Writing samples that explore the expansion and condensation of ideas, serving both as a pseudo-diary of my internal thoughts and as a statement of external curiosity.

On exploring atmospheres in 6 (or 7) words, an extension of the Ernest Hemingway exercise.

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... iridescent clouds over a sapphire sea...

... like old leather and stale cigarettes...

... for sunny days and white wine...

... peeling layers of skin and glue...

... in the red glow of taillights...

... the subtle aromas of earthen musk...

... with garish greens and languid yellows...

... wander like ghosts along littered walkways...

... curtains that soften the morning sunlight...

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On an Ohio State Football game, and in particular one moment against Oregon in 2021.

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... a thunderous stampede of O's and H's and I's and O's, circling the stadium like a pack of predators surrounding its prey. A whistle blown. A timeout taken. The stadium, already deafening, gets louder. How? I do not know. The entire world is vibrating, frozen in time in this cacophony of unrelenting noise. Scarlet bleeds from every section, only stalled by walls of solid grey....

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On Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).

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It's so raw. Archaic and futuristic. Glittering with grit and grime. Basic and mythic. Primordial is the word. Rough around the edges, but filled with so much passion and wonder and charm. I would give my left hand to go back in time to 1977 and watch this without any context. Without the grand story that follows, the lore and fandom and the inherent attachment I've had to this franchise since I was 4 years old. To go back and see it as just another movie in the summer of 1977. I probably would have imploded... like the Death Star. The first half is far better, but you can't deny the unparalleled spectacle of the second (if you were in 1977, of course).

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On closing a good book.

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There is a profound sense of silence when you finish a book - unless you're sitting in Grand Metro Station, or reading on a bench in a busy park, or if there are people in the room next to you - when you have learned everything you needed to learn and read everything you needed to read. Bound between two covers are a couple hundred pages that contain the sum of all an author has written on a subject, or a character, or a world yet unexplored. There are secrets in those pages, voices in those words.

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And a part of you may just think that this book has sat on this dusty bookshelf waiting for you to pick it up and flip through the pages one by one until there's no more flipping of the pages to do. It may seem, in that moment when your eyes trail off into the empty white space that follows the book's final word, that you are the first person to meet these characters, listen to their conflicts, and join them in their resolutions. As if this book has waited for you and you alone. It may seem, as you put that book back on that shelf, that this story is real, in another time, in another place, in another world now explored.

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There is pleasure to be found in reading these types of books, with stories and characters so fully realized; stories told by different authors with different voices for different purposes. Yet, in each of these books - some with pages aged to yellow and nearly torn in two - there is a thread that connects them and binds them together. That thread is you, or me, or your granddad who originally put the book on that dusty bookshelf. In short, the reader.

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It is a wonderful thing... an unopened book. And so is the silence that follows it.​​