A content note for any who have endured and survived any kind of abuse, I’m angry today and this touches on the horrific Cornell University case. Just a heads up for those who need a little advanced warning. I love you all.

Women do math that men never have to do.

The advanced geometry of a city street at night, the angle of shadows and the diameter of the streetlight glow they’ll feel a fraction of a percentage safer in, the physics involved the moment a hand finds its way to their shoulder or the small of their back. Science, too, as they must become chemists each time a drink poured becomes a drink handed to them in a bar or club and they worry of something dropped into it, or the rejection response that men invent and call primal when their advances are denied.

So too are they experts on silence. Their own when some small man demands it of them as they believe their voice carries more value, but another type as well. Another kind worse than the rest:

The silence of those who should be speaking up for them, with them, who should be a voice of opposition to the bullshit reductions and terrible atrocities they face. The silence of those who refuse to punish those who commit them, the silence of those who still do not teach the next generation to change.

I can still see the glow of the cell phone screen that had the messages on that Cornell University fraternity group chat that sparked a lawsuit and an absolute fever pitch of anger across the world. I can see the words, the absolute degradation of another treated like a joke, like a human being made commodity, made property. I see those who responded, those who the lawsuit says partook, but I see someone else, someone somehow louder.

I see the men who stayed silent. I see that deafening silence, the apparent refusal of every single other man to speak up and stop it. I see the resistance to rock their disgusting boats, I see the complete apathy towards doing the right thing.

I see her, too. The woman tossed into a sea of tumult and chaos against every shred of her will. I see her cast aside, abandoned by all those who did nothing.

I also see that NOTHING, where god dammit, I should see something ferocious.

We’re doing this, all of us, this whole society of men, and we always have been. I don’t know why it’s never gone away, I don’t understand the machinations that haven’t let this horrific and outdated and abhorrent ideal of masculinity die, but here we are, and here we shouldn’t be.

This is a furious letter to the men I know.

This is a demand, because pleas don’t work, because asking politely has never elicited a single meaningful change, clearly. This is me, SHOUTING at you, that we have to do better, we have to be better, we have to set better examples, we have to be loud about this. Now, and always.

We have to raise boys that become men who are actually strong, not just this pantomime of it that somehow we all have been hoodwinked into believing. We have to raise boys who respect women, and more, who refuse to be complicit when others do not. We need men who understand something simple but profound:

Women do not need saviors, they need men who are willing to break the silence amongst men.

Only men can do this.

We have to raise boys who not only refuse to laugh when the jokes begin at that awkward time between 8 to 12, but speak up and offer resistance to those making them. Who risk it the outcasting, who say NO when everyone else is saying Yes to the behaviors that have become obscenely normalized.

We have to raise boys that become men who understand true strength is speaking out when no one else will, it’s making a fucking change when everyone else throws their hands up in some pathetic surrender to the “way it’s always been.”

It is the way it’s been because WE, the men who CAN, and SHOULD, and for some reason still will NOT, have been turning a blind eye away from what’s happening until it actually happens to someone we know, someone we love, someone we call friend or family or lover.

What a disaster we’ve created, all of us “we” over centuries and centuries of passing down, either with intention or with apathy, such disfigured definitions of what it is to be a MAN. What it is to be masculine. These lessons of power, of persuasion, of acquisition, of aggression. Somehow, we’ve taught that to be a man is to take what you believe to be rightfully yours, to own, to control, to dominate.

This letter, this essay, is not one of pointing fingers at any specific reason we have done this. It’s not to blame any one group, not Hollywood not “that damn rap music” that shouldered the blame for so many things in the early ‘90s, because in truth, it’s not possible to blame any one thing. It’s all of it, it’s none of it, it’s just pointing a finger at the reality that somehow we’re still perpetuating by not speaking up against it.

By not educating those that follow us how to stop it.

This is step one of a thousand that must be taken. This is the first push towards some great change that must come. Men who do speak up, must teach others to do the same. Men who do refuse to stay quiet, men who do refuse to allow others to hurt, to threaten, to dominate, to control, need to be louder, need to be even stronger.

No longer can “not all men” be the bullshit line spouted by those who use their voices, because it’s not enough. It’s just not e-fucking-nough, and never has been.

