In August of 2019, I moved to Ireland. My life begins and ends with that sentence. My old life ended, my new life began. Anyone who has followed my music for any length of time knows that I grew up Mormon. I don’t think that anyone who still follows my music will be surprised to learn that I left the Mormon church about five years ago. To put five years of grief and trauma into a ridiculously succinct nutshell: I stopped believing in it. In fact, I started actively disbelieving. And in order to be true to myself, I had to leave. I moved on. I don’t really intend to go into all that here. I put a lot of that pain into my record, The Darkness and the Sun. Other writers more gifted than I have documented the unspeakable pain and loss of reeling from that rift, crossing that chasm, and I don’t intend to go into it here right now. Maybe at some other time.
What matters is that my life changed. I changed. And I found that I needed to pick up the little sloughs of leftover skin and try to build some kind of new human with the remnants. It became increasingly clear to me that in Utah, all I could build was a kind of Dr. Frankenstein imitation. I needed a defibrillator. I needed to throw myself out of an airplane at 4,000 meters. I need to jump from a speed boat and feel the shock of the icy ocean. I needed to blast myself into a new existence. So I moved to Ireland, ostensibly to get a master’s degree in creative writing at University College Cork. But perhaps the degree was just a means to an end.
I meant to start this journal the minute I arrived. But as it does, life got away from me. But I intend to begin now. If anyone happens to be surfing along the binary highway and takes a little detour to my site and actually reads this, stay tuned for more. I hope to write every day, or at least once a week.