Ruminations | September 2026.

Good morning, it is October 1st.

For the last few weeks, I've been considering the ways in which I relate to my work (primarily my writing)–and working on expanding the scope of this newsletter to include more creative nonfiction, personal blogs, and other essays. There's a solid chance I will be rebranding this newsletter to reflect that broader scope (once I figure out what to call it). There will still be a section for the more straight-laced reporting that I do, but–and I get into this in my writing below–I want to grow a little bit (okay, a lotta bit) in my craft, and fine tune my voice and style as it relates to the work I've been doing. There's always room to improve, I think.

What follows below is a much more personal piece of writing than I'm accustomed to publishing. I'm not a memoirist by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a writer who is currently struggling through one of the many troughs of life, so what is a writer to do but...write about it? (Heh.) Forgive me if this isn't nearly as polished or interesting as some of my other work; I'm in the midst of an....era, I suppose (my more weeb friends like to call it my 'anime training montage'), in the progression of my creative process, and there are bound to be bumps and brambles snagging the path as I walk along.

Okay, here we go. If you find a typo, no you didn't.

Rudderless, restless, and bored. A lethal combination these days. Dangerously underemployed and low on options for getting me out of this mess. Creditors calling day and night; always hunting for ‘cash or plastic,’ as HST might say. I am, I think, not cut out for a traditional career. A 9-to-5, while enticing due to its stability, is simply too boring (as if they’re even calling back). My mind atrophies in such an environment; I feel stagnant, restless, and sick. I seek to destroy such stability as soon as I have it. My life must be creative, full of tension and passion and maybe a little chaos. There must be art, too, and music. I have written so much about wanting to find the rhythm of my life— to pluck the strings of my One, Strange, Experience to some sort of beat I find familiar. To tell stories. To travel. To not fucking settle.

I am tired of a grey professional life. Tired of shoving myself so haphazardly into a lumpy, misshapen box; I immediately begin clawing desperately to be released from it like a crazed, bleeding animal. I left the beige cubicle of my copywriter's desk at 26 because I was certain that I would burn the place down before I ever accepted my lot. I became bored with my studies and walked into the flames of Minneapolis in 2020 because I wanted to be there. To see it with my own eyes. To tell that story. What sort of madwoman finds that reasonable? 

What am I so afraid of?

—Diary Entry, 21 September 2026.

I’ve been trying to make sense of my life and work this year, which has led quite predictably to a drop off in what I’m publishing. Most of my summer has been a whirlwind of working non-media festival contracts (honestly, at this point I should probably just write a book about those experiences), leaving Los Angeles in a hurry with creditors on my heels, and reading. Like, a lot. 

I know I’ve mentioned this before, and I likely will again, but the layoff and subsequent descent into job application hell (hundreds of jobs applied for and counting…) has plunged me into a state of numb paralysis and forced me to confront a number of things about my life—namely, what I consider to be the definition of success (changing weekly), and what I think about my writing, my documentary work, essentially, my creativity, and if it is still worth pursuing even if the most accessible career avenues have been buried in a landslide of industry contractions and layoffs. 

I have consistently fought against this nagging feeling that I am not that important in the grand scheme of things and therefore my troubles need not be acknowledged, or written about. Others’ struggles are far more important than my own, and those are the struggles worth uplifting. Clearly this is bullshit, but try telling The Committee that as they sit around the conference table in my head and remind me incessantly of my own insignificance. 

I take myself and my work too seriously, I think. I find the image of “serious journalist” that many (my readers, God Love Them) throw my way particularly difficult to live up to. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have come to loathe this image. I feel nothing but pressure to perform this “serious journalist” character to its very end. What if I fail? What if I’m not actually who they say I am? Still, I cannot walk away from it.

None of the work that I currently work on—the radio show, or much of my reporting—is paid. I volunteer for the radio station because I care deeply about the form and the stories I get to tell. I post my footage to my Instagram because there’s no budget for video at most publications, and those stories are important regardless. You could chalk that up to succumbing to 'vocational awe' and opening myself up to the same sort of exploitation that those of us in these industries deal with regularly, but I think it's a little deeper than that. I’m working on complaining less about this and reminding myself that I love this craft, even if the industry is cold and dead and lying on a slab in the morgue. On the days where I succeed at this, I feel a deep and abiding love for it; it’s exciting, feels important. Through my work, I have given myself a chance to thrive–not in the capitalist, financial sense, but in the soul nourishing sense. God help me, I love it.  

Still, I find myself ruminating on my writing process with regularity these days. Essentially, that I have none, except the occasional crack of lighting; a bolt of painful electricity that burns the soles of my feet and sends 6000 words back up into the atmosphere. There is no discipline or routine and I often feel stagnant, waiting for the clouds to gather and the wind to pick up before I sit down to write again. Waiting for a strike of lightning is not the way to be a writer. How can I break free from it? I’ve been reading a lot of new journalism, creative nonfiction, and literary journalism in the past few months, trying to make sense of where to go from here. I am not trying to be Groundbreaking or Innovative, merely to grow personally as a writer, a documentarian, an artist, a journalist.

