HeyJaredBurnt Toast Energy
Narrating the second half of life with questionable judgment and lower expectations.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 10
- Latest publication
- Sep 12, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 16, 2026
Latest issues
Three to Five Business Days (opens the original)
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I thought this was my last week in Idaho.That belief now seems adorable.I had behaved like a person who was actually leaving. I gave away the rest of my furniture. What I didn’t give away, I shipped to Oregon. This included my king-size bed, which, in retrospect, feels less like moving and more like an act of aggression against my future self.Since Sunday, I’ve been sleeping on an air mattress.“It’s only for a week,” I told myself.This is the sort of thing you say before the universe hears you a
Bedtime Has Become a Hostile Work Environment (opens the original)
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I used to think of bedtime as one of the safer parts of the day.You brush your teeth, turn off the lights, stare at your phone until your eyes feel pickled, and then go unconscious in a room specifically designed for that purpose.It seemed foolproof.Lately, however, bedtime has become less like rest and more like reporting for a shift at a factory where nobody will tell me what we manufacture.By about seven-thirty, I can feel it coming.Not sleep.Dread.There is something especially irritating abo
Jesus Christ, I Should Have Kept the Money (opens the original)
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I’ve been a homeowner for more than twenty years, and during that time I have paid homeowners insurance every single year.Thousands and thousands of dollars.And in twenty years, I have filed exactly zero claims.Not one.No fires.No floods.No trees crashing through the bedroom ceiling while I slept peacefully beneath them.No mysterious sinkholes opening beneath the kitchen and swallowing the refrigerator.Nothing.Every year I paid my homeowners insurance premium, and every year my house remained st
No Immediate Cause for Alarm (opens the original)
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I want to cry.I’ve wanted to cry for about a week now, but apparently my body has decided this would be an inefficient use of resources.Instead, there’s a ball in my chest. It just sits there, presumably waiting for further instructions. Occasionally I think, This is it. Here it comes. But no. Nothing. My body has apparently reviewed the situation and concluded that what I really need is acid reflux.For the last couple of days, I’ve walked the dogs and imagined sitting down in the middle of the
I’m Beginning to Take This Personally (opens the original)
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Apparently, the universe does not want me to sell my house in Idaho.I had suspected this for a while, but yesterday at two in the morning it decided to clarify its position by surrounding the house with wildfire.I woke up randomly at 2 AM because, apparently, some tiny survival instinct buried deep in my brain is more reliable than the local emergency notification system. The power was out and an orange glow was coming through the windows. I looked outside and saw flames on every side of the pro
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