died of a murder-suicide a few floors below me while I was staying in the Grand Hyatt in Bangkok it hardly had any effect on my enjoyment of the trip. No cap.

Taiwan: I stopped in Taiwan for a few days on my way home from Thailand. Because of my language-learning journey in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwan has become pretty much my second home at this point. Friends picked me up from the airport at the tail end of a typhoon and immediately took me to an all-you-can-eat hotpot place, where I quickly forgot about my delayed flights in a sea of great conversation, delicious meats, and spicy numbing broth smeared all over my face like some fat, rosy-cheeked king feasting on roasted pheasant in 15th century Europe. To have these warm human connections waiting for you on the other side of the planet is an indescribable blessing that I do not take for granted.

Mexico: At the end of October, my girl and I ventured out to Quintana Roo, staying in Playa del Carmen for a couple of weeks. It was my first time in the Yucatan Peninsula. We were able to celebrate Dia de los Muertos in Mexico, which was a longstanding, high-tier bucket list item.

Sure, we were rented a highly abused Ford that looked like it made it through at least a couple of runs to Thunderdome. It came with the check engine light on ("All of my cars have that," the guy at the rental agency told us). Still, it got us up and down the Riviera Maya in determined pursuit of delicious pastor, beautiful cenotes, and all the wonderful treasures that exist only in Mexican Walmarts.

I love Mexico. As a native Angelino, I've always considered growing up under the influence of Mexican culture a true gift, and through years of environmental osmosis, it's become an indelible part of this gringo's identity. I keep telling myself that I'm going to start learning Spanish at some point, but the perfectionist inside of me won't allow myself to start until I attain a comfortable level of fluency in Mandarin first.

The stuff that kept me sane in 2024:

Tacos: Not even considering my time in Mexico, I probably ended up eating more tacos per capita in 2024 than I did in the past five years combined. My tastes also migrated from carnitas to al pastor and birria in the process. The pure joy and excitement that stirs my sweet little heart every time I round a corner and see a taco truck gets me all giddy and makes me feel like a kid again. I'll leave it at that, because I have plans to draft up a post about tacos in the near future (Seriously).

Hiking: I promised myself that after my half-marathon training ended (in October) I'd dial back on the running a bit and return to hiking, which has always been a deep well of mental sustenance and clarity for me. It doesn't take much, just an early jaunt around the hills at Griffith Park on a Saturday morning contains enough good energy to wipe out the stress from a grueling week at the day job and get my head where it needs to be.

Love: I'll end it here by cranking up the cheese factor a bit, but finding love in 2024 really imbued my spirit with a sense of purpose, duty, and courage that simply wasn't there in previous years. If you're lucky enough to have found genuine love, cherish and cultivate deep gratitude for it. It's a superpower.

See you in 2025.

Godspeed.

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Don’t give me presents. I don’t want your cards, your good tidings, holiday cheer, or any of that stuff.

All I want for Christmas this year is some peace and quiet.

I'm staring down a nine-day break from my day job that's going to carry my holly-jolly ass straight into 2025, and to keep it real, I don't want to see another human being during that entire stretch. Work has been madness. I'm about two or three more frayed nerve endings away from foiling up the windows and nailing the door shut.

The holidays are generally regarded as a time to huddle around with loved ones, knock back a couple of glasses of eggnog, and cozy up around the crackling fireplace. In reality, the season ends up being a time when you have to grit your teeth down to the gums in restraint when Uncle Randy starts working on his seventh can of Keystone Light, now in full freefall, howling uncontrollably in a pit of his own misery about how the gawt-daym Mexicans are taking all of our jobs away while uncomfortably eyeing your 16-year-old daughter in the stairway.

Cue up the boys slap-boxing themselves red in the garage as they step on the dog's tail, all while the second turkey you don't want to eat in the span of a month roasts away in the oven, and you have more or less what the traditional American holiday season has spun itself into in the year 2024.

Naw, I'm good, dawg. I’m giddy over the prospect of a low-effort Christmas. The tree stays in the closet this year. I'll just be cuddling up to the Cannon Films Collection and eating microwave-reheated Tamales from the Vallarta in my robe. Pure bliss.

2024 is marked as the year that I officially lost hope in humanity, or maybe it's better to frame it as I let go of my hope for humanity… because this was very much an intentional decision. I mean let's be honest, we're beyond fucked at this point. Before, there was always that seed of hope sitting back there, confident that we'd wake up and reverse course. The common folk would band together and rise, the evil and greedy who have commandeered and abused all of the power structures would be punished, and we'd eventually triumph because, despite our differences, human beings are essentially decent, intelligent, and strong in numbers.

Yeah, well that was a fucking lie. I've always found it a lot easier to deal with human beings on a one-on-one basis, but taken collectively, we're a bunch of dumb, grinning assholes willingly getting fleeced by the 1%. And although the year ended with a CEO no longer being where a CEO once was, I believe that was an anomaly, and don't think America collectively has the grit, the social consciousness, nor the appetite for sustained resistance to repeat that bold act. The authorities will continue parading this guy around like he's Bane to dissuade the copycats, the TikTok ban will fail, and we'll all go back to our normal pastimes like ignoring school shootings.

Yikes. Can you get any saltier, Dan? Let's reign it in a bit, because the point I'm trying to make here, believe it or not, is a positive one. You see, since letting go of hope and instituting a healthy regimen of willful ignorance toward all news (outside of Kendrick vs. Drake), my mental clarity, focus, and sense of purpose have grown exponentially. The burden of hope is a tremendous one, and after being forced to brunt letdown after depressing letdown, it wears the mind and emotions down. Just like politics and religion, that degree of daily investment tears you away from your true, untainted identity. Your hopes and dreams become the hopes and dreams of the tribe, and it's easy to lose sight of the things right in front of your face, that you once had a passion for, that you do have the immediate ability to nurture and grow.

And that's where I find myself in the tail-end of 2024. The world may be burning around me, but somehow I'm smiling more than ever and finding my small slice of peace in it all. I'm making the conscious choice to remove myself from the Big Game and am turning inward, working on my writing, my photography, and my language-learning journey. I’m spending time with the positive people in my life, recultivating my passion for reading, knowledge, and learning.

I've essentially become the This is Fine dog. And I'm OK with that. It's always been my favorite meme because, in these wild times, it appears to be the only logical way to forge forward without completely losing your mind. Honing our perspectives, and reclaiming control of those things in our immediate circle has become our greatest shield against this mess. Call it stoicism, call it whatever you want. Don't deny yourself the freedom sitting right in front of your eyes. Choose peace today... because fuck it, we all gon' die.

Hello? Anybody still here?

I'm writing this at the San Diego Grand Hyatt Manchester, I’m in the Harbor Tower to be specific, one of two pastel-colored monoliths erupting into the sky, teetering on the edge of the San Diego Bay. I'm here for a conference related to my day job but decided to play career-roulette and momentarily duck my workplace responsibilities, whisking myself up the elevator and into the tranquil sanctuary of my room because of a sudden and overwhelming urge to return here, to MidThoughts.

Logging into substack and wiping the cobwebs off of my publisher dashboard to find my precious 28 subscriber count undeterred by my 8 months of cold indifference, still waiting for me despite my heartless and cruel act of abandonment is getting me all choked-up and emotional.

Well, Daddy's home little ones, and looking down at your big, watery, saucer-eyes and clenched lips, I'm overwhelmed with guilt. I hope you can find it in your pure and untainted little hearts to forgive me.

Regardless, I knew I'd come back here someday. Truth is, back in May I attempted to draft up a post titled Love Does not Exist in this Dojo, (Which I am 130% gonna reuse, so don't steal that shit) that attempted to explain why I went from log-flipping, Rocky Balboa levels of determination to see this newsletter to success, to a sudden, unexplained departure as cruel and merciless as the day my biological father walked out of my life forever (true story, bro).

Well, fast forward to the end of November, and I finally find myself with enough inspiration and courage to offer up a proper explanation.

I fell in love y'all. I fell into a syrupy, extra-sweet, watermelon Jolly Rancher type of love. A love born of fate, but with enough complications tossed our way in the process to truly test ourselves and make sure that the commitment level was real. More details to come as deemed fit and necessary, but for now... yeah, love.

But this post isn't about my love story. This post is about MidThoughts, a newsletter that as I stand here looking back at it, was my almost project. After spending over half of my life constantly dicking around with the idea of going all in on this writing thing, picturing myself as a milder, less fun Hunter S. Thompson, hopping in my RAV4 in thirst of acetaminophen-fueled adventure in the produce aisle. In that wild, writer's pipedream, MidThoughts was the closest I came to making those ambitions a reality.

Strangely, I feel as if I intentionally aborted in the name of love just as I was finally making headroads with this project. I was getting comments from other writers that I truly respected, and I had a couple of posts gain a readership beyond any of my feeble expectations. So when love entered the picture, that was my perfect opportunity to self-sabotage and find my exit ramp, relieving me of the burden of thinking up new content every couple of weeks while navigating a new and exciting relationship.

But now, amid this soulless trade show, rubbing shoulders with what feels like over 10,000 backpack-toting technology zombies, all typing notes they will never look at again on expensive, carefully maintained iPads connected to magic keyboards, I had the urge to break free from all of this digital noise and dull industry chatter to pull something out of myself that has been sitting dormant and unnurtured for months on end.

So that's why I'm here, liberated from all of the sleep-inducing talk of firewall appliances, and multi-factor authentication tokens taking place down below, returning to this space that once showed so much potential and promise to me as a creative endeavor at this time last year.

So where does MidThoughts go from here?

That's not an easy question to answer. But let me say first that I want to take another serious crack at this whole newsletter thing. The urge to begin writing stuff again has hit me hard and I'm trying to tame that skittish attention span of mine again. It's been full of that wild horse energy, all snorting and braying in open defiance, kicking up dust and causing trouble for me whenever I show up with the lasso and a gentle timbre in my voice to begin to calm and temper it.

I've been committing myself to hunkering down for writing sessions again. Rehabbing my creative self slowly, building back up to a respectable daily habit. Over the past several weeks 10 minutes of writing after dinner has grown to 15, and then 20. I've managed to round the half-hour mark and now am heading north, hovering somewhere around 40-ish minutes, five or six times a week.

I'm ready to take the plunge again, but I'm split on the direction I want to head in. The beautiful, sickly distraction of love and an eight-month break from keeping those writer's sensibilities sharpened on the whetstone of life have no doubt pulled me in other directions than I was headed earlier this year, leaving me a little conflicted.

