We never rest anymore, do we? We never just actually rest and allow ourselves the dignity of a reset, mental or otherwise. We go and we go and we go and we push ourselves beyond the breaking point and then we marvel and wonder at why we feel so worn thin.

We turn all hobbies into hustles, we milk our talents dry, told to suck every ounce of value out of the things that once set our souls on fire. I am sorry for this, though it be not my fault. I am sorry.

Today, something different. Let’s do this…

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When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom.

Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born.

It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it.

Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it.

I remember the day I learned it was wrong.

Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized.

Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process.

I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable.

All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment.

To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong.

As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever:

Wonder is an act that requires tenderness.

To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder.

Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you.

Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again.

With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping.

This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again.

Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle.

Pluck.

Like string for music, like resonance from stillness.

Pluck.

Like leaving the rest behind.

Carpe Diem. Pluck the day.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

Been a spell since I’ve shared a never-before-read poem for you goofballs, so why not today?! WHY NOT NOW!?

I stumbled on another poem I wrote a couple of years back for the same amazing guy who purchased not one, but TWELVE completely original, custom poems, as a gift for someone he loved.

Different stories, different memories, different feelings, emotions, and reasons, but I had complete creative freedom to translate those into words.

Translate I did. Or tried to.

The poem is below, and also, Substack now lets me add “Audience specific” content inside the same post, which is amazing and weird, so for all you amazing weirdos that are part of the paid community and help keep this unicorn of a place alive, you’ll be getting some special insight, breakdown, and more details on the piece below.

For those new to here, just browsing, or who haven’t yet joined the family, you’ll see the poem and hear me reading it, with an opportunity to join us for the whole shebang.

Just letting you know how that all works!

Here’s the poem, and some crap about it:

Writing this one, truth told, came easy. I’ve long said my only real fear is a life without Sarah in it. I know this is bad, I know this is not very Buddhist of me as non-attachment is love in its purest form, but you know what:

F all that.

When I love, I Love all the way.

This poem was born from that. I do not know what comes if she left before I did. I do not know what anything is, what I am, what the world would be. I do not know, I do not wish to know.

This poem is that. “The feather’s weight for a forlorn wait.”

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Here, below, is the spoken word version of this piece, for those who do not abhor the sound of my voice.

I Love you all.

Be good.

We talk about lots today, from us having to cancel a trip to shoot an elopement in Hawaii because of that asshole Hurricane Lowell, to how we’re still fighting with SIXT and Expedia for charging us $100 for a car rental we couldn’t pick up because all flights were canceled because of the

AFOREMENTIONED F’ING HURRICANE.

So that’s fun. We also dive into the Question of the Week:

What are unwritten “rules” of life YOU need to Un-learn? What introductions do YOU need to rip out in order to live happier, healthier, more FULL lives?

Leave a comment

We answer too, if you wanna see the way we feel about things.

Also, in case you forgot:

We have the official date for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool shit like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:

September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!

So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.

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Have a rad rest of your Hump Day, and do precisely that.

Here’s the little thank you the post generates at random for some of you lovelies who joined us live!

I love you all.

Be good.

Are you like me? Ok, I know 99.99% of people will never, ever be able to answer Yes to this, but still, in some ways maybe you are. Maybe we’re the same, and that’s why we’re all here, and that’s what makes this place beautiful.

Today we’re going to test that with a bit of poetry. Yep, POETRY.

Let’s do this thing…

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It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been.

Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls.

Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore.

I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still.

I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes.

It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said:

Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life.

I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out.

I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated.

I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative.

To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line.

Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in.

Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself.

We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream.

I remember being measured, long before I was even understood.

Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be.

This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us.

That set us free.

Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them.

I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts.

It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed.

I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

You’ve noticed, I’ve no doubt, this whole rad place has lost all the fire talk. It’s cause, as mentioned, I’m just not fire. I’m water. Actually, more than most things, I am unicorn, which might not make sense, but that’s ok. I am because I love them.

That means, The Matchbook has morphed itself back into what it shoulda always been, Brain Rain, because that’s what my silly mind does. It just pours, and pours, and I hope most often it doesn’t turn to flooding.

Anyway, today’s Brain Rain is back to what it was before. Random rabbit holes, things I loved, things I’m digging in my life, things I’ve found, bought, eaten, seen, heard, or anything else. It’s a distillation of what’s been occupying my thoughts. I really hope you dig it.

Also, keeping this place alive and keeping me able to write here is a full-time undertaking. If you wanna help keep this unicorn of a spot on the internets alive, you can. Click the button. Join the fam. Anyway, onward.

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Here’s the brain raining my mind’s been doing. Enjoy:

1. The Outrun on Netflix - Scottish film set in the Orkney Islands just off the northern coast, and the first film ever shot on Papa Westray. Emotional, heavy, lonely, gorgeous, and reaffirming. Saoirse Ronan is once again a splendor. Watch this one.

