This Book Started as a Moon Thought and Got Out of Hand

It was 4:30 in the morning and I had just walked out of a donut shop. The moon was hanging there like it knew something I didn’t, and without thinking I sent a text to a friend:

“Have you ever looked at the moon and wondered if Osama Bin Laden looked at the same moon as you”

They responded with exactly what you’d expect:

“What the fuck is wrong with you lmao”

That was the moment something cracked open. I started sending more random psychotic texts to people. Stuff that didn’t make sense but felt emotionally true. One of them was

“My Roomba joined ISIS and took the kids”

Someone told me that sounded like it would make a good story. And unfortunately for everyone involved I agreed.

At the time I was deep into writing He Waits in the Plaster. It was slow dark and emotionally heavy. I needed something else. Not a distraction. Just a different outlet for the stuff in my head that didn’t fit anywhere else. I also didn’t want to get burnt out with writing He Waits in the Plaster.

So I started writing Roomba. Then Reagan. Also a document with a ton of just one line crazy thoughts They didn’t need to follow rules. They just needed to exist.

My Roomba Joined ISIS and Took the Kids is satire but it’s also personal. It’s about divorce and losing control and blaming a vacuum for things that broke long before the battery died. It’s structured like a soap opera because emotionally that’s what it felt like to live through. Everything was too loud. Too dramatic. Too surreal to be real.

Writing it was a release. A way to laugh at the mess without pretending it wasn’t real. The same goes for Ronald Reagan Sold Me Crypto From Beyond the Grave. These stories are insane. But they let me explore how absurd real pain can feel when nothing makes sense and everyone expects you to act normal anyway.

So yeah. This book started as a text about Bin Laden and the moon. And it became something stupid and honest and weirdly kind of healing.