Advertise on podcast: Chasers of the Light Podcast with Tyler Knott Gregson

We’re all idiots, you know? Every single one of us. We fight what is in the war-like defense of what we think should be. We refuse to accept a truth until we’re too weary to deny it any longer, then we spend what little energy we have left trying to convince ourselves we were alright with it all along. We see our own nature, clear as freshly washed glass, and then we smudge it all up trying to aim the pane somewhere else. To harvest a different view. Seasons, too. Spend a winter wishing for the warm ease of Summer, spend a Spring longing for the fog and falling leaves that Autumn brings. Spend all the light we’ve got wanting dark, spend the long, long hours of pitch after daylight savings time officially ends ruing every moment we wasted desiring the peace that comes when light finally starts its fade away. There’s another way, and I’ll be damned if I’m not trying my hardest to practice it. There’s a lean in. There’s something a half-leap beyond accepting what is, and maybe it lives just a hair away from actually joyfully celebrating it. Maybe it’s a simple embracing. Loving, with all the passion it deserves, even if the intensity is something you can’t quite manufacture yet. Seasonally, in almost more ways than any other, this is something we’re trying to get better at, after all, where you practice, you improve. First step for us is acknowledging the truth of what is, and the slow eradication of focus onto anything we believe should be. The Autumnal truth of this first Sunday of November, this day that also happens to be the first where we “gain” an hour of sleep because of some arbitrary reshuffling of all the clocks left in a home that do not automatically do it for themselves, is this: Call it light then, the first on a numbered list in our souls, the initial focus of our practice. Shifting how we feel about it, the way we accept it, the types we allow in. It’s candles now, more than the blaze of overhead LED fixtures our contractor insisted on installing all those years ago. It’s lamps in corners in place of total illumination. This is a season of less light, and our hunting and gathering, our farming and roughly surviving ancestors knew this without having to practice at all. As light fell away, they lit more candles and ended their days earlier. They snuggled in to the darkness, never trying to drive it away. Second then, perhaps a call to slowing down. They knew this, we need to too, and Sarah and I speak of it often as we glance to the valley spread out below our deck and see far fewer cars far earlier into the evenings now. This is not a season of ferocious action, of fury, of frenzy, of spin. This season, the one we name Fall, and there is a reason for it. A fall into stillness, into the hibernation that the colder weather and dimmer shine deliver, and we are trying so hard to accept this. Not all things must be completed, not all battles even need to be fought, let alone won. Let Go, say I to she, Let Go, says back she to I on days I might forget. Autumn is now for reflection for she and I, it’s for recollection and not worry. It’s not easy, especially this year being one of such transition for she and I, one where we find this nest empty but somehow our hearts just as full. Look back, for certain, as I do this often and always, but hold not the worry we once did. Slow down, just slow down. We’ve wearier bodies than ever before, and I know it will continue this way. We are aging, and I call it beautiful. Practice, I think we must over and over again, in refusing to compare to any others, but more than all things, to ourselves as we might have once been. Maybe this, more than all things. Aren’t we trees, after all, each and all of us? Aren’t we born to grow our leaves, to stretch towards sunlight, but then, ahh but then, when the sunshine dips and our earth rotates itself ever-so-subtly away from that glowing ball of gas and heat, let those leaves fall? Aren’t these branches made to not only endure a time of bareness, but to embrace it, to store all the light until it’s needed once again? Aren’t we on this circle we’ve been on for eons and eternities? Haven’t we tread these paths before? At such great length I have spoken of embracing the darkness within us, how we must practice this, too. Just last weekend I sang these praises for a long time to your eyes and ears, now this time I ask for something deeper: Embrace the darkness around us, too. How, I know I will be asked, how when it feels so thick, so syrupy and viscous? How do we slice through and leave ourselves room for the practicing? Lean in then, lean and practice and light our candles to pocket tiny pools of glow in these giant growing seas of darkness. Snuggle in then, and embrace the shift, embrace one another, and forget our nonsensical obsessions on all we think should be in the face of all the beauty that is. Slow down then, and hibernate, and allow for more rest. All growing things must finally slow, must pause, must wait to grow again. Let go then, accept the changes we must not only survive, but thrive through. See our branches not as bare, but simply waiting. Leaves will return, they have before, they will again. It has always been this way. I love you all. Be good. Accept our shadows embrace the dark around us. Listen to the light. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

So nearly there, so nearly to the day of thinnest veil. So nearly the time of costume and mask, of guising and letting in all that’s been pressing on the membrane between this world and the next. So nearly to the haunted hours, the bone-tired collapse into midnight sheets after the fading of the light. So nearly to the shadow seconds. I’ll not waste your time, not these few days before my favorite holiday, I’ll not say a truth and pretend it’s revelatory, for it is one we already know. I will not speak to you and declare as though I’m discovering this fact we already know is one: We all have a darker side. We know this, covered it’s been time and again, and then probably again after that. We are beings of shadow and light, two opposites that spin as one thing, moons that catch both reflected shine and harvest some indefinable dark. We have always been this. This Halloween is not for acknowledging this, not for once again highlighting it. This season of thin veils and weariness that causes hands to tremble is for something else. This time, it’s for calling out another truth, another reality we forget to speak aloud. Today, it’s the spotlight on the exhaustion, the invisible toil that is managing some second self as a full-time job. This is the labor of caging what we call monster, that bit of us who is jealous, who is petty, who is furious, ashamed, longing, or less. This is for the Jekyll we swear doesn’t exist, though we hear the scratches on the back of that secret door. Autism, for me, means that door really doesn’t exist, and I almost never have that secret to keep, and so bizarrely, it almost creates something unique — a vantage point. I say this