Category: Life

I’ve recently realized that much of my adult like has meandered just below the level at which I would prefer to operate. While I get that that’s a dubious descriptor with zero context, it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to examine the shape from enough sides to give it definition. Less an examination of my life from a new filter and more an exploration of patterns that have emerged in my career, my personal pursuits, and my relationships with friends and family.

One of the eternal curses of creatives in modern America is the understanding that success is a moving target with little regard for individual contribution. For many, the process of searching for success is as much a process of failing upward as reaching for something profound or inspirational. For particularly enterprising creators, there is a scientific approach to success, a way of barraging the system with a flood of content knowing that statistics are ultimately in your favor. But now the system is the moving target…

Let me regress a tad.

When I was just out of high school, I had an overwhelming passion for writing music. I picked up the guitar when I was 16 and started penning original songs, heavily inspired by such a dizzying array of genres and styles that I struggled to describe my ambitions in any coherent way. I found collaborators, expanded and refined my craft over the next several years, and had nebulous dreams of finding a way to leverage my art into a life of plenty.

Clearly, that didn’t work out. Was this a fail point? By conventional definitions, I don’t think so. But I also have become acquainted with persons over the course of my life who took their ambitions and cranked them up by applying a little bit of the scientific process… more specifically, it’s rare to become a rock star in a Kansas town with no meaningful connections. So could I have tried harder? Was there a significant deterrent beyond my own anxiety that kept me from pulling up stakes and finding a community that supported my craft and gave me better access to those connections?

We know from the movies that it occasionally happens, but also that the odds of success are transitory. Not singular, as one might suspect, if only because our definitions will vary. My framework for success – what it means to have achieved a given goal – is likely very different from the next guy’s. And this relative ambiguity, combined with a certain nature risk aversion, has become the compression that limits my life at a lot of potential fail points, depending on how you view them.

Sure, I have achieved some pretty cool milestones with my creative passions. I have published a novel and I’m working on the follow-up, recorded an original album and have several songs in the can for my next one, produced a long-running podcast with designs on moving from our classic audio format to YouTube… But these achievements also come with a big asterisk. While I have fans and lovely people who support me, all of these efforts are produced start to finish by yours truly. I am my own publisher. Pointedly, no one has ever invested in me beyond the scope of my own purview.

Does that diminish the value of my work? I don’t think I’m particularly narcistic, but I feel like it speaks for itself. You could make the argument that I could have tried harder – made the move to Los Angeles or Nashville when I was younger and tried to find a profitable outlet for my songwriting skills, or spent a few years shopping my book around and collecting rejection letters in hopes of garnering the support of a traditional publishing house – but that moving target I was talking about? Part of that’s the shift in the traditional models where companies scouted and developed talent. That model barely exists and is hardly recognizable today. Publishing houses and record companies still keep an eye out for talent, but now the talent has to come to them larger developed – completed manuscripts or recordings, a strong social media presence with significant influence, and the means to leverage much of that influence independently.

In other words, rather that getting your big break, you have to do the work yourself and decide whether kicking things up to the next level is worth sacrificing control of the product to someone else’s whim.

It’s harsh. And it’s still only tangentially related to my point.

Let’s glance at my career. When I started in radio, I was 21 years old and looking for a fun and fulfilling way to pay the rent and support my guitar habit. I found that I had a great head for production – an organizational mindset, a sense of what works and what doesn’t, and a love for collaboration – and a work ethic that provided me with ready opportunities for advancement. In a few short years I was the Operations Manager for a group of stations out in Dodge City, and about half my job was administrative. I managed the on-air and production staff, scheduled remote broadcasts and events, monitored our transmitters and technical equipment, liaised with the business and sales departments, and maintained our files for federal compliance. I was on call 24/7, and I was generally the last word in dealing with anything that happened on the air at our stations.

It was exactly the job I was best suited for. And it weas impossible to hold on to forever. I had ambition to keep climbing the ladder, but I’d reached the highest rung within my comfort zone. I didn’t want to endanger that, but life had other plans for me.

