Hi. I’m Moose.

That’s not my legal name, but it was the name my parents were planning on giving me up until the moment I was born.

Legend goes, this name “Moose” had been stuck in their minds for months, but they ultimately changed their approach after finally reaching the delivery room — having second thoughts on if such a name was going to give me issues later on in life.

After a panicked deliberation, they settled on the unoffensive, no-frills white-guy-du-jour name of July 1990:

“Jeff.”

Thirty-one years later, the very human-thing talking to you (me, Moose, “Jeff”) is having a bit of an identity crisis.

You see, the thing I’ve most always wanted to be in life, more than any name or title, is a writer.

Sure, I had my childhood dreams of starting at quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, or being the hottest new wrestler on WWF: Raw is War. Those career pathways, like many others I tried as an adult, didn’t quite pan out like the 2nd Grade career projects promised. (Did anyone have Comcast Repo Guy on the list at Age 8? I didn’t.)

But the writing thing…that’s stuck around.

In 2006, I enrolled in the journalism class during my freshman year of high school. By 2007, I was taking pictures and writing sports summaries for the black-and-white county weekly. I took on a few desk assignments in 2008, and come 2009, I was the editor of the school newspaper.

But what’s more important to me is that during that time, I kept a prominent MySpace and LiveJournal blog. It seems like chump-change to us now in the viral age, but staying up all night pouring my heart into the keyboard and waking up to 1,000 reads on my latest post during the George W. Bush era was electric to me as a teenager. Some folks would share my posts in the long-gone MySpace Bulletins, and a few family members kept the blogged bookmarks tabbed for their own enjoyment — what a way to watch their young little son/nephew/cousin grow and mature in real-time.

Whatever cheap thrills a typical day in rural-ass New Palestine, Indiana, brought for me as a teenager, I most always found the time to put them into words before bed that night. The musings were sometimes minor, like a trip to race go-karts, or a recap of a local birthday party. But often, they wandered into some heavy territory that was on a lot of my peers’ minds: Peer pressure. Questionable influences. Parental disagreements. Dating. Heartbreak. A general fear of the future and everything associated with entering the real world.

Growing up with my family in a cabin in the woods, miles away from the closest neighbor, let alone a suburb or no-invitations, everyone-welcome pool party, I tended to be alone with my thoughts quite often. So putting them down for myself — and letting others read them — was a tremendously validating thing for me, a kid who never really wanted to live in the wilderness to begin with. The internet was my best friend, and I may still spend more time on the computer than in bed.

Aiming for bigger and better things than New Pal, I had my sights set on the journalism program at Indiana University. Eventually, predictably, I got accepted, and I prepared for the move.

Then Dad died.

I spent my first two years at college doing the hard-party and hooligan frathouse riffraff thing. Lots of mischief. Tons of fun. But it was everything I needed to shirk responsibility and grieve for a little bit. I got out, I met some babes, I found the bedroom, and I generally showed up for most classes that held my interest. A few professors saw the good in my work, and a select few stepped into my life as mentors.

But I did very little writing of my own.

Mid-way through college, I found out pretty quickly that the hedonistic style of studying wasn’t going to land me where I wanted to go professionally. So I hunkered down and put myself to work at the Indiana Daily Student as an undergrad: Copy editor. Album reviewer. Arts writer. Police beater. Yearbook member. Podcaster. After a year or two of giving the general Hoosier masses something to distract them in lecture halls, I fell up enough stairs to earn the position of managing editor, a position I kept for about 6 weeks, before I was offered an internship “I couldn’t refuse” ($10/hour, nearly 3 states away).

I was beaming with joy. I had managed to wedge myself from existential quicksand, and I was doing the damn thing in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

But I did very little writing of my own.

Not too long after, the local newspaper called me and “asked if I was ready to come home.” It was like a dream come true! I took second-shift design jobs and stayed up past 2 a.m. most nights making sure the building didn’t burst into flames before press. I took on an advice columnist position, covered city affairs, and edited obituaries. I helped design and star on a streaming-only sports show, which saw me rapt with nerves but generally glad to be there. I spent most major holidays and family events tucked away in the cavernous newsroom, yet I was proud of myself for being able to live on my own, to find a quality girlfriend, just to be a sort of accomplished adult for the first time.

But I did very little writing of my own.

The past five years of my career — whether it falls into journalism, writing, paid grammar asshole-ery — have not come with that same zest. Sunny days at the local newspaper turned to grim ones. Our staff shrank to a third of what it was when I was hired on, and I read enough writing on the wall to quit a few weeks before I undoubtedly would have been let go. (“I went out with cake instead of a cardboard box,” I still explain at parties, a jestingly self-aware smile on my face.)

Then Mom died.

I hopped around a few places trying to reignite my passion for writing and publishing. I needed something, anything to pass the time as I grieved — so I took some pretty lofty steps away from the norm: I watched paint dry for a flatulent father and daughter who talked shit about their clients under the guise of an appraisal company. I delivered food for about two weeks. Things were going pretty well at the K-12 professional development company, where I was a marketing and brand specialist with his own cubicle and expense reports, but COVID buried those dreams like a lead slab. They gave me the call two days after Election Day (when we as a nation still didn’t have a collective answer to “who won?”).

Since then, I’ve recovered decently, finding an adjunct teaching position at IU through the Media School (which absorbed the journalism program I graduated from). I spent the spring semester managing to find ways for students trapped in Zoom University to engage with something, to feel something, for God’s sake, in my literary journalism class that covered all the good stuff: Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Lillian Ross, Tom Wolfe, and all the other folks who used to smoke cigarettes inside without abandon.

But I still do very little writing of my own.

By this point, the structure and pattern of this entry should tip you off: I’m here to do more writing. I’d like to do more writing for me. Somewhere in TOTO, I traded away my personal dreams to type out someone else’s words — at the going rate of $15 for each hour I’ll never be able to write back into existence.

In general, I’d like to use this space as a catch-all for anything and everything I would like to say. The concept of maintaining a personal website/blog/publication for mass consumption petrified me while working for newspapers and corporations. Forget being “cancelled” — angry column readers once advocated for my public stoning. A few years later, a man called my employer and threatened me physical harm.

But I’m 30 now. That’s 31 next month.

And I can’t dare let these words stay inside me for fear of anything. What the hell would I tell 17-year-old Moose (nee, Jeff), who emptied out every single thought in his noggin because he felt like it was the best way he could EXIST in this world? What am I going to tell him? That I’m afraid? Oh hell, how about too busy?

That’s not very punk rock of you, Moose. Get those fucking words out and stop regretting a damn thing.

My long-running MySpace blog was erased in its entirety. The LiveJournal? Its password was long-forgotten to a long-deactivated email account. The high school newspaper issues? Lost somewhere in the foreclosure. My professional clips? Buried behind paywalls and broken content management systems.

Hell, even my long-beloved poetry journal is locked in a storage unit across town, a metaphorical prison of its own:

And if not for the sake of two spare keys, there’d be very little hard existence of my career as a writer.

I plan to dedicate this experiment, “Moose on the Loose,” to the spirit of the daredevil poet of my teenage past. To the junior who boldly called the high school administration a “tool” in the student paper. To the nerd discovering art and poetry for the first time, and feeling compelled to something beyond video games. To the college kid and adult professional I should have been, with healthier parents who otherwise would have been along to root me through any finish line.

Here’s to you kid. You always had it. And you’ll never lose it, if you just make sure you do it from time to time.

Now put on a goddamn pot of coffee and wipe off your nasty-ass keyboard: The people are waiting.

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-moose