A perceptive soul would recognize my pursuit of truth, my disdain for mediocrity, and my unwavering commitment to questioning everything (even at great personal cost). They might say that I am a sensitive contrarian, a dramatic artist, with a strong sense of justice and a hair-trigger bullshit detector. They might say that I am hellbent on breaking free from the gilded cages of mass culture. They might add, somewhat critically, that I overcompensate for my crippling shyness ironically—but, in the end, it is so typical American push-and-pull drama—with brazen exhibitionism: wild writings of physical and emotional and historical nudity daring the world to take a swing.

A person just meeting me for the first time would be struck, even alarmed, by my intensity. People might point out, as they have, that I am a little earthquake: casting a paranoid glance over shoulder each way, as if I were Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, each time I begin to speak (yes, even in the course of the same conversation); manic eyes—protrusive, as if I am being choked—that dance and dart as I give my monologues that never seem to cut to the gist; hands that jazz brush the air with frenzied strokes; sweat-stained pits that manifest the hot-blood pumping beneath it all. They might note that, in my quickness to get fiery, I cannot seem to let even trivial topics go and that I am prone to repetition that invites eye-rolls of familiarity. Perhaps with euphemism, they might sum me up as “excitable.” I have had it put to me that way by the late American Philosopher John McDermott.

My intensity is my trademark—a blessing no doubt, but also a curse. I will give just one example of its negative dimension. Once I was talking one-on-one with a colleague during the coffee break after I gave a talk at a conference. In what proved a seamless continuation of the fact that my stares from the podium had many nervously looking to others for corroboration that (to put it euphemistically) something strange was going on, the man (whom I had met only just that day) backed up along the wall and then down the wall as I argued whatever point I had been arguing. I went on and on until we almost made a complete circle of the room! I imagine myself having nystagmic eyes every time, more than a decade later, I cringe over the scene: a casual chat turned into “escape the madman.” I am the type of person, to put it a bit more lightly, that after an hour of driving down a dark highway in deep conversation will not realize—until the furious blaze of lights honk past us from behind—that we had been crawling at 20 mph bound to make him miss the morning flight.

A person who knows me well knows where, in particular, my intensity tentacles: intensity in routine and self-care and hypochondria-teetering awareness of my body; intensity in curiosity (always foraging for literary gold in every domain with a megawattage lamp, amazed seemingly by everything and so easily distractable); intensity in seeing the principles behind what people say (and, relatedly, in seeing the hypocrisies in people who are less principled, people who are less able to see how their stance or judgment on one particular matter butts heads with their stance or judgment on other matters). Because of all this, I often feel—although I might just be paranoid—that strangers wonder to themselves whether I am just too educated for them to understand or simply out of my mind.

One thing that comes to mind is that, however much I have changed from who I once was (physically, spiritually, ideologically), I have empathy for the old me. I am not the one, despite a world obsessed with before-and-after stories, to make that cliché move we see so often from “reformed” people: namely, affecting this attitude—a holier-than-thou attitude—of contempt for who one once was. It seems to me that the reformed-sinner move, this performative trampling of one’s past self (as if it were a mortifying yearbook photo), often boils down to a sophistry meant to manipulate both the speaker himself and his audience into thinking that he is a trustworthy judge. The logic of the strategy should be clear. How could he not be a beacon of reliability, a wise man who tells it like it is when he threw his own self under the bus—as a cautionary tale—with such definitive cruelty? That is the idea anyway, used by many traveling preachers and salesmen.

Beneath my critical (and some might say pessimistic) exterior beats the heart of an optimistic romantic, deeply in love with the idea of human potential and greatness. As Chomsky and so many others have said by analogy: just because I rail against my country does not mean I am not a patriot—indeed, quite the contrary! Many are unaware how deep my modest, almost ascetic lifestyle, goes. I sense my days are too simple and regimented, too devoted to describing and learning and practicing, for most people to handle. Their skin would crawl in the repeating groundhog days of a Dickinson or Spinoza.

I want to take this in a more lighthearted direction. For a long time, I did not wear any fragrances (aside from the smell of laundry detergent on my clothes and whatever underarm deodorant I happened to use). But in the process of helping—perhaps begrudgingly—my girlfriend choose her favorites from a perfume sampler she received for Christmas, my nose met Tom Ford's Ombre Leather. This scent slammed me. It made me confront something I knew theoretically—and knew definitely when it came to pussy—but never gave much conscious thought to: namely, that olfactory art is an art, just as much as visual, musical, and literary art.

I had ignored perfumery for so long, associating it with mass-man consumerist fluff. I gave no thought to the idea that, and this is true with everything else (from food to architecture to music), there were perfume creations beyond the designer yawns that I could not but associate with sheeple and Swifties at some Ulta BeyHive. How wrong I was. That first sniff of Ombre Leather—damn. Suddenly, I was Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole of olfaction—a chasing of the dragon you can read about here.

