I live a secret, parallel life. In it, I write nonfiction.
In my everyday life, the one people see, I am a crime fiction author. But when no one is around and I’m alone in my office, I crack open a Mac Pages document and write about real things.
Some of this has made it online. First Tumblr, now Medium — I post without promotion or fanfare. Perhaps it’s like “Good Will Hunting,” with Will solving math problems and then escaping before anyone sees him. Why, Will? Because, secretly, he wants to be a mathematician.
But these articles — from politics to philosophy to environmentalism — all tell a larger story. I’ve been telling some version of it since I was young.
Around age 19, I was living in Fleetwood, NY. I remember crossing the street to my apartment building, to that glass-door entrance flanked by pin oaks, when it hit me: I would write a book called The Meaning of Life. This is of course a terrible title and a seemingly pretentious thing to think — but rather than profess the actual meaning of everything, the book would draw from all sorts of disciplines, and synthesize them.
Everything goes together. The world religions express similar themes, scripture can reveal philosophy and science, quantum physics is faith-like in its depictions. Electrons once in contact remain in contact no matter the time and space which separate them? Everything in existence emerges from and returns to a “field” that surrounds and binds us all? Upon death, the illusion of time collapses so that we’re now everywhere and everywhen??? Magical!
“God’s will” seems a lot like fate, or determinism, yet the concept of free will undergirds criminal justice, capitalism, even industrial animal agriculture. Agriculture turned animistic religiosity into polytheistic and later monotheistic religiosity because we invented gods to protect our animals and crops.
Time is not linear. Big business and governments are hardly extricable. People are terrified of a “one-world government” yet oblige an overarching system of global consumer capitalism. We’re consuming ourselves into runaway inflation and planetary collapse and conjuring a culture war through unhealthy social network interactions while at the same time living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
You could say it all started when I discovered The Book by Alan Watts. But since I was asking my friends if they believe in God as early as first grade, it probably began long before that.
(Other favorite and influential works include Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari, Embracing Mind by B. Alan Wallace, How to Do the Work by Nicole LePera, Hate, Inc. by Matt Taibbi, The Field, by Lynne McTaggart, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.)
As a recovering addict and consummate quitter of things (beginning fourteen years ago, I quit drugs and alcohol, then nicotine, then Facebook) I have 48 years of life experience to draw from. I raised my son (now 19 himself) as a single parent until he was five, when I met my wife, a mental health therapist who is my best friend and love of my life. We have two spectacular daughters together.
But this is about being a closeted nonfiction writer. This is about feeling that it’s time to step into the light and begin sharing may “other side” with you — even if it risks upsetting the apple cart (because politics and philosophy and environmentalism can all do that).
I’m not sure if this is the best thing, to begin posting links to my nonfiction here, to start acknowledging it in my newsletter, but, heck. You only live once. (Probably.)
As a writer, I don’t have a supervisor. Or coworkers. It’s mostly just me. Some days are spent feeling aimless and torn. I search my soul for the right thing to do next, the most authentic. Hopefully this is that.
Hopefully my nonfiction is useful to people. I have this nagging impulse to save the world. It may not be possible, but if I can nudge things in that direction, the effort is worth it.
I believe the key to this salvation includes looking inward at our own often unprocessed trauma and shame — unseen drivers of our daily actions. Because when we understand the influences on our ideologies, we can begin to appreciate the similarities, rather than the differences, among our most cherished beliefs.
Here are some of my latest, most popular articles on Medium:
Well? Tell me what you think. I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or get in touch THIS WAY.