What was 2025?



2025 brought a cluster of changes. It was messy, and I’m thinking that the mess was in service of simplification.

I didn’t read fiction, write fiction, or connect with friends as much as most years. I was at home with my family. I grew closer with Hanna in ways that grew my world, as I do every year. I took care of Patrick, our toddler, and followed haphazard routines as child care shifted and he started preschool. Spending time with Hanna and Patrick this year has been the absolute peak experience of my life. I worked a lot. I got three teeth removed and went to see Othello with Denzel Washington on painkillers, for my birthday. I started going to the gym again. I constantly played catch-up.

I focused on bringing my large and fragmented family (divorces and remarries) together, centered around Patrick. Hanna and I brought Patrick to her sister’s beautiful wedding and spent time with her parents. We spent a week with her parents in Acadia National Park. Recently, my mom and stepdad and dad and stepmom and three of my siblings moved to western Massachusetts to be around Patrick. It’s cheaper, in some areas, than where they lived before. Retirement, school, and jobs loom. Financial realities are razor-sharp. Having my family physically closer has been good for our relationships. It’s a colossal help and inestimably good that Patrick is surrounded by so many people who love him. Birthday, barbecues, parties, Christmas, all centered around our home.

I tried to make peace with work, a little. It’s a fucking slog trying to care about day job writing while pining for the time required to read books and write my own stuff. That slog, I’ve always approached with anger, each day, each assignment. I’ve tried to exhaust myself less with anger. I changed roles in the massive corporation I work for and now write UI text, the little phrases and words you see in software. I found that putting uncomplicated effort into doing my job lets off the steam. It chills-out the perceived constant battle with it. I think I’m afraid of the potential future where I end up caring about this job in my heart, and where that care allows the work to overwhelm what I see as my real goals. But that’s not a potential future, because I don’t want it.

Writing was up and down. I abandoned a novel draft after several years. The story, which I’d rewritten numerous times and spent time and money to improve, was an echo of lessons I learned during MFA years. It started with an idea that I had before MFA years, then I think I used its parts to experiment and learn. It turned out too flat after all that stretching. The initial fire died and the fires I tried lighting died in smoke. It was too simply literary for me. I found myself wanting to hurt it. So, I took a seed that I wrote in some stream of consciousness writing and mashed it into another seed, and now I’m on the second draft of a new short novel. I think it’ll be ready to send out to small presses in the spring. Beyond that, I keep having essay ideas and killing them. I have a sense of a future story based on the first person on my dad’s side of my family to come to the U.S. He came at 17 or so to escape poverty in the UK. He lied about his age and enlisted in the military. He died not much older at Custer’s last stand. His mother followed, found that her son was dead, and that’s how the Sheas started here.

I started making music with VCV Rack, software that simulates modular synthesizers. Modular synths are way too expensive in hardware form, so this is a nice way to learn. I don’t know if I’m going to share songs or anything, but I enjoy spending time, when my mind isn’t tuned for reading or writing, trying to create sounds that feel right. I’m working on making the modular synths sound right with guitar and electric bass to round out the energy.

I read a good number of books about history, politics, and political philosophy. I felt like I needed to gorge on context in order to establish a working perspective. My working perspective is: parties, governments, and social schemes like popular culture are public relations mechanisms through which military intelligence clusters find opportunities to expand and exert power. There’s no smokey room and no unifying will – these public relations mechanisms are not usually under explicit control – only competing centralizations of capacity and means to act through them. I can’t say there’s a singular goal in the works beyond an urge toward survival – domination generally uses survival as a stand-in goal. People do seem to become convinced of truly insane and warped realities (e.g., the communists are coming for your children) in order to rationalize destruction and killing. There is no adult in the room, no successful politician can escape capture, and I am an expendable pleb. The current wave of totalitarian zealots and genocidal maniacs is an unmasking and empowerment of means that have been used since the early 20th century, at the very least, in their modern form. The only real solution is probably armed rebellion by a collective in the west, and that option went out the window long ago, because of the gap in access to military technology. Collectives tend to fuck things up anyway, and who wants all that death? Who can be so cruel? There is no reconciling the political and economic world with the inner world. Anyone I’ve known who has tried has ended up broken or a liar. . . . That’s all very zoomed out. It’s overwhelming and the time I’ve spent focusing on bringing my family together has given my mind a clarity amidst chaos, hate, and murder.

What else? I stopped trying to get good at any video games. I played calm games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, and Oblivion. I made peace with the part of myself that doesn’t care about beating, winning, or maximizing. Games, to me, fall somewhere between reading and watching shows. I want to make something in or with them.

I want to wrap this thinking up and feel like writing some ideas that I want to bring into the next year:

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