I woke up this morning, and the haziness was still there. I knew today was the day of my counseling consultation. I felt a little optimism — like I was at least moving in a positive direction. I ended up at the food court and ordered tacos. They packed so many ingredients into the first one that I ordered an extra tortilla and made a second taco from the overflow. I’m resourceful. I stopped by to see my friend Robert at the building and told him I was there for my session. We caught up briefly. Then I headed down for the appointment. I was about 30 minutes early so I could eat and get myself calibrated. I filled out the preliminary paperwork. Mostly checkboxes. Questions about urgency. Whether I wanted to hurt myself or anyone else. Mood scales. No space for specifics — just boxes to quantify what’s wrong and how severe it is. A counselor named Jessica greeted me. We sat down. She asked what brought me in. She went over the standard confidentiality policy. Every...

I t started with a fresh haircut. Just around the ears and the base of my head. Cleaned up. Maintained. I still have goals of growing it back out the way I had it before someone chopped it off without care. That’s still the vision. This is maintenance, not surrender. Then I went to Sprouts for some calming drink mix with magnesium. Quick update: Sprouts moved from Airline. You’ll now find it in the shopping strip by Shoe Carnival, near Best Buy at Everhart and SPID. That was the mission. Something to take the edge off. Nothing dramatic. And then my body decided otherwise. My saliva got thick. My sinus passages dried up. I started hyperventilating. I needed water. That’s sympathetic nervous system activation. Fight-or-flight. Adrenaline. Sudafed — pseudoephedrine — can increase heart rate and anxiety. Add dehydration. Add grief shock. Add a recent cold. Physiology under load. My nervous system spiked. Here’s what mattered. I asked for...

 Friday, February 27, 2026 — 10:46 PM I haven't been feeling well all day. I'm trying to hang and be normal, but inside there is a storm. A storm of emotions, pain, chemicals, traumas, etc. I just need peace. I made a choice to solidly stay home. Get better. Originally, my idea was to use my healing toolbox with EMDR, breathing, grounding, etc., and still continue to do life until my mind catches up with my body. That hasn't been working. I need respite. I’ll be solidly staying home and working with my self-healing tools. No outside activities aside from my tent in the front yard and my hammock time in the park. I need to really let my body and mind completely stop spinning. I hate this. It feels like I'm actually on the bridge between normalcy and whatever this is, but more so on the opposite side of healing, slowly heading that direction. I've been here before. I got through this before. I can d...

  Sometimes we don’t even realize the ways we’ve sinned against Him. That is why repentance matters. Not as a ritual. Not as fear. But as clarity. Scripture does not teach that God refuses to hear anyone who is imperfect — if that were the case, no one would ever be heard. However, Scripture does show that ongoing, cherished sin can hinder prayer, unforgiveness can disrupt fellowship, motives matter, and confession brings restoration. Spiritual alignment before prayer is not about earning access to God. It is about removing relational barriers so that communion with Him is clear and unhindered. The Barrier: When Sin Is Held Onto Psalm 66:18 states, “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” The emphasis is not on struggling. It is on cherishing. There is a difference between battling weakness and protecting it. When sin is protected, intimacy is disrupted. Relational Integrity Matters Jesus teaches in Mark 11:25 that when we stand...

  UNMUTE AUDIO Stay Alert. Stay Guarded. Stay Ready. That wasn’t a philosophy. It was installed. Recognizing fight or flight. The body remembers. It can flip the switch on you unannounced. It’s hard to come back. Even when you slightly have what feels like normal, you can slip right back into hypervigilance. Lately, I’ve been suffering heavily from dissociation. Today was a bad day. Very disconnected. It’s a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Hyperarousal — alert, guarded, wired. Dissociation — numb, detached, unreal. Emotional release — tears, grief, anger, overwhelm. I’m moving through all of it. This isn’t random. It’s autonomic state shifting. The vagus nerve sits at the center of it. Hyperarousal When the sympathetic system dominates, I’m scanning. Tight. Ready. Heart rate elevated. Muscles braced. Attention narrowed. No immediate threats — yet everything feels triggering. That’s a sensitiz...

