A fifteen-hour road trip across Saskatchewan with my brother, watching the prairie unfold through grain elevators and abandoned towns. The quiet weight of prairie masculinity, the failure of academic knowledge to translate into brotherly wisdom, and the architecture of goodwill found in midnight motels.

I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley, shoplifting Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters, and I'm alive and writing today because of that. Recent neuroscience confirms poetry activates the brain's dopaminergic reward system, treats anhedonia, and is—more than metaphor—medicine.

My annual birthday essay on turning thirty: examining the cross-cultural agreement—from Confucius to the Hebrew Bible to Zoroaster—that thirty is when formation ends and function begins. My dark year of depression which turned out to be preparation rather than delay, and on writing 200,000 words since, which turned out to be the same thing.

A eulogy for two kinds of loss: those who die and those who become simply elsewhere. Filtered through Didion, Barthes, C.S. Lewis, and Pema Chödrön. On ambiguous grief, the names written down so they don't disappear, and the sixteen-year-old who already knew that love stems out from verbs.

On the poets who found different terrors inside the phrase 'earn my keep'—Jeong Ho-Seung, Brecht, Heather McHugh, Kim Hyesoon—and the theological dispute over whether grace can be deserved, turning thirty in borrowed time, and the nuthatches outside who do not know the feeder was set out for them.

A review of Jake Beka's sophomore poetry chapbook SINKHOLE—eleven poems across four continents and three generations, tracing patrilineal damage as a force that reshapes geography, contaminates water tables, and follows you across borders. A chapbook with genuine cosmological ambition that succeeds everywhere it refuses comfort.

On the subscription economy, Walter Benjamin's aura, Pokémon scalpers, the rot of physical media, and the person at the photocopier making what the streaming model cannot touch.

We have the first human photograph of Earth from space in 54 years, and I can't help but meditate on what it means to be human on a fragile planet in 2026.

Born on April 13th, 26 years after Apollo 13's failure, I explore my personal connection to the Moon as Artemis II astronauts journey toward Her. The Moon has scientific importance, cultural naming traditions, religious significance across civilizations, linguistic ties to lunacy and menstruation, and is the first poem. The Moon unites humanity across time and space as we return to Her once again.

A few minutes before I begin writing this, I woke up into an anxiety attack. There are a lot of issues I could be writing about, the world is fraught with uncertain violence. This is a story about me, and also a story about North Darfur and Kansas and Haiti and India. I ask this: whose suffering gets reported? Whose death counts behind glass?

A quarter of the entire Internet uses Cloudflare. This is an existential threat to the Internet's ideals. I realized I need DDoS protection, but I could not use Cloudflare in good conscience. And so, I'm beyond excited to announce that I'm now using Deflect.ca for my website.

A review of the prank I pulled yesterday, in addition to serious discourse about being silly, including thoughts on the role and importance of satire and literacy. I also share a detailed technical breakdown of the scripts that I added to the prank as well.

After MONTHS of hard, gruelling work being completely independent on my personal site, I've been lucky enough to find healthy, sustainable partnerships with several incredible companies. Today, I'm sharing some significant changes to how brennan.day operates—and what that means for you, my readers.

Exploring constitutive moral luck through Nagel and Williams alongside Nietzsche's Übermensch and amor fati, I reflect on the recursive gratitude I feel for who I constitutively am—and argue that blogging is a philosophical practice of self-overcoming: a daily, recursive Yes to existence.