I moved to Wichita in 2007, hooking one of my closest friends up with the opportunity to sidle into my old position. It launched his career for him, and I am extremely gratified at his success in life and the role that I played. After a few more years in radio, I found my way to the post office and once again started looking for opportunities for advancement. I was an acting supervisor at the call center in Wichita. I saw real potential for moving up. But then… once again, life intervened. I got sick. Missed six months of work while doctors tried to figure it out. By the time I’d gone under the knife and had the problem addressed, I had used every bit of my FMLA leave, so the very next time my gout flared up on me (which happened a lot when I worked in very stressful environs) the job went away.

I later leveraged all that management experience into an assistant branch manager position at a credit union in rural Colorado. The experience was invigorating; I rarely even saw my boss, so I had all the responsibilities of managing the branch. We had to move after about a year, and I’ve interviewed for similar jobs in the time since, but no opportunities have emerged. I’m getting old, and I suspect that younger, more attractive talent is picking up a lot of those jobs.

In much of my life, I have been almost a thing. As a self-published writer, I could have done so much more to promote myself, setting up booths at events, finding book stores and communities that like to promote independent writers, and figuring out how to really engage with my audience via social media. The same with my music… I recorded a fantastic album in 2011, then found myself in a job schedule that prevented me from playing out to support it locally, much less booking shows and hitting the road. In my career, I was almost a supervisor at the post office, almost a manager at the credit union.

This is the pattern that has captured my imagination of late. Maybe I should write a song about it.

For those following along at home, I’m at 73,000 words (out of 110,000) in Veil of Shadows. It’s creeping along.

With the long-awaited arrival of 2026, the usual sense of renewal feels somewhat hollow this time around. I mean, don’t get me wrong – last year was a shit year for me and mine. We lost a dear friend, Jonikka lost a job, money’s beyond tight, our health insurance is about to go away… it’s not been easy. The holidays have largely passed without comment in my household. And that probably contributes to the malaise.

So I don’t feel ready to make any resolutions, brook any big announcements or predictions for the new year, or even wax philosophical about our hopes for the future. For now, I’ve decided upon a different tack: I’d like to revisit some of the moments in my life that have proven truly pivotal. Many of them aren’t large productions at all; we all understand how marriage and divorce, the death of friends and family, the arrival of new children in our lives – how all of these things herald change. But what about the moments you didn’t see coming. The decisions that were easy in the moment, but had lasting repercussions.

For example… I was an imaginative child, but I remember being a little trepidatious when my friend’s older brother – who was generally very sarcastic and kinda mean – decided he wanted to run some D&D for his sister and her friends. I agreed to sit down and play, and that afternoon was so instrumental in how it affected the course of my life that it’s one of the very few real memories I have from my elementary school years. I can draw a fairly straight line from that afternoon to running TsunamiCon.

About a year prior to that, when I was 7 years old, we had a landlady who taught violin in a little studio over her garage just across the street, and I would sit on the steps outside and listen to them play. I can similarly draw an only slightly crooked line from that experience to cranking out music with my blues band all these years later.

Of course, childhood holds all kinds of wonders that often shape the direction of our lives in one fashion or another, so it’s kind of a cheat. It’s just as easy to look at decisions I made as an adult that had far-reaching implications, but they are often more complex. Less crooked lines and more spiderwebs hoping to catch a tasty nibble. That job I took because it sounded like a cool experience, leading to a career that spanned well more than a decade. Or the decision to send my podcast crew to local events, where they secured guests with whom I would later start a business.

I think that’s what I’d like to do in 2026: find opportunities to create pivotal moments. Do the thing, whatever it is. Finish projects and start new ones. Reach out to people who can enrich my life, and find ways to be of service. I’m 50 years young now, and it’s a good time to keep moving forward.

So.

How ’bout that Stranger Things finale, yo? Dude!

