I’ve always been a pretty trusting person, and the weirder the situation, the more enticing it is for me. The oddities in life are what give me a thrill. So when the gruff old man from Facebook Marketplace invited me to his home to pick up some wood, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to get molested—just kidding—to test my humanity.

Would I get murdered or decapitated in the woods? Or would this be the start of a thriving relationship with a hermit in the woods, like a Disney movie?

I arrived at the property. The place looked exactly what you would think it would look like: a backwoods Pensacola hick’s 3-acre lot, shit everywhere, generally disorganized, old things hanging from walls, and a tin roof. It was cute, but it could be the last place I ever saw.

There he was, exactly how I imagined him: short, with a long white beard, gruff voice, short sentences with mostly silence when he could get away with it—he would never use his words if he didn’t have to. He waved me toward the back of the property as I drove up in my truck. My heart was literally pounding out of my chest. When would I get shot in the face? I was thinking to myself, *I could fucking take this guy*, as I looked at this decrepit 75-year-old relic of a man with nothing but pure fear.

I got out of my truck, looked him in the eye, and shook his hand.

“So what do you need?” he said to me.

“I honestly have no idea.”

“What are you trying to build?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure.”

This was the start of my adventure. I honestly didn’t even know why I was there other than to see what was going to happen.

“Teach me.” *Don’t touch my asshole.*

The dark thoughts that creep into your mind when you meet someone for the first time and you’re kind of in a vulnerable place—pretty fucked up how society has made me think this. I think I was there to prove society wrong, that I wasn’t going to get locked in a tiny shed and get my eyes peeled out of my skull. Maybe that’s the reason why I was there. What the fuck is courage?

And so he taught me. I had no idea what the different types of wood were: cedar, maple, oak. He walked me around his property and showed me all the different types of wood that were brought to him by the mill. I listened to him as I wandered around, and the old man showed me all the woodworking equipment. I don’t think there was a single tool in his shed that was manufactured. The entire place was littered with wood chips and smelled like maple sap. It was sick—it was a man’s dream to have that shop. He was going to show me everything. I was going to get skull-fucked in the face. Just kidding. This was going to be an apprenticeship. He was going to groom me. Wait, no, he wasn’t going to groom me—he was going to help me. Fuck.

It turned out he was an old chief in the Navy, a truly wise old man of 75 years old. I began casually visiting him as much as I could. We worked on this project building a poster board out of wood. He showed me each part of the project step-by-step, from picking out the wood to cutting it to gluing it together to sanding it to everything in between. I’d never done anything like this except for woodworking shop in middle school, where I nearly cut my hand off on a bandsaw because no one was watching me. I remember that shit—literally no one else saw it. I never told my teacher because I was just scared I’d get in trouble.

I was literally playing with a bandsaw. That’s the dumb shit you do in middle school. That’s the stupid way you get taught in school: like, here’s all these power tools and all this crap, have fun. No one actually teaches you anything—you’re in a class with 20 other kids and there’s one teacher, and they just taught 20 other kids an hour before and 20 before that.

For the first time, someone was actually sitting down one-on-one and teaching me everything he knew from a lifelong perspective. This man was literally giving me the forbidden knowledge, like I was on an Assassin’s Creed mission in an open-world map and I’d run into an ancient old man who gave me the wise words.

It literally did happen like that. The second day I came, he handed me an old book. The thing was basically falling apart, and it was inscribed 1961. The book was called *The Richest Man in Babylon*.

“Read this and give it back to me.”

I read it back to front. It turned out to be an old financial book in a setting of ancient Babylon. It was truly great information.

Each day I could, I went to Norman’s. He taught me stuff instead of playing with my butthole. I got so lucky. Just kidding. Why the fuck does everyone act like if they’re a stranger they’re going to be a rapist? I’ll tell you why: the news is a fucked-up place. The internet is a fucked-up place. It’s keeping everyone from actually learning things from each other and trusting people from the street. It’s destroying society. I was on a mission to not get diddled and prove everyone wrong—so far, I had not gotten diddled.

