I’m finishing a short story collection called Open Windows: of Worlds and Men. It’s deep and true and, at times, even beautiful.

Right now, it’s sitting on an editor’s desk with an amazing publisher. I can’t say who just yet, but as soon as I get the green light, this Substack is where I’ll let everyone know.

In the meantime, I’ll be sharing updates, early excerpts, and behind-the-scenes reflections here first.

Supporters also get access to my other work—essays, stories, memories, and more.

If “Homecoming” hit you, or if you just want to see where this all goes, subscribe below so I can reach out directly. You’ll be the first to know when the book officially finds its home.

—C.B.

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P.S.—here’s a little bonus flash fiction just for you:

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(TLDR: Let me know what you want to see more of down below)

Dear Reader,

I’ve been working hard—really hard—on more projects than is probably good for me, but I don’t know what else to do with my hands.

I had two new essays just picked up by County Highway: one is about fishing for critters in the woods of North Dakota using glow sticks and is called “Fish On”. The other is about my time finishing concrete in Kentucky summers and the lessons I learned about family and about a life worth giving to my wife and sons. It’s called “Something Solid”.

I’ve got an interview that I did with Devon Eriksen (author of the breakout novel Theft of Fire) being run in the fall issue of Man’s World Magazine next month.

I finalized a short story collection (called Open Windows) that’s currently with two publishers. Hopefully it’s not too damned weird for them. It might be. It’s a journey through lots of different genres that I think reasonably coheres. I’ve been wrong before, though.

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The following is a rewritten version of a piece that originally appeared in Foundation Father, a wonderful publication about raising children and being a worthy husband. I hope you enjoy.

My son bellows defiance at the sea.

I watch green glass waters shatter atop him and melt into a rumbling foam carpet that pulls him along the smooth sand floor. He rolls like a rag doll for a distance, little limbs caught in the spin cycle of some great oceanic washing machine.

Then the waters retreat, and he’s back on his feet again, yelling louder than before at waves that hiss defeat. I’m unsure if he knows they’ve only gone for but a moment—sliding out just long enough to gather reinforcements and pummel the beach anew—and him along with it. I’m not sure he’d care if he were aware. This is the arrogance of young and wild men, and it is a thing of great beauty.

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The following is an edited version of a heavily satirical essay originally published in Man’s World Magazine (Issue 15). It’s not fiction, though it sometimes feels like it. It’s about California, school libraries, two-spirits, pink bicycles, and how I went from a plugged-in, well-meaning suburban dad… to a radical. Or at least, that’s what they’re calling guys like me these days.

I have a confession to make. I may have been radicalized.

I say “may” because I’m not sure how that works exactly. Is there an indicator that goes on, like a check engine light or something? Is there a smell, perhaps? Maybe there’s a device that, when placed on my head like the Harry Potter sorting hat, will shout out something like, “FAR-RIGHT!!” instead of “GRYFFINDOR!!”?

(Let’s be honest, I hold an equal chance of making it into Slytherin house, though—perhaps the best men do.)

If I was in fact radicalized, it somehow wasn’t the direct result of studying psychology in university, though that will wear the sanity and sensibilities of any masculine man down to their nerve endings. No, it was likely due to a series of events that took place in the fall of 2023 when disillusionments fell like dominoes—one after the other—knocking into one another and knocking me firmly off my perch on that little cliffside labeled “everything is fine.”

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I spent ten years in the Navy. Somehow, I managed to be homeported in California for the entirety of my career. My first tour was in Coronado, where I deployed to jungle and desert environments alike. My second tour was in Ventura, where I deployed mostly to remote islands in the Pacific to work on underwater missile ranges and subsea surveillance systems. My last tour was in Northern California, training candidates for accession into various special programs. This is where we stayed when I got out.

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I was being swallowed up by a place that was supposed to be familiar. I watched as dilapidated buildings slid over my windshield like crooked teeth in a mouth full of hate. Shotgun houses—with siding that curled and porch awnings that pitched and slanted like the grins of idiots—watched me make my way down the lane in my little rental car. Ditches that I’d always thought of as too deep for such a narrow street flanked me on either side.

