The Not Very Stable Mind Behind the Musings
Yeah, “not very stable” fits me pretty well.
It’s not that I’m nuts—at least not in the clinical sense. I just change directions a lot.
One minute I’m focused, organized, and certain I’m finally going to finish something. The next, I’ve spotted a new question, an interesting statistic, some bit of history, or a completely unnecessary project that suddenly seems more important than whatever I was doing five minutes ago.
My doctor blames the caffeine.
I blame the world for being too damn interesting.
What I really need is more time. A day on Venus lasts about 243 Earth days. That seems much closer to what I need for an average Tuesday.
A friend once told me, “You don’t catch up until you die.”
So I’m hoping to stay behind for a while.
The Chief
C. David Moreland is the name on the books. A lot of people simply know me as The Chief.
I’m a retired, disabled Navy Chief Hospital Corpsman. My years in medicine, public health, health-care management, leadership, and military service left me with plenty of memories, a healthy distrust of easy answers, and the habit of asking one more question than everyone else wanted me to ask.
Retirement did not cure that.
These days I live near Memphis with my amazing wife, our grown children nearby, and the people who have managed to outrank everybody else in my life without attending a single promotion board—my grandchildren.
They pretty much run the place.
“Never ignore a good rabbit hole.”
– C. David Moreland
Never Ignore a Good Rabbit Hole
I’ve always been curious.
Sometimes inconveniently so.
As a kid, I loved baseball, Hank Aaron, and the Atlanta Braves. Somewhere along the way I started playing with the numbers behind the game. That turned into a lifelong habit of looking for patterns.
Statistics became one of my favorite rabbit holes.
I’ve used them to think about military problems, health care, politics, college basketball, and quite a few things no reasonable person would spend three days analyzing.
I once finished second in a national Final Four pool. I might have won it if I hadn’t ignored my own numbers and let my Memphis Tigers survive one round longer than the statistics said they should.
Loyalty is admirable.
It can also ruin a perfectly good spreadsheet.
The rabbit holes did not stop with sports. Politics. Religion. History. Law. Medicine. Veterans. Technology. Leadership. Human behavior.
Something catches my attention and down I go.
Sometimes I find something worth writing about.
Sometimes I just lose the afternoon.
Fair enough.
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
— John Lewis, speaking atop the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 1, 2020
Why I Write
I’ve been writing for what feels like most of my life.
Millions of words.
Stories. Essays. Novels. Screenplays. Opinions. Notes. Half-finished ideas. Files created on computers I no longer own and projects I occasionally rediscover like archaeological ruins.
For years, much of it simply accumulated.
Now I’m trying to finish some of it.
The old work. The new work. The serious things. The ridiculous things. And the thoughts that show up at two in the morning and refuse to leave until I write them down.
Some of what I write is heartfelt. Some of it is satire. Some of it is unapologetically opinionated.
Sometimes all three show up on the same page.
I have enough ego to believe I may have something worth saying.
I also have enough experience to know somebody will probably throw tomatoes.
Figuratively, please. My reflexes are not what they used to be.
The goal now is simple:
Write the damn stories. Finish the thoughts.
I don’t know how many of them I’ll finish.
None of us knows how much road is left.
But I’m still here. Still writing. Still laughing. Still wandering down rabbit holes. And still hoping there are a few ridiculous adventures left—especially with my grandchildren.
That is enough reason to keep going.
“Always wake up with a smile knowing that today you are going to have fun accomplishing what others are too afraid to do.”
— Unknown
Yes, I use AI.
I use it for brainstorming, research assistance, editing, book-cover concepts, images, organization, and sometimes for helping me wrestle a half-finished idea into something resembling a finished one.
I don’t consider that something to hide.
I’ve written millions of words and started more projects than any reasonable person should admit to. Without tools like AI, a great many of those ideas would probably spend the rest of my life sitting in folders waiting for me to get back to them.
I think of AI as an extension of my creative process—a tool, an assistant, and sometimes a pretty good sparring partner.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to use it and teaching the tools I use how I work, how I write, what sounds like me, and—equally important—what doesn’t.
The ideas are mine. The experiences are mine. The opinions are definitely mine. And the final decision about what gets published is mine.
Choose Joy – Life’s Greatest Revenge
If there is one idea underneath almost everything I write, it is this:
Choose joy.
Not happiness.
They are not the same thing.
Happiness usually wants something from the outside world. Good health. Good news. Good weather. A little money. People behaving themselves.
That last one alone makes happiness a risky investment.
Joy is different.
Joy can show up when life is good, but it can also stay when life is most definitely not cooperating. It does not make pain disappear. It does not pretend everything is fine.
It simply refuses to surrender the whole day.
That matters.
So I choose joy.
Not perfectly. Not every minute.
But deliberately.
Maybe that is why I once called it life’s greatest revenge.
The world gets its shots.
You get yours.
So welcome to my little corner of it.
It’s a little wild, occasionally wobbly, and prone to unexplained detours. If you have the time—and the patience—follow me down a few rabbit holes.
Maybe we’ll find something worthwhile.
At the very least, we should have a little fun getting lost.
The Chief
HMC(SW/FMF)
USN (Ret.)