“May you live a thousand years…”

A blessing, not a curse. I remember having to look that up. Like… the sentiment seems generous on the surface, but you hardly have to spelunk very far to find potential subtext. Despite the superficial well-wishing generally borrowed by the phrase, precious few of us see even a century of life, and far too few of us even half that.

Thus, it seems imperative that I find a way to contextualize the first half-century of my life. My 50th birthday approaches in something like 11 days, and while I frequently watch my birthdays pass with little more than a friendly nod on the way by and seldom any significant fanfare, it seems incumbent upon me that this particular milestone be recognized.

I have surprisingly few regrets attached to this period of my life. My achievements include a fair number of things that bring me joy: loving wife and children, quality friends, artistic accomplishments, self-respect. Even a legacy of sorts in my hometown. Lots of good memories. I’ve managed to learn from most of my failures and avoided doing folks wrong wherever possible. I’ve taken care of others because it’s the right thing to do, and I’ve made an effort to love freely and without reservation.

I’ve come up short here and there. I’ve shifted careers three or four times and never reached high enough to satisfy the specter of my father’s perceived expectations (not a real thing, I know). I’ve remonstrated with myself over the education of my children. Like many people my age, I’ve breezed through a few relationships that I could have handled better. I’ve leaned heavily on my collaborators to try to more powerfully ignore my own shortcomings.

And if you’re my age, you know… the years just fly by. Fifty years really is a long damn time. It doesn’t feel like it nowadays, but it is. That’s the reason we all say that we’re getting old, or commiserate over feeling older, because it’s kind of a surprise if you’re not paying attention.

Tempus fugit. Time flies.

So how should I celebrate? Because I really think I should. Celebrate, that is. Not just give it the usual companionable nod, but somehow grab it’s sleeve and share a quick drink, at the very least. Many of my friends have already crossed this threshold, and maybe you had similar notions… or maybe you just beheld the befuddled grace of its tactless aerial display as it flew by. No judgment here, right? One thing we know by now… we’re all in this together. And none of us get out alive.

Heh. That’s trite, but still satisfying at some level.

How about… tempus est umbra in mente. Roughly, “time is a shadow in the mind.” Ran across that in a Stephen King novel recently. Stuck with me.

I recently watched a video from music and production guru Rick Beato where he discusses the strange course of his life over 62 years and how much it changed in the later years of his life and career. Here’s the video if you’re interested:

One of the more interesting takeaways is the idea that one of his most valuable skill sets at this point in his career is probably his ability to tell stories. He does it a lot. Stories of his life and career and collaborators… he talks about songs and musical constructs like they’re friends or old business partners.

I pondered this for a bit, and I realized that it really is central to his appeal. I enjoy his channel and return and again and again; even when I’m only tangentially interested in the content of a video, I’ll tune in.

Now I’ve long understood how personality drives entertainment. My first career was in radio, and the bulk of it involved putting people on the air and providing them the tools and support they needed for success. In that environment it’s impossible to miss the fact that the only real difference between one radio show or another, most of the time, was in the personalit(ies) that drove the program. As a podcaster over the years I’ve relied on the same mechanism – I’m not saying a whole of things that listeners can’t find elsewhere, but I say it in my own way.

I tell stories.

As the years have slipped by, however, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the stories I tell. As an interviewer, I always prided myself on being able to find “true” moments in a conversation, particularly by disrupting a person’s ability to rely on rehearsed and regurgitated answers. Not excessively, of course; you’re not going to get a lot of interviews if you routinely make people uncomfortable. But now I find that so many of my stories are the same. They’re starting to feel rehearsed and uninspired.

Is that because I’m not creating new experiences worth talking about? Is it because my perspective on life and my hobbies and interests no longer evolves with enough grit to create new context?

Does getting older mean having less to say?

How often have you visited with an elder just to hear them share the same story you’ve heard before. I think we often dismiss this as their inability to remember that you’ve already heard it. But what if it’s just that we have a habit of telling ourselves and the people around us stories all our lives, and that as we get older the stories become more inflexible? We literally have less to say?

Unless we continue to push ourselves to have new experiences.

