You gotta start somewhere
If you perk up when someone asks you about something you're passionate about, why not invite those people to the table?
Welcome to My Special Interest.
The idea here is to get sh*t on the page, or get whatever’s already on the page out into the open. Otherwise it will sit and gather dust, and My Special Interest is not about gathering dust. It is about the joy of learning, leaning in, and turning towards.
I have decided to launch this without importing any subscribers (not that I have many to import…) because I like the idea of starting afresh and letting the content speak for itself.
Of course I like the idea of amassing legions of followers, but truthfully, doing this here, in this way, is as much about keeping my own cogs whirring as it is about anything else. I am interested in this stuff, I enjoy learning and writing about this stuff, and funnelling those processes into a Substack publication may be the best way for me to maintain a path forwards. Otherwise I writewritewrite in circles. I’m more likely to keep following a thread if, in doing so, I contribute to a Bigger Something (BS), even if that BS is just a mass of threads.
Does the name have anything to do with autism? Potentially. Stick with me to find out.
A driving force behind My Special Interest is the idea that better understanding our past can help us understand our present. This is obviously obvious, and likely drives a million other Substacks, and limitless creative projects. So be it.
The topics I cover here will include, but may not be limited to: early religion, dead rocks, astrology, astronomy, archaeochemistry, the Hebrew Bible and associated texts, the 300 years between Jesus Christ’s death and Christianity’s official ‘launch’, Carl Jung’s take on ‘things seen in the sky’, UFOs in general (sorry, UAPs), psychedelics, messianism/environmentalism, irony, meditation/consciousness, neurodivergence in the ancient world, and whatever comes up when I pull any one of those threads for long enough.
The question that started this whole thing off, for me, was: if He came, would we believe Him? And then it occurred to me (or rather someone very special to me opened my eyes to the fact) that this sounds a little too euphemistic…
But it loosely translates to: if Jesus really were somehow God, and some kind of Second Coming were to occur, what would He need to do or say in order to convince us of His authenticity? Or: what message could a saviour have that would save us? Are we ready to be saved, or would a genuine messiah’s message simply get lost in a sea of Instagram reels and TikTok How To guides? Are we too ironic to attain enlightenment, too self-orientated to transcend, too selfish to understand love?
I invite input from anyone and everyone: comments, feedback, suggestions of what to read next, explanations for why I’m catastrophically wrong about something, and so on.
I have an idea of what the pieces I publish here will look like, and they fall into two broad categories: long-form nonfiction articles (you might call them ‘essays’) in which I explore a particular topic that in some way provides useful context to the questions listed above, and short fictionalised accounts of familiar biblical narratives, such as the birth and crucifixion of Jesus (or narratives that in some way run contra to familiar biblical narratives, such as the eventual death, at a ripe old age, of the so-called messiah).
I’m afraid I cannot promise weekly posts; I am not sufficiently advanced. Besides, I’m ‘travelling’ – I left home in April 2023 on my bicycle and probably won’t return for some time. I write this from Kampot, Cambodia, on a nine-year-old laptop.
Nor can I specify at this stage what a paid subscription will get you, or if tiers are on the cards at all. Inevitably, that depends on a constellation of factors. Irregardless, you are welcome to commit your pennies. Now, I invite you to press the button below, gawk at a photo of a monkey, and await the future with realistic expectations.