We’re raising boys that turn into men that are capable of this, and what’s even more quietly nefarious is that we’re also raising boys who are capable of the silence when others do. It’s not enough to raise boys who turn into men who will not harm a woman, it’s not enough to lay your head on a pillow each night confident that your son would not do what those monsters at Cornell University did.

If you don’t KNOW, definitively, that your son, your boy, your young man, would have stood up and stopped it, you’re not doing enough. Period. Full stop. Forever.

Do more. Be better. Educate. Teach. And most of all, fucking Demonstrate the behavior you demand of them.

Somewhere in this country tonight, a woman is going to be holding her keys between her knuckles, taking a deep breath, and walking down the street to get into her car or unlock her front door. Somewhere, another is opening her own drink to guarantee to herself she won’t be drugged. Somewhere, another is trying her very best to let down ever-so gently a man who won’t stop “complimenting” her at the bar lest his ego make him angry.

Somewhere else in this ridiculous country tonight, someone’s phone is going to light up a dark dorm room or frat house or night club or bar. One small little glow in a house full of young men, and there will be a thumb hovering just an inch above it.

It’s one of our son’s.

What that thumb does next, however it responds, someone taught it.

I love you all.

Be good better.

Also: 1-800-656-HOPE or https://rainn.org

Help is available. You’re not alone.

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Song of the Week

You’re here because one day a long time ago I posted a poem on the internet.

That’s weird, but probably mostly true. 3000+ poems, 4,000+ haiku, however many thousand photographs, essays, videos, and stories later, some of you are still here. Wild, this.

It’s the poetry then, I wanted to revisit today, to share more of. Thought I could share one that I don’t know if many people have read, unless they purchased my latest book, The Never Was. Which, if you haven’t and want to, click the link below and it shall be so.

Snag a copy of The Never Was

Maybe, thought I, people like hearing the behind-the-scenes stories about how poems came to be what they came to be. The stories behind them, the inspiration. Maybe, they’d want to dive a little deeper.

Maybe this is what might entice some people to truly join this family and help keep this place alive. Maybe this is a perk that I could offer to the paid community. Not necessarily more content, but more connection. The live gatherings are doing this, this community is doing this, so why not try?

Here is the poem, and below it, the stories behind it, and the spoken word recording of me reading it, so you can hear how my brain heard it the moment it fell out of my mind.

I often wonder about my silly mind. About being on the Autism spectrum, about my place in it. Saw they just replaced the official symbol for Autism too, saw they went from puzzle piece to an infinity sign made of rainbow.

Color, I think they aimed at, the idea of the wide spectrum of color that all eyes see differently. What then, if you see yourself as something else? What does it say if the middle of you feels different?

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I love you all.

Be good.

Happy Wednesday ya little unicorns. Welcome back to another Fuster Cluck LIVE!

Here, as per yoozh (like usual? anyone know how to spell this?), here’s THE QUESTION of the week:

Also, holy smokes: WE HAVE PICKED THE DATE FOR THE NEXT MENAGERIE!

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Have a rad Wednesday, do something beautiful.

I love you all.

Be good.

Too much pressure on perfect these days, too much focus on the flawless. This is nonsense, rubbish. I think what’s broken is More beautiful, breathtaking for all the fractures and cracks. I’m not alone in this, kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold and silver lacquer sought to show just how stunning things can become once shattered then repaired.

Today I want to dive into that, and I want you to join me, if you like.

Let’s do this…

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Truth begins in terror.

In the absolute certainty in your own disbelief that anyone truly cares.

Here’s a truth: I was alone for years because I carried a secret truth in my soul that I knew with every morsel of my being, was worth risking it all for. A life that shined like some beacon in the distance, a life worth waiting for, worth fighting for. I knew this, and felt the terror, but believed anyway that that life was the one I was meant to be living. A life lived fully. An unwritten life.

Todd Anderson knew this in Dead Poet’s Society, and I remember him shaking, his quivering breath as he looked down at his own desk. Vulnerability, in the end, and a crippling fear of it, was the thread that linked him to his friend Neil. Neil didn’t make it to the end of the film, Todd did, and I always was so struck by that contrast.

There is a cost to living your life fully, and I know this now. Took years at this discovery, took going through more things than I thought my little vulnerable heart could handle, but I got here, I’m here, now.

What took even longer to understand, however, is there’s a cost to not living it fully too. Both have a price, but I believe we are only able to afford one. The other, it turns out, is far too steep, it’s more than we can ever pay. This is what Neil knew in Dead Poet’s Society, this is what took him from this place, hollow and haunting as it may sometime seem.

Keating knew the opposite, and so too did Todd Anderson, only too late to save the pair of them, Keating from his dismissal, Neil from his irreversible act of self-harm.

A refusal to live a life less ordinary, to transform yourself and the machinations of your own soul to fit into the machinery of someone else’s invention. To quiet the thumping heart within your chest, costs everything, it turns out.

To live fully can sometimes cost our jobs, our friendships, our stability, our vulnerability, our ego, our own sense of who we were before we refused to concede a moment longer. Todd saw this after Neil’s death, after he could not live a life fully as himself, and chose his own path that he knew would end so tragically early. Todd saw, and stood on his desk anyway.

He stood, first.

I didn’t know where I wanted this entire four-part saga through Dead Poet’s Society to go when I thought it up. I knew the film meant more to me than I knew how to say, so I thought I owed it to it, to myself, to try to say it anyway. To speak of these costs, to speak of the terror that comes with truth, as it so often births it. I’m ending it here because it’s where it must end, not in sermon but in sharing of the simple truths I’ve learned after 45 years of living, those that came from refusing to live anything other than fully.

There were years of heartache, of a loneliness that can only come from watching others live the life you believed you were supposed to be living. There were years of sickness, of frustration, of stillness forced upon me like handcuffs no key was ever created for. At the end of them, as there is always an end to them, it was there but faint, there but still shining.

The great big beauty of a life fully lived, the consequence of the courage to choose it.

I created this place, this home to the rattlings of this curious mind, because I wanted there to exist a place that granted everyone who came the permission to feel EVERYTHING. The permission never needed, but somehow fed to us like a pill we did not wish to swallow.

I created this place to offer reminders, to offer little winks across the expanse of this universe that could shake you as though sleeping, to gently place my hand on your slumbering shoulder, to whisper you awake.

This is the cost of living with your heart wide open, I wish to say to you, Sometimes it takes everything, sometimes it’s almost more than we can pay, but, but…

There is no other way.

This time of year messes me up, to put it as ineloquently as possible. It shakes me every time, with its Autumnal scents and the sounds of leaves underfoot, the first lighting of wood fires and the smoke that rises like sage stick to smudge the evil spirits from this valley, this home. School returns, but not for me, not again, but I am transported back in time to a version of me that felt some shaking silence inside, that, like Todd Anderson, felt the tingle of vulnerability, the sensation of it clawing at the inside walls of you, wanting out, wanting freedom.

I just wanted to pay tribute to that film, to this season, to the yearly reminder that I cannot live a life anything short of fully. There are no halfways, no part-ways, no almost-theres. It’s all, or it’s nothing. It’s in, or it’s out. It’s everything, it’s everything, it’s everything.

I will not sermonize you on how to live, I will not push you to do the same as I do, I will not give you an optimized list of how, of why, of the pros or cons or whatever the hell else performs well on Substack and Notes and Social Medias that rot our souls, I will not, I cannot.

I will just be in this place, this strange unicorn of a place I made to give a home to all those who refuse to live a life written by someone else, who refuse to cower to the terror in truth, bow to the bombastically boring insult that is normal.

I will be here, and I will be waiting.

For you.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

No one tells you what it’ll feel like when the nest you’ve been building, re-building, cleaning, filling with life, food, laughter, and pain, is all of a sudden a hell of a lot more empty.

Turns out, it’s lots of things. It’s insanely sad, to be certain. It chokes you up at random times when the rooms are quieter, when the noises less frequent, when the schedule somehow opens up in ways that are at first subtle, but then somehow shocking. It’s sorrowful, and it carries an ache, and this is not to be denied. But sometimes, it’s something else too.

Sometimes, it’s exciting. Sometimes it brings its own bizarre joyfulness, it’s weird feeling of freedom that you almost feel guilty for internally celebrating. Both you and your partner will probably be hesitant to voice it, lest you reduce the possibility of their current sadness (if that’s the moment they are indeed in) to inconsequential.

Bottom line, it’s a lot of things. These photos kind of represent the end of dropping off Addie at school, and the beginning of a life of two empty nesters, trying to figure it all out. Click through to enjoy them, to get a sneak behind the curtain of what it meant to us. Oh, and join the family, so we’re not so lonely. Also so we can afford college at all, hahahaha.

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We didn’t linger after making sure Addie’s room was how she wanted it. We cried, we hugged, then we got the hell out of dodge. I think this helped, in a way. The tears came, they always will, but when we got back into Helena we immediately took Gilly on his nightly walk and were treated to one of what proved to be DOZENS of staggeringly beautiful sunsets.

As if to soothe our little suffering, the sky got so beautiful, the storms rolled in, and we were treated to some very Irish feeling weather. Somehow, rain always acts as balm to the ache in a soul. Washes it all clean.

Sarah also went with the full Justin Timberlake January 8, 2001 AMA outfit of denim on denim on denim, and somehow, made it look freaking beautiful.

That walk began a month of walks. Every single night, with no schedule we had to uphold, we walked, and still do. In the forest and mountains behind our home, in the simple loop sprawled out in front of our house when we walk with my parents and their dog, Gilly’s sister Murtle. Every night, a walk, a reset, a breath, a stare into the wide skies and sunsets and storms and deep sighs that somehow refill lungs and souls at the same time.

There’s so much beauty my friends, even when it hurts, maybe even especially then.

Go for a walk. Find it.

As I said, August FLABBERGASTED US with sunsets. Look at the light in these, look at the glow, the contrast between the stormy dark clouds and the eruption of some backlit fire-like glow. Look at my wild-haired Irish girl, who I love in the wind more than all other places. Look at the way the lake water holds the glow from the sky above it, look at the fuckin SPLENDOR that we’re gifted. Just look.

Also look at this amazing portrait of Gilly as I walked up the stairs from the bakery in the basement. What a peach he is.

The month continued to unfurl like ribbon before us, and we just kept walking. Quiet dinners together, we hold hands more than I think we ever have, which is something I didn’t think possible until now.

For some reason we scoot even closer on the couch each end-of-night when we finally watch some silly show before showering together. We see each other, as we always have, but I swear our eyes look deeper into each other than before the nest got quieter and others call it empty. I think it all added up to a realization, if I’m honest, and it’s a peculiar one of such simplicity:

It was never a nest we were building at all, it was a birdhouse, and as long as we’re in it, it can never be empty. It’s home, and it’s just waiting for the days it’s all stuffed up again.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Bit of a weird one today friends, but of a true Fuster Cluck as we’ve been SO damn busy, we had to go live whilst driving home from running one of 30535 errands. That’s why the poem reading, and my apology for the video stopping at the most hilarious place ever is just above hahaha.

Still though, we get down to brass tacks, whatever the F that means, and we dive into the WEEKLY QUESTION! Wahooooo.

If you missed it in the video, here is the break down and the question I’m dying to hear your answers to:

ALSO, TOMORROW IS THE NIGHT! The Menagerie LIVE hangout! Our 2nd official gathering with all you beautiful folks!

I PROMISE, next week will NOT be as big a shitshow. I promise.

I Love you all.

Be good.

Few things I love more than Equinox days, than halfway points, than feeling like you’re at a tipping point, and will soon fall over into something new. Few things feel like newness like this, like you’re past the point of no return, from what matters little.

We’re here again, the Autumnal Equinox is today, upon us now, and this is that of harvest, of reaping from all we have toiled over, all we have sowed.

Let’s do this thing…

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I had a teacher my freshman year of high school that told me I should abandon any and all hopes of ever being a writer.

“Some people can write, some cannot,” she said, and told me that pretending otherwise would be an unfair joke. She taught my Honors English I class, and also happened to be my Homeroom teacher, so I had to see her twice a day, every day, the whole year.

I am lucky, I suppose, in that I was not, and am not still, the kind of person who holds opinions like these at all dear. My autism insulates me from embarrassment, but whilst doing so, it also insulates me from adding any weight or gravity to the way I might be perceived. I know, and have known all the time I’ve been on this strange earth, precisely who I am, what I stand for, and where the boundaries of my interests, my talents (or lack thereof), my curiosities, and yes, my dreams, exist.

Still though, her words were angry words, they were needlessly cruel, and I remember at the time thinking how glad I was they were aimed at me and not someone without the bizarre and unfair advantages my brain granted me—undiagnosed at the time, but still keenly aware. If ever there were an opposite, an antithesis to the Keating of Dead Poets Society, it was she.

