An Introduction

I’m a card-carrying word nerd. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. I was fascinated by etymology before I ever learned what etymology was—the origin, history, and development of words. Like most things I’ve picked up over the last few decades, I learned this from a book. Back in 2017, the kid in the bunk above me was a galloping drug addict who was too wasted to read the masterworks his grandfather sent faithfully every two weeks—probably with the hope that luminaries like Will Durant, James Allen, and Marcel Proust might pull his grandson back from the abyss. Who knows? Maybe this tactic eventually worked. There are definitely people in my life who believed and prayed and loved me out of all my self-destructive bullshit. I have no idea what became of this young man. His name was Blake. He was just one of the thousands of people I crossed paths with over the course of this odyssey. As an older prisoner who had walked the same hot asphalt he was travelling, I tried to talk some sense into him. But he wasn’t trying to hear it. So our relationship was mostly transactional. I gave him food and coffee; he gave me books. One of these was a Bartlett’s Roget’s Book of Rare Words. Something like that. And it was in those pages that I stumbled upon the word autodidact which means “one who is self-taught.” I immediately scribbled it in my journal. Right next to pachydermatous, multi-hyphenate, and iconoclastic. (Like I said: word nerd.) But self-taught is a bit of a misnomer. Who in this world is really self-taught? Over the course of this decades-long prison bid my teachers have been Plato, Siddhartha, Michael A. Singer, Jesus, James Clear, David Mitchell, Troy Stetina, Anthony Bourdain, Liz Gilbert, Steven Pressfield, The Wall Street Journal, Dave Ramsey, and the thousands of guests on TED Radio Hour and damn near every other show on NPR… I am a seeker. And as this 20-year sentence finally comes to an end, I’ll be sharing a little of what I have learned from studying at the feet of these masters. You might not agree with all of it. You might not agree with any of it. But a writer’s job is to observe and tell the truth. You can find that here on The Life Autodidactic. See you next time. Momentum.