Each day I’d spend something like 20 to 30 minutes there and then tell him I needed to go walk my dog, which I actually did need to do. I found my ginormous black lab on the street outside my house—just a discarded piece-of-shit dog that no one wanted, covered in fleas. My wife and I took him in and saved his life. Again, maybe my lot in life is to prove everyone wrong, to try to do the right thing, maybe. To trust things. To everyone walking by my dog on the street, I feel bad for you—you just thought he was another stray animal. He is one of the most wonderful things that have ever come through my life, and all I had to do was give him a chance. The chance you wouldn’t give him. In the searing heat of July in Pensacola, I gave him a chance.

Norman looked me in the eye and asked me solemnly, “Do you want me to watch your dog?” It turned out it was the answer to all my problems. Davey, this massive black lab that I didn’t know would come into my life, was laying in my tiny townhouse every day. Norman gave me the opportunity to send him to a 3-acre property, fenced in, to run around. It was a beautiful symbiotic relationship: I would show up in the morning and drop Davey off, and he would be watched by the old man while I headed to work. When I came to pick Davey up, Norman would teach me some things in the woodworking shop and give me some wise advice. Then I’d head home.

This went on for a while. The only unforgiving part of the entire thing was that Norman lived 30 minutes out of the way, and then I had to drive another 45 minutes to work, which made my commute incredibly long and arduous.

There’s no fairytale without a troll. One morning as I was dropping Davey off with Norman, an irate man approached my car, coming from Norman’s neighbor’s house.

“Is that your [dog]?” My thought was literally, *Of course, you fucking retard.* It was the kind of confrontational question that the person already knew the answer to and that it was the start of a fight. I was all there for it at 7 AM.

“Don’t ever trust that man.” I looked this guy in the eyes—I already saw the signs of derangement and possible alcohol abuse. He was fucking crazy. “Your dog got out yesterday, FYI.” I already knew this because Norman told me. Instead of this neighbor guy trying to help Norman, he complained about it to me as if I was going to turn on Norman, the guy who was literally watching my dog and giving me advice all for free. After dealing with this guy for a couple minutes, enough was enough, and I drove off. I called Norman to tell him about what happened.

Norman said that for literally 30 years, his neighbor had been completely crazy. See, Norman literally built his house on the property, and he asked to chop just a few trees down in the back. For 30 years, this neighbor had taken it personally.

We make choices in life: who to trust and who not to trust. It is ultimately the most consequential decision we make in life—where we get our information from, where we get wisdom from.

But what do I know… I’m just a black dog.

FREE WISDOM FROM NORMAN

1. Never let anyone shit on you—open up your mouth instead.

2. Save one dollar for every $10 you make.

3. There was once two barracks on the naval base fighting over whether or not to chop down a tree. One of the barracks wanted to chop it down to use the wood. The other barracks wanted to save it for the shade. The barracks who wanted to save it charged a sentry to protect the tree. Every hour of every day, the sentry stood to protect the tree. Each sentry diligently manned the post, never leaving the tree unguarded, for 20 years. “Why do we watch this tree?” one of the sentries said as they were relieving the other guardsman’s post. “I don’t know—we’ve always done it. It’s tradition.” Sometimes you need to reevaluate.

4. Better to drop one pebble in the river once a day than a pile of pebbles in the river occasionally.

5. Never, never trust a woodworker that has all of their fingers.

6. Never trust a janitor to be your jewel dealer.

7. Put your money to work for you.

8. Save money by fixing things and never waste.

9. Never trust new tools. Instead, trust old tools. It’s a common misconception—old things have lasted longer.

10. Marry well.

If you’re expecting some feel-good feminist puff piece about empowering women and placing them on pedestals, think again.

All my life I’ve been surrounded by tough, adventurous, free-willed women who never took shit from anyone. They worked hard, set goals, chased them, and succeeded.

My grandmother survived the Battle of Britain—forty-plus straight days of German bombardment. No one thought the Nazis would cross the Channel. They were wrong. My grandmother, probably no older than nine, huddled in a train-station shelter with other kids, little food, pitch black, waiting out the bombs. We treat war as an abstraction that happens to someone else. Not her. She lived it. Every day. Her own father was killed in North Africa.