The real obstacle there is that getting older invariably means having less energy to devote to the exploration. Rick mentions in the video above that he started his YouTube channel in 2016. He would have been 54 at the time, launching into a new adventure with very little idea what he was getting into. And that he’s so glad he did it then, because he doesn’t know that he’d have the energy to pull it off if he started at 62.

I turned 49 recently. Sometimes I still feel young – particularly if I’m not calling attention to aches and pains with any sort of locomotion – and sometimes quite the opposite. I still love so many of the things that I do: writing and running RPGs, writing songs, working on my next novel. You know… telling stories. It gets harder and harder. I still read a lot, absorb TV and movies, and listen to music and podcasts… to get inspiration. To learn from those stories. Trying to perfect the craft of telling a story.

But how important is the art of storytelling if you have nothing new to say?

I don’t have an answer. Yet. Here’s a picture of my cat.

One month ago today, I heaved a big sigh of relief. After a difficult season of somewhat abbreviated paychecks, family health issues, a great time at the Wichita convention that cost us a chunk out of pocket to attend… our finances were finally moving the right direction. While we were heading into the holidays with a very limited budget, bills were being paid and we had a little breathing room. When Christmas weekend rolled around, my wife Jonikka and made the trek back to Kansas to spend the holiday with friends and family. We lingered for a time, ringing in the new year with camaraderie and a sense of relative contentment.

When we were on our way home on January 4th, we received the call. My wife’s contract with her employer – which should have given us another six months of rebuilding and finally being able to put money away – had been terminated. We were officially adrift, fluid enough to make it through the end of the month.

As often happens in our lives – so much so that it’s virtually a meme in our family – disaster accompanied opportunity. Just a few hours before receiving the call, a close friend had heard us waxing on about how much further my wife’s salary would stretch if we moved back to Kansas, and my sister-in-law had proposed that a new medication on the market might very well be the solution to Jonikka’s lower-altitude health concerns. Said friend offered to procure us a home, paying a rent that is only a fraction of our current commitment in Colorado Springs.

So with hearts a bit heavy, we prepare to bid farewell to our mountain home, with every intention of returning some day soon. The boxes are already starting to pile up around me as a write this, capturing the contents of our apartment with efficient cardboard sterility. We have two weeks to pack and clean, load our belongings into our cars and a massive uHaul, and make the voyage back to Kansas. Our coffers are dwindling. The cost of the move is staggering. Jonikka continues to look for work as I do my best to bring in a comparatively paltry sum. Our debts, while not insurmountable, are burdensome, and supporting a family of four beyond the next few weeks with our current resources is, in a word, unrealistic.

Invariably, things will work out. We have a seriously uncanny way of emerging from hardship with surprisingly few scars. That doesn’t make the interim any easier, of course, and while I want to be hopeful… well, it bleeds the energy right out of you.

A month ago, when I was heaving that sigh, I was staring at the arbitrary start of the new year with aspiration and a bit of hope. 2024 would be the year I finished the next book. I had plans for my podcasts and my Patreon supporters, and I was thinking about heading to Kickstarter with another gaming project. I was lining out ways to address the damage to our credit in the wake of the Pandemic, and we were starting to talk about buying a car and working toward a house.

That phone call was a serious kick in the teeth.

But we have each other. We have amazing friends and family that have helped where they can. We have games that bring us joy, and my projects – while on a temporary hold – continue to tantalize me with their possibilities. I am optimistic about the next adventure, no matter the hardship, because perseverance is inevitably the greatest tool in our collective utility belt.

And there’s one other thing I want to acknowledge. Over the years, my wife and I have striven to be the kind of friends who help anyone we can. We’ve opened our home and our pantry, our wallets when we could – sometimes even when we couldn’t – and the karmic elevation of that devotion to showing love and respect to those around us is paying off in dividends. It’s not a reward for good behavior – the reward, conspicuously enough, was caring for others – but rather a reminder that your kindness and compassion has a way of being revisited upon you when the need is there.

Good morrow, friends. Wherever you are, we’ll see you soon.