Recently, I’ve been having a lot of anxious teenager dreams about being back at uni, as my English ancestors would say. In some dreams, I’m late to lecture—always late, it seems—and the entire auditorium stops and stares at me as I make my clumsy entrance to my seat and smack a student in the face with my satchel. In other versions of this dream, I’m sitting in a graduate seminar but I don’t know what the class is for or who the professor is or whether I’m in the right class. In still other dreams, I have a handful of syllabi on my desk and I’m trying to figure out what classes they’re for because there are no course names, descriptions, or numbers. No learning outcomes. No professors’ names or course trajectories either. They’re basically syllabi for ideas. Every dream reveals a different conundrum about fear, longing, education, & ageism.

I want to believe that my Kafkasque dreams have a deeper meaning than simply university performance anxiety. Because that would be tragically banal. After all, I am starting my online MBA at the end of August and there are courses in regression analysis and two-variable statistics, for example, that quietly terrify me if we’re being honest. That, however, is another MIXTAPE for another time. But could my wish that my dreams have a deeper meaning simply demonstrate the intellectual need to be—*clearing throat*—deeper than I actually am? Simply because I need to believe that I’m deeper than the archetypes in my dreams or at least deeper than the representation of my dreams? If there is one thing both artists and intellectuals crave, it’s depth. Depth of meaning. Depth of analysis. Depth of signification. Depth of character. Depth of study. Depth of vocabulary. Breadth and depth of research. Literary work that has deep emotional, cultural, & intellectual depth. Deepness is basically a coke bump for an intellectual. A shot of mezcal for an artist. This brings me back to dreams. I have questions.

I’m not saying dreams have no meaning. I’m not implying they have no etiology either. I’m not even suggesting they’re meaningless. And god knows Freudian analysis can be an addictive hobby much like psychoanalyzing our enemies. Or like taking personality quizzes online or looking up your exes. But that’s precisely where I get skeptical. I wonder whether humans oversignify the meaning of their own dreams because it makes us feel better to believe our dreams signify something in the first place. Because it creates an sense of wonder and mystery to believe that our dreams offer us some kind of coded but profound insight into ourselves and/or into the nature of our existence and/or into the meaning of our lives that we can simply unlock with the right code breaker. Certainly, dreams would be much more emotionally and spiritually satisfying if we can treat them like safes hiding away our valuables. But cognitive psychology suggests that the ability to think, even in our dreams, doesn’t mean that our thoughts are necessarily profound or that we are deeper than other species. Sure, we think, and Descartes can ponder all he wants in his bathrobe about the foundational nature of human cognition for as long as he wants, but the act of thinking doesn’t in and of itself make us profound. In fact, many of our thoughts are remarkably superficial. Ditto with our dreams. Ditto with our speech acts. And this is why I think humans lean so heavily on religion and past lives because they both give our existence the signification and the genealogy we’re searching for in our dreams and in our lives outside of academia.

This leads me—as so many things do—back to storytelling. Specifically, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves about others. Most people don’t consider themselves writers or editors but in fact, every human is constantly writing and then editing and then re-writing and then re-editing a very long story about themselves that goes on forever about their place in the world in other people’s lives. It is a story about their own lives but also about their version of reality and the rules they’ve made for themselves in that reality. And often this act of storytelling has a metaphysical and moral weight to it as well.

We’re here because in another life. We were born to. We are the ancestors of. We will return to the kingdom of. After we pass, we will find. We are the product of. This life is a test. We will be rewarded in the afterlife. We must have hurt someone in another life. This world isn’t real. This life is temporary. We are being tested by. The poor shall be rewarded. The wicked will be. Once we are reunited we will.

Our storytelling is often a tool to make sense of the disorder around us but also an act of judgment on others and simultaneously a rationalization of ourselves (and our many mistakes and errors). We are the narrators, after all. We are the self-appointed protagonists in a cosmic drama we believe we are the center of. We are the unknown heroes and everyone else is either a minor character or a love interest or a nemesis or a narrative disruption from our own main-character performance. But our mistakes, our errors, our acts of cruelty—we tell ourselves stories about who we are and how we became the people we became whether by birth, culture, astrology, experience, or destiny, and those stories make us feel better about ourselves. At least for a moment. We use stories to explain why the world has come undone. We use stories to comfort our own agony in the face of foundry. And there’s nothing wrong with a good story. Stories take us back to cave drawings of bison. Stories console. Stories decipher. Stories figure out. Stories numb pain and piece together our shreds.

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And as the narrators and principal characters inside our own heads, we tell ourselves a lot of stories about ourselves that may or may not be true, but that certainly feel good when we tell ourselves these stories about ourselves and about the world. And one of those stories is that human beings are infinitely complex and our dreams are a code that can unlock the meaning of our existence. But part of narratology is understanding the motive behind the story. Why is the narrator telling this story now and to whom are they telling it? What does the narrator gain by telling this story in this way? In other words, what is the rhetorical strategy behind the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others about ourselves? There are people who believe every thing is exactly what it appears and nothing and there are those who believe that everything signifies something else and those that believe that nothing means anything to anyone. And they cohabitate our cultural space.

So, maybe my dreams are telling me something profound about my life that I cannot understand at first glance. How lovely that will be if it’s true! But maybe my dreams are just my unconscious mind reimagining everything that is on my mind all the time using a different vocabulary of imagism and cinematography, creating tiny movies about everything I have forgotten, everything I cannot bear, everything I can’t say out loud, everything that I want and fear and long for the most, everything that is dormant inside my mind that lingers in my long-term memory. If that’s the case, well, that’s a good enough reason to consider my dreams. But that doesn’t mean my dreams are necessarily profound anymore than every thought in my brain is helpful, honest, insightful, true, or even worthy of consideration.

The human mind is an incredible microchip and the privilege of life cannot be overestimated. But before we had movies, we had dreams. And maybe movies were simply our first honest attempt to capture the phantasmagorical art of dreaming. Maybe dreams are just primordial entertainment for the loquacious mind. A movie channel you stumble on after getting home late and there’s nothing to watch and you’re not ready to go to bed yet and every movie turns out to about you.

Except for a few darlings of the publishing industry and/or trust fund babies, being a writer really means spending most of your week not writing. It’s ironic but true. Whether you slog away at a regional university teaching 4-5 classes a semester or working as I do in finance, you will spend the vast majority of your time thinking about writing but not writing nearly as much as you’d like to. It’s almost a universal rule of the working writer. After all, your income as a professor (or a financial planner in my case) doesn’t come from the time you spend writing. It comes from your time teaching, doing university and department service, reading MFA applications, mentoring students, reading theses, & critiquing manuscripts if you’re a professor. Your books help you get tenure, but you’re not actually paid for your books but your teaching responsibilities. In finance, I get paid to help my clients from the alpha to the omega. My job is to complete them. When they win, I win. When they win, the company wins. And I get to use my teaching ability and my love of research, learning, & analysis to make a small but profound difference in people’s lives. Not only that, but I get to use my empathy, my organizational and communication skills, and my rapport with my clients to help them dream about the future and also protect themselves from the future. My career as an author is just part of my secret, alternate identity. Sometimes, I feel like I have a hybrid brain or I’m a walking contradition. Most of the time, I feel like I’m just a balanced human being who happens to write music, speak multiple foreign languages, work in finance, and publish books.

But I know that I will not have time during the work week to write since I have classic business work hours from 8-5. Intellectually, I detest this schedule as much as I detest the idea of this schedule. But physiologically, my body is thriving. I go to bed and wake up either at the exact time during the work week or within an hour of that schedule on the weekend. I’ve never slept better. I may not sleep enough, but my body has found a delightful cadence after decades of bad sleep with inconsistent and divergent sleep schedules fueled by writing deadlines, merit reviews, story critiques, & getting lost in the flow. One evening: 4 AM. The next: 1 AM. Then: 2:45 AM. It was out of control. Now, it’s shamefully boring. It’s heinously corporate. But it works beautifully for my body in ways that are absolutely an insult to my imagination:

• Go to bed at 10-10:30 PM

• Wake up at 6 AM

Being a literary fiction/nonfiction writer who works in finance has its own unique charms and disadvantages. But I feel like I’ve learned a few things along the way and they keep me sane whenever I start idealizing my old life as an underpaid, overworked, stressed-out academic professional. For one thing, the weekends are sacred now. Before, my weekdays always bled into my weekends. I often worked seven days a week teaching and there was no boundary separating work from play. Ever. I could be reading in bed, notice an email from a freaked out student on my phone, and even if I waited until the next day to respond, I KNEW IT WAS THERE IN MY INBOX WAITING FOR ME.

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Now, that boundary has barbed-wire fencing and guard dogs and a watch tower. And I like it that way. I can afford not to think about my job if I want to on the weekend. I can literally get away from my job now. Something I was never able to do before because academia is totalizing by nature.

For another thing, my biggest agony before—namely, money—isn’t an issue anymore simply because you get paid more when you work in the market than when you work outside the market as academia must do. As a professor, I made decent money but it was sometimes a little depressing compared to how many degrees I had and also how much my own students started making after they graduated from college. If you want to get humbled instantly, just look up the average salary of anything your former students are doing and you’ll realize that they are making more money than you are (or were) as their professor. Since higher education is both overpriced but also culturally undervalued, most professors stay middle-class until their final years teaching.

Another thing: I was constantly worried that my retirement/pension plan would never be enough in academia whether working as a lecturer or as an assistant professor on the tenure track. And if there’s one thing that gets in the way of the creative process, it’s poverty. No matter how we, as artists, might try to glorify it. Defined contribution plans for lecturers, even in the unionized UC system where I taught for four years, are partially clipped by your middling, compressed salary. Now, I’m not worried about that simply because Fidelity has great benefits and I’m also contributing 15%-20% of my salary to my retirement now, which hurts but is also necessary in my circumstance. This is something I would never and could never do before. I still have an incredibly long way to go before I’ve made up for the many years I didn’t plan for my retirement and the many years I was unable or unwilling to think about the future concretely. And yet, when I’m working on a manuscript or revising a short story or reading a novel of literary fiction or a poetry collection now, I can do so completely immersed without my thoughts creeping back to the smoke in the distance. I’m more present now because I’ve finally started taking care of my future for once. Something I should have been doing before but chose not to for a lot of terrible, half-though-out reasons. Part of this is also my desire to take care of LB in my old-age and another part is not wanting to be a burden to her (or anyone else) financially because I didn’t save enough for my own retirement. I refuse to be one of those piece of shit authors who only thinks of themselves and who relies on their community to always bail their asses out.

I know it’s very gauche to talk about money and incredibly unsexy to think about retirement as an indie literary non/fiction writer, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that we must have these difficult conversations especially since we—the artists, the intellectuals, the literati, & the scholars—tend to devalue, pardon the oxymoron, the value of money and the peace of mind that a good retirement plan gives us as writers, artists, public intellectuals, creators, & cultural critics. Instead of romanticizing poverty, malnutrition, resource scarcity, & uncertainty, though, I choose stability now and that’s precisely because I’ve lived on the other side of the train tracks. I know poverty and malnutrition. I know what it’s like to live on $100 a week. I know what it’s like to stuff your pockets with free hors d’oeuvres at the Yale reception table. I know what it’s like to take a student loan out just to pay for a bag of Trader Joe’s groceries. I know the empty space of an unfurnished apartment. And I know the feeling of sleeping on a futon without a blanket. I never want to experience that again. I hope that no one else does either. And to that end, I will make choices that give me the peace of mind I need to create the kind of books I want (you) to read now and in the future. That’s the promise I’ve made to myself. And now the world.

I’ve been watching the World Cup since I was a boy. Soccer was my best sport and I loved it with a passion. I used to play in the YMCA Saturday League where I scored a ton of goals as an inexhaustible striker. Some of those goals were absolutely off sides, but who’s counting? I certainly wasn’t. Soccer was my jam and I was damn good at it. As a boy, I used to create competitions inside my head to see how many times I could juggle the ball in our backyard before dropping it. I was obsessed with Pelé documentaries on HBO. I even went to Soccer Camp at the local community college because soccer touched a nerve inside me.

