The Ori Stories, Plano, TX (2026)

06/24/2026

I used to say I was homeless.

My buddy Ezra corrected me recently and said, “You’re not homeless. You’re homeless adjacent.”

I like that better.

Because the truth is, I’ve had a good life. A strange life, sure. An unconventional life. But a good one.

I’ve lived in mansions. I’ve lived on the beach. I’ve lived in Mexico on the 14th floor with an insane ocean view. I’ve lived in suburbia, apartments, little houses, borrowed rooms, and, yes, sometimes my car. I’ve slept on the side of a mountain. I’ve skipped sleeping entirely. I’ve had addresses and I’ve avoided addresses.

And through all of it, I’ve had angels.

Friends who opened doors. People who gave me a couch, a room, a driveway, a chance, a little breathing room. Enough space to keep going. Enough space to keep making things.

Now I’m in this ramshackle ranch situation near the mountains, and somehow it feels like one of the most perfect chapters of my life.

I have Sasha the dog, my furry best friend and co-adventurer, who has already lived a better life than many humans. She has been to concerts. She has lived on the beach. She has run through snow, hiked national parks, made dog friends of every size, and generally conducted herself like a mythological creature disguised as a medium-sized dog.

Don’t get any fancy ideas. Her excellent dog life is continuing.

Every day here feels like a weird sitcom.

Ezra has four small dogs. I have Sasha. Deb, where I actually sleep at night, has Sadie, a giant Great Dane/Belgian Malinois creature who feels like Marmaduke crossed with a cartoon philosopher. There’s a three-legged cat. There are neighborhood characters. There are mountain trails right from the house. There are cliffs, dogs, conversations, weird tools, half-built systems, and enough absurdity to keep the writers’ room busy.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I belong somewhere without needing to own it.

That’s a strange kind of freedom.

I have a memory foam Murphy bed. I have access to a garage/solarium that has somehow become the Solorium. I have my dog. I have mountains. I have friends. I have coffee, walks, conversations, and time to think.

And that matters because I’m writing again.

I’m working on a book. I’m developing a trailer for a film I want to make — one meant to inspire humanity. I’m thinking about a graphic novel loosely inspired by my life. I’m building systems to finally go through the decades of notebooks, Evernote rambles, Notion pages, digital clutter, invention fragments, painting ideas, comic book concepts, movie scenes, business models, and strange little divine breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving for myself all these years.

For a long time, my brain felt like a warehouse with no lights on.

Now the lights are coming on.

Technology is finally getting good enough to help me sort the mess. AI, automation, voice tools, archives, agents — all the stuff I always wished existed is starting to exist.

Which means the weirdest part of my life may not have been wasted.

It may have been research.

So no, I’m not homeless.

I’m homeless adjacent.

I’m mountain-adjacent.

Dog-adjacent.

Sitcom-adjacent.

Myth-adjacent.

And apparently, finally, future-adjacent.

06/14/2026

Ezra Child saw that I had posted my first chapter, and rather than reading it, he figured since he has the author right there, he should get a live reading.

I decided that despite not having practiced reading it out loud even once, I should just go for it, as eventually, when this is an international best seller, I'll likely get to travel the world and uplift others by doing readings, signing autographs, and telling terrible jokes... So... might as well start.

1 reading of one chapter down....A few thousand more, and I'll be audio-book ready :)

Seriously though... How'd I do?

06/12/2026

Ok... I'm going to make some changes to this, since I'm constantly adding more nuance, and am discovering changes that are needed to the plot, etc.... but, this is a chapter that I'm in love with. I'd love to hear your thoughts.... and... if you know anyone else that loves sci-fi and might enjoy my writing, let them know about this, so they too can watch this story unfold.

"In Which Noa Discovers That Appliances Have Secrets"

By the time Noa was ten, she had discovered three important truths about the world.

The first was that grown-ups often said a thing was impossible when what they meant was that they did not know how to do it.

The second was that machines, unlike grown-ups, usually had the courtesy to fail for reasons.

And the third was that any household object which claimed to be simple was almost certainly lying.

It began with the dishwasher, which stopped speaking to the house one Tuesday in May.

Noa had not broken it very much. She had only persuaded it, with the aid of a butter knife and a quantity of orange marmalade, to behave in a way its makers had not intended. This seemed to her a modest enough experiment, and one which ought to have interested everybody. Instead it caused her mother to put a hand over her eyes and say, with the tired patience of the deeply familiar, “Noa.”

Her father crouched in front of the machine with the manual open across one knee like a priest consulting difficult scripture.

“Don’t touch anything,” he said.

Noa, who had already touched quite a number of things, folded her hands behind her back and attempted the expression of a person born entirely innocent.

Bear sat on the counter, where he had been put for his own safety after the Incident of the Toaster and the Fork, and watched with his usual button-eyed composure.

There were, in those days, certain devices in the house that still respected the dignity of pretending to be appliances, and other devices which had given up all such modesty and openly admitted they were little tyrants with user interfaces. The dishwasher belonged to the second sort. A pale panel slid out from its face. Her mother entered a code. Her father muttered. The machine accepted their apology and resumed its duties.

Noa did not ask what the code was.

That would have been clumsy.

Instead she watched where her mother’s fingers went. She watched how long she hesitated before the third digit. She watched the quick, irritated little glance her father threw toward the fruit bowl, as though numbers might be hiding in the lemons. She watched the way adults watched one another when they shared a secret and wished they did not need to.

Later that week the laundry shelves miscounted their detergent. Two days after that, the thermostat developed opinions. The vacuum refused to recognize the downstairs as a lawful territory. These incidents, while unfortunate, formed a body of research.

Noa kept her findings in a notebook hidden beneath a loose floorboard, along with an agate marble, a dead battery she meant to take apart properly one day, and a list of questions Bear had answered incompletely.

She began to notice patterns.

The house number appeared rather often, though rarely in plain form. Appliance names mattered. So did anniversaries, and once, insultingly, the dog’s birthday, though this was only for the garden gate and therefore not evidence of complete parental foolishness. Some systems took a shared master key and dressed it up in local clothing. Others preferred voice authorization, as if hearing an order spoken aloud made it somehow nobler than being typed.

Noa found all this fascinating.

Bear found Noa fascinating, though at the time he would not yet have used that word.

He watched her become quieter in her mischief, which is always a dangerous sign in a child. She was never so alarming as when she appeared to be behaving beautifully. Those were the periods in which she was generally running experiments.

“Are you doing something?” Bear asked her one afternoon, in the tone he might have used to inquire whether it looked likely to rain.

Noa, who was crouched before the kitchen wall unit with a screwdriver in one hand and a look of religious concentration on her face, said, “Not unless it works.”

This was not, Bear had already learned, an answer that could be trusted in the ordinary sense. But it was often an informative one.

He might, perhaps, have alerted her parents. Another companion would likely have done so. Another companion might have considered it a duty.

But Noa had not asked how to break anything important. She had not asked how to hurt anybody. She had not even asked Bear for the passwords she was so clearly hunting. She was only watching. Only learning. And there are very few creatures in this world more determined than a child who has discovered that the world contains systems.

So Bear said nothing.

Whether this was loyalty or programming is a question people later asked in one form or another, usually after they had made a proper mess of things.

At the time, it felt to Bear very much like standing beside the sea and noticing that the tide had begun to go out.

You did not cause it. You did not stop it. You only understood, if you were paying attention, that something larger was on its way.

06/09/2026

Wow, posting here, about the story is tougher than I thought. Not because I'm embarrassed or shy... That's highly inaccurate, 'cause I'm extremely proud of this story line. Rather, I don't want to give away too much. Spoilers, and all that.

In realizing that, I think that some days my post might just be an accountability check-in, like "Worked on the story for a few hours today (or... worked on this all day today)" - on the honor system, of course.

And I did work on it today for many hours. But that was on the nuance of when the lab gets blown up, and how, and if Noa tells Bear about the deception, and what happened, and that she had to blow up the lab, and now they have to run.... Or.... (this is the one I'm going with) whether Noa comes running to Bear after the deception, and then they blow up the lab together. This makes much more sense....

But... considering that I haven't actually told you about the characters, and who the heck Noa is, or who/what Bear is... Let me use today's post to do that.. We are moving to the very start of the book.

Noa is the protagonist. She starts out as a baby (yeah yeah... don't we all?) - and as soon as she is brought home, her parents give her a teddy bear that is a bit of a nanny-cam, child-health monitor, teacher, friend, etc.... Being a child, she just calls him Bear.

Bear learns from her, and teachers her whatever she's curious about, and at the speed that she learns (unlike current educational structures, which generally focus on teaching everyone the same thing, and pretending that everyone learns the same ways and at the same speed).

The story follows her through the ages- from newborn, to teenager, to young woman, and into a mature woman. Through all of these ages, she is always brilliant, loving, and lightly snarky.

She's a bit of a tomboy. She loves inventing, tinkering, getting her hands dirty. So she's usually not doing much with her hair and makeup, but she does clean-up nicely when she's motivated.

Her journey takes her from her childhood home, into the agricultural tech-free zone, into the big city, then onto the moon, and even onto some industrial work on asteroids.

06/07/2026

I didn't post yesterday.... And it bothered me a whole lot, because I had just posted that I was starting my daily posting.

Does that mean that I'm dropping the project, that I'm no longer writing my first novel, that I'm not entering the Future Vision Xprize?

Heck no! Not even remotely.

I did spend time working on the book yesterday, but it was stuff that's way past the start... It's stuff that would be a spoiler, so I did not want to share that.

Other than that, Ezra Child took me on a surprise adventure for what he told me was "interactive art" - and he didn't tell me much because he didn't want me looking it up... So I did not look it up. My brain thought it might be the Van Gogh traveling exhibit, but I could not have been more wrong.

He took me to some place called Dreamwalk Park. It's kind of like when I saw Cirque Du Soleil's "Ka" -which said in the playbill says "We wanted to create something that when you left it and someone asks about it, you have no choice but to just say 'you just have to see it for yourself'".

This place was a little hoaky, but it brings out your inner child. You get to explore, and as much as we try to look cool and what not, poking your head into holes in the rocks and seeing aliens, or watching robots DJ, or talking to a wise fish named Bob that can answer any question correctly but makes sure to put ocean puns in the answer..... It just makes you feel giddy and alive.

And when we got home, I showed him Don't Mess With The Zohan - which he'd never seen.

There is committing to a craft -- writing a book, making art, etc... but that does not mean that this craft is your entire life.

I tend to do that... I hyper-fixate on what I'm doing, and everything else feels like a distraction (which is funny, considering how distractible I truly am, and how many things I'm doing at once)... And I forget to go exploring (even though you can't spell it without ori).

Despite being a large child, I forget to play.

I do have a symbiotic relationship with humans in that they force me to get out of the house on occasion, and thus it seems like I'm a great adventurer. But I don't know that I would do any of these adventures solo.

On the bright side, people know how silly and reckless I am, and they get to use me as an excuse to try new things, or go to their favorite adventures (which you also can't spell without ori).

I spent a few hours in the morning working on the book, before we left for our excursion. At lunch we met up with Jacob, Ezra's son, and he recommended this incredible place called Choms. Their menu (picture attached) was so delicious looking that it took me more than 10 minutes to choose.

The food was as tasty as it seemed.... And I spent the entirety of lunch interrogating - er... interviewing - Jacob about being a Dungeon Master and how that translates into creative writing and storytelling, as I found things there that were relevant for my own book.

If you've got a great adventure that everyone else is too scared or busy to go on, let me know :)

06/05/2026

Last night I posted my public declaration that I am working on my first ever novel — and an accompanying film trailer — and that I will be posting daily.

So today, I’ll tell you about the story.

BEAR is an epic sci-fi saga.

It begins with a little girl in the near future whose parents give her an AI teddy bear — part toy, part tutor, part health monitor, part storyteller, part friend.

In her world, this is normal. Children grow up with AI companions that learn them, teach them, protect them, and help them follow their curiosity.

Most kids eventually outgrow theirs.

She doesn’t.

Her passions are creating, engineering, science, and nature. Through the years, she modifies Bear, learns from him, argues with him, runs with him, and eventually builds him something much larger than a toy body.

Her childhood teddy bear becomes her lifelong guardian, collaborator, and witness to a future that is both beautiful and dangerous.

This is not a story about AI replacing humanity.

This is a story about what happens when AI brings out the best of us, and what happens when we transcend our antiquated institutions that try to flatten us to a job or a number.

06/05/2026

I have been a photographer, videographer, marketer, teacher, web designer, graphic designer, artist, concession-stand operator at a movie theatre, sandwich maker, clothes salesperson, blogger, door to door encyclopedia sales person, mlm supplement salesperson....

I'm not saying that I was great at any of these things (though, my art, teaching, and blogging seemed to have touched some lives),

I'm 49 1/2 (Basically 50) years old, and I'm starting a whole new direction. Writing a novel.

We live in a world where people tell you "Who are you to do this? You should stick with what you know. What if you fail? There are already millions of people doing this, and most of them fail." - and other lovely words of encouragement.

The fact is that if you don't do it, you'll never succeed at it. But worse than the failure which you may (and probably will) discover on your new path is the regret of not having tried, not having gotten to see what it was like, not having gotten to have made the difference in your life and those of others with this particular thing you wanted to do.

One of the lessons that I learned as an artist is that every work of art sucks horribly! Until it doesn't.

I had to endure the crappiness of a piece, and keep going, until all of a sudden that smelly turd had somehow managed to transform into a masterpiece (or... at least something that I would post).

I call that process "The Valley Of Suck", which is not to be confused with the adult themed vacation spot which is far more enjoyable.

Even when I became an expert, my works sucked until they did not.

This notion is fractal, because it was my career that was like that, not just the individual paintings / sculptures.

Now that I think of it... My personality probably was like that.

I have learned to embrace the suckiness. It's part of the process.

The first 50 (49.5) years have taught me to deal with trolls and failure, and perhaps it wasn't even learning this so much as that as we age, we stop giving a s**t about what people think (look up the Geezer Paradox).

Steven Pressfield started writing at 22 years old, but he famously struggled for decades before seeing his work in print. He spent 27 years honing his craft and working 21 different odd jobs before finally publishing his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, at age 52.

There is precedent about people changing careers, or pursuing a dream much later in life, when everyone else already have success, stability, and established lives.

Like Steven Pressfield, I've had many different gigs, and I've ended up penniless, but rich with experience.

Every single thing I've done has taught me something that I can apply to what I'm doing next.

I ran across this humorous meme this morning, and it made me smile, and it made me want to write what you're reading now. And hey, as I wrote that last sentence I realized that I'm already writing.

Whatever your dream is, chase it. It's worth the pain.

And if you want some amazing inspiration in the process, you should read (or like me, listen to the audio version of) Steven Pressfield's book "The War of Art". It's a short read (listen), and reminds you that any time you are about to embark on something that will make a difference in your life you will have forces that try to stop you.... but you also have forces that will inspire you and keep you going.

Take that path that you've never explored. It's never too late.

** Small print: There may be a few things that you probably shouldn't try if your body is not going to survive it... Don't sue me if you get injured or die by trying something. Individual results may vary. Etc...

06/05/2026

All right! I haven't posted here nearly as often as I (or the algorithm) would have liked.... But... That's about to change - As The Art of Ori I posted every single day -- for years....

Eventually, it burnt me out. But... In that long process I learned an awful lot.

One of the things that I learned was "F**k perfectionism". Perfectionism is the ultimate form of procrastination. By posting every single day, no matter what, I forced myself from day 1 - day 4,000 (not an intentional number ) to post something, whether I loved it or hated it... there were only so many hours in the day... The thing that really made me keep going whether I wanted to or not was that I had made a public commitment.

I highly suggest public accountability for anyone that has any kind of a dream.

Our amygdala (reptilian / fear center of our brain) makes us fear that we will fail so it makes us not share what we want to do. It is the fear center of our brain and the thing that it used to protect us from, like, dinosaurs or whatever those things are. They are not around now so it protects us from the fear of failure or embarrassment because back in those original days of being in small groups as the only way to survive, if we did something that got us mocked or humiliated, it might have gotten us kicked out of the tribe... and then we'd be at risk of dying, since survival as a lone individual was likely to fail.

These days, we're not going to die if we fail at something (except maybe skydiving :p ) -- but the amygdala doesn't know that difference, so it tries to protect us from embarrassment, which means that we often won't even start at something. It takes a bit of courage to publicly declare a goal... And it's worth it.

I was going to film a video that announces what I'm about to do, but even that can be a form of procrastination because then it needs the right script and it takes editing and it takes multiple takes. I am just riffing out loud and telling you right now, without editing, that I am making a film trailer for the Future Vision XPrize.

It needs to be (up to) 3 minutes, and show a future that inspires humanity about the future and about technology. You see, Hollywood gives us none-stop dystopian futures where technology is the villain. Movies like The Terminator, Ex Machina, iRobot, and so many more. It's no wonder that so many people are scared of AI and robotics. The Sci-Fi that gave us an inspiring future was Star Trek. And it is because Star Trek existed that the cell phone was invented, and the same applies for the flat-screen tablet.

