Human beings are complicated creatures. Our stories are rarely neat. So how should I summarize mine? I’m a husband and lover to a beautiful woman. Father and hero to a wonderful son. A novelist, essayist, Army veteran, former defense contractor, and Texan. I’ve traveled all over the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, mostly in a professional capacity taking part in security and intelligence missions.

Ethnically Jewish but raised Christian, in my twenties I became an atheist and was an active writer among the “anti-woke left” between 2014-19. Yet after the pandemic of 2020, learning more about my heritage in 2021, taking psychedelics in 2022, and reading many of the classics in the Western canon in 2023, I underwent a worldview shift in my thirties that resulted in a recovery of my belief in God and an embrace of “counter-cultural cultural conservatism”.

You can still find writings from my previous life under Young Heathen. But I hope you’ll find my recent essays on Cowboy Mystic to be more engaging, enraging, and enchanting. Driven in part by the Renaissance proverb that “A well-rounded man must be an artist, a warrior, and a philosopher”, I’ve been grabbing life by the horns for 34 years and hope to wrestle it 66 more.