Unfortunately for me, our junior high didn’t have a soccer team for reasons that never made sense to me and I wasn’t interested in American football even though my geography teacher, Mr. Bell, really wanted me to play wide receiver for the flag football team since I was one of the fastest boys in our grade and had been the anchor runner in relay races on the Track and Field team. A team, for the record, I dropped out of a few months later in order to train to become a concert pianist. When I told the Track and Field coach I was leaving the team so I could practice the piano 4-8 hours a day, he said, “God bless you, son!” It was one of the kindest things any man had ever said to me. Something I have never forgotten, even after all these years.

Unfortunately, my parents didn’t see it that way when I tried to argue that practicing the whole summer was the musical equivalent of an internship. I did, however, get accepted into Interlochen Arts Academy a year later where I did in fact practice 4-8 hours every single day and live and breathe music and fine arts, including art, dance, theater, creative writing, & of course, romance, since my brain is just wired that way. But that also meant that my dream of playing on a varsity soccer team quickly died since Interlochen didn’t have athletic teams at all—intramural or varsity. It was too artsy. That’s probably why I loved it so much. Wherever I was as a teenager, my love for soccer continued to burn brightly, but almost no one played soccer during recess. The kids in my neighborhood were more interested in BMX bikes and heavy metal girls with hair-sprayed bangs and rollerskating and downhill skiing. I liked those things too, but soccer was the sport I loved the most.

I was attracted to the international ethos of the World Cup: the pageantry of games, the different flags and anthems from around the world, the players speaking different languages, the jerseys with different colors, insignias, & designs. Each world cup showcasing another part of the world. Before I flirted with the idea of becoming an international lawyer for the UN or working in international development or volunteering for the Peace Corps in adulthood, my first glimpse of the world was the World Cup on TV where I could see the rest of the globe from our little hamlet in Northern Michigan.

In the ring finger of the mitten (which is how people from Michigan show you where they live), we had cherry blossoms, vineyards, & idyllic green fields. We had peach and crab apple trees. We had sand dunes and dandelion fields. We had fresh water lakes and small fishing towns. We had white trash Republicans & small-town liberals. What we didn’t have was the rest of the world. But watching the World Cup on TV gave me the whole world on the screen with one of the most graceful and rhythmic games in the history of human culture. Every match became a portal to the other side of the planet for me and I jumped right into every game with an adolescent fervor that was endless and insatiable.

As a Gen X adult, I still marvel at the sheer beauty of the beautiful game. The perfect synchronicity and cadence of every attack and counterattack. The complicated schema that coaches use, modify, & adjust depending on their opponents’ strategy. The dizzying speed of the game. The interplay of angles, trajectories, timing, & athleticism in every set piece. The unspoken politics when two national adversaries play each other on the field. Sometimes finding unity where their political leaders have failed and other times battling each other ferociously for all the political subtext they dare not speak out loud in press conferences.

But it is the World Cup that really captivates me. I feel about it the way that I used to feel about the Olympics as a boy before I understood the correlation between GDP and Olympic medal representation. But soccer cannot be bought with money no matter how much you throw at it. The richest countries do not monopolize the sport. The tallest and the fastest athletes are not the best footballers. The richest countries aren’t necessarily the best soccer teams either. Teams like Argentina, Brazil, Capo Verde, Colombia, Croatia, Portugal, Ghana, Czechia, Sénégal, & Mexico can play head to head with Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway. And countries like the USA, Canada, India, China, Japan, South Korea, & Australia, are lucky to break into the knockout rounds. Of course, if we’re talking about the USWNT, they have been kicking ass for as long as I can remember and I’ve been watching their matches for a long time. But with men’s soccer, there is incredible parity, especially now that many developing nations have players that get recruited by the best European, American, & South American football clubs. Much like basketball. And with that parity comes incredible skill, coordination, passion, beauty, cohesion, diversity, humanity, & emotion. There are few sports that are as universal and as deeply human as soccer/football. It is the universal language of joy and heartbreak. It is an exhibition of the best and the worst part of humanity condensed into 90-minute spectacles we replay over and over again inside our heads.

The imagination is a crazy thing. Crazier than anything in the DSM-5 manual of mental disorders. And yet, my imagination would never have created the unprecedented executive overreach and constitutional erosion that we see now in 2026 watching a narcissist dedicate his presidency to payback, division, & self-enrichment. We have never seen this level of blatant corruption in the American presidency in modern times and we may never seen this level of blatant corruption again if the midterm backlash has anything to say about it in congressional races. Trump is on a whole new level of corruption, greed, vindictiveness, divisiveness, crudeness, & cruelty. And that’s saying something for American politics.

For most of us, we will have to grin and bear it until the GOP loses its majority in the US Congress and then again when Trump leaves office with an infected reflective pool that no one needed, a gaudy ballroom that no one asked for, & sticky CPI numbers that no one wanted with a shameful 4.2% inflation rate as of 21 March 2026. It’s inevitable that our artistic and literary imagination as writers and artists would become very active during such troubling times.

After all, what is art and what is literature if not the engagement with, and the response to, but also the critique of, the changing world? We were made for these moments.

My imagination has been in overdrive since Trump was reelected like many writers I know. And so I’ve been thinking recently about the democratic authoritarianism taking place in this country as Trump further isolates us from the rest of the world with his blind tariffs, ignites a series of losing NATO and EU feuds, makes embarrassing trade agreement concessions, starts a war with Iran without provocation, plasters his mug on every national building and currency, & flirts with the suspension of habeas corpus and the invocation of the Insurrection Act. Just to get back at his sworn enemies. And honestly, I can’t help but wonder how different our life would have been if instead of an aspiring authoritarian narcissist, we had a benevolent dictator instead. Obviously, I oppose any and all dictatorships, but I couldn’t help but let my imagination go wild for one MIXTAPE and try to imagine what a parallel version of our political reality would look like if our Supreme Leader had had a totally different moral and political code. So here goes!

If I could be a benevolent dictator for a day, I would issue the following executive orders at midnight:

1. I would legalize abortion on the federal level and enshrine it into common law

2. I would reschedule weed along with psychedelics to schedule V, immediately decriminalize recreational or medical use, & erase all former records related to drug possession and distribution of weed and psychedelics. I would also remove qualified immunity, civil forfeiture, 3-strike laws, prosecutorial discretion while defunding for-profit prisons, banning unpaid prison labor, & prison unions lobbying

3. I would require all churches that participate in political advocacy to relinquish their non-profit status or pay fines in proportion to their violations while remaining on probation for 5 years

4. I would require the EPA to come up with fines for pollution that would be so high, violating companies would simply be incentivized to follow green energy policies and states would incentivized to apply for federal credits as long as they followed green energy policy. At the same time, I would create a carbon tax but simultaneously create a regressive EV credit for middle-class and low-income families

5. I would fine empty houses after they had been on the market for one year and require that homeowners rent their unoccupied houses to tenants at a sliding scale starting from 95% of the mortgage value and going down 10% every year until either sold or rented out

6. I would fine mortgage companies & private equity firms for every month their storefronts remain vacant after a one-year grace period to find new tenants or convert into affordable housing

7. I would give states the power to temporarily bypass certain zoning laws and regulations if there is a housing crisis and/or if the rate of home ownership fell below a certain threshold/ratio while simultaneously helping first-time home owners purchase homes with generous credits, no-interest loans, and mortgages while also helping small businesses with pro-rated rent and upstart grants for vacant brick-and-mortar shops

8. I would make sure that SNAP and social security were completely self-financed and immune from budget cuts and that neither SNAP nor social security could be touched by future administrations or political parties

9. I would mandate for paid lunch for civil servants and public schools, free daycare for children and old people, and 4-day work weeks à l’européen

10. I would ban phones from public school classrooms and fine parents who didn’t play an active role in their kids’ learning and development

11. I would ban assault rifles and their endless variants and require mandatory training, licensing, & a system of database red flags including domestic abuse

12. I would make the college football playoff a 16-team playoff determined by approved objective metrics and tabulated by IBM’s Watson, abolish conference championships, & not allow pre-season voting until three conference games had been played

13. I would mandate that we stop subsidizing corn and start subsidizing organic sustainable farming, green energy initiatives, & small local business grants

14. I would make public universities free and require federal, state, funding and one-time mandatory donations by alumni in the top 5% of graduate earners so they could pay it forward to future students

15. I would recodify the Voting Rights Act and require all states with either de facto or de iure discrimination against minority voters to be put on mandatory probation and forced to meet a series of metrics to remove federal pre-approval

16. I would mandate that each president be allowed to nominate two Supreme Court justices per term to replace two justices of their choice

17. I would forgive all student loans for students and alumni who earn 30,000 hours of volunteering or teaching in public schools or working as a public defenders or engaging in civic and local community development with prorated forgiveness for fewer than 30,000 hours

18. I would mandate that all private high schools & universities embrace a holistic admissions policy that included merit, potential, first-generation status, volunteering, data-based systemic disadvantage, ingenuity, & class as the primary criteria for admission

19. I would shrink the Pentagon’s budget immediately and reallocate it the Department of Education, the Department of the Interior, the FDA and USDA, SNAP, the DEA, the Department of State, National Endowment of the Arts, HBCUs, the Cybersecurity unit of the NSA, & simultaneously create a Department of Art, History & Culture

20. I would initiate a progressive billionaire tax that can be paid through charitable and/ or humanitarian contributions

21. I would abolish ICE

22. I would refortify the SEC & the CFPA (Consumer Financial Protection Agency), & expand their enforcement and penalty capacity

23. I would mandate that HR departments and insurance companies treat pets as family and entitle their parents to family leave, bereavement policies, & life insurance

24. I would mandate organic farming, GED, art, foreign language classes, conflict resolution, group therapy, & trade courses to all prison inmates and also rescind the ban on felony voting

25. I would create a 1967 based two-state solution for Palestine & Israel with UN forces creating a buffer zone, international monitors to protect national sovereignty and investigate human rights abuses, and European and Arab countries creating a joint fund to help the industrialization of Palestine, a demilitarized zone between the two countries, a Truth & Reconciliation Committee based on South Africa’s post-apartheid era, the demilitarization of settlers, and a war crimes tribunal for both the IDF and Hamas

26. I would require that the SEC regulate digital currency and subject it to the same AML laws and regulations as other securities

27. I would create a public option and/or create Universal Healthcare, cap profit margins for Big Pharma, & incentivize wellness programs

28. I would create a free national voter registration department that helped Americans register to vote online in less than 5 minutes in every state and territory, which automatically enrolled you in a free voter ID program with state of the art background checks for all eligible voters.

29. I would grant all states the right to count mail-in ballots as they arrived

30. I would mandate that the US Government open up ROTH IRA accounts for every US citizen newborn and make one-time deposits of $1000.00 in their accounts to be invested in a Target-Date fund that clients could not touch until the age of 59.5 when it would be worth somewhere between $64,000 and $245,000

Other News & Updates

I’m a bit late in reporting this, but in less depressing news, I earned my certificate in Alternative Investments from the Harvard Business School online! This was easily one of the most informative and useful courses I’ve taken in finance this year. I learned a ton about private equity, venture capital, global macro, real estate, private debt, & mergers and acquisitions. I know some of you might find this material incredibly boring, but I really enjoyed my time and learned so much about alts. And Harvard Business School’s online Learning Management System was stellar.

Earning this certificate was very satisfying for me for many reasons. And now, after getting this certificate and the Wharton certificate in asset & profile management, I’m taking the next year or so to study for the Certified Financial Planner certificate, which is the gold standard in financial planning. And, oh, yeah, while I’m at it, I’m also thinking of getting my MBA too. I mean, why not? Exciting times!

As much as it pains me to admit this and god knows I like giving the middle finger to human mortality, the day has come to say goodbye to running. For good I mean. I find this incredibly tragic but also inevitable. As much as I could visualize me finishing a marathon in my golden years with blue roses raining from the sky and a finish-line banner encircling my waist, the truth is that running just doesn’t feel the same anymore for this Gen X body of mine. Running just doesn’t feel good the way it once did. There is no longer the rush of endorphins after every final sprint. Not at all. Running has become labor. Even a liability at times. I should have learned my lesson several years ago when I tripped on two different curbs in two different months like a slapstick character. Each time, I had to run for 2 more miles with blood running down my arms like a street fighter. My gaping wounds kissing the cold air.

