Writing for a Reader Who Cannot Read Yet

Everything else I publish is aimed at somebody who can click on it today.

One reader cannot.

Thomas David was born August 4, 2026. He will not read a word of this for years. And when he does, he will not read it the way you are reading it. He will not get one piece on a Tuesday and another one next month. He will sit down one day, probably as a grown man, and take the whole thing at once, out of order, alone, on a screen.

That is a completely different reader.

Once I understood that, it changed what I am willing to put on this site.

The archive is the letter

I did not set out to write my son a letter. I set out to build a record, because the record was the only thing I had that nobody else could edit on me.

But a daily archive under my own name, in my own words, going back years, is a letter whether I meant it that way or not. It is the longest thing I will ever write him. And it is the one version of his father that did not get run through a headline, a clip, or somebody else sentence.

He will be able to read what other people wrote about me. That is not going anywhere and I am not pretending otherwise.

What I get to decide is whether there is something sitting next to it, in my voice, with the dates on it.

The rule it handed me

Here is the practical part, and it is the reason I am writing this down instead of just thinking it.

I run everything through one filter now before it goes live.

Would I be alright with my son reading this back to me in fifteen years?

Not is it true. Not can I defend it. Those are lower bars and I clear those first, every time. This one is different. It catches the things that are true and defensible and still not worth leaving behind.

The shot I take at somebody because I am tired and it would feel good for about four minutes.

The half sentence that is technically accurate and built to mislead.

The post written at eleven at night when I am angry and the anger is doing the typing.

All of that passes the truth test. None of it passes the fifteen year test.

What it took out of my writing

It took out most of the heat that was not earned.

I still hit hard. I still say exactly what I think about how I was treated and by whom, and I am not softening that for anybody. The record is the record and it stays.

But there is a difference between hitting hard and swinging wild, and a kid reading his father at full volume will spot that difference in about two paragraphs. Children are ruthless about this. He will know the difference between a man who was angry about something real and a man who just liked being angry.

I would rather he find the first one.

He gets the bad days too

I am not building him a highlight reel. That would be worse than useless.

He is going to read the days I did not want to get up. The days I wrote about praying and not feeling anything come back. The days I got something wrong in public and had to go fix it in public.

If I edit those out, I hand him a father who never struggled. Then the first time he struggles, he thinks something is wrong with him.

That is the exact opposite of what this is for.

So the low days stay in. They are load bearing.

The part I keep coming back to

Almost everything I do here has a number on it. Views, clicks, signups, whether a thing sold, whether anybody shared it.

This has none. There is no metric on it. The return date is somewhere past my ability to see it, and I will probably never know which pieces landed and which ones he scrolled straight past.

I am writing it anyway.

That is the most honest thing I can tell you about why this site exists. Part of it is business. Part of it is defense. And part of it is a man putting his own account on the record for one person who has not learned to read yet.

Everything else here is asking you to click something.

This part is not asking anybody for anything.