I want to relaunch the newsletter. That much I'm certain of. I just don't know what that consists of yet. Do I keep the name? Or do I tear this vacant structure down like they did The Tropicana and rebuild it according to my new bubbling whims? Do I continue a focus on middle-age adjacent material, or do I expand into other territories? Common Substack wisdom tells me that expanding into broader topics is a bad thing. I should be finding my niche. But if not focusing on contending with middle-age, then what? Truthfully, I'm feeling a lot younger at 45 than the 44-year-old shell of a man I crawled out of earlier this year.

I want to maintain that playful, borderline-immature tone that keeps me smiling through all of the hopelessness that we face today, in a simmering, uncertain world caught in the swirl of the widening gyre. I mean, I have to. That's just who I am. But as far as where I want to aim that loaded cannon of silliness, I just don't know yet.

Just know that I'm on the way back. MidThoughts is on the way back, even if it's resurrected in a new form. I'm just doing some work on the back end here, hammering out the details of the contract.

Of course, if anybody is still out there all these months later, I'd love your input / personal experiences. Bonus points if you have your own newsletter and have faced a similar extended absence and/or mild change of heart in your creative compass.

In the meantime, just know that I'm still around, and am gearing up for something. Give me a little more time to figure out how to properly get myself back here in working order.

See you soon...

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Hey, doods.

I'm not one of those newsletter writers who have this magical, endless creative well of topics and ideas to draw from. I've always been curious about how other writers run their newsletters, probably in the hope of discovering that baseline workflow that everybody but me seems to know about and operate from. It kinda shocked me when I read that a few other writers that I admire maintain a collection of 20-odd drafts or so, all in varying stages of development, and then choose one to polish off for that week’s essay.

I don't work like that. I give myself two weeks to come up with something and my stupid-weird brain has a knack for tossing some errant thought my way literal days before my self-imposed publishing deadline, which ends up becoming that week's newsletter. It’s the creative equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck, and although it creates a somewhat stressful, menacing writing environment, it does offer up some lovely self-induced spontaneity and adds a breezy, super-casual flavor to my words that kinda just works for me. Can’t think too hard about what you’re writing if you have that unwavering, unsympathetic deadline staring you dead in the face, amirite?

Seat of my pants. That's how we fly these friendly skies.

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But now and then my melon returns a big fat 404 Not Found error for the entire two weeks and leaves me scrambling until the very last minute for some rando topic to write about. That’s when I find myself flipping through the mental Rolodex of mundane everyday stuff to find something worthy of latching onto that I can reasonably bullshit my way through riff off of for about 800 words or so, providing a desperately needed reprieve until that ominous deadline once again begins looming overhead in a couple of weeks.

That’s this issue of MidThoughts. What follows is a glorified morning pages session, the day before my publication deadline. No edits. No revisions. Just pure brain pudding spilled out onto the digital page. Hey, it might not look pretty, but at least it’s Content…

I want to start by lobbing a serious question out to you all. How many of you out there peddling your content on The Substacks have a regular ol’ 9-5 job? I’m asking for a friend. When I made a commitment to take a more active role in self-promotion on my newsletter at the turn of the new year I did this while staring my own reality cold in the eyes. While trying to realize just a small fraction of my inner creativity through this newsletter, I’m also tugging around this massive burden of a 9-5 management job that has its thirsty fangs permanently sunk deep into the back of my neck.

And this is not a complaint. The pay is good enough to allow me to live comfortably as a single father with a newly-christened adult child while living in a modest apartment in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles. I travel once or twice a year, am able to eat out a couple times a week, and am left with enough extra income to pursue my real interests like writing and photography. And until I somehow crack the code and leverage this little side project of mine into a full-fledged business enterprise, or reach my breaking point with work and the dwindling tolerance I have with my fellow Americans and decide to just say fuck it and flee the country, I’m gonna amble along with this current status quo.

The thing is though, the responsibilities and demands of the 9-5 often put a serious damper on the residual time and energy I have left to spend on making this stuff. That’s why I go from extreme highs, where I’m riding a wave of high creative energy and manage to put something out there with polish that I’m proud of that manages to crack 100 views in a day, to low-ebb weeks like this, where I’m literally churning out these lazy screeds at the 11th hour just as Substack hurls these chilling reminders into my mailbox, ratcheting up my anxiety by warning me that I have “2 days left to hit my publishing goal.”

As someone who reads at least as often as I am writing here, it’s easy to get lost in the idea that all of these newsletters that I enjoy reading are written by full-time writers who aren’t caught in the muddy trenches of having to deal with bothersome, silly distractions like Careers, or Putting Food on the Table, or anything like that. These people spend a few hours writing one or two mornings a week and then the rest of the time it’s just endless racquetball at the sports club with the occasional dinner date with their art colony bros thrown in to break up the boredom.

But that can’t be the case. It can’t be. The beauty of a platform like this is that it offers an open invite to even wretched, wart-nosed commoners like myself who just have a passion for words and ideas to step up to the plate and give it a shot. Substack is digital publishing for the everyman. Writers of the world, unite! Seize the means of production! We’re all supposed to be equals here, right?

…right?

So let me ask a favor of any of you who managed to make it this far. If you’re publishing content here (or anywhere else for that matter), please drop a comment below and tell me what your “real” day job is, and how you manage to marry that with your creative passions and a steady publishing schedule. And if there’s some secret sauce to this whole thing that I’ve missed all these months, feel free to drop that down below as well. 😉

And ahhhh shit, I did it again, didn’t I? Didn’t I say just two issues ago that I wasn’t going to write anything else about Substack or the writing process? And here I am again kicking the can around by myself, swinging from the chandelier at my own private pity party.

OK, well let me present a little peace offering and try to make it up for you with this rad-ass shit from Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo:

Crisis averted! See you in a couple of weeks!

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I'm being utterly sincere when I say that Substack is one of the only safe, untainted corners left on the internet. It's a rare, razor-thin sliver of positivity and hopefulness in an otherwise bleak, darkening horizon. I imagine today's internet as some ever-burning, disaster-ridden, digital Gotham City; a lawless, hate-filled digital sponge full of extremists, ugly conflict, and greedy corporate opportunists with dollar signs in their eyes and rising, Joker-esque grins revealing hungry, bloody fangs.

The internet has gone from a beacon of hope and connectedness that once enticed us with promises of bringing the world together, to a dumping ground for humanity's worst fears and instincts. It now seems to exist merely as an interface for stoking division and stalking your every move in a desperate effort to prey on, and mercilessly exploit all of the most exposed vulnerabilities of your psychology in a shameless, unmasked ploy to squeeze every last buck it can out of your bank account. It didn't take long to transform all that giddy potential of the AOL days into a digital minefield that could, quite possibly, spell our doom.

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Yikes. That's a pretty bleak picture, yo, and I'm sorry for all of the heavy-duty language and imagery here, but lately I've been thinking of those early days of the internet, back around the turn of the millennium—pre-Covid, pre-9/11, when we were a lot more innocent, mostly friendly, and a whole lot less racist. Back when our wildest fears sprung from an unfounded lack of faith in our digital architecture, and that looming specter of Y2K that would send electrical grids into total collapse, the stock market into utter freefall, and cause forests to burn and acid to rain from the sky, all because Microsoft may have kinda not figured out how to make that seemingly simple transition from 11:59 pm 12-31-1999 to 12:00 am 01-01-2000.

Back then there was no Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. There was only The World Wide Web, The Information Superhighway, The 'Net. Those words no doubt conjure up whispy memories of grinding hard drives sealed away behind yellowing, off-white, Compaq tower plastic, the obnoxious squealing white noise twang of dial-up modems, and those stupid-heavy CRT monitors causing our desks to warp and buckle under the weight.

I remember those AOL CDs that would show up in my mailbox long before I had any actual firsthand experience with the internet. My deviant buddies and I would stockpile a thick stack of those bad boys up and then fling them across the street at the evil neighbor's house like mini-frisbees at night, daring that sour bastard to again send us scrambling down the street as he ambled out in a fury, clutching his shotgun, and demanding Jesus Christ himself descend from the heavens and strike us dead then and there.

It wasn't until my Freshman year in high school, when I signed up for a "digital computing" class, that I had my first taste of an actual desktop computer and the internet. A few weeks into that first semester, some Matthew Broderick, War Games-ass child prodigy classmate of mine found a way to sneak a WAD file of the shareware version of DOOM onto the high school computer lab LAN, and instead of plugging along on whatever C++ Basic programming shit we were assigned at the time, we were instead IDDQD'ing ourselves into omnipotence and chainsawing ourselves through the gates of hell. It was glorious and I suddenly found myself a whole lot more interested in all this goofy computer shit.

It was the second half of the year when California rolled out an initiative to bring this mysterious, invisible sorcery known as The Internet into schools statewide that our computer lab got plugged in and we finally set the plasma rifles aside to explore this fresh, uncharted, and seemingly endless terrain.

Loading up Netscape Navigator, I quickly realized that I didn't know exactly how to internet. None of us did. Google didn't exist back then. What the fuck was a Google? We mostly just poked around in the dark. Our first experiments were plugging whatever infantile shit we could think of in front of .com to see where it would take us. There was "fart.com" "ass.com" etc. (please follow those at your own risk, I have no idea where they'll take you these days, and endorse none of them). Later on, we discovered Webcrawler, one of, if not the first real search engine on the World Wide Web (which holy shit, somehow still exists), and from there the lid of the internet was blown wide open for us. It didn't take long for some of the more morally askew students to track down some pretty heinous stuff online. I remember the Kurt Cobain suicide photos in particular were especially disturbing, and I refused to look at them. You have to remember these were the primordial days of the internet and there were no such things as internet filters, trackers, or any real way to monitor student activity. We were basically in permanent stealth mode. It was the wild west out there.

As time passed, we began to find our footing, and before I knew it, my dad dropped 1,500 bones on a Compaq Presario, and boom, our household suddenly had our very own computer, complete with a blazing, greased-lightning 33.6k dial-up modem.

If you weren't around for it, it's not easy to grasp how different of a world it was like being online back in the mid-90s. None of the rules of the modern internet needed apply in those days. This is back when it was actually exciting to see a new email pop up in your mailbox first thing in the morning (Wow! A real Nigerian prince? And he's emailing me??) Back then, I could get away with an Uber-secure password like dogz1 to secure my Earthlink email account. Online shopping was still in its infancy. Who knows, we were probably flinging unencrypted credit card numbers across the globe willy-nilly without a second thought in those early years. Amazon was "Earth's Biggest Bookstore" and eBay was "The World's Online Marketplace". It was simply incredible to me that with a few clicks, I could have some Okie dirt-kicker from across the country willingly ship me a replacement head for my Robocop action figure that went missing years prior for the very reasonable price of 4 dollars plus shipping. I didn’t know anything about how any of this shit worked, it was pure wizardry to me, but it was magnificent.

One thing I can say, with complete sincerity, is that the internet was genuinely fun back then, nothing like the burdensome, barely tolerable necessity that it's become today. Back then it really felt as if the internet belonged to us, that we were the ones in charge. It was still so new and the world's corporate and government entities hadn't yet figured out how to leverage this massive beast and pry it out from our hands. That came later.

We were like a bunch of primates wielding bazookas, this new and very powerful tool was capable of shaping or destroying the world, and what did we do with it? We made shitty webpages on GeoCities. Big ol’ ugly webpages with navy blue comic sans text layered on bright neon green tiled backgrounds, busting blood vessels in our eyeballs, testing the limitations of human eye strain.

The rough-edged, crude, and unwieldy nature of early HTML only lent to its charm. Making webpages back then was the digital equivalent of giving an excited child construction paper, a glue stick, and a box of Crayola washable markers. The blank canvas freedom of a place like GeoCities stands in pretty stark contrast to the social media platforms that emerged later on, which sometimes will pretend to be outlets for self-expression, but try to shove all of your expression into their little prepackaged box, adjusting your shoulders, raising your chin a bit, and positioning you just right before ramming the algorithm down your throat.

There was absolutely no limit to the decadence and excess in terms of webpage design on GeoCities. Seeing something like an animated GIF was mind-blowing technology at the time, so naturally we loaded them on our pages with zero restraint. There were the spinning skulls, the animated flames, and the spinning skulls in animated flames. Oh, and you had to have the shitty MIDI rendition of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid auto-playing in the background as well, can’t forget that. It took about eight minutes to load your webpage, but it was totally worth it. A beautiful experience to behold.

Aside from all of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan pages, the Bruce Campbell WAV collection sites, and the lowrider pics galleries, my personal favorite offerings on GeoCities (which I guess weren't exclusive to GeoCities, but definitely tapped into the same creative wellspring) were far more off the rails.

You see, The Internet was the first time I remember seeing stupid schoolyard humor on display for wide-scale consumption. This is the same kind of humor that got peddled around the basketball courts before the bell rang or sprung out of the dumb inside jokes that would induce those bellyaching drool laughs with your siblings. Completely asinine stuff like Optimus Prime's dick secretly being a bus or the thing where you hold your tongue and try to say “Apple”. I'll spare you from most of it. But the open nature of the early internet allowed this kind of humor to escape what would otherwise be walled off to the public by media regulatory boards such as The FFC or The Comics Code Authority. It all seems so commonplace now, but at the time seeing this kind of proudly dumb humor online for all to revel in was extremely cathartic.

Chief among these was the early internet's hilarious and nonsensical obsession with Mr. T, which gave rise to infamous meme pages (long before the word "meme" was stamped into the common lexicon) such as Mr. T Ate My Balls, which amounted to nothing more than a few ultra-low quality screengrabs and comic book scans of Mr. T professing his powerful and unyielding appetite for testicles.

This all somehow kinda segued into the whole "Mr. T vs." series of websites, which took these crude Photoshop jobs to the next level in digital comic book form and chronicled Mr. T's assumedly non-canonical adventures as he'd cruise across the planet in the A-Team van, protect youth centers, and inevitably throw people into space. No one was free from Mr. T's wrath, and his list of victims ranged from Boba Fett to Marilyn Manson.

It was all such stupid fun. We were all having such a wonderful time, and then, I don't know, the internet kinda found its direction and ended up losing most of its charm in the process. The dust from the whole dotcom boom settled and gone were the CDNOWs and eToys of the web, with only giants like Amazon and eBay standing in the wake of it all. Regulation and corporate acquisition of the online space quickly followed, Google ballooned and relegated Webcrawler to the distant memories of ancient nerds like myself, and shortly after that came the rise of smartphones, social media, and the internet went from something that we intentionally plugged into once or twice each day, into an inescapable reality that now enshrouds our lives and infringes on every movement and transaction we make.

I'd argue that with the polish of the internet over time, the soul of what made it such a magical place was taken away. The last vestiges of this unchained, pioneering spirit of digital anarchy have been mostly snuffed out and relegated to the deep pockets of Reddit. Even a creative platform like Substack is severely limited in terms of design and visual expression when compared to a place like GeoCities, which handed us the scissors and encouraged us to go play. We'll probably never see that type of zany unburdened freedom ever again, the tools are far too refined now, and that bonkers type of humor is far too normalized. The Internet has become our lives and it just isn't cool anymore. Facebook and Twitter made sure of that. I think at this point, a lot of us are all kinda just done with it. The real risk-takers are now fleeing from their digital presence, back into the real world, and analog of all places.

The real world. We've been away from it for so long now that maybe that's the next untapped frontier.

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The last time we were all gathered here huddled around the campfire I was gushing with gooey praise for all of my newsletter-writing colleagues—no, my tribespeople, who were bringing their beautiful, fog-filtered views on life to the Substack platform.

This time I want to flip the coin and take a drive to the other side of this otherwise burgeoning metropolis. Just a quick jaunt off the beaten path over to the sleazy, red-neon-lined alleyways in this dark city.

Imagine if you will...

It's fast approaching midnight and you're feeling all hot and bothered in this concrete jungle. You loosen your tie and wipe the sweat from your brow, trying to avoid stepping in oil-slicked puddles or broken beer bottle glass when suddenly a slim figure in a tight red skirt materializes out of the shadows, obscured by a bellow of manhole steam and with a thick shade of rouge that reminds you of circus cotton candy.

Hey big boy, wanna take a walk with me? I'll show you how to get from 0 to 1000 subscribers before you can whisper the words "search engine optimization". You're gonna have a night you'll never forget. You'll be flipping that switch and going paid before you know it. Cross my heart and hope to die.

…Whew. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

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Welcome to the seedy world of Substackers Substacking about Substack, not to be confused with Mediums Mediuming about Medium, which was all the rage in the online writing community about four or five years ago. This is where you'll find the real good stuff, fresh off the cargo ship, smuggled in under a bed of coffee beans to throw off the scent of the dogs. Pure uncut product that will have you dancing in wild ecstasy with bubbling visions of paid subscribers throwing dollars at your feet as Lil Wayne's A Milli booms in the background and your publication drowns in a bottomless sea of restacks.

You see, for every genuinely beautiful and profound piece out there about the subtleties of self-discovery in middle age or the simple restorative magic of a walk in the forest, there's another one grabbing at that greedy, lustful core of your wrinkled little heart, promising massive subscriber gains or proven growth strategies that will get you PAID, fiendishly sucking the humanity out of this platform. These two halves combine to form an ugly, delicate, and somewhat menacing alliance. The universe has a funny way of rebalancing itself after every action, and the whole meta-segment of Substacks brokering out Substack growth strategies on Substack may be just another bizarre manifestation of that.

To put it another way, if this represents the meaningful, artistic, soul-nurturing side of the Substack Community:

Then this represents the cold, calculating, marketing-driven side:

And besides being born with blue skin, the thing that's really unsettling about these growth strategy substacks is just how much they lead us astray from the purpose of why we originally came here, to share and celebrate our creative voices and attempt to find and develop our audiences organically.

Sometimes I wonder if Substack’s eerily robust stats tab is the worst thing going for it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across notes from otherwise respectable writers who get pulled in, all purple-tongued and sugar-high from obsessively drinking the stats Kool-Aid. You get one hit piece that launches your humble little newsletter into orbit, and then suddenly find yourself in a gooey, dewdrop web of adrenaline, hitting the refresh button every three minutes and stumbling around Substack notes in a cranked-up dopamine-fueled stupor, pounding your chest and declaring yourself champion while tapioca pudding slowly dribbles from your lips. At that point, we’re teetering precariously close to this place becoming Instagram for the literary crowd… a steady drip of that sweet, sweet brain nectar with every new sub as you sprawl yourself slack-jawed on the corner, forever chasing, but never quite reaching, that first high.

OK, maybe I’m embellishing a teeny bit but my point is, don't let the whole subscriber chase get in your head, man. That’s not the reason we’re here. Don’t ever lose sight that we’re writers dammit. Our words are poetry and we have bled for our art. We need to be up there sitting on grassy hilltops with our notebooks in our laps and tears in our eyes because life has wounded us in numerous ways and yet, against all odds, we have persevered.

Ah… But try as I may to ignore them, it's pretty evident that these pieces on the whole newsletter marketing/self-promotion side of this platform are just too loud to ignore.

It’s been said that if you can't beat 'em, then boy, you best be joining 'em.

So I'm tossing my hat into the ring. Here's my shitty advice on how I was able to grow my newsletter from 0 to 20 subscribers in the span of nine months. I promise you that if you follow these tips to the letter you too will experience agonizingly slow growth, spend hours a week of your valuable time writing into the void, and watch your most heartfelt work get slapped by humanity’s cold indifference and forever stomped into the pavement of this road to big-baller success on Substack.

• When you have 0 subscribers write as if you have 0 subscribers

  When I first decided to publish this newsletter I heeded the advice of others. When you have zero subscribers, write as if you have an audience of thousands. I did that, and you know what? My writing suffered from it. It was boring, stuffy, calculated, and overly safe. It's only when I dropped all pretense and started writing like no one was reading that sparks started flying and things began to come alive around here. I locked my frontal lobe away in the trunk and began publishing these stupid ravings with no social filter, like an old man screaming at a bowl of oatmeal, and that's when I finally got comfortable, punched the cat off of the couch, swung my filthy ProWings up on the coffee table, and stuffed my fingers under my belt, Al Bundy style.

  I can't promise you that anyone will read your stuff once you take this bold, artistic leap, in fact, they probably won't. The system is stacked against you and you've already lost. But dammit, at least you'll be maintaining a sense of integrity.

• Commit to regularly publishing at least once a week, and then abandon it immediately

  Come on, you have a day job. You gotta put food on the table bro, you don't got time for that shit.

• Develop a niche, and then mercilessly burn it to the ground

  Yes, MidThoughts is a newsletter geared towards self-discovery in middle age. But with one quick skim through this issue, you'd never guess that. Once in a while you just need to get something off your chest, readership be damned. Sometimes a guy might have some pretty strong opinions about American Ninja II: The Confrontation, and I ain't gonna let something as silly as audience alienation stand in the way of that.

