My grandmother could take flour, water, and whatever else she had on hand and make something I have been trying to find again for 57 years. Biscuits and gravy. Fried green tomatoes. Bacon. The smell of it all mixing together in that kitchen while she told stories and I waited.

I've had some close. Never the same. Never will be.

But here's what I finally understood — I'm not actually chasing the biscuits. I'm chasing that feeling. The simplicity of it. The joy of waiting for something good while all the details of the moment are right there in front of you — the smell, the sound, the sight of her working the dough — and you're fully inside it because you're a kid and nobody has taught you yet to skip ahead to the goal.

We are so focused on end results that we miss everything happening on the way there. The journey isn't the consolation prize. It's the thing.

So what do you actually want right now? Not globally. Not eventually. Right now, in this moment — what is it?

If you have to pull over to answer that honestly, pull over.

I went back and listened to the very first episode I ever recorded.

It was terrible. Not terrible because the ideas were wrong. Terrible because it wasn't me. I was trying to be subtle. Measured. Some version of what I thought a podcast host was supposed to sound like. What the fuck was I doing?

This episode is about where I actually come from — the foundational texts, the real ones, the ones I use as philosophical tools rather than religious weapons. The Bible isn't a cudgel I'm swinging at you. It's a set of allegories I broke down until they meant something to me personally, stripped of every pastor and parent and institution that tried to use it as a control mechanism.

You don't have to share my foundation. You have your own. What I'm asking is that you look at it honestly and make sure it's actually yours — not something handed to you that you've been carrying ever since without examining it.

I'm not here to beat you down. I'm here because I know what it's like to be down and I know there's another way. That's it. That's all this has ever been.

Part 2 of 2.

Someone commented on a post I made about St. Louis — flowers still bloom, birds still sing, even in a city that wrestles with being the murder capital of the country — and asked: what's the point of this post? What's the objective?

And I realized I didn't owe them an answer. Not because I'm being difficult. Because the objective was mine. I took the photos. I wrote the words. I put them up. What you do with that is yours.

That moment sent me back behind this microphone to say something I should have said closer to the beginning of this podcast. I have been managing my impression. Stopping words. Softening mannerisms. Running a quiet calculation in the background about how I might be perceived. And doing that — even slightly — pulls me away from the thing this podcast is actually supposed to be.

So here's my commitment. I'm done tap dancing. What you're going to get is where I actually come from, why I actually do this, and what I actually believe about who you are underneath everything you've been told you are.

This is Part 1. Part 2 is where it goes deeper.

I was up at 4am and nothing was coming. No notes, no inspiration, no momentum. I laid on the sofa and eventually dozed off.

At 7:11 in the morning I was yanked awake by gunshots. Close ones. I live in Tower Grove South in St. Louis — good neighborhood, great park, real city. And gunshots happen often enough that we're not shocked. But this morning I was. Because it was 7am. And because something about the sound of it just cascaded into a whole set of questions I wasn't expecting to be sitting with before my coffee.

How much of my life have I spent trying to be who other people expected me to be? How much energy have I devoted to meeting everyone else's needs while losing the thread of my own? The job. The relationships. The city. The religion. The race. The gender. The nation. The whole list of things other people handed me as the definition of what my experience was supposed to be.

I almost didn't make this episode. My brain told me to stay away from the microphone when things aren't clear. I made it anyway. Because I know I'm not the only person who wakes up some mornings and thinks — what in the actual fuck are we doing?

This isn't despair. It's a question worth asking out loud.

We all know how this ends. What we get to decide is how we relate to the journey in between.

Describe cotton candy to someone who has never seen, touched, or tasted it.

Not fluffy. Not sweet. Not spun sugar. Those are words. I'm asking you to make someone feel what it is to have cotton candy dissolve on their tongue for the first time.

You can't do it. Not really.

Now tell me what you want your life to look like.

Same problem.

We spend years reaching for things we've never actually stopped to define for ourselves. Love. Happiness. A relationship that works. A life that feels like ours. We use the words because everyone around us uses them. But if you can't feel it while you're describing it — if you can't put yourself inside it clearly enough to know what it actually tastes like to you specifically — you can't have it. You're just circling something you've never actually touched.

This episode is about getting specific enough about what you want that the wanting itself feels like something real. Not somebody else's definition handed to you. Yours. Built from your own experience of what feels good, what feels true, what feels like the life you actually want to be living.

You can't have what you can't describe.

Start with cotton candy. Work your way up from there.

I recorded what my wife and I both agreed was probably the best episode I've ever done.

Then I didn't hit save.

Gone. All of it. And I sat there with my head in my hands doing exactly what we all do in that moment — beating myself up, running through every version of if I had just, reminding myself how imperfect I am, calculating everything I lost.

And then I asked myself: what are you going to do about a moment that's already gone?

Absolutely nothing. Because you can't. There is no command Z for what's already been done. The only thing that exists right now is right now.

This episode is about that — not in some inspirational poster kind of way, but in the real, practical, sitting-in-your-chair-with-your-head-in-your-hands kind of way. The moment's gone. The day isn't. A bird just flew into our window view and perched on a tree long enough for Sharon and me to see it and then it was gone too. That's not a shit day. That's just a day.

Cut yourself some slack. Not because you deserve a pass. Because dragging around what you can't fix serves absolutely no purpose.

The next time I talk about what I lost today, it'll probably be better anyway.

I got up Sunday morning, watched a YouTube interview with Lee Marvin on the Dick Cavett Show, and immediately felt like a dick for being surprised that he was intelligent.

That's where this one starts.

From there we end up in your closet. Literally. Go open it. Look at what's in there. And ask yourself one question — why did I buy that?

I'll tell you what I found when I asked myself. I spend a shit ton of money on electronics without blinking. New MacBook Pro, SSD, trackball mouse, the whole ecosystem. But clothes? My wife had to make me get new jeans because I had holes in mine that weren't supposed to be there.

Turns out there's a reason for that. Goes all the way back to elementary school, Sears Tough Skins, and my mother taking the hem out of my already high-water pants so they'd last another season. That little white line where the color had washed out. The patch that never matched. Kickball in pants so tight I couldn't move anyway.

You don't know you're poor until you know.

And once you know, you either stop buying things or you buy everything you didn't have — and then wonder why you never wear it.

This is what our closets are actually about. Not fashion. Not status. The conversation we never had with ourselves about why we value what we value and where that came from.

Doc Martens, charity shops, bedazzled jeans, and the English-made versus everything-else debate also make an appearance. It's a Sunday Stroll. That's how this works.

I got up this morning and genuinely asked myself what in the absolute hell I'm doing with this podcast.

I've got my notebook. I've got my notes. I know how to outline things, stay on point, work through A, B, C with sub-points. I know how to do all of that. So why am I not doing it here?

Because that's what the course is for. And because I realized this morning that the stream of consciousness I've been apologizing for is actually the thing I should have been celebrating.

This episode is me taking the pressure off. Off myself and off you. I'm not here to make you feel inspired on command. I'm here to lay some things out — as disorganized and chaotic as they may be — and let you take from them whatever is actually relevant to your life.

But I do want to leave you with one question before I go get coffee with my wife.

Look around you. The clothes in your closet. The car you drive. The job you have. The place you live. Did you choose those things because that's what you actually wanted? Or did you just get on the expected track and stop questioning it because that's what you were taught to do?

No judgment. Just the question.

This is going to be an honest hot mess. That's the whole point.