Less than a year into the second reign of the mad American king—a monarch with all the subtlety one might expect from America’s first—it’s easy to forget that his first term was no cake walk. Supposed terrorists in every rescued migrant, children separated from parents on the border, over-told numbers of personnel scandals and the constant turnovers that resulted, the utter weaponization of foreign relations, the camera-captured continuation of systemic racism culminating in George Floyd and the rise of BLM, and, of course, the pandemic…we were in a constant collective state of emergency.

It was a time of destruction, mostly of our idea of normal. But it also was a time of repair, or at least, for many, the recognition of its need. The ubiquity of psychotherapy that took shape during this time is not surprising: a lot of us decided to have a look under the hoods to see if we might be part of the problem.

In 2018, hot on the heels of therapeutic discoveries of my own, I started with a steering wheel and ended with a qwerty keyboard. I saw neither coming: the road trips nor the discoveries they would lead me to.

Some of those discoveries, I found, I could not live with.

Ronald Henderson has been writing since discovering early that, if you lift the needle on a 45 and replace it into the same grooves over and over, you can begin to hear the words under there on that there Jerry Lee Lewis record that's spinning on your older brother's turntable at forty-five revolutions per minute. And those words are telling a story. That's the real magic in the barn that's shakin'.

Ronald is retired from nonsensical capitalist endeavors and currently lives in Portugal. There is a wife, a daughter, grandkids, and all the family that you get along with those sorts of folks. He is, as the Midwest Christians say, living a blessed life.

Most times personal, Ronald's writing also comprised a large part of the contributions he made in corporate settings. There was often praise, but no lasting reward for either endeavor.

He discovered somewhat later in life that a retired quill can have a hidden store of ink if one can put oneself on a collision course with it. The document you hold is evidence of that (and provides an explanation for that previous sentence.) I learned to breathe in these pages: a useful skill to have even when you stop running.