Rattlings of a Curious Mind by Tyler Knott Gregson

Tyler Knott Gregson starts Part II of his Dead Poets Society deep dive and discusses Carpe Diem and the rebellion that is remaining full of wonder.

When he first said it, when he first explained it and planted it like a seed in the weirdly soft loamy soil of my young, undiagnosed autistic brain, it seemed to germinate almost instantly. Then sprout. Then poke through the mud. Then find the sunlight of my curiosity. Then blossom.
Carpe Diem, Keating said. SEIZE THE DAY, and a mantra was born.
It wasn’t just me who felt this blooming, I know this. Carpe Diem spread like a damn wildfire full of wildflowers after Dead Poets Society came out, and with it inspiration that I think stuck with so many people who were actually alive and cognizant enough at the time to absorb and embrace it.
Motivational posters, Robin Williams himself in interviews, TV talk shows, it was everywhere, seize the day, they said, take it. It’s yours, only yours. Take it. SEIZE it.
I remember the day I learned it was wrong.
Carpe never meant seize. It never meant take, not by force, not by aggression or domination. It meant something gentler, and the distinction carries with it more weight than I ever realized.
Carpe means pluck, not seize. Pluck like a single raspberry on a bush full of them, like a guitar string to play a song, like something you care enough about to bring with you, without taking it all, without breaking the whole thing in the process.
I’ve seen, more times than I can count, the ways this world is obsessed with acquisition. I see more people alive today who possess more money than they could ever spend than ever before, I see the obsession with success spread faster than I knew it possible. Owning, becoming, manifesting, optimizing, seizing, take priority over all things deemed less worthy, less valuable.
All my life I’ve watched people seize the things around them. I’ve watched them take perfect quiet mornings, the kind that come often in September, and grab them by the still chilly throats, I’ve seen them force them into productivity. I’ve watched as people grab hold tightly to the experiences they should be enjoying, and hold them up to the camera like some great fish they wrestled from the sea. Memories like trophies, days like acquisitions. I’ve not felt like this, not really ever, it’s not something my strange brain understands, and for a long time I felt like this was its own particular brand of failure. That maybe Keating would give me a forlorn look, put his chin down towards his chest, and walk off without saying a single word. Devastating me with his quiet disappointment.
To Pluck is a gentle thing, the truer translation of carpe diem something warped along the way. To pluck is soft, it’s the delicacy of a droplet of morning dew on a single strand of spiderweb, it’s the steam from my tea cup each morning. It’s a moth you reach for, that sits and rests atop your fingertip long enough to dry its wings from the brief rainstorm it just flew through. It’s the rightness of being gentle in such stark contrast to the wrongness of watching the whole world get it wrong.
As a boy, I was taught that if you want to feel a butterfly land on you, you have to stop chasing it and let it come to you. Same for trying to feed a bird, or squirrel, or any other animal my little fascinated brain latched onto as “new best friend.” Chase it, it will run, wait, be patient, be tender, and it might just come to you. They did, they still do, and it shows me every day a truth that I will defend forever and ever:
Wonder is an act that requires tenderness.
To seize is to damage, to ruin for the sake of owning, having, acquiring, controlling. To pluck is to take without destruction, to hold while preserving the wonder.
Something in me shifted when I realized this distinction. When I took the inspiration that Dead Poets gave me and let it grow, blossom, into something bigger, something more acute and important. To pluck the day is to sample it, I finally understood. It’s to remain amazed in all the day so willingly offers you. It’s to reach with gentