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, stoic, 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, embrace of “counter-cultural cultural conservatism”, and adoption of Karaite Judaism.
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.
❧Influences: Prior to 2020, my influences were Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Anthony Bourdain, George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Since 2020 however, I’ve come to enjoy the work of Yoram Hazony, Niccolò Machiavelli, Joseph Campbell, Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Oswald Spengler, Douglas Murray, and Roger Scruton, as well as the fiction of Roald Dahl, Cormac McCarthy, John le Carré, and the poetry of Yehuda Amichai and Ovid. Yet three influences who have remained constant throughout my adult life—regardless of my shifting political and spiritual views—have been Marcus Aurelius, Plato, and Carl Jung.