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Field notes from a fraying mind

This isn’t just writing—it’s survival—a fight to wrestle thoughts from the ether before they tear me apart.

This one’s a bit unhinged, but maybe we all need that sometimes—a raw, unfiltered glimpse inside the chaos upstairs.

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Is this what it feels like to go insane?

Buy the Ticket. Take The Ride.

If you got the fucking fruity pebbles, the mojo, the gentleman sausage to man up and make it happen.

Most people ain’t got the stomach for this shit. Too nerve-racking, too nauseating, they say.

I’ve studied myself nearly as long as I’ve been upright, pretty much since Moby Dick was a minnow.

Dumb.

I wonder if anybody will visit me in the cuckoo’s nest.

Probably not. I imagine they worry I might write about them. It happened just the other day at the grain elevator. The outbound scale was on the fritz and the line had backed up, wrapping around the lot and back to the dumping pits, a thousand or so feet around the horseshoe.

Drivers and farmers, tempers flaring, all eager to get on with their grain-hauling day.

Meanwhile, your humble author sits beneath the crushing weight of a thousand unruly thoughts, wrestling to make sense of even one.

This grizzled cager struts to my door, “suppose I’m gonna read about this fiasco next week in your little email.”

Careful. Say too much, and you might find yourself in the core of the damn story.

It’s like a guy gets stuck. Soon as you’re awake, the mind pops off like a two-stroke Yamaha, off to the races until she hits the ditch or the tank runs dry.

And then you have this vision of your grandfather waving a razor-sharp hunting knife around while cursing your name for butchering his story.

They don’t tell you how people you’ve known your whole life, people you thought were friends, will turn away when you transform.

They don’t prepare you for the isolation that comes with breaking free from the narrative others built for you.

Nobody prepares you for this shit.

Personal transformations gum up the works.

My mind feels like the grain hopper with the auger running at full cap, grain bubbling like a melody and threatening to overflow at the slightest shift in the planet's geo-orbital orbit.

What?

Genie’s out of the bottle now, son.

No going back.

Even when folks you’ve known for years start acting strange, out of character even for them, once they feel themselves lose grip over the narrative they’d built for you when they see you smashing down walls they were convinced would contain you.

They’ll take little digs at you.

Oh wow, you wrote for a magazine. Ha, that’s cute.

Or wow, an ag startup asked you to sit on their advisory committee; I bet that makes a lot of money—for fuck sake, people … Get a goddamn grip. Are your lives so sad that you need to play these psychological games with people who break out of your miserable orbit?

What’s with all this orbit talk?

They don’t teach you about this shit when you pick up some random book off the shelf about childhood wounds designed to help you figure out why in the name of Mary Magdalene you are the way you are.

Most people bury their heads in the sand.

Hardly anybody dares look in the mirror and tell it like it fucking is.

Call a spade a spade.

How would Hunter S. Thompson handle the start of this foul year, 2025? Probably with a fistful of pills, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a typewriter pounding out the madness.

And Robert Greene? Likely chart a path through this minefield of narcissists, weaving his 48 Laws into a masterclass on breaking free and rewriting your shit-sandwich of a story.

Who the hell am I?

How did it come to a point where I’m driving fifteen gummies in my paunch just to keep the squelch monsters at bay and get some damn sleep at night?

Strange vibes this January. Weird vibes, indeed.

How long has it been now? Three years? Maybe four. The clock spirals.

Forcing it. 553 words now. At least you wrote something today ... pure rambling ass drivel. This unearthing project will never end at a rate like this. Blocked. The universe knows it. I fucking know it.

Even Alex Trebek probably knows I’m blocked, laughing from some celestial game show stage.

But for some reason, I can’t let it go.

Stop trying to control it, man.

Maybe that’s the point—learning to let it all spill out, even when it feels like madness.

This shit makes no sense.

I’m still waking up at the ass crack of 5, mind kickstarting like a souped-up Triumph, tearing across the track like the driver’s shit-ass wasted—on edge, out of control, and barely holding it together.

No closer to knowing myself now than I was ten years ago. Mabye more.

Typos. Hitting the skids already. Christ, this is like extracting new toenails with your mind.

Maybe I have lost reality, slowly slipping away while it waves goodbye like grandparents waving on the steps after a summer visit. I can’t hold my pee much longer.

Have to break the spell of this madness.

Come back to it.

Figure out what the fuck this is.

Might have relieved the pressure, but shit’s still bubbling up.

900 words and I’ve barely scraped the surface.

Maybe 42 fit for public consumption.

This is when writing feels like torture—bamboo sheaths under fingernails or Q-tips jammed too far in because some jackass didn’t listen and never got their ears flushed.

The auger’s still spinning—churning up the shit swamp, bubbling over.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll wring out another 900-word frenzy.

Belly rubs.