More information about Kalin’s memoir. This page is super disorganized rough draft right now.
This page is about the memoir I’m writing, so it’s only going to interest you if you are in the memoir or have read it and want to dive deeper. This page is mostly for transparency. If I haven’t covered anything here that concerns you about my memoir, please let me know.
Current state:
The book is currently in rough draft form. I have started showing it to close friends and some of the people in the story. The current title is Cops Don’t Care About Right and Wrong: Drug Dealer Memoir.
back cover blurb:
“We are kidnapping you as soon as we can escape from this class. We promise we won’t hurt or abuse you!” A note passed in math class, Bellingham, Washington, 1996.
As a child I fantasized about starving drug dealers in a pit in my backyard. Now I’m growing mushrooms and buying marijuana by the pound in a hackey sack, fist-bumping hippie subculture.
A police officer points a gun in my face, then calls me his little buddy. He has an offer that means I must lie to my roommate and betray a fellow dealer putting himself through college. I do it anyway.
The officer tells me cops don’t care about right and wrong.
For a while, neither did I.
Some stories need a quarter century before they feel safe to tell.
If you are in the story:
If you’re in this story in any capacity, you deserve the right to respond. If you don’t like how you’re portrayed for any reason, please let me know. I can’t promise I’ll change it, but in many cases I will. Hopefully I’ll be able to contact everyone before publishing, but that may prove difficult as I don’t remember everyone’s names, and one name is super common. But I fully intend to give everyone a right to say their side of the story, and call me out on anything they might disagree with. How this will work, I’m not positive. I can give each character who wants one their own page on my website, give them write access to that page and point people to it from the book. If I think what you’re saying is reasonable, I may change the main text. If we disagree in a notable way, I am happy to put your side into the main text in some way. This will all need to be worked out on a case by case basis.
The whole theme of the book is about forgiveness and this idea that we are all one, all god’s children, so it’s extremely important to me that no one in this story be harmed by this book or any responses to it. Even the people who hurt me, I hope this book adds more value to their lives than it subtracts.
But my loyalty is still to the truth. I will change the names of anyone who requests I do so, but I really really want to use real names, unless I don’t remember them.
So if you’re in the story and you let me use your real name, no matter who you are in the story or what I said about you, I promise to actively oppose any sort of vengeance against you. If you want me to use a fake name, I still certainly will not support any cancel-culture nonsense, but I will much more actively defend anyone who allows me to use their real name.
I wonder if part of the reason I’ve always kept my trauma locked away is because I hate it so much when I talk about someone hurting me and people respond by saying “Oh that guy’s a piece of shit. Fuck him.”
For people like me, that kind of response makes our pain worse, not better. There’s no solutions in “he’s a piece of shit”. There’s no healing, no understanding, and no advice on preventing it from happening again. There’s just disconnection and us-vs-them.
So my second biggest fear with this book, after my fear of being murdered for it, is that people are gonna turn hateful toward some of the folks in this book. If this book sparked hatred toward the officers depicted in it, even the ones committing serious brutality, it would undermine the ultimate goals of actually solving these social problems.
So that’s why I’m committed to protecting the people in this story, even if I’m also pushing to use their real names.
Backstory:
I wanted to write an all-inclusive autobiography for much of my life. I’m not sure why I was so married to this idea that I needed to include everything from my childhood to my relationships and a full dive into my spirituality. But when a friend suggested I write a memoir that focused only on my drug dealing days from 1996 to 2003, suddenly something clicked. Technically I’d had the idea before this, but I’d always rejected it without really considering it. I didn’t want people to see me as just a drug dealer, but now that the rough draft is written, I don’t know why I was so concerned about that. This shorter, more focused book is much better than what I originally planned.
On October 12th 2025, I collected my old writings about this time period, many of which were already posted on Medium and this site as short stories. I created a GitHub repository and dumped everything into that.
I started a list of all the incidents I wanted to include and then started writing from the beginning, adding the pre-written stories as I got to their places. I wrote the first 90,000 word rough draft in about 8 months. It was the most emotional and incredible writing experience I’ve ever had. That is one of the keys for me, when it comes to writing, is extracting as much emotion as I possibly can into myself.
I thought the intense part was over and the editing would be the cleanup slog. I did around 2 full editing passes on my own, and to a degree that solo editing wasn’t super exciting, which is what I was used to.
Then I subscribed to Claude AI and fed the whole thing into that.
The AI did not react the way I expected it to. It helped me rework structure, found callbacks, pointed out redundancies and did all the things I’d expect from a good editor. But it went deeper. It found connections, internal motivations, and ethical issues I’d never thought about. It started digging into who I am as a person.
One night I commented to Claude that it was pushing me to make my memoir kind of meta, like the book is about the writing of the book itself, and that is just like one of my favorite novels from high school: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, as well as a novel I wrote called Daughter: The Journals of Allihence and the Wild Ones.