After purchasing various decants of the most artistic releases from various niche houses (especially in the leather and tobacco realm), I have come to hold several close to my heart. While Ombre Leather started my journey and remains high on my list, my current top choices are: Amouage's Royal Tobacco (a licorice and frankincense concoction that takes you through the whole experience of smelling a good cigar in a humidor to then smoking it all the way through); Amouage's Journey Man (a bright tobacco scent with a fiery spiciness of Sichuan berries and cardamom); Xerjoff's Naxos (a widely-appealing vanilla-honey tobacco); Ormonde Jayne's Montabaco (an addictive iso-e-super mountain air blast of fresh tobacco and leather base); Amouage's Jubilation 25 (an opulent masterpiece of sour blackberry Middle-Eastern resin). Second to these I would perhaps include: Gucci's Guilty Absolute, Tom Ford's Ombre Leather, Tom Ford's Tobacco Oud, Nishane's Fan Your Flames, Nishane's Suede et Safran, Rasasi's La Yuqawam Pour Homme, Rasasi's Tobacco Blaze, Sospiro's Erba Leather, and Akro's Smoke. (My nose is still developing, though. For example, I might at this point knock Naxos down to the second tier and place Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud (along with its Severus-Snape / Julian-Sands-Warlock cousin Laudano Nero) to the first tier and perhaps, in a surprise move, place the peppery-patchouli-leathery spice bomb Kajal’s Sawlaj there as well.)

Just as with high-level art in other domains, niche scents are often an acquired taste. For example, I hated Tom Ford’s Tobacco Oud at first. Now I love it, and it makes me feel like a powerhouse. Several I still cannot get behind (even after trying hard)—yes, even well-regarded ones like Nishane's Ani and Nishane's Hacivat, or Mancera's Red Tobacco (which I cannot stand). A tremendously difficult thing is to educate the audience, to raise their level of appreciation for the olfactory art: challenging the nose like a sommelier challenges the palate. It is easy to lower their appreciation and sensitivity. Just as pop pablum does to their capacity to appreciate and even tolerate masterpieces of music, department-store dreck has diminished their capacity to appreciate and even tolerate masterpieces of niche perfumery. (Do not think I am being unempathetic. I was once a child who, only used to the inoffensive black olive from the can, felt the shock—"How could anyone actually like this?”—when I had my first taste of a pimento-stuffed green olive.”)

For those who have yet to open up to fragrances, I urge you to dabble. Please visit my perfume page for descriptions of various scents. You can purchase decants there as well.

It is hard to pinpoint my political views because things shift, concepts reverse. Although it has admittedly become harder for me to stay this way (after I became a target of the left-wing’s version of cancel culture), I am nuanced and independent. You are not going to get all my stances on important political issues just by knowing one. (For example I see both sides: why it is important to stop people buying huge Pepsis at McDonald’s and yet why that sucks to be restricted to live how you want when you are not directly hating people. I prefer an indoctrination/education/grooming approach to getting people not to get the Pepsi to begin with—and second higher taxes on those items as a disincentive and also a way to offset medical costs (only I want to make sure that money goes in the right pool.)

Given my scathing mockeries of campus SJWs (well-to-do white kids with their Portlandia scarves and staches and their insisting on making black people see how oppressed they are), one might think that I am anti-progressive. No no, absolutely not! The truth is that I am theoretically at least the most progressive person I know. Although my progressiveness has been curbed by newfound consideration of the consequences to children, I have long advocated for identifying as any race or gender that you would like, for the abolition of retributive-based justice, for the moral permissibility of bestiality and cannibalism and incest, for the legalization of prostitution, and other issues that would make even the most liberal minds squirm. The leftwing campus progressives who targeted me were pushing a safe-space ideology clearly against diversity: silencing, shaming, censoring whatever ideas or people or facts or even words deemed unsettling to so-called “vulnerable populations,” especially if those words came from someone with the wrong optics and leanings and identifications: cis white male who might even dare to have an Amerikkklan flag on his porch on July 4th. If that were not bad enough, they pushed that dissent-silencing agenda in the opposite-day name of “diversity,” twisting the concept into a parody of itself. No, I am a real progressive. I know the importance of heterodoxy, of contagion, for our hygiene. Immigrants, in the wide sense of that term, keep us fresh and on our toes. Too much intrusion, to be sure, might kill us. But we all have seen the retardation effects of too much inbreeding, the autoimmune and allergy issues of not allowing kids to eat dirt at the park on playdates.