not in any way decorated with ego or pretentiousness, but instead from a place of rarity. I’ve read a dozen dozen articles about our “shadowed selves” from inside the cage, as it were. I’ve read listicles and how-to pieces on how to embrace those parts we think are uglier or not quite as socially acceptable, but more, I’ve read how we should tame them, banish them, or worse, destroy them altogether. Nonsense. It’s the shadow bits of people I love the most. It’s every single thing they call broken or gross. It’s the moments of pure honest emotion, the times they are so deliciously human and betray that imperfection. It’s when they have a little burst of jealousy that proves how much they care, when they get hilariously petty in response to the undeniable ridiculousness of someone else’s behavior — please see Oreo-Gate for a beautiful example of this — and I find nothing more attractive than seeing the real when all everyone wants to present is perfect. Everything these days has a polish. A shine. Everything is rehearsed and re-recorded and any thing inside any of us that anyone anywhere could ever call cringey is swiftly ironed flat. All the wrinkles of our individuality steamed to the point of silky and taut. We hide it when we’re upset with someone else, pretending all is well when all is very much not f*****g well. We say fine when we do not feel anything remotely resembling it. I’m quiet in public situations a lot, not what you’d expect if you know me privately. I’m goofy almost always, but when I get into situations that cause the ‘Tism part of my being to screech back in irritation with all the lights, all the noise, I tend to watch. I know what lives in the dark, I’ve seen it. Hell, I’ve fallen in love with it. Almost all of the reason for this entire wholesale rebrand on this site that was once Signal Fire, was this. This shadow, this darkness, this quirkiness, this oddity. I got so tired trying to fit this place into the box that Signal Fire and everything around it created, but more, I got tired of thinking everyone else might feel pressure to do exactly that when they come here. This place, this beautiful place, is for exactly who it says it is for on the mandatory “one sentence description” that Substack makes you give: “Poetry, essays, photography, and beautiful weirdness for the seekers, dreamers, riff raff, and quiet rebels — from Tyler Knott Gregson” Turns out, that’s all of us. Every single imperfect one of us. I rebranded because I’m really, unavoidably, and to quote Bella Swan, irrevocably, weird. I’ve always been this, I’m a rabbit hole disguised as a person, I’m Autistic special interests that pour out like I’ve been stabbed. I’m passion, I’m a little bit of light and a lottle bit of shadow. You are too, and I love this about you. It’s nearly Halloween and so where I’d usually be telling you all to wear your best costumes, throw on your coolest disgusting silicone masks, this time I’m gonna ask you to do something different: This year, go as yourself. YOUR WHOLE self. The shadow and the sunshine, the dark, the light, the good, the bad, the ugly, the parts you usually hide and pretend don’t even live in your house, let alone that you’ve got them chained up in the basement with the dryer tumbling as loud as it will go. It’s in you, it’s always been in you, and I watch it from across the room at parties or when wandering some random gathering downtown. I see it in the spaces between what you do say in the comments, I feel it like a second voice from somewhere more honest in you. Right now, it’s a whisper. Let me hear it’s scream. I love you all. Be good. We don’t fear the dark, the shadows deep inside us. It is shame instead. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

I have lost count how many times I’ve printed it, how many times I’ve signed my name at the bottom in a weird archival pen that won’t fade in sunlight. I’ve never tried to keep tally on how many envelopes it’s gone into, how many different addresses around the world. I just know something simple: When someone loses someone they love, it’s words they come looking for, it’s poetry they need. When a funeral or memorial is looming like some storm cloud just over the mountains on the horizon of their life, when all things seem to crash and crumble, when tomorrow is stained not with promise but with absence, more than all things it is understanding we seek. It is the comfort that comes with knowing you’re not alone in what you’re enduring. That somewhere, someone, has come through it too. More than all poems I have written, it’s the one below that is requested, the one below that I send them. It is Typewriter Series #690, as all my poems carry numbers instead of titles. It is words for those that remain, it’s the ache named for those left trembling. They are only words, just simple letters that sit with other simple letters and form simple words that become uncomplicated sentences. They come from this imperative in me that teachers since the very beginning called useless, called unnecessary, called frivolity and a dead-end road that would never make me a living. Oh this beautiful uselessness. I just spent all of September writing about Dead Poet’s Society, and today I’m reminded of the message that stuck with me far above any other. It was not Carpe Diem that resonated upon first finding it, it was not O Captain My Captain, it was the entire speech in the video below. It was this monologue, and I will paste it here in its entirety in case you wish to read it rather than hear it delivered. “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” “Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.” That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” It is not solely grief that sends strangers knocking on my door. It is not just loneliness or longing, sorrow or the sweet serenade that surrender sings when we find ourselves haunted by sadness. It is love, too. It is love, always. Maybe more than all others combined, it is love that brings people whose hands I do not know to me, whose laughter is still a language I’ve not yet learned. Love found, love awaited, love being fought for. Love the pool their toes just begin to dip into, or love in a form so deep and true that it makes two wish to join themselves into one thing, to bind their hands or put rings on fingers or speak promises into the only space left unfilled between them. The terrifying closing of that final gap. I’ve been asked to help others find words for proposals, for second dates, for the telling of a story they know not how to define as the poetry it’s always been. It is not law, not medicine, not the engineering of a bridge or a home that I do, not these useful pursuits that would serve the world in a way that would also pad my pocket and make it so much easier to feed my family. It is poetry, it is photography, it is writing and hoping a community is built up around the thoughts that stir from somewhere dark and deep inside me. It’s this beautiful uselessness, it’s this gorgeous frivolousness that is why I am here, what I “stay alive