About

I've been experimenting with creative writing since the late 1990s, although I didn't start taking it particularly seriously until around 2015. Before that, my ambitions were largely centered on filmmaking. I attended film school in 1999 with the rather absurd notion that I might someday become the next Steven Spielberg.

Apparently, reality had an entirely different plate of bullshit in mind for me to eat.

Years before I could get the Internet in my home. I would just use an old Windows 95 machine that had MS Word on it and learned the ins and outs of how that machine operated. What it could do, what it could potentially do with some tinkering, what it definitely could not do. I never had a particularly good memory. So, I began to write copy text for all these modifications. I had already had a pretty good track record writing essays for school, both in High School and College, particularly in college.

What followed were years of what I like to call “zero-budget filmmaking.” Not low-budget. Zero-budget. There's a difference. Medical issues in and around 2012 forced me to reconsider what I could realistically accomplish pushing and pressing the way I was going. Writing became a practical alternative. I had decades of ideas, observations, stories, and questions floating around in my head, and a word processor was what I had in abundance.

What began as an attempt to organize those thoughts eventually became something much more complicated.

I write about film, television, science, science fiction, horror, technology, culture, religion, politics, philosophy, psychology, human behavior, and whatever other absurdist rabbit hole happens to capture my attention. Sometimes that's an original story. Sometimes it's a review. Other times it's a several-thousand-word examination of a question that probably cannot be answered straight forwardly. Unfortunately, once I start pulling at a thread, I tend to keep pulling until I've figured something out for myself. Most of my commentary writings are me just trying to sort out all this stuff in my head in a way I can make it make sense for myself. Not the masses. That would come later.

Much of my writing is influenced by existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism. I'm interested in the contradictions of human existence, particularly our apparent need to manufacture meaning in a universe that has never demonstrated any obligation to provide any.

That perspective also influences how I examine entertainment, especially horror, science fiction and music.

I'm not particularly interested in simply declaring that something is scary, disturbing, funny, absurd, intelligent, or ridiculous. I want to understand “why.”

• What genuinely frightens human beings?

• What merely entertains us by imitating those fears?

• At what point does horror stop being horror and become dark comedy wearing a monster costume, CGI creation and/or an AI recreation?

• And why do audiences sometimes react to the same material in completely different ways?

Those distinctions interest me considerably more than whether a particular movie deserves three stars or four.

Artificial intelligence has added another layer to all of this.

As AI continues to develop, I've become increasingly interested in the possibility that our writings, recordings, and other creative works may eventually serve as historical snapshots of how individuals understood their own existence. Not necessarily an objective account of the world, but something arguably more revealing: a record of how that world appeared through one particular person's eyes.

That's part of what motivates me to keep writing.

I want as much of my actual self in these works as reasonably possible. Not some sanitized, professionally marketable CreatorSLOP or SLOPfluencer version of myself, but the reasoning, contradictions, humor, frustrations, observations, and profanity that make the perspective uniquely mine.

I don't expect future generations, human or otherwise, to agree with everything I've written. Hell, I don't necessarily agree with everything I wrote ten years ago. But disagreement doesn't have to make the material worthless. It makes it a record of how ideas develop, how perspectives change, people can grow, and how one individual attempted to make sense of the circumstances in which he existed, which makes zero sense.

If someone or something encounters these writings fifty or a hundred years from now, perhaps they'll find something entertaining, something worth questioning, or at the very least a reasonably detailed example of how one human being interpreted the cultural madness of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

And if an Artificial Intelligence eventually ends up absorbing all of this, well, at least it'll have plenty of material to work with. Talk about free rent in something’s head… And perhaps that is a bigger legacy than what everyone else does when they come in contact with the inevitability that absolutely everything will come for all of our pounds of flesh at some point in our mortal lives.

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And, so, it goes.” — Dan Simmons, “Hyperion”