You would have thought that running while bleeding would have been the first clue but running has always been part psychological victory over the body. After fighting to regain my form over the years after a prolonged battle with arthritis in my foot and professional schedules hostile to early morning runs, it was incredibly difficult to treat these obstacles as anything more than temporary setbacks. And runners are used to those, even the painful ones. Remind me to tell you the story about running my first half marathon with a half-healed ankle sprain. Not my shiniest moment!

I have a long relationship with running that is intimate as it is devoted:

1. When I stopped smoking my senior year of college, running helped me get over my nicotine cravings. Well, running, relationships, & books. Definitely not in that order either.

2. In Seattle, running was one of three things that saved me during an undiagnosed depression and a series of low-points in my kaput relationship. The other two things, in case you’re curious, were writing and the Peace Corps

3. In grad school (the second time) at Notre Dame, I started running again. Normally after work and before my 1-on-1s with a Japanese friend of mine where we would speak to each other in English and Japanese

4. When LB and started dating, running was one of our first things in common. “Cositas en commun,” as her papi used to say. Running was one of the things that helped her get over her heartbreaking divorce. Running was one of the things that helped me get over my heartbroken relationship in Seattle. Together, we used to go on long runs in Oak Park at night, sometimes for up to 5-6 miles at a time. If you ever read my short story, “The Blue Men Inside My Head” in the Antioch Review, that story came from one of our late-night runs. We even ran the PAWS 5k race in Chicago where I promised LB I would be right besides her the whole way and where, as soon as the starting gun was fired, I disappeared in a cloud of dust

5. Running was transcultural: I’d run in South Bend, Buenos Aires, Berkeley, Chicago, LA, New Haven, Ann Arbor, even Burkina Faso, and had learned that the air tastes different in different cities as the lungs speak their language

6. LB and I ran in three half marathons: the 13k in Venice, the Rock’n’Roll Half Marathon in DTLA, & the Chicago Half Marathon

7. At one point, we were such hardcore runners that we would run in 10º weather on the Chicago Lakefront Trail from Rogers Park all the way to the Northwestern campus and back with frozen salty dates in Ziplocks tucked in our running vest pockets for refueling. We weren’t messing around

8. We sacrificed countless Sundays to go on long runs in the early morning from K-Town all the way to WeHo and back before we drove to Locali and devoured vegan Badass Breakfast sandwiches

9. Running was one of the healthiest things I could do for my body that was absolutely free, save for the costs of some decent runnings shoes

So, saying goodbye to running, for all of these reasons, has been a very hard thing to do. Least for all, for emotional and psychological reasons. It felt like running had been a major part of my life—minus the injury periods—for so long that I couldn’t imagine myself not running. And for the longest time, I was the runner when no one else was in my circle of friends. And that felt really good to me that I had something to call my own that no one else did. Something I did whether it rained or snowed. But my body is different than it used to be. And it’s not that I can’t run anymore or that I can’t run fast. I can. I have. But running before work sucks because I can’t calm down the way I used to on days off (and I don’t have days off anymore during the week). I don’t like running when I have a tight schedule because I start stressing about my tight schedule. I’m never lost in moment when I run like that. And I don’t like running fast and then feeling like my heart is going to explode. If I’m going to run, it should be on a day off when I have time to kill and the afternoon sun hasn’t emerged yet. But that’s no longer possible with my schedule.

Out of all the things I miss about running, I miss the identity and the euphoria the most. I miss the endorphin rush. I miss the feeling that my body is this perfect graceful machine. I miss losing myself in my running. Something that never happens anymore for myriad reasons: LA drivers are assholes and they almost never stop for you. Other male runners are always competing with you in ways that feel egotistical and annoying. There are politics to running past a woman when she is by herself on the sidewalk that you have to understand and be mindful of, which makes you weave in and out of the sidewalk. Ditto with families. People with baby carriages or big dogs. Also, LA’s sidewalks can feel like obstacles courses put in place by drivers who have never walked a block in their lives. So many things get in your way: gigantic roots of trees, slanted driveways, broken pavement, assholes parking in the sidewalks, Teslas trying to pretend you don’t exist, teens on scooters, men with ponytails on e-bikes who clearly belong in the street. And these things are your life. But they all take you out of the element. This is why now I prefer to walk now. Walking can be sufi wisdom. Walking can be meditation. Walking can be aerobic and sweaty. Walking can be calm and contemplative. Walking can be made in the form of your own image designed just for you and your body.

Maybe this is middle age speaking and maybe it’s just a survival strategy that makes the most sense in California where pedestrians are routinely endangered, despised, run over, & harassed by drivers who only see other cars. Especially the big ones. But now, I prefer to walk in LA. Many Angelenos haven’t walked a city block since adolescence. I think they’re missing out. As I’ve written before, driving is a form of editing. I love driving. But when you drive in LA (or any city for that matter), you’re revising LA.

But walking is the authentic and deeply flawed version of reality you need to experience more. Not less. Walking outside, smelling the air, feeling the sun on your face, hearing (or not hearing) the traffic and people walking their dogs and that UPS guy delivering packages to that always-empty art dealer and shoppers chatting in front of Trader Joe’s, hearing (or not hearing) the sound of your own feet tapping the ground—all of that brings you down to earth. It connects you to the earth below your feet. To the world you exist in. You are not the observer driving past reality or racing through it. You are reality when you walk. You are part of the world with your own body. Your body feels the world in every step.

I find all of this oddly comforting. I find it important too, especially for someone who spends so much time inside his head like I do. I need to ground myself often. And walking does that for me. Just like meditation.

I suppose it was inevitable that one day I would chose to stop running and pick another activity for movement. I still like to dance. I still lift weights. I still like to travel the world and walk through new cities until my feet have blisters on them. But walking has been comforting and grounding to me in a way that I need right now. After lunch, I always go for a walk now. After dinner, I always go for a walk now. On the weekends, I walk as much as I can. Sometimes it’s a chore forcing myself to get up after eating a giant bowl of açaí and watching trashy British reality TV, but Love Island isn’t going anywhere and my body needs what it needs so it can keep humming.

I do my best to listen to my body now. After decades of forced programming involving vegan and then macrobiotic diets, intermittent fasting, irregular artist and scholar schedules, wine drinking, & inadequate sleep, which my body did not ask for and did not appreciate either, now I try to honor my body in all the ways I can. It has done so much for me for so long now. I feel like this is the least I can do. Walking is the way I show my love to my life now. It’s become the love language of my body.

Now that I’ve signed the publishing contract, I am ecstatic that I can finally tell the world that my first science fiction novel, Dukkha, My Love, will be coming out in 2028 by Unsolicited Press! This novel will be my first work of speculative fiction. Keep in mind, though, that my literary fiction roots are definitely in the dirt of the manuscript. Just as exciting (at least to me anyway) is that when readers buy a copy of DML, their purchase will also come with free access to an interactive, nonlinear, multimodal hypertext version of the novel that I created back in 2017 that will act as an alternate, permutational version of the novel. IOW, Dukkha, My Love, the hypertext, will be more than simply an electronic version of the novel. It will be a contingent, nonlinear, variable narrative text since readers will able to click on blind links that take them around the novel much like Dream Pop Origami and the connective tissue of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments. The hard copy and electronic version of Dukkha, My Love will be episodic and centrifugal but much more linear than the hypertext version. Something for everyone, as they say.

When I was thinking of the best presses for this particular novel, I thought about presses that showcase conceptual writing and literary fiction by the Other, including mixed-race and BIPOC writers. Women writers. Queer writers. I thought of presses, particularly in the west coast, that have made a name for themselves with a fearless and talented cohort of writers year after year. I thought of presses with not just diverse but also deep catalogs with unique and talented authors who routinely take huge risks publishing the best and most original books available. And I thought of small presses that have an artistic vision for themselves and for their readers. And Unsolicited Press was an easy choice for me, not just because of the amazing experience I had publishing Dream Pop Origami and the beautiful website they created to accompany my conceptual, choose-your-own-adventure memoir about mixed-race and hyphenated identity, but also because there are so many things that this press does that I love, respect, & support as an indie artist and former literary scholar. Much of my love of UP has to do with the managing editor, whom I adore, respect, value, & love very much. She has made it a joy and an honor to be in this press’s catalog and that’s no small matter for me.

More than a press, Summer is creating a culture where books are vital artifacts in the human experience again. The books in Unsolicited Press’s catalog are of a high literary caliber. They’re deeply original. They’re unapologetic. Audacious. And they leave nicks on the cultural imagination.

Of course, 2028 is a long time from now! But an organized small press should have books in the pipeline years ahead of schedule. That’s how you know that an indie press is not only organized, but productive. You don’t have to worry about getting aboard a press that is quietly sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Furthermore, with a publishing date years into the future, I’ll have plenty of time to think about and possibly reach out to authors for blurbs, sketch out a limited book tour if I have the time, money, & resources (which I definitely don’t), & think about ways to get my book into the hands of readers, reviewers, & the literati. That’s why I like having plenty of time between acceptance and publication.

Of course, your experience with a small press depends more on your own effort than almost anything else. Some indie authors get their books published and then do absolutely nothing, so the press loses money. Other small press authors are so driven by the need to promote their work that they can’t shut up about it. Even ten years later, they’re still plugging away at their book. Walking into family reunions with a silkscreen t-shirt of their book cover. Slipping business cards with Bookshop CR codes of their singular publication into the pockets of grieving relatives at funeral homes and complete strangers during rush-hour on the El. My vote is for something in between laziness and lunacy. I think at minimum you should make some effort to promote your book, if not for the sake of your own art, then at least for the sake of the publisher who took your project on knowing full well that it would not have a positive financial return in their ledger. And that kind of fearless artistic support and investment should be supported. Not taken for granted. Certainly, not punished inadvertently.

At the end of the day, no one should be fighting as hard for your books as you. Not your editor. Not your publicist. Not your agent. Not your publisher. If you won’t fight for your books, who will? Who can? Who should? I know some writers find self-promotion distasteful but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. You’re not self-promoting. You’re not begging people to buy copies of your books. At least I hope you’re not. You’re advocating for your books in order to find your readers. After all, you’re just an artist looking for your audience. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. If you don’t look, you won’t find your readers and they certainly won’t find your book without some stroke of good fortune. I’m not saying be annoying. I’m not saying be monomaniacal. I’m saying put yourself out there to find your readers. Your book deserves at least that effort. And so does the small press supporting you along the whole way.

And so, while I continue looking for homes for my other manuscripts in both the small press and corporate publishing spaces, I’m ecstatic about my first science fiction novel coming out in a few years with a press that rewards talent, conceptual originality, cultural import, & artistic audacity above all else. Hopefully, I will be able to make it to a theater near you to read from Dukkha, My Love in 2028 if I decide to do a limited book tour.

Recently, I’ve been getting hit up by a lot of similarly written emails by so-called list curators and festival promoters on Goodreads. They all seem to follow the same script:

1. They all use the same AI summary function to tell me what they loved about Dream Pop Origami even though it’s abundantly clear they’ve never read it. Literature professors—current and former—have a nose for these things, trust me. Somehow, every scammy email magically use the same language in the same places to describe the various generic, stylistic, thematic, & structural layers of my memoir. Almost as if they’re getting the same summary from the same source.

2. Their synopsis of Dream Pop Origami is essentially an AI translation of the synopsis I myself wrote for my own book. So, you can imagine how gratifying but also surreal it is to watch one scam artist after another pretend they’ve read my memoir by basically quoting my copy to myself. One thing I do agree with them though is, it does sound like a great memoir, if I may say so myself! Maybe these scam artists should get off their asses and read it and get back to me.

3. One scam artist offered to include my conceptual memoir in a Goodreads reading list called “Reading the Classics.” Fully ignoring the fact that Dream Pop Origami is neither classic nor canonical. The cost was a mere $150.

4. Another scam artist offered to include my memoir in a Goodreads reading list called Listopia, which includes the most popular books, for a mere $500.

