ESSAYS
THE BALCKWELL ARCHIVES
For a purely chronological list, click here.
Personal Essays
2026
2025
- Numbers on a Screen
- Moments
- A Place
- The Weather Is Going to Get Cold Soon...
- Can I Ride Upon A Cloud?
- Two Cats, Two Novels
- My Natural State
- Further Thoughts on Hearkening
- A Mid-June Journal
- The Rainbow Connection
2024
- The Six-Minute Mile
- And I Was The Monkey King
- RAINICHI 2023 #001 PROLOGUE
- Problems & Proverbs in the Canadian Prairies
- Written on the Occasion of My Twenty-Ninth Birthday
- RAINICHI 2023 #000.5 - An Immediate Digression Concerning the Japanese Language
- RAINICHI 2023 #000 – An Introduction
- In a Town Where I Am Going to Live
- A Retreat to the Customs Office
- The End of a Coastal Man
- Free & Easy
2023
- What More Could You Ask For?
- Gotta Go to Work, Gotta Go to Work, Gotta Have a Job
- Asleep on a Sunbeam
- One Chance Out Between Two Worlds
- Smoke & Mirrors
- Transmission From the Planet Balckwell
- Hello, Japan. Goodbye, My Japan (RAINICHI 2023 #-001)
- Where Did Balckwell Go?
- Shake Off The Dust
- Reach Out For the Truth of My Life (Part Two)
- Reach Out For the Truth of My Life (Part One)
- Proving That I Exist
- Releasing My Novel
- Am I Religious?
- When Conversation is Impossible
2022
- The Graveyard Story
- The Wretched Life of the Man Who Lives With Ghosts
- A Certain Sensitivity to Noise
- Shall I Languish in Obscurity?
- The Ko Rule of Eternal Revision
- You Can (Not) Go Back
- Enough of All That!
2021
Art & Literature
- Natsume Soseki: Through The Eyes of a Cat
- Apolitical Borges
- Call Him Ishmael
- A Brief Introduction: Pierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville
- Is This Website a Valid Literary Medium?
- On the Road to Nekomachi
- Kafka’s Nightmares
- In Xanadu
- The Boy and the Heron
- The Daikon Farmer Points the Way, With a Daikon
- Gaza Writes Back
- I'm Not Good Enough
- Neil Young's Mesoamerica
- Rock Man's Sexual Cycle, or, Leave Me to My Polish Curses
Philosophy
- Escape From Reality
- The Balckwell Guide to Philosophical Beginnings
- Being Hit With A Stick
- Chuang Tzu and Zhuangzi Wage War Throughout Heaven and Earth
- The Geography of Geography
- What’s the Point of Liking Music?
- Love & Dreams (True & False)
- Heaven & Good Things
- In the Eyes of the Unfathomable Deity
- Creative Evolution
- What is a Human Being?
- The Internet Made Me Stupid
- Ain't Got No Clock
- Speedrunning Faust
- I Don't Like It Any More Than You Do
- In Heaven, Everything is Fine
- Is Outer Space Real?
- Beyond Materialism
- Tunnel to a New Sky
- Through the Lens of My Ludens Goggles
- Irreconcilable Distances, Permeable Boundaries, Overlapping Memories
- & Engage in Jolly Cooperation!
- Everything & More & More
- Bloodpath and Beyond
- The Lint Filter Sounds Like Donkey Kong, and So Does the Kitchen Sink Mat
FROM MY OLD WEBSITE
2018
2017
- A Short Dream, About You
- The Only Bacon is a 'Bacon,' The Only Meat is a 'Meat,' The Only Memory is the One We All Forgot, and Eighteen Months of a Watch
- Saizeriya and the Last True Beauty
- Not Quite Themselves, or Humanity's Grand, Ever-Evolving Dash Toward a Brick Wall
- What Makes Conscious Life Such a Wonderful State of Being, or The Apathy of a Goodbye We Forgot to Say
- 'Do You Know "Tayoru?"' – A Conversation with a Chinese Girl on January 9th, 2016
- Four Hot Dogs
- Take My Hand; Take My Whole Life Too, or What The World Calls Love
- Everything Feels So Real, and Then It Doesn't, and Then It Does Again, or This Beautiful Street Would Just Be a Hard and Sad Street For Her
- Lie To Me, While The Earth Will Still Let You, or Teach Us to Slam Dunk Our Basketballs
2016
- My Fun November
- A Confused Fish Eats a Dog, and A Bloody Fish Sees a Cat
- We May Probably Be Happy Forever: The Fictional Anti-Sequel to 'Not For you Baboo'
- A Review of Love, or Not For You Baboo
- As Much a Nantoka as Nantoka: A Retrospective Written Upon the Remembrance of Two Closely Related Events That Occurred Within the Same Week, One Year Ago
- Screaming About The Games We Play, or 'I Can Laugh About It Now But at the Time It Was Terrible
- A Time In Tokyo, or Hold On To That Right Thing
- Football Ruined My Life
- I'm Home – Oh Wait, What's a Home? or An Apple Tea To Go, Please
- Morrissey: An Autobiography
- How I Feel Terrible On the Internet, or Think About Me When You're Sad
- A Review of the Video Game "Super Mario Maker"
- words
2015
- Outside the Old Normal, Inside The New Normal, or 'This is Where I Buy My Delicious Cakes'
- Between Me And You (Is an Indiana Jones Transition), or Wherever You Go, You Are Yourself
- New Jacket, New Shirt, New Mike – Relatively Old Pants, or The Stor(ag)e (Of My Mind)
- A Night at the Club, or Darkness Seeps In Through The Ears
- This is One: Here We Go
- Here I am: I Am/Was/Am Not Jim/Roy; Let's Move On: Alright, Let's Not Talk About Love, or We're Not Talking About Love Today
- Only In Dreams: A Title Based on That Song By Weezer, or She, With the One Large Earring and the One Small Earring, Eating a Hot Dog
- Tiny Explosions of Memory and Feeling, or How To Create (And Exploit) A Past
- A Library of Vending Machines, or A Museum of Taiko Drums, or The Pain of a Pouring of Tea
- What Chases Me Across the Sea