Lawyers, Leadership, and Lips
What a fucking week. Lawyers talking numbers. Leadership finding its footing again. Surgery scheduled for the part of my face that never fully healed. Justice, it turns out, isn’t a courtroom ideal, it’s an insurance calculation. And I’m still learning how to live in the space between gratitude and anger.
We Keep Arguing the Wrong Fucking Things
We always argue about the loudest parts of the problem while ignoring the structure underneath it. Immigration isn’t the real debate. Federal power is. And nobody seems willing to talk about that.
Strength Training, or: How Weakness Feels Before It Feels Like Progress
Last night I lifted ten-pound dumbbells and they nearly wrecked me. This morning I’m sore, smiling, and absolutely certain of one thing: strength doesn’t come back all at once, it comes back honestly, rep by rep, when you finally decide to start.
I Think I’m Afraid of the Dark Now
I don’t remember the accident, but my body does. And when the sun goes down and the headlights start moving faster than trust can keep up, the dark doesn’t feel neutral anymore.
Fuck Molds
People love molds. They love neat categories that let them stop thinking. And when you don’t fit, they don’t expand the mold, they try to shove you into a different one. That’s how freedom gets replaced by slogans.
I Have to Be at Work in the Morning
I have to be at work in the morning. I don’t have time to take a weekday off to remind legislators to get the hell off my Constitution. Yet somehow, I’m expected to defend my rights every single year from people who don’t understand them.
Two Tons of Inattention at Fifty Miles an Hour
This happens two to three times a day when I ride. Not once in a while, every day. Two tons of inattentive driving versus a human body, and the only reason I’m still here is because I ride like everyone else is trying to kill me.
Guardrails, Guns, and the Slow Death of Plain Speech
At some point we stopped arguing about policy and started padding reality. When algorithms decide which ideas are too dangerous to even discuss and legislators criminalize lawful behavior in the name of “safety”, the problem isn’t guns or technology. It’s that we’ve forgotten the difference between being civilized and being spineless.
Between Torque and Grief
My bike is finally done, brighter and louder and harder to ignore than ever. And somehow, that joy exists right next to grief, anger, and the quiet realization that my life has been reduced to a number in someone else’s legal game.
I Had to Tighten My Left Boot Today
Recovery doesn’t always announce itself with milestones and applause. Sometimes it shows up in the smallest, most unassuming ways, like the moment you realize your left motorcycle boot is finally loose. After months of swelling, loss, replacement, and rebuilding, tightening that boot became proof that healing is still happening.
3 a.m. Metrics
Waking up at three in the morning is my new normal. It’s when my mind is sharpest, and also when it gets trapped, chewing on the bullshit metrics we’re told define a successful life: job, money, love. Somewhere between a foggy Minnesota road and the imagined violence of someone in a hurry to go nowhere, it became painfully clear: our priorities are broken, our patience is gone, and the math we’re using to measure a life doesn’t add up.
Dress Codes, Double Standards, and the Eagles of Santa Fe
They call it a club, but it’s really just a private bar where people get overserved without breaking the bank. The place reeks of weed, the drunks slur their way through the night, and nobody bats an eye. But somehow, that wasn’t the problem. The problem was a black tank top. On me.
A Good Fucking Day
Today didn’t fix everything. I’m still not the same person I was before the accident, and maybe I never will be. But for the first time in a while, my brain showed up, my bike plans snapped into place, and something I built actually landed exactly right. Some days aren’t about healing or closure. Some days are just about momentum. And today? Today was a good fucking day.
Compliance Is Not Care
I went into my medical records looking for information. I came out pissed off. At the top of every UNM Health record it says my name, my birthdate, and then, predictably, male. No way to fix it. No place to correct it. Meanwhile, the Catholic hospital somehow got it right. This is a story about that moment, and about the systems that insist on explaining themselves instead of listening.
Freedom Requires Responsibility (And Other Uncomfortable Truths)
We’ve reached a bizarre moment in American culture where saying freedom comes with responsibility is treated as cruelty, and expecting people not to shit on public sidewalks is somehow controversial. This isn’t about lacking compassion. It’s about refusing to lie to ourselves about personal agency, work, and the choices that shape a life. Responsibility isn’t oppression. It’s the price of dignity.
Learning the Shape of the New Me
Coming back to work after the accident taught me something I wasn’t ready to learn. The hardest part wasn’t the schedule, the exhaustion, or the logistics. It was realizing my mind doesn’t work the way it used to. This is about grief, fear, and learning what it costs to survive.
Standards Are Not Cruelty
Somewhere along the way, enforcing laws became “heartless” and lowering standards got rebranded as compassion. A society without shared rules isn’t kind, it’s chaotic. This is about public decency, selective enforcement, and why refusing to talk about facts is destroying any chance of real discourse.
Too Many Voices, Not Enough Thinking
We used to filter ideas through editors, facts, and effort. Now we filter them through comment boxes and megaphones. Somewhere along the way, liberty got confused with volume, and thinking became optional. This is a rant about noise, freedom, and how shouting isn’t the same thing as being right.
When Did Dignity Become a GoFundMe?
I grew up poor in farm country Minnesota, back when dignity mattered more than comfort and work was how you solved your own problems. You didn’t crowdfund hardship. You handled it. Somewhere along the way, that changed. Now every setback comes with a digital tip jar, and we call it community instead of what it really is: the quiet death of personal responsibility. This isn’t about cruelty. It’s about what we lost when work ethic gave way to electronic begging, and why that should scare the hell out of us.