Author: Derek Castleman

I’m a total horror junkie. I’ve got an annual Shudder subscription, and in my apartment there’s a framed scratch-off poster of the “100 Best Horror Films of All Time.” I watched every single one — yes, even the ones I’d already seen (which was like 80% of them because, well … horror is my thing). Most nights I drift off to sleep with a horror movie playing in the background. My wife and I battle it out in Trivial Pursuit: Horror Edition — I usually win, but she gets her revenge in a few rounds. Oh, and sitting by my…

Life is divided into three periods — that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain. Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life,” X The Stoics deeply considered the nature of time in their philosophy. As I had discussed in a previous article, they viewed that life is not short if lived right — we just shorten it by wasting time. In this shortening of our lives, they observed that we often focus on the wrong aspects of time. By doing so, we not…

I’m going to do something I have never done before. I am just sitting here with my earbuds, listening to music and letting the words flow. I am going to write this all-in-one shot. I am not going to edit this other than a read-through and make sure that I did not misspell any words. I do not want this edited. I want this to be me. Pure. Raw. Me. For the past almost three months, I have been dealing with depression. And it is not like this is something new to me or anything like that. Knowing that I…

Life is short. It is a saying that we so often hear and for many of us we can so easily agree with. It can make sense. The way that days can pass us by…the months…the years. It seems as if everything can just become a blur. Moment after moment rushing by as if they were a speeding train. And for those of us in recovery, we have to struggle with the harsh reality of possible years wasted and gone down the drain to the time in which we were actively involved in our addiction. …the life we receive is…

My daughter has Stargardt’s Disease. Now, there might be a chance that you are exactly like me and have no clue what the hell that could mean. Until she had been diagnosed with it, I had never even heard of it before. And it might make sense if you, like me, have not. It is something that is thought to affect possibly 1 in every 10,000 people, while something like being bipolar, which I suffer from, is much more common, affecting 1 in 100 people. As my daughter has learned through her trials of dealing with this disease, it is…

Most people (nearly 80%) quit their New Year’s resolutions by February. Just one month to abandon the goal they laid out for themselves to improve their lives positively. More interestingly, one in seven people never thought they would see it through. Some quit because of societal pressure (40%), and the average American would spend $15,748.19 to have someone keep them accountable (Gervis 2020). Therefore, people are setting goals they never expect to achieve, cave into peer pressure, and would pay someone to make them accountable for keeping their goals instead of finding accountability inside themselves. It is sad when you…

What is your pleasure, Sir? Now, if you are a horror movie addict like me, you might remember this line. It is the first and last line to the horror movie Hellraiser (I love this movie so much I even have a tattoo of it). If you have not seen this movie, one of the common misconceptions is that the bad guy is Pinhead, a demon sent from Hell to punish. But in reality, the antagonist is a man named Frank, a person who pursued pleasure all over the world trying to find it in its ultimate form, only to…