Unmute I stayed up too late finishing yesterday’s entry — the one about  The Origin of Death . My mind was still turning long after I laid down. Even while I was asleep, it felt like my brain was processing, reorganizing, breaking down everything in life. I feed it a lot of information, so it makes sense that it keeps working even when I’m not consciously directing it. I woke up later than I intended. I had to get up during the night to use the restroom several times. That’s been happening more often lately. Maybe I’m overhydrated. I do intake a lot of fluids. But I’m also aware that frequent urination can signal other things — kidney issues, blood sugar shifts, p...

  Unmute Up to this point, I’ve spoken of death from personal experience. Through an emotional voice . Through a clinical lens . Through the agonies of before and after . Through hospital rooms and funeral homes. Through occupation as an obit writer . Through ethics and autonomy . Through the weight of grief that lingers long after the service ends. I have examined death as event. As policy. As memory. As fracture. But I have yet to discuss the spiritual aspect of my nemesis. Death — both my enemy and my friendly reminder to live. The origin story. How death was birthed. Genesis. Adam. Eve. The serpent. God. Death did not begin with a body in the ground. It began with a whisper. The serpent did not need teeth. He needed a voice. He leaned into Eve’s ear and planted something there. Not fruit. A distortion. A temptation. Death was born from the whisper uttered into eves ear.. ...

  Unmute I talk about “Life Is a Storm” often. It started as a phrase. Then it became a lens. Eventually it became the name of this space. But recently, I felt the need to see it. Not just say it. So I made the poster. It isn’t fantasy. It’s a psychological self-portrait — a visual consolidation of themes woven throughout this blog. Death stands behind me. Not as a threat. Just present. Memento Mori. The storm above is life — loss, growth, culture, noise. The glowing rabbit represents attentional redirection — choosing where the mind rests. Monkey is family. Grounding. Real love. The poop monsters represent intrusive thoughts and negative noise. Persistent. Often ridiculous. I’m not stopping the storm. I’m standing in it. Life is a storm. The storm isn’t going anywhere. But neither am I. The ideas in this image aren’t isolated to a single post or poster. They’re woven through my books as well. The Operating Without a Manu...

UNMUTE AUDIO I’ve been thinking about REM sleep. Not in a mystical way. In a structural way. During REM, executive authority weakens. The prefrontal control center — the voice that says “don’t think about that” — quiets down. Emotional and memory networks become more active. Ironic Process Theory suggests that when we try not to think about something, part of the mind keeps monitoring for it. The Zeigarnik Effect suggests unfinished emotional loops remain cognitively open. Combine those with REM sleep, and something interesting happens: The suppressed becomes spotlighted. Not because it wants to harm. Because it wants integration. I’ve been writing about REM sleep recently — in more than one piece — exploring these ideas and how the mind monitors what it tries to suppress. Those ideas have been sitting with me. The past two nights, they stopped being abstract. Over the past two n...

  Who gets to decide when suffering has crossed the line? Modern societies answer that question through three primary authorities: the individual, the medical system, and the state. Each claims legitimacy. Each defines “irremediable” differently. Each draws the boundary in a different place. The right-to-die debate is less about death than about jurisdiction. It concerns who possesses the authority to determine when continued existence constitutes preservation — and when it constitutes harm. Autonomy argues that the individual is best positioned to assess subjective suffering. No external observer can fully quantify interior pain. Personal agency, in this view, is foundational to dignity. Medicine offers a different lens. Clinical authority rests on diagnosis, prognosis, and treatability. The term “irremediable” is not philosophical in medical contexts; it is operational. It requires evaluation, documentation, and professional consensus. What is intoler...

UNMUTE AUDIO About the Header Graphic The monster represents the intrusive thought you’re trying to suppress. But the mechanism isn’t about fighting the monster. It’s about substitution. Try this: Don’t try to forget the poop monster. Try to forget the magical bunny-like creature instead. Carry something small that represents it — a keychain, a token, a mental image — and deliberately tell yourself not to think about it. Watch what happens. Your background monitoring system will begin scanning for the very thing you’re trying to suppress. The attempt to forget activates the reference. The reference keeps it alive. That’s the architecture. You don’t erase what haunts you. You change what loads by default. There is something mechanical about the mind. The harder you try not to think about somethi...

  Today — well, actually lately — I’ve started to wonder if I might be a nihilist. Not because I hate life. Not because I want to leave it. But because sometimes, since my mother passed, everything feels like a waiting room. Like I’m counting down without a counter. Like we’re all just doing time until exit. That thought didn’t arrive dramatically. It slid in quietly. After silence. After fatigue. After grief had been sitting in my chest longer than I admitted. It didn’t start with philosophy. It started with an experiment. I tried that “focus on the back of your head” technique — the one floating around online. The idea is that if you shift awareness away from the front of your brain, thought quiets. It worked. Too well. The narrative dropped. The chatter stopped. For a moment there was nothing. Peaceful. But unfamiliar. And then my system panicked. It felt li...

I came across an article about an actress seeking access to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program. The headline emphasized that she was “physically healthy.” That phrase did the heavy lifting. It was engineered to provoke. Healthy people aren’t supposed to want exits. That’s the moral shorthand. If there’s no visible tumor, no oxygen tank, no hospice bed, then the idea feels obscene. But what interested me wasn’t the outrage. It was the threshold. The article described years of psychiatric diagnoses. Chronic suicidal ideation. Treatment attempts. Medication cycles. Hospitalizations. Functioning in public. Collapsing in private. A person who could work on set and still return to a hotel room and disintegrate internally. Not a dramatic spiral. A prolonged one. And that’s where my mind went — not to agreement or condemnation — but to the edge. If suffering becomes medically documented, chronic, treatment-resistant, refractory to interv...

Death follows me, not in superstition and not in spectacle. It follows me because I walk toward it. I am a feature obituary writer. My work places me in the presence of endings. I sit with families in living rooms and at kitchen tables. I listen as they describe laughter, discipline, sacrifice, habits, contradictions, and devotion. I gather what remains in memory and shape it into narrative. When I am finished, a life that has stopped moving regains dimension in print. The documentary Obit introduced many people to the quiet subculture of obituary journalism — reporters who research, structure, and document lives with discipline and historical responsibility. I recognize that tradition. Obituary writing is not casual tribute. It is reported narrative. It is craft. It is accountability to the record. There is a difference between a funeral home notice and a feature obituary. A funeral notice announces a death and provides service de...

UNMUTE AUDIO   We’re often taught that strength means staying — that real growth is proven by how much we can endure. I don’t agree. Staying in situations that drain you is not automatically noble, and endurance by itself is not a virtue if it costs you your well-being. Recently, I was encouraged to stay. I was told that things can get difficult, even toxic, but growth happens when you work through it. I was told it would be handled. That coaching would take place. That improvement requires patience. That staying would make me stronger. It could have been manageable. That’s the part people might not understand. The situation itself wasn’t catastrophic. It wasn’t some dramatic implosion. It was something small — something that shouldn’t have been anything to begin with. In fact, it centered around something I did not even do wrong. A mistake was made — but not by me. Instead of listening to what act...