5. Another scam artist offered to include Dream Pop Origami as one of the festival highlights at a well-known Australian book store and festival. I wrote back and said, “That sounds amazing. Tell me more!” both in disbelief and curiosity. Reader, they did not respond.

6. Still another scam artist offered to highlight Dream Pop Origami at the Miami Book Festival where for the bargain-basement price of $750, I could have my very own table, promotion poster, & everything . . . along with all the other authors dumb enough to drop $750 for a festival that only cost $150 to register for.

There’s nothing new in our culture about scams. Scams are as old as clichés. They work because people want to believe they could be true. Scams don’t work without gullibility and idealism. And writers tend to be both gullible and idealistic because we live much of our lives inside our heads where we create our art. But what I find particularly gross and morally repugnant about this particular scam is that they’re not targeting the big commercial authors who are making millions of dollars for every paperback copy of their newest book at Target. They’re not targeting the hoi polloi of the publishing industry, whether agent or editor, who pogosticked from Ivy League university to publishing. They’re not targeting the millionaire commercial writers either, a term that is so oxymoronic, I just snorted while typing that sentence. They’re targeting authors who have devoted much of their lives to publishing their own books without pay for most if not all of their lives.

If this scam targeted the literary darlings and the commercial fiction millionaires, that would be one thing. Those authors have money. They have agents. They have publicists. They get to appear in Rolling Stone and People magazine and sometimes even talk show to discuss any number of trite and obvious things. More power to them. But the point is, they have a seat at the table. Small press authors, on the other hand, are still in the audience watching that roundtable discussion. That’s what I find particularly heinous here: these scam artists are targeting small press authors who are simply trying to publish their best work, build their readership and fanbase, connect to devoted readers, & maybe participate in the literary ecosystem that still thrives on hype, credentials, and networking, not necessarily talent.

So targeting small press authors who all have other jobs to support their books is just an incredibly shitty thing to do. Especially authors who receive little or no royalties in their entire career. To be a small press author means by definition you cannot live off your art. Not because it’s not worthy of million dollar contracts, but because imprints can’t or won’t even know of its existence and they are the ones that shell out those once-in-a-lifetime advances. Even if those advances themselves are still extraordinarily rare. In other words, these scam artists are punching down at authors who are routinely ignored by the industry and are almost never paid what they’re worth artistically. These are authors who produce great art all the time for the sake of creating great art. It’s the purest Bloomsbury shit you will ever see. That also makes this particular scam a moral abomination. But scam artists have no shame because they have no money. And no artist is more vulnerable than small press authors to the dream of publicity because so few of us get enough of it in our lifetime for our books unless we get extraordinarily lucky.

To this day, I’m astonished, and I mean astonished, when I’m walking around a literary festival and someone sees my name tag and says, “Hey, I loved your book!” It feels like a THC-gummy daydream. But the rule as a small press author is that every venue you read at, you’re always a new writer to the audience. You’re never a writer that people already know. You literally need your introduction wherever you go. And that’s fine. But it’s also humbling and also unavoidable. This is also why I think that scam artists should pick better targets. Which is precisely why they won’t. They go for the people who have time to read their scammy emails and dream a little. At the end of the day, the very thing that makes many small press authors so good is precisely the thing that makes us susceptible: we give people a chance when no one else would because our books are full of people the world has ignored. That’s why we take the time to tell their stories, even if no one thought to ask.

In Other News

• On a less depressing note: I’m relieved and happy to have finally finished my Certificate in Asset & Profile Management at the Wharton School/Penn. I had to put studying on hold for a few months during the holidays and when I was doing my continuing education for my financial licenses. It gives me joy to have a certificate that illustrates the time and effort I put into understanding the fundamentals of portfolio management since this is one of the most important skill sets working in finance and in investment advising. Not to mention there were math questions in some of the lesson tests and module exams that were way over my head as the consummate humanities brat. All the more reason to be stoked and proud I believe.

• Another exciting note: I found out last week that I got promoted to the Investment Solutions I position at Fidelity after only four months working as a High Net-Worth/Client Support Specialist. It’s a personal victory for me since scoring high in metrics means, among other things, not just surpassing the calls per hour, trade accuracy, and growth metrics, but also learning to shut up. Something I’m not particularly good at. But it’s been a linear chart of improvement for me. Also, from my tenure track job search days, I learned the importance of being overprepared for an interview, so I was definitely ready. My new team leaders must have agreed because they offered me the position before the interview was finished. I’m stoked about this new position in particular, because it will combine financial planning and guidance. That means I will be able to use not just my Series 7 license (the so-called stockbroker license) but also my hard-earned 66 license (the investment advising license), which will be a joy and a privilege. I mean, if you’re going to study your ass off to earn a license written by lawyers and investment advisors, you might as well use it.

• I have other exciting news to share in the coming weeks, but I will be saving that for another MIXTAPE. It deserves its own newsletter. Stay tuned!

LB and I were doing our Sunday tradition of playing with our babies (our pooches) in the backyard, eating açai, & then walking to a café in our neighborhood to drink coffee and talk about life. This tradition is a brief respite before we clean up the house a little, do meal prep work for the week, plan out our outfits, & study for our different courses. It doesn’t last very long, but we value it very much because it’s the only time we have together where our schedules are perfectly colinear during the week. I work on Saturdays but LB doesn’t. I don’t work on Thursday and Fridays, but normally she does. But our Sunday ritual gives us a brief but important moment of perfect synchronicity and conversation that is as comforting as it is necessary.

This past Sunday, we were talking about random things when the topic of dressing one’s age came up. Now, personally, I think people should be able to wear whatever they want whenever they want with the understanding that different communities and work environments do require different dress codes.

California is an amazing place for stylistic creativity. It’s the ideal state for people doing whatever they hell they want according to the rules of their own personal stylization. Some outsiders, upon first glance, might think that LA has no style. That’s incorrect. The default style here is hybrid by design because the state is multidimensionally hybrid: it’s American/Asian street style meets leisurewear meets reformed gangster meets surfer dude meets comfort culture meets Valley Girl meets Big Bad Designer logos. LA’s stylistic hybridity is part of its identity and is part of the reason that you’ll see some guy in frayed jeans shorts and a Chanel t-shirt or a girl in Lulu Lemon tights, god-forsaken flip-flops, a Trader Joe’s tote bag, and Louis Vuitton baseball cap. Ditto with the Aviator Nation crew. The Supremes. The Wannabe Vogues. The Pale Hipsters of Silver Lake. The list goes on and on, but the stylistic hybridity remains.

But this MIXTAPE is less about LA fashion (as much as I love to explore that topic) and more about what I figured out about the relationship between the way I write and the way I dress now: at some point, I realized that I stopped dressing for others and started dressing for my own self-love. And that’s who I write for now as well. But it wasn’t always that way.

In the beginning, like almost every literary non/fiction writers I know, I wrote for others. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, that can be healthy if you’re willing to acknowledge the relationship that your text has with your readers. Something genre fiction writers are excellent at and that literary fiction writers are horrible at! But writing for others as a literary writer can also be a slow form of artistic betrayal that ultimately undermines your own creative integrity if you don’t pay close attention. You don’t realize it until one day it hits you that you haven’t written a single thing that makes your heart sing in months because you’re trying to satisfy the unknowable needs of the literary gatekeepers who reject amazing submissions every day.

For the longest time once I got serious about my writing career, I wrote for my future editor and their many demands. I wrote for my censorious reader who noticed every imperfection and repeated metaphor. My invented agent who had worked with all the greats. My biggest critic who hated everything about me writing. The biggest asshole in my workshop who was always the least original writer there. My indomitable inner critic who cannot be slayed. I wrote for all the people that hated me, ignored me, downplayed my talent. And it did not work. And while writing as a form of revenge is highly recommended, writing to satisfy your critics is futile for one simple reason: it never works. Your critics, your haters, that asshole in your workshop, the colleague who sneers at your writing career, that writer who constantly acts like she knows more about the industry than you do, your imaginary critic, your frenemy who never supported your writing but still has the gall to send you emails to buy his book, & the cruel voice inside your head that dismisses everything you create—none of them will ever be satisfied. They will never give up. They will never surrender. They will never say yes. And they will never love your art. They will never love you the author. Many of them are sadistic by nature, especially the ones that don’t exist. Many of them are too self-centered and drowning in good fortune to appreciate your talent, especially the ones that do. As long as you write for them, you are compromising your art for an impossibility.

I was having lunch with Aimee last month and we were talking about how you never really know what’s going to be sold and what’s going to be huge until it is. The market is what the market is and no amount of market targeting in your writing is going to guarantee the income outcome you’re seeking. That’s why it’s pointless—in most but not all instances—writing for the publication industry and writing for an editor and writing for an agent and writing for a trend because no one knows what’s going to happen with your book unless you’re a celebrity with a salacious memoir. Otherwise, it’s like trying to predict the stock market. A lot of very smart people are wrong consistently. So, since it’s impossible to know what sells and what doesn’t, what editors love and what agents ignore, you might as well write what you love. You might as well write according to your own poetics.

Share Mixtape by Jackson Bliss | ジャクソンのミクステープ

This brings me back to clothes. While my personal style has been LA/Japanese street style for a long now along with a healthy dose of Diesel in the 2000s and G-Star in the 2010s with requisite tattoos, facial stubble, pierced nose, beanies, designer wallet, chucks, etc., I did eventually return to my preppy roots back in 2014. I’d scored my first post-PhD job teaching at UC Irvine as a full-time lecturer. To this day, my years there were some of my favorite in my teaching career. Part of the reason I started dressing more professionally and more like an East-Coast prep, at least in my mind, anyway, was based on the need to feel more professional. I wanted to look like what I was. I wanted to appear more like who I’d become: an academic professional. An author. A scholar. A professor.

Another part of my reunion with The Preppy Handbook was based on not wanting to look exactly like my students all the time. The looks I used to get when I’d walk in wearing a Supreme hat, G-Star flannel, and a pair of raw waxed denim in the mid ‘10s was nothing short of priceless. But there were moments when I didn’t want to feel cool in the classroom or on my commute or when walking around LA.

And coolness is the beating heart of street style par excellence. But coolness is rarely defined within and is always judged from without. Coolness can become a singular occupation when you’re young but it feels more and more wasteful and conformist and pointless and childish to chase coolness as you get older.

Sometimes as I was making my commute from DTLA to Orange County, I wanted to feel stylish. Cosmopolitan. Fashionable. Even sophisticated. And donning an oversized hoodie, Chucks, and slim jeans wasn’t cutting it for me everyday. So I began investing in the J. Crew sale rack. The rest, as they say, is l’histoire, mon ami. This is how I returned to my preppy roots. Someday, I will write a separate MIXTAPE just about the class performance of my inner prep style. But suffice it to say that by the end of my first year teaching in college, I felt invigorated with my stylistic versatility where one day I could walk into the classroom carrying my little plastic lunch bag from Harrod’s and wearing a flat cap, cardigan, trench, and chinos and then the next day walk in like an Eurotrash MC. I had, what they call, aesthetics. My clothes have been an important part of my identity since I was a boy. It would take a lifetime to become the director of my own wardrobe, however.

Now I’m at the age where I don’t give a shit what’s cool anymore. The only reason I pay any attention is because it tells me about the world I live in. Fashion is part of the fluidity and the cyclicality of style. I’m an amateur cultural anthropologist at heart like every inquisitive writer I know, so I’m naturally curious about the world I live in. But I don’t pay attention to trends for cues or for affirmation and I no longer judge myself based on the styles of others because they don’t matter to me. Part of that is age: why should I dress like a 14-year-old kid with a premature mustache on an e-bike? Part of that is profession: why shouldn’t I dress like an author? Or an Angeleno? Or a stockbroker? I’m all of those things. But now, I dress for myself. I don’t care if tight jeans are passé. I wear them if I want to. I don’t care if wearing cardigans, button-downs, and pressed pants or suits and wing-tips is too preppy for West Hollywood. I wear them because I feel sharp when I do. I don’t care if wearing matching sweat shorts and hoodies is too Youth Culture or leisurewear for someone my age. I feel like an Angeleno when I wear them. And I don’t care if baggy jeans are cool again. I will never touch them with a pool net because I can’t stand them after watching most of the ‘90s dominated by baggy jeans wide as jean skirts.

