Monthly Archives: September 2026

A House Is Not a Motel: On Endurance, Belonging and What Comes After Survival

The problem is not that endurance failed. The problem is that it worked. I can teach students how to be successful. I cannot, apparently, teach them how to be happy. The same system produced a career, a large house, freedom, and children strong enough to leave. What it cannot manufacture is home, because home requires another free person, and another free person cannot be built. This is an essay about what comes after survival, when getting up was supposed to be the beginning of something, and turned out to be the thing I knew how to do.

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Tears in Rain: Love, Loss, Memory and the Reality of Things That End

Endings have a habit of travelling backwards. If someone does not want me now, perhaps they never did; if something lasted a week, perhaps it was nothing. I don’t think the final chapter has that authority. People change, futures collapse, witnesses die, and memory edits without asking. None of that can make Wednesday cease to have occurred. Permanence is not the test of reality. Small is not the same word as false. A thing can disappear completely and still have happened.

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And This Is Sid: Witness as Co-Authorship

Call Me Womble said I am the baker, and my life is the bread. Then Ian pointed out the obvious problem: there are other people in the bakery. This is an essay about my friend Dave, who stole my stories, helped produce them, blamed me when he died, and kept editing afterwards. Personality happens between people. Being seen is not a passive event. Usefulness asks what I can do for you; witness asks whether I am here. We make one another. We do not own one another.

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Call Me Womble: Art as Life, Life as Art and the Individual as Artist

There is no archaeological Wayne waiting under the sediment. I make the work, the work makes me, and I have never seen a good reason to keep those jobs in separate rooms. This is an essay about selfhood as a practice rather than a possession: life as material, the individual as artist, and why “find yourself” is looking in the wrong direction. Identity is not recovered. It is made through thought, action, contradiction, failure, and a kind of individuality that does not ask the category what to do next.

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From Troy to Rome: How The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid Fit Together

The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid are not a trilogy, but together they form an extraordinary narrative arc from the Trojan War to the legendary origins of Rome. Achilles embodies the tragedy of war, Odysseus the struggle to return home, and Aeneas the search for a new one. Following their stories reveals how Virgil inherited, reworked, and ultimately Romanised Homer’s world.

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