When I dated, I had fun, but I always knew when a girl wasn’t the one. Beauty fades like a new car losing its shine. You see celebrities—supposed pinnacles of physical perfection—cheating on each other. Why? Because without ideals, character, substance, beauty and love don’t last. I needed someone tough, someone who could raise my kids and handle my wild temperament and had a wild temperament of her own. I needed grit and determination but still would take care of me.

My mother, at 39, with four kids already, decided to chase her passion: long-distance running. She didn’t just get good—she became the best. She trained every day, entered races, lined up against college girls and beat them. She raced in Madison Square Garden against women half her age and slaughtered them. The best of the best, beaten by a mom of four.

She wanted to be a labor-and-delivery nurse. I’d grown up as the son of an orthopedic surgeon; I knew better. I told her she was made for the emergency room. She half-agreed but asked why. I said, “Because you were built for it.”

And that’s what she became. We had no idea how much fortitude, pain, suffering, and pure sacrifice it would demand. Every night she came home exhausted, aching, an emotional wreck.

I told her every night she was handling it well. There’s no “good” way to handle the ER. It’s the gutter of society—drug addicts, psychopaths, traumatic injuries, all colliding together every hour. Nothing is ever convenient in the ER. One minute a guy’s throwing chairs in the lobby; the next, a man’s having a heart attack down the hall, all the while one of your patients is jacking off. It’s fucking disgusting. Where are the feminists then? Where are the police? Who is there to help?

My other grandmother—mother of five boys and one girl, wife of my dad’s orthopedic-surgeon father—used to snap, “Elbows off the table,” and the whole room froze. She ran a tight ship. Work does come home. It should come home. Some say work should stay at work and this is partially true, but work is your life. If you’re not tuned in to what your spouse is feeling, you don’t have a real relationship. That’s how people cheat, drink too much, scream at their kids, spiral. You have to know what’s on their mind, especially the bad shit. They need to know that you know, and you care. But there’s a line: letting them lay their burden in your lap is not the same as carrying it for them. You go through it together.

One night she came home with the thousand-yard stare. I asked what was wrong. She said a man had arrived with a bandage around his head, supposedly for stomach pain. While she was alone with him in the room, he said, “Want to see something?” and started unwrapping the bandage. He was schizophrenic and had scalped himself—exposed his cauterized skull and brain to her on the spot. Straight out of a horror movie. Guess what? This is a drop in the bucket. This shit happens every single day, and people just… keep going. She told me how, one time, another nurse working the front desk didn’t immediately admit a suicide risk patient. Work is extremely overwhelming. It was a momentary lapse in judgment. In the next moment, the guy decided it wasn’t worth it and jumped off the parking garage instead of waiting in the waiting room.

How do you go from that to the grocery store, picking up the kids, walking the dog with your spouse? How do you even share it?

People say therapy fixes everything. Depressed? Therapy. Lonely? Therapy. PTSD? Therapy. Let me be clear: therapy is mostly bullshit. Medicating yourself on a cocktail of drugs to cope is bullshit. A little upper now and then? Fine. Twenty meds to stay “stable”? That’s medicated avoidance.

No therapy, no pill, will ever replace a rock-solid relationship and family. When you’re surrounded by people who love you, who show up every hour no matter how bad the day was, you can’t stay sad. You can’t stay depressed. There’s nothing you can’t do.

So, here’s my message to modern feminism: the cure for your sadness is not “empowerment.” If you need marches, parades, blogs, and constant lashing out at men, you’re coping for something deeper. Everyone needs love, support, family, structure. My grandmother and mother weren’t feminists—they were feminine and successful. The victimhood movement is the real barrier. Nothing is handed to you. Man or woman, you earn it. Anything given freely means nothing.

The suffragettes didn’t scream for equal wages; they went out and crushed the competition. They became mavericks unbound by gender or excuse. They cut a path. Modern feminism is regressive, led by woman with no direction in life. Angry at something. Angry at men, maybe some rightfully so for whatever specific reason or life story. So what? Move on.

My grandmother didn’t spend the next seventy years whining about bombs ringing in her ears, rotten beef, or her father blown up by a roadside bomb in North Africa. She decided to learn from it, accept it, and live life by the principles she was forced to learn. When my siblings or I left food on our plates, her thick English accent cut like a knife: “Don’t waste.” It drove the lesson home. Time is short. Kids need to learn hard lessons now. She sure did.

