When You Come To A Fork In The Road ...

Time For Me To Move On

Aug 03, 2025

The great baseball manager Yogi Berra was known for bending our language in charming ways. He didn’t always know how to say what he needed to say. But he got his point across.

Famously, he was giving Joe Garagiola directions to his house when he reportedly said, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” This is a classic Yogi-ism because it gives us a giggle. But also because it contains simple wisdom, however skewed linguistically.

One pictures Garagiola standing on the gravel shoulder with his Buick idling patiently, scratching his head and wondering which fork is a continuance, and which is something new. But most important, which road will take him where he wants to go.

This, of course, was back when the Thomas Guide was high-tech navigation.

Now I use Google maps, and whatever detours I need to take, are updated almost instantly. Nowadays, getting lost on the way to a physical destination is almost impossible. You’d have to be willfully ignorant of the modern world to go far astray.

However, in other areas of our lives, it’s become more and more complicated to find our way. The same sort of miraculous algorithms that let my phone warn me of a collision ahead … have made navigating society downright perilous.

The essay I wrote here about the bafflements of turning 70, was - by coincidence - the 70th Substack that I’ve published. There are an even greater number of drafts that I never published. 97 apparently.

I began this experiment in late 2023, and now at just the halfway mark of 2025, it seems that my road is forking.

As Yogi Berra knew, this means I have to choose. I’m having a hard time with this venue. Since Trump returned to power, there are three things everyday that could be worth writing about. But by the time, I’ve invested an afternoon researching and a whole morning writing, there are three more things.

And truthfully, I am sick to death of Donald Trump taking up space in my brain. With everybody leaping up to tag their own hot-take to the president’s latest provocation, I’m sure that a lot of people are making bank as they wear themselves out. But I would like to to set my own pace. Think and write about what interests me. And make my contribution by sharing about whatever seems to be of long-term value.

As hard as it is to imagine, there will come a time when Trump and Trumpism and Trump hatred are only memories. But there will still be human concerns about which people are confused and looking for some perspective. I would like to devote my energies to the wider human project of all of us thinking these issues through.

Life is brief enough. Transient and fleeting and impermanent enough, without getting worked up every day, over whatever events have set the ‘influencers’ to competing for our eyes and ears. Most all of it is disposable. Gone and forgotten as the next batch of nonsense pushes into view.

I’d really like to spend my remaining years focused on songs and stories and essays that might outlive me. Not to mention grooving with the human beings who will be around long after I’m gone. And those who won’t.

Many of you know me through the videos I made with my then-partner Jason Siler. We began as a Facebook channel in early spring, 2017. We were just making short punchy talking-head statements, with no idea of what to expect. But that little FB page quickly found an audience and before the year was out we had 80,000 followers.

For reasons I won’t get into here, we migrated to YouTube in March of 2018. At first, we reposted a handful of the Facebook videos that had done well, and the two of us recorded some podcasts that we never published. We were trying to figure out how that new-to-us platform worked.

Finally we were ready to post something specifically made for YouTube.

As they are now, immigration crackdowns were at the top of the news. Donald Trump was in his first term, and trying to reify his ‘Build A Wall’ campaign promises. As a career blue-collar worker in a sanctuary county, I had lots of experience with unauthorized migrants in the home-trades job market. The impacts were real and obvious. But so was the human story.

I didn’t want to enter YouTube with a hot-take robbed of all nuance and destined to be forgotten once it satisfied the partisan appetites of whoever clicked on it. So I marked our arrival on YouTube with a longer video that expressed my own experiences and opinions on the issue.

This went live almost exactly 7 years ago.

And BOOM! The video blew up, and put our channel on the map.

We’d seen the fork in the road, taken it, and been immediately rewarded.

My immigration video was the blueprint for all of my best work in video commentary. To this day, I’m proud of how even-handed it was.

I wish I could say that I held that balance in every video thereafter. It was a tough time to be a guy with old-school values in a city that was exploding with the overwrought ideas that would soon be collectively known as ‘Woke’.