This brings me back once again to writing where I started this MIXTAPE and where I’m going to end it. In the late 2010s, I had an agent and I found myself revising my novel for her based on my limited understanding of what editors wanted. But what did I know then? What do I know now? Very few male authors were selling their novels back then after the Me-Too movement hit the world hard and, for the first time, the publishing industry made a bona fide effort to make amends. After centering male authors for so long, the industry did the right thing, I think, and centered female authors, and it’s been that way since. But when the cultural market shifted, I revised based on what I thought the market wanted, and not what represented me as an artist. At the end of the day, I had a great novel that was original and had a voice that could sing for days and complex, interesting characters, but it was the wrong time for a male bildungsroman with a mouthy, mixed-race narrator and the publishing industry didn’t want it. The cultural events at that time were not something I could have controlled. But every stylistic revision I made after an editor rejected my novel during submission only took my novel and my style farther and farther away from my own center of gravity as an artist. That was by big mistake: compromising my voice, language, characterization, & style on the altar of publishability. Finally, I no longer recognized my novel’s stylization. I no longer recognized my own narrative structure. And that’s because I’d stopped revising that novel for myself. I was writing it for an invisible audience of insatiable critics who did not and would never love me. My personal advice is don’t write for them. Write for your ancestors who adore you. Write for your inner child who is curious and inquisitive and bold and fascinated. Write for your biggest fan who is always looking for something new to love in your writing. Write for the comfort it gives your soul to know that such a book could be out there in the world some day.

Share

I’m not saying be complacent. I’m not saying be satisfied with less that you deserve or what you’re capable of accomplishing. I’m not saying ignore craft or the value of persistence or work ethic or originality. I’m not saying don’t revise your manuscript a million times. Do all of those things! Have the highest artistic standards of anyone you know when you write and revise your manuscripts with a fierceness that comes with being an original artist. But.

Write for the part of you that is taken by the written world. Write for the part of you that finds reading as an act of revelation. Not for the agent who reps commercial fiction, not for the agent that doesn’t see you, not for the agent that wants something you are not, not for the editor who doesn’t get mixed-race Asian voices in literature or who see Asian writers as only women writers, not for the world-weary critic who has seen everything and done everything and has given up on the joy of the reading, & not for the writer who “forgot” to thank you in their acknowledgements after you helped them with their manuscript. Write for those who understand you and celebrate you. Write for those that get you and need your writing in this world. Write for a younger version of yourself that needed the book you’re writing right now. Write for an older version of yourself that will need the book you’re writing right later on. Write the way only you can and write it in a way that feels important, nourishing, & necessary to you as an artist. Write for the part of you that still ignites into flame when the right spell of words comes together for one brief moment. Write for that feeling. Write for that moment. Write for that ignition once more and let the chips fall where they may.

As long as Monday’s blizzard is resolved quickly, I’m heading off to New York City on Wednesday to give a joint reading and panel discussion with a group of super-talented mixed-race, Asian (aka hapa) writers at Columbia University. It’s going to be a joy and an honor. It’s also going to be a couple days of intense and non-stop nostalgia, reconnection, & reflection for me. You see, it’s been twenty years since I was last in New York. Back in 2006, I was finishing my editorial internship at Warner Books just as it was becoming Hachette Books USA. It was a turning point both in the corporate publisher and also in my graduate and professional career as an aspiring literary fiction writer. I’d finished my first year of my MFA and had just been awarded a Sparks Summer Internship Fellowship to spend the summer in New York working for various editors who acquired books in various genres from commercial fiction and celebrity memoir to erotica, SF, & everything in between. Usually, internships are unpaid but Notre Dame paid for my internship and that’s honestly the only way I could afford to spend the summer in the city. How else could a poor MFA student afford to live in New York? On top of everything else, my girlfriend of the time lived in Queens. So the summer of 2006 was an ideal convergence for my unaffordable dream.

I was subleasing a room in a converted underwear factory that a group of Japanese expats had transformed into a loft apartment in the middle of Bed-Stuy. Sometimes at night when I came home late, I ran from the G line station to my apartment. In my morning commute, I was always reading the next book on the subway that I’d taken from the Take Shelf the week before: imagine a gigantic library of free books for the taking by Little, Brown and all the other imprints at Warner Books. All of its print runs had extra copies of new books that were free to all employees. And took I did. On the weekends, I spent most of my time in Queens not thinking about books, agents, & advances. On the weekdays, I commuted from Bed-Stuy to Midtown dressed in button-ups I’d bought in the Chicago Zara sale rack when I was teaching English and Spanish literacy for Americorps. I loved New York but often felt like I was too poor to live there.

The truth is that for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved New York. I loved New York when I was at grad student at Yale and took my weekend trips from New Haven to Brooklyn. I loved New York when I was an intern at Warner Books. I loved it even though I was always poor. They key to hiding my poverty was clean and pressed clothes.

So, now, there are some things I’m genuinely curious about on this trip:

1. I’m curious to know what New York will feel like as a grown adult who can afford to enjoy the city for a couple days

2. I’m curious to know what New York will feel like as a published author who no longer has an agent and who doesn’t have a big-5 book under my belt (yet), but who once thought New York was the only city for aspiring mixed-race writers like me

3. I’m curious to know what New York will feel like 20 years after my internship and 27 years after my first grad school experience

4. I’m curious to know what New York will feel like as I reconnect with old friends from college, mixed-race festivals, & the Instagram

5. I’m curious to know what New York feels like having lived happily in LA for 15 years now

6. I’m curious to know what New York feels like having written and published a backwards novel about four strangers who meet in New York on the C train during hurricane Katrina called Amnesia of June Bugs, which Karen Tei Yamashita called a love song to America. It was debut novel written from a place of so much love for the city’s energy, language, history, & effortless multiculturalism.

Obviously, I won’t get to do everything on my list and if too many flights get canceled, I might not be able to do anything at all. But as long as I make it to the Village and have lattes at one of my favorite cafés there, stroll through Central Park, browse around Strand, meet some friends at Union Square, get bagels (or at least photos) at Grand Central, explore Harlem, or get a cannoli in Little Italy, I’m golden. I don’t need to do everything. I don’t need to see everyone. I just need to revisit the places and see some of the people who have visited me in my dreams and stopped by in my daily thoughts for much of my adult life as ideas, recollection, prayer, daydreams, & nostalgia. There are few cities besides Tokyo and Chicago that I have thought about as much as I think about New York.

One of my favorite things to do is figure out where I was at another point in time in order to see how far I’ve come. It’s probably the writer in me who loves to look back in time and reflect on my life and understand how much things have changed and how far certain thematic threads have continued, so I can’t resist the Where Were You Game, even when the answers are incredibly familiar. One of the tragic flaws of Angelenos is that they (we?) think they’re the protagonists in every story, but this is not first-person delusion. These stories are the stories of a storyteller.

5 Years Ago (Ann Arbor, MI)

On January 2020, I had just finished my first semester at Bowling Green where I taught creative writing and literature as an assistant professor. I was deliriously happy for a short time. I’d fought tooth and nail to get that job. After getting a bunch of Skype and campus interviews for tenure track jobs, I finally got my dream academic job offer and turned down another offer before it could materialize. My students at BG were pretty amazing that first semester. They were smart, talented, hardworking, & generous. At the same time, my writing career changed drastically. After publishing short stories and essays in literary journals like ZYZZYVA, Fiction, Tin House, Tri-Quarterly, Guernica, and a few prominent periodicals like the New York Times, The Huffington Post UK, and Longreads, I’d had three books accepted for publication with three small presses in six months! It was hard to understand and even harder to believe. I even won a book contest for the first time in my life. Something I’d never done before.

And it felt so good to be back in the Midwest. But living in Ann Arbor, a small city I’d dreamt of living in more than once in my life, a city that has consistently been rated one of the best cities to raise a family in, turned out to be an odd fit for a childless couple from LA with tattoos and an electric car and two shi-shi dogs and endless wanderlust.

Even though I was born in Traverse City, Michigan and LB was born in Chicago, meaning we are consummate midwesterners, our neighbors called us the California couple. We had been Californicated, we just didn’t know it. At the same time, LB and I didn’t care because now we were so close to Chicago, Detroit, Canada, everything we’d missed in LA. We couldn’t wait to take our first road trip to Chicago to see family and take our first vacation up north to visit vineyards on the Mission Peninsula and visit cafés in Detroit and cross the Canadian border someday. We had so many things planned.

But the honeymoon would last only one semester before Covid-19 hit, tens of thousands of people were dying in ICU units all across the country, & the world came to a crashing halt with the leader of the free world telling people to inject bleach into their veins. If anything made me reconsider the meaning of life and the point of my existence, it was the pandemic.

By May of 2022, after LB had decided to move back to LA because she was absolutely miserable in Ann Arbor and after I’d had several bad experiences with racist students and white feminism at BG, we packed Jiyū, my beautiful black Prius, with our two babies, Zoe & Gogo!, and for the first time in my life, I drove us to California with a debilitating case of arthritis in my foot that made me look like an OG. Even though I had visions of cutting my foot off almost every day of our journey back west. The drive back to California, even despite my temporary disability, was one of the most healing and joyous experiences of my life. When we pulled into the garage of our new apartment in Hollywood only five hundred feet from the first apartment we’d ever lived in LA—a perfect full-circle moment—we felt like we’d come home. We were just two midwesterners who now called LA home.

10 Years Ago (DTLA, CA)

On January 2015, I was living in DTLA. LB and I had just moved back to LA after two of the coldest and most painful years of our lives in Chicago. Though Chicago had always been on our minds in LA from 2009 to 2012, after we returned to Chicago in the summer of 2012, we missed LA terribly. In ways we didn’t expect, predict, or understand. I had dreams of walking around Silver Lake for three months straight after we’d moved into our condo rental in Rogers Park, which was just a short walk from Loyola University where LB had graduated from and where I’d attended for two years before transferring to Oberlin College. After our fifth and final IVF attempt had failed, LB and I closed that chapter of parenthood forever. The pain of the void of our parenthood was something that took years to heal from. Sometimes, I still think the pain hides in strange places. As I was applying for tenure track and then later lecturer positions, one day LB turned to me and said, “Get us back to LA, Chickpea!” And I did. Maybe because I needed to. After getting hired at UC Irvine as a lecturer to teach rhetoric & writing, we moved back to LA and discarded some of the pain and the trauma and the profound sadness we’d been holding inside. It was the unique pain of realizing we would never have a child of our own. In Los Angeles, we moved into a gorgeous loft apartment in DTLA during its renaissance because downtown Los Angeles was the opposite of everything we’d known in Chicago and everything we’d experienced the first time in Hollywood. Esquire called DTLA the last great American city. And for the four years we lived there, it was. DTLA was everything we could have asked for with its bold new character, new restaurants and cafés opening up seemingly every month, Little Tokyo and the Grand Central food mall just a short walk away. Suddenly, the working-class city with its six months of glorious snow and bone-chilling windchill and its three months of brutal humidity was replaced with the city of movie stars and rock’n’roll and its endless sunlight and glamor and vegan brunches and luxury cars and chaotic subways and Pan-Latinamerican festivals and maze-bookstores and standing-room-only udon restaurants.

After failing in our quest to become parents, returning to LA was exactly what we needed to let go of our beautiful hometown and walk into the California sunshine again.

15 Years Ago (Hollywood, CA)

On January 2010, I was living in a contemporary apartment much like this picture in Hollywood just with half the furniture and twice the space. I had only been in LA for five months but after living in South America for a year overdosing on Argentine mate and cheese and onion empanadas, strangely enough, I started to miss the States, even though it was in a recession.

Returning to the States but moving to LA was a powerful juxtaposition of the comforting and the unfamiliar.

I was quickly taken with LA and grad school was only part of its charm: I loved LA’s picture-book weather and blooming Bougainvilleas and 70º-degree Decembers and scoliotic palm trees and the thriving Thai, Korean, & Japanese neighborhoods and its hiking trails and surf spots and cute cafés where everyone had a vision of themself in ten years and an IG handle and a celebrity run-in story and a famous neighbor. Back in 2009, it felt like half the city had sworn off coffee and gluten. Juicing was a lifestyle choice, not a menu item. Dispensaries and electric vehicles popped up here before the rest of the country.