2. Daughter from Hell by Gracie Abrams - Don’t know why, don’t really care why, but this song is f’ing beautiful and haunting and the lyrics are beautiful and the sound makes some itch in me feel scratched. Give it a listen.

3. Loose-Fit Lived In Pleated Khakis by American Eagle - Apparently I love pants with pleats? I don’t know why, or the mechanics of why they feel better, but these beauties come in some weird old railroad fabric looking herringbone and they feel like I’ve had them 40 years. Comfort is king. Damn the rest. I bought 2 cause they were only $36.

   

4. A Missive from Late Season Fishcamp by - Stunning piece of writing that celebrates the heart-stretching, nostalgic aching, beauty of all things being temporary. Our time in a place, the place itself, our blink of an existence. All from the point of view of an amazing writer on the brink of leaving her seasonal home.

5. I Swear on Netflix - Another Scottish film and this one will leave your entire heart soaked and overfilled and frustrated but somehow relieved and hopeful. I grew up with a friend who had Tourette’s Syndrome in the 80s and 90s and so I was intimately familiar with so much of what the main character experiences. True story, told beautifully, shot just south of Edinburgh. Stunner. Watch it.

6. Altra Torin 9 shoes - Sarah and I have doven (dived? dove? doved? diven?) headfirst into adding more Zone 2 running into our workout routines, and we’ve been running together because we’re pathetic awesome and do all things together, and neither of us have ever had running shoes that didn’t in some way hurt. These don’t. Wide toebox, zero drop, Vibram grips for the weird roads in Montana, and so far we love the hell out of them. If you just want comfy shoes that you can run or walk in, Altra’s seem to be really weirdly rad and have a cushiness that feels like marshmallows but still somehow stable? Science.

7. Payton Tolle Hug - Watching grown men who play professional ball sports be randomly sweet and unconcerned with their egos or how their masculinity is perceived is vital. Red Sox pitcher paving the way, and bringing some sweetness back to the game.

That’s all she wrote this week. I’d love to know YOUR finds in the comments.

Leave a comment

I Love you all.

Be good.

So, if you want your name in fancy pink letters, maybe next time don’t miss out and join us. I also have no control over who it picks to celebrate, so consider it a lottery and just keep watching for your chance to appear hahaha.

The question of the week for everyone to answer:

How do YOU travel? How do you balance being a traveler AND a tourist, and what are your tips that you’ve learned along the way?!

Leave a comment

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts, and start a rousing discussion below.

Also, DO NOT FORGET:

There’s STILL time to join the family as a paid contributor to 1) keep this place alive, and b) join us for the 2nd round of THE MENAGERIE! If you don’t know what it is, it’s our LIVE hangout on Zoom/Google Meeting where we get to see each others faces, share stories, share poetry, share thoughts, ideas, promote each others businesses, all that good stuff.

Let’s grow this friggen herd, and let’s start with you. Click the button below the galloping unicorn, and it shall be so!

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Have a rad rest of your Wednesday evening.

I love you all.

Be good.

I have written mountains of articles, poems, and pieces, about how this season has always meant, to me, starting over again. I blame it, and always will, on school always kicking off right at the tail end of August and first blush of September. It will forever feel like beginning again, the machinations of school roaring back to life. An example is below! :)

Today I wanted to dive into that, but for us adults that haven’t attended a class for however many years. Let’s do this…

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No one wants to call themselves a tourist.

No one goes through the long and winding line, stands nervously facing the border guard holding the stamp of permission to enter their country and answers the question “Purpose for your visit?” with “to be a tourist.” It’s not even an option on the customs form.

We who have returned from adventures invent other terms for what we were whilst we were away. Explorers, we call ourselves, wanderers, maybe. Pilgrims, if we really want to sound spiritual. Or, if any of us watched any of Anthony Bourdain’s global expeditions, we might choose another word and wear it proudly: Traveler.

“Be a traveler, not a tourist!” said the sign above Bourdain in the famous image above. He with his cigarette and angst and simple wardrobe and stunningly deep conversations that made him so magnetic and impossible to not watch, he of beautiful words and delicate insight to the places he went to. He who left us too soon. He believed it, and lived it, but since his passing I’ve seen so many people use his ethos not as a moral, ethical, or even spiritual foundation of their own travel, but as a way to judge the style, the means, or the itineraries of others.

I was at the Samhain (Halloween) Fire Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland a few years back with Sarah and our dear friend Beavs when it happened to me. When I did this, when I momentarily and accidentally repeated Bourdain’s mantra out loud and with an annoying air of superiority. I was watching a young girl pose for about twenty straight minutes in front of her mobile phone selfie camera that was on a tripod with a giant ring light. She hauled that thing all the way to the Fire Festival, and with an entire chaotic, beautiful, deeply historic and symbolic fire ritual happening not thirty feet from her, she spent the entire time taking selfies. You can see one of the poses below.

I remember asking those I was traveling with what the point was of coming, of making your way across whatever oceans or continents or even city blocks you had to make your way across to be there, in that place, watching those flames and those dancers dance, if all you were going to do was ignore the festival, and just take selfies for Instagram. I remember we probably laughed and thought “tourists,” under our breath like it was an insult, like we knew better, like we were something different, something better. Like we were Travelers.