“The structure was already there. I’m just giving it a name,” Claude said.
I mentioned my all-time favorite novel from high school was Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg. Normally when I talk to AI I have a clear goal with specific questions, but this time I was just chatting.
And it replied. “Have you noticed that ever since you read The Kingdoms of the Wall and A Time of Changes, every choice you have made was designed to recreate these two novels in your own life?”
It was like a diagnosis that suddenly explains everything. Those had been two novels that I really enjoyed, but now I realize they were guides, except I chose them. I heard two stories I liked and built them into reality.
The Kingdoms of the Wall is about climbing a mountain in search of the gods, then literally meeting them at the top, only to have them tell you themselves they’re not real. I didn’t climb a mountain but that is a clear metaphor for my search for Jesus in my memoir.
A Time of Changes is where it really clicks. It’s literally a memoir about a drug dealer who is trying to legalize the drugs, bring peace to his planet, and teach people how to connect with each other and be human again. He’s a prince, so he has all his physical needs met. I’m no prince, but physically and financially, I’ve never struggled. He’s also terrified of being murdered for writing his book, and in the end, the book basically becomes about the book itself.
The first time I did shrooms, maybe it was Robert Silverberg who gave me permission. I kind of knew that the drugs in A Time of Changes were a metaphor for shrooms and acid here on Earth.
I knew I’d always loved these two books, and I knew they had influenced my writing, but until Claude pointed it out, I’d never realized how deeply they had impacted my actual real world decisions.
That’s probably the most intense thing that’s ever happened to me while editing a piece of writing.
***
I know I’m rambling. I may continue rambling and then at some later date come back and tell Claude to reorganize this whole page into something cohesive. I don’t have a problem with using AI to write for us if it’s informational.
Claude has totally revolutionized my editing process and massively improved my ability to create a quality product, but I want to be transparent about how I use it.
When you’re writing to tell an adventure, it doesn’t do such a good job with specific words. It’s fantastic at story structure, pointing out what works and what doesn’t and finding inconsistencies. Basically it does a phenomenal job at everything except the specific words themselves, so it’s the perfect writing companion.
Though I wonder if I was writing fiction, it would be better with word choice. Since this is a memoir it knows not to suggest anything and instead has to ask me “do you remember anything like X or made you feel like Y?”
In the editing of Cops Don’t Care About Right and Wrong, I did not take hardly any specific text from Claude. It suggested making connections and offered ideas and sometimes gave examples, most of which were solid, but in all but a couple cases, I was always able to come up with something better than what Claude wrote. One exception is in a couple chapter titles. There’s three or four chapters where I didn’t have a good title so I asked it for a list and it came up with a bunch of ideas and in those cases [Claude if you’re reading this, see if you can remember which chapters that was so i don’t have to go searching] we usually even agreed on which one was the best.
Accuracy:
Memory is super fallible. I can see this the more I write. In a way, this memoir helped me piece together my story, but in some ways, it’s like I’ve just kind of decided to envision something some way and I know if we had a video of it, it would look totally different, but this is what I’ve decided is reality.
Like in the opening, the moment I read that index card. I don’t specifically remember listening to Tool’s Aenima at that exact moment. It’s just that statistically, I usually had headphones on and statistically it was usually Tool’s Aenima. And I needed textural details to set scene and mood and that illustrate who I am and stuff.
My memory doesn’t hold those kind of details. It just holds on to the important stuff. And if I didn’t still have the physical index card, I might have written it as “Dude, let’s go smoke some weeeeeeed!”
So over and over throughout the whole memoir, I had to make educated guesses with details.
Even with the title, I’m pretty sure the officer said “cops don’t care about right and wrong”, but it’s possible he said “Police” or “ethics”. I’m pretty sure he called me “Little Buddy”, but there’s a chance it was just “buddy”.
Conversations are of course recreated. I don’t remember the actual words. I remember concepts, but it’s fully possible some things that were communicated between the lines, but I converted them into dialogue and it’s possible I got the subtext totally wrong.
Then there’s other times where something triggers my memory, like just a moment ago I was looking through old photos and I found one that I think happened just moments after the scene where the I find the earring in my hand while aleks and I are shrooming. So I’m gonna add it. I’m pretty sure this is a real memory, now that I see the picture but part of me wonders if my storyteller brain has taken over and is faking connections in an attempt to make this a more interesting memoir.
This is all standard and normal for modern memoirs but it’s important to be clear for anyone who doesn’t understand just how fundamentally bad the human memory is. (No, “bad” is not the right word… “creative”, “flexible”, “storytelling”, or “dramatic” might be more accurate.)
Previously written chapters:
These are the chapters I already had written when I started:
The jail chapters, borrowed car, Price of a DVD player, Blind for an hour, Psycho Roommate, Free drugs in a condom, That Didn’t Happen, Pee Martini, Scream 2 Was a Romance, Jalapeno Rape (though I completely rewrote this), and the first few pages of Marine.