And style, profession, & the capitalist performance of self-branding crashed into one another in every conversation I had. Love it or hate, that’s LA.

In January of 2010 I was in my second semester of grad school at USC where I had started my PhD in Literature & Creative Writing. My fall semester workshop was with Aimee (Bender), my spring semester workshop was with Tom (aka TC Boyle) & my third semester workshop was with Percival (Everett). Not bad for an emergent writer who had been teaching IT employees how to conjugate English verbs only a year prior. In Buenos Aires, I really thought I was done with grad school for good. Evidently, I knew nothing about myself in 2008. While at USC, I also took an incredible interdisciplinary seminar with the poet, David St. John, where I collaborated with three talented musical composition grad students and wrote three separate libretti for them that they set to music. And then I watched those libretti performed by USC grad students for a live audience in a series of concerts around LA. It was a stellar experience. One of the highlights of my graduate school career was watching my bilingual libretto, “The Miracle of the Walking Fish”, that composer, Laura Kramer, had set to music, performed at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music with voice and acoustic guitar. It’s a long poem about a teenager who travels from Mexico to LA to find his missing dad. When he’s in Mexico the stanzas are in Spanish and after he crosses the border the poem switches to English. Later in the summer, I would spend two months in Berkeley studying Japanese at Berkeley on a FLAS scholarship and meet one of my favorite people in the world. At the same time, one of my short stories, “Sixty-Seven Dollars for My Favorite Dictator” was published in ZYZZYVA right when my Japanese intensive course began. And all the local bookstores in Berkeley sold copies of it too! That year would end up being one of my favorite years of all time.

20 Years Ago (Chicago, IL)

On January 2005, I was living in a tiny studio in Lakeview with two cats and a girlfriend I was drifting away from. I was an Americorps volunteer teaching reading, writing, culture, & literacy in English and Spanish for the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban School Improvement. I was fucking miserable. My relationship was kaput. I missed the West Coast. I missed living in Chicago as a student. My 20-something, mostly white female co-workers, treated me horrendously. My brother was going through a relapse. I didn’t have the right clothes for Chicago’s winter after living in the Pacific Northwest for the past four years. And there was a gigantic hole in the ceiling of the bathroom staring down at me every time I took a bath to get away from girlfriend. My Hail Mary was to apply to MFA programs that fall. By December of 2004 and January of 2005, the rejection letters starting pouring in from Iowa, Cornell, Columbia, Johns Hopkins that I quickly threw away. For months, it looked like my dream to become a writer and get my Master’s was both naive and impossible. It felt like everything I had believed in was either falling apart or revealed itself as impossible. I lost hope in my life back then. I fought my own feelings of failure constantly. I lost almost every fight inside my head. I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, that my dream to become a writer was not dead. Not even close. After spending my tax return on two dirt-cheap flights to Rome that I found in the travel section of the Chicago Sun-Times that involved a brutal 18-hour layover in London, I flew back to Chicago with a fever. I walked into our tiny studio with my dissipating girlfriend. Ali and Misha, our two kitties, greeted us with tiny meows. I walked into the bathroom and played back my voicemail where I learned that Notre Dame had accepted me into their MFA program. They offered me the Sparks Fellowship and a tuition scholarship. They offered me a summer fellowship just because. They said I could apply to a fully-paid summer internship to work in the publishing industry New York if accepted. Then shortly after that phone call, Indiana University offered me a full ride as well. The creative writing director called me every day like a jilted lover: Where are you? Why won’t you call me back? I’ve left several messages and I still haven’t heard anything. Please call me back. Please.

I couldn’t believe how quickly my life had turned around. How quickly I didn’t recognize it when fortune suddenly shined its beatific rays on my face.

After listening to my future thesis adviser, Valerie Sayers, congratulate me in her voicemail, I crawled into the tub while that gaping hole in the ceiling looked down at me, invisible insulation foam sprinkling down on the floor. My head ached with post-nasal drip and pulsating sinus pressure. I lay in warm water and realized that my dream to become a writer was not dead. My dream was still very much alive. My life had only just begun as an artist.

I don’t believe in resolutions for the simple reason that resolutions smell like temperance to me. There’s an implicit morality in resolutions that I don’t like. A self-imposed prohibition that feels too preachy for my personal values. Like telling yourself to stop drinking or forbidding yourself from swearing or eating chocolate or doing online shopping or playing Call of Duty until 3 AM or celebrating pagan holidays or watching Japanese porn or eating red meat or falling in love with lunatics. With resolutions, it just feels like The Baptist Council has entered the chat. And there’s a cut-and-dry metric of failure and success that I find unhelpful for someone searching for the motivation, the discipline, & the self-forgiveness necessary to make meaningful changes in one’s own life for no other reason than the passing of time.

I prefer goals. They’re less judgmental and more understanding. They have more doors and windows to enter and leave as necessary. They’re vaguely Machiavellian and open to surprises. What’s great about goals is that they also allow for perseverance and creativity. They let you fall down and get back up and they don’t judge you for falling the way resolutions do. They don’t judge you for walking in circles before reaching your destination. Resolutions do. You’re either on the narrow path or you’re not. You’re on the wagon or you’re not. But making progress towards a goal is still progress even if it’s not fulfilled and that’s not a spiritual participation trophy, by the way.

My goals, like all goals, are hyper-individualistic, and for that I apologize if this MIXTAPE lacks some of the cultural universality I strive for when I normally write a newsletter. I have a feeling that few things will be as subjective as this but here I am in 2026 looking for new goals for a new year.

My 2026 Goals

1. Find a home for my linked, sophomore short story collection, The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss

2. Find a home for my literary/science fiction novella, Dukkha, My Love

3. Find a home (or at least an agent) for my Salingersque/Andersonian novel, Dizzie & Moto

   

4. Travel at least once domestically and at least once internationally

5. After binging on books on finance, investing, & well, Marxism, start reading fiction again. First I want to read more Elena Ferrante and then more books by talented friends

6. Meditate more

   

7. Protect my running, weight-lifting, & sleep schedule from doom scrolling and PS5 escapades

8. Get promoted at Fidelity

9. Reach $100k in my investment portfolio (might not be possible this year, but it’s worth striving for)

   

10. After saving enough money in my emergency fund, buy or lease a new car because sometimes you’ve just gotta drive around LA listening to Bad Bunny

11. Lose 3-4 pounds or gain more muscle

12. Publish a new electronic album in 2026

    

13. Buy a navy suit and a nice khaki trench on sale for work because you can never have enough of these staples in the financial space

14. Get work done on Lower Wacker (Chicago reference), otherwise known as the bottom half of my sleeve

15. Do more yoga

    

16. Spend more time in the East Side of LA

17. Finish The Ghost of Yosei, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Outer Worlds 2

18. Finish my Wharton Certificate in Asset and Profile Management

    

19. Start my Harvard Business School Certificate program

20. Start studying for the Certified Financial Planner certificate

21. Spend more time with LB and our babies on the couch together

    

22. Have more picnics

23. Take road trips to Malibu, Santa Barbara, or Ojai

24. Watch the 2026 Men’s World Cup

    

25. Cut out social media on work days

26. Get out of the house more and take more photos of world around me

TIME

Now that my professional life is fully calibrated to the corporate schedule—not the easiest transition after working in academia for ten years—I feel like I have no time to waste. In academia, I was always busy. But. I felt like I had time to waste. Even if that meant waiting until my next break, the prerogative to waste time was always there. Floating in the back of my mind like a childhood grievance. In the financial space where I’ve been working for the past 14 months now, I’m always busy but I feel like I have absolutely no time to waste. This means that the choices I make now have much bigger consequences than they did as a college professor because I won’t get a chunk of time back if I squander it now. That means I can’t erase a period of stagnation or a lack of creative productivity by simply waiting to crank things up during spring break like as I once did. Every unproductive weekend I have now lingers with me until the next weekend. At the same time during every weekend now I also find myself fighting the very real and very justified urge to do absolutely nothing all weekend to counterbalance a week of constant productivity. I don’t blame people who decide to do absolutely nothing (on the weekend or after work) after they’ve worked all week. That down time is perfectly merited, healthy, & justified. But the artist in me hates it. I wish I didn’t, but that’s how you know I’m an artist.

This reminds of a conversation I once had with Tom (aka TC Boyle) where he told me that the way you can spot a writer is whether it bothers them when they’re not writing. Not writing doesn’t mean you’re not a writer, but not writing and not being bothered that you’re not writing probably does. I think he was right then and I think he’s right now. I guess that’s why I’m bothered all the time artistically speaking.

I need to create art. That need for artistic creation is part of who I am. But creating art takes discipline, initiative, execution. You need a relentless work ethic to create and then finish a work of art. So what’s a literary fiction writer working in finance to do? The answer is write on the weekends.

SPACE

The organic corollary. Just as I’ve been thinking a lot about time, I’ve also been thinking a lot about space, specifically what I put into my mind and how little hard drive space there is for new thoughts, new material, new projects, new experiences, & new inspiration. And the cycle starts from the very first moment I wake up. Unless my self-control is in control, which is not a sure thing after getting out of bed groggy and a bit sad while the rest of my family is still in bed, the first thing I do after peeing is look at my phone. It’s a fast and immediate sprint to my three inboxes (two personal, one business) and Teams and the New York Times app and the Fidelity app and Reddit back to the Fidelity app. Before my brain has even had a chance to process reality, here I am running on my favorite trail of established neural pathways. Only on the weekends do I challenge this.

But during the week, I have a work schedule and I follow that work schedule. The junk food I put into my mind for entertainment, passing time, & emotional decompression is a way to cope with and de-stress during the work week: the crap videos I watch on Instagram as I’m waiting for my coffee to re-heat in the microwave, the hot-take videos on politics, comedy, video games, chess, cute little dogs, languages, football, & economics that seem to find me wherever I go, the instant-karma videos that pop up in my YouTube feed now. The worst part is that I’ve already seen most of these videos, which makes it even more frustrating that I’m watching them again. Like so many things connected to cultural production, these videos—like all forms of original art—have simply been reframed and detached from the original author even when the author is the star of the video.

Much like how we process white sugar, the way we process art in America always removes the stuff that’s actually good for you like the molasses to create a product that’s cheaper, less healthy, & more addictive. That means that my mind is consuming a lot of saccharine crap because it’s convenient and it’s readily available in the social media ecosystem, not because it’s healthy. Healthy is always more work.

Not only am I concerned that my mental diet is unhealthy but I’m equally concerned that my mind is too full of stuff I don’t need as a writer or a global citizen or a stock broker or a husband or a buddhist. I don’t live in Chicago or New York anymore so I don’t have the access or the energy I once did to head to the Art Institute or the Met or walk through Manhattan or the Gold Coast for an hour or linger in Powell’s or walk to Central Park or Grant Park for my soul food. And that’s okay. I live in LA. I love this city. But you have to remind yourself to walk around this city or you won’t. You’ll drive everywhere without realizing it. That’s why I run 9 miles a week and I schedule my walks after lunch and I go to the gym. I’m trying to force myself to be part of the world everyday, even if it’s just traveling in squares for the time being and smelling the sunshine. But I think a lot about the power and the beauty and the speed and the engine of the human mind. I think analogously about how slow computers are when there’s not enough hard drive space. I think about how quickly new computers work before we transfer our 10 GB of photos and our 24 GB of music files and 49 GB of our favorite movies. And what is that data if not human code? What is data but a signifier or our own personal experiences condensed into a series of snapshots, files, folders, & memories that form the human self bit by bit and byte by byte?