I looked down shortly after taking the photograph, just after I took another image, this time of Sarah with her face painted, I looked over at Beavs with his own camera out capturing the insane revelry on stage of people in Pagan and Celtic attire, some topless, some with torches or flaming swords, and laughed. To her, I was doing the exact same thing she was, just aiming at something different.

The girl with the ring light never looked up from her myriad of poses and felt a guilt or pang of I’m missing it, and strangely, whilst photographing her, then Sarah, then Beavs, neither did I. We were both there, we both traveled some indeterminate but probably astronomical number of miles to be there, and we were both just capturing what we wished to capture, enjoying the event as we each wished to enjoy it.

I’ve felt the judgement too, I’ve been on the receiving end of the weaponization of the “Traveler not a Tourist” motto. I’ve mentioned things we’ve seen or done on trips, shown people itineraries of what we hoped to experience on trips we had upcoming, and I’ve felt the raised eyebrow and scoff that they wouldn’t do what we were planning on doing. They’d not dare stoop so low as to do touristy things. They were travelers, after all.

I’ve heard all the aloof advice to never go where the crowds go, to never bother with the famous restaurants or bars, to avoid the marquee things because after all, they are traps…Tourist traps.

I remember the judgement when I told people about kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland. I remember people laughing and trying to tell me that’s not “Real” Ireland, that’s just a gimmick set up to siphon money from eager tourists and their deep, burning pockets.

I also remember kissing the Blarney Stone. I also remember the hilarious stories we were able to tell after we did so, from running past the “Fast Pass” passengers that showed up on white busses as long as whales because we were younger and faster, to applying massive thick layers of chapstick to our lips before we smooched it so we could wipe off the nastiness once the kiss was planted. I remember having an amazing day, exploring the castle and its grounds, realizing that sometimes the most clichè things are clichè because they are actually pretty fantastic, and earned it.

I’ve been wide-eyed and spellbound and struck with awed fascination in some new place more times than I can count. I’ve been gawking, I’ve been camera-to-nose and probably beyond awkward all over the planet. I’ve stood in jeans and a flannel shirt at 9pm in the middle of a sweltering Belizean jungle while Howler monkeys screamed like Jurassic Park dinosaurs and thought I’d die from sweating so much. I’ve stood in line to see castles and I’ve been to Temple Bar in Dublin, I’ve taken long arm selfies at famous places, I’ve been a tourist in every possible sense of the word.

I’ve also found hidden beaches that are only accessible after long and challenging hikes. I’ve stood atop “secret” mountaintops that I was told only the locals know about. I’ve sat with bar regulars in tiny pubs and screamed for Liverpool Football Club to find a way to win in the 90th minute. I’ve learned the customs and tried to speak the languages and did my best to show how much I might be from the United States but I wasn’t the “Ugly American” that so many loathe. I’ve been a traveler, too. In every other sense of the word.

“What’s the purpose of your visit?” I’ll surely be asked again the next time I step off a plane and into that wild snake of a line before first steps on foreign soils. Maybe I’ll say adventure, or travel, or fun. Maybe I’ll say I’m after life-altering and transformational, silly or ridiculous. Maybe I’ll stand there, bag packed after standing in a crowded airport alongside everyone else, and say I’m there to learn something new. To step out of my bubble.

Maybe I’ll say I’m a tourist, and I’m just there to do touristy things.

Maybe, just maybe, next time, I’ll pack a ring light too.

I love you all.

Be good.

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Song of the Week

It’s the fair, really. The fair comes to town, the carnival, the lights, the dust, the tradition. Something about it makes me nostalgic, hell, I wrote an entire piece on how I’d always wanted to run away and join the circus. You can read it by clicking below.

Anyway, Helena does it right with the Rodeo, Stampede, and Fair, and we always go. Not for the rides, but for the photographs. One more quick thing before we dive in:

If Signal Fire's been worth the price of admission this summer, I'd love for you to join the Firekeepers — the fire could use a few more hands.

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On to the fair, and the end of July!

Click to view on the website, which lets you view these bigger and scroll through the gallery.

As I said, Helena just does it right when it comes to the little fair. It’s at the Fairgrounds (obviously) and something about the dust, the fading July light and sunset pastel color, the neon lights, the glow, just feels good. It’s made for the Fuji camera, it’s made for random little snapshots of all that light in all that dark. Berto joined us, and along with Addie and Lady G, they all demolished some beautiful Acai Bowls first. Energy for the photographs we’d be taking, I think.

It was hilarious the four of all all wandering around with our Fuji cameras, a little team that should be sponsored but somehow isn’t. Cough HEY FUJI I AM TALKING TO YOU Cough.

I love the rides and how they show up on the frame, I love the games with the little pools of light that surround them. It feels like nothing else exists except for this little parking lot filled with shine. It feels like Stranger Things, and it feels like youth, but back when things were simpler.

