After I found my voice in an after school poetry club in 8th grade, I embraced the weirdo label. It usually made people laugh. …

Examining My Personal History with Marijuana and How My Tastes Have Recently Shifted — Every now and then I think of a quote from winemaker and rebel Eric Glomski in the documentary “Blood Into Wine,” where he spoke about how the human senses of taste and smell are rather underdeveloped, saying, “Because we’re such a visually oriented and stimulated culture, our vocabulary and our…

How Two Recent Events Made Me Realize I Still Need To Integrate What I’ve Learned From The Last Three Years — I’ve been meaning to share these thoughts for a while, but due to the subject matter I’ve been putting it off. Look, I get it. Everyone’s told me the pandemic is over. In the state where I currently reside, the governor declared the pandemic over about a month and a…

Always Thought I was a Dog Guy. But Now I’m Not So Sure. — Free-flowing and frequently amusing thoughts often percolate through my brain after I smoke, vape, or nosh on a creative-inducing strain of cannabis. Sometimes I decide to jot down these stoned moments. Then, after a nap (and occasionally forgetting I even wrote anything until checking my notes), I go back and…

Observing How Various “Progressive” Companies Are Anything But When It Comes To Wages — Using particular colors when painting in the past could have proven dangerous, believe it or not. Van Gogh was renowned for using particular colors that also contained a lot of lead. The fact that he may have had a propensity to lick his brushes undoubtedly didn’t help. …

A recent realization led to me understanding why I may not be an official “morning person.” — Until recently, I pretty much just accepted that I was a “morning person;” an early bird that was just jumping up out of bed and practically right to work since my employer has mandated that most employees work from home. …

One Poet’s Perspective on the Expanding Creative Uses of AI — The other day, I was chatting with my brother. At some point in the convo, he asked me how I felt about Chat GPT and other newly emerging AI writing tools. He’s always been much better at keeping up with more tech trends than me. I can barely keep up…

Sharing some updates and trying to keep my inner child alive. — 2022 was a mess. It’s why I did much less posting than originally anticipated. I’m not going to get into too many specifics, but between nearly losing a comfortable job, being forced to leave our cheap digs around my birthday, the hassle and hustle of moving, getting COVID, and a…

Forget what the experts have said about what we have learned from the latest global pandemic. Despite being nearly two years into one of the worst pandemics certainly in U.S. History, let alone the world, it’s surprising that I’m still seeing articles written by people (I’m assuming they mean well) who can’t wait to tell us what this pandemic has or is teaching us about ourselves…