Flirtation

Not every weekend, but whenever I can, I’ve been doing something for the past couple months that has helped me reclaim mental space, clean up the junk in my mind, & establish different neural pathways than zombie consumer culture: it’s my morning weekend ritual. I still wake up at 6:30 AM on the weekends to give my body the regularity it craves. The sleep is always infinitely better though. But sometimes I linger in bed. My phone is always in the bathroom, so it’s not the first thing I look at. Eventually, I meditate in my office and then I take a bath with Epson salts. Right now I’m obsessed with the Oat Milk and Argan oil Epson salts. Once I’m in the bath, I finally read my phone and catch up on the world. Then, I read whatever book I’m reading. Right now, that’s Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk through Wall Street. Eventually, once I’m done reading all the books in my finance library, I’ll return to reading literature again in the bathtub: books by my friends first and foremost because I love them and I’m proud of them. Books in English and French and Spanish. Japanese books in translation and books on other subjects I know nothing about. Then LB and I spend the rest of the day working on our projects, watching TV and eating meals together, going on walks together, playing with the pooches in the backyard, walking them before the coyotes come out, cuddling with them on the bed. Right now, LB is working on her Master’s in Education in computer analytics and I’m working on my Wharton Certificate in Asset & Profile Management. Eventually, we’ll both be done with our degrees and our certificates and I’ll go back to working on my novels and we will end up going out on dates on the weekends again. Something I definitely miss. But for now, the weekend feels restorative and tranquil and productive and healthy. And my mind doesn’t feel full but supple.

Even on weekdays, I have a rule not to read my phone before I go to bed. Instead, I either lie there and I reflect or I read whatever book is currently on the menu because that’s the mental state I want to be in before I fall asleep. Unless I’m running late with going to bed, which is already proof that my life isn’t balanced that day, this routine has made a difference in my life. Of course, I don’t get to meditate every day as I’d like to. I don’t get to work on my books as much as I’d like to either. But I’ve never been more productive in a sense. I literally can’t afford to waste time anymore. At the same time, I can’t help but feel like I could be doing a lot more not to binge so much on cultural junk food during the work week. If nothing else, wouldn’t ten minutes of peace and quiet feel infinitely better than watching rehashed videos again for the third time? In my heart, I know this is true but I haven’t found a better alternative yet. Sometimes, I think about simply not going on social media at all during the week. I’ve done it before and I always feel lighter, healthier, calmer. But I’m not quite there yet. This might be the next step. This might be the last step before my mind feels free. For the time being, I have my weekends and they mean a great deal to me.

One of the biggest mistakes I made as an aspiring writer back in college was assuming that everyone loved books and everyone loved reading. Reader, they do not. Even people that do love books won’t read them if they don’t or can’t make time to read. Many college educated Americans were forced to read books as undergraduates, so they stop reading them after they graduate, their assigned readings quickly morphing from hard copy and electronic textbooks to text messages and Reddit fora. For the rest of Americans outside of academia, they simply never got started reading because what’s the point? Why start now? They made it this far without books so why start now when it feels like there’s not enough time outside of reading? It’s not that Americans don’t read, it’s just that they don’t read books. And our test scores prove it.

Books take time, focus, & patience. Despite the numerous amenities available to us, Americans are incredibly impatient. We like immediate answers even if they’re the wrong ones. That’s why rumors travel faster than facts. We have 24-hour supermarkets and 24-hour customer service and 24-hour Wal-Marts. Those things are normal to us, even though the rest of the world has to accept normal business hours and cutoff points with all business except e-commerce. And in this world that we’ve created with the American mind constantly filled with click-bait social media content, low-grade entertainment, constant phone alerts, stalking advertisements that follow us through different media, & non-stop algorithmic content, much of it recycled, inane, and derivative, our brains have no time to reflect and no time to learn. We are being taught to consume, absorb, & passively watch content all day long for reasons that aren’t in our best interests as a cultural marketplace of ideas. Artists, in particular, have the most to lose with content consumption as I argued a while back. But the thing about books is, you can turn them off. You can close books, but you can’t find the end of a TikTok timeline, that’s why books are so important to our own cultural evolution and neural pathways but also so vulnerable to cultural relegation since their payback is imaginative and linguistic instead of visual and spoken. It’s almost as if many of us can’t even hear our inner voices anymore because it’s drowning in social media content. But that’s another MIXTAPE for another day.

If you think about it, reading has always been vaguely unAmerican. From colony book-burnings to 2024 book bans on Ruby Bridges autobiographies, from the attack on academia that Rush Limbaugh conservatives waged in the ‘90s to the bonfires of marxist texts during the McCarthy purges, from the burning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the Abolitionist era to the invisible burning of queer, Black, BIPOC, & trans texts in reactionary school districts in red counties in response to so-called woke curricula, the reality is that reading has always been the enemy of orthodoxy and the orthodox church, the enemy of social conservatives, the enemy of misogynists, & the enemy of counterrevolutionary movements. That’s not my opinion, that’s history.

Reading educates and challenges. Reading transports and translates. Reading questions and explores. Reading transgresses and constructs. Reading makes us reconsider reality. But reading also comforts. Reading inflames. Reading provokes. At the same time, reading (can) reconfirm one’s own belief system regardless of where it is in the political or racial or cultural or class spectrum because there’s a book for everyone. So, the act of reading isn’t free of confirmation bias and it doesn’t have to be intrinsically revolutionary either. But based on the speed of American culture, reading by its sheer slowness and demands of attention, critical thinking, and open-mindedness, is a direct threat to our immediate gratification culture (aka id culture). I’d argue that’s possibly the best reason to read books right now I can think of besides the joy of reading and the way reading nourishes the human spirit.

It’s precisely because reading slows down everything that I think many Americans have an additional reason to view books with hostility. As it stands, we prefer break-neck speed and hot takes and immediate consequences and constant motion, even when we’re merely driving in circles in an abandoned parking lot. But it’s not just everyday Americans that don’t read. Even some authors who love to write don’t love to read because that means entering into another author’s artistic world and some authors are, well, egocentric AF, since that’s where their art come from. From inside themselves. We all know people who love to speak more than listen and believe it or not, there are many authors who are the exact same way.

So, the question of what is a reasonable assumption to make about readers in 2025 has to start with the postulate that there are no reasonable assumptions to make about readers in 2025 because most people don’t read anything except their smart phones. Full stop. Even the miracle of you reading this issue of MIXTAPE is, just that, a miracle. This is a humbling place to begin journey as an writer.

These days, I often wonder if we’ve reached that point in time where literary fiction and CNF, the genres that I know and love the most, have been culturally demoted to the same elitist space as contemporary art has since the ‘60s: demanding, incredibly niche, capable of being incredibly profound but also alienating to its audience, constantly flirting with but also challenging its own elitism, requiring immense patience, intelligence, & often, education. Like contemporary art and the critics that decode it for non artists, literary fiction has become an important niche within literature. Most people will pass by without even knowing it exists.

These days, it feels like editors are silently begging you to do anything that feels even vaguely cinematic in your literary fiction manuscript as if books could ever compete with movies. Books can’t compete with movies until they’re optioned to become movies. We must let books be books, but that’s precisely the problem. Literary fiction has become contemporary (linguistic) art now that basically requires college majors to study, interpret, contextualize, and engage with, just like contemporary art does for the masses. There’s nothing wrong with contemporary art and nothing wrong with literary fiction. In fact, I’d argue they’re both highly evolved art forms that demand a lot from their respective audiences and also give back so much to culture, criticism, academia, & scholarship. I’m here for those things now and forever. But. Despite the annual literary awards given to works of (mostly) literary fiction like the Pulitzer, The National Book Awards, The Booker, & the Nobel Prizes, most Americans don’t read those books and most agents won’t represent literary fiction authors because there’s no money in literary fiction. Especially if you don’t represent it. And unless you’re a celebrity who dabbles in book writing just so you can cross that massaged accomplishment off your list or you’re a bona fide LitFic author with 3 million Twitter followers or one of your books has been optioned into an HBO series or you snuck into the industry before the door was closed to literary fiction writers twenty years ago, you’re going to have a rough time publishing your literary fiction and literary creative nonfiction books. Much like the golden age of tenure, the golden age of literary fiction and CNF is now long gone. At this point, the exceptions really prove the rule.

Of course, literary agents still love those awards because they’re fantastic publicity and they’re illustrious and they help sell more books and they confer prestige to the agency, all things that agents love deeply, but outside of a few prominent agencies like Nicole Aragi et al. that specialize in literary fiction or have client lists that are heavily weighted with it, agents don’t want literary fiction authors unless they have a huge platform and the agents that do are either retired or retiring. For as long as I can remember, literary agents have wanted you to to be famous. But if that’s not possible, and of course it’s not, at least dress up your literary fiction novel into upmarket fiction. You know, genre cross-dressing. Or even better yet, simply write commercial fiction. Agents really want you to throw in some riveting plot lines and maybe a dead body that floats to the surface of a local lake, just to keep readers interested. IOW, they want you to be a commercial fiction writer with literary fiction devotion. It’s fine if you can turn a phrase now and then, but please do so sparingly and remember, space ships and dead bodies sell more books than exquisite metaphors. An exquisite metaphor, on the other hand, can linger in the cultural imaginary forever. It can get repeated over and over again, get quoted and cited, repeated and read again, analyzed and repeated out loud at a cafe, always cycling in and out of the public consciousness for a very long time. That is not nothing. But sadly, that is also not enough to pay your SCE bill.

Of course, the literary fiction authors who already have respectable backlists—thanks to extensive publicity and promotion by the imprint years ago—can stay in the game, but for everyone else, it’s better to submit a debut memoir filled with scandal and death and smut and revenge. It’s better to publish the book of an author whose short story went viral in The New Yorker, even if no one knows their name, than to publish a novel that changes the way that readers view reality or that gives readers a new way of understanding what it means to be human again.

Literary agents like to talk about books like Viet’s The Sympathizer as proof that the industry is working and still taking risks in great writing. But I’ve known Viet for a long time. He was my professor and later thesis adviser at SC long before he published his first book. And Viet will be the first to tell you that his novel got rejected by every imprint except the last one. While his book is fantastic, its publication doesn’t prove that the publishing industry got it right, it proves that once again the industry almost got it completely wrong.

If every imprint but one rejects your debut novel, quietly rejects it for being too academic, and then that novel goes on to win the Pulitzer in fiction, then the industry is doing a terrible job of recognizing and investing in new literary talent. And we shouldn’t be surprised about this. Literary capitalism has always placed profitability over literary merit, but for the longest time, that seemed true of commercial fiction, not literary fiction.

But now that separation has been erased if it ever existed. Now, unless you’ve met one of the pre-qualifying characteristics—you’re famous because you went viral, you got your MFA from Iowa, NYU, or Columbia, you have a million followers on Instagram/YouTube, or you’re a movie star taking a hiatus from movie trailers and film festivals—your career as a literary fiction writer is pretty much DOA unless an agent decides to resurrect you as a pet project. That might sound fatalistic—and dear reader, it certainly is—but that’s the industry speaking, not me. And the worse the industry gets, the more it needs to sell a million copies of your next book to pay for the last million dollar advance that didn’t pay out.

I can’t tell you the number of agents that I’ve talked to via email in the past decade who simultaneously told me they loved my manuscripts and then admitted that they can’t sell my books in the current marketplace and that it’s an indictment on the marketplace, not my books. Now, I get that this might just simply be a gracious response to an ungracious process—rejection—but you know things are bad when agents are telling you that the literary market sucks. It’s their job to put a finger to the wind and know which direction the Mistral blows. When even they find the industry to be incredibly hostile to original and beautiful and audacious writing, then getting a Big-5 press to publish your book starts to feel more and more like winning a low-stakes lottery and less like a talent show. And maybe that’s the big lesson here writ large: talent, originality, even timeliness, they don’t matter the way they used to. What matters now is the hype, the platform, & the pitch. Not the manuscript. And that is the simple reason why I’ll always consider both small and corporate presses for my manuscripts because I don’t expect the Big-5 presses to give me or other literary fiction writers the chance I deserve. Stranger things have happened, of course, and I’d love to be wrong about this. But there’s nothing more mundane than rejection in the publishing world.

