I never sat down and said yeah let me write a book where Ronald Reagan haunts a trailer park and convinces a broke man to invest in dead president crypto. That sentence alone should have stopped me. But it didn’t. It started everything.
It began as a joke. Some weird late night idea that came out of being too tired and too wired. I had been swimming in grief and sarcasm for months. Every thought I had was either a breakdown or a punchline. Sometimes both. So I made a fake title. Just to see how absurd I could be. Ronald Reagan Sold Me Crypto From Beyond the Grave. That was it. No story. No characters. Just chaos and a smirk.
Then I wrote the first chapter. It felt stupid in the best way. A man sitting in his boxers getting financial advice from a ghost on his Roku. It was dumb. But it was also honest. Underneath the nonsense was something else. Regret. Loneliness. Addiction. This character wasn’t just some punchline. He was me. He was people I’ve known. He was trying to survive the absurdity of American life with nothing but grief and hope and broken internet.
And somehow that became therapy.
The more I wrote, the more it stopped being just a joke. I was bleeding into it. The wild parts were still there. Reagan showing up during a lightning storm. A Roomba that joined ISIS. But between the chaos were pieces of things I couldn’t say out loud. About what loss does to people. About how easy it is to fall for a voice that tells you you’re still useful. About the hunger for purpose in a world that keeps selling you knockoffs.
I didn’t plan for it to be a book. I didn’t outline it or pitch it or do anything the smart way. I just kept writing because it made me feel something that wasn’t dead. And eventually I looked up and it was done. A whole damn book about a man falling apart in the funniest way I could imagine.
People laugh at the title. That’s the point. But if you read it, you’ll see the shadow underneath. The feeling of being so broken that you’d follow a dead president into financial ruin just to feel like someone still believes in you.
It’s satire. But it is also grief therapy with fart jokes. Which maybe is the most honest thing I’ve ever made.