You don’t hate men—you hate yourself. You hate what you’ve allowed yourself to become. You hate the excuses and you’re the one who makes them. You ignore the women who actually suffered—the intolerable, the insufferable—and pretend you’re in their league. You’re not. You’ve never felt bombs creeping closer in the dark long night, wondering if a rat will crawl across your face. Your city on fire. Your classmates’ families being obliterated. Those women didn’t whine about the patriarchy. They prayed to God their dad’s and brothers would come home from war victorious and at all. The woman wasn’t going to storm the beaches of Normandy, they would keep the men fed. Every job was equally important. And there lies your equality that you were so desperately looking for. There was no gender equality, just harmony. We all will work together based on our strengths to get the job done. Rebuild the city. Defend the homeland. Feed each other. They scoff at your plight.

So what is it like to be married to a real hero? It’s hard. As a man, I want to be the hero, the defender etc. etc. I swallow my pride easily though. Right now, it’s my turn to support her and I’m proud of it. When she walks in from a shift, I take the bag off her shoulder, rub her neck, feed her. I do it out of pure love and admiration. Maybe some men can’t do that, shame on them too. I’m proud my wife isn’t a fake feminist marching in the street, praying a phantom patriarchy collapses under her chants. Instead, she comes home exhausted because the ER is understaffed—because more women won’t step into the fire of medicine and help her. She wishes other woman would help her, but instead other women look down on her for not conquering some genre of life that men have supposedly monopolized. Guess what, it’s all fake, you can peruse and conquer anything you want to do.

Become what you want to be. A lawyer, a doctor, pilot, nurse, mother, long distance runner. Do us all a favor though, quit make excuses and dragging other women down, it’s shameful and a waste of everyone’s time. And stop putting other women down for wanting to be the healer that they are inatly passionate about. Women can be whatever they want. The only thing in your way is your own hate.

But what do I know… I’m just a black dog.

The lights? The branding? The stats fed into his skull like metrics for meaning?

Fuck no, it’s the fight. The fight to the fucking death.

The edge. The sense that at any moment, something could go terribly wrong, and your head could be lopped off.

I’m not an F1 fan by trade. I couldn’t tell you the fastest lap at Monaco or the fuel ratio on a McLaren. I do, however, know the feeling of danger, of hovering just above the line between living and the dead.

It gives me a tear in my eye. That’s the energy every man, deep down, understands. Our love language.

And that’s what Formula 1 used to be. Among many other dead sports.

Dancing with Death

In the 1970s through the 1990s, Formula 1 wasn’t a brand. It was possibly smearing a wall at 200MPH in flaming ball of fire. The cars wanted to kill you, the tracks unforgiving, the dudes unfiltered.

James Hunt was the face of it, fearless, unpredictable, and a partier. He didn’t pretend to be humble. He didn’t rehearse answers for interviews. He raced to win or die trying. He drank, fought, laughed, and drove harder than anyone alive. It is a thrill to watch him.

There was no “image strategy.” His image was real. It wasn’t a show. He wasn’t a character. He was the real deal.

Beside that chaos stood the F1 girls, the Marlboro girls, the John Player girls, the ones who gave color to danger. They were part of the ecosystem: the flash of red and white against the roar of engines, a living emblem of the sport’s style and confidence.
They weren’t there to soften it. They were there to amplify it. And they did.

The Power of the Paddock

The paddock was a temple of adrenaline and precision.
Men tuned engines by ear, cigarettes hung from their lips. The nerves were high, but the emotions controlled. The air carried sea salt, petrol, and perfume, the scent of glory. A moment of relief between death rides.

Every driver knew the odds. The 1970s alone saw dozens of fatalities.
And still, they lined up. They tightened the straps and stared at death with calm eyes.
When Hunt climbed into the cockpit, the world fell quiet, a man and a machine about to unravel the laws physics. Man, and machine linked through flow.

Around them, the women, the fans, the journalists, they were drawn to it not for spectacle, but for authenticity. There was no script. Just the noise, the heat, and the danger.

When Safety Killed the Thrill

Then came the new age, the polished logos, the perfect PR statements, the “engagement metrics.”
By the late 1990s, the sport had been sterilized. The paddocks looked more like trade shows than battlegrounds.

