There’s a particular kind of silence every electrician learns to respect—a tense stillness that settles in the seconds before a high-voltage switch is thrown. In that suspended moment, enormous energy hovers between potential and release. To prepare for it, I wore fire-resistant clothing, noise-dampening earmuffs, and safety glasses, and I deliberately turned my face away from the equipment at the moment of activation. That last precaution was for the arc flash: a sudden, explosive burst of light and heat caused by electricity jumping through the air if something goes wrong. It arrives without warning. It shows no mercy.
In the worst case, if a fault occurs and high-voltage current finds an unintended path to the ground, everyone in the room faces potentially catastrophic consequences. Even after exhaustive inspection and testing, I could never be fully certain of a system’s integrity, or how it would respond to the immense surge of current and voltage unleashed at the moment of energization. I spent much of my electrical career learning to read that silence, to sit with uncertainty, and to act with precision despite it.
I never imagined that same silence would one day become the perfect metaphor for my relationship with writing, memory, and the nature of the universe itself. When I closed the switch on this epic book, there was no 10,000 degrees F plasma blast, so the circuit may just hold.
We shall see!
In a different electrical environment, every electrician eventually encounters a simple and humbling truth: a signal sent into a circuit that doesn’t match its impedance requirements—its balance of resistance, capacitance, and inductance—doesn’t simply pass through. Some reflects back toward the source. Some dissipates as heat. Either way, energy is wasted before it ever becomes meaningful. Where there is no true match between transmitter and medium, there is no clean transmission. Only interference, and loss.
The inverse is equally true, and equally profound. A receiver precisely tuned to a signal’s frequency can extract meaning from what others perceive as static. This is the principle behind every radio ever built: not raw power, but alignment. The quality of connection between transmitter and receiver determines everything—not the strength of the signal alone, not the sensitivity of the receiver alone, but the degree to which their characteristics are matched.
This is not merely the physics of electricity. It is, I have come to believe, the physics of all meaningful exchange: between people, between generations, between a writer and a reader not yet born.
My father was not a naturally good listener. He possessed a sharp instinct for what held his attention—and an equally sharp instinct for what did not. In my infancy, his solution to a crying child was to carry that child—me—into the garage and place me in the car so that he might sleep undisturbed.
My parents eventually abandoned that particular practice, but the silence it installed in me proved harder to dismantle. They were puzzled when I didn’t begin speaking until well past the age of four. By that point I am sure that I had several verbal darts circulating in my mind, looking for targets I might hit. I had simply learned, early and without anyone intending to teach me, what every electrician eventually discovers: without a resonant circuit, accurate transmission is impossible. I was waiting, perhaps unconsciously, for a connection that might actually carry my first sacred signal of personal identity.
It never quite arrived—at least not in the form, or the timeframe, that the audiology and linguistics experts my mother consulted believed it should.
But the dam eventually broke, as it does for those who finally find even a partial frequency match. And once it broke, I could not stop talking. My father wondered aloud, more than once, whether I would ever shut up. He never understood that he had helped build the dam himself—and that once it burst, he was going to be flooded with everything that had accumulated behind it.
Late in his life, as memory slowly withdrew its favors, he became something of a captive audience when I was called to manage his deteriorating affairs. In that captivity, perhaps for the first time, he listened with something approaching genuine attention. His quietly disinterested presence across all those earlier years had offered something unexpectedly valuable, nonetheless: the simulation of a receiver. Imperfect, unsparing, real. He was my first important audience—and in his small, flawed way, perhaps my most honest one.
I carry a memory from the third grade that captures the paradox of creative offering with unsettling precision—and that has stayed with me precisely because it has never stopped being true. I was playing in a forest with my neighbor Mary when she proposed the “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” game. I agreed with enthusiasm, pulled my pants down to my ankles—and she refused to reciprocate and then ran away, leaving me standing there, exposed, vulnerable, and met with complete indifference.
Writing has mirrored that experience throughout my life.
The act of transmission is, at its core, an act of exposure. To offer a signal is to make yourself visible—to pull your pants down, metaphorically speaking, and hope that something of equal honesty comes back in return. That reciprocity, that confirmation of resonance, is what the scribe seeks most deeply: not applause, but evidence that the signal crossed the distance and found its match.