My friends were almost all on that bandwagon, and I was trying to slow their roll, as people with more conservative brain-wiring are always doing.

On a previous blog-site, back in 2012, I’d written about how we were ‘divvying up our values through our word-choices’. The idea being that within our partisan system, we’d learned to avoid words that made us sound like ‘those people’.

As example I used two terms. ‘Compassion’, and ‘Self-Reliance’. Compassion was used so often on The Left, that you almost never heard it mentioned on The Right. Just as you often heard conservatives extolling self-reliance, while that phrase was seldom spoken in progressive circles.

My claim then, was that because we tried so hard to use only the language that ‘coded’ us as members of the ideological tribe we’d thrown in with … our very thinking became impaired. Each rejected word creating a small blind spot around what it described.

A person whose genuine compassion for a needy person, had sent her into action, might forget that self-reliance was the ultimate goal, and end up supporting policies that coddled rather than empowered.

Likewise, a fellow who thought a lot about self-reliance might forget entirely, the educational, emotional, and monetary support a needy person would require, in order to build that self-reliance.

I was coming to the conclusion, back then, that partisanship was itself the problem; driving each opposing tribe to ever more blinkered visions of the world.

Of course that didn’t stop me from getting caught up in partisan battles. The algos mined our newly revealed propensity for a sort of intellectual fight-or-flight, keeping us up late arguing with people we’d likely never meet, about issues we’d only just heard about.

Evolution never saw this shit coming, and it took me a while to leash-train the ape with whom my higher brain shares a skull.

Jason and I were a team of two, surrounded by a vast number of friends and acquaintances who were often gunning for us. So yeah, our stuff did get a bit snarky at times. If only to entertain and encourage one another.

Was I sometimes more a part of the problem than I was of the solution? Without a doubt. I think I can do better now.

It’s always been my way to get hands-on with whatever catches my fancy. Within a year of my first stage performance as a singer-songwriter, I was putting on shows. Before another year was out, I’d established a weekly concert series and was booking national touring acts.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that I’d be unsatisfied with opining quietly from the sidelines as the country - aided by social media - flung itself headlong into the divisions that have now left us all but ungovernable.

I’ve never been a spectator.

Nor have I ever been an extremist. I had, though, been decidedly left of center. Until age, disillusionment, and YouTube, pulled me an equal distance to the right of center.

Eventually though, the swinging pendulum of my perceptions, has come to rest at a place that hybridizes most of what I’d thought from both perspectives, into something center-ist, but hopefully not indecisive. I consider myself mostly conservative by temperament, but I also understand that complex societies need quite a lot of government. And that advocating for self-reliance, should never come at the expense of compassion.

And so, after thinking and arguing from each of the two dominant perspectives. After gaining a large following on YT, and then walking away from it when MAGA went cultish. After taking much time to think things through, and experiment here with the ideas still fighting it out between my ears …

After all of this I am firmly convinced that partisanship will always trigger in us our tribal instincts, and send us into the ditch at the side of the road.

The road that has always and will always fork at random intervals.

I think that I’m settled firmly into the ‘Post-Partisan Perspective’ that I’ve been talking about for the last few years. And I believe that now, at this particular juncture, I ought to be reaching for the largest audience that I can find. And that means a return to YouTube. Perhaps even TikTok.

I’ve re-acquired most of the video gear that burned up in January, and this past week, I made a couple of tentative test-videos. A bit more gear is on the way.

The timing of this shift in direction was inspired, in part, by the resurgence of a non-political video we made 6 years ago. It’s called The Case Against Tattoos and a day never passes where I’m not notified of new comments on that video. Almost 17,000 of them at this point, as the video edges toward 1,000,000 views. Almost 70,000 since the wildfires suggested that change was afoot. Lately it’s been rolling along at about 500 views a day. I probably won’t get 500 views total on this post.

And as you can see from the chart on the chart above, all but about 3% of those views came from YouTube’s own algorithms. Obviously, I’m squandering an opportunity by hiding out over here.

I don’t think that any of my seventy pieces here has touched even one thousandth as many lives as that tattoo video. It almost seems to be calling me back into service by calling attention to these statistics.

