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The Phone in My Hand Is a Studio I'm not saying I love smartphones. I know they can be problematic for a variety of reasons. The endless scrolling. The manufactured urgency. The way they've colonized every moment of potential boredom and turned it into another opportunity to consume content or feel inadequate or both. All things being equal, I prefer a laptop or desktop and a good keyboard. But I will say this: I love that on days when I'm too sore, exhausted, sick, or depres

The Fortune Cookie Knew I cracked open a fortune cookie today. It said: Discover the strength within yourself. I've been going through a lot the last six months. I won't get into all of it on this particular post. Some things aren't ready to be written about yet. Some things need more distance before I can see them clearly enough to turn them into words. Some things might never make it to the page, and that's okay too. But this message came at the right time. The Discovery Pa

The Womp Rat Problem Or: Was Luke Skywalker Just Genociding Chuck E. Cheeses? There's a line in Star Wars  that's haunted me for years. Not Vader's "I am your father." Not Obi-Wan's "these aren't the droids you're looking for." Not even Yoda's backwards syntax that launched a thousand memes. No, it's Luke Skywalker bragging about shooting womp rats in his T-16 back home. "They're not much bigger than two meters," he says, casual as anything, like this is a normal hobby for fa

Our Shows Got Primetime Or: What Power Rangers and X-Men Taught Me About Being Taken Seriously When I was a kid, my absolute favorite show was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I remember when the action figures came out. My father searched high and low for a Red Ranger. Then the Zords. Each new piece of merchandise was a quest, a triumph, proof that this thing we loved was real enough to exist in plastic form at Toys "R" Us. Then Season 2 premiered in primetime. And so did X-Men

Everything I Know I Learned in a Kitchen Or: Why Baking Still Vexes Me For most of my teens and twenties, I worked in restaurants. I've been a barista, a fry cook, a bartender, a server, and even a shift manager briefly. I learned how to cook in these restaurants—not from culinary school or cooking shows, but from the kind of education you get when someone hands you a spatula during a dinner rush and says "figure it out." I did figure it out. And once I "retired" from that li

The Coins at the Front of the Bus My first experience riding the city bus was with my grandmother Eva in Anderson, Indiana. This needs context: Anderson isn't exactly known for public transit. It's a factory town that built itself around cars—specifically, the parts that go into cars. The bus system existed, but it existed the way a lot of things exist in small Midwestern cities: technically, sporadically, and mostly for people who didn't have other options. My grandma Eva wa

Men on the Sun...or...What I Learned About Theatre at the Abraham Lincoln Freedom Festival There are performances you remember because they went well. And then there are performances you remember because they tested the fundamental limits of what a human body can endure while wearing period-appropriate clothing and pretending to care about historical accuracy. This is about the second kind. The Setup Rockport, Indiana. July. The Abraham Lincoln Freedom Festival, held annually

The James Dean Speech Teacher... Or. ..How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Lead with My Chin I was in the green room—which wasn't a room, just the back corner of the Fairmount, Indiana Library near the bathrooms—when she found me. She had that energy. You know the one. The post-show audience member who's already halfway through their feedback before you've fully processed that they're talking to you. I was still in character mindset, or at least in that fuzzy post-performance

The Right Speed I don’t drink coffee regularly. I want to be clear about that, because I have tried coffee. I don’t hate it. I even like it sometimes. But coffee hits me too fast. It flips a switch instead of turning a dial, and suddenly my brain is sprinting ahead of the day it’s actually in. Dr Pepper Zero Sugar delivers at just the right speed. It eases me into being awake without launching me into overdrive. Enough caffeine to be present. Enough sweetness to feel like a

An Artist and Dad in Process This isn’t a how-to blog…well, maybe it is…but I’m not here to give instructions. I’m here to offer insight — about things that have and haven’t worked for me, stories that feel important enough to write down, and those anvil-on-the-head lessons I mostly learned the hard way. I’m a dad. I’m an artist. Those two things don’t take turns the way I thought they would. They overlap, interrupt each other, and occasionally team up in ways that feel usefu