Free Your Mind: New Philosophy, official release event at Clintonville Books, Wednesday July 1st, 2026, open to the public.
https://clintonvillebooks.com/events/5612920260701
Imagine if Plato’s Symposium was set at a meeting of a Black secret-society, inside a boarded-up storefront on Parsons Avenue, and if the topics discussed were how to find new ways forward out of the seemingly inescapable problems of the modern world.
BOOK EXCERPT (From Chapter 1: I Have Measured the Days of Babylon):
The year of Our Lord, 2025, began in tragedy, with the burial of a much younger friend. I had fancied myself his mentor, but in the wake of his loss, I wondered if he should have been mine instead.
We were both eccentric, big-picture visionaries, but he had the greater gift for translating his dreams into realities. In his brief life, and relatively short tenure in our Central Ohio community of Black creatives, he had been a transformative force. In the midst of the isolation of the COVID pandemic, he started a weekly outdoor fireside gathering that built what rapidly became my closest group of friends. In a wider circle, he founded a highly regarded inner-city chess program, one that transformed the lives of children and adults alike.
And then there was the black envelope, one of his last gifts to me before his unexpected illness. It contained a key, an address, and a handwritten list of dates. Cryptic riddles had been our common language, but in this case, I knew what the envelope represented. I had been polite when he first offered it to me, then promptly tucked it in a drawer. Secret societies suited my friend’s playfulness and sense of fantastic adventure, but I viewed them with suspicion.
I’m not a joiner by nature. I’m no Mason, and I never pledged a fraternity, neither Alpha nor Omega. Ancient orders shrouded in mystery are great fodder for books and movies, but what are they really other than social clubs with odd and questionable rituals? If they’re really such storehouses of lost wisdom, in a world so deeply in need of it, why hoard it? What’s all the secrecy for, except to make the members feel special? It’s all marketing, irresistibility through exclusion.
But I could no longer afford my standoffish attitude. My study of the craft of writing taught me that fictional characters don’t transform until forced. The job of the author is to pile on the misery, foreclose other choices, and push them to the point where they have no alternative but to change. In art, so too in life. As for them, so too for me.
It wasn’t just my friend’s untimely death, that shocking reminder that tomorrow is not promised today. I was on the cusp of my half-century mark, and had realized too few of my early ambitions. It’s the universal complaint of the middle-aged, how fleeting our dreams of youthful glory. In my case, however, it wasn’t just boyish goals unachieved, but significant responsibilities unfulfilled.
By the year I turned sixteen (around the time of my departed friend’s birth), I already knew where the world was headed. I surely wasn’t alone. The year was 1992, the signs had long since become clear. We were worried about the hole in the ozone layer, not climate change, but it didn’t take a genius to realize we couldn’t keep using up natural resources at an ever-faster rate. Smartphones, the internet, and artificial intelligence were still largely in the future, but technology had already started to alienate us, one from the other. Then, as now, there were wars, and rumors of wars in the Middle East, and in diverse parts of the world, and it didn’t take imagination to see that our enthusiasm for killing each other was a path towards total mutual destruction.
I hadn’t yet been disappointed by the broken promises of the first president I personally supported, Bill Clinton, but I already knew democracy wasn’t a magical cure-all. As a new driver, I hadn’t yet experienced being stopped by the police for “driving-while-Black,” but in the wake of the previous year’s Rodney King beating, I could already see how fragile and how illusionary was America’s vaunted racial progress. The massacre at Columbine hadn’t yet ushered in the heartrending era of school shootings, but the culture that bred it, of violence, anger, and all-too-easy access to guns, was already pervasive. In short, few of the crises of the subsequent thirty-three years would find me unforewarned.
What did come as a shock was the ineffectiveness of my own efforts to “save the world.” Yes, it was a ridiculously outsized, arrogant, messianic goal. But I made progress over the years. I did deep dives into root causes of everything from war to poverty, and became convinced there were achievable things that would ensure a more sustainable future for all. But I found my insights difficult to put into practice, and even more difficult to communicate. And so I gave in to existential drift. My personal life took precedence over my mission. I got married and started a family. I found a stable job, as a computer programmer at a big corporation. Behind the closed doors of my own home, I was happy.
But now, in 2025, the chickens were coming home to roost. American democracy was under assault from within. Brutal wars in the Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere were endangering the globe. Mass shootings had become so common, they no longer made for front-page news, and neither did the fires, floods, and other “natural” disasters caused by climate change.
After an all-too brief tenure in the wilderness, racism and xenophobia were reasserting their mainstream legitimacy. Artificial intelligence was threatening my stable job. People such as eccentric billionaire Elon Musk, with money, power and influence, were deploying it in ways that made things worse, not better. My friends and I spoke openly of plans to flee the country, yet in our hearts we knew the diminishing possibility of personal refuge in conditions of global chaos.
And so, this meeting was crucial to me. I wasn’t going in search of deep hidden secrets to transform my life. I was seeking something even more rare and precious, a receptive audience. And I was running out of time to find it.