It’s funny how long you can spend in such a small place, how many hours you can wander over and again looking at the same dozen little things and see them different every time. Again a lesson in this, again something to remember and to hold.

I think often of this, of how so many lessons hide in such plain sight. They all seem to fall back onto the same idea though, they all seem to add up to the same thing:

Be where you are, and nowhere else.

Be all the way there, allow yourself to see and not rush, allow yourself to find the silly little miracles in all that mundanity.

Just be.

After the fair, after the realization that once again, all those lights would be dismantled and trucked or trained off to another small city in this great big state, there’s always a tiny bit of sadness. The end of the fair feels like a precursor to the end of Summer, and while I’m not the biggest fan of this season in Montana with all its oppressive heat, it’s suffocating wildfire smoke, but it still pangs of melancholy when you know that soon enough it will be Winter again.

We also checked out (but didn’t photograph really) the amazing OokiSoraCon here in Helena. It’s a convention put on by our dear friend BJ that has grown to insane proportions from its humble beginnings, and now has people fly in from all over the world to celebrate comics, Anime, games, community, and art. It was inspiring and amazing to see how far BJ has taken it, and I’m in awe of her originality.

Wrapped up the month with a visit to Beavs and Toph, caught the amazing late-evening light they get every night in a neighborhood I once lived in, and the sprinkler catching the hazy sunset just felt so immediately nostalgic.

The final photo I captured of the entire month is the one of Sarah in black and white, and I LOVE it. It quickly became my phone wallpaper, for good reason.

That’s the month that was, that’s what my eyes saw, those are the little bits of beauty I had to capture, bring back, and share with you.

I hope you love them.

I love you all.

Be good.

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If you missed it, full video above. We go over how our first ever LIVE ZOOM HANGOUT went, talk about the elephant unicorn in the room that is the FULL site re-design and the whole new direction I’m taking things, and we ask some important questions we’d love your take on.

For what it’s worth, the first ever Live Zoom Hangout, which we’re hereby dubbing The Menagerie, was so much fun, so beautifully intimate to share an hour and a half with a dozen or so of our paid community, and swap stories, poems, and even — gasp — a private, first ever reading of the first few verses from our upcoming Novel in Verse! AHHHHH.

We have an official date for our next one too:

Thursday, September 24th. 6pm Mountain Time.

We’d be over the moon to have you join us, to grow the ranks, and to make this family even more special. Click the little button below the trotting unicorn to make it so.

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Hope you have a delightful rest of your Wednesday, and thanks for rolling with the changes at this little place. I hope you love the re-design, but more, I hope you love the entire new direction this place is taking.

I’ve never felt better about it, and it feels so good to totally settle into my own skin.

I love you all.

Be good.

From the mouths of babes, they say, comes the greatest wisdom. Is it possible we’re at our wisest when we’re new, fresh, young, and untarnished by the rust of the world? Possibly.

Some suggest this is why people on the Spectrum, like yours truly, speak the most truth, some suggest it’s the fact that we’re unburdened by the ego and afterthought that what we say is closest to unblemished we can come as adults. Perhaps.

Today I want to talk wisdom. Let’s do this thing…

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Be not deceived by the beauty in the photograph above, the roads in the north of Scotland (or Ireland for that matter) are astronomically narrow, absurdly tiny.

Some are lined on both sides by stone walls built hundreds of years before the United States was even a country, some are shoulder-less or at least the depth of the potholes render them as useless. Some are less than the width of a single highway lane in America, some even smaller than what we call a bike path, yet remain two lanes by some display of absolute lunacy. Some are filled with sheep, others drop offs that will plummet you to the sea, or down a massive cliff face. Narrow as understatement, narrow as optimistic if you’ve ever driven them, especially once you learn the speed limit is still somehow around 60mph.

Halfway down the 18km single half track road from Dunvegan to Neist Point, the furthest West you can travel on the Isle of Skye, Sarah and I both began to question every tiny decision that day that led us to that precise point. Truthfully, by that point in the trip I think we’d felt overwhelmed and overstimulated more times than we can count. (I actually wrote a whole article about it, click the thing below to read it if you missed it)

There’s a rule to driving over there, on roads like that, and it’s a simple one. Passing places exist every so often, little jut-outs where one car can pull into to allow the other car to sneak by, often by inches, always to the tune of Sarah squeezing her eyes shut in terror until the inevitability of a screeeeech down the rental car door she perceives, finally passes uneventfully. It’s such an unspoken and sophisticated system that there even exists a headlight flash signal the person closest to the passing place uses to alert the other driver that they are free to keep driving, that they’ll stay until they go past. A courtesy. A gesture.

Something happened to that gesture over the years, something shifted. We started noticing it after on our first trip back after the long hiatus of Covid. We kept looking for the courtesy, for the little bits of unannounced kindness, kept offering them up even though they weren’t being offered. They didn’t come, they just stopped arriving. Gone were the gestures, and in their place a strange sense of entitlement from so many our wandering feet crossed paths with.