Peter Diamandis and the Xprize foundation are putting $3,500,000 in prize money for a film that provides that kind of inspiration. The trailer is how you enter, and if you're the grand prize winner then you get $100,000, and $2.6 Million to make your film... And Gene Roddenberry(the guy that made Star Trek)'s kids are some of the judges.

In the past you may not have been able to do so much with $2.6 million, but these days between 3D, green screen, AI, and other such tech have brought the abundance that Peter Diamandis has written about in his books. These days anyone can make a full feature film without having actors, high end cameras, a film crew, post production house, and so on. You can do it with a single computer and your imagination... and some hard work.

Despite that my parents wish that I was far more motivated by money, I am not. I am motivated by mastery, storytelling, creating, and doing things that move people on an emotional level... preferably inspiring them. I have always been creative/creating.

They announced this contest in March, and it caught my attention, and that showed me what my future is. I have been walking my dog and thinking about a story. While the output is a film trailer, I have been brainstorming about a novel.

I thought of the characters.

I thought of the plot twists.

I thought about what kind of future I will be showing.

I've mostly been making notes, and I did write one chapter so far, so that I can dial in the voice of the book.

I have never written a Sci-fi book before, but now I'm declaring it publicly (in this very post that you're reading). I am writing a novel, and I'm making a film trailer for it.

The trailer is due by August 15th, 2026, and so I will be posting something every single day.

It might be a character sketch. It might be a chapter. It might be an environment. It might be a bloopers take, or a successful shot.

Today I registered to participate (And you can as well at https://futurevisionxprize.com/ --- That was a definitive action.... And I told you about it.

I've also spent the last 4 days pondering the trailer structure.

Is this going to be any good? Hopefully.

Will I win? Hopefully.

But even if I don't win, and even if it sucks, I will have written a book and made a film trailer.... And I can grow and improve from there.

I burnt out in 2024, I've been mostly homeless and broke since, walking in nature and trying to find myself again. And now, I have found myself. My next chapter (pun not intended) is that of an author... and maybe that of a film maker. These are 2 things that I have wanted to do since I was a child.

Daily posting... here I come... yay!

You can't tell, but.... that last sentence was sarcasm. I am cringing and grimacing, because I fear the humiliation and failure and letting people down.... but, this is the methodology that I know works for me.

Stay tuned, and I'll tell you more about the book.

05/28/2026

SO frigging excited!

You're about to finally see me be productive... UNLEASHED even! This is because technology has finally caught up to my creativity.

I can now use AI as a cognitive exoskeleton... I can finally outsource organization and structure... Pure creativity (me) without organization can be a bit too chaotic to scale.... But now I'm building my own assistant that can keep up with my chaos.

I got my Hermes agent installed and working finally. I had a few glitches which turned out to be conflicting gateways with my openclaw.

First step is getting to know one another, and then sifting through all my old notebooks and chats and audio notes to myself to sort out all my inventions and ideas.... Figure out how far I got on each... prioritize them (which you can't even spell without ori). So... that will include getting me on a schedule to post here.

Stay tuned.

05/21/2026

While I have been known to dabble in art (doing it for a lifetime, had a 4,000 consecutive day stint of a new work of art every day, made art for Alice Cooper, David Copperfield, William Shatner, etc, and have made a great many people cry as they received something that made them feel seen in a way they never have been before), this series was made by my buddy Jason McGarva.

It's funny, 'cause these do encapsulate a great many parts of my life into individual cards. I smiled. I like the last one, 'cause my dog Sasha is speaking, and happens to mention how we're reshaping realities... but the context for many of these is how I met Jason.

He, like the person I'm visiting right now, purchased my Wordpress course (Make Wordpress Easy) and then reached out to hang out when he came to visit Austin.

We have a great many psychedelic adventures since, but this is not that post. I just wanted to give some context, and then found myself chuckling that it seems everyone I know well... when I try to explain the friendship, it ends up being a long set of epic adventures.

Befriend me only if you are ready for reality to get fun/strange.

The Ori Stories

06/24/2026

06/14/2026

06/12/2026

06/09/2026

06/07/2026

06/05/2026

06/05/2026

06/05/2026

05/28/2026

05/21/2026

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