Mary didn’t stay to find out whether what I was offering was worth receiving. Most audiences don’t. Over the decades, I have transmitted thousands of pages into the world, in emails, to fellow members of men’s groups, to Facebook readers, to editors seeking to make money off of my efforts, and, now, to Substack readers—reflections, analyses, explorations of subjects I believe carry genuine weight.
The response has been largely silence.
My pants remain around my ankles, but it is no longer so awkward for me.
Embarrassment has become a luxury I can no longer afford at this stage of life. What remains when the need for reciprocity or applause falls away is something cleaner: the obligation to transmit. Not because reception is guaranteed, but because the signal is real—and suppressing it is a form of interior dishonesty I am no longer willing to perform. The transmitter does not determine whether the signal is received. The transmitter determines only whether the signal is sent.
Throughout recorded history, certain individuals have accepted the responsibility of documenting the interior life of their era. These are the scribes—not merely recorders of events, but custodians of why those events mattered: the emotion beneath the fact, the truth beneath the surface, the human cost behind the statistic. Their task is to ensure that the signal of lived experience does not dissipate as heat into the indifferent atmosphere of time. It is a sacred function in the oldest sense: set apart, consecrated to something beyond personal gain or recognition.
Consider what John Steinbeck understood during the Great Depression. He could have observed the nation’s suffering from a safe distance—a transmitter broadcasting from a great remove, its signal weakened by the very distance it traveled. Instead, he shed his identity, disguised himself as a migrant worker, and lived among the displaced. He didn’t simply report on suffering; he allowed it to flow through him, to alter his own frequency. The result was not journalism. It was resonance—a transmission so precisely tuned to the lived experience of its subjects that readers who had never set foot in a labor camp felt, upon reading it, that someone had finally described their own interior landscape.
There is a Japanese tradition that illuminates the depth of this same responsibility. A Japanese friend of ours, who had traveled the world extensively, took it upon herself to return fallen soldiers’ flags to their families. Over time, these flags had ended up as curiosities in shops across the globe, most people entirely unaware that they were far more than decorative objects. These WWII flags—once raised with wind and hope—carried memories. In their return to the families who had lost everything, life’s precious circle was completed. The scribe does something profoundly similar: using language to connect the stories of the dead and dying to the living, ensuring that no signal is lost before it finds someone to receive it.
This function becomes exponentially more urgent when the civilization in question is itself in decline.
Our social, political, and ecological frameworks are fracturing under pressures that have been accumulating for centuries. What fractures shared narrative fractures people. And what holds people together, in the end, are the stories that say: this happened, it mattered, and you are not alone in inheriting its consequences. When a civilization loses the ability to tell a coherent story about itself, it begins to lose the resonant frequency that holds it together. The carrier wave weakens. What once transmitted meaning becomes noise.
This is precisely where the scribe becomes indispensable.
History is full of writers whose significance was recognized only long after their deaths—mystics, philosophers, and poets whose words gathered meaning as the world slowly developed the capacity to receive what they were transmitting. The vulnerability of creative offering, then, is not evidence of failure. It may be evidence of a signal that belongs to a frequency the collective has not yet learned to tune into.
I was, by trade, an electrician. I have been retired from that career for over a decade. Now, by inspiration and then compulsion, I am a scribe. This is not a book about electricity. It is a book about everything electricity—and a complete human life—has taught me to see: in the universe, in the movement of grief through a soul, in the way love travels across time, and in the quiet miracle of meaning accumulating in an ordinary life.
With no children to carry forward my name, the written word may be the only vessel through which anything essential in me passes into future generations. The readers who most need what lives in these pages may be people I will never meet—strangers not yet born, not yet ready, who will one day stand at the edge of their own particular silence and need to know that someone else stood there first, looked out into the charged dark, and kept transmitting anyway.
That thought does not diminish me. It clarifies my purpose.
I am not certain the universe is always listening. I have learned, across many decades and many silences, that this is not the point.
The point is to send the signal.
And so, father—in whatever form you now take—
Can you hear me now?
May you find, within these pages, a frequency that resonates with something sacred and alive in you. May it carry you, with your wonder intact, into the life, love, and death upon the unlimited bandwidth of the universe.
