Festival of Distraction
David Lynch called his fundraiser the Festival of Disruption, after a Maharishi line about breaking the surface of ordinary life. For nearly thirty years, Twin Peaks fans gathered in Snoqualmie and North Bend for something else: cherry pie, bus tours, signing lines, and the occasional high school drama. This essay is about fan communities, the Mistake of the Intellect, and why the most important question in a dark theater isn’t who made the film. It’s who is watching it.
The Secret History of The Red Room Podcast (2011 - 2022)
Scott Ryan and I built the Red Room Podcast on eleven years of disagreeing in good faith as two nobodies from Ohio with no credentials, arguing about television because we loved it enough to take it seriously. Then Twin Peaks: The Return arrived and did something neither of us expected: it broke the show. This is the story of what a podcast can survive, and what it can't.
Why Is Everybody So Sick?
Ask someone how they're doing and you'll get a symptom list — that's the culture now, illness as personality, suffering as the only proof anyone's paying attention to their own life. JB Minton spent ten years learning it doesn't have to work that way: stress lives in the body before it's ever a thought, and no amount of thinking gets you out of it. Suffering, he argues, is a mistake — not a life sentence.