11 was my number long before it was my episode number...

This one starts at the Lexington Truck & Tractor Pull with a few questions from an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while:

What’s the plan? What do you enjoy? What do you actually want to do?

For maybe the first time in my life, I just said, “I don’t know.”

And I meant it. So this episode is me sitting in that answer.

Professional limbo. Financial insecurity. Bankruptcy. Walking away from a job that was about to pay me more than I’d ever made. Watching childhood friends build businesses and families while I’m still trying to figure out what I’m building. Being a caretaker who has always found it easier to take care of everybody else than himself.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that: Interstellar, Stutz, eight hours with my mom, the cost of work, the value of time, and the uncomfortable realization that the more I learn, the less certain I seem to become.

No answers on this one. Just a lot of questions.

Thanks for letting me come thru your speakers again!

Podscraps is the show inside the show... A collection of things I find that make me stop, think, feel, or look at something a little differently.

Fresh off finishing Project Hail Mary, this one became a collection of thoughts about the strange little experience of being human.

James McCrae’s Instructions Before Visiting Earth. Duncan Trussell and his mother talking about people appearing and disappearing. Alan Watts on letting people leave. Joaquin Phoenix reading Star Child. Timothée Chalamet reading Charles Bukowski.

Different scraps circling the same things: arriving, connecting, loving, losing, letting go, wondering, and figuring out what to do with whatever time we get in the middle.

We get a turn.

This is about while we’re here.

Question. Feel. Reach.

A kid from Lexington went to Huntsville looking for opportunity. Ten years later, he left looking for peace.

In this solo episode, I trace the jobs, relationships, mistakes, ambition and insecurity that kept pulling me back to Huntsville. I also wrestle with the city itself: its growth, its manufactured sense of community, its relationship with status and security, and the complicated history beneath the Rocket City story.

This is not a definitive account of Huntsville. It is my account of what the city gave me, what it rewarded in me and why I finally realized the life I had spent years building was no longer the life I wanted.

There is a sun. There is a moon. Two things can be true at once.