(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.

As of this morning, I’m over 90,000 words in on a new novel. I think I have five more scenes in it before I begin the rewrite. It’ll be ready in time for the Ark Press contest in October—it’s pretty weird, too. Maybe there’s a pattern here.

Lastly, I’m still finding time to have quality coffee talks with the wife and do boy/creative stuff with my sons. I recently took them cliff-jumping into the American River for the first time. They were pretty sketched out, but they got it done, and they felt ten feet tall—which is about the height of the little cliff they jumped off of.

My two favorite little guys also commissioned me to draw badass Zelda stickers for their school notebooks. I think I delivered (that sword is the size of my HAND):

Aside from delivering an update, I wanted to see what to do with all that free time I don’t have (while finishing grad school and doing all of the above). I think you’ve gotten to know me through my writing, but I’d like to get to know you a little more on here—maybe by finding out what type of writing appeals to you most below? Feel free to drop specific essay/story titles that you’ve enjoyed (whether on Substack or elsewhere).

Talk soon,

—C.B.

Leave a comment

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.

Go West, young man. The mountains call you forth. There’s gold in them thar hills. Seek, and ye shall find.

The call to adventure has led to its fair share of horror—to war and pain—to hardship and broken hearts—but it is also the very thing that sets sail across strange horizons. It is the spirit that ropes horizons and saddle-breaks cruel, hard lands into towns and cities, states and nations.

It’s what shot men into the bleak blackness of space and left behind flags and footprints on the powdery skins of distant rocks—and it will do so again. This ancient command shouts across time and rattles young men to their very bones. Some hear it louder than others, and they are the ones who grow itchy and restless in a world gone too familiar.

But where do the wild ones go in a world hell-bent on homogeneity? In a stilted environment that demands complete conformity and state-steered domesticity? Many of them go inward. Some rage outward. Some of them go away entirely. Yet, we have need of them.

Go any way you must, man, but—for God’s sake—whatever you do, don’t stand still! Don’t glue those wandering feet to the freeway modes of being. Don’t lean into contentment and complacency that wraps its soft arms around you in sedating and comfortable captivity.

Live hard. Live fast.

Find yourself a proper adventure to adventure and, once you’ve shattered yourself against the unknown properly, return home, wherever that might be. Then give rise to the next batch of wandering ones, for we have great need of them, but hear my caution well, for when they are yours to guide.

Don’t dare to stamp out their wildness for the sake of the mundane. In service to either safety or the status quo. Don’t presume to file their pointed teeth prematurely into the sterilized smiles of the docile. Don’t trim their claws too flat while they still have need of them. That is not your place.

That is the job of the unknown.

Another wave crashes atop my boy, and something forgotten inside me flares to life, pushing its way out. I look to the people around me, scrolling phones, tapping black glass awake that keeps them asleep, and I close the paper pages of the book that long since been my way to sublimate the call. Go West, young man.

Then, I’m up and I’m tearing my shirt off like it’s on fire and I’m running before it can even hit the ground. The water claws at my ankles—at my knees—my waist. I arrive just as the ocean’s cavalry arrives, just in time to join the battle against countless droplets of an ancient medium bearing down upon me and my son with immortal hearts full of vengeance.

His eyes are as wild as mine as I lift him up, and the water crashes over me, but I stand wide against its weight, though it tries like hell to topple me. The sea swallows me up—hungrily and completely—but not him.

Him, I hold high. High enough that his eyes can catch the sun only now beginning to crack its fiery yolk upon the far horizon—on all those places that he has yet to see and explore—and as the water begins its hasty retreat, I hear the call of the unknown again.

But this time it’s different.

This time it uses not my name, but his. His small yells of defiance at the cowardly water stop short. He pauses. He cocks his head, and I convince myself that he hears it, too.

Where do the wild ones go when all the wild things are gone?

They go to the only place they have left. They go onward. On to the next plain, the next frontier, or even to the next world—wherever the adventure might be—even when the rest of us can’t for the life of us see it.

