Reason’s retirement party is winding down. The reliquary awaits: a lovely spot with a view of the rotary phone, rabbit-ear antennas and Cherry Blossoms.

The age of words is dead! 

Long live wordage in its stead!

These last five-plus years, ever since Covid gifted ignorance a megaphone, there’s been a constant feral babel in my ears from the cognitive estrangement from meaning all around me.

In the right, the same manipulated confabulations of digestible words and algorithm-fed pabulum, just enough to pass through the narrowing mind, a prophylactic strategy to shield our rawboned attention span lest we hurt ourselves with an idea.

In the left, speech instrumentalized to suit the zeitgeist of the day, the commodious redefinition of definitions to absolve us from taking moral responsibility for the self-obsessed, immature society we’ve become.

When the apocalypse really kicks in, I picture word lines snaking for blocks and try to blink away the pleas for scraps of the alphabet, all the while praying my hush isn’t the blank slate that licenced the many, near and far, to subjugate us into expression insecurity.

Would that I had taken swimming lessons growing up to better navigate the dilution of language I never imagined in my older age, this liquid moment we are living in that demands we plunge and save humanity instead of sunning ourselves obliviously in the margins.

We are sleepwalking into a monoculture socializing us against being literate, knowledgeable, informed. Vocabulary’s become a dirty word. Inarticulacy and its lickspittle, Obscurantism, are the new aspirational.

Best we use fewer words, the smaller the better, to manifest and to exact misery than stretch our mouths to educate and to enlighten.

Best we distort the meaning of words to affect what we mean than to respect what they actually signify.

Best we traffic in prefabricated pith and exponentialize mother f. tongue-ligating complete sentences from gestating into paragraphs that beget the fully-formed thought.

The arc of public discourse has been bending toward silence for far too many of us having way too many meaningful conversations inside our heads. johnnywalnut.com is where I hope to lend voice to these conversations, say the quiet parts out loud.

The world needs more words now more than ever. More words to elevate us beyond an ankle-deep understanding of what it means to be alive, to be human, and to hold the condition of being human to account.

This is about finding our way back to words, as many of them as we can, and assembling them the way we used to when we spent our words capital freely until we were broke, and the richer for it.