Hello. My name is Tom. And it’s lovely to meet you.
Twenty years ago, my eighth grade English teacher gave my class a major assignment: pair up with a classmate, interview one another, and incrementally publish chapters of each other’s biographies to our classmates. Two-page, double-spaced minimum, size 12 font, Times New Roman preferred, but Arial and Calibri permitted, and please don’t forget your name and date in the top right corner.
Unfortunately, this was right around the time I was going through something of a pre-teen, anti-establishment streak. Listening to the Clash, strutting around with my shirt untucked, parroting South Park quotes to my classmates – I swear, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee had never seen such a rebellious young white kid.
And so, I did not interview my classmate. Because where was the subversive civil disobedience in that? The world didn’t need to hear another story about an upper-middle-class white kid from an affluent American suburb. What it needed was an awkwardly paced space opera featuring light sabers, a war for the cosmos, and a malevolent dark lord threatening to destroy the universe.
And so that’s what I produced.
And the craziest part was that I got away with it. My classmates loved it. My teacher loved it.
Before turning in each assignment, we’d spend the first half of the class presenting our biographies to our classmates. I’d never volunteer to go first, of course. You couldn’t seek celebrity like that. It had to happen organically. Only when enough of my classmates were shooting glances in my direction and quietly entreating me to speak up would I stand up like the local D-List celebrity I was fast becoming. “Well, I guess if you insist… Chapter 3: Darkness Awakened.”
I may have been insufferable, but if my classmates enjoyed my stories, well, that was enough for me.
All these years later, I am no longer a fourteen-year-old punk-rock wannabe. I am a thirty-two-year-old corporate middle manager working for a mid-sized distribution company in northern Milwaukee.
Somewhere in the last two decades I traded my D-List celebrity status for mid-tier corporate hierarchy, and my untucked shirt for a business casual dress code. Comedic space operas gave way to strongly worded emails, and treacherous dark lords gave way to C-Suite corporate leadership.
And in many ways, that’s totally okay. There’s no addiction quite like a bi-monthly salary, and I do have a unique, almost sensual, affinity for Excel spreadsheets.
However, in many ways it is emphatically not okay. I must acknowledge with fear and alarm the rapid velocity with which life is passing me by. I can’t say whether my life is currently in its first, second, or final act. But I do know that the story can end at any moment, and probably sooner than I’d like it to.
And so, I’ve opted to reclaim some small portion of my eighth-grade D-List celebrity status and refocus on the thing I love most: Telling stories.
Which is exactly the purpose of this website.
My objective is simple: Write stories for others to share and enjoy. And, corporate fatigue permitting, have a lot of fun doing it along the way.
Many of these stories will be (mostly) true tales from my own life; others will be entirely fictional: short stories, vignettes, and the like. Almost all of it will center around the absurdity of life, our small place within it, and the power of stories to help us make sense of it all.
If you enjoy my content, please also consider becoming a subscriber on my Substack (www.existentialwannabe.substack.com) and / or following me on Instagram (@existential_wannabe). I will be posting exclusive content to the former, and above average internet memes to the latter.
If you’ve made it this far into my introduction, you’re remarkable, and I hope I’ve convinced you to stick around a little bit longer. If you do, I can’t promise you masterpieces. But I can promise an honest attempt to channel the fourteen-year-old version of myself, and to do my damnedest to keep you entertained.
Thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to our time together.
The Existential Wannabe 