  UNMUTE AUDIO   The Question We Avoid Some may say, “If you have to ask, you probably are.” That kind of statement shuts the door before the conversation even begins. It assumes evil is obvious. Loud. Deliberate. But what if the more dangerous place isn’t asking the question? What if it’s never asking at all? Because evil rarely announces itself. It doesn’t feel sinister or dramatic. It feels justified. It feels protective. It feels reasonable. Most people do not wake up intending to become corrupt. They wake up intending to protect themselves. And somewhere in that process, something subtle begins to shift. Not rebellion. Drift. You don’t wake up evil. You drift there — one justified decision at a time. A Bad Day vs. A Formed Heart Drift doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like pressure. Sometimes it looks like fear. Scripture gives us a clear contrast. Peter had a bad d...

This is my first comedic open mic. I’ve done open mics before. Slam poetry. My own music. Concerts. Even karaoke. Standing in front of people isn’t new to me. Comedy is. I was planning to go up tonight. Instead, I’ve been up most of the night coughing. Barely slept. Throat wrecked. You can’t do comedy if you can’t breathe right. So I’m not going tonight. That’s it. This Life, Death & Culture writer might actually have a pulse. Maybe I do have something in me that isn’t heavy. Maybe I can pull a few laughs. But not like this. However, I was able to finish my Sh*t Magnet entry. The open mic will be there next week. Or the week after that. I’m not rushing it. In the meantime, I’m putting up a tent in the front yard. No national park. Just space. I’ll probably bring Monkey with me. The stage isn’t going anywhere. I’ll keep you posted. Knock ’em dead? Possibly. Just not tonight. — Los

Unmute Alright, so here’s the deal.  First off, I want to talk about the whole sh*t magnet thing. Like I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries, it’s been a running family thing since I was younger. I always encounter these people who seem to float around life f*cking with other people — messing with other people — and people allow themselves to be messed with. They allow themselves to be doormats .  But when these people end up confronting me — these disgusting people — I don’t bend. I don’t play that sh*t. I end up putting them in their place.  Most of the time, these are ugly people in the sense that you can tell they have bad attitudes — the way they talk, the way they carry themselves. They move with poor energy. Maybe they need to tweak something about themselves. I don’t know.  All I know is there are bad people in the world, and they treat other people horribly. And some good people they treat ill j...

I got back home earlier than expected from Goose Island. A day was all I needed after all. The EMDR session I conducted felt successful. I was able to bring myself up to around a 7 or 8 out of 10. But since being home, I can feel myself drifting again — maybe back to a 5 or 6. I’m sliding toward where I started. I’ve been riding that scale. Earlier today, while I was in the grocery store, I felt like I wasn’t fully there. I had gone to pick up medication — loratadine, dextromethorphan, and guaifenesin — for a slight throat irritation, cough, mucus, drainage, and a runny nose. Nothing dramatic, just enough to wear the body down. I grabbed orange juice. Soups. Teas. Warm things. Warmth helps. It signals safety. It supports the parasympathetic system. So in a way, I was addressing two things at once — the physical symptoms and the nervous system. But the drifting was still there. I was moving. Functioning. Walking aisles. Searching for items. But my mind kept ...

Grief Shock In Part I, I described what I did. Here, I’m describing what I now understand was happening. What Happened Neurologically After loss, the nervous system recalibrates upward. Threat detection increases. Tolerance narrows. The sympathetic branch dominates more easily. At self-checkout, the delay wasn’t the trigger. It was the lowered threshold. At the sandwich shop, tone and posture escalated faster than usual. The knife registered. That wasn’t dramatics. That was amygdala scanning under load. When stress chemistry stays elevated, the prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for context and filtering — becomes less efficient. Stimulus moves closer to reaction. I wasn’t “becoming someone else.” My nervous system was overloaded. Dissociation: The Structural Indicator Irritability was visible. Dissociation was structural. Hearing my voice but not fully feeling inside it. Clinically, this is called depe...