• Have absolutely no clue about the platform you’re writing on

  Utilize Substack’s chat and survey features to drive readership and encourage engagement.

  Substack doesn’t have chat and survey features, you dumbass.

• Set yourself apart from the pack Completely alienate yourself from the rest of the community

  Liberally sprinkle your writing with obscure references to 80’s straight-to-video action films and long-forgotten Saturday morning cartoons (Think somewhere between Snorks and Captain N the Game Master for a good idea of where to start here).

  

  The goal here is to intentionally club yourself in the knees, Tonya Harding style and make sure that nobody wants to suffer the embarrassment or risk the credibility hit of a possible future collaboration with you. Position your writing in such a way that even a mere restack of your work would be deemed far too risky a move for even the most established of writers here, and could instantly topple their reputations. You want to make sure you do this as early on in your Substack journey as possible, before any hint of success, to completely eliminate any chance of your work getting any type of traction on the platform. When you see your subscriber count stall out somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 over the course of about six months, you’ll know that you’re on the right track.

Clearly, I'm having a little fun with some of these. And despite my mental inertia endlessly pulling my words into the realm of pure cynicism and hypocrisy, please know that I’m joking about that last point in particular. In actuality, this is probably the least toxic, most supportive gathering of like-minded people on the internet, and since engaging with the community regularly, I've experienced nothing but good, wholesome, beachy vibes. Any community of intellectuals tolerant enough to entertain a grown-ass man commanding the mental residence of a giggly kindergartener with a mouthful of Pop Rocks is a community that I'm proud to call myself a part of.

OK, I promise that the next issue of this newsletter will have nothing to do with either writing or Substack and contain actual Stuff instead. It's not lost on me that by publishing this nonsense, I'm only contributing to the problem. I consider myself an environmentalist and the last thing I want to do is recklessly aim my can of Aqua-Net up into the heavens like some kind of lunatic Captain Planet villain and further contribute to the widening hole of content about writing in the Substack ozone layer.

No sir, I have principles.

Besides, writing about writing has been done to death. And after Stephen King wrote On Writing I don't think much else needs to be written (oh God) on the subject.

So Imma' leave it at that. See you back here in a couple of weeks with some actual substance.

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Dammit substackers. Please stop being so dang impressive.

There are times when I feel wholly outclassed here on this platform. I'll sit down in the morning, sifting through my newsletter feed or perusing random pieces that others suggest on notes, and it seems to be nothing but an avalanche of talented thinkers ruminating with pure, undiluted eloquence on themes such as the tension and tussle of the creative process, or dispelling effortless, deeply poignant reflections on overcoming formidable personal challenges.

I'm getting choked up just thinking about your beautiful lives in your quaint little beach alcoves as you sip your turmeric teas under the gentle glow of lavender-scented candlelight. Your words have brought me to the verge of tears with your musings on a whole slew of topics ranging from reconciled complicated relationships to the memories of your 11th-grade English teacher who first stoked your interest in Proust. 

Meanwhile, here I am, howling with a straight-jacket in my own derelict corner of the Substack universe, waxing on about my colonoscopy poops and ninja movies, comparing Paul Hertzog's soundtrack for the 1988 martial arts masterpiece, Bloodsport to the works of Mozart.

I’m a grown-ass 45-year-old time-capsule of a man who never managed to escape his 1991, 12-year self. 

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My heart sinks every time I read your wonderful stories, and I feel like the only child in a room full of adults. You're all making beautiful cinema while I'm over here drawing cartoons. I'm the guy showing up to your wine-tasting function 40 minutes late in socks and sandals with chili stains on his t-shirt. This is RAIDER NATION baby!!

I'm going to be honest. I wish I could write like you. I want to touch hearts and move minds. I want you to appreciate the little things in life. I really do. I want you to read this newsletter and emerge as a better human being. 

You know, after my painful divorce, I was lost in a 10-year haze of tortured wandering, heavy depression, and an unyeilding addiction to Adderall. but then I read Dan Benson's colonoscopy article, and wiping the tears from my eyes, I finally typed the first line of my novel that changed the trajectory of my life forever.

I want to be one of you. Lord knows I've tried.

But I can't. I can only be me. 

I first began this online writing gig a while back, long before the neural pathway that birthed this newsletter ever etched itself into my thought sponge. I cut my teeth about 15 years earlier in fact, writing film reviews on my childhood friend's movie blog. Most of these pieces were about obscure low-budget horror, martial arts, or Mexican wrestling films from the dregs of cinema's mud bucket. But my goodness, they were fun to watch and write about. When you have a gem of a film like The Clones of Bruce Lee in your sweaty little palms, the possibilities for a hilarious roller-coaster of a film review are limitless. 

All of this is to say that I feel as if I'm always walking a thin line when it comes to writing. It's like there are two very different objectives that I want to achieve here. On one hand, I want to bring content with real value. I want to hang with the Emma Gannons of this space, clinking wine glasses, popping confetti, and wearing exotic furs with the same 20 or so high-profile writers who are dropping the mic with every click of that publish button and are blowing me away as a matter of habit every week on this platform. 

On the other hand, there's still that stray nerve inside of my dumb ol' noggin that gets the back of my neck all moist and itchy with anticipation, thinking how awesome it would be to, without any warning, suddenly drop the definitive scholarly study of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop on my newsletter. Or to attempt to draw out some underlying, deeper meaning connected with the time my friend Felipe and I were out in the desert shooting road flare duct-taped propane canisters with shotguns and caused a small brush fire that ended up almost getting us arrested for arson (we were idiots.)

So, how do you marry those two very different objectives? How can I give The People genuinely beneficial content while being true to myself and satiating that desire to write Fun Stuff?

I don't know. This newsletter may be my way of figuring that all out. I've staged the MidThoughts newsletter as a publication to explore and find a new kind of happiness in midlife. A big reason for this is because I suddenly find myself at this gateway to middle age and for some unexplainable reason, it's the most excited I've ever been about my future. There's a steady creative buzz in the back of my skull, like a fly trapped in a window, from all of the latent potential I feel has built up from spending my last 15 years working in the soulless vacuum of IT. 

It's wild, but I can actively feel my psychology shifting on a day-to-day basis, like a couple of tectonic plates settling into their new positions in the days following an earthquake. It's still so fresh to me. I've hit that point in life where the ego and its dumb compulsion to chase down silly things like status and image gets unceremoniously dropped. You realize that stuff means very little in the long run and you're left with a new kind of unburdened freedom and all of this empty space for new mental furniture that actually means something. 

My 45 years on this planet have brought with them some sobering experiences and have taught me many profound lessons. As I enter midlife, I'm digging deeper than I ever have and am connecting with a refreshingly truer version of myself that couldn't have existed when that pesky ego was sitting in the front seat 10 years ago. I'm liberating myself from many of the lame, outright false beliefs that tend to become stamped on your brain after prolonged exposure to society. 

The most ominous of these beliefs are the ideas centered around how we are supposed to handle growing old.

I've been watching kung fu movies, playing Tetris, and calling people dude nonstop since I was nine years old. Am I really supposed to stop doing that now that I'm a nearly 45-year-old “respectable” administrator with a university degree? There's still that slightly devious and playful part of me with eyes darting and a half-smile sneaking out of the corner of my jaw that never made it out of high school. I'm still here, watching the same loud, obnoxious action movies that amused the hell out of me 30-odd years ago. If I want to watch Arnold throw a machete into some guy’s chest and tell him to “stick around” for the 122nd time in my life, I’m gonna do just that. If I need to dig myself out of a sour mood I know I can listen to 2pac or Manowar at an unreasonably loud volume to smooth out the jagged edges. 

After well over 30 years of this rodeo, I know what works for me.

I don't think this is me rejecting the cold truth that now, in 2024, I am indeed a grown-ass adult and a fairly old one at that. I should have some creative integrity and not go around peppering my writing with potty jokes and carelessly littering the Substack platform with stupid references to Jean Claude Van Damme movies from 40 years ago. 

But you know what? At no point in my journey did I ever take the words "grow up" to mean “abandon what you love”. Maybe it's not that I never left high school, maybe it's that the prevailing mentality from those years stuck with me because it engaged my soul in a way that the grown-up one just can't. And for the record, I have this whole other part of my personality that can handle the grown-up stuff just fine anyway. I can appreciate philosophy, study a second language, and develop my writing without becoming a self-flagellating intellectual douche. The mischievous Dan who has that sudden, inexplicable urge to flip over the lunch table can sit right up there with the one who pays his bills on time and monitors his credit regularly. The two can coexist. 

So as much as I admire you beautiful, wonderful substackers, I have looked deep into my cloudy heart and realized that I can never be you. I have to write these missives from the front desk of my own comfort zone, in my own voice, and not try to dress them up in some phony pseudo-professional dressing where I aim to simply fit in, write the stuff that gets me the subz, and pretend that I have what it takes to stand shoulder to shoulder with Rosamund Dean, Emma Gannon or their ilk. What kind of lame, self-deprived, clout-chasing existence is that anyway? Besides, you all are way better at that kind of stuff, so I hope you can embrace with open arms the fact that I'll often lapse into being the resident clown in this neighborhood from time to time. 

So with all that said, I’m seven months in and still haven’t figured out what the hell I'm trying to do here, other than the fact that I'm having lots of fun doing it.

And for now, at least, I kinda want to keep it that way.

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We're a month into the New Year, and I'm fortunate enough to be riding the most significant wave of personal motivation I've experienced in over ten years. 

I find myself in a very blessed space right now. Motivation can be a very fickle beast. It can be here today and gone tomorrow, which is why most self-help gurus correctly advise against placing your goals in the hands of motivation, where they can be whisked away at a whim and instead focus on gradually building self-discipline.

I can't argue with this advice. Self-discipline is always the safer, more sustainable bet. 

However, when motivation graces your daily life, it has the potential to create magical, life-altering changes in your psyche. It can turbocharge your willpower and cement your discipline. When you are locked into a serious spell of motivation, it's like a drug. It knocks down whatever self-limiting walls you've built around yourself and becomes something close to pure sorcery.

Motivation may not be a reliable force, but I wholeheartedly encourage you to embrace it when it does appear in your life. Over the years, I've discovered my own methods of wielding and taming motivation. 

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Although most periods of motivation are short-lived, I managed to sustain a period of intense motivation for over five years, where I was able to redeem myself by reversing one of my greatest regrets in life, failing to earn my Bachelor's degree after graduating high school. 

I finally accomplished this feat 15 years later in my mid-30s, graduating Summa Cum Laude, winning a scholarship, and earning eight IT industry certifications in the process. All of this while going through a divorce, being a dad, losing my mom to cancer, and working a full-time job.

It was a grueling process, and the fact that I had to hold down a full-time job during the day meant that I was basically working at all times, whenever I was awake. After my day job ended at 4, my classes would start. I was getting home at 11 pm on weekdays, studying from sunrise to sunset on weekends, and shunning all opportunities for a break, taking summer and winter intersession classes whenever I could to avoid stretching out the process any longer than it needed to be.

The discipline was there, but there was no way I could have seen it to the end without the intense motivation that I felt at the time. There were a few core ingredients that were involved in this recipe for sustainable, long-term motivation that worked for me:

1. You have to really want it to the point of sacrifice

The first requirement in drumming up motivation is that you have to really want The Thing. However, wanting alone is obviously not gonna be enough. We all want things. You have to want The Thing to the point of willingly committing yourself to some substantial life-altering changes in your daily life. You have to be willing to sacrifice time, your most valuable resource, to execute your plan day after day. You have to be willing to give up a significant amount of entertainment, enjoyment, leisure, comfort, and socializing. You have to be willing to subject yourself to many things you don't want to do for extended periods each day. You will suffer. You will be tired. However, the number of sacrifices that you are willing to make inversely affects the speed and probability of you reaching your goal.

If you really want to get clever in engineering motivation. You can find creative ways to make the hard work enjoyable, effectively diverting the enjoyment you would otherwise be giving up into the tasks making up the action plan itself.

2. Embrace and transform your pain into power

This one may ruffle some feathers, but I've found that I've been my most determined and resolved to achieve success when I was experiencing periods of emotional pain.

I'm not saying to create pain in your life intentionally. If there are events or elements of your life that are causing you pain, don't let them break you. Instead, leverage those emotions into solid determination. The pain is already there. You can't snap your fingers and make it go away. You're already hurting. Make it work for you.

When I was pursuing my degree, my divorce and the toll it was taking on my son was painful to witness. I'll never forget his tears when he discovered his dad was moving out. A year later, I had to watch my mom, who was so proud of my progress in school, slowly fade away and die of uterine cancer. I was hurting so unbelievably much, and all of that pain only steeled my resolve to work even harder to achieve that calmer, peaceful, and more stable life on the other side of it all. It had to all mean something, and I knew that I could actualize that meaning by channeling all of that emotion into the process.

One of the most powerful tools I've learned to wield in life is the power of perspective. The ability to take an otherwise horrible situation and flip it on its head to your advantage felt like a literal superpower when I first discovered it. You can draw some of your greatest sources of motivation from pain, disgust, adversity, and suffering. 

3. Cultivate faith in your abilities and trust the process

Once your goals have been defined and your plan to get there has been decided, it's just a matter of showing up and doing the work, and then repeating it every day. The more ambitious your goal, the slower your progress will likely be. Somewhere in the process, you will grow frustrated at the lack of visible progress. Maybe it's more difficult than you imagined, or you're not making the gains that you thought you should have by now. You may feel like you're wasting your time... like you're not cut out for [insert goal here] after all.

This is a crucial make-or-break point in goal-chasing, and if you can manage to muster up the mental fortitude and perseverance that it takes to make it past this zone of self-doubt and frustration, believe me when I say that real results await you on the other side.

Above all, trust yourself and trust the process. You have to have real faith that you can achieve this goal. If you let that single sliver of self-doubt creep in and take hold, you risk jeopardizing the whole damn thing. Practicing visualization exercises has really worked for me. It's not just some bullshit gimmick peddled by self-help gurus. You have to paint a detailed mental picture of the life you're working towards and get intimately familiar with that vision and what it looks and feels like. It makes actualizing it through action so much more urgent and inevitable.

4. Create a self-perpetuating motivation cycle

Having more than one goal that you're working towards at the same time does far more good than harm. There's a misconception that you're dividing your focus and energy, but my experiences have always shown me that the motivation I derive from progress and hard work on one goal gets directly funneled into the next one. 

Case in point: while I was working towards completing my degree, I was determined to graduate with high honors. I had something to prove to myself after taking the easy way out after high school and dropping out of college. At the same time, I was training for my first half-marathon. Now, I'm not some uber-elite runner, and I wasn't out to do anything other than run the whole thing at a halfway decent clip without pausing. Still, the elation and sense of achievement that I felt with every aced class carried over to training for my run, and every time I managed to outdo my previous best pace or distance during my training runs, well, I took that energy back into the classroom.

This ping-pong of achievements between these two goals created a kind of self-perpetuating motivation cycle. Furthermore, each of these goals served as a break from the other. 

Your mileage may vary on this. But speaking from personal experience, I never chase down a single goal at a time anymore. Once in a while, I'll have three big things that I'm chasing down at once, but I've found that holding two big goals at any given moment is the magic number... for me. 

5. Get yourself hype

I cannot understate how much I lean on music and movies to keep my willpower sharp and my mind focused. I go hard on hustler / baller-ass hip-hop playlists on Spotify. Stuff in the vein of Jay-Z, Nipsey Hussle, Eminem, Rick Ross, Jeezy, and Lil Wayne. My Spotify is completely littered with these types of get-hype playlists.

The other genre that I dive deep into during long runs and study sessions is one that's more reflective of my age as a late-bloom Gen X'er, and that's 80's Rocky-style training montage music. Stan Bush, John Farnham, and the sonic masterpiece that is the Bloodsport soundtrack are my mainstays here. Honestly, the cornier, the better. I come from an era where movies like No Retreat, No Surrender, The Best of the Best, and Kickboxer would have you spending your entire Saturday practicing jump kicks in the garage, running all kinds of ninja ambush scenarios through your head. You may look at these films as 80s cheese, but I view them with the same fondness that I did when I was 10, and they still make me feel undefeatable.

But you do you. The point here is to keep yourself locked in. Stay motivated. Allow yourself to embrace the high drama of your own story and be the star of your own narrative. It will only serve to hone your purpose and resolve. Use whatever music or imagery conjures up mental images of triumph over adversity, slaying your own personal demons, or leaving your own limitations in the dust. 

6. Do a little bit more than you're comfortable with

Growth comes with pushing personal boundaries. Your goals will require going past the limits that once stopped you. In every session, set your time, your distance, or your words to what you can realistically handle, and then add just a few more minutes, a few more steps, or a few more sentences beyond that. Just a bit extra is all we need. Too much, and you'll wear yourself out, and we want to maintain that motivation and keep ourselves engaged with the process.

What we're doing with that little bit of extra effort is training the mind to go beyond personal expectations repeatedly. It's the same concept as building muscle. The muscle gets torn down so that it can grow, acclimate to the new load, and go just a touch harder on the next session.

Rinse. Repeat. Put in the reps. Those micro gains accumulate over time. This is one of the many reasons why I'm so vocal about journaling and documenting the process. You might not notice the progress from one day to the next, but look back a few months, and it will be very apparent that you're operating on a different plane.

Like Meek Mill said, "There's levels to this shit."

Outro

I was originally a little hesitant to publish this piece on MidThoughts. The theme of motivation is not specific to the middle-aged, and I don't want to come off as some Jocko Willink rise-and-grind motivational speaker, which I’m most definitely not.

The truth is that I've been locked into these serious "grind-zone" periods of my life about as often as I've found myself in those lazy, Jimmy Buffet-ass beach bum phases. At the end of the day, both are important. Mr. Miyagi always taught Daniel-San the importance of balance. 

But I can't deny that I've experienced some very special phases of life where the conditions were just right to spark a chemical reaction of motivation that honed my focus and drove me beyond what I thought I was capable of. I'm extremely grateful to have reached a point where I'm able to nurture, wield, and prolong these forces of motivation when I'm able to call on them. I'm sharing these observations from my own experiences in hopes that they can be applied to your own.

Finally, there's no better time to be motivated than in middle age. For a long time after finishing my degree, I was tired. I had put in a lot of hard work. With a decent salary, I felt as if I'd finally earned the right to relax. But with that came the steady grind of the 9-5, and that combination numbed my passion and creativity. I was coasting with no real purpose outside of making sure bills were paid, and my son was being taken care of. 

Something was missing. There was just a big, gaping hole where all of that enthusiasm and drive once stood. I had nothing to chase after. I had no dreams that could reignite my soul and send me flying head-first into the process of actualizing them.

But now, staring down the barrel of a boring career spent behind a trio of computer monitors, I realize that I need something more. This can't be the rest of my life. I won't let it be. I'm not going to get swallowed up into the jaws of 9-5 complacency. I'm entering midlife on my own terms, keeping my curiosity fresh and my soul plugged into a creative outlet that allows me to remain wired into the rhythm of the universe.

I'm gonna have fun, dammit. 

That's why I started the MidThoughts newsletter. And that's why finding motivation in midlife is so vital. At this point in our lives, we're walking a very narrow precipice, and on both sides are bottomless chasms of endless empty days ready to swallow up your years as you plug away in a thick blur of email and Zoom meetings all the way to retirement. 

It's very easy to lose your footing if you're not focused.

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You haven't really made it to the big leagues of middle age until you've had your first colonoscopy.

Sure, you can talk a good game about how your hair has been thinning. You can complain about your blood pressure, deteriorating eyesight, or chronic back pain. But those are all just things that gradually onset as you age and make you feel like you're entering midlife.

Little did I know that the very experience that was to christen me into the legion of middle-agers would be the very thing that liberated me from all of the negative stigma surrounding it.

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The "big middle" of our lives is a period marked by vagueness, uncertainty, and no clearly defined boundaries. Navigating it can be an exercise in extreme frustration. I know personally I've had more than a couple of doctor visits where I had been experiencing quirky body pains and sensations, and my doctor's final assessment began with "I really don't know what could be causing it, but as we get older..."

"...but as we get older..."

Ouch.

So if ten years of medical school can't explain why your neck has been suddenly giving you pins and needles when you look up or why eating broccoli suddenly bloats you and makes you extremely gassy, you just have to toss it into that big ol' mysterious "Maybe I'm just getting old" bucket.

Going through the experience of getting your first colonoscopy is the closest thing that we, the middle-aged, have to a graduation ceremony. It's our sacramental rite of passage. It gives us the certainty we need that we've finally arrived and can unequivocally self-apply the label of "midlifer." We no longer have to question whether we're in midlife. We've officially made it.

I see the colonoscopy as a much less metal and far more pathetic version of the Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Initiation, where instead of enduring gloves full of angry stinging Bullet Ants to transition into manhood, we subject ourselves to a ritual day of fasting and self-induced diarrhea followed by an otherwise normal quiet morning suddenly turned sideways by taking the ol' colonoscope up the butthole to signal to ourselves that we've finally entered that long, second-stretch of the marathon before retirement.

The weight and gravity of these rituals don't change over the years or between cultures. They just take on new forms.

I had my colonoscopy on the morning of Friday, December 8th, at the age of 44 (Having a family history gave me an unlock of the procedure a year early). After a solid month of dreading it and spiraling myself into a mental state where I was determined that the doctor would find my colon a nightmarish forest of bloated, malignant, bloody polyps and purple hemorrhoids, I drank my gallon of GaviLyte, set any dignity that I had left aside for the day, and set up shop in the bathroom for the evening.

I won't get into the savage details here, but it's probably the closest thing I've had to a transcendent experience in a long time, and not in a good way. I also watched a ton of YouTube. In the wake of the aftermath, I was left starving, desperately craving a burrito, and specific parts of my body were in desperate need of ointment.

Early the next morning, I arrived, clean as a whistle and empty as the vast cosmos, ready for my procedure. What follows is an actual snippet from my journal entry that evening as I attempted to document the experience to the best of my ability. Some details may be a little fuzzy, as I was under moderate sedation:

December 8, 7:00 AM - I'm told to strip, put my belongings in a bag, put on a gown, and lie down. I'm asked a series of questions, none of which I remember. The nurses joke with me. They know that I'm nervous. A jabbering mess. I'm hooked up to an IV. It takes a couple of tries for the nurse to get it in, she obviously hasn’t had that first cup of coffee yet.

7:15 - The doctor's nurse arrives, comments that she likes my tattoos, and wheels me to the room where the procedure will occur. The doctor enters, introduces himself, and then tells me that it shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Sedation is administered. I'm loopy, but not nearly as loopy as I want to be. The doctor then instructs me to lie on my left side and hug my knees to my chest. Here we gooo!

7:22 - I'm tired, but far from asleep. I feel something cold and wet pushed against my rectum... Moooooon Riiiverrrr!!

7:23 - I glance at the monitor and see the inside of my colon. I find it strangely fascinating. I'm trying to spot where the cancer is. I quickly realize that I don't know what I'm looking for and that everything looks like a cancer to me.

7:24 - The doctor spots something, pauses, identifies it as a polyp, announces that he will remove it, and then ‘snip’. With a quick, elegant flip of the forceps, I watch him yank it.

7 minutes later - It's over. I'm wheeled back into the main room, and the curtain is pulled closed. The air that was used to balloon my colon for the procedure is causing some intense cramping.

A few minutes after that - The doctor enters and tells me that he spotted some minor internal hemorrhoids as well as the aforementioned polyp that was removed. Besides that, everything else looks normal. He uses the words "healthy colon" to describe his final assessment. I don't have cancer.

I can't tell you how much of a relief those two words, "healthy colon," were to me. When it comes to colon health, the gene fairy has most definitely not decided to sprinkle her magic dust upon my tainted bloodline. My mother was diagnosed with colon cancer in her early 50s, and my cousin, who is actually six months younger than me, had just undergone a successful treatment for stage IV colon cancer last year. These two events were cranked up to 11, playing on steady repeat in my head in the days leading up to my procedure, ratcheting my anxiety to extreme levels. I was getting old, I told myself, and disease is my sad, certain fate.

So yes. My colonoscopy officially rubber-stamped my midlife passport, which I totally accept and hold with pride. But much more than that, my colonoscopy and a surprise clean bill of health were potent reminders that to associate middle age with a physical or mental decline is poisonous, self-defeatist thinking, and it's the kind of thinking that we are sadly programmed to make automatically in middle age.

Stop believing that midlife equates itself to anything other than the best years of your life. Wake up every day excited about where you are on this journey. Stop telling yourself that you're past your peak and on the downward slope. There is no downward slope. Stop voluntarily erecting those invisible, self-limiting walls of "getting old" around yourself.

Explore. Practice. Play. Take up an art. Practice a new instrument. Learn a new language. You've earned the right to have fun after 40+ years of struggling, loving, heartbreak, success, defeat, frustration, elation, and fighting.

It's ok to acknowledge you're getting old. You are. Joke about it if you want. I do. But don't ever convince yourself that it's all downhill from here or that you'll never be as good as you were in your glory days. You're in midlife, and these are your glory days.

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OK. 2024. Here we go.

In my younger days, those days when I truly believed that I was smarter than everyone else, I was vehemently opposed to the concept of New Year's Resolutions. Why wait until New Year's, I would say to myself, when you could get your shit together at any moment and make a solid commitment towards crushing your goals?

And that was not an incorrect assessment. Yes, you could and should be ready at any moment to ride any wave of motivation that you are lucky enough to have come your way. Tying your commitment towards success to an artificial and arbitrary date on a calendar, a thing that doesn't exist in any reality outside of people's minds, is absolutely a constrictive and self-limiting approach.

But as I grow older and begin poking around in the entryway of what we call midlife, my attitude towards New Year's Resolutions has softened much, to the point where now I actually embrace them with open arms. As you get older and you begin to get a grasp on the fact that time is inversely dwindling as age increases, you have to choose your battles, and that means accepting some of that long-established silliness that no amount of raging against the machine will change, at least not anytime soon. I'm talking about things like taxes, the Gregorian calendar, and New Year's Resolutions.

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So now, I just say fuck it and lean hard into the concept of New Year's Resolutions. I actually begin to feel myself brimming with a special, buzzing kind of energy and renewed focus as we find ourselves in the dwindling days of December. Yes, it's an arbitrary date on an imaginary calendar, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon. You may as well go hard and leverage it for your own success.

All that to say, I have some very genuine goals for MidThoughts in 2024.

When I began this Substack newsletter last year, I had zero desire for anything relating to growth. My sole purpose was to challenge myself by imposing a weekly (which very quickly turned into a bi-weekly) deadline to get something published while juggling the stress and demands of my day job as a technology manager. I wanted to develop my lifelong passion for writing with the pressure that comes inherently from publishing your work on a public platform. 

I would say that with a couple of missed deadlines due to vacations and travel, I met this initial goal. I was writing consistently, more or less, and it was enough to satisfy me personally. I was content with my stagnant, single-digit subscriber count. The numbers didn’t matter to me. 

Growth and development of the newsletter into anything even remotely resembling a community was a near-zero priority. I am shamelessly horrible when it comes to social media and self-promotion. It's a scary, often toxic world that I'm always hesitant to dip my toes into. Give your elderly parents a smartphone for the first time, and watch your patience truly tested to its limits as they fumble around, pressing down hard on the glass with trembling fingers as they try to wrap their heads around the strange device, and that's basically me when it comes to social media. Yes, I have an Instagram, but there's nothing there. I've tried Twitter, or whatever you want to call it now, but I don't know how to Twitter, so I ultimately give up every time. 

But with 2024 comes a desire to actually gain something resembling a foothold on this platform. I'm past the point of mere consistency being a means and an end unto itself. I want to build and (gulp) promote to the point where MidThoughts can eventually become something bigger and more meaningful than my own personal online journal into the ponderings and exploration of this time in our lives that we call middle age. I want to lend more dignity to what I'm attempting to do here, see some growth and engagement, and hold myself to a higher standard when it comes to compelling content that resonates with others going through the same experiences. 

I even have the tiniest spark to someday turn the ideas fueling this newsletter into a book, which are probably the most cringe-inducing and Substacky words that one can possibly utter on this platform, but fuck it, it's the truth. I'm 44 years old, far past the mile marker where modesty matters much anymore. I'm willing to put my old, curmudgeonly ass out there and float whatever goddamn lofty dream happens to coalesce itself into my grey matter.

It was this sobering piece, by Remy Bazerque, regarding the cold-hard reality of finding an audience on the Substack platform that cemented my resolve and sealed my course of action. The truth is that if you want to take your words anywhere here, you have to be willing to play the game. I don't think there's any way around that. So, I'll be committing myself to actually using Substack features like notes regularly, engaging with and following other compelling voices on this platform, and actively promoting my content as best as I can.

As far as I'm concerned, I have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. This late-bloom Gen-Xer has seen Rocky III enough times to know that all it takes is the ability to conjure up a mental training montage and a solid playlist of Survivor songs to cultivate enough naivete to knock down any self-imposed limits that I may have inadvertently built around my peripheral. 

So buckle up and protect those receding hairlines. It's 2024, and this is the year where I'm taking MidThoughts to the readers.

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December has arrived, and with it come the darkest days of the year.

This isn't just some figure of speech. I mean this quite literally. It's December now, and it's always dark outside.

The manipulation of our daylight hours, through both natural and manmade means, has always had a profound effect on our moods. As the months slowly grow colder and the Earth's tilt gradually sends us sliding away from daylight, I can't help but feel a little anxious as seasonal depression ultimately kicks in, no matter how much I try to fight it.

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I think a big reason for this is that I love the outdoors. I'm your prototypical Southern California boy. I love long days at the beach, hiking in the mountains, running along the bike path, or just exploring the city. These activities keep me feeling alive in my midlife years.

Watching the daylight slowly dwindle between the height of summer to the dead of winter causes a kind of subtle, helpless pain. To think that just six months ago I was able to stay out past 8 pm to watch a sunset that now occurs at just past 4:30 pm every day. That's nearly 3 and a half hours of wonderful sunlight that has just evaporated into the ether sometime between July and December.

The early sunset causes us to retreat indoors prematurely, and it sucks. Since we yanked the plug on Daylight Savings time last month, the darkness only seems to be creeping in earlier and earlier. I've been doing all of the things I love far less. My running days have become more and more sporadic, and my trips to the beach and mountains have become nearly nonexistent.

Don't get me wrong, I've been doing other things to fill the void. I've picked up an incredibly nurturing mindfulness practice, and I've been journaling daily. Still, as much as they help smooth the edges, I'm missing that physical element that comes with being outside. There have been studies linking the lack of vitamin D and depression. But I think there’s more to it than that because even as I pop my extra vitamin D capsule in the morning, I’m still missing something that only comes with being bathed in actual sunlight.

The weekdays especially hurt during the dark days of December. I spend all day rattling off emails in the office, wasting the precious daylight hours that I do have camped behind the steady electric buzz of a trio of computer monitors. All I can do is helplessly look out the window, wishing that I could be out there, and when that proverbial 5 o'clock whistle finally blows, I amble out into the parking lot under darkened skies.

It can't be a coincidence that the holidays we mainly associate with this time of the year, Christmas and Hunnukah, both have bright lights as a core component of the festivities. They're also the times when we seek the comfort and warmth of our loved ones, perhaps to fortify ourselves with the hope and joy that we lack in our surroundings this time of the year and combat the innate darkness of the season.

Unlike the summer, where you merely have to endure the physical heat, there is an additional mental component that you must contend with in the wintertime. In addition to weathering the cold of the season, you must also forge through the days of premature darkness and the emotional, circadian toll that may take. Keep your loved ones close during the dark months. That's all I gotta say. Throw on a coat and go for a walk during the weekend. Soak up whatever daytime you can and keep reminding yourself that on the other side of this, literal brighter days lie ahead.

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How have you been faring during the dark days of December? Sound off in the comments! Since MidThoughts is still in its infancy, your feedback is vital in growing this community and delivering compelling content that resonates with you.

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Quick announcement: I’ll be on vacation from the 19th through the remainder of the year, which may or may not affect the timing of the next issue of MidThoughts, but I have a couple of real hum-dingers coming up that I think you all will enjoy. So stay tuned!

Little did I know that two people were living in my head this whole time.

Sorry, maybe I should back it up a bit. I realize this first sentence might give you the impression that I’m juggling split personalities or teetering on the ledge of schizophrenia, which is not the case (until my therapist tells me differently).

The two Dans living in my head are the same in almost all respects. We love breakfast burritos, sushi, MF DOOM, 80s action films, and beach trips. We’ve both been through the same experiences, have read the same books, and have seen the same movies. We’re both caught in the same predicament: trying to get from point A to point B in this wild game of midlife.

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The differences only arise when it comes to how we choose to react to all of the random things life throws our way. The dominant Dan, that is, the one that’s usually in the driver’s seat, has a tough time making adjustments. He’s not very adaptable and has a sharp tendency to complain, panic, avoid, or even flat-out ignore unanticipated challenges that rear their head in daily living. He’s been called a coward. He was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder years ago. But when life is going smoothly, on autopilot, he can give the impression of a relaxed and even laid-back kind of character. This calm can go on for months, years, even. 

As long as life sticks to the script. 

But as soon as fate throws him a curveball and the unknown creeps into the picture, he goes to pieces. He gets trapped in spiraling cyclones of thought of what has happened or what might happen. Once this fear grabs hold, it completely takes over, torturing him and making him feel helpless. He’s been known to become mentally paralyzed by panic attacks and bouts of depression. He can’t focus. He’s not present. He thinks way too much. The cyclones engulf his mind, his life. He can’t act. He can’t move forward. He can’t function.

He reacts with terror.

Until a few weeks ago, this was the only Dan I knew. It was me. I was an anxious person. This was the identity that I had self-applied after years of experiencing these doom-spiral patterns of thought. 

When a long period of calm finally gave way to another spike of anxiety last month, I decided to seek help. I couldn’t stomach another vicious spin cycle in the anxiety washing machine. I needed a new perspective. 

I needed therapy.

My first session was more of a release than anything else. When you’re living with a chronic anxiety disorder, you feel terribly alone with your thoughts. You’re hanging on to all of these lines of toxic speculation all by yourself, with no one to relate to, and my prevailing instinct was to dump it all out and unload all of this mental baggage for a professional to pick apart and assess. Honestly, half of the benefits I reap from therapy come from just getting all of this stuff out in the open.

But after dominating the allotted hour, spewing all of my mental vomit out into the open, my therapist sat back and gave me a simple but potent perspective on my tortured years of anxious thought.

She described my anxiety-ridden self as my “4-year-old in the driver’s seat.” She explained that I’ve been allowing these chaotic thought patterns to dominate my thinking for nearly my entire life, putting myself at the mercy of what amounts to me handing the keys of my “vehicle” over to a moody, edgy, and irrational small child.

This sounded very familiar, and I thought it was a pretty apt description of how my mind has been operating for my entire adult life. 

But there was another self up there, she continued. There was a rational, more assertive, and mature me that had been locked up and hidden away for decades. This was the caretaker, the parent of that wild, temperamental child that had taken up the helm of my consciousness and had no idea what it was doing. 

If I wanted peace and tranquility, it was up to me to dust the cobwebs off of “parent” me and take control of the situation. That poor child has been living frightened, full of fear with too many responsibilities and no one to take care of him, and it was my job to call my mature and rational self into action, reassuring that child that everything was going to be ok, that a grown-up is in control now and will be taking care of everything. 

There was no need to worry any longer.

And that’s what I’m working on now, calming the 4-year-old inside of me every time I catch him beginning to spiral with thought in any direction. Earnestly convincing him that the boogieman is a lie, a figment of his imagination that can’t exist in the rational world. 

It will take time. I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be easy. Undoing decades of habitual thinking is never something that’s going to happen overnight.

But just knowing that a greater power in myself has been awakened and put in control goes a long way in beginning to rectify the damage that has been done. 

There is a mental health crisis affecting America (and possibly globally as well). I’m not in a position to pinpoint where it came from or what brought it about, although I have some ideas. But that’s beside the point. What I want to hone in on, this being a newsletter about midlife, is that this is not a phenomenon affecting only younger generations. Those of us in our 40s, 50s, and beyond are not exempt. If you’ve been struggling with anxiety, fear, depression, or lack of meaning in your life, the help is out there. 

I’m an avid believer that great things can come out of even the most dire of situations, and the wonderful thing about this mental health crisis is that decades of stigma and taboo regarding mental health are being washed away as we realize that these are real problems that everyone faces, and has always faced. 

More people are getting the help they need than ever before, which gives me hope that all of us have a brighter and more beautiful life within arms reach, and it’s accessible right now. You may just need a guiding hand to help you reveal it for yourself.

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Are you fighting your own mental health issues in middle age? Has therapy helped you navigate through some of life’s challenges? Sound off in the comments! Since MidThoughts is still in its infancy, your feedback is vital in growing this community and delivering compelling content that resonates with you.

If you enjoy the newsletter, subscribe (it’s free!). If you really want to show your support for my work, you can pledge for a future paid subscription.

That’s all for now. Be sure to join me back here in a couple of weeks for another issue of MidThoughts.

Full Disclosure: This is an article that I originally published on Medium about a year ago when I was beginning to ease myself back into the world of online writing. It never got the traction that I felt it deserved over there, so I’m republishing it here on Substack with some very minor edits for consistency’s sake.

I’m not the biggest fan of recycled content, but these past couple of weeks have left me with little time to sit down and roll out a new issue fresh off the ol’ grey-matter. Instead of skipping a post completely, I’ve decided to toss this article back into the winds of the Substack algorithm in hope of giving it a second life.

I’ll be back to freshly-minted content in a couple of weeks. Until then, enjoy.

Don’t let perfectionism be the enemy of good enough.

Seriously, I’ve heard this bit of wisdom thrown around so many times over the past few years now that it’s permanently lodged itself into my consciousness. Still, the necessity to let go of perfectionism is not easy for any creator to accept. They will peek into their viewfinder, and when that first composition isn’t something absolutely Earth-shattering, or even good for that matter, they’ll hang up their tripod and tell themselves that they’ll come back to it when the inspiration is there.

But the inspiration never arrives.

Inspiration is a Trap

Inspiration is an awesome thing when you’re in the midst of it. But it’s a poor prerequisite to base your creative endeavors on for two main reasons:

1. It’s incredibly fickle and fleeting.

2. It gives you an excuse to quit when you’re not “feeling it.”

It’s the practice, not the inspiration, that adds up to consistency in your creative output.

Now, I’m not a professional photographer. I’m just a midlifer trying to hone my writing craft on Substack. But it took a plastic camera that I bought on Amazon to give me permission to toss myself into the winds of this crazy writing experiment and be as sloppy as I needed to be in the process of finding my creative voice here.

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Freewheeling in the Land of FujiFilm

About a year ago, I decided I wanted to do something special for my son during his senior year of high school. We never traveled together much, and since his own creative aspirations lay in the world of Japanese Manga-inspired art, I thought a trip across Japan would do us both a lot of good.

A special trip like this called for a special method of documenting it.

I didn’t want the pressures or anxiety involved with vlogging our adventures, and I was still way too hung up on perfectionism to dare write about them. No. I wanted to enjoy this special experience with my son and not spend my time in constant worry about whether I had it in me to tap my inner creative well to come up with some amazing work that could accurately chronicle this journey.

I was looking for something fun and different to cement these moments for us, and most importantly something casual and unobtrusive, so that capturing our memories took a backseat to actually experiencing them.

I found my answers in the Kodak Ektar H35.

The Kodak Ektar H35

The Kodak Ektar H35 is not a good camera.

There’s no way in hell it costs even a fraction of its $50 price tag to produce. It’s a plastic shell housing a plastic film take-up spool with a plastic film rewind shaft to wheel it all back in once you’re finished. Even the lens itself is plastic. A photo’s actual composition is only vaguely defined when you peek through the viewfinder, leaving your final composed shot at the mercy of your own guesswork.

The H35’s most compelling technological feature is the AAA battery compartment wired to its simple onboard flash mechanism. The housing squeaks, creaks, and bends when handled, and the whole thing feels so flimsy that with every press of the shutter, it seems as if the entire camera might crumble onto itself like a sheet of paper.

And I love it.

Imperfection is Freedom

The beauty of the Ektar H35 is that it sets the bar so unbelievably low right from the get-go that it takes all the pressure out of trying to produce anything falling within the guidelines of what is commonly considered aesthetically pleasing.

The Ektar plays by a different set of rules. Much like the line of Lomographic cameras that it descended from, It is a creative tool that leans hard, right into its own limitations. It takes the fact that it’s practically a toy and embraces it. There is a kind of candidness and innocence in the images that it produces. They are off-center, the edges are blurry, and the fixed shutter speed will often punishingly under or overexpose your photos at a whim. The expectations are so low here, that you can’t help but feel artistically liberated when it’s in your hands.

On top of that, the H35 is a half-frame camera, which splits the frame in two, doubling a normal 36-exposure roll of film into 72 shots, further easing the pressure and encouraging you to get wild and shoot nearly anything even vaguely interesting.

And with that all said, after shooting with the Ektar for a while, you begin to discover your potential to improve and create better photos with this awkward and primitive tool. You send your rolls out to get developed and when you get them back you thumb through them, noticing which mistakes were yours and which were baked into the camera itself, and you quietly nod and say to yourself:

I’ll shoot even better shitty photos next time.

Through the H35, we see the beauty of imperfection. There is no polish, only the raw product of your original intention, and there’s a very profound honesty in that.

The Rough Cut is the Final Draft

So, coming back to my writing journey here on Substack, this is an aspiration that I have long been putting off out of fear of putting something out there that is not my best. I was paralyzed by my creative anxieties and, because of that, refused to even get started.

The couple rolls of film that I shot with the Ektar H35 while I was in Japan were a potent reminder that there is a special kind of freedom that comes with embracing flaws and imperfections. When you give yourself permission to screw up, it opens up a world where honesty and creativity can flourish.

Committing to writing online, especially when you’re just starting, essentially means that you are practicing in public. You will fail. You will fumble. Maybe the awesome idea you have in your head will be limited by your ability to articulate it properly.

The rough edges are a part of this process and can be beautiful in their own right. You take your limitations and embrace them, through practice, you can even work them to your advantage.

So what if I miss my mark? Maybe every word won’t land right. Perhaps an awkwardly phrased sentence may give way to an idea that is only half fleshed out as a result.

But you know what? That’s ok. Because when the comments roll in, and I look them over, I can assess my mistakes and see where I went wrong and then nod and say to myself:

I’ll write an even better shitty article next time.

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Have you ever allowed perfectionism to stand in the way of good enough? Has creative anxiety made you quit a project before you even started? Sound off in the comments! Since MidThoughts is still in its infancy, your feedback is vital in growing this community and delivering compelling content that resonates with you.

If you enjoy the newsletter, subscribe (it’s free!). If you really want to show your support for my work, you can pledge for a future paid subscription.

That’s all for now. Be sure to join me back here in a short couple of weeks for another issue of MidThoughts.

Halloween is a nothing holiday these days, and that sucks. 

Is this normal in midlife? It went from an annual cornerstone calendar event as a child, rivaled only by Christmas, to a holiday that's barely a blip on the calendar in my mid-40s. The only indicators of the holiday at my age are the plastic skeletons, hollowed-out Jack o' Lanterns, and foam-molded faux-gravestones that dot the front yards of every few homes that I pass on my morning run. 

But as a kid, Halloween was an event in our household. My dad was particularly fond of the holiday, and I think that stemmed from his fanatical adoration of 80's VHS horror films and straight-to-video bangers of slasher films. My brother and I had our childhood innocence savagely tainted early on with films like Madman, Return of the Living Dead, Witchboard, and of course the original Evil Dead saga. My dad's enthusiasm really affected my brother in particular, who found inspiration and took things a step further by stocking up on foam latex, red food coloring, Carro's corn syrup, and an ever-growing stack of Fangoria magazines, meticulously teaching himself the craft of special makeup effects (a passion which continues to this day).

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So when Halloween rolled up on the calendar every year, our family did not fuck around. My dad would immediately get to work with his stuffed newspaper and pillowcase-headed dead body hanging on a noose from the tree in our front yard. My brother would be planning whatever fucked up lacerated burn-victim face concept of a costume he would cook up in his mind's eye months in advance. 

When the day rolled around every year, our parents would set us loose as we put in three hours or so of solid work around the neighborhood, picking clean every house and filling up our double-bagged plastic grocery sacks full of candy. My dad would follow us by car, bumping the Michael Myers theme song from his worn cassette tape of the Halloween 4 soundtrack at top volume. 

It was a vibe, and my brother and I would have candy for weeks afterward. 

And then, somewhere in my teenage years, all of the fun and magic of the holiday just stopped. 

It only got worse once adulthood hit. I traded in my sack of candy for a pile of bills and a dead-end job that paid the rent. Halloween would come and go without much notice at all. 

Once in a while, I would spend the evening popping in Madman or one of the Evil Dead films, listening to the occasional group of Trick-or-Treaters passing outside. It was a long-shot attempt to drum up and recapture some of that old Halloween magic I experienced in childhood. But it never really was effective in taking me back to those days. I just had to wrestle with too much other crap in adulthood, and to be perfectly honest, whatever residual Halloween excitement remained ended up dying when my dad passed away. 

Halloween had a window of resurgence when my son was growing up, in the prime ages of 4 to about 12 or so. My kid absolutely loved dressing up as superheroes, and when the 31st would roll around, he was hype AF. I loved his enthusiasm, hopping around the couch in his Spider-Man costume and shooting invisible webs from his wrists as the evening drew near and the Jack O' Lanterns began to flicker on. I was unabashedly living vicariously through him, and for the first time in ages, Halloween meant something to me again.

It was a much more tame version of Halloween than the blood-and-guts-soaked ones I grew up with, as my kid wasn't lucky enough to experience the heyday of bottom-shelf VHS slasher films like we were (Which, as a byproduct, helped him retain his innocence far longer than that of my brother and I), but it was his excitement of the evening that mattered. 

During the height of this brief Halloween renaissance, I even joined him one year, dressing up as Mexican luchador cinema leyenda, Santo: The Man in the Silver Mask, as I walked him around the neighborhood. 

But as any of my midlife brethren can tell you, kids grow up fast, and the second wave of Halloween was here and gone, snuffed out like the last lingering flames of a candle inside a hollowed-out pumpkin.

When my son one year suddenly declared that he was "too old" for Trick-or-Treating, that was a wrap. My heart died just a little more, and I abruptly found myself where I've been since; Halloween has once again been relegated to a nothing holiday that holds no more fun for me.

It's not just Halloween, either. Christmas, Easter, and even birthdays seem to lose most of their magic after you emerge out of the sanctuary of childhood and the mechanisms of "reality" slap you in the face. All of these holidays are containers of memories from a time when life still held so much mystery and the possibilities of the world seemed endless. I kind of hate that kids can find the answer to anything with a simple Google search these days. I can only hope that they're still able and willing to suspend disbelief and indulge in the magic to create their own potent memories to call back on when they're at the point in their journeys that we find ourselves today. 

And on the eve of this Halloween (which also would have been my dad's birthday), I'm dipping back into those memories to drag some semblance of that Halloween spirit back into the forefront. Tomorrow night, I'll probably cook dinner and put on John Carpenter's The Thing, and during the quiet parts, I'll listen closely for the reassuring chatter of excited Trick-or-Treaters passing by outside.

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Sorry if this week’s musings on Halloween are kind of a downer. But I’d like to hear from you all. How do you inject some of that magic and wonder back into the holidays? Or do you let them just pass on by with little notice these days? Sound off in the comments! Since MidThoughts is still in its infancy, your feedback is vital in growing this community and delivering compelling content that resonates with you.

If you enjoy the newsletter, subscribe (it’s free!). If you really want to show your support for my work, you can pledge for a future paid subscription.

That’s all for now. Be sure to join me back here in a short couple of weeks for another issue of MidThoughts.

It seems the further and further I plunge into the dense woods of midlife, the more and more I find myself seeking comfort and refuge in the nostalgia I grew up with.

I think the true power of nostalgia is in its ability to whisk you back in time and put you instantly back in touch with your childhood mindset, which, in certain core aspects, is superior to your midlife mindset, which has seen its sense of limitless wonder and imagination savagely razed, corrupted, and plundered by the harsh realities and bullshit, self-imposed "rules" of adulthood. Your young mind is pure and untainted, and I firmly believe that nature has intended this as our natural state. We're the ones who have willingly abandoned it in the name of greed, ego, status, or even just financial stability.

Nostalgia may be the only link left keeping this critical, natural mindset in our peripheral. And that's why, no matter how many try to dismiss nostalgia as a waste of time. I keep it close, seeing it as a vital reminder of who we were before a sense of responsibility nuked our curiosity and punk rock sensibilities. Because, while the clothes change, the hair thins, and the bills roll in, at our core, we're still that same goofy little kid swinging nunchucks around in the garage.

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So, not a day goes by where I don't give myself some blast-from-the-past, shot-in-the-arm to remind me of who I really am underneath the career, the mortgage, and the car payments. Sometimes, it's an album, sometimes a retro video game, but nothing conjures up my connection with my younger self more than the films I first discovered on the video store shelves on the precipice of my teenage years.

There are a few childhood movies in my core rotation that I find myself routinely going back to, movies that stood tall as sacred totems to everything that was awesome to me as a kid. The bulk of these are martial arts and action films of the mid to late 80's. They escort me away from all of the madness, fear, and anxiety of today and put me right back into that frame of mind where arming yourself against a group of faceless terrorists or knowing kung fu was all you needed to conquer any adversity that life threw your way.

I don't watch these films in the same way that I did as a kid. I've seen them so many times by now that I've practically memorized every line, every explosion, and every spinning kick to the face. These films have metastasized themselves to my consciousness. Nowadays, I will put one on and tune in and out as I take care of other things around the house. Just being close to them, being in their presence, is enough to calm me. I put them on in the same way that someone would light a candle or a stick of incense, as a way to add some calmness and a sense of tranquility to my space. But instead of a soft golden glow or the gentle smell of lavender, my ambiance is punctuated by Uzi-wielding green berets, ninjas, and heavy synth-tinged soundtracks.

I'm especially drawn to the Canon films catalog, in particular the run of films produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. These plots exist in a simple universe where ninjas, top-secret international martial arts tournaments, and ruthless vigilante cops proliferate the land. Standing from our vantage point 35-odd years later, they can be regarded as crude, cheesy, out-of-touch, stupid, and infantile. They are products of a bygone era.

Which is precisely why I love them.

When the weight of a world fraught with fear, inflation, social-economic instability, and the ominous specter of authoritarianism lurking on the horizon becomes too much to bear, their simple worlds, full of total badasses and stealth assassins functioning on very simple rules, are the perfect escape from the madness of it all.

These films of my youth are my comfort foods. They remain vital components of my middle-age survival toolkit. When I have a shitty week at work, or I'm spiraling in and out of mild depression over the cost of living, the occasional health scares that come with growing old, or the heartless, manic greed of our political actors, I know that I can throw on something like Bloodsport, Cobra, or American Ninja II: The Confrontation (which the real ones know outshines the prequel in every single way) and for at least 90 minutes can get lost in a world of stealth assassin infiltrations, or symphonies of machine gun fire and explosions, where none of these complicated, harsh realities exist, and the bad guys always end up getting what's coming to them.

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Where does your personal well of nostalgia spring from? Do you routinely make nostalgia a part of your daily life? Or do you feel like looking backward is pointless? Sound off in the comments! Since MidThoughts is still in its infancy, your feedback is vital in growing this community and delivering compelling content that resonates with you.

If you enjoy the newsletter, subscribe (it’s free!). If you really want to show your support for my work, you can pledge for a future paid subscription.

That’s all for now. Be sure to join me back here in a short couple of weeks for another issue of MidThoughts.