• It’s one of the more interesting things to happen to pop punk sincerity in years. Most people would probably dismiss I Fight Dragons as another nerd-adjacent power-pop band built for people who own at least one hoodie with thumb holes and complicated opinions about retro gaming hardware. But that’s reducing them unfairly. What they’re actually…

  • A reflective essay about hypervigilance, conscious choice, and the exhausting habit of constantly checking whether your feelings, routines, and relationships still genuinely belong to you. On drift, devotion, and learning to trust your own instruments again.

  • It wasn’t even a big comment. That’s part of the problem.Not an argument. Not a confrontation. Just a sentence, dropped into conversation, the kind of thing that should have passed through me without leaving much of a mark. Except it didn’t.It caught, somewhere inconvenient, and now it’s here. Again.This happens more often than I’d like…

  • My 2025 playlist is DONE. Fifty-two songs. No analysis. No liner notes. Just the year, as it sounded. It was a shit year, but we got there in the end. I managed to make something warm and sustaining out of it. And also there were potatoes.

  • I don’t have a great track record for getting attributions right, but I think it’s Tai Chi that has the idea that humans have a finite amount of energy. That if you slow your movements down enough, you extend that energy, and by extension, your life.Please don’t fact-check me. It will ruin my train of…

  • Notes on stubborn pleasure in difficult times A Tactic, Not a Philosophy At the beginning of 2025, I started using the phrase aggressive joy like a life raft. It wasn’t aspirational. It wasn’t curated. It definitely wasn’t gentle. It was something I grabbed onto at the start of the year as a way to get…

  • On music as memory, misdirection, and rescue In another life I would have been a rock star. All ego and wild wardrobe choices, making an artistic choice to stain my fingers black à la Michèle Lamy, and crying at the end of every concert. But the closest I ever got was being a radio producer,…

  • Or: how my brain keeps shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE” during perfectly normal interactions. There’s a part of my brain that is deeply committed to my survival.Unfortunately, it is also extremely dramatic, wildly overconfident, and deeply uninterested in nuance. This is the amygdala. Its job is to notice danger and react fast. It does…

  • On growing up, letting go of coolness, and finding yourself in the wrong Addams The Dream When I was younger, I wanted to be cool and mysterious.I wanted to be Wednesday. Specifically: Christina Ricci’s Wednesday. Deadpan. Central. Still. A child who never flinched and never explained herself. She didn’t need to perform charm or softness….

  • I’m 150 days sober. I didn’t mark it on purpose.I didn’t have a countdown or an app or a plan to announce anything. I only checked because people kept bumping into the edge of it, and it turned out to be one of those milestone numbers humans seem to agree are important. Or at least…