All posts

I have moved many times in my life. The process appeals to my systematic mind: Acquiring boxes and tape. Plotting out what to pack when. Mentally determining how to arrange the boxes in the van.  The process appeals to my mind, the execution is what I could do without.  Three more moves, that is the goal: From my new place to the interim place. From the interim place into storage. And, finally, from storage to the last place I will live. That is the goal, at least. When my ti

I write books as well as songs. I play the word processor, I play the guitar. I’ve been doing what I call “art shit” since I was a teenager— (This story will be told in the second memoir, which comes out in late June). Cleaning out an external drive, I came upon songs I recorded when I was 19. What I lacked in skill, I made up for in pretentiousness: I took myself far too seriously back then. Honestly, I cringed as I listened to those old recordings. I was an insecure child p

The Hill I grew up around sociopaths and low rent conmen.  I grew up around wealthy people in the third richest county in the United States. The house I lived in recently sold for two million dollars. If you saw it you’d think I grew up with money and privilege. No, we had old cars, normal clothes, struggled to pay bills. The house on the Hill was an illusion. My father lived in Sausalito on a houseboat. His neighbors were genuinely wealthy, had nice cars and clothes— They we

I had car keys for the first time in my life. I kept taking them out of my pocket, jingling them in my hand, running my fingers over the metal. The ignition key had six sharp points. I knew it by touch already. I wasn’t trapped at my grandmother's, wasn’t marooned as I had been in high school. The house I grew up in was three miles from the nearest bus stop. You needed a car to get to a job and a job to get a car. For four years I’d been stuck inside that loop. Not anymore. I

This is an outtake from my memoir The Bad Kids. I couldn’t find a good place for it in the book and wasn’t completely happy with the ending. It was a disappointment; I really wanted this chapter to be included, I just couldn’t make it work. Hope you enjoy it. IDD. TEXAS By the time I got to Holly Heights, my shirt was sticking to my back. How was it so hot in April? Even the birds seemed to be hiding from the heat. A car came up behind me as I trudged up the street; it was No

"Time, memory, and the long consequences of living." I do not speak with an English accent because I am pretentious or a pretentious Anglophile. I speak this way because I smoked too much weed when I was a kid. Let me explain. In my memoir The Bad Kids , I tell stories about the misadventures of my friends and me—misadventures fueled by copious amounts of marijuana. By the time I graduated eighth grade, I had stopped smoking. Before starting high school, I reinvented myself a

Dear Monica, I write. This is my calling. If a good story insinuates its way in my head I feel obligated to follow it wherever it leads. My father had a stroke a year ago. Thankfully, he had a nearly full recovery but it got me thinking about the past, about things I’d mostly forgotten, people and events I’d blocked out because the memories were impossible to face. Not because they are awful memories, but because they were beautiful and beauty is fleeting. We touch beauty whe

The Substack is a place you can also join my mailing list. Thanks for being here, IDD. https://open.substack.com/pub/izaakdaviddiggs/p/how-the-bad-kids-came-to-be?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Time, Memory, and the Long Consequences of Living…. I’ve had people explain to me how allowing Jesus Christ into their lives opened the world up for them.  Other friends have attempted to elucidate how becoming parents caused them to look at the world in a completely different way. I have had neither experience, but still I understood. I’ve explained how the art stuff I do makes me aware of a connection to something much larger than myself— This is not about that; that is a c

My father had a stroke in early 2025. Luckily, he made a nearly complete recovery but the event caused me to think about the past and our relationship over the years. Memories returned of my childhood, the person I had been and the things I had done. These recollections reminded me of a few rough chapters I had written two years earlier about a boy and the misdeeds he committed with three friends. I had typed those chapters and forgotten about them—until Dad had his stroke. L

I am currently creating promotional material for my upcoming book The Bad Kids . This will be the first in a series of memoirs I will be releasing. I am going to create videos using AI generated photographs of people and objects relevant to the story. The picture below the title of this blog is a recreation of my friends and I circa 1981. Dave and Roy are pretty much spot on though I ended up more handsome than I actually was. Same with Rich, he also had a bigger nose. The pr

This picture is AI created. My prompt was "Evil Don Knotts" As my new book The Bad Kids gets closer to publication I have to plan its promotion. Part of marketing a book is creating videos. I do not possess the skill to do this nor do I have the money to hire another artist; this is where AI comes in. This is a difficult subject for me as I am certain it is difficult for other people who write and have books to promote--- Using AI affects the livelihood of someone else in th

I have a dream, maybe it's an odd one: I want to live in a bookstore. My desire would be to find commercial space in a small, rural town. Could be a shop in a building, could be a former gas station, as long as it has some sort of bathroom*. You walk in the front door and there's an open area. This could be for (local) art showings. I'd have local art on the walls, taking a small commission from the sales. Beyond the open space are the shelves of books. I'd source them from a

So...I got off the bus a few minutes after midnight last night. I live on the border of Old Town and the Pearl here in Portland, you see a lot of tents on the sidewalks, a lot of people on the cement without tents. Last night there was some guy crashed out a few feet away from the entrance to our building. Some people would be inclined to get some water, toss it on the guy, and snarl "This isn't a KOA, move on, motherfucker." Some people would be inclined to go up to their ap

The Dickens quote everyone uses is "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It is overused because it is perfect: Balance. Yin and Yang. Trade offs. We want a job with less stress so we accept less money; that path leads to more freedom but less security...(whatever security means in 2025). I just turned 58 and live in a 325 square foot apartment. I don't have a pension or any sort of retirement--- But I have what I really want, three days in a row off to work

A couple of weeks ago my father asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said a sleeping bag; that was, literally, the only thing I wanted. If you asked me today what I want I’d say nothing. I have everything I want. Maybe not everything I desire , but everything I want. I desire more guitars, books, and clothes, an old Volvo station wagon, but those are fantasies. That’s what a desire is, a fantasy, a daydream. A want , on the other hand, is something you actually need. My

I need to escape one thing in this life: My fear. I will be another year older in four days; I carry too many things on my shoulders. Perhaps you do, as well. The biggest thing most of us carry is fear. It's in a large, dark sack we sling over our shoulders as we move from day to day. It rattles in there like cheap cook pans. Sometimes the rattling sounds like laughter; our fear mocking us. Every blog should have an SEO friendly title, fuck that. I have spent decades cowed in

We have shootings, but nothing extraordinary for a medium sized American city. We have a transient crisis, scores of the mental ill and...

This is the Channeled Scablands Washington

Is ego a trap...or is the superstructure holding things together? What is the importance of identity? We certainly embrace labels:...