Those Who Saw Me

More though, I remember two other teachers that went another way.

I remember two who embodied all Robin Williams’ Keating stood for in the film that inspired this four-part saga through September. I remember Mr. Wirak, and I remember Mr. Proctor, and I remember how they changed my life.

Mr. Wirak was my 4th grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School here in Helena, Montana, and he was the epitome of cool. He said rad, talked like a surfer who smoked too many cigarettes when he was younger, and wore a collection of crazy ties and long coats. He walked with a looping gait, encouraged debate and argument even in 4th grade, and capped off every day with a game of Trash Can P-I-G for one student each day. Winner got respect. He was the first who taught me to think so far outside the box, the box kind of ceased to exist at all. He made learning an adventure, and was the first to truly stoke the flame of curiosity that, until that point, had always been forced to stay small and smoldering little embers by other teachers who didn’t know how to handle my over-abundance of passion.

Mr. Proctor came next, a cyclocross bike racer who spent years traveling the globe and working on small farms after he graduated college. Who had stories of living in places like Austria and Switzerland, told tales of far-off countries and instead of simply making us read To Kill A Mockingbird, he asked us to adapt it into our own version of a screenplay. Pick a scene he said, make it a movie.

We wrote more in his class than any I’d ever had before it. Instead of forced absorption of words written by other authors from other times, we were told to become the writers instead. Our words, which meant so much more work for him, but our chance to show the way we could make letters dance with letters to form what we hoped were beautiful waltzing words across the white pages we pulled from our Word Processors, those relics that filled a temporary gap between typewriter and a shiny real computer most of us still didn’t have.

I still have my essays from him, I still have the notes. More than this, I have the memory of him being the very first person to tell me I could, and should, write.

To Awaken What Slumbers

It’s gratitude now, more than anything else.

It’s feeling thankful not just for Proctor and Wirak, but for that Freshman Honors English I teacher (who shall not be named) who told me I should not dream the dreams I dreamed, but aim lower. Aim elsewhere.

Some awake what slumbers within you by gently stirring your shoulders, by whispering tender encouragement while you stay dreaming. Some shout, and scream, and pull the covers off so the first chill of morning can shock you into standing.

Both work, but only one keeps you warm.

As the first true month of back-to-school has crested at its midpoint and is already careening towards ending, I sit and look off my deck, and I am taken back to each new beginning from Kindergarten through graduation from college 16 or so years later. The school supplies, the backpack filled, the brown bag lunch carried as I could not stomach the cafeteria lunches.

I type these words and think of all you who will read them, and stare at the blinking cursor in disbelief that after all that has come, gone, transformed, and occurred, somehow the dream I was told as a freshman to abandon, has come true.

I am a writer.

What a gift to awaken what slumbers in the soul of another. What a gift to be a teacher, a mentor, an artist, hell, a ghost, to someone else. To shape them, to allow them to dream, and believe that one day they might reach them.

What a gift to show others the way to see the world in a brand new way, to dare, to chance, to stand upon the desks and shout O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN into the ether and angst that defines so much of the start of our lifetimes.

I was gifted many of these, some in school, some on the baseball diamonds I grew up haunting, some as authors, some as artists, some as Buddhas, beat poets, or best friends.

I tried too to BE this for those who came to me.

This is the lesson I think Wirak and Proctor, Whitman and Kerouac, Basquiat and Buddha all were trying to impart, whether they knew it or not. That I could be what some might not have ever had, that we all can.

That the way we live can inspire others to do the same. To stand up, to change, to grow.

Keating told us the Dead Poets still speak to us. They always will. I just keep trying to listen, to live in a way that will maybe one day encourage others to do the same. It’s all I can do, in the end.

Take the lessons I was so lucky to be taught, and try to teach them again to someone new.

To listen to the dreams someone else is dreaming, and instead of trying to squash it into submission, give it the belief to grow.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

Holy sweet jumping jeebus, August was a MONTH. Filled, you could call it, with every single emotion a month can bring. Some joyful, some sorrowful, some strange in the newness. Filled.

Here’s what happened, what I saw, what we felt, and how it all shook out. Hope you dig em, and if you do, just join the damn family already, we all wanna snuggle you.