The roads may have stayed the same, hell they actually got a lot worse in the years between our very first visit in 2018 to our most recent in September of 2025. The potholes deeper, the little repair jobs already showing their decay, and the sheer volume of cars on them multiplied exponentially. It wasn’t this though that alarmed us, it was what wasn’t there. It was the lack.

More times than we could have counted on those half-track stunning roads in the middle of nowhere, we encountered a complete lack of the gesture that once warmed the places we traveled to. The courtesies that were commonplace, that made you almost feel like a local when you flashed those headlights at the right person with license plates that showed they actually lived there and they gave you the tiny wave and nod of appreciation as they tootled past you, that you did it properly right, those had become rare, those had become almost extinct.

Something was spreading, we decided, some isolating sense that what others were doing, where they were going, what they were wanting or needing, mattered more than anyone else. Even more nefariously, it was ambivalence to the tune of them not even bothering to notice they were doing it, that they weren’t maliciously trying to be road hogs that barreled their way straight at you with no passing place for you to try to huddle into, but something worse. That you weren’t even a whisper of a thought in their minds, that you were less than an obstacle, you were nothing at all.

Same roads, only narrower now.

We brought it home with us, this noticing, and it’s only grown wider since. It covers so many things I don’t know if we ever paid attention to, not really. People on the trails behind our home, mountain bikers who fly past us going 40mph on a tiny little mountain trail that force us to jump off into the trees to avoid getting run over, people in airports walking quickly whilst staring at their phones and slamming their shoulder into yours. I’m sure it’s been here all along, but maybe Scotland just helped open our eyes a bit wider to it. Maybe we just forgot.

What happens when no one flashes their headlights anymore? Not on the miniscule roads of Skye, not in the winding stone-walled lanes of Ireland, not anywhere? What happens when everyone collectively and quietly just decides, even without malice, that the other cars just aren’t worth the bother?

What becomes of us when we lose sight of what those tiny roads were built for in the first place? That they were originally built with a completely different understanding of space, that it belongs to everyone, and so sometimes it has to belong to someone else first. Before you. We’re forgetting that, not just on the bike path sized roads of the Isle of Skye, but in grocery store aisles and on mountain trails, in airports or lines for tickets or entry to a concert. Everywhere. Every lane we seem to occupy.

The great and awful narrowing when no one allows others to move first, when no one concedes. All that is lost when we stop yielding, on roads, in friendships, in life.

What becomes of a world that loses its courtesy? To a civilization that forgets the gesture?

Halfway back from Neist Point, an hour or two after Sarah and I had been so lucky to see two of the rarest and most sought-after orcas in the entire Atlantic Ocean make a surprise appearance and play on the coastline for almost a half an hour, on that same stretch of insanely tiny and nearly crumbled road, we came upon another car heading to where we’d just left. We saw them coming, imagined the excitement they were surely feeling driving to where we’d just spent a few hours exploring, and we understood.

Even though it wasn’t our passing place, even though it wasn’t our turn to pull over and signal them, we stopped well before we needed to, scooted our car as far over into the little cutout part of broken road, and waited for them to crest the little hill.

Then, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, we flashed our headlights.

I love you all.

Be good.

Join the Family

Song of the Week

That’s the thing about chaos, it just happens and it really doesn’t care if you’re prepared for it or not. Part II of July was this, my goodness was it ever. Brace yourselves, cause it’s happening.

Also, a quick note:

If you love this place and you’re able to support it, every single one of you helps keep this fire lit. Thank you. Truly.

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Ok. Part II of July, let’s do this:

Click to view on the website, which lets you view these bigger and scroll through the gallery.

As I said, chaos just shows up. It arrived first in the form our one of my favorite people on the planet, a face that will be familiar to you now that you wandered through the April Fuji Journals a few months ago. Anna “B Nana” and her amazing fiancee, Danuel Dan The Man Danny. They were in town because her dear friend (and our client!) Taya Lynn McCarthy™ was getting married and they got to stay with us as we were photographing it! We got to spend a string of days together, including the wedding day, and it was so amazing to be reunited so soon after our wander through Ireland together. Her entire family was in town too for the wedding, and it’s a family I truly adore.

We got to take them all to visit Addie at work at the Big Dipper Ice Cream, where she’s a pro-level scooper, and it was rad seeing everyone together. Then, Birthday #2 happened, and Sarah made her amazing famous dessert for a 2nd time so that this time the “Family Birthday Party” could also enjoy the fruits of her labor. It was a strawberry dessert, fruits, see what I did there?!

Some of the very best sunsets in recent memory decorated the 2nd part of July, and we sat on the deck for all of them. It’s amazing looking back from here, saturated in so much forest fire smoke, and thinking that so recently we had clear air and could actually breathe. I know it will return, but it makes you long for the days you can enjoy the outside, and not just be sequestered away for your own lung’s sake.

Addie had her THIRD birthday, with the same dessert as she requested, this time with a separate set of friends. The cake, once again, was stunning.

