My entire book-length memoir, serialized right here on Substack
From “Who am I, and how could I not know?” to finding the voice of self, sanity and soul.
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Learning To Listen
An Ordinary Disaster is one man's proof that despite what may seem like our inability to hear it, and all of our attempts to avoid it, we can all learn to listen to ourselves, and to act upon the inner voice of our self, our sanity and our soul.
This raw, gritty, vulnerable memoir takes us from the author's vibrant but emotionally vacant youth in 1980’s San Francisco through a deeply conflicted adulthood of depression, isolation, and addiction that lay hidden beneath a successful careers in the early days of the internet and as a small-business entrepreneur. Starting, growing and eventually selling his own business while desperately trying to escape his inner darkness through sex, travel, and drinking, the author eventually rediscovers his love of the outdoors and his connection to physical movement and adventure, which leads to an awakening of his intuition, the end of his life-long dependence on alcohol, and the rediscovery of his identity as a man.
A provocative combination of truth-telling, hard-won life lessons, and powerful prose, An Ordinary Disaster is a concrete and hopeful demonstration that there is a way forwards for anyone who is plagued by a repeating chorus of "I don't know," feels stuck in a state of existential dissatisfaction and depression, or hopelessly disconnected from their inner voice and sense of self.
Interview with the Author
My friend Michael Lipson interviewed me recently about the development and writing of the book, which began with the clear feeling that “I'm here to tell the truth.” Writing “cemented my sense of self,” and “made me feel like another person.” “The creative act is a form of dreaming,” and in doing that dreaming, I came to feel a great weight lifted, and an expansion of self. Listen to the full interview here.
Table of Contents
The full manuscript is currently about 66,000 words, or about 275 pages. I’ve serialized the entire work here in pre-publication form. You can of course read in sequence, but feel free to jump in anywhere!
The Thing That Refuses To Be Named
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