Category: Books We Read

It happened on an ordinary street, at an ordinary hour.

Nothing about the setting suggested significance. There was no urgency, no promise, no narrative momentum. Just a pause. A glance. A moment of softness that didn’t ask to be continued. And then it was gone.

At first, it registered as nothing more than an observation. But like most things that matter, it lingered. Not because it demanded interpretation, but because it resisted dismissal.

Beautiful Men: The Dog Walker began there—at the edge of something small and easily overlooked—and slowly became a meditation on fleeting connection. On gentleness without agenda. On the quiet, almost imperceptible ways life reassures us when we are paying attention.

This book is not about romance as possession. It is about presence. About the subtle flirtation between the self and the world—a dynamic that does not seek escalation or resolution. These moments do not ask to be named or secured. They ask only to be noticed.

There is a cultural bias toward continuity. We are trained to measure meaning by duration, to assume that what matters must lead somewhere. Encounters that do not develop into stories are treated as inconsequential, their value dismissed because they do not accumulate.

This book resists that logic.

It suggests that some encounters are complete precisely because they do not extend themselves. That their power lies in their brevity. That they exist to remind us of our own receptivity, not to promise connection beyond the moment.

In this sense, the dog walker is not a character so much as a figure of attention—a stand-in for the everyday miracle of noticing another human without attempting to possess the experience. The exchange is light, mutual, unburdened by expectation. It leaves no trace except a subtle recalibration of the senses.

My mission here is not to romanticize strangers or elevate fleeting attraction into myth. It is to reclaim attentiveness as a form of intimacy. To suggest that meaning does not always announce itself with permanence, and that some forms of connection are valuable precisely because they remain unkept.

There is a discipline to unkeeping.

To notice without grasping.

To receive without claiming.

To allow something to be meaningful without insisting it become more.

Beautiful Men: The Dog Walker is written for readers who sense that life is constantly offering small confirmations of aliveness—if only we are willing to slow down enough to perceive them.

Some encounters are not meant to be kept.

They are meant to be noticed.

And noticing, it turns out, is not accidental.

It is a practice.

This book was written during a period when sleep stopped behaving.

Nights lost their edges. Mornings arrived without permission. Time collapsed into something viscous and unreliable. Thoughts no longer lined up in sentences; they arrived in fragments, sensations, impressions. Logic—once dependable—loosened its grip. And in that unraveling, something unexpected surfaced: a form of clarity that did not announce itself with arguments, only with felt truth.

Fever Dreams was born in those liminal hours—when exhaustion stripped away performance and left only what could not be faked. When the mind, too tired to maintain coherence, finally stopped interfering. I did not understand more in those moments. I noticed more.

This book is not about healing as progress. It resists the familiar arc of breakdown followed by breakthrough. Instead, it examines altered states as teachers in their own right. States often dismissed as dysfunction—burnout, dissociation, sleeplessness—are treated here as thresholds rather than failures.

There is an intelligence in the body that does not rely on explanation. When the mind exhausts its narratives, the body begins to speak more clearly. Through sensation. Through timing. Through an unedited knowing that bypasses language entirely.

Mysticism, in this context, is not decorative. It is functional.

Fever Dreams does not treat intuition as an aesthetic preference or spiritual affectation. It approaches it as a legitimate epistemology—a way of knowing that operates beneath cognition, beyond linear thought. One that cannot always be translated, but can often be trusted.

The book pays attention to what surfaces when we are too tired to curate ourselves. When ambition softens. When coherence collapses. When the question is no longer What does this mean? but What is happening in my body right now?

My mission with this work is simple but radical: to legitimize experiences that are routinely pathologized or dismissed because they resist neat explanation. To suggest that not all clarity arrives through control, and not all understanding is verbal.

This is not a romanticization of suffering. Collapse is not framed as desirable. But it is treated as informative. As an altered state that reveals what remains when the usual scaffolding falls away.

Fever Dreams is written for readers who suspect that their most lucid moments did not arrive during periods of composure, but during moments of unraveling. For those who have felt more awake while falling apart than while holding everything together.

If you recognize that kind of clarity—arriving sideways, unannounced—this book is not here to explain it to you.

It is here to sit with it.