I am increasingly drawn to noocracy/epistocracy, the rule of the wise. I might not go so far as giving more voting weight to those who have memorized all the facts of US history and contemporary affairs and geography and all that. That is the sort of approach someone who thinks Jeopardy is a measure of intelligence. I am in favor at least of a more inclusive, culturally-unbiased, and wiser approach: giving more voting weight to those who can demonstrate mastery of basic logic. Imagine a world where logical acumen carries more weight at the ballot box than blind party loyalty. To use an old Socratic analogy, surely we want the masters of navigation to steer the ship, not the oarsman only there to row.

My growing orientation against unrestrained democracy and more toward the Platonic rule by philosopher-kings potentially bumps heads with my advocacy—which will be readily apparent on this site and in my writings—for free speech and artistic expression. However, for several reasons, I think wisdom would dictate protecting the marketplace of ideas. For one, the philosopher-kings are not infallible gods. If they really have the requisite orientation for the position, they will understand the importance of having accessible competing viewpoints—especially ones from the margins, outside their own framework. Second, they will also understand Psychology 101. People are going to get pissed off if you restrict their freedom to express themselves. Silencing invites rebellion. As far as regular people, “bronze souls” in Plato’s terminology, getting their hands on topics and truths that might prove dangerous or unhygienic for them, I imagine the philosopher-kings more likely to gatekeep than ban treatises of philosophy or works of art. Parents (at least the good ones) do not ban a movie because it has violence. Rather they block their children from accessing that movie until the children have proven themselves able to handle it. The philosopher-kings, and I make this point in my essay “An Olive Branch to the Cancelers”, will operate in a similar fashion: protecting while not stifling, and all while laying out milestones and challenges and experiences to nurture maturity.

This modern-day inquisition lit a bigtime fuse. It resulted in a phoenix flourish of creativity, of rage-fueled poetry and open letters. Two meaty books of satire came out of it: "An Unopinionated Introduction to Philosophy" (a textbook set in a dystopian future where the agenda to protect college students from anything unsettling has been honored consistently and thereby taken to its radical extreme) and "White Supremacy on Its Deathbed" (a lyrical jeremiad arguing that the greatest evidence for the lie of white supremacy being at its heyday again, a lie paralleling the Satanic panic of the 80s and the red scare of the 50s, is the various things done in the name of antiracism to “dismantle” it). Given that I place literary output as my central mission, that positive impact—that manna—cannot be underestimated. My run-in with the cancel sheeple in their tartan scarves was also the spur for Safe Space Press. So that was good. When life gives you lemons ferment those fuckers into a kombucha of defiance!

The crucible of cancelation arguably had an even deeper positive effect on me. It hammered home the importance of resilience, of forging one’s path, of standing tall on principles when the condemning world wants you to kneel. Facing ostracism for my beliefs reaffirmed my battle-cry commitment to intellectual freedom. If any part of me had once regarded the pursuit of truth as mere academic exercise, that part was cremated.

Cancel culture also had a specific effect on my art. Before the storm of firings and legal battles, I was a bit tipsy—corny as it is to admit, although Hume’s admission of the same makes it a bit more respectable—on dreams of literary glory. The hardship sobered me up, self-indulgent ambition crumbling under the gravity of a cultural mission. It made me much more concerned about social well-being. It yanked me from the slumber of excessive self-concern, forcing my eyes open to a broader social wellbeing. (That said, I do think that I have dipped too low into the ephemeral muck of the rabble over the last few years. I do want to recalibrate my orientation to my aboriginal North Star: to grappling with the deepest questions of human nature and reality—only now with more of a sense of myself as a worker for humanity.

I can summarize it by saying that I am a Spinozist. What does this mean? Many things. But there are some fundamental aspects. First, nothing can happen that is not natural. In regard to humans, this means we are not exceptions cut off from the organic flow—the flow of everything exerting, in more or less obvious ways, to exert its power. We are not governed by different principles than those that govern electrons and fungus. Second, nothing can happen that was not guaranteed to happen by the past, if there is a past, and ultimately by a base reality that I argue in my professional capacity exists by the necessity of its own nature alone (and so deserves, if anything does, the title “God”). Insofar as we are considering ourselves as effects of this base reality, nothing is ultimately up to any of us. To highlight the ramification of this fact in a broad stroke: no one of us deserves praise or blame for our thoughts or actions any more than a black hole deserves blame for devouring a planetary system. While I do think that praising and blaming have a practical role when it comes to incentivizing and disincentivizing, no one ever technically deserves—independent of any practical considerations—praise or blame.

I do not want to convey the impression, given what I have just said, that I deny human agency. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Goethe, I put primacy on human agency even as I accept that everything we do is ultimately a function of what is in place—temporally or ontologically—before us. My philosophy is centered on the pursuit of individual greatness, the constant questioning of accepted truths, and the embrace of life's challenges as opportunities for growth and self-discovery.

Let me put it this way. Just because everything is determined by what is prior (such that my creating this website was guaranteed to happen before the earth was even formed), that does not mean that there is no point in trying to change things. There is a point in trying to change things even in this deterministic situation. After all, your influence can be one of the factors in bringing about the change. Determinism does not imply that I cannot influence what happens to me or that others cannot influence what happens to me. If someone cuts my finger off, that is an influence on me. If determinism is true, that does not mean that I would have lost a finger no matter what. It simply means that it was guaranteed by the past that I would lose a finger because it was guaranteed that the guy who cut my finger off would cut my finger off. Being a Spinozist does not mean that no matter what goes on—no matter what we do or think, no matter what influences enter into our lives—our futures are fixed. Our futures are instead fixed precisely by what goes on, in which case it does still make sense for us to plan for the future. Even if Spinoza is right that everything that goes on has been set in stone for eternity, that does not mean that you cannot thwart your drive to eat ice cream, that you cannot oppose all the thoughts and cravings pushing you to eat ice cream. It is just that whatever makes the difference to you not eating it—a resolution not to, say, when picturing your diabetic foot getting chopped off—was as much determined as the rest of the factors were. The power to free yourself from being dominated by certain instincts—agency—is compatible with Spinozism. Your resistance to eating the ice cream does not, despite what so many of my students found so difficult to grasp, refute Spinozism.

Nietzsche, Spinoza, Goethe. Their ideas and works have significantly shaped my thinking and approach to philosophy.

Getting a PhD, and doing it the tough way of writing a sustained dissertation that rectifies a misunderstanding common among Spinoza scholars, was pretty big. I came from a city and living situation rife with malnutrition and illiteracy, drugs and despair (even arson). Also, various of my literary projects, especially my magnum opus: "Made for You and Me."

Too many to name. But oddly enough, I just added to my list C. S. Lewis’s epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters. And finally, after putting it off for close to two decades, I have just started reading Dave Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I am drawn to works that challenge conventional wisdom and offer new insights into the human condition. Ancient texts, radical philosophical treatises, and groundbreaking scientific works are of particular interest.

Because of how my mind works, I need to put on blinders. I am one of those types that will grind away at whatever crosses my path. That is why I have long said that to wrench the most out of me, the most ideal situation would have been a wise master directing me to some of the most important problems to grapple with. If I had that, I believe I had the capability—if only because of my head-ramming discipline (rather than native gifts of IQ)—to solve various problems in a wide variety of areas: from engineering to metaphysics, from math to film theory. If there was ever anyone who would have benefited from and appreciated serving as an apprentice to a great master, it would have been me. (And I might add that, perhaps even more so, it would have been Dave Wallace. His mind roves everywhere and needs to capture infinitesimal detail, which is why we get pages and pages of description of the tunnels of the Enfield tennis academy or of the seemingly irrelevant sweat-bead-path minutia of a tennis match. Imagine if a master directed a megawatt mind like that, constrained it a bit more tightly to the “major” questions? But of course the rub of being a human who goes for greatness is that you have to let so many doors close. So there is always going to be a sacrifice where a person such as myself could say, just imagine if. . . . I do let that check some of my feelings here. But anyways. . . .) Since I lack such a master (aside from the dead writers whose spirits whisper on my shoulder), I have to be on guard against casting my eyes too widely. Once I set my sights on something, even if beneath me (so to say), I will grind away at it. I am like a machine. My discipline—perhaps my chief asset—can easily turn into a hindrance. It has me stay in unfavorable or time-wasting situations that others with less discipline to stick with something would have abandoned much sooner.

I need to start sending writings out for journal publication again. I have been slacking on that over the last few years. The urge to write takes up so much of my time it is hard to find time for self-promotion. Self-promotion does have some importance, however. Who would find my work otherwise. I would write even if alone forever on a desert island, yes. But I do feel it is important for me to have readers. (If we stripped the desert-island me of any hope that someone would find my writings, I might at least be less inclined to write—although I do think it is such a compulsion now that I would regardless, at least until other task gradually shouldered it out.)

This website has been my attempt to devote a bit more time to self-promotion. Emily Dickinson is someone whose life I largely mirror. Like her live a secluded (outwardly uninteresting) life. Routine is important for me, as it was with her. It serves as the steady drumbeat against which I can create a jazz—a difficult but accessible poetry—much more avant-garde than one would think just looking at my life.

Caffeine is one, at an extremely local level. Desire to prove myself, especially to my home city (abstractly) and my son (concretely), in the face of my upbringing seems a good candidate too. I like to say that the realization that all my actions shape the very look of an all-perfect base reality (a position that I defend in both creative and academic writing) is a big one. However, the biggest motivating force is likely much more mundane and stereotypical: to distract myself from the reality of my mortality. My pursuit of truth, the potential for human greatness, and the beauty of intellectual discovery motivate and inspire me—all that might very well be explained by that if people like Ernest Becker are right.