Reader of Murakami, graph theory, the occasional Oulipo constraint.
Writing the debut novel THE LOOP LINE — nine strangers, one loop, releasing Oct 19, 2026.
Since you are looking for controversy, let me wade into one.
1. Extractive Foundations: Colonial systems were built to extract wealth, leaving behind a bureaucratic nightmare. Rebuilding civil and economic infrastructure from scratch takes decades just to reach baseline stability.
2. Weaponized Division: "Divide and rule" wasn't an accident. Colonizers deliberately institutionalized splits across caste, creed, religion, and gender to ensure post-colonial states remained too internally fractured to unite or prosper.
3. Intergenerational Trauma: Decades or centuries of subjugation break down civic trust and social cohesion. Healing that deep-seated psychological and cultural damage takes generations—it doesn't vanish the day a flag changes.
@DrDavidVernon Perec and Calvino, along with others, were a great inspiration for my debut novel, they were master craftsmen, the likes of which are not easily reproducible. I realized that we can only take the inspiration, not become one.
@dommenrod Thank you, dear friend!
Your kind words are deeply appreciated.
May your Sundays be filled with peace and happiness, and just as much on you weekdays too.
Sending a fraternal hug right back to you!
The Day After His Birthday
I'm writing this the morning after T.S. Eliot's birthday. He would have turned 138 yesterday, September 26th, and for a few hours my timeline was full of people quoting "April is the cruelest month" like a benediction. I didn't post anything. I was sitting with something closer to disappointment, and it felt strange to bring that up on the day everyone else was celebrating. So I waited until today, and I'm still not sure that makes it better. There's something a little uncomfortable about admitting you've fallen out of step with someone's work the day after the rest of the internet finished toasting him.
Here's what I actually feel, once the discomfort clears. Eliot's command of language isn't in question. Nobody who has read The Waste Land out loud, even badly, can pretend the rhythm doesn't do something to you. What I've come to feel, slowly, over a lot of rereading, is disappointment that all of that skill was built into something so hard to actually live inside. I don't think Eliot wrote for people. I think he wrote for an archive, and I happened to fall in love with the archive before I noticed it wasn't built for me.
The Waste Land is the clearest example. It reads less like an open room where anyone's grief could walk in, and more like a private library where you need the right credentials at the door. To really feel what a line is doing, you're expected to already know your Dante, your Webster and Middleton, your Augustine, your Upanishads. (Not Anglican theology, for what it's worth. He wouldn't formally join the Church of England until 1927, five years after this poem. What actually haunts The Waste Land is Augustine's Confessions sitting uneasily next to the Buddha's Fire Sermon. But the general shape of the complaint holds. It's a poem that assumes a syllabus.) When a poet needs pages of his own footnotes to hand you the floor plan of a poem, something has shifted. I don't think it's malicious. I think it's just what happens when you write toward your own erudition instead of toward a reader.
He had a theory for this, of course. The "escape from personality," poetry as something colder and more architectural than confession. I understand the theory. I think I even agree with parts of it. But I keep noticing what it costs. Grief, the ache of a dying city, whatever spiritual hunger runs underneath those five sections, all of it gets filtered through so many borrowed voices that by the time it reaches you, you're not feeling it so much as decoding it. I don't want to consult a glossary to know that a poem is sad. That's not a flaw I can argue him out of. It's just the thing that keeps me at arm's length.
So no, this isn't a takedown. I don't think Eliot failed. I think he built something extraordinary and then, deliberately, made it hard to get inside. The castle is real. The stonework is real. I just wish, on the day after his birthday, that he'd left a door open somewhere for the rest of us.
@TheAtlantic I suppose the question is whether we should question the new age digital media or the latching mechanism of the mind, a point to think about.
@inspiringmyday An accurate depiction of how life treats you in unexpected ways, pulling the rug underneath without giving you the inkling until the ground hits your back.