Thank Odin for journals and half-finished books—the only sane refuge when the clock slips past decency and the brain decides it’s time to light every fuse at once. Those early hours are dangerous territory. The world goes quiet, but your thoughts come in loud and unfiltered, pacing the room like caged animals. Writing is the only way to let them out without setting the place on fire.

Sure, I could take something chemical and knock myself into oblivion. Plenty of people do. But where’s the sport in that? Insomnia has a certain honesty to it. A manic clarity. If the mind insists on running laps at 3 a.m., you might as well hand it a pen and see what it confesses.

The last few entries have been a glorious mess—Hunter S. Thompson, Rajneesh, family ghosts, the state of the soul, the slow-motion weirdness of modern life. No narrative arc. No thesis. Just raw thought bouncing from wall to wall like a drunk pinball. And that’s fine. That’s the point. Not everything needs to connect cleanly to be true.

Then there’s the political beast lurking in the corner, foaming quietly to itself. Right vs. left. Republicans vs. Democrats. A knife fight dressed up as a debate. It’s radioactive ground, and I’ve spent years circling it without stepping in—staying in my lane, watching from the shoulder while the traffic piles up in flames. There are days I want to quote something sharp, something honest, something that cuts through the bullshit. But I’m not quite there yet. I can feel it coming, though. Like pressure in the air before a storm.

I’ve got issues with the Democrats—especially the brand of socialism that forgets human nature exists. And the so-called Grand Old Party? That thing barely resembles its former self, bloated on nostalgia and bad faith. I don’t trust either side, and that makes everyone uncomfortable. But we’ll see how long I can keep poking that bear with a stick instead of climbing on its back and screaming.

What really gnaws at me is the repetition. History looping like a scratched record. The rhetoric, the fear, the division—it’s all familiar. I get flashes of the ’80s and ’90s, but twisted, accelerated, and amplified. There’s a new element now, though: a frightening number of people who either don’t know history or treat it like a buffet—picking the parts they like and pretending the rest never happened. Those are the dangerous ones. The selective amnesiacs. The willfully blind. They drive me absolutely insane.

And that’s where I stop. Before the soapbox appears. Before the rant becomes a manifesto.

What I really need is dirt under my boots and a camera in my hands. Trees don’t argue. Rivers don’t lie. Light behaves honestly if you let it. Photography has a way of dragging the mind back into the body, back into the moment, back into something real.

So that’s the plan. Step outside. Breathe. Shoot. Let the world spin without me for a few hours. The words will still be there when I get back—waiting patiently in the dark, like they always do.

(Photo by Robert Jackson)