for.” There is no shame in me for this. There is no wish or regret or some secret great ruing that stirs in me. Some have guitars in closets that call to them like siren songs from sea-soaked rocks, for some it is sketchbooks, poetry of their own no one has ever been allowed to read. It’s all these useless things we are told are hobbies and nothing more, that they are silly, they are for the quiet hours after the real work has been done, the private things that live in the space that’s left after a living is earned or the smarter choices. A living earned, and it is here I so greatly struggle. To be alive is to earn it, to endure the rollercoaster that is this human existence. To wake, to struggle, to breathe, to keep a heart beating on a planet that spins and orbits and storms and surges. To navigate the minefields of interaction, to survive the sorrows and the sadnesses, but more, to notice, to celebrate, to treasure the millions of little astonishments that disguise themselves as such ordinary things. To revel in the beautiful uselessness, to pursue it as the truth more important than all others. To see, to seek, to share. I am here but a blip, a half-blink of a single eye in a cosmos filled with uncountable others. I will make my time here matter in every way I know how, I will sit and chase down these slippery little sentences so I can give them back to you. I will aim my camera at the sunsets, the hidden smiles, the moments on a street far from those you call your own. I will create music from my suffering, I will help you find words to explain the love you have found. I will make art, as Glen Hansard begged me to do when he won his first and only Oscar, I will make art, I will make art. I will, because it is what we stay alive for. It is, perhaps, the most noble of all pursuits, though it be not well-paid. It is this we reach for when we are hurting or lonely, when we are broken and we swear we cannot be repaired. It is this we seek when we find something so beautiful it races our heartbeat or silences our voice or steals our breath or sends us gasping into the disbelief that it, all of it, can possibly be so beautiful. It is this, it has always been this, this perfect, shining, staggeringly lovely uselessness. I promise. I will. I Love you all. Be good. This silly pursuit, this beautiful uselessness, is why I am here. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Happy Hump Day goofturds. Another Wednesday, another Fuster Cluck LIVE. Believe it. Says the HD version isn’t available for some stupid reason, so you’re gonna watch us like it’s 2003. Cool, who doesn’t love SD? It’s a very, very random one today, everything from fart sounds to howler monkeys to our passionate plea to everyone to sell their gas stove/range. Not really passionate, but you still should. Cue every wannabe chef shouting rage at us. Here, as per usual, is THE BIG QUESTION! What is something someone you love has taught you about yourself that you never would have discovered on your own? and if you’re brave, a follow-up: What if the lesson isn’t flattering? All this from a super long, very sappy love-letter to my beautiful wife on our 7th anniversary this Sunday. Oof, I suppose I kinda like her, huh? If you missed it, it’s here: Also, for all you generous members of our paid community, DO NOT FORGET, our LIVE hangout, aka THE MENAGERIE is again this Friday, October 16th, at 6pm Mountain Time! Here’s the details how to join: This link SHOULD work, so everyone save it, set a reminder, whatever you need to do to access it so we don’t have a snafu like last time: The Menagerie LIVE with Lord & Lady Gregson Friday, October 16 · 6:00 – 7:00pm https://meet.google.com/ebi-oapy-jba or click the button here: The Menagerie is one of the perks of being a member of the paid family that help keep this whole unicorn dancing. If you would like to join in on all the fun, we’d love to have you! I love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

24 hours from right now, I will have been married for 7 years. Today, however, is an anniversary of something else. Call it the first lesson on real love given from the woman a single sleep away from becoming my wife, and I her husband: Less than 24 hours before Sarah and I got married, 7 years ago to this very day, we completely changed the plan for the wedding we’d had for almost a year. After enticing 24 of our friends and family members to adventure with us East across an ocean, North across a country, and then West across an island, we then called a wedding audible. Now, instead of a drive up a winding single-track Scottish road into a Fairy Glen, we’d all be trudging through a valley carved between the Black Cuillin mountain range. We’d be all crossing a river and a bog, knee deep in heather and moss, fern and grass gone russet in preparation for the Winter that felt only moments away. Another lesson on love, taught from the one who has taught me more than anyone else, and I call it the very first wedding gift she gave me. Always trust your heart, I suppose she’d call it if I forced her to, or perhaps let the universe guide it. Maybe even Be brave enough to change your mind. However she’d summarize it, the lesson would be this, and it would be simple. Being with someone almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 7 straight years probably sounds to some like a prison sentence. To others, it might sound like some unholy test from a reality show probably invented by the creators of Love Island. To us, it’s just normal life. It’s just what it’s always been. To me, I’d have it absolutely no other way. I can say with a certainty that only comes after this much time with a single soul, that almost everything I know of love, of life, of real and lasting joy, I have learned from my time with Sarah, from walking beside her, behind her, and witnessing the way she lives. The way she loves. Lessons on love are not a thing to be turned into some listicle, not something to be bullet-pointed, numbered, or transformed for virality. Lessons on love are sacred things, made so by the unbelievable tenderness of those who do the teaching. So too with these, so too with her. Patience, I guess above most things. I watch in awe as she demands nothing from those she loves, as she allows for the timelines of others with something that borders on a Buddha-like grace and quiet resolve. There is no rushing through an interaction with my wife, there is no forceful push to end what you are speaking of, to how long you need her. Patience too, maybe mostly, in her willingness to ask for, as she’ll never demand this either, what it is she needs. Patience in the waiting of years to live the life she knew she wished to live so the living of it would not possibly harm another. What a thing to witness, what a lesson to absorb. Loyalty that borders on ferocious insanity too, and imagine she would agree. If she loves you, she loves you all the way, and there are not halfways with her loyalty to you. To say she’d be a shovel-in-hand type of person should you ever need a body buried is to