Danuel tried out our e-bikes, we wandered a bit more downtown and took Fuji photos all along the journey, I also found a water pipe that had my name on it, so clearly had to straddle it in my Vans for a photograph. It’s funny how many opportunities for beauty just sit and wait for us to actually come looking. Problem is, we’re all so damn busy to actually DO the looking. Problem is, we think we have time to change this.

We have now. Nothing more is promised.

Just now. Go look.

More time with Danuel and B Nana, Henry got to go in and finally get his birthday present from Addie (his birthday is in February haha) and she got him new hoop earrings. Our good buddy Lowell did his masterful work of installing them, Henry looks rad as usual. Gilly also ate his first official ice cream cone from Big Dipper. To say he loved it is an understatement, as the little devil ate it all in 2 bites. I think he got a brain freeze. It was cute.

A few random spots to show Danny the Montana State Capitol, the Cathedral (even if you ain’t religious, which we ain’t, this building is STUNNING) and a bit of our famous downtown walking mall. All the while, Sarah did her dough and baked and filled her lovely bread sheds for people to come and gobble it all up. Still the golden light poured in. Still we loved it.

We also did as my hat told us to do, we Love More, and we all felt very tired, as we’d photographed 4 weddings at this point, in only the first 2 weeks of the month. Sheesh.

More soon, one more installment with some of my most favorite photographs I’ve taken in months.

I’ll see you soon.

I love you all.

Be good.

Also…join this family!!! It’s time.

Join the Family

Yup. Stuff is changing, and it’s changing for the Better. The best-er.

Drumroll please…

Moving forward, Fireside is going LIVE every Wednesday right here on Substack so we can hang out, talk, and answer your questions in real time! It’s gonna be a shitshow, I know this, but we’ll figure it out as we go.

Inside the full video here’s what we talk about today:

• The Empty Nest Shift: How we’re coping with dropping not one, but TWO kids off at college, a bit on empty nesting, and learning to fit your life around who you’re becoming.

• Actually Solicited Life Advice: How to practice Buddhist “blanket forgiveness” when you’ll probably never get an apology.

• Travel & AI: Why relying on AI to plan your trips is a disaster and why you should probably hire Sarah instead.

• Current Obsessions: What we’re watching, listening to, and loving right now.

DON’T FORGET: Tonight at 6:30 PM MT is our first-ever Live Zoom/Meet Gathering! Grab your favorite ice cream, upgrade below to get the link, and come hang out with us face-to-face.

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Below, for our amazing Firekeepers paid community, are all the details: the link, the time, all that good stuff, as well as the poem I read today, and the weekly conversation, this time around what we’re all obsessing over.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

This world of ours is fast, it’s ruthless (often) and it’s unwilling to slow down or appease anyone. Doesn’t matter how rich you are, how beautiful, how young, if it wants to it will chew you up, spit you out, and punish you until it decides you’ve had enough for a time. This is true, not always, but it is true, and can be massively overwhelming.

How do we combat this? That is THE question. I don’t know we’ll ever have the answer, but I do know I have a simple tip that can help us feel less like we’re floating away, and more like we’re here, we’re ok, and we will be fine.

Let’s do this thing…

Read more

Sometimes in this strange little life you get to meet people that change absolutely everything. They don’t erase what you were before them, but they make you somehow forget there was a time before them at all. They just become an extension of your soul, of your brief and beautiful time here. For me, that is .

Artist, author, poet, thinker, spoken-word performer, community builder, outside-the-box-thinker, and fellow Autistic, he is one of the best friends I have ever had, and I love him with all I am. He runs the amazing here on Substack, and has created the Yellow Lamp Poetry in New Zealand, that host the most spectacular live shows, events, lit mags, and workshops. Basically, he’s a genius.

He’s so unique, so brilliant, I decided it’d be time that the wider world once again gets reminded of his existence, that they get to bask in the unbelievable shine of his spirit like I get to. That you, all of you reading this, get to find someone else to know, to adore, and to let change your life too.

We conducted a full hour long interview, and honestly if you have the time, I highly suggest you watch the whole thing. The wisdom he spills out is breathtaking, and beyond valuable. As I did with ’s Word Witch interview, I put a few of the questions and answers below, but again, the full thing is an hour long so I couldn’t put it all here.

Here are a few amazing answers to my questions, highly concised down (is concised a word?) for your reading pleasure, and to get you to listen to the rest, because it’s magical:

Q1 — You recently years ago moved from Wales to New Zealand I want to know has that geographical shift influenced your imagery or your rhythm or even the themes and things that are present in the things you’re writing now and in what way?

Ash: “Do you know what what’s strange, is me and you talk about a lot is algorithm. So when I was in the UK I was into a rhythm of the algorithm right, like post this here post this then yeah and then it’s kind of like okay if I don’t do that then no one’s gonna see my stuff and there was a pressure to it. Whereas here it kind of feels impossible to post at any good time which which sounds negative on the forefront but it kind of just became this thing where was like “Oh I don’t actually care now,” which is kind of a positive thing where I’m just kind of, I’m just gonna put out what I want to put out when I want to put it out. And I feel like it kind of relieved the pressure for me subconsciously. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been doing Yellow Lamp, which is my poetry show, which we’ll get into later, but because of that, I like stage more. And I get to be like, hey, come see the show. I’ll read you the whole poem.”

