Essays

Interior of a rustic frontier cabin at dusk, with a lit oil lantern, worn journal, and tin mug on a rough wooden table overlooking a desert landscape

Longform Essay AI & Technology ~9 min read • Jul 12, 2026

I Should Have Been a Heavy Equipment Operator….Or A Cattle Rancher

A senior systems engineer with nearly three decades of experience reflects on the gap between professional aptitude and personal temperament, tracing how an accidental entry into IT became a career...

A middle-aged person sitting alone in a sterile hospital waiting room with harsh fluorescent lighting, plastic chairs, and a muted TV on the wall showing blurred news footage. Their hand is frozen mid-reach toward a smartphone resting on the seat beside them, but they have pulled back, choosing instead to sit still with their hands folded in their lap, staring into the middle distance with a contemplative, slightly unsettled expression. The room feels quiet and suspended in time. Through a small window, warm afternoon light filters in, suggesting the world outside moving at a slower, more natural pace. The overall mood is introspective and melancholic, a visual tension between the pull of digital distraction and the rare stillness of an unoccupied mind. Photorealistic editorial style, muted color palette with cool fluorescent blues contrasted against warm amber tones from the window, shallow depth of field.

Longform Essay AI & Technology ~9 min read • Jun 30, 2026

What has fundamentally changed the world for the worst but us humans haven’t realized?

Boredom was never the enemy. For most of human history, idle time quietly powered memory consolidation, creative insight, and empathy through the brain's default mode network. Smartphones and algorithmic feeds have colonized those cognitive gaps, training our brains away from depth and sustained thought. Frank argues we didn't fix boredom — we amputated it, and we're only beginning to feel what's gone.

A weathered 1980s suburban neighborhood street at golden hour, showing an empty driveway in front of a modest ranch-style house with the lights off inside, while a group of kids on bicycles rides freely down the road in the background, no adults in sight. The foreground features a worn door key on a lanyard resting on concrete front steps beside a scuffed backpack. The scene evokes late afternoon independence and quiet solitude — a child's world operating without supervision. Shot in warm, slightly faded tones reminiscent of analog photography from the early 1980s, editorial realism style with nostalgic depth and a bittersweet emotional undertone.

Longform Essay AuDHD / Neurodivergency ~9 min read • Jun 24, 2026

The Pros and Cons of Being a GenX Latchkey Kid

Growing up as a Gen-X latchkey kid on Lakeside Drive in Milledgeville, Georgia meant coming home to empty houses, cooking dinner at eleven, and figuring everything out alone. Frank reflects honestly on how that unsupervised childhood built real capability, resilience, and problem-solving instincts while also leaving lasting wounds around emotional regulation, isolation, and decades of undiagnosed AuDHD.

A dimly lit mid-nineties college apartment at night, a young man in his early twenties sitting alone in a worn armchair beneath a single lamp, a thick open textbook on his lap and a yellow highlighter loosely held in one hand. He stares into the middle distance, not at the page, his expression distant and inward, caught somewhere between effort and paralysis. The room is cluttered with the quiet evidence of a life being lived hard — stacked books, a half-empty coffee mug, papers spread across a desk nearby. The warm amber light creates deep shadows, giving the scene a heavy, intimate atmosphere. The mood is melancholic but not hopeless, evoking the weight of undiagnosed struggle, the loneliness of not having language for what you are experiencing, and the particular exhaustion of a mind that cannot rest. Photorealistic editorial style, cinematic lighting, muted color palette with warm amber and cool shadow tones.

Longform Essay AuDHD / Neurodivergency ~10 min read • Jun 24, 2026

A Discipline Problem

At 55, Frank receives an AuDHD diagnosis that reframes decades of academic failure, sensory overwhelm, and social exhaustion he had blamed on laziness and poor character. From six quarters of academic exclusion to a 28-year self-taught IT career built on hyperfocus, he traces what working three times as hard as everyone else actually looked like, and what it means to finally have a name for it.

Rusted classic muscle car parked inside a weathered wooden barn in a desert ghost town at sunset, lit by oil lanterns

Longform Essay AuDHD / Neurodivergency ~9 min read • Jun 23, 2026

The COPO 9561 Was Never Supposed to Exist

In 1969, Chicago Chevrolet dealer Fred Gibb used GM's internal fleet ordering system to build 427 cubic inch Camaros that corporate policy explicitly prohibited. Frank draws a parallel between Gibb's approach and navigating systems as a neurodivergent person, arguing that understanding what rules actually protect, rather than simply following them, is the difference between compliance and genuine reading comprehension.

A dimly lit home office at 3 AM, illuminated only by the soft blue-white glow of rack-mounted server equipment. A lone figure, bald, wearing a t-shirt, crouches in front of an open server rack filled with meticulously organized cables in neat bundles secured with zip ties, glowing network switches with blinking LEDs, and labeled patch panels. On a nearby desk sits a cold cup of coffee, a laptop with terminal windows open, and scattered technical documentation. The room is quiet and intimate, shelves lined with networking equipment and hard drives. The overall mood is peaceful, focused, almost meditative — the portrait of someone completely absorbed in a passion project in the middle of the night, the warm satisfaction of solitary craftsmanship radiating from the scene. Photorealistic editorial style with moody, cinematic low-light photography aesthetics, shallow depth of field, cool blue server-glow contrasting with warm ambient desk light.

Longform Essay AuDHD / Neurodivergency ~9 min read • Jun 23, 2026

The Homelab Is Not the Point

A hobbyist reflects on maintaining an extensively over-engineered home server setup that far exceeds the demands of its nominal purpose, arguing that framing the project as infrastructure for something else...