Welcome to Writer's Brain!
We'll get to my first essay, entitled 'The Dichotomy Of Imagination', after these messages.
Hello to the paragons of humanity,
Yes, if you’re reading this, you have topped out as one of the coolest mofos in the history of the planet because you’re generously donating your time to take a look inside my brain.
Seriously, I couldn’t be more grateful.
Entering my second calendar year as a full-time freelance journalist and writer, I oh so modestly realize that the amaranthine flow of words from my brain might actually be worth reading.
And now I have a forum to share them all free of restriction and oversight.
Even as I type that last sentence I feel a jolt of fear. Throughout my entire life I’ve been called abrasive, told I’ve had a big mouth, been labeled as “too much,” and been blocked on social media by famous DJs like Calvin Harris (real example).
But I realize, in all of these situations, the undesirable result has come from my speaking my mind (in hindsight the result wasn’t always undesirable either), from sharing the words that come from my brain.
I started writing in the first place because I recognized that writing actually is nothing more than taking the words from my brain and putting them on the page or in the word processing program.
Now that’s how I make my living. To say I’m grateful for that is an understatement, and honestly, it’s inaccurate. The more accurate word is flummoxed. As in, "How the fuck is this actually how I earn an income?” (Yeah expect tons of profanity in this newsletter as well).
The day may never come where I actually answer that question. I’m not really concerned with that. But when the day comes that the words stop flowing is literally the day I die.
Until then, when I’d like to share some of those words without going through the pitching and editing process, this is where those words will land.
Expect essays about cerebral concepts, listicles about music festivals, collections of poorly written poems (they’re getting better I swear), deep dives into my own relationship with spirituality and the higher power.
All in all, these writings are more reflections of how I think than anything, and the fact that anyone is taking the time to engage with those reflections, it’s another “How the fuck?” situation. But even if I don’t figure out that one, I’ll always be grateful.
I am grateful to you, but I also need to give a specific shout of gratitude to the lovely Kat Bein.
Kat gave me so much help in learning how to work with Substack and also gave me so much inspiration in starting my own newsletter after seeing how honest she is in writing her own.
Kat if you’re reading this, thank you so so so much. And for everyone else, I’m going to drop all her links below. Please subscribe to her YouTube page (where she posts her awesome festival vlogs and her interview program ‘Kat Calls’), subscribe to her newsletter, Kat Scrawls, and follow her on socials for even moar great stuff.
Kat Bein Links:
Now on to my first actual essay for Writer’s Brain. As you can see it took me a bit of time to get here, which is apposite because my brain is hella into rambling. So expect even more and more and more of that in the future of this space.
After this edition, there will be a section at the bottom dedicated to the new music I found between newsletters, but the intro took over that for the launch, and now I can build suspense for all the fire you’re going to get with the next one (and yes, these music recs will seriously be so fire it will put Taco Bell’s sauce to shame).
‘The Dichotomy Of Imagination’
What goes beyond the infinite?
Imagination is the power of the divine, and only human beings have this power.
We’re the only ones with an endless source of ideas, contrivances, and predictions that we can manipulate as we see fit, whenever we want, as a part of our natural biology.
Furthermore, we can actually put that power into action. Basically every product of human civilization, from super-charged muscle cars and 1000-thread-count bed sheets to movies that gross over $1 billion and the books those movies are based on, to skyscrapers that live up to their namesake and a new recipe for a cheeseburger that somehow tastes better than all the other cheeseburgers, they all started out in someone’s head. It was only imagined and then it became real.
Throughout my entire life, I always felt I properly appreciated this blessing from the higher power. I was the kid who spent his youth playing make-believe. Pretending I was Jedi, a pro snowboarder, a zombie hunter.
I can’t tell you how many different forms my backyard took over the years. Someone else would go outside and see a humble lawn with a few trees and a swing set. I would see a canvas upon which I could project my wildest dreams.
Now at the age of 30, I’m making a living off of imagination. I’ve said for years that writing is basically just thinking. Thinking about ideas and then expressing them. Pretty much the fundamental function of imagination.
Pulling something, anything, out of the endless void of the subconscious and bringing it into the world.
Turning nothing into something.
It’s a divine process. Not so different from the creation of the universe. There was nothing. Now there’s something. Clearly, you can see this idea makes me very excited. We have infinite power, and by definition, nothing can go beyond the infinite.
Or so I thought. Turns out, there is something beyond imagination…
“You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”
That’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Darth Vader in probably the most immediate application of foreshadowing in the history of film. Just a few seconds later, Darth Vader does indeed strike down Obi-Wan, but how exactly does he become more powerful?
I’m not writing a newsletter (at least not this one) to dissect what Obi-Wan meant in that moment. This newsletter is about imagination, which is supposed to be endless and infinite. So how can something go beyond what’s already endless and infinite?
Other than the fact that I make my living off of my imagination, and other than the other fact that I spent more time in imaginary worlds as a kid than in the real one, I could always imagine myself doing pretty much anything.
I could imagine myself flying through the air like Superman, dodging bullets like Neo, casting spells like Dumbledore.
Now as an adult, I can imagine myself achieving my most sought-after goals.
Spending the day in New York City with St. Vincent; interviewing her as she takes me around her favorite street corners that inspired her latest album for a 20,000-word cover story.
Some would describe the type of imagination in the previous paragraph as “visualization,” picturing your goals before they happen as a means of making them happen. Starting in your head and then bringing them to reality.
And let me tell you, visualization works.
So what am I missing? If I can imagine wild scenarios as well as my own goals which have later come true, what’s beyond that?
To answer that question you’ll have to follow me across the pond to London. To keep a long story (that I’ve probably told to most of you reading this already) short, I traveled to London for an indefinite period of time after living basically my entire life in Los Angeles.
Not just in Los Angeles. Pretty much all of it was spent in the same room, in my parents' house, in the plain suburb of Burbank, less than a mile from the hospital where I was born.
I spent that time doing mostly the same things (playing video games, smoking weed, drinking beer, going to gigs) with the same people. Day in and day out.
Yes it was cyclical, and at times tumultuous, but the kind of opportunities, and frankly, the kind of safety I enjoyed…it’s all any kid could want.
And yet despite this truth (that I only fully recognize in hindsight) for which my gratitude is unending, living in the same, repeating circumstances is, in fact, what defined my inability to understand the idea of going beyond the imagination.
Because imagination is not only a divine power, it’s a sensory experience.
Remember a couple of hundred words ago when I said our imaginations are limitless? Well, a more accurate statement would be imagination has the potential to be limitless.
That potential depends on an individual’s willingness to remove the limits from themselves. By doing so they expose their senses to new forms of stimulation.
Without that willingness, imagination is the perimeter keeping people within the boundaries of their past. For some that perimeter is solid. Impenetrable, nothing to see beyond it.
To go even further, for some that perimeter can cover the sky, too. Blocking any forms of light. Leaving the imagination to fester in what’s come before with no chance of seeing what could be beyond.
For many others, the perimeter is a chainlink fence. The world that lies beyond is there. Waiting. Unfortunately, climbing the fence is dangerous, but until the climb happens, all that’s left is what’s come before.
See, when someone closes their eyes and imagines a scenario, everything happening in that scenario is a sum of different sensory recollections pasted together from different memories.
Memory works like an imperfect hard drive in a computer. Human beings experience the world through their senses, and everything that activates our senses—everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—gets recorded in our brains.
Imperfect because everyone forgets tons of stuff, but they also remember a lot, too. And even if they don’t remember something to where they can access it at will, a tiny detail can remind them of an experience and suddenly the entire memory is fully formed.
All that knowledge that’s stored in our brains. That is what creates the foundation of our imagination. People can then piece together segments of those memories in new ways, and that becomes the fantasy.
As a kid, I could imagine myself as a pro snowboarder because I would spend like eight hours a day playing SSX Tricky on my Gamecube. The images associated with doing a Banzai 1260 were clear. I just needed to imagine myself doing it instead of Eddie (the name of the hippie character with the ginger afro).
I could imagine myself battling through a zombie apocalypse because I had seen Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead far too many times for a kid my age. The images of exploding undead limbs are still so clear I have to wipe spectral blood off my face.
The same applies to visualizing goals. I can imagine myself interviewing St. Vincent because I know what she looks like and after conducting hundreds of interviews myself, I can imagine her sitting across from me as I ask her what it was like to travel through time when she was writing Daddy’s Home.
What I can’t imagine in that scenario, is how she would answer my question. What she would actually say.
And, well, lo and behold, that’s what actually makes the interview worth pursuing.
It’s what also makes the interview terrifying.
She could answer with a series of words that unlocks the key to why her music has guided me to more insight and connection with myself and the world around me than any other artist in history.
She could also scoff, look at me with a confused leer, and explain why my impression was entirely off base.