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First steps in to August brought us visiting my folks up at their house in the deep woods of Elliston. We made the trip over the pass, got some fresh pipers (carrots) from their greenhouse, let Gilly run buck friggen wild through the forest, then chased a train down the highway to go back over the pass home. We had to get home cause we had important stuff to do, namely Helena’s celebration of PRIDE, finally. Turns out, Helena celebrates Pride first week of August as our dear friend Kev, the former director of MontanaPride.org, never wanted people to have to choose between the marquee Pride events that took place all over June and even into July.

Kicked things off with Drag Trivia Night, which was rad, and we took 3rd place under the team name The Queefer Sutherlands (my idea, bragging about this one). Wildfire smoke was the theme of August, and it permeated all things, the light most noticeably. Still, gave it an eerie almost old-school feel, and I liked it. Gilly loved his car-rides, and I snuck MULTIPLE shots of him being cute in the side-view mirror.

Saw Margz and Caiomhe on 6th avenue driving home from Drag Trivia, so had to snap a quick portrait of them. We miss them a lot, and it’s bizarre now that we’re not afforded the opportunity to people we grew so accustomed to being around, so often.

Day 2 of Pride kicked off with the Pride Parade first, and then, the Drag Show that literally shuts down 4 downtown city streets. Hot flippin damn can they dance. Huge turn out for the street party, amazing theatrics, moving tributes, and it was so stunning seeing our little town show up so huge, in a state that the nation only knows as a giant red blob on voting maps. Not so, friends, not so. We have a vibrant LGBTQIA+ community here, and we’re also absolutely packed full of people like Lady G and I, allies through and through.

I Love the photo with purple glow and Mount Helena looming like some protective guardian behind it. Just sayin.

The end of the Pride festivities is always sad, and this year doubly so, as it somehow also ushered in final days with Addie in town before we had to drop her off at college to begin her Freshman year. Henry already gone, we made sure to do all the little Helena things once more, and went on lots of Fuji walks with her downtown, and behind our house to remind her all she’d have waiting for her when she finally got breaks. Helena is special, and as a kid everyone always acted like they hated it here, but there always was a quote that said “Helena sucks so bad it sucks you right back.” Touchè. We all want to come back eventually, it’s just so perfect, so slow, so connected, so close to nature. It’s home.

Loaded up everything she could possibly need in the back of the ol’ Subaru, made the 2 hour drive over the mountains, and finally in the middle of the month, made it to her dorm parking lot.

Move In Day is no f’ing joke friends. No joke at all.

Her dorm is rad, her roommate is her dear friend Kendal, and we spent all day getting her situated before she began orientation week and a slew of activities that, as much as she wished she could be, Sarah just wasn’t able to participate in. ;)

A final stop at Henry’s new apartment, his first of what I’m sure will be many (especially given the 7.24% mortgage rates haha), and it was amazing to see how in such a short span of 3 or 4 days, he was able to make it feel like his bedroom back here. Like home.

Sarah sobbed almost half the drive back home, I held her hand and tried to just be there without crying too, and didn’t try to fix a single thing.

Some aches you just have to swim in.

All in all, a wonderful first half of August, and these are simple photos that represent it.

One more installation of these next week, so do tune in.

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We talk about a lot today, diving into everything from some vintage typewriters I’ve got for sale (more on that at the end) and my article this weekend that you can read if you missed it by clicking below:

And, as per usual, I ask you the question of the week that I cannot wait to see your answers to. It is this:

What in your own life have you been seizing that deserves to be plucked (or gathered) instead?

Basically, do some inventory, some self-reflection, and ask what you’ve been seizing where a gentler approach would serve oh-so-much better?

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Also, ANOTHER reminder in case you done plumb forgetted:

There is STILL TIME to join us for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool shit like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:

September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!

So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.

Oh, and for the typewriters I’ve got up for grabs if anyone wants to buy one. Here are the pics and basic details. I did my best to look up fair prices based on condition and crap between eBay and Etsy and am being as cool as I can about it:

First one is the Royal Quiet De Luxe 1950’s model, WITH the case, totally immaculate/serviced/wonderful WITH a backup ribbon brand new in the package. These go anywhere from $225 - friggen $800 on Etsy. $250 + shipping and it’s yours.

