I’ve been teaching fitness since the 1970s and writing seriously for the last five years. Before that I spent three decades in corporate sales — long enough to develop a finely calibrated detector for what people promote versus what’s actually true.
That detector is what this Substack is about.
I write at the intersection of recovery, fitness, philosophy, and culture. Not because those categories belong together on a shelf but because they’re all asking the same question underneath: what’s real, and what’s performance? Some essays are explicitly about sobriety. Some are about attention and movement and aging. Some are about why craft matters more than virality. They’re all the same essay at the core.
38 years of continuous sobriety. Nearly five years of daily morning pages. A masters from Gonzaga. Half a million Quora readers give or take. None of that makes me special — it just means I’ve been paying attention long enough to have something to say about what I’ve seen.
I’m not building an audience to monetize. No courses, no coaching, no transformation packages. This is writing because writing clarifies thinking, and because some things need to be said plainly.
Subscribe or don’t. Come back when you feel like it. No special offers. This is not the Columbia House Record Club.
Also:
PauseWhenAgitated.com — Recovery writing for skeptics and seekers
JimStalker.com — Hub for everything else
JimStalkerFitness.com — Elegant fitness and the music that makes it matter