When Liberty Media banned grid girls in 2018, the move was sold as progress, a step toward modernization. But to men who remember the soul of the sport, it felt like the final corporate checkbox.
Because Formula 1 didn’t just lose women in short skirts, it lost its heartbeat. It lost the heat. The pursuit of the hunt.

Technology made it safer. Money made it cleaner.
And somewhere in that process, we stopped watching for courage and started watching for content.

The Seduction of Risk

Risk is the oldest language of men.
We build, we climb, we fight, we compete, not because it’s logical, but because it reminds us we’re alive.
Danger doesn’t repel us. It defines us.

That’s why watching Hunt throw his McLaren into a wet corner at 180 mph mattered.
It wasn’t about a stopwatch, it was about conviction.
A man doing something that might kill him, perfectly.

Modern F1 feels like a simulation, precise, beautiful, but hollow.
We’ve engineered out the imperfection, and in doing so, we’ve engineered out the emotion.
A sport without the chance of ruin isn’t a sport. It’s a product.

The Girls, the Glory, the Gone

The grid girls weren’t victims, they were part of the theatre.
They chose to stand in the storm and cheer on their man. To be close to the danger, to the smell of oil and champagne and victory. They were just as much a part of it.
They were icons of presence, confidence, and style, and they gave the paddock something the modern era can’t fake: soul.

They represented the world around the race, a place where men chased excellence and women were drawn to that gravity.
It wasn’t about domination. It was about polarity, masculine danger meeting feminine grace.
And that balance gave the sport its energy. There was a balance to it.

Love of the game.

Drive Me to Death

Formula 1 didn’t die. It just forgot what made it worth dying for.
It wasn’t the engineering. It wasn’t the sponsors.
It was the courage to risk everything under the eyes of the world.

When Formula 1 stopped scaring us, it stopped thrilling us.
When the paddock lost its girls, it lost its grin.

And that’s what every man still searches for, that split second between control and chaos where you feel the whole world lean in.

But what do I know?
I’m just a dog.

When the Marlboro girls, the noise, and the smoke made F1 feel alive.

⚙️ The Lost Art of Risk — premiering tomorrow at 6 AM EST on Davey the Black Dog.

#F1 #JamesHunt #GoldenEra #Risk #DaveyTheBlackDog

I consider myself a writer. That’s been part of who I am for as long as I can remember. I don’t know if I’m a particularly good writer. In a lot of ways I don’t really think that matters. That being said, for the last several years all of my writing has been dedicated between academic research and writing my novel. Both of those have been very serious passions for me for different reasons. As a result, I haven’t focused on this sort of casual, philosophical musing in a written format for a long time. The novel project is ongoing, but the research is probably at a pause for the time being just because of the place I’ve chosen to be in life. That now leaves a corner of my mind open for this kind of writing.

People reasonably close to me know that a core part of my identity and my story is that I was raised as a devout Mormon, and now, more importantly, I’m not. Incidentally, a lot of my close friends are religious people. They have rods to cling to and guide them that I’m admittedly jealous of. I describe myself as a wanderer, especially in the realm of faith. But I’m not a passive, aimless wanderer. I’m a wanderer looking for direction.

That personal condition brings me to the topic of truth. I’m jealous of my friends’ guiding principles, but I stand by my priorities and I own my station as something I chose. That chosen priority is an active search for truth. In a gross oversimplification of my background, I left the Mormon church because I concluded it wasn’t true. It is a charitable and constructive and value-oriented organization. By many definitions it is a “good” institution. But I don’t care about those things, I care about what is objectively true in the universe.

I believe I’ve seen glimpses of truth. The world presents itself to me in three parts.

There is the Perceived. That is the things in front of us. It is the lens through which the creator has allowed us to see everything in our mortal way. I do not mean it to be just the physical world, although this is a part of the Perceived. It is also emotion, relationships, connection to nature and souls and so much more. The perceived is a beautiful thing. It is a gift, yet a harbinger of pain, and also pain itself.