Second one is a Royal Arrow not totally sure on the year, but these look to range anywhere from $150 - $400. $200 + shipping and you can have it.

If not, ain’t no thang.

Thanks for tuning in and giving us 30 minutes of your valuable daytime hours. Cannot tell ya how much I appreciate it. Cue obligatory auto-generated “thank you note” that somehow Substack does hahaha:

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I love you all.

Be good.

We never rest anymore, do we? We never just actually rest and allow ourselves the dignity of a reset, mental or otherwise. We go and we go and we go and we push ourselves beyond the breaking point and then we marvel and wonder at why we feel so worn thin.

We turn all hobbies into hustles, we milk our talents dry, told to suck every ounce of value out of the things that once set our souls on fire. I am sorry for this, though it be not my fault. I am sorry.

Today, something different. Let’s do this…

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When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom.

Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born.

It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it.

Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it.

I remember the day I learned it was wrong.

Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized.

Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process.

I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable.

All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment.

To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong.

As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever:

Wonder is an act that requires tenderness.

To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder.

Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you.

Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again.

With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping.

This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again.

Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle.

Pluck.

Like string for music, like resonance from stillness.

Pluck.

Like leaving the rest behind.

Carpe Diem. Pluck the day.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

Been a spell since I’ve shared a never-before-read poem for you goofballs, so why not today?! WHY NOT NOW!?

I stumbled on another poem I wrote a couple of years back for the same amazing guy who purchased not one, but TWELVE completely original, custom poems, as a gift for someone he loved.

Different stories, different memories, different feelings, emotions, and reasons, but I had complete creative freedom to translate those into words.

Translate I did. Or tried to.

The poem is below, and also, Substack now lets me add “Audience specific” content inside the same post, which is amazing and weird, so for all you amazing weirdos that are part of the paid community and help keep this unicorn of a place alive, you’ll be getting some special insight, breakdown, and more details on the piece below.

For those new to here, just browsing, or who haven’t yet joined the family, you’ll see the poem and hear me reading it, with an opportunity to join us for the whole shebang.

Just letting you know how that all works!

Here’s the poem, and some crap about it:

Writing this one, truth told, came easy. I’ve long said my only real fear is a life without Sarah in it. I know this is bad, I know this is not very Buddhist of me as non-attachment is love in its purest form, but you know what:

F all that.

When I love, I Love all the way.

This poem was born from that. I do not know what comes if she left before I did. I do not know what anything is, what I am, what the world would be. I do not know, I do not wish to know.

This poem is that. “The feather’s weight for a forlorn wait.”

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Here, below, is the spoken word version of this piece, for those who do not abhor the sound of my voice.

I Love you all.

Be good.

We talk about lots today, from us having to cancel a trip to shoot an elopement in Hawaii because of that asshole Hurricane Lowell, to how we’re still fighting with SIXT and Expedia for charging us $100 for a car rental we couldn’t pick up because all flights were canceled because of the

AFOREMENTIONED F’ING HURRICANE.

So that’s fun. We also dive into the Question of the Week:

What are unwritten “rules” of life YOU need to Un-learn? What introductions do YOU need to rip out in order to live happier, healthier, more FULL lives?

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We answer too, if you wanna see the way we feel about things.

Also, in case you forgot:

We have the official date for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool shit like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:

September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!

So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.

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Have a rad rest of your Hump Day, and do precisely that.

Here’s the little thank you the post generates at random for some of you lovelies who joined us live!

I love you all.

Be good.

Are you like me? Ok, I know 99.99% of people will never, ever be able to answer Yes to this, but still, in some ways maybe you are. Maybe we’re the same, and that’s why we’re all here, and that’s what makes this place beautiful.

Today we’re going to test that with a bit of poetry. Yep, POETRY.

Let’s do this thing…

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It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been.

Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls.

Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore.

I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still.

I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes.

It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said:

Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life.

I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out.

I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated.

I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative.

To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line.

Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in.

Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself.

We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream.

I remember being measured, long before I was even understood.

Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be.

This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us.

That set us free.

Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them.

I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts.

It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed.

I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

You’ve noticed, I’ve no doubt, this whole rad place has lost all the fire talk. It’s cause, as mentioned, I’m just not fire. I’m water. Actually, more than most things, I am unicorn, which might not make sense, but that’s ok. I am because I love them.