undersell the depth of her conviction in love, for I don’t believe she’d need a shovel at all. The body would be gone before you knew it needed burying, she’d risk everything to make you not have to do the digging. Passion too, though it decorates itself in many colors. In the way she tells a story, in the “biffff” sound effect that finds its way into every dramatic turn as she describes it with her whole body as though actually absorbing the impact of the moment. Passion in the way she kisses, in the strength in her fingers as she holds your hand. Passion in the gasp as she discovers a view of some indescribable beauty, a sip of a coffee of perfect roast, a bite of a croissant expertly layered with perfect Irish butter between each fold and press. Passion I shall not speak of here too, as it is ours and ours alone. As there are no halfways in her loyalty, there is no part-ways with her passion, and watching her learn to express it has been a singular joy in my life. What of curiosity, and what of it when she is married to probably the most insatiably curious person on the planet? What can she teach to me of what I imagine I already know so much of? Everything, it turns out, as to truly love another, you must never stop being curious about them. How she leans into the things I wish to understand, how she lends an ear to the words I never stop speaking, eyes to the dark holes the rabbits of my brain have never stopped falling down. I think of the exhaustion that must internally creep for her, but never seems to make its way to the external surface when my autism slows me on every walk to investigate every single living creature, when my mind opens itself for pouring every single night at 10pm or later as we shower and I speak of 10,000 things that sat inside me all day. Curious, she stays, and aims it at the curiosity I have in such excess. I watch her navigate a life, I watch her circle back to those who have harmed her, those who were slow to accept the love she found with me, those who voiced opposition to her taking a new path, and I again am in awe. Forgiveness, then, or perhaps name it Grace. I do not understand the reservoirs of these inside her, though I’ve been swimming in them for almost two decades. Each time I think my feet are somewhere near the soft floor of her seas of grace, I sink further, I feel nothing but water between my toes. She allows, and while an argument could be made that sometimes that allowance is too generous, she never once sees it as such. So swiftly she forgives, so soon she’s ready to show up again, and again, for those who might not deserve it in truth. This is her grace, the ocean of tenderness she gives out though so seldom receives it in turn. There is kindness in this, though not the type that disguises itself in it as some elaborate ruse. Many are nice without being kind, always seeming so wonderfully open and helpful, these mayors of nonsense and false connection. Always a promise, though you learn it later to be hollow. Sarah is the promise and the delivery that follows, the idea that love is showing up when you say you’re going to show up, it’s helping when you know help is needed, whether it is asked for or not. Every single thing I know of kindness, has been displayed so effortlessly in her, and I do not understand how she never runs out. I think back to those 24 hours before we said our vows into the mist and heather, before we kissed under a rainbow over a bridge built across a river that Myth says gives you eternal wisdom, though the egos of modernity have shifted that gift to one of beauty. I think of the final night we slept not being officially one thing, not being husband and wife, and I remember my sleep being a peaceful one. I remember the wind outside the windows of the Sligachan Hotel, I remember the rattle of those old panes, the rainfall that pelted the glass and then fell away for a perfect sunrise only hours before she’d walk across that peatland to me. I remember the quiet grace she carried across that bridge when I turned to see her for the first time, the explosion of green in the dress she surprised me with. I remember every moment from that first waking on our wedding day to waking this day beside her, running my fingertips across her naked back, and waiting for her to stir. I remember every lesson, every gift, and still cannot understand the balance of this universe that decided I’d earned them. 7 years ago tomorrow a life together officially began, or at least the measuring of it. In truth, I think it’s been forever, in a thousand different bodies, a thousand different times. All I know of love, of life, of real joy, I have learned from her. Happy Anniversary my only love. Thank you, for everything you’ve taught me. I love you all. Be good. Everything I know of love, of life, of real joy, I have learned from he… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Heavy one today kids, bit more serious than most of you will probably used to in light of this weekend’s Sunday Edition post. If you missed it, do read it before diving in to this week’s Fuster Cluck, it’s here: Anyhow, we dive DEEP into toxic masculinity today, into what actual changes we need to make, and who needs to be the ones stepping up and making them. Hint, it is as it has always been, Men. Here again for this week is THE BIG QUESTION: What are you willing to risk to do the right thing when everyone around you is doing the wrong thing? And a follow up, if you dare: If someone were learning how to be a human being by watching you, what would they learn? Like I said, heavy stuff, but after that, I dive into some more fun stuff, including the earth-shattering news that somehow, by some stretch of miracle: Robert The Bruce is my 21st Great-Grandfather. Bam. That also means I’m related to Mary, Queen of Scots. HOLY HELL. Oh also weird, my 11th great-grandfather was John Thomas Clarke who just so happened to be the ship pilot and master mate, AKA the Navigator, of a pretty famous ship….yep, THE F’ing MAYFLOWER. Weird. Awesome. Yes. Anyway, watch the video, dive into the conversation about it all, and let’s make some meaningful strides into fixing what I refuse to believe is beyond fixing. As usual, here’s the auto-generated accolade thing it makes after every video! Tune in and maybe you’ll be lucky to be called out next week: Thank you Heather Bauer, Sarah Cauble, Kevin, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

