Introduction to PJ Goose

I am P.J. Goose, author, artist, lifelong academic,beach-goer, chemist, cook, and a cashier.

There's always more to the story than anyone can fully articulate. Books have been written about books, about events that lasted minutes. In my life I have noticed that the most important work concludes itself, during the phase of reflection. The work gets you there, the work wraps up the experience from predictions into memories, it allows you to investigate it in your own hands. The work is how you don't just take someone's word for it.

In my first work, Sublimation and Other States of Change, I learned more than I ever imagined I would. Firstly, was that I could do something. There is always something I can do for myself that comes back to my community. I learned how to finish something. I learned how to let the work and those feelings go. Once I felt every word in this work, once I held it in my mind, my mouth, my hand.

Substance abuse of any kind ruins lives every day. Substance abuse will never not be braided into the relationship I have with my father. At the same time, I have learned neither of us are made of substance abuse, bad memories, or misplaced harshness. I will never fix my dad, but maybe what both of us wanted, though lost in translation, was just for me to save myself, and for him to save himself. Two suns burning alongside one another, safe in the presence of one another. This safety does not have to burn forever, but it must exist somewhere.

There are lines drawn in the sand all day. We draw them in the sand so when the truth rises above, and washes everything away, we can still draw them again, anew. There are dreams with their own tide of time attached, and when the tide rises, we have to let go of once was to continue on. Not every dream is ours to enact in our sleep, in our wake.

I am good at math and science, it's important for me to express that I chose this life of writing and visual expression. Math and science exist as the framework of our rule-governed world. Business has bought itself a place on stage. I wrote this book to understand for myself, how the academic world I trusted with my life, interacted with towers of sandcastles. What am I carrying for my parents through the flooded tide? I froze for a time in my life. I was hard, ice-cold, unforgiving, and impatient; this feeling did not make me strong, but fragile, messy, and worst of all misunderstanding.

The path for me changes all the time because it does not exist. I was dreaming of poetry in engineering classes, I was reciting words to myself that someone else was kind enough to learn and share by their own hand. The truth is not a static force, its a force we observe in motion, serving a greater purpose than washing away the lines we drew. Sometime I believe the truth picks me up and washes me out into an entity that could consume me, move me, and spit me out into another life.