Encapsulating the perceived is the Barrier. It is a layer that varies in thickness from person to person. It is blinding and inhibitive, but it is also protective. Some pierce through it more easily and more often than others. I’ve had experiences in my life that I can’t explain within the normal confines of the Perceived. Beautiful things, bloody things, and things in between. These experiences occurred at thin spots in the Barrier. Something, or someone decided I was at an important enough moment to break the standard order, and pierced through it to show me something. I have both succeeded and failed in my reactions to these experiences, and I have been both punished and rewarded each time accordingly.

This then begs the question: what lies outside of the Perceived and through the Barrier? That is where Truth lies. The Gnostics understood this. The Coptics, Manichaeans, and Mandaeans in the modern day. Outside of Perception there is knowledge. It is cold, uncompromising, and unfathomably complex. This is similar to where Cthulhu lies in Lovecraftian horror. It is where Paul Atreides reaches as he attempts his “scattering the fool-self of his dream.”

Truth is almost synonymous with the Unknown. But, by my own previous definition, it occasionally allows pieces of itself to be Known. These are the moments when Truth itself decides to reveal itself within the Perceived. When I say I have experienced this a few times in my life, please understand I don’t say that from a place of hubris. I believe most people have experienced what I am describing at some point or another. Truth manifests. It wants to be understood. It’s just too bloody complex by its own nature to be seen more than a grain of sand at a time.

That desire to be understood is the reason the Barrier and the Perceived exist in the first place. The Perceived is an expression of Truth. It simplifies itself, and we may accidentally convolute the simplification, but it is the only way it can communicate with us in a digestible, common manner.

This leads me back to where I began. I have dedicated my life to piercing the Barrier as much as possible. I want to experience glorious, gritty, uncompromising Truth. I don’t deserve it. If I ever experienced it fully I have no doubt I would lose my mind. If I am Babel and God strikes me dumb I will accept my fate. My desire manifests in a search for religion, for spirituality, and a willingness to accept that I don’t know. Because sometimes, when Truth grants it, I do know. And I am grateful for those moments.

I am lost, but I am hunting.

But what do I know… I’m just a friend of the black dog.

Surrounded by grotesk, sunken in, obliterated couches from tens of thousands of saturated cheeks cutting cisco farts; tearing through the fox leather down to their wooden bones. They were beat to hell those couches, meagerly leaning up against those walls with little hope, cursed for eternity. Walls, end to end, strewn with classic rock posters, camp memorabilia, and obscure 90’s EPs.

Damn I can smell that wooden room from here. The moment you entered, the striking old furniture smell bantering with wood dust, pine sap, and sweat. A distinct lived in smell that wasn’t quite good but felt like a home for rebels.

Gathered around on the bombed-out sofas, the boys faced the center of the little cabin. There lied a horseshoe shaped wooden desk etched with legendary names, foul burned-in words, and old black mix boards that did little to change the sound. At the end, a microphone and a 2001 iMac on its last legs; possibly with a soul of its own.

So integral to the operation was the iMac that it could not be replaced, many tried. Some would even go as far as saying it would keep running even after unplugging the thing. Despite its stamina and malevolence, it struggled to keep itself cool, blaring the fan throughout the day and shutting down intermittently to take a nap. It was like Diesel in that way.

Campers and staff didn’t come in there for warmth, far from it, they bared the swelter of the hot room for something else.

To live in the heat of the moment.

But what do I know… I’m just a dog.

Davey the Black Dog

Now I tell you, we did go and see people talking to each other, etc. etc. But there’s nothing more stupid to me than being in a bar with 15 TV screens.

Am I a little bit of a freak for wanting to actually meet strangers instead of watching the colorful boxes on the walls. See, I’ll tell you the truth I am a freak. I want to see people’s lips move in ways that leave me in a profound state of emotion. Make me fucking laugh dammit. Hell, even hate me and try to blow my brains out.

At least they’ll remind me that I am actually alive at all.

Ghosts in the machine. My favorite Police Album.

We are. But which one is worse; to be a ghost in the machine or to watch it all alone from the outside feeling helpless.

You cry out to them and they can see you, but they can’t hear you.

I have a strange sense of purpose now though, to find others who have broken out. To break others out. To break others out with their help.

And in the meanwhile, enjoy life by the fireplace, smell the ash, feel the words. To feel.

I have time to be a ghost, I have no time to feel.

But what do I know… I’m just a dog.

Davey the Black Dog