Instant karma videos are all the rage on social media. Whether it’s videos of Karens getting slammed to the ground for stealing sweatpants at Target or a video game driver getting pulled over on the 410 for weaving between cars at 120 mph, or one-sided videos of political debates where your algorithm always wins, the human appetite for justice has morphed into the human appetite for vengeance, violence, & nonstop payback. And the more out of control America feels whether in our political system or in the court system or out in the streets, the more insatiable the American appetite for consequences for those transgressions, whether real or imagined. But no matter how you define transgression here, our appetite for (immediate) consequences, otherwise known as payback, accountability, FAFO, karmic retribution, etc., etc., has become insatiable. Almost pathological. And the problem isn’t the call for accountability—which almost every person I’ve talked to supports—but what this country has become in pursuit of accountability: a massive revenge tour for the aggrieved party.

As I’ve mentioned in other MIXTAPEs, philosophers have things to say about revenge. Hegel, for his part, talked about the endless cycle of revenge in his writing. He knew that negating the negation led to an infinite regress because every action that someone performed to get their revenge became a new pretext for the other person to get revenge back.

• My revenge→ Your “new” reason to get your revenge

• Your revenge→My “new” reason to get my revenge

This repeats ad nauseam.

This vicious cycle, and I do mean vicious, never ends because revenge is always at the expense of someone else. We might create stories inside our head on how our revenge is fair but other people’s revenge is unfair and our mind might work overtime trying to paint us as the good guy and the other the person the bad guy, but as long as we’re stuck in this cycle, there are no good guys. There are only those stuck in the cycle and those freed from the cycle. Those are the only options.

For Buddhists, this cycle is samsara. Think of it as the merry-go-round of pain and suffering and anger and resentment and lust and revenge where the end and the beginning are soldered together into a perfect ring. For some Buddhists, the whole point of meditation can be reduced to the attempt to free one’s mind of Samsara. But you don’t have to be a Buddhist to see the point here. Just human.

And sadly, there are few things more self-defining than revenge for human beings. We always choose revenge because revenge feels like agency. Because it feels like justice. Because it feels like the opposite of powerlessness, which can be a slow toxin of the soul. But there’s no agency if you’re stuck on the karmic hamster wheel and there’s no agency if you’re stuck in an endless cycle of pain, suffering, & retaliation either. That’s the tragic irony.

This is counterintuitive, I realize, but I’d argue that while many of the important lessons we learned from the Me-Too movement and the George Floyd protests were both essential and long overdue, I think they have each, in their own way, contributed inadvertently to a synergistic demand and counter-demand for justice that has only made us, as a society more unforgiving, more spiteful, less nuanced, more impatient, less forgiving, more cruel, less understanding, more punitive, less conciliatory, & more willing to destroy someone’s life for saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing in a broad spectrum of mistakes. And make no mistake, we have all said and done the wrong thing at some point in our lives.

Now, obviously, everyone can get behind fairness, consistency, & accountability. But the question is, what should justice look like and who gets to define it? Conversely, what is injustice and who gets to define that? Most of our conversations around these hot-button issues so far have been clumsy and counterproductive and simplistic and defensive and dehumanizing and in bad faith. Sometimes, it feels like we don’t even pretend to be fair in our discussions of loaded cultural topics anymore. Our sole aim is to obliterate our opponent and then replay a bunch of clips of that obliteration in all our bloated social media accounts so we can get a million likes from viewers who already agreed with us before we’d opened our mouths. Our politics have become revenge politics.

And the human appetite for violence, which is now powered by a cultivated talent for outrage, reductive thinking, selective hearing, ad hominem attacks, conspiracy theories, dataphobia, & endless hyperbole, has reached new levels. I can’t say we’re better than this because this behavior is exactly who we are as humans. But the tragedy here is that it’s who we have chosen to be. We have picked option R over and over again and it’s a terrible choice. If revenge is on the menu, we will pick it over and over again because it’s emotionally satisfying to see our enemies destroyed. It’s almost like somehow, even though the world has finally graduated from apocalypse dramatic series, we are still living in the apocalypse inside our heads. Our brains have reduced civilization to humans and zombies. Nuance is for underpaid intellectuals.

But in my reading of the apocalyptic zombie genre, I think anger is the true contagion and humans are the zombies. Just look how we treat each other now. We have become rabid, brainless, empty fools thirsty for blood and incapable of reasoning. We are all infected now. And we never pass up an opportunity to take revenge on our so-called enemies. And that is precisely the problem here.

In this contagion of anger, we have forfeited our critical thinking and research skills and expertise. We have abandoned altruism and dialogue and nuance. We have sacrificed our communication and empathy. We have become the monster. We have become the allegory of the brainless cannibal. We have become the genre of the collapsing world.

But there must be another way. There has to be another way. And I think it must start with the way we communicate with each other, continue with the way listen to each other, & end with the way we respond to these important conversations. Each part of this dialectic is important and interconnected to the other two parts. They must all co-exist together or none of them will exist since they support each other and are all interconnected.

1. We Must Communicate Better

2. We Must Listen Better

3. We Must Act Better

Ultimately, even if it feels good for a few moments to get our revenge, we know in the back of our minds that our so-called enemy will do everything they can to get their revenge on us now and we will be looking over our shoulder until then. It’s time for us to redefine our humanness because we cannot survive this way for much longer. It’s time to treat violence, revenge, cruelty, & retaliation as antisocial behavior. As moral failure. As character deficiency. As civic vice. As emotional immaturity. As cautionary trope of the human time bomb. And as a form of cultural self-destruction. If necessary, we should stigmatize that behavior and punish it in our political, economic, & social systems. But we should also reward those who renounce revenge. We should reward those who are actively seeking to create a more harmonious, fair, transparent, honest, patient, & equitable society that operates in good faith and tolerates good faith disagreements and different perspectives and approaches to common goals.

It’s time to stop rewarding violence and impatience and selfishness and cruelty and dehumanization and start rewarding conflict resolution and patience and altruism and emotional intelligence, empathy, & kindness.

There are a million ways we can incentivize this. But above all else, we must prioritize and support behavior that nourishes community, protects the unseen, instantiates harmony, promotes dialogue, celebrates empathy, & contributes to the common good in this world, including the natural world. Right now we all want forgiveness but none of us want to forgive our enemies. Even when our so-called enemies realize the errors of their ways, we punish them for not knowing or we punish them for not knowing sooner. We punish others for not being us in the moral scale until the end. And in the process of trapping ourselves in this incessant cycle of pain and revenge and anger and violence, we’ve made a world very much in our own image. But it’s just one image. And maybe that’s the problem.

There was once a time when I got into two different programs at Yale—first the MAR program in religion and literature at the Divinity School and then the MA program in East Asian Studies at the Graduate School—and for a little while, I was deliriously happy. With the blessing from the Director of Graduate Studies at the East Asian Studies program (who wrote one of my letters of recommendation), I waited for the dean to send me my official acceptance letter so I could apply for need-based scholarships, a tuition waiver, & maybe, just maybe if I got lucky, a graduate stipend. That’s not how things turned out. The dean sat on my acceptance letter for reasons that have never made sense to me, even now, sending it out two days after classes had started. It was surreal: my classmates were back at school and I was waiting for my acceptance. All deadlines for scholarships were closed by the time I received my letter in the student mailbox. While I’d received a partial scholarship at the Divinity School (the E. Rhodes Scholarship, not that Rhodes scholarship) and while the tuition for that program was smaller, I couldn’t cover my tuition at the Graduate School without a scholarship. Even the window for grants had now passed, so I took out loans just to cover tuition and housing for one measly semester. I should have seen this sign for what it was, but of course, I was too concerned about my first reading assignments to see the big picture. In academia, that’s not normally a fatal flaw.

Almost instantly after I transferred programs, my life turned on me like some childhood allegory. I subleased an apartment without blinds from a friend of a friend for the summer that got so hot in the morning I actually woke up in a pool of sweat. I busted my ass all summer long working part-time at the Union League Café as a busboy and part-time at the Yale Sterling Library as a circulation librarian. My on-again-off-again girlfriend spent the summer in Madrid living her best life and going out to nightclubs and making out with European boys and telling me about her fabulous life en España on the phone while I was living my worst life that only got worse once the fall semester began. After the dean had finally give me my acceptance letter, I lived on $80 a week working only at the library, Yale’s cathedral-cum-Borgesian dream. I loved walking through the dark corridors of the library but I deeply missed the community and the fellowship I’d had at the Divinity School. I missed the affordability of that program. I missed the Autumn strolls from my Dante seminar. I missed the conversations we used to have in the courtyard about Proverbs, Hebrew scripture, New Testament Greek, Cartesian Duality, raging exegetical debates but also light stuff too like NBA rivalries, school pride, best pizza (Chicago or New York), best New York falafels, coolest bookstores, Tori Amos songs. I wasn’t there to be come a minister but I felt like I belonged.

At my new apartment, my Spanish roommate, who was my friend first before he became my roommate, turned out to be a huge disappointment. With his bloated stipend, he’d eat my food and then not replace it until I asked him to. He started dating one my exes from Oberlin College and made sure they had sex while I was getting ready for work. He removed his silverware so I had to eat my food with my hands and cut garlic for bruschetta with a sole butter knife. He turned out to be a dick. His friend, the guy who’d subleased his apartment without blinds to me for the summer, turned out to be a scumbag. After I racked up a huge phone bill calling my on-again-off-again girlfriend in Spain (a totally stupid and irresponsible move on my part, I admit), he changed the locks of his apartment and held on to 90% of my possessions, convinced thatf was the only way I’d pay him back. It wasn’t. I would have paid him back because it was my mess not his. But he was vindictive, so he held on to my:

• Comforter

• Laptop

• Sweaters

• Most of my books

It was hard to be a grad student without these things. It was hard to succeed in grad school without these things. But I didn’t complain. After I paid the friend of the friend back, even offering to pay him interest, he told me I had a week to move my things out of his apartment or he was throwing them into the street. In retrospect, I should have kneed him in the stomach and told him to kiss dirt. I should have gone to the police and reported him. It’s what he deserved and it would have freed up my things much faster than waiting until I had enough money in December. But like I said before, I was being too pragmatic and I wasn’t seeing the big picture and man, that picture was big!

I rarely misjudge my friends but I often misjudge my enemies. Especially when my friends turn out to be my enemies, a word I don’t use lightly. I guess that comes from the fact that ultimately, I don’t understand human cruelty anymore than I understand human psychopathology. My knowledge is only theoretical at best and that’s not enough to truly understand malice in others.

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The Album I Wrote in 3 Days

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This MIXTAPE is going to be short because I’m in the thick of training right now at Fidelity. In case you’re curious, I’ve been deliriously happy with everything so far, but that’s a topic for another newsletter. Today, I just want to celebrate two things because they represent new and old …

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My friend and mentor, Aimee Bender, and I have had many conversations over the years on the art of the constraint: you make up a rule and then write around that constraint. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, there is freedom in slavery and slavery in freedom and having a rule is basically an artistic…

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These past four months have been a whirlwind of tiny achievements and professional challenges in my personal journey as a new financial professional. One of the industry highlights for me was when I passed the Series 66 exam in mid-April, which is a combination of the Series 63 and the Series 65 known as the Uniform Combined State Law Examination, which is a mandatory license for investment advisors.

For those of you that are you new to MIXTAPE or missed earlier newsletters, I changed careers from academia to finance for a bunch of reasons, one of which was to become my own patron of the arts and support myself (and the people I love) so that I can continue to write and publish books in the future on my own terms not the academy’s. Right now, I’ve got two novels in the pipeline and a second collection of short stories ready to roll and I’ll be revising everything until I find the right agent or small press. As I’ve been telling people, my night job hasn’t changed, but my day job definitely has.

When I was in academia, the academy was my artistic patron. In return, I had to teach and mentor BFA and MFA students and do admin work and university service almost 24/7. That was the agreement. That’s why professors need the summer to write because they’re too busy not-writing during the academic calendar. As a professor, you receive artistic patronage but it’s always on the university’s terms. Compared to nothing, that’s a fucking marvelous arrangement.

But you shouldn’t be comparing your job to nothing. You shouldn’t compare your time or your art to nothing either. And yet all of us in academia do that because we have Stockholm Syndrome. We are in love with our kidnappers. We spend a lot of time defending universities because they keep us alive and because we value the dialectic of teaching and learning and artist creation. But when someone point out flaws in the academic salary structure, we tell them how much better our kidnappers are than those other kidnappers we’ve heard such terrible things about.

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