I really don’t know what I’m looking for when I read the New Journalists. Honestly, there are probably 50 other journalists and creative nonfiction writers that could give me the inspiration I'm looking for (believe me, I'm getting to them, too). At any rate, I took a crack at Didion’s After Henry late last year and found her writing to be stodgy and self-important; much of it was insufferable to get through and left with me with the distinct impression that Joan had never struggled a day in her life. She reminisced gayly (sic?) on the little apartment she and her husband and young family rented in Brentwood, of all places. Wrote about the halcyon days of Los Angeles politics in the 1980s. Started a blood feud with Nancy Reagan. Only a few lines of her writing, when she spoke candidly about the disquieting sensation of losing hope in your day the longer your checklist gets—I’ll find that quote in my notes later—seemed to speak to me with any significance. Her political writing felt catty and rude; the sort of shit you find deep in the sordid pages of some shlock celebrity gossip magazine rather than the cover of the New Yorker. Maybe that's the point, and I missed it entirely. Everyone tells me Slouching Towards Bethlehem is worth the read, so perhaps I'll take another crack at her before I leave her behind forever.

I also picked up some of Hunter S. Thompson’s late work on a lark when I visited a bookstore in the Bay Area a few weeks back. I finished reading Kingdom of Fear (2003) late last week and was bitterly disappointed. 355 pages full of the nostalgic ravings of a drug-insane old man. Afterward, I went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about Thompson’s drug use and it seems most agreed that his writing fell apart after 1974. As I said, drug-insane ravings. A lesson there, surely. Clearly Thompson’s drug use caught up with him in the end: he committed suicide in 2005, two years after the memoir was published, and his ashes were shot out of a cannon, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a madman to request in his last will and testament, I guess.

At any rate, I found most of the memoir (if we can call it that) quite disturbing, as if Thompson’s only goal was to shock his readers into a state of calamity. There are portions of that book that made my skin crawl. Shocking for the sake of it and nothing more. It’s any wonder that the worst men I know idolize the man. I wanted to revisit his early work just to see if there’s a kernel of inspiration somewhere in there, though I’m not certain that what I find will be worth internalizing. His indignant rage drips, bleeding, off the page. You come away from his writing feeling sticky and wet and a little off-kilter.

There was a time in my life, even recently, where my only inspiration came from the same sort indignant rage—at the state of things, at my inability to finish a project, at my abysmal financial situation, you name it. It’s quite easy to log onto the internet and find yourself staring into a churning abyss of shocking headlines about the escapades of the worst humans to ever walk this planet. How would Hunter put it? Bastards! PIGS! We should drop them in a pit of acid. These demons should be crushed underfoot and left to drown in a pool of their own blood. Ho ho ho! Where do I come up with this stuff? Beats me, Bubba. Mahalo. There’s a time and a place for rage, to be sure, especially in writing. Crank the temperature up to 100 and feel its clarifying effects, particularly on the creative process. Too much rage, I think, turns me into a cynical monster incapable of having fun. I fear entering into a state of being where the only way to write is to be angry.

Perhaps I’m jealous—that these writers seem to have been born in the right year of the American Century, back when editors took your phone call and writers could earn $5 per word and a lifetime of acclaim for one or two well-placed articles. Thompson rented an apartment in DC for nearly a year on Rolling Stone’s dime so he could cover the 1972 election cycle. He wrote 14 installments, half of them absolutely insane, and made a mint on the accompanying book. Try getting anyone from Rolling Stone to answer their email these days, let alone bankroll a multi-month, multi-installment political writing project. The writing world simply doesn’t look like that anymore; everyone’s a content creator, and everyone's competing for a tiny sliver of a very small pie. Literary innovation feels like a pipe dream when your biggest competitor is an AI slop machine that plagiarizes your favorite author and churns out bullshit for the cost of a Netflix subscription. 

Even the chance to cut your teeth at a small daily in the city isn’t a pathway to a writing career anymore. I mean shit, Marie Colvin got her start at a small union newspaper in New York before climbing her way (rather quickly, I might add) to Paris Bureau Chief at a now-defunct wire service and catapulting into some of the most consequential foreign war reporting her generation has ever seen. That doesn’t happen these days, not without money, or a willingness to be dead broke and on the lam for as long as your body can stand it—until you break through or die poor. These days, your best bet is to throw yourself onto the whims of the online audience; sensationalize your Youtube thumbnails and bend the story into Yellow territory, let yourself get manhandled by the cops, sell your footage for peanuts and the promise of exposure. It all stinks, all of it. There’s gotta be a better way. 

Anyway, I’m sure there’s a good way to find a path forward in my craft that doesn’t feel as limiting as straight-arrow journalism can feel sometimes. I never went to J-School and don’t have the money for an MFA, so I’m working with what I’ve got: long periods of self-study and many frustrated attempts to enter into a more literary form of writing; scraping the internet for creative nonfiction syllabi (Thanks, Jeff Sharlet, yours are fantastic) and pulling books of essays from the shelves of the local library. Maybe a writing residency is in my future—who knows. Until then, I'll read, read, read. And maybe write (just a little bit).