Hizzah to me and also to you

Today is my birthday. I am now 37, and yet, if you asked me what age I actually feel, I’d say somewhere between 24 and "ancient woodland wizard."

On the one hand, I’m forever that 24 year old who threw a house party teeming with delightfully inebriated chaos of 20-somethings doing body shots off the backyard picnic table, and all I truly wanted to do was sit on the kitchen floor with my best friend eating an entire box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans—totally sober.

And yet at the same time, I feel wholly qualified to lead the Fellowship of the Ring to Mordor, largely because I’ve developed the rare and noble gift of keeping wildly incompatible people from strangling one another simply by telling morally-compelling stories at inconvenient times.

And since I regard you lot as fellow travelers on this increasingly surreal quest (feel free to fight over who gets to be Merry and Pippin), not so much heading to Mordor as we are stumbling through life embodied by that scene in Dungeons & Dragons where we must cross an ancient, cursed bridge with overly complex rules, designed by a particularly nervous bureaucrat determined to ensure that no one is ever harmed, offended, mildly startled. Should you accidentally stray from the enforced 12-step formula, the whole thing would collapse into a pit of collective outrage.

But the joke’s on them. I grew up watching kids be humiliated on Legends of the Hidden Temple as they flailed helplessly in the cursed Shrine of the Silver Monkey because some sadistic Hollywood executive clearly thought, “Let’s film the hardcore parkour Temple Run at the end of a 10-hour day when their legs have the structural integrity of overcooked noodles and see if they can still assemble a puzzle while being chased down by grown men in under three minutes.”

So no, I won’t crack under pressure. I was forged in the fires of televised injustice. And I still want vengeance for the Blue Barracudas.

So here we are, at the world’s least structurally-sound obstacle course, dangling by emotional rope bridges, trying to figure out if it’s safe to have an opinion, or if that too will summon the gelatinous cube of cultural disapproval.

Naturally, this made me super duper depressed for about ten years. (That’s the clinical term. “Super duper.” Very serious and bleak.) I watched lifelong friends, cousins, and former heroes—all slowly get sucked into this cult.

And yet, somehow, my inner Green Monkey sensed something was amiss. Spiritually agile and suspicious of the host’s motives, I abandoned everything I knew and forged ahead without so much of an understanding of the position of Polaris in the sky.

But that, my friends, was the beginning of the end. Or possibly the end of the beginning. Or, more likely, just another Wednesday in the fabric of the universe.

And while I am, to this day, reviled in at least seven group chats, shadow-banned from the family WhatsApp, and accused by my cousins of being a white supremacist simply for committing the radical act of registering as an Independent (despite having been raised by three generations of civil rights activists, dedicating my life to solving for world peace, asking ChatGPT, “what would Jesus do here?” whenever I’m at a crossroads, and politically aligning with Nelson Mandela)...

Still.

It’s the friends we’ve made along the way. And by “friends” I mean you rogue bunch of philosophical misfits, mystics, and people who once majored in political science.

Together, we have crawled through the flaming obstacle course of moral decay, escaped the noisy echo chambers, and learned to dodge at least one sentient algorithm with tentacles of a kraken.

And now we feast.

We gather ‘round the sacred Substack table as unlikely allies lifting our mismatched mugs to the sky, toasting not to certainty, but to the mysteries of higher truth.

To the ones who asked the forbidden questions, who got weird on purpose, who broke free from the cult of certainty with nothing but guts, and to the glorious weirdos who just showed up for the snacks—you’re the reason it’s fun.

May your carbs be plentiful, your doubts be useful, and your table always have room for one more.