Other Writing

Becoming Father *This article first appeared on my Substack. Check it out -

*This article first appeared on my Substack. Check it out - plus many more - at the link below*

I was in college back when the Middle East conflicts had reached a second or third-round apex. In 2014-2015, Iraq was pretty hot (again), Afghanistan was warm, Iran was always in the background (as always), and, most relevant for me, the terror group ISIS was ramping up activities in Syria and the surrounding territories. I had friends who were in the military, relatives who had received Purple...

Fire and Song: One Impossibly Small Moment * This Article First Appeared on

* This Article First Appeared on my Substack. Check it out for this and more articles, with a new one published every Saturday morning.*

Not so long ago, (though long enough that the chill was in the air,) my family and I had such a wonderful evening - an evening born of effort and pain, an evening short lived in that moment, but which captures where we are, where we've been, and what we'd like to run towards. In some ways, this evening was genuinely unremarkable; in fact, unless you were...

What Are We to do With the Aliens? *You can find this article and more on

*You can find this article and more on my Substack, “Remembering Tomorrow*

Recently, my wife and I have started watching the “reboot” version of the long-running TV show Dr. Who. For the longest time, I held out from watching it based on principle: it was a really big deal while I was in college, and since everyone around me was into it and I had never heard of it, I constructed an ego wherein the “whovians” were they in this relationship and the never-seen-its were the us. For me, that...

Growing up, my family was a sort of central-hub for social gatherings. Our friends would come down for an afternoon, a weekend, or an extended length of time not only to socialize but to help us out with some homesteading tasks. If we were not hosting a formal square dance, we were inviting families over for a pig slaughter. If we were not offering a background for a homemade movie, we were welcoming family friends who just wanted to stop by, and potentially spend several nights. We were...

On Opinions and Articles

It is a curious phenomenon indeed that Conservatives and Liberals alike, in trying to communicate their personal opinions on our country’s decline, always insist on somehow bashing our military. Be it labeling us potential extremist/insider threat breeding ground or lamenting the decline and warning we are “in trouble,” everyone has an opinion they simply must share - all while considering themselves objective third party in their observations. And all these people...