A content note for any who have endured and survived any kind of abuse, I’m angry today and this touches on the horrific Cornell University case. Just a heads up for those who need a little advanced warning. I love you all. Women do math that men never have to do. The advanced geometry of a city street at night, the angle of shadows and the diameter of the streetlight glow they’ll feel a fraction of a percentage safer in, the physics involved the moment a hand finds its way to their shoulder or the small of their back. Science, too, as they must become chemists each time a drink poured becomes a drink handed to them in a bar or club and they worry of something dropped into it, or the rejection response that men invent and call primal when their advances are denied. So too are they experts on silence. Their own when some small man demands it of them as they believe their voice carries more value, but another type as well. Another kind worse than the rest: The silence of those who should be speaking up for them, with them, who should be a voice of opposition to the b******t reductions and terrible atrocities they face. The silence of those who refuse to punish those who commit them, the silence of those who still do not teach the next generation to change. I can still see the glow of the cell phone screen that had the messages on that Cornell University fraternity group chat that sparked a lawsuit and an absolute fever pitch of anger across the world. I can see the words, the absolute degradation of another treated like a joke, like a human being made commodity, made property. I see those who responded, those who the lawsuit says partook, but I see someone else, someone somehow louder. I see the men who stayed silent. I see that deafening silence, the apparent refusal of every single other man to speak up and stop it. I see the resistance to rock their disgusting boats, I see the complete apathy towards doing the right thing. I see her, too. The woman tossed into a sea of tumult and chaos against every shred of her will. I see her cast aside, abandoned by all those who did nothing. I also see that NOTHING, where god dammit, I should see something ferocious. We’re doing this, all of us, this whole society of men, and we always have been. I don’t know why it’s never gone away, I don’t understand the machinations that haven’t let this horrific and outdated and abhorrent ideal of masculinity die, but here we are, and here we shouldn’t be. This is a furious letter to the men I know. This is a demand, because pleas don’t work, because asking politely has never elicited a single meaningful change, clearly. This is me, SHOUTING at you, that we have to do better, we have to be better, we have to set better examples, we have to be loud about this. Now, and always. We have to raise boys that become men who are actually strong, not just this pantomime of it that somehow we all have been hoodwinked into believing. We have to raise boys who respect women, and more, who refuse to be complicit when others do not. We need men who understand something simple but profound: Women do not need saviors, they need men who are willing to break the silence amongst men. Only men can do this. We have to raise boys who not only refuse to laugh when the jokes begin at that awkward time between 8 to 12, but speak up and offer resistance to those making them. Who risk it the outcasting, who say NO when everyone else is saying Yes to the behaviors that have become obscenely normalized. We have to raise boys that become men who understand true strength is speaking out when no one else will, it’s making a f*****g change when everyone else throws their hands up in some pathetic surrender to the “way it’s always been.” It is the way it’s been because WE, the men who CAN, and SHOULD, and for some reason still will NOT, have been turning a blind eye away from what’s happening until it actually happens to someone we know, someone we love, someone we call friend or family or lover. What a disaster we’ve created, all of us “we” over centuries and centuries of passing down, either with intention or with apathy, such disfigured definitions of what it is to be a MAN. What it is to be masculine. These lessons of power, of persuasion, of acquisition, of aggression. Somehow, we’ve taught that to be a man is to take what you believe to be rightfully yours, to own, to control, to dominate. This letter, this essay, is not one of pointing fingers at any specific reason we have done this. It’s not to blame any one group, not Hollywood not “that damn rap music” that shouldered the blame for so many things in the early ‘90s, because in truth, it’s not possible to blame any one thing. It’s all of it, it’s none of it, it’s just pointing a finger at the reality that somehow we’re still perpetuating by not speaking up against it. By not educating those that follow us how to stop it. This is step one of a thousand that must be taken. This is the first push towards some great change that must come. Men who do speak up, must teach others to do the same. Men who do refuse to stay quiet, men who do refuse to allow others to hurt, to threaten, to dominate, to control, need to be louder, need to be even stronger. No longer can “not all men” be the b******t line spouted by those who use their voices, because it’s not enough. It’s just not e-f*****g-nough, and never has been. We’re raising boys that turn into men that are capable of this, and what’s even more quietly nefarious is that we’re also raising boys who are capable of the silence when others do. It’s not enough to raise boys who turn into men who will not harm a woman, it’s not enough to lay your head on a pillow each night confident that your son would not do what those monsters at Cornell University did. If you don’t KNOW, definitively, that your son, your boy, your young man, would have stood up and stopped it, you’re not doing enough. Period. Full stop. Forever. Do more. Be better. Educate. Teach. And most of all, f*****g Demonstrate the behavior you demand of them. Somewhere in this country tonight, a woman is going to be holding her keys between her knuckles, taking a deep breath, and walking down the street to get into her car or unlock her front door. Somewhere, another is opening her own drink to guarantee to herself she won’t be drugged. Somewhere, another is trying her very best to let down ever-so gently a man who won’t stop “complimenting” her at the bar lest his ego make him angry. Somewhere else in this ridiculous country tonight, someone’s phone is going to light up a dark dorm room or frat house or night club or bar. One small little glow in a house full of young men, and there will be a thumb hovering just an inch above it. It’s one of our son’s. What that thumb does next, however it responds, someone taught it. I love you all. Be good better. Also: 1-800-656-HOPE or https://rainn.org Help is available. You’re not alone. No haiku this week because I don’t want to write a poem about this. I am tired of it, and I want something to change. Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Happy Wednesday ya little unicorns. Welcome back to another Fuster Cluck LIVE! Here, as per yoozh (like usual? anyone know how to spell this?), here’s THE QUESTION of the week: WHAT DOES LIVING FULLY MEAN TO YOU, and more importantly when you’re faced with the choice between staying where you are and changing your life, and both paths will cost you something. How do you know which price is the one you’re willing—or able—to pay? Sometimes living fully costs you stability. Sometimes it costs you a relationship. Sometimes it costs you an identity you’ve spent years constructing. Sometimes it costs you the approval of people you love. Sometimes it costs you money. Sometimes it costs you the version of yourself that everyone else was comfortable with. If both choices have a cost, how do you decide which cost you can live with? What’s your metric? What does NOT living fully cost? I really cannot wait to hear your answers here. Also, holy smokes: WE HAVE PICKED THE DATE FOR THE NEXT MENAGERIE! October 16, 2026 at 6:00pm Mountain Standard Time! We’ll be back for another Live gathering with all you beautiful souls. The one we just did a few days ago, September’s gathering, was absolutely stunning and I really hope more of you decide to join the next one! YOU make it magic. This time I’ll be better about sending out a separate reminder email for all you lovely folks. Sorry I pooched the screw this last one for anyone that missed it, I thought the info in the Fuster Cluck post would be plenty! Lesson learned. The date and time is for our generous paid community, but we’ll be back for another Live gathering with all you beautiful souls. The one we just did a few days ago, September’s gathering, was absolutely stunning and I really hope more of you decide to join the next one! YOU make it magic. Join the fam and help keep this unicorn alive! Have a rad Wednesday, do something beautiful. I love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Truth begins in terror. In the absolute certainty in your own disbelief that anyone truly cares. Here’s a truth: I was alone for years because I carried a secret truth in my soul that I knew with every morsel of my being, was worth risking it all for. A life that shined like some beacon in the distance, a life worth waiting for, worth fighting for. I knew this, and felt the terror, but believed anyway that that life was the one I was meant to be living. A life lived fully. An unwritten life. Todd Anderson knew this in Dead Poet’s Society, and I remember him shaking, his quivering breath as he looked down at his own desk. Vulnerability, in the end, and a crippling fear of it, was the thread that linked him to his friend Neil. Neil didn’t make it to the end of the film, Todd did, and I always was so struck by that contrast. There is a cost to living your life fully, and I know this now. Took years at this discovery, took going through more things than I thought my little vulnerable heart could handle, but I got here, I’m here, now. What took even longer to understand, however, is there’s a cost to not living it fully too. Both have a price, but I believe we are only able to afford one. The other, it turns out, is far too steep, it’s more than we can ever pay. This is what Neil knew in Dead Poet’s Society, this is what took him from this place, hollow and haunting as it may sometime seem. Keating knew the opposite, and so too did Todd Anderson, only too late to save the pair of them, Keating from his dismissal, Neil from his irreversible act of self-harm. A refusal to live a life less ordinary, to transform yourself and the machinations of your own soul to fit into the machinery of someone else’s invention. To quiet the thumping heart within your chest, costs everything, it turns out. To live fully can sometimes cost our jobs, our friendships, our stability, our vulnerability, our ego, our own sense of who we were before we refused to concede a moment longer. Todd saw this after Neil’s death, after he could not live a life fully as himself, and chose his own path that he knew would end so tragically early. Todd saw, and stood on his desk anyway. He stood, first. I didn’t know where I wanted this entire four-part saga through Dead Poet’s Society to go when I thought it up. I knew the film meant more to me than I knew how to say, so I thought I owed it to it, to myself, to try to say it anyway. To speak of these costs, to speak of the terror that comes with truth, as it so often births it. I’m ending it here because it’s where it must end, not in sermon but in sharing of the simple truths I’ve learned after 45 years of living, those that came from refusing to live anything other than fully. There were years of heartache, of a loneliness that can only come from watching others live the life you believed you were supposed to be living. There were years of sickness, of frustration, of stillness forced upon me like handcuffs no key was ever created for. At the end of them, as there is always an end to them, it was there but faint, there but still shining. The great big beauty of a life fully lived, the consequence of the courage to choose it. I created this place, this home to the rattlings of this curious mind, because I wanted there to exist a place that granted everyone who came the permission to feel EVERYTHING. The permission never needed, but somehow fed to us like a pill we did not wish to swallow. I created this place to offer reminders, to offer little winks across the expanse of this universe that could shake you as though sleeping, to gently place my hand on your slumbering shoulder, to whisper you awake. This is the cost of living with your heart wide open, I wish to say to you, Sometimes it takes everything, sometimes it’s almost more than we can pay, but, but… There is no other way. This time of year messes me up, to put it as ineloquently as possible. It shakes me every time, with its Autumnal scents and the sounds of leaves underfoot, the first lighting of wood fires and the smoke that rises like sage stick to smudge the evil spirits from this valley, this home. School returns, but not for me, not again, but I am transported back in time to a version of me that felt some shaking silence inside, that, like Todd Anderson, felt the tingle of vulnerability, the sensation of it clawing at the inside walls of you, wanting out, wanting freedom. I just wanted to pay tribute to that film, to this season, to the yearly reminder that I cannot live a life anything short of fully. There are no halfways, no part-ways, no almost-theres. It’s all, or it’s nothing. It’s in, or it’s out. It’s everything, it’s everything, it’s everything. I will not sermonize you on how to live, I will not push you to do the same as I do, I will not give you an optimized list of how, of why, of the pros or cons or whatever the hell else performs well on Substack and Notes and Social Medias that rot our souls, I will not, I cannot. I will just be in this place, this strange unicorn of a place I made to give a home to all those who refuse to live a life written by someone else, who refuse to cower to the terror in truth, bow to the bombastically boring insult that is normal. I will be here, and I will be waiting. For you. I love you all. Be good. Live a life fully shout against anything less. Stand upon your desk. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Bit of a weird one today friends, but of a true Fuster Cluck as we’ve been SO damn busy, we had to go live whilst driving home from running one of 30535 errands. That’s why the poem reading, and my apology for the video stopping at the most hilarious place ever is just above hahaha. Still though, we get down to brass tacks, whatever the F that means, and we dive into the WEEKLY QUESTION! Wahooooo. If you missed it in the video, here is the break down and the question I’m dying to hear your answers to: We are shaped by those who believe in us, I know this with all I am. It’s so easy to day to be a cynic, to be one who doubts, finds cracks in the plans, in the hopes, in the dreams. Who points them out, who encourages an acquiescence to some strangling sameness so that they don’t stand out as doing less, as being less, as dreaming less. Please do not be this. Please do not believe this. Please do not allow this. I know you have mentors that guided your way, I know you had teachers, friends, parents, or beautiful happenstances that led you to becoming these stunning people you are here, now. I want to know who they were. I want to know what they taught you. I want to know who calls you this. Sound off, let’s make a roll call of those who helped us become these people here, today, in this signal fire. I cannot wait to meet them. ALSO, TOMORROW IS THE NIGHT! The Menagerie LIVE hangout! Our 2nd official gathering with all you beautiful folks! The link is here the link is here! Click the button below and you should be able to save it. Tomorrow, September 24, 2026. 6pm Mountain Time! The Menagerie Live is one of the rad perks of joining this wonderful family. Click the button below and it should unlock it all and give you the link. There’s still time! I Love you all. I PROMISE, next week will NOT be as big a shitshow. I promise. I Love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

I had a teacher my freshman year of high school that told me I should abandon any and all hopes of ever being a writer. “Some people can write, some cannot,” she said, and told me that pretending otherwise would be an unfair joke. She taught my Honors English I class, and also happened to be my Homeroom teacher, so I had to see her twice a day, every day, the whole year. I am lucky, I suppose, in that I was not, and am not still, the kind of person who holds opinions like these at all dear. My autism insulates me from embarrassment, but whilst doing so, it also insulates me from adding any weight or gravity to the way I might be perceived. I know, and have known all the time I’ve been on this strange earth, precisely who I am, what I stand for, and where the boundaries of my interests, my talents (or lack thereof), my curiosities, and yes, my dreams, exist. Still though, her words were angry words, they were needlessly cruel, and I remember at the time thinking how glad I was they were aimed at me and not someone without the bizarre and unfair advantages my brain granted me—undiagnosed at the time, but still keenly aware. If ever there were an opposite, an antithesis to the Keating of Dead Poets Society, it was she. Those Who Saw Me More though, I remember two other teachers that went another way. I remember two who embodied all Robin Williams’ Keating stood for in the film that inspired this four-part saga through September. I remember Mr. Wirak, and I remember Mr. Proctor, and I remember how they changed my life. Mr. Wirak was my 4th grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School here in Helena, Montana, and he was the epitome of cool. He said rad, talked like a surfer who smoked too many cigarettes when he was younger, and wore a collection of crazy ties and long coats. He walked with a looping gait, encouraged debate and argument even in 4th grade, and capped off every day with a game of Trash Can P-I-G for one student each day. Winner got respect. He was the first who taught me to think so far outside the box, the box kind of ceased to exist at all. He made learning an adventure, and was the first to truly stoke the flame of curiosity that, until that point, had always been forced to stay small and smoldering little embers by other teachers who didn’t know how to handle my over-abundance of passion. Mr. Proctor came next, a cyclocross bike racer who spent years traveling the globe and working on small farms after he graduated college. Who had stories of living in places like Austria and Switzerland, told tales of far-off countries and instead of simply making us read To Kill A Mockingbird, he asked us to adapt it into our own version of a screenplay. Pick a scene he said, make it a movie. We wrote more in his class than any I’d ever had before it. Instead of forced absorption of words written by other authors from other times, we were told to become the writers instead. Our words, which meant so much more work for him, but our chance to show the way we could make letters dance with letters to form what we hoped were beautiful waltzing words across the white pages we pulled from our Word Processors, those relics that filled a temporary gap between typewriter and a shiny real computer most of us still didn’t have. I still have my essays from him, I still have the notes. More than this, I have the memory of him being the very first person to tell me I could, and should, write. To Awaken What Slumbers It’s gratitude now, more than anything else. It’s feeling thankful not just for Proctor and Wirak, but for that Freshman Honors English I teacher (who shall not be named) who told me I should not dream the dreams I dreamed, but aim lower. Aim elsewhere. Some awake what slumbers within you by gently stirring your shoulders, by whispering tender encouragement while you stay dreaming. Some shout, and scream, and pull the covers off so the first chill of morning can shock you into standing. Both work, but only one keeps you warm. As the first true month of back-to-school has crested at its midpoint and is already careening towards ending, I sit and look off my deck, and I am taken back to each new beginning from Kindergarten through graduation from college 16 or so years later. The school supplies, the backpack filled, the brown bag lunch carried as I could not stomach the cafeteria lunches. I type these words and think of all you who will read them, and stare at the blinking cursor in disbelief that after all that has come, gone, transformed, and occurred, somehow the dream I was told as a freshman to abandon, has come true. I am a writer. What a gift to awaken what slumbers in the soul of another. What a gift to be a teacher, a mentor, an artist, hell, a ghost, to someone else. To shape them, to allow them to dream, and believe that one day they might reach them. What a gift to show others the way to see the world in a brand new way, to dare, to chance, to stand upon the desks and shout O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN into the ether and angst that defines so much of the start of our lifetimes. I was gifted many of these, some in school, some on the baseball diamonds I grew up haunting, some as authors, some as artists, some as Buddhas, beat poets, or best friends. I tried too to BE this for those who came to me. This is the lesson I think Wirak and Proctor, Whitman and Kerouac, Basquiat and Buddha all were trying to impart, whether they knew it or not. That I could be what some might not have ever had, that we all can. That the way we live can inspire others to do the same. To stand up, to change, to grow. Keating told us the Dead Poets still speak to us. They always will. I just keep trying to listen, to live in a way that will maybe one day encourage others to do the same. It’s all I can do, in the end. Take the lessons I was so lucky to be taught, and try to teach them again to someone new. To listen to the dreams someone else is dreaming, and instead of trying to squash it into submission, give it the belief to grow. I love you all. Be good. Be who you needed, awake all that is sleeping. It will set them free. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Hump on hump day humpers. It’s another Wednesday, so it’s another Fuster Cluck LIVE with your two dinguses of hosts, me and Lady G. We talk about a lot today, diving into everything from some vintage typewriters I’ve got for sale (more on that at the end) and my article this weekend that you can read if you missed it by clicking below: And, as per usual, I ask you the question of the week that I cannot wait to see your answers to. It is this: What in your own life have you been seizing that deserves to be plucked (or gathered) instead? Basically, do some inventory, some self-reflection, and ask what you’ve been seizing where a gentler approach would serve oh-so-much better? Also, ANOTHER reminder in case you done plumb forgetted: Official Date for the next Menagerie LIVE Google Meeting Hangout is scheduled! September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time! Link to come, so don’t miss it! We cannot wait to hang out with you all again! There is STILL TIME to join us for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool s**t like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be: September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time! So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory. Oh, and for the typewriters I’ve got up for grabs if anyone wants to buy one. Here are the pics and basic details. I did my best to look up fair prices based on condition and crap between eBay and Etsy and am being as cool as I can about it: First one is the Royal Quiet De Luxe 1950’s model, WITH the case, totally immaculate/serviced/wonderful WITH a backup ribbon brand new in the package. These go anywhere from $225 - friggen $800 on Etsy. $250 + shipping and it’s yours. Second one is a Royal Arrow not totally sure on the year, but these look to range anywhere from $150 - $400. $200 + shipping and you can have it. If not, ain’t no thang. Thanks for tuning in and giving us 30 minutes of your valuable daytime hours. Cannot tell ya how much I appreciate it. Cue obligatory auto-generated “thank you note” that somehow Substack does hahaha: Thank you Mara, Kevin, Ash Ley Maris 🦋, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom. Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born. It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it. Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it. I remember the day I learned it was wrong. Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized. Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process. I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable. All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment. To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong. As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever: Wonder is an act that requires tenderness. To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder. Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you. Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again. With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping. This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again. Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle. Pluck. Like string for music, like resonance from stillness. Pluck. Like leaving the rest behind. Carpe Diem. Pluck the day. I love you all. Be good. Should we learn to pluck and forget about seizing, what joy we can find. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Happy Hump Day you goofballs. The intro to this goes very off the rails, as per usual, so if you like complete idiocy, do watch. We talk about lots today, from us having to cancel a trip to shoot an elopement in Hawaii because of that a*****e Hurricane Lowell, to how we’re still fighting with SIXT and Expedia for charging us $100 for a car rental we couldn’t pick up because all flights were canceled because of the AFOREMENTIONED F’ING HURRICANE. So that’s fun. We also dive into the Question of the Week: What are unwritten “rules” of life YOU need to Un-learn? What introductions do YOU need to rip out in order to live happier, healthier, more FULL lives? We answer too, if you wanna see the way we feel about things. Also, in case you forgot: Official Date for the next Menagerie LIVE Google Meeting Hangout is scheduled! September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time! Link to come, so don’t miss it! We have the official date for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool s**t like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be: September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time! So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory. Have a rad rest of your Hump Day, and do precisely that. Here’s the little thank you the post generates at random for some of you lovelies who joined us live! Thank you LeftieProf, Mara, pickingplumeria, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I love you all. Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been. Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls. Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore. I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still. I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes. It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said: “This is a battle, a war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls.” Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life. I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out. I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated. I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative. To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line. Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in. Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself. We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream. I remember being measured, long before I was even understood. Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be. This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us. That set us free. Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them. I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts. It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed. I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip. I love you all. Be good. To unlearn the rules, tear out the introductions, and begin to live. Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson Song of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe