I’ve been feeding these machines—AI, code, silicon ghosts—with thoughts. Some mine, some borrowed, some stitched from the long cloth of human doubt. Then I tossed in a question like a final coin in an old wishing well: Do we have a duty to publish truth?
The machine did what machines do best: sifted the scatter, found the pattern, rolled out an answer smooth as a Zen pebble—yes.
And I felt that yes too.
But a doubt clung to me like the last smoke of a burnt match. Musashi warned never to move on a partial feeling, and I could hear him in the shadows: wait until the mind is clean as a blade just sharpened.
And then there’s that Zen tale—one I can’t shake—about the young monk itching to lecture a nearby king, bursting with wisdom he thinks the world needs. The master stops him cold: the king won’t listen, he says. Some people must walk their own crooked path to understanding.
And earlier this year, I finished a book—poured myself into it—then tucked it away like a letter I wasn’t brave enough to send. Recently I opened it again, dusted off the sentences, polished the bones. I thought: maybe this could help someone.
But the doubt whispered again: they’ll be like the king—deaf to it. Maybe I should deny myself permission to publish.
Or maybe it’s Musashi again: do nothing useless.
And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? These days trying to make people reflect feels like shouting poetry into an empty warehouse—your own echo coming back with a shrug.
Sometimes I wonder if this was how Aquinas felt before he put down his pen forever. One revelation and the whole Summa suddenly looked like a child’s sandcastle. He saw something vast, and human words felt small, useless.
Or take the flat-Earthers, or the moon-landing deniers—you could hurl truth at them like bricks and they’d still duck behind the cardboard shield of their beliefs. Psychologists have their profiles, and the conspiracy theorists I’ve known fit them like gloves.
So I look at my finished manuscript and wonder: what reception would it get? Would the LGBTQIA+ community ever consider the idea that strict heterosexuality isn’t the default state of most humans? Would feminists acknowledge that powerful men, across history and now, often desire what they desire despite ideology or expectation? Were ancient men really so different from the ones scrolling their feeds today? We still read Plato and find ourselves in his lines—so maybe not.
There are lies we treat as scripture. Stonewall is one of them. A friend of mine—a journalist with ink in his veins—tracked down men who were actually there. Their version of events was wild, raw, unvarnished—so different from the official myth you’d think they were talking about some other night in some other city. The gap between truth and the “approved story” was the size of a fairy tale, and maybe that’s all some histories are: bedtime stories for adults who crave heroes.
Still, I think I’ll publish. There’s one section left to finish—on the long-term mental health fallout of growing up too fast, burning too hot, seeing too much before you even knew the cost. I’ll get it done before the year ends. Maybe I’m wrong to feel the work is useless.
I keep thinking of a moment from years ago: I was out shooting street photos, drifting back toward the station, and picked up a gay newspaper for the ride home. Inside was a piece written by a young man asking what exactly he was expected to be proud of—and why, beneath all the rainbow gloss, he felt a quiet anger he couldn’t name.
I understood him. I still do.
Would Alexander the Great strut drunkenly down a city street in a jockstrap, waving a flag? Maybe—after enough wine. But you wouldn’t dare laugh unless you were ready to have your tongue removed by dawn. Pride is a strange beast. Truth is stranger still. And people—people believe what soothes them.
But maybe somewhere out there is one reader—just one—who’s looking for something real. And maybe the book is for them.