Rattlings of a Curious Mind by Tyler Knott Gregson

I had a teacher my freshman year of high school that told me I should abandon any and all hopes of ever being a writer. “Some people can write, some cannot,” she said, and told me that pretending otherwise would be an unfair joke. She taught my Honors English I class, and also happened to be my Homeroom teacher, so I had to see her twice a day, every day, the whole year. I am lucky, I suppose, in that I was not, and am not still, the kind of person who holds opinions like these at all dear. My autism insulates me from embarrassment, but whilst doing so, it also insulates me from adding any weight or gravity to the way I might be perceived. I know, and have known all the time I’ve been on this strange earth, precisely who I am, what I stand for, and where the boundaries of my interests, my talents (or lack thereof), my curiosities, and yes, my dreams, exist. Still though, her words were angry words, they were needlessly cruel, and I remember at the time thinking how glad I was they were aimed at me and not someone without the bizarre and unfair advantages my brain granted me—undiagnosed at the time, but still keenly aware. If ever there were an opposite, an antithesis to the Keating of Dead Poets Society, it was she.Those Who Saw MeMore though, I remember two other teachers that went another way. I remember two who embodied all Robin Williams’ Keating stood for in the film that inspired this four-part saga through September. I remember Mr. Wirak, and I remember Mr. Proctor, and I remember how they changed my life.Mr. Wirak was my 4th grade teacher at Jefferson Elementary School here in Helena, Montana, and he was the epitome of cool. He said rad, talked like a surfer who smoked too many cigarettes when he was younger, and wore a collection of crazy ties and long coats. He walked with a looping gait, encouraged debate and argument even in 4th grade, and capped off every day with a game of Trash Can P-I-G for one student each day. Winner got respect. He was the first who taught me to think so far outside the box, the box kind of ceased to exist at all. He made learning an adventure, and was the first to truly stoke the flame of curiosity that, until that point, had always been forced to stay small and smoldering little embers by other teachers who didn’t know how to handle my over-abundance of passion. Mr. Proctor came next, a cyclocross bike racer who spent years traveling the globe and working on small farms after he graduated college. Who had stories of living in places like Austria and Switzerland, told tales of far-off countries and instead of simply making us read To Kill A Mockingbird, he asked us to adapt it into our own version of a screenplay. Pick a scene he said, make it a movie. We wrote more in his class than any I’d ever had before it. Instead of forced absorption of words written by other authors from other times, we were told to become the writers instead. Our words, which meant so much more work for him, but our chance to show the way we could make letters dance with letters to form what we hoped were beautiful waltzing words across the white pages we pulled from our Word Processors, those relics that filled a temporary gap between typewriter and a shiny real computer most of us still didn’t have. I still have my essays from him, I still have the notes. More than this, I have the memory of him being the very first person to tell me I could, and should, write.To Awaken What SlumbersIt’s gratitude now, more than anything else.It’s feeling thankful not just for Proctor and Wirak, but for that Freshman Honors English I teacher (who shall not be named) who told me I should not dream the dreams I dreamed, but aim lower. Aim elsewhere.Some awake what slumbers within you by gently stirring your shoulders, by whispering tender encouragement while you stay dreaming. Some shout, and scream, and pull the covers off so the first chill of morning can shock you into standing.Both work, but only one keeps you warm.As the first true month of back-to-school has crested at its midpoint and is already careening towards ending, I sit and look off my deck, and I am taken back to each new beginning from Kindergarten through graduation from college 16 or so years later. The school supplies, the backpack filled, the brown bag lunch carried as I could not stomach the cafeteria lunches. I type these words and think of all you who will read them, and stare at the blinking cursor in disbelief that after all that has come, gone, transformed, and occurred, somehow the dream I was told as a freshman to abandon, has come true.I am a writer.What a gift to awaken what slumbers in the soul of another. What a gift to be a teacher, a mentor, an artist, hell, a ghost, to someone else. To shape them, to allow them to dream, and believe that one day they might reach them.What a gift to show others the way to see the world in a brand new way, to dare, to chance, to stand upon the desks and shout O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN into the ether and angst that defines so much of the start of our lifetimes.I was gifted many of these, some in school, some on the baseball diamonds I grew up haunting, some as authors, some as artists, some as Buddhas, beat poets, or best friends. I tried too to BE this for those who came to me.This is the lesson I think Wirak and Proctor, Whitman and Kerouac, Basquiat and Buddha all were trying to impart, whether they knew it or not. That I could be what some might not have ever had, that we all can. That the way we live can inspire others to do the same. To stand up, to change, to grow.Keating told us the Dead Poets still speak to us. They always will. I just keep trying to listen, to live in a way that will maybe one day encourage others to do the same. It’s all I can do, in the end.Take the lessons I was so lucky to be taught, and try to teach them again to someone new. To listen to the dreams someone else is dreaming, and instead of trying to squash it into submission, give it the belief to grow.I love you all.Be good.Be who you needed,awake all that is sleeping.It will set them free.Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott GregsonSong of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Hump on hump day humpers. It’s another Wednesday, so it’s another Fuster Cluck LIVE with your two dinguses of hosts, me and Lady G.We talk about a lot today, diving into everything from some vintage typewriters I’ve got for sale (more on that at the end) and my article this weekend that you can read if you missed it by clicking below:And, as per usual, I ask you the question of the week that I cannot wait to see your answers to. It is this:What in your own life have you been seizing that deserves to be plucked (or gathered) instead?Basically, do some inventory, some self-reflection, and ask what you’ve been seizing where a gentler approach would serve oh-so-much better?Also, ANOTHER reminder in case you done plumb forgetted:Official Date for the next Menagerie LIVE Google Meeting Hangout is scheduled!September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!Link to come, so don’t miss it! We cannot wait to hang out with you all again!There is STILL TIME to join us for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool s**t like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.Oh, and for the typewriters I’ve got up for grabs if anyone wants to buy one. Here are the pics and basic details. I did my best to look up fair prices based on condition and crap between eBay and Etsy and am being as cool as I can about it:First one is the Royal Quiet De Luxe 1950’s model, WITH the case, totally immaculate/serviced/wonderful WITH a backup ribbon brand new in the package. These go anywhere from $225 - friggen $800 on Etsy. $250 + shipping and it’s yours.Second one is a Royal Arrow not totally sure on the year, but these look to range anywhere from $150 - $400. $200 + shipping and you can have it. If not, ain’t no thang.Thanks for tuning in and giving us 30 minutes of your valuable daytime hours. Cannot tell ya how much I appreciate it. Cue obligatory auto-generated “thank you note” that somehow Substack does hahaha:Thank you Mara, Kevin, Ash Ley Maris 🦋, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I love you all.Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom.Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born. It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it. Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it.I remember the day I learned it was wrong. Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized. Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process. I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable. All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment.To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong. As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever:Wonder is an act that requires tenderness.To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder. Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you. Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again.With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping.This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again. Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle. Pluck.Like string for music, like resonance from stillness. Pluck.Like leaving the rest behind.Carpe Diem. Pluck the day.I love you all.Be good.Should we learn to pluckand forget about seizing,what joy we can find.Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott GregsonSong of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Happy Hump Day you goofballs. The intro to this goes very off the rails, as per usual, so if you like complete idiocy, do watch.We talk about lots today, from us having to cancel a trip to shoot an elopement in Hawaii because of that a*****e Hurricane Lowell, to how we’re still fighting with SIXT and Expedia for charging us $100 for a car rental we couldn’t pick up because all flights were canceled because of theAFOREMENTIONED F’ING HURRICANE.So that’s fun. We also dive into the Question of the Week:What are unwritten “rules” of life YOU need to Un-learn? What introductions do YOU need to rip out in order to live happier, healthier, more FULL lives?We answer too, if you wanna see the way we feel about things.Also, in case you forgot:Official Date for the next Menagerie LIVE Google Meeting Hangout is scheduled!September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!Link to come, so don’t miss it!We have the official date for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool s**t like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.Have a rad rest of your Hump Day, and do precisely that. Here’s the little thank you the post generates at random for some of you lovelies who joined us live!Thank you LeftieProf, Mara, pickingplumeria, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I love you all.Be good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been. Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls.Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore. I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still.I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes. It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said:“This is a battle, a war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls.”Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life.I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out. I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated.I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative. To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line. Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in. Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself.We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream. I remember being measured, long before I was even understood.Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be.This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us. That set us free.Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them.I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts.It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed. I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip.I love you all.Be good.To unlearn the rules,tear out the introductions,and begin to live.Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott GregsonSong of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe