How Did I Get Here?

What's Happening at The Thinking Log

I feel I owe you an explanation. What am I doing here? But, to be honest, the question is more fairly, “how did I get here?” It’s a weird story.

Before I get to that though, I want you to know that The Thinking Log is intended to be a place for experimental writing. I’ve created this space to develop a sort of essayistic storytelling focused on places, the people that occupy them, and their intertwining histories. Hell, there will probably be a little psycho-drama. I wrote half a dissertation on Faulkner after all. There’ll be long sentences sometimes.

But, more to the point, I wanted a platform that would let me play around with long-form projects that weren’t quite books, but also outstripped the formats that understandably dominate popular literary journals. I also thought Substack would be a good platform to bring back something of the old weekly serial, combined with an essay form that could approach aphorism in its ability to present both short, self-contained bursts, and connect them thematically to form a larger whole.

These formal considerations explain, in part, why the first project is conceived as a travelogue documenting a journey home after a long absence. Journeys, road trips, can be episodic. You move from point A to point B in relatively discrete segments that can be given place names and parceled out in time. Thirty-six hours to Cumberland. But a lifetime really.

I’m a philosopher by training. Some of you will already know I have a PhD in philosophy and literature, and you might even know I earned it at Purdue University. Boiler Up! I liked my time in graduate school and the idea I have of what philosophy can be is inseparable from this project. This is, at its core, a philosophy thing.

But that whole “literature” thing is hanging out there too, you know? And some of my favorite philosophers are also innovative prose stylists. Likewise, some of my favorite novelists are prone to philosophizing. There’s something, too, that’s fascinating to me about philosophy as a practice of writing. I was always, and am still, getting into trouble among academics for doing whatever the hell this is. I hope you’ll bear with me, though.

To make a pedantic point, the title is a double entendre. It’s literally a log where you think, a fallen tree, as I’ve already posted, but it’s also a log of thoughts, like a journal or a travel-log. Captain’s log, Year of Our Lord, 2021. Not that I’m religious. But the whole thing does have an air of mystery about it.

This is because I wanted to try something different.

I just finished a manuscript, a novel, written about my childhood in the year my parents divorced. This Substack is really a direct extension of that project, explicitly confronting the philosophical dimension of my writing there by leaning into its essayistic elements. Both projects will remain ongoing.

So, naturally, the writing here will be a lot about the places we’re from, how they shape us, how we shape them, how our histories intertwine. There will be a journalistic quality, a sort of reporting about places and the people in them, and also about the state of things. We are, all of us, particular, but living our particularity through an ultimate situation that is shared by everyone. Connected by this fever-dream of the sum total, we are, each of us, universalized by the movement of history, of which we are a part. History, in turn, is particularized in each of our unique situations, the totality of the parts reflected in their relation to us, the past always existing in perpetual re-inscription through new relations to an ever emerging present.

Then, there will be that philosophy stuff.

Sometimes, though, I’ll just want to sit by the creek with a beer. The sun through the trees, reflected in a thousand rings across the water, lazily disturbed by the occasional flop of a fish somewhere in a pool in a bend among the rocks. These are the good times, and times for reflection. Even when we get away, there we still are. It helps to remember the obvious sometimes.

I got my start, journalistic-wise, when I was 17 writing about local World War II veterans as part of an award winning oral history project at Allegany High School. Last year, I started writing a column on art and philosophy for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. Part of what I’m trying to do here is connect those dots, to figure out how we go from point A to point B in a relatively short life.

This project is also a reckoning. Though I retain some connection to academia through my Associate Editorship at Analecta Hermeneutica, the peer-reviewed journal of the International Institute for Hermeneutics, and I was recently invited to teach an eight-week course for Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, I have been recently forced to face the reality that I may not have a place in the academy.

Increasingly, my philosophical output is driven by writing for places like Erraticus and The Philosopher, and by events I help organize with Filo Sofi Arts, where I serve as the Director of Philosophical Praxis. I’ve also become involved with a great non-profit, The Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation, out of Philadelphia, one of my old stomping-grounds.

I guess there will be some tea spilt about the state of higher education. But none of this culture war bullshit. I’m so sick of culture war bullshit.

Which is not to say there won’t be any politics. I got some politics. I know which side I’m on.

What I’m trying to say is — I want to prepare you. I don’t know what I’m preparing you for, but this is your warning and your invitation. I hope you’ll take this journey with me and see just where the hell we end up.

I hope you’ll let me know what you’re thinking and feeling about these pieces, too. I hope as we grow together, there will be a space for some collaborative efforts. I am, I know, a perpetual student. Let other people know if you find yourself at home here. There’s room enough for everyone.