That means, The Matchbook has morphed itself back into what it shoulda always been, Brain Rain, because that’s what my silly mind does. It just pours, and pours, and I hope most often it doesn’t turn to flooding.

Anyway, today’s Brain Rain is back to what it was before. Random rabbit holes, things I loved, things I’m digging in my life, things I’ve found, bought, eaten, seen, heard, or anything else. It’s a distillation of what’s been occupying my thoughts. I really hope you dig it.

Also, keeping this place alive and keeping me able to write here is a full-time undertaking. If you wanna help keep this unicorn of a spot on the internets alive, you can. Click the button. Join the fam. Anyway, onward.

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Here’s the brain raining my mind’s been doing. Enjoy:

1. The Outrun on Netflix - Scottish film set in the Orkney Islands just off the northern coast, and the first film ever shot on Papa Westray. Emotional, heavy, lonely, gorgeous, and reaffirming. Saoirse Ronan is once again a splendor. Watch this one.

2. Daughter from Hell by Gracie Abrams - Don’t know why, don’t really care why, but this song is f’ing beautiful and haunting and the lyrics are beautiful and the sound makes some itch in me feel scratched. Give it a listen.

3. Loose-Fit Lived In Pleated Khakis by American Eagle - Apparently I love pants with pleats? I don’t know why, or the mechanics of why they feel better, but these beauties come in some weird old railroad fabric looking herringbone and they feel like I’ve had them 40 years. Comfort is king. Damn the rest. I bought 2 cause they were only $36.

   

4. A Missive from Late Season Fishcamp by - Stunning piece of writing that celebrates the heart-stretching, nostalgic aching, beauty of all things being temporary. Our time in a place, the place itself, our blink of an existence. All from the point of view of an amazing writer on the brink of leaving her seasonal home.

5. I Swear on Netflix - Another Scottish film and this one will leave your entire heart soaked and overfilled and frustrated but somehow relieved and hopeful. I grew up with a friend who had Tourette’s Syndrome in the 80s and 90s and so I was intimately familiar with so much of what the main character experiences. True story, told beautifully, shot just south of Edinburgh. Stunner. Watch it.

6. Altra Torin 9 shoes - Sarah and I have doven (dived? dove? doved? diven?) headfirst into adding more Zone 2 running into our workout routines, and we’ve been running together because we’re pathetic awesome and do all things together, and neither of us have ever had running shoes that didn’t in some way hurt. These don’t. Wide toebox, zero drop, Vibram grips for the weird roads in Montana, and so far we love the hell out of them. If you just want comfy shoes that you can run or walk in, Altra’s seem to be really weirdly rad and have a cushiness that feels like marshmallows but still somehow stable? Science.

7. Payton Tolle Hug - Watching grown men who play professional ball sports be randomly sweet and unconcerned with their egos or how their masculinity is perceived is vital. Red Sox pitcher paving the way, and bringing some sweetness back to the game.

That’s all she wrote this week. I’d love to know YOUR finds in the comments.

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I Love you all.

Be good.

So, if you want your name in fancy pink letters, maybe next time don’t miss out and join us. I also have no control over who it picks to celebrate, so consider it a lottery and just keep watching for your chance to appear hahaha.

The question of the week for everyone to answer:

How do YOU travel? How do you balance being a traveler AND a tourist, and what are your tips that you’ve learned along the way?!

Leave a comment

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts, and start a rousing discussion below.

Also, DO NOT FORGET:

There’s STILL time to join the family as a paid contributor to 1) keep this place alive, and b) join us for the 2nd round of THE MENAGERIE! If you don’t know what it is, it’s our LIVE hangout on Zoom/Google Meeting where we get to see each others faces, share stories, share poetry, share thoughts, ideas, promote each others businesses, all that good stuff.

Let’s grow this friggen herd, and let’s start with you. Click the button below the galloping unicorn, and it shall be so!

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Have a rad rest of your Wednesday evening.

I love you all.

Be good.

I have written mountains of articles, poems, and pieces, about how this season has always meant, to me, starting over again. I blame it, and always will, on school always kicking off right at the tail end of August and first blush of September. It will forever feel like beginning again, the machinations of school roaring back to life. An example is below! :)

Today I wanted to dive into that, but for us adults that haven’t attended a class for however many years. Let’s do this…

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