Q2 — When you read your work aloud, what is a specific feeling or thought that you hope that the audience gleans from it or feels it or connects to? Is there an overarching thing that you hope that the audience feels or connects to?

Ash: See this is this is this has evolved too because again if you asked me this probably a couple years ago the answer would have been different, but so many people like to just read a poem I’ve kind of stopped doing as many open mics because I hate reading one poem I feel like it’s not enough. I feel at minimum I need free poems now because I want to give you something that’s a range I don’t want to just go like hey here’s a sad poem have a sad day I want to have like here’s a sad poem, here’s a funny poem, here’s a gentle poem right like you got three different you got for these three different things that you’re giving out to somebody so what you take away from it is our poetry is so ranged. Because it’s also like my job we had a lamb to like kind of promote poets right it’s absolutely so poetry is kind of my job so I got to show people the range of it yep the whole thing on is like which I take on as a job. So when I do a set, I like to try and show people that it can be fun, because that’s the most vital part, I feel.

Tyler: Well, yeah, because your job is almost like the big top ringmaster, where your job is to show, look, we have strongmen, and then we have people riding on horses, and then elephants, and then we have trapeze artists. We have the whole range of it.

Ash: I’d love someone to just come back on a horse, read your poem, I feel like.

Tyler: That’s why you need to move to Montana. We know people with a lot of horses.

Ash: That’s my specialty when I move to Montana. They’re like, “Have you seen the poet horseman? He’s around here somewhere.” Oh my God. I would love that. People would come and hunt me down and be like, “Read me a poem.”

Tyler: Well, you don’t know that that can’t happen until you just finally move here.

Ash: Yeah, I got really distracted by the horse now. I’ve forgotten the questions, so we should go to the next one.

Q3 — Is there a poem either of yours or anybody else's that you feel like more than anything else kind of encapsulates or sums up what it feels like to be an artist who lives with autism rather than just a neurotypical person? Have you written one yet, or have you read one that you're like, holy shit, that's it — that's what it feels like?

Ash: I got a book on that, which I am put out — it’s called 14,000 Ducks — and it’s just a load of like… oh God, we’re gonna get weird with it. So I created this guy and his name is Jared Roy, and I imagined him after Zane Lowe, you know, on Apple Music. But he interviews me in this book, and then I answer with poetry and quotes, I feel like, because I did feel like I could — because there’s too many sides to autism, yeah, there is, to get it in one poem. I feel like I have a poem called I Have Autism and that gets pretty close, I feel, yeah, but the whole picture was this fake interviewer interviewing me and then I just answer with poems and drawings. It’s kind of a strange book, and no one likes the format, I keep putting it forward to people, and people keep saying, “We won’t publish this without changing the format. I’m like, “No, I don’t want that.” If you want it, you have to have the format. But I think people are a bit scared by it because it’s so weird. So this guy’s just interviewing me, and there’s fun poems in there.

I think it’s important to note that I think it’s dying down a little bit, but we went through a very big phase of autism where it got traction on TikTok. And the negative sides of autism became more mainstreamed. And then the good parts about it were buried.

Tyler: Unless you were like Young Sheldon who has a weird scientific or mathematical ability, or you’re some weird genius that can… it was like the only positive thing in pop culture about being autistic was like, you can remember a city after a helicopter ride and then you can draw it, or you know what I mean? It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t anything that we had, like people who you’d actually go meet. It was like the 1% of the 1% that had savantism.

Ash: Watch me throw this bag of rice on the floor and tell you how many grains there are exactly.

Tyler: No, yeah — it was either that or people rocking back and forth in the corner and drooling, you know. There was not the middle ground.

Ash: No one talks about the gentle goods, you know?

Tyler: No, that’s a perfect way of putting it.

Ash: Yeah, and that’s what we need — the gentle goods that are like… it’s not even big or negative. There’s a middle ground.

Tyler: And that’s where you and I live.

Ash: Yeah, that’s where we live.

Tyler: And I feel like that’s what we need more content on.

Ash: I don’t know if we need more content necessarily on like, “Hey, this is why it’s hard.” I think that’s an important poem to write, especially for yourself and processing. Yeah, I think what we really need is we need to know like, “Hey man, what’s your weird thing that you’re obsessed with?”

The gentle goods.

What a stunning way of saying this, saying what he and I have felt for so long but until he said it in that way, I don’t think I ever realized was this. The Gentle Goods. Not the debilitating aspects of Autism, not the over-the-top savant tendencies pop culture shows.

Another answer he gives is stunning too, and I want you to watch it to find it. He speaks of the immense creative risk of choosing yourself. I love it. Please go find it.

