I’ve never been much of a joiner. After an early childhood trauma—the sudden death of my mother, when I was four—I found it hard to believe in much of anything. The election of Ronald Reagan, when I was nine, only underscored the feeling that the world didn’t make much sense. Then, when I was eleven, my school got funding to purchase new telescopes and the science teacher gave the battered old ones away to interested students. I was one of them, and that telescope changed my life.
Peering through the eyepiece and watching the surface of the Moon unroll itself before me, I felt a powerful sense of homecoming. Gazing at the terminator—the line that divides the light and dark sides of the Moon—I felt there was something here for me, a riddle I’d gazed at my whole life but never understood.
Ever since then I’ve been on a mission to explore this place, whether through psychedelics or my time in the D.C. punk scene. I sensed there was something beyond what I saw with my own two eyes, something that might explain the sense of unreality I’d felt ever since I was young.
It’s my mission to explore this edge. Living on Earth can feel alienating and anxious in the best of times. My sincere hope is that my writing serves as a beacon for those who feel like they don’t belong to their lives.
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