Bio? Mitchell Nobis just said he didn’t know who he was. Geez, didn’t you read the thing? The poem? At least, he thinks it’s a poem, but what does he know. He doesn’t even know who he is, and he’s plenty old enough to have solid ideas about that by now. He doesn’t think it’s a “failure to launch” kind of thing, especially since he’s probably only a decade away from retiring as a public K-12 teacher in Metro Detroit. I guess you could fail to launch for an entire career, which, now that you mention it, could very well describe him even though he did receive a teaching award once—that was very cool. But no, his lack of solidity is probably more a result of living in a world with continually muddying sensibilities of right and wrong, of good and bad. Have you tried to parent in the 21st century? Sheesh. Do you ever know what the right thing to do is? You’re just always winging it, right? But they sure as hell didn’t tell you that when you were young. Nope, it was all “do this and life’ll be great,” but then you did the stuff, got the grades and diplomas and jobs and then you found out that we’re all just primates plugging away at it, that the adults were just winging it all along, that the best advice you ever got, in the end, was from that one Bloom County comic strip where Steve Dallas, the perpetually soused lawyer character, was asked what the Billy and the Boingers band should do at this one critical point in the recording studio, and he said, to Opus the Penguin, he said “just wing that mother,” and then decades later, you figured out that’s all any of us are ever doing, that the ones who seem sure of themselves have only locked themselves into a pattern because having a truck and a proper 401(k) creates a sense of control, and maybe it does provide some modicum of control over the chaos, but then you put the window down in your car tattooed by scratches and dents from your kids and their baseballs and dead tree branches and Nerf guns—because Nerf manufactures kiddie munitions now instead of footballs, speaking of good and bad being all mixed around—and realize that, nope, the math and investments don’t control the chaos, that so many others of your species sell their whole soul just to get money to create a sense of control, but nah, can’t be done, not really. There’s always entropy, and, besides, there’s no way to control and give at the same time so why would you aim for the former? I mean c’mon, we’re all just animals in it together. Some of us seek to control and some of us seek to wonder, but we’re still crazy, lovely, asinine, brilliant, terrible, befuddling animals. But if you want a sense of this particular animal, you can find more at mitchnobis.com or @MitchNobis on Bluesky/Twitter.