And obviously, that vid was anything but a hot-take reaction to what some partisan politician had done or said. It’s just my personal take on a stubborn fad that’s now marked up a third of all Americans. In some age-groups it’s closer to half. Liberals and conservatives alike. My video has staying power, because the issue has stayed with us.

We’d all like for our work to live a while in the public domain, wouldn’t we? Even popping up now and then with a growth spurt, years after we made the original effort?

That doesn’t happen with blog posts. Not without some engagement from an outside source. My readership is stagnant, and has been for a year. You folks almost never share these columns. And as far as I can tell, Substack itself only promotes writers who came here with a big audience gathered elsewhere, who they know will make the platform lots of money.

YouTube, on the other hand, cooperates at least to the level of suggesting videos to potential viewers. If I watch two videos by, say, a dude reviewing tools from a barn in Vermont, I will be offered more videos by that same guy, and also by other people doing the same kind of reviews. YouTube’s algorithms are democratic, for good or ill.

Of course, I can’t imagine that those little strings of code have been waiting with bated breath for my return. I’m a distant digital memory by now. I’ll have to start small, and maybe stay small. Or maybe I’ll connect again! Who knows?

Writing here … for a readership of a few hundred … has accustomed me to being satisfied by a response that would have been disastrous for me as a YouTuber from 2018-2022.

When everything you post gets tens of thousands of views, and certain videos fly out into the hundreds of thousands, you will struggle to keep your perspective. I’m hoping that my expectations have been reset to the point where I’ll be satisfied if my thoughts prove useful to any significant number of people.

I don’t want to assume or even imply any cultural importance on my part. But if a person knows that he or she has anything of value to offer, isn’t it his or her duty to disperse it as widely as possible? I think it is.

But it won’t be easy.

It was goddamn traumatic to watch countless viewers whom I knew to be good and decent people, go down the twin rabbit-holes of Stop-The-Steal and Stop-The-Vaccine. It was heartbreaking to watch them choke off their own objectivity, and adopt a form of political loyalty that seems free of moral guideposts.

I don’t think Trumpism will be over soon. But the last couple of weeks have shown us cracks in its edifice.

My instincts are not infallible, but sometimes I have been able to sense a moment approaching. Right or wrong, I’m getting that signal now.

Thanks to all of you who’ve taken this ride with me. It’s been my privilege to write these 72 published pieces, and to read your comments.

I’ve known people much smarter than me, who longed to make a larger impression and never got the chance. I’m grateful to know that I had at least some value here on the planet.

I have ideas about the shape my YT channel will take, but I expect that there will be some flailing at first.

In my experience, 1,000 to 1,400 words is about right for a video script. Much briefer than the post you’ve just read. So I’m looking forward to some brevity; as you no-doubt are.

Thanks for reading. Stay well, and watch your YouTube suggestions for the newer, older me.

Yours, Dave

P.S. It will cost me money when my ‘paid’ subs unsubscribe. Substack purposely promotes the ‘yearly’ subscription. Because it serves their business model. The writer’s portion of that 50 bucks comes in right away and gets spent. If the writer leaves Substack at any time, he or she is then liable to repay all of those yearly subs - on a prorated basis - whatever portion of their money has not been ‘earned’ by writing received.

This is to be carried out by Stripe, Substack’s embedded money processor. I tried to quit once before and found that I’d be ‘buying my freedom’ for almost a thousand dollars.

It’s clearly an entrapment scheme to keep struggling writers pumping out the content. No ‘subscribe’ page is available that doesn’t offer the yearly, cheaper-by-the-month option. This isn’t even remotely ethical from my perspective.

When I get my YouTube channel up again, you might consider letting your subscription here run out as a way of supporting my new venture. But keep your eye on Stripe. Don’t let them auto-renew you.

If all of this sounds too complicated, just unsubscribe. I’ll take the hit, and consider it a lesson learned. Far as I know, all that I’ve written here will remain on Substack’s servers, if you ever want to revisit any of it.

Morrison At Large

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