Perhaps I could theoretically imagine what she would say in either of those scenarios, but what I couldn’t imagine, what no one can, is how her answers would make me feel.
That’s what lies beyond our imagination, the feeling.
And well, that feeling…it’s the best.
And the worst.
That sounds so corny and lame that it’s embarrassing. Just as J. J. Abrams employing it as a connective theme in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker was so embarrassing. The fucking banality of it all.
But J.J. and I now know that the feeling really is everything.
Our deepest desires are beyond what we can imagine. Just like our deepest fears. Everything we want to experience and everything we don’t want to experience. And so often those two ideas are one and the same.
We want to go after our dream job, but we don’t want to fail at our dream job. We want to move to a new city, but we don’t want to undertake the task of building a new life.
Both sides provide the potential for the feeling, and while one is terrifying, what I now realize after traveling to another part of the world, is that staying within the confines of imagination is more terrifying.
Sure there is always some amount of unpredictability in the day-to-day, but spending practically my entire life in the same place doing the same things with the same people, my senses were being activated in the exact same ways.
Just like all the tv shows I would binge over and over and over. Maybe I notice a tiny new detail in one episode on the 12th full run-through of Scrubs, but it’s still the same show, and I’m still watching it.
What’s worse is that I was slowly but surely realizing that the fantasies I was piecing together were the same, too. I was losing touch with the divine power I had relished so much as a kid.
Life was becoming smaller and smaller as I got older, and all I could think to do was immerse myself in a new environment; a new environment called London.
When I left LA to go to London, I didn’t really know why. I knew I wanted to experience life somewhere else. I knew I was going to go to hella gigs. I knew I was going to continue being a journalist.
What I know now is I went for the feeling.
The sensory experience of London isn’t vastly different from LA or any big city, really. Lots of cars. Lots of buildings. Lots of people. Doing lots of things.
But the similarities didn’t matter nearly as much as the differences. As my brain overflowed with new sensory experiences, I found similar experiences to feel different.
Even though it had happened before, it was like it never happened before.
On my third week in London, I took the 90-minute bus ride over to the birthplace of Radiohead (Oxford) to see St. Vincent (I’m gonna be bringing her up a lot in these newsletters, soz) and as I was waiting in line to get in, I met a group of people who, like me, had made the venture on their own.
Not only did we all become friends, but we were representing five different countries: America, Saudi Arabia, Portugal, England, and Ireland (technically six if you count Poland, but we’re gonna leave Poland off cuz trauma ya dig? Lolz).
Telling that story, it doesn’t sound too noteworthy. Friendships are a natural result of live music events, and the different countries part is a cool little cherry on top.
The aspect of the story that can’t be “told” is the feeling I got from that experience. Being entirely alone in a foreign country, and then suddenly my favorite artist who isn’t dead (like Zeppelin and The Doors) or ascended to god status (like Radiohead and Gorillaz) connects me with an entire group of people spread out all across Europe.
I now have a network of amazing people that stretches all over the continent, and some of the people in that line became my best friends.
That story is of the senses. I tell someone the story they picture what it’s like to meet someone new when waiting in line for a gig and then partying with them at the gig.
No matter how many words I orated or which combination I orated those words, it would never communicate the feeling of me being there. All those words could do is act as triggers for sensory memories.
The feeling is beyond the senses, beyond the imagination.
We can’t imagine how new experiences will make us feel. If we could, then no one would do anything ever. What would be the point?
That’s one of the core tenants of Inception. If we could just hook up ourselves to a dream machine where our greatest fantasies felt real, we would never leave, and we see people doing that in the movie.
The feelings from these new experiences are what make life worth living, and there is no shortcut to finding them.
In order to have the feeling of getting something we really want, we have to go outside of our imagination which means we have to risk losing something we really want.
Going beyond the imagination is going into the unknown, going off the map, where the King of Red Lions tells you it’s just too dangerous to continue (10 points to anyone who gets that reference).
When you’re in the unknown, that’s when you tap into the true divine power of humanity because the unknown, that’s what’s actually endless. That’s the nothing from which human beings can create something.
The super-charged muscle cars and 1000-thread-count bed sheets to movies that gross over $1 billion and the books those movies are based on, to skyscrapers that live up to their namesake and a new recipe for a cheeseburger that somehow tastes better than all the other cheeseburgers.
Anyone can imagine those things. Few can actually create them, and only the creator knows the feeling of making that something out of nothing.
It takes time. It takes work. It takes fear. But that feeling…oh that feeling makes it all worth it. And the only way to get that feeling is to make it happen.