While Human Voices Wake Us is still on hiatus, I wanted to play this episode from the archive, to celebrate the official release of my book of essays, Notes from the Grid. 

Get your copy here.

Tonight's episode is a reading of the last essay in the book, "All Its Ways." You can hear the other episodes from the book, that I recorded last summer, here.

If this episode speaks to you in any way, please consider buying the book, or sharing it with anyone who might be interested. I’ve never put more of myself into anything, even my poetry. I doubt that writing a hundred pages will ever take so long again, or contain so much.

I started the book back in 2006, sitting at a Kinko’s in Corona, California. It has followed me everywhere since then, into the world of marriage and fatherhood, from Ohio to Brooklyn and now to Pittsburgh, and from the strange land of my mid-twenties and into my forties. I can hardly believe it's done.

Here are only a few of the questions the book asks:

What if we rediscovered our own privacy, our own hidden life, a place where our opinions and ideas didn’t need to be constantly proclaimed, seen, and approved?

What if we understood that the only real problem is meaning, and where we choose to find it or create it?

What if we sensed that none of our categories or attempts at identity can completely represent or explain us? What if we accepted our own complexity?

What if we were taught that the world cannot be perfected, that irregularity cannot be overcome, that ambiguity cannot be ironed out? What if we found ways to live in a difficult and uncertain world, instead of being overwhelmed by its imperfections?

What if we reconsidered what all of this could mean for how we live with culture and religion, education and technology, and how we view the past and live in the present?

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