Memories of swimming and splashing in them with the other poor kids bubbled up from the deeper parts of my mind. Summer rains would flood the storm drains with water like chocolate milk and we’d try not to get sucked into the culverts. We’d emerge from the muddy water, into the overcast heat, peppered with leeches whose anesthetic mouths kept us clueless while they planted razored kisses all over our sunburned bodies.

For better or worse, this street was home. At least, it had been. Over the years, I’d managed to run far from it in just about every way that could matter. I’d kept off the drugs—the hard ones that bloom sores across sunken cheeks and lead to shrunken teeth like the withered smiles of jack-o-lanterns left too long in a Kentucky sun. I’d managed to stay out of jail and prison—an anomaly in my family and neighborhood. I had even, through joining the military, escaped the type of crushing poverty that sits heavily on people’s chests, making it hard to breathe. I’d felt that feeling before, but never quite understood it. The air was free, after all. It was having a dream that would cost you.

I got the call by way of a text message, the one we’re all destined to get, provided we live long enough to answer the phone: Last chance to say goodbye. She’s going down fast. I didn’t want to say goodbye, though. I didn’t want to come back to this place, return to a world that I’d managed to claw myself out of—not because I was ashamed. The time for shame over such things had long since passed in my life. It’s just that, to me, it’s always been better to look forward rather than to dwell on the past—to focus on what could still yet be instead of stirring up all the things that have already gone by.

DOUBLE-WIDE DREAMS:

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The first time I heard the phrase white flight was during a gen-ed course on American History. The kind but dusty old professor tossed the word out there in passing like we were all supposed to know what it meant. Then he clicked to the next slide, and he rambled on. I’d only recently begun attending college, after a decade spent in the U.S. Navy, and I sat surrounded by mostly twenty-somethings who nodded along in understanding. I didn’t understand the phrase, though. In fact, I’m confident I had never heard it up until that point. So, I raised my hand and asked the professor what it meant.

He explained to me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, white families fled the cities to get away from black and brown folks. Then, he clicked for the next slide and rumbled along like an old locomotive cutting a familiar track. Meanwhile, I was thrown into the past, my imagination grinding its gears until I was back in the only place I recall my family ever managing to escape.

It was a single-wide in a run-down trailer park, choked with overgrown weeds and crisscrossed by underwhelming gravel thoroughfares. I remember feeling relief when we said goodbye to that tin-walled tumbleweed, mainly at the prospect of no longer having to flee it each time a tornado siren would scream down the county road. Aside from that feeling, I have only two other memories of that haggard place: when the manager of the mobile home park gave me a concussion, and that time I burned my rear end getting out of a cold bath.

You can be forgiven for not knowing that mobile homes aren’t renowned for their heat retention properties. In the wintertime, in ours, you could damn near see your breath. There was no central heat, and we didn’t have the funds for such luxuries as everyone having their own individual warm bath. On a day when it was my turn to go last, the water was already frigid by the time I got undressed. My mother brought in an ancient box heater and set it as close to the bathtub as the electrical-taped cord could manage. The thing buzzed like a crate of resentful bees from an angry distance that was both too far to be effective and too close to be safe.

I moved like white lightning—in and out of the tub in a blur—sudsing just the important parts of my skinny body before momentarily dunking beneath the chilly water. When I stepped out of the bath, only partially rinsed and chattering, I wrapped myself in a ratty towel and huddled in front of the little heater to warm back up. I inched closer to its orangey glow, jagged electrical wires putting off pitiful heat. The thing was doing its disgruntled best but still could only manage to warm small patches of my body at any given moment. So, I inched closer, rotating like a vertical, voluntary rotisserie chicken. Closer. When my rear end pressed and sizzled against the metal grill that caged the front of the heater, I yelped, and my hands teleported to my backside. As my pale ass flew entirely too close to the electrical sun, I shot into the air in the only version of white flight that I would ever know.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when we finally moved out of that place, but I do remember it feeling like a dream. Nor do I remember how many months passed between the first time I heard the term white flight and the first time a professor used the words white privilege. That felt like a dream, too, though not the good kind. I remember feeling personally attacked— watching all the struggle and effort and sacrifice it took for me to climb out of the squalor and chaos that I had been born into disappear like warm air through the drafty eaves of an old single-wide trailer. Then I remember being very, very angry. These days, it seems like a lot of other people are, too. Maybe that’s a good thing.

DOWNSTREAM FAREWELL:

I got the call by way of a text message, and I hesitated. Knowing what was fact and fiction with her had always been hard, especially toward the end. When I was growing up, I never knew if the stories she told about my childhood were real or not, and that had made things difficult then. Now, however, I think I can see what she was up to. Sometimes, when reality is too hard and too flat, a fiction can be a balm of sorts, or—as I discovered in the pages of novels that took me far away—it can serve as an escape route. It can add a little color to drab pages of black and white. It can change the story. At least for a time.

After my older brother texted me, I called the nurse station, and a man who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn answered from two thousand miles away. He laughed and told me that she was doing just fine, that she had been up and walking, and that he had been in her room yuckin’ it up with her all morning—said, “Boy, ain’t she somethin'.” I was inclined to agree.

I hung up, relief filling my lungs like welcome air, and I decided to wait. The next day, my brother texted me again, more urgent this time, and I dialed the nurse station once more. Foghorn-Leghorn answered, but there was no bounce in his words today—no pep in his verbal giddyup. He said it was bad—real bad—"say sorry”. I hung up the phone and bought a one-way ticket, knowing in my heart that I would never make it on time. I’m ashamed to admit that a terrible, miserable part of me was relieved. So, I had to make do with saying goodbye at a river.

Much of the childhood that I’d forgotten, that I’d distanced myself from, caught up to me like some long-lost shadow that I’d shaken loose somewhere along the way. As I drove down my narrow street with its too-deep ditches toward my childhood home, I was hit with a realization that I’d likely always known, at least on some level. It takes a real son-of-a-bitch to convince kids—boys and girls who are, at this moment, growing up in ways similar to my own, and worse—that they’re somehow privileged by dint of the color of their skin.

You have to have a dark heart to snuff out the already weak fires that burn within their sometimes-empty bellies, fires that will need to roar like an angry river for them to even stand a snowball’s chance of making it out of the circumstances they were born into. What type of person would also demand that they add blood debt and back-of-the-line obligation to their non-existent inheritance? My mother died with three hundred dollars to her name, a stack of past-due bills, and a desktop littered with high-interest loan denials. Was she privileged, too?

I said goodbye to my mother at the river, while the muddy waters of the Ohio did their lazy best to slow the flat-bottomed freight trains of floating cargo pushed along by the sleepy barges, because I arrived too late to do it in person. I’m not sure she would have wanted me there, if I’m being honest. Such was our relationship by the time she passed. I stared into that water, and a part of me couldn’t help but see bigger versions of us kids playing and splashing in those chocolate-colored currents. Then I closed my eyes.

The most beautiful thing about a river is that it continues on, and that change is always just around the next bend. Oftentimes, I count it a kindness that some old dead philosopher was correct when he said that no man can enter the same river twice. I said goodbye to her at the river. If there was one privilege I had in this life based upon my skin, it had nothing to do with the color that it was and everything to do with the woman who made it for me.

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“I got it,” he said. The guy in the otherwise empty classroom snapped his dark brown fingers like he was Einstein, having finally pieced together the proper equation with an E and an M and a C in it. “You’re c-c-c-culturally black.” He leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms and nodding approval at his own ability to maintain an insane worldview in which white people simply had to be more privileged than minorities, even if that meant turning me into one—despite my pale skin and a set of baby-blues that would get a nod from Sinatra.

Tyrone was a black guy seven years my junior. He had a stutter like a faulty version of one of those heart-shaped quarter beds in stuffy velvet wrapped honeymoon suites. He was veteran, having been some non-deployable MOS in the Air Force that allowed him to do a four-year stint basically in the backyard of the town in which he had grown up, where he happened to have been raised by a white lady who adopted him, who happened to be an unmarried psychologist—hence the major we both shared.

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I recently finished a novel by B. F. Skinner, who is perhaps the most famous behavioral psychologist of all time. If you’ve ever taken so much as a survey course in psychology, you will have heard his name—likely with the term “operant conditioning” following closely behind. Skinner spent over half a century exploring the ways in which, with the right incentive structures, you can turn animals into regular circus performers—manipulating them into conducting the most odd and unexpected acts.

He trained rats to solve puzzles and play a version of rodent basketball. He trained pigeons to make art and to square off against each other in pigeon ping-pong matches. He proved against a shadow of a doubt that with enough patience and knowledge of a creature’s reward systems, you could compel it to do just about anything, regardless of how bizarre and unnatural. You probably know all of this, though.

What you might not know—what your overpriced textbooks and underwhelming professors didn’t teach you—was that Burrhus Frederic Skinner was also an inventor with a penchant for putting living things into boxes as well as a utopian novelist who would (in the book’s preface) place Karl Marx beside Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius in a list of “great men who are said to have made a difference in human affairs.” More importantly, you are almost certainly unaware of the extent to which B. F. Skinner’s work is leveraged against you on a daily basis.

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Jerry sat and stared unblinkingly at the overhead sun bulb in his little room. His white puffy body poured over the sides of the reclining chair, which doubled as his bed, like folded mayonnaise. His breathing was labored, though he hadn’t so much as stood in hours.

“Angela, what time will lunch be here?” he asked the room.

A voice answered in an imitation of humanity that still sounded cold and artificial around the edges.

“The courier is still fifteen minutes away, Jerry. Would you like me to send another pulse to the driver?”

The men and women employed to deliver all the things wore headsets that alerted them to new pickups and dropoffs, as well as customer reviews and complaints by way of pulses—small subcutaneous jolts that were more annoying than painful. It sounded like a hellish vocation to Jerry, much worse than being an unboxer.

“Absolutely,” he said, “send one every five minutes until they get here.”

Jerry shambled to his feet without a shred of grace in a series of groans and pa…

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I NEED A HERO:

Everyone loves a hero. It’s the reason people will shell out twenty bucks to sit through a three-hour movie in sticky, vinyl-wrapped chairs that haven’t been properly cleaned in God knows how long. It’s one of the reasons that guys lose track of hours, or even days, after a new Fallout, Diablo, or some other video game drops. It’s why my sons harangue me to read just one more chapter—then another—of a good book, and it’s likely the reason I almost always say yes. If there’s a story that’s deeper than the Hero’s Journey, I haven’t found it yet.

Deep stories serve a purpose. They grip us. They reach down right into our nether regions and grab us by the archetypes. When they let go, we walk a little funny at first, but we emerge slightly changed as a result. That’s because the Hero’s Journey is more than just a story to enjoy—it’s an adventure by proxy. It allows us to travel alongside a fictional character in abstraction and, somehow, to return with gold/wisdom/talismans of our own without ever having to step physical foot onto a proper pathway.

Humans need heroes. They always have. The Sumerians and Babylonians had Gilgamesh. The Greeks had Odysseus. Tolkien brought the post-war world the small-but-mighty hobbits and—when I was a kid—Rowling penned a staircase-dwelling orphan that happened to take us all to wizarding school, and save the world in the process. These stories didn’t find success so much as they filled a need—they satisfied a cultural hunger. Without them, a culture becomes emaciated, thin, weak, and easily pushed over in the direction desired by whoever is doing the pushing.

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More often than I care to admit, I’m struck by the absurd realization that human beings are civilized versions of chimpanzees. I’ll be sitting at an outdoor restaurant eating with my family, talking about things, and watching water fountain jets set to popular music, when a couple of women will walk by holding stiff-sided shopping bags. Then a thought will appear in my head, unabetted and unwanted: that shaved primate just bought a new pair of designer jeans. I’ll look around as if expecting to see someone else having the same thought at the same moment, but thankfully, no one ever does.

Then, a waiter will walk past, carrying a basket of freshly baked bread, and set it down in the middle of a neighboring table. I’ll continue to watch for a few more moments as every pair of eyes at the table dart to the bread. Just for a moment, you can see the primate flash across the faces of a few of them—that desire to grab, to get, to gorge—but none of them, at least this time, give into it. They’ve learned to suppress their simpler urges, which is no surprise. They are at a restaurant, after all, and we rightly kick the people who don’t learn to push down their primate urges out of our civilized-great-ape game—or at least that’s what a functioning society does.

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Studying personality psychology is as useful as it is annoying. It’s useful because it allows you to realize that people actually differ in how they view and experience the world. It’s annoying because it requires you to reconsider that the chatty Kathies of the world who claim to enjoy horrid things like corporate Christmas parties and small talk aren't full of shit. Somehow, in a way that I can never fully understand, the Kathies are telling the truth.

That’s because the world manifests itself differently for people with different personalities—same world, different worldviews. To an extrovert, it's a place of social opportunity and novel experiences. To a disagreeable person, it's a place to compete for what you want. Creative people see it as a place to make new things, even if it requires breaking the old ones. Conservative people disagree, seeing it as a place to maintain what we’ve been given. All of them are right—some of the time.

It seems to me that a functioning community is built of opposing personalities. Introverts oppose extroverts. Creatives square off with conservatives. Optimists have pessimists. Leaders have followers—and so on. However, instead of this oppositional nature justifying endless in-fighting and calamity though, it can have a balancing effect on society as a whole. The problem is when it becomes imbalanced.

SOCIETY AS A ROWBOAT:

Human beings are both individually conscious and social creatures, which means we exist at two levels simultaneously. We are singular entities, completely separate from other people, as well as members of a community. As a result of this, we have to learn to cycle between the individual and the collective—something that we rarely do well. More often, we find ourselves pegging the needle to either extreme. It can take decades for a person to learn to how do this well. It takes a community longer still but how long does a society take to get the balance right? Centuries? Millennia? A better question might be how long does it take for a society that has by some miracle managed to balance the individual and the collective to devolve into something akin to a dysfunctional rowboat—the crew working against one another, lacking a shared destination, and destined to sink?

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“Keep it moving… keep it moving,” droned the little creature—a gelatinous thing that looked like a pair of eyeballs plopped atop a mound of congealed hand sanitizer. Eyes that were thankfully disinterested enough not to recognize me. It waved flashlights with bright, pointed cone lids at the steadily flowing river of beings that poured into the final corridor of the transport station.

Above the entrance to the corridor was a metal arch with cut-out curved letters that said simply:

THE GARDEN TRANSPORT STATION

“How many times have you been through?” a sing-song voice asked from beside me. I looked over to find a pair of wide, friendly eyes suspended in translucent purple-tinged goo only inches from my own.

“Through?” I said.

“The gateways—life,” she said. I got the feeling that she was, in fact, a she—though here, there weren’t any lady parts or man parts to speak of. Here was transient. “I’ve been through seven times,” she said without blinking. Seven tim…

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Let me borrow your internal movie maker for a bit. I’ll give it back, I promise. I want you to envision a war room. Put it inside a tent. There should be a huge map sprawled on top of a big table surrounded by hard men. What type of warriors are they? Horse-riding Samurai? Anglo-Saxons in heavy, jingling mail? Modern Spec-Ops guys kitted out in plate carriers and FAST helmets? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they’re all gathered around, analyzing the enemy’s position, and that at least one of them is smoking a pipe.

Picture one of the men closer to the table—preferably not the pipe smoker—pressing a dusty finger onto the map. He might be pointing at a gate, a tunnel, or any building in particular. It doesn’t make much of a difference, so long as he’s indicating a spot that an enemy would have a hell of a time defending, monitoring, and/or restricting access to. Now, imagine him speaking up, probably in a higher-pitched voice than you might have otherwise expected.

“Here’s the weakest point in the enemy’s position—the place where they’re the most vulnerable.” A few heads nod. There are a couple of grunts of agreement as the others see it, too. So, he carries on. “Then, by all means—and at all costs—we should avoid it because, you know, vulnerability is strength.” The room goes quiet.

I picture him standing up a bit taller, convinced that what he just said is both profound and useful. In my mind, he’s smacking fruit-flavored gum while everyone else in the tent is trying to wrap their heads around the nonsense that came out of his mouth. Finally, someone breaks the silence—it’s the guy with the pipe.

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I held an aged ten dollar bill between us. He looked nervously at the grocery store, teeming with shoppers. This was supposed to be good for him—independence—agency.

“Why do we need money for milk?” he asked with the haughty air of a grade-school philosopher.

“Because everything costs something, son,” I said.

“Everything?” he said.

“Everything.”

“We could just take the milk,” he said.

“Like stealing?”

“If that’s what you want to call it,” he said.

“It’s not what I call it, it’s what the dictionary calls it,” I said. I took a steadying breath, as that’s what I’d been told good fathers do. “Then you’d pay for it with time instead of money—time spent in jail. Get the milk?” I urged the greasy bill closer. He looked out the window.

“We could change that law,” he said.

“Then everyone would have to pay for the milk. Safety. Society. Stability. Milk,” I said. He seemed to be thinking about it. I lowered my outstretched hand, feeling tired and like a failure in more ways than one.

“We could burn it all …

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You can fit somewhere in the ballpark of fifty baby Gordian worms (commonly referred to as horsehair worms) onto the average pinhead. They’re so small that Mayfly larvae, which are tiny themselves, accidentally ingest them while hanging out—doing larvae stuff—in the water—where both creatures start out their life. Once a baby Gordian gets swallowed, it burrows down into the Mayfly’s insides. There, it waits, content to not become too much of a bother. That’s because Gordian worms aren’t after Mayflies. Instead, like Machiavelli himself, they play the long game.          

Mayflies aren’t considered adults until after they gain their wings—which, if the old adage holds up, occurs just about every time a homeless person pisses through a sewer grate (every time a sewer grate rings, a mayfly gets its wings, or so the legend says). Once they become winged, which can take up to two years, they escape from the water and fly into the air as free as can be for the next day or so. Then they die—o…

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She had a laugh like an old brokedown car—the staccato of an engine that wouldn’t start. It made me want to take the plastic knife off my paper plate and push it into my eardrums. Instead, I stared at her teeth and smiled.

“We just got a new car,” she said to anyone that would listen, in between big smacks of gum. “Stevie picked it up for my birthday. Ain’t that right Stevie?”

From over by the smoking grill, in a cluster of three men talking about sports scores and performance reports, Steve raised a plastic-cupped salute.

My wife appeared like a wisp and squeezed my shoulder, not without affection. I tried to make my smile more believable.

“It’s way too fancy for me,” the woman with the machine gun laugh said. She let out another three-round burst. I gripped the arms of my chair until the hard white plastic bit into my fingertips. “Brand new. Off the lot. All the bells and whistles,” she offered when I failed to urge her for any details.

“Well, that sounds lovely,” my wife said in a voice…

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Two old fellas sat at the park. The sun was bright, and the air was crisp, but they complained anyhow—as old men are prone to do—about the weather.

“That’s one hell of a sweater, George,” said the smaller one from under a bushy mustache.

George’s bulging frame was squeezed into an absolute circus of a Christmas sweater that—in Clyde’s opinion—no self-respecting man would have worn.

“The old lady got it for me,” George said, looking over at Ethel, who was chatting with another woman some distance away. “I’d take it off, but you know how she gets if I don’t wear the stuff she buys me.”

His tone was a veneer—a mock annoyance sitting overtop a chasm of deep and enduring love like a manhole cover. George had been with Ethel since he was a kid, and their love was still like something out of a storybook.

George smiled. George was always smiling. Clyde looked at Ethel—who gave a little wink and a wave to George. After all these years, he still pined for her like a puppy chasing its owner, and she …

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