And I wish them well.

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.”

Subscribe now

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.

California is like a beautiful woman (who also happens to have a personality disorder). She sure is nice to look at, and can be fun and exciting to be around, but make no mistake about it, boys—she’s batshit crazy. This was a non-issue with my wife and me until we had school-aged children. I can deal with crazy. I’ve been around it my whole life. Hell, I’m studying crazy, for God’s sake. So, I figured we’d be fine if we could just manage to find a good school in a somewhat sane city encased within a decently conservative county—and we were.

For a while.

Subscribe now

My oldest son was in the fourth grade when it happened.

I had been growing increasingly concerned over some of the things being pushed through the school system, but my being locked into a graduate program didn’t readily afford us the flexibility to uproot and move. My wife, being the communal juggernaut that she is (if you can find one fairly high in trait agreeableness, I’d recommend it, fellas), came up with a viable strategy: get so heavily involved in my boys’ school that we would have the most up-to-date intel on the goings on as well as a presence that we could leverage if things were to ever go pear-shaped. The strategy worked well. Again, for a while.

She became a room mom, joined the PTA, and was a member of something called the School Site Council. She took over the art program for the entire damned elementary school. I taught the art lessons (I’m the talent, she’s management). We were like a power couple from a sitcom about white people in suburbia, and it paid off. When our youngest was assigned a shit teacher, we were able to get him reassigned to a good one.

When a kid in one of our sons’ classes was going around punching kids in the chest, we told our son that if the little shit hit him again, to punch him in the nose as hard as he could. If he was sent home, we’d pick him up and take him to get ice cream. We gave the teacher a heads-up, after which she nodded and said, “Good. Someone needs to punch that kid.”

We were exactly where we belonged. We were surrounded by our people and teachers who genuinely cared for our kids. We could almost ignore all of the craziness on the news and social media about pumping kids’ heads full of ideas about race, privilege, guilt, gender, and communism. For a while.

As my oldest son’s fourth-grade year progressed, things started to get a bit hairy.

The teacher had recently won a “Teacher of the Year” award, so we assumed he was in good hands (little did we know at that time that awarded teachers in California would become something of a heuristic for those who pushed ideological subversion into the classrooms). Though my wife offered to help out in the classroom, the teacher almost always turned her down. We thought maybe this was normal. They were, after all, in the fourth grade now. Kids need space from parents to develop as individuals.

However, one day, my oldest son came home and said, “Dad, do you want to hear something I learned at school about Native Americans today?” My pulse quickened. I nodded and smiled. “Did you know that there were people among them who had two spirits?” My face was a mask, but behind it, I was sharpening battle axes and rallying a mob to tear down the California Department of Education brick by brick.

We would round up the perpetrators and line them in stockades where we would throw dildos—no, no, we don’t want to become like our enemies—rotten fruits and vegetables at them and put them on a diet of sunlight and water until they fasted their way to a spiritual revelation or, at a bare minimum, starved out the parasitic ideas that had turned their brains into Marxist mush.

Instead, I laughed. I played it cool. You should have seen me. My blood pressure was redlining the gauge bolted onto my aorta, but I was carefree. “Two spirits?!” I said. “Sounds a bit greedy to me, kiddo. One is all I need.” I ruffled his hair and told him to tell me more about it, but inside, I was making plans. We were moving. We would sell the house—hell, we’d burn it to the ground and take the insurance money if we had to—and relocate…where? Some place sane. Some place where people weren’t rolling over and offering up their underbellies to anti-American radicals and the globalists. My mind settled onto the sanest and most American place that I could think of at the moment: TEXAS!

He told me about the lesson, describing indigenous two-spirits, whereby some people were neither man nor woman but, somehow, something in between. Something unnatural. I didn’t offer up the term “non-binary”, but I knew what laying the foundation for gender ideology looked like when I saw it. I told him that people fall into the trap of thinking just because something existed in olden times, or because it’s from some far-flung place and exotic, that it's somehow a good idea. The same people who believed in the existence of whatever the hell a two-spirit was, also practiced cannibalism and thought human sacrifice would appease their crotchety gods.

Then, I told him thanks for telling me about what he had learned at school, that I really enjoyed it when he did it, and I went outside.

Outside, I was a sweating mess, even though it was nearly cold enough for me to see my breath. I immediately called a like-minded dad of one of the kids in my son’s class. I gave him the rundown and asked him to tell me if I was overreacting. He said not only no, but hell no, and what were we going to do about it? I told him I needed to think—to do some research.

Over the next few days, I morphed into Rain Man on a casino floor. I was Russel Crowe playing John Nash at Princeton University. I was crazy with digging through educational policy from local to national levels in order to get a lay of the land about what was and wasn’t allowed to be pushed in public schools. What I found pulled me further away from my false sense of security. Texas was looking more and more like the promised land with every passing moment—forget the milk and honey, we were moving to the place of meat and morality! The more I read, the more I realized that we were in the midst of a cultural revolution—and states like California were ground zero.

The other dad and I talked about meeting with the principal to get moved to another class. However, the very next day—as I was dropping my sons off at school—my youngest noticed a fat kid on a bike, maxing out the PSI of the tires as he labored his way to school. I knew the kid, who was a bit of a bully, and my first thought was good on you big boy—maybe you’ll lose some weight and stop being such a little asshole to everybody. However, my youngest son remarked on the bicycle’s lettering being bright pink.

I pulled into an open space in front of the school and shifted my truck into park. I killed the engine. My youngest spoke up.

“The other day, the librarian read a weird book,” he said. Oh shit. Alarm sirens started whirring in my head again. Keep the mask on. Stay calm—cool as a cucumber. I am the ice man.

“Oh yeah? What was it about?” I said, trying but likely only partially pulling off nonchalance.

“It was about the color pink,” he said, “That it’s for everybody.” He grabbed his little backpack, which was not pink. “It was something like ‘pink is for boys, pink is for girls, pink is for everybody’.” I nodded. I had no problem with the color pink, but like most modern ways of subverting a culture, the true message is snuck in with a palatable veneer—a bit of plausible deniability. If pink was for everybody, why in the hell would the book be titled Pink Is For Boys?

I nodded again, at a decision that I had just made—though it would take me a bit to realize that I had made it.

Subscribe now

We pulled my sons out of school at the start of winter break. We began homeschooling them through a charter that taught the classics. They started to learn Latin. They were taught about the Founding Fathers with respect and reverence that didn’t ignore faults in a way due to such flawed but great men.

The following year, they reenrolled at the same school, but this time in person. This past Veterans Day, I was asked to speak at an assembly. Not knowing what to expect, I receluctanlty agreed. My wife and I pulled up to the school. The parking lot was lined with row upon row of elementary students waving little American flags and shouting USA! USA! It was pretty amazing. To be honest, it kind of choked me up.

My boys now walk around our house whistling God Bless America. They learn about Rome. They learn logic and rhetoric. They learn the importance of the great experiment that is our country and how much of an impossible place it is when compared to the rest of the world—as well nations of the past. We can talk about slavery being vile in the same breath where we discuss how England was the first place to outlaw it and how America is the only nation to have fought a civil war over it.

Above all else, we’ve begun to feel hopeful again about the direction our country is taking with its gradual return to sanity, hard work, and gratitude. It’s no longer a radical position to want a nation with a border, a school system that focuses on ideas rather than ideology, and placing the pursuit of truth and greatness over the equitable redistribution of resources based on a person’s skin color, sex, or whatever the hell else they might self-identify as—or how many spirits they might claim to have.

I think it’s safe to say, based on the standards of only a few of years ago, that we’re all far-right now. California is still without a doubt the hot girl with a personality disorder, but more and more I find myself staring at those majestic mountains, her shining sea shores, and the curves in them thar hills and I think, Yeah, she’s crazy…

…but I can fix her.

Leave a comment