Ah, so this is dystopia. As I annually do, I’ve curated a list of my favorite pieces from the year that was, each with a small snippet of director’s commentary.

In last year’s edition, I remember saying: “I initially wanted to cut this list to a Top-10, but, sadly, dystopia has been very good for business and has given me a lot to talk about.” Well, in 2020, we reached a level of hell that depressed me past the point of wanting to say much at all.

I wrote significantly less this year than I did in either 2018 or…

You do not need to rampage deep into the sleeping city — adrift with the demons who cast you down, chasing some mythical white elephant’s ivory, hunting to feed the insatiable village of voices inside your cranium who beg for bigger, better, badder, bolder.

You do not need that seventh whiskey — that fire-water set ablaze to drown the doubt that creeps into you as you saunter your way across the dimly-lit bar ready to ask that comely one to play the romantic lead in a play you’ve yet to write.

You do not need that Mercedes C-Class, what with…

It was 3 a.m. and I was stoned to the fucking skies, man. I was not yet 21. I’d just finished a late-night serving shift at IHOP in Buffalo, New York, which meant I spent about six hours working, and another 90 minutes in the back parking lot toggling between hotboxing in some nameless degenerate’s rusted-out sedan, shivering, and learning to skateboard poorly.

On my way home, I bought a 32-ounce strawberry/lemon-lime Gatorade and ordered pizza from a place called — I shit you not — Ying's Wings and Things & BAR. [The stylization is important: It was a Chinese…

[*taps mic*]

Alright. Every year at this time, some quasi-dignitary who meets some trendy definition of success stands at one of these here podiums and blows smoke up your ass for 45 minutes about how you’re the greatest generation and you’re going to change the world and when they look out into this sea of young, impressionable faces, they’re filled with hope.

And they’ll do so with gravitas. All the while — half of you drift in and out of sleep and the other half tap away in group chats coordinating party plans.

I’m not going to do all that…

I went to Las Vegas over the weekend in what was my first honest-to-goodness vacation since October 2019. I don’t typically love Vegas — I don’t club, gamble, or enjoy touristy things or bro-y meatheads — but there are few better cities in the U.S. for food, sunshine, and feeling like you’re “off the clock.”

You say you’re going to Chicago and work will send you texts and emails. You say you’re going to Seattle and work will assume you’re there for a job interview. …

Look. What I’m about to tell you isn’t, like, a new idea. Ain’t even new to me. Ever since college, when I laid awake baked off my ass at 2 a.m., hoovering Tostitos and queso, watching Matthew Lesko hawk federal grant money in his bullhorn-loud Riddler-meets-Bill Nye getup, promising riches if you paid $49.99 for his book, I’d been thinking of saying this.

I’m certain it’s already been said. Maybe it’s been said by one of your favorite writers or LinkedIn influencers. If this post goes viral, maybe one of them will definitely rip this off and try to pass…

LOL but but but but ... *why* did you binge on self-help books in 2020?! I *know* you knew the jig was up by then. :)

Sadly, I think while self-help in a vacuum is dead, there will always be a desire--maybe now more than before, given how awful we're (to varying degrees) getting it from the powers that be--to dream of being someone else: someone who seems like they have their shit together, someone who has what we want, someone who's in better shape than we are, someone who's in cinematic love, someone who doesn't have to work so…

[Author’s Introduction: My entire adult life, I worked like hell to write something that mattered. More than a decade into — and at the apex of — my career, it still took six ketamine trips and 12 frenetic hours at a coffeehouse to pen my first (and only) signature piece.

So much has changed since that pivotal day, except for one thing: Every time I return to the keys, I’ve tried like hell to recapture that magic. And, every time, I’ve failed.

Two years later, this is the story of how that story changed my life, how my mental health’s…