This video ends with me telling him quite simply that I love him with all my heart, and he feels the same. To share a planet with a man like this, to share a friendship, a love, is something I really treasure, and so I really do hope you’ll not only watch or listen to the whole interview, but go follow him everywhere you can.

Ash, thank you. For you.

Tune in, watch it all, learn. What a beautiful man.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Song of the Week

A month of light.

How lucky I am to capture it, to carry a little camera on my hip everywhere I go. To aim it at what I see, to borrow it all. To bring it back to you.

The thing about light though, is that it needs something to hold it. Lately, this humble Signal Fire has burned a little lower than I’d like to see. Some of you, even some who have been here a long long while, have had to step back from the Firekeeper community, and I understand that more than you know. Life asks things of us all the time and we must decide when to listen.

Still though, I’ll say it simply, the way I try to say almost all things here: IF this place has ever felt like light to You, like something worth carrying home, I could really use your help keeping it lit. Not out of guilt, just a very honest ask, from me to you.

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Ok. Here’s July:

Click to view on the website, which lets you view these bigger and scroll through the gallery.

Kicked things off with the World Cup, complete with its very obvious advertising breaks veiled as “water breaks” and a whole lot of hype surrounding the USA team. I never got on board with Team USA, mostly due to a weird feeling of arrogance I felt from them everytime I watched them play, but still, it was fun to see a group of people all cheering the same way. Even though I was cheering for the underdogs they played against haha. After that, Sarah and I had a July 4th wedding that took place at a Clay Arts Guild here in town called the Archie Bray (that’s quite famous!) and so we went on a scouting trip/date night wander. I love that place, we’ve photographed at it many times, and the wedding was stunning. Seeing random bits of priceless art scattered about the grounds always makes me feel strangely warm, thinking that Glen Hansard’s directive to “make art. make art.” is being heeded.

Our dear friends John and Serwaa also moved back from Washington D.C. and we got to check out their new house and stunning gardens. It’ll be lovely having them back, and we’ve already spent more time together. The first bit of July was still clear air and stunning sunsets, so Lady G and I took full advantage of our nightly walks. Chaos was coming, you could feel it on the horizon.

Speaking of walks, one of those evening walks turned quite eventful, and I love the photo of my Dad in black and white as it was taken JUST before the true chaos began. The image that follows it is the aftermath, as the three of us were desperately pouring shampoo all over Gilly. He’d somehow found a squirrel that a hawk had killed, and said squirrel was rotting from the inside out (complete with maggots) and smelled worse than almost anything I’d ever smelled. Of course he rolled in it. Of course it smeared all over his entire body. It took 2 full washes and half a bottle of concentrated dog shampoo to rid him of it. To celebrate this being complete, and him being rid of the scent of decomposition, I took Sarah to get her favorite soft serve ice cream in the world: Goloso. If you’re in Helena, ever, find it.

I also celebrated my 45th birthday on July 6th. Which was low-key as I wish it to be, and lovely. Sarah, as always, made me feel so loved and held. Speaking of, you can still give me the best gift ever by joining this little family. Just sayin’. ;)

Something about the two first photos in this gallery, the porch door and the light on the garage, mean so much to me. Those two views are beyond nostaligc, as they are the door to my childhood home, and the view from the front door where my best friend growing up lived. McKenzie and I have stayed friends all the while, and I feel lucky for this. Anyway.

Birthday one (of three) for Addie also took place only 3 days after my birthday, and she celebrated with all her high school cross country and track friends. It was amazing to see some of them that I hadn’t really seen since they left for college, and the other half was a group that are just now starting their own senior years. Time moves so swiftly, and I do not know what to make of this. I do not know how to understand it.

Not a bad first third of a month, not a bad first third at all.

I hope you’re all still loving these.

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper

Almost every movie, every book, every cliche bit of art talks about how it’s good to forgive, but never forget. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, you know how it goes.

What if that’s wrong?

What if holding on tight to the story is what’s preventing you from healing? What if never forgetting and having the reminder of that weight is what’s bogging your whole life down?

We talk about blanket forgiveness a little today, and we talk about the power of just letting go of the whole damn story we carry after we’ve been hurt.

I also ask a question, and I hope you’ll answer it.

Give the video a watch, stick around to the end for a poetry reading.

Also…

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

The official FIRST ever FIREKEEPERS Live Google Meeting/Zoom Signal Fire gathering has a date! Mark your calendars now, so we can all hang out and spend some quality time together. More details will come on what bit of technology we’re gonna use, but the date is:

Wednesday, August 19th, 6:30pm Mountain Time!

We figured this gives the best chance for people everywhere to attend. It’s 5:30 for Pacific so you on the West Coast should be home from work, and only 8:30pm on the East Coast, so not yet sleeping. For some International Folk this is gonna suck, and maybe not be do-able, so we’ll try to make the next one be a time that works better for you.

Now, onto the poem I read today for all you Firekeepers that keep this place burning. Starting next week, the poem reading will just be for Firekeepers and will be a little fun perk. :)

I love you all.

Be good.

Become a Firekeeper