Dad's Junk Book

transitioning into fatherhood and regular newsletter updates

Hi, I’m Mick. I created the Taco Bell Quarterly, I wrote a book, and now this is the newsletter that I’m going to try to convert you to buying my book with. Wait, please, don’t leave me. I promise, I won’t hard sell you until it comes out next year. Then you can unsubscribe all you want. In the meantime, watch me desperately flail around trying to get your attention.

Some of you have seen this before. I used to blog in the 2010s. I wrote about toys, snacks, and items I found at flea markets and thrift stores. I was always searching for stories to tell, hoping to write the coolest articles that would make me go viral and land me a book deal. While that didn’t happen, I did make some friends along the way.

One of those online friends, William Bruce West, passed away recently. He was always among the first to hype up my latest creative endeavors, including this one. He was the first one to follow back on bluesky when I was relaunching this newsletter in January. Later that day, I was shaken to learn he had a stroke that he wouldn’t recover from.

Will was one of my favorite bloggers and a prolific one: he wrote online about his hobbies, music, and collecting from 2003-2025. Over the years, he wrote lines, jokes and status updates that live in my head forever.

His obit had another line that has stayed with me — he didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career in life, but he always knew he wanted to be a father. It moved me deeply. We were the same age with two kids in the prime of their childhoods — another reason his death hit me hard. We were Facebook pals as well, slamming the heart button on the back to school pics over the years. I will miss him.

I’ve never known what I wanted to do when I grow up either — except for writing. When I was a kid, I used to contact random biographers on AOL, whose books I borrowed from the library, pretending to be somewhat of a culture journalist myself. Writing was just something I always knew I wanted to spend my time doing.

I’ve also always known I wanted to be a father, which is strange to say, because I was assigned female at birth. Although I was not out as trans for the first decade of parenting, I viewed myself as a father figure. In fact, it was everyone else’s insisting on viewing me as a mother anyway that pushed me to come out.

I didn’t carry the kids. Before transitioning, I felt like a distant step parent in the equation of raising them — or a nanny who tagged along to make sure they were well behaved. I realize now I was as disassociated in my role as a parent as I was in my body.

Over the last 2 1/2 years, I’ve been transitioning — coming out, starting HRT, getting top surgery, and changing my name. I feel so genuinely grateful to be in the right alignment of mind and body, getting to hear my children’s voices call me dad while they are still in their childhoods. Transitioning into fatherhood has been a gift, and during the same time period, I’ve been writing the book that I’m now feeding to you in a slow drip.

I was surprised at how much perspective being a dad added to the story. My book is called Junk, and it’s about nostalgia and capitalism and how it shapes our identity. I could have never written the book in my prior embodiments of self — and I think that’s always true — trans or not. Time is an illusion. Stop worrying about whether it’s too late. You’re going to be right on time. (That’s Dad advice.)

My kids and I sifted through the treasures of childhood, looking for the coolest stories to tell. I might have accidentally inspired them too much to become writers in the process.

“Dad, can you put this in your Junk book?” was one of their regular requests, alongside asking for candy or Robux, look at me pleadingly while holding up a random squishy toy or keychain won from a claw machine.

Nope, kiddo, but I can certainly put it in my newsletter. Here is an adorable dog keychain that is enjoying its interim stay with us in idyllic childhood, between the factories and landfills.

I wanted to share my nostalgia with them — the Happy Meal toys, the fruit snacks, the trading cards — but it turned out they had their own crap. Instead we shared a kind of magical storytelling of ourselves, as we explored who we could be when we grow up.

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I’ve been writing as work for the last few years. Please follow along as I attempt to learn how to write casually and for fun again. It’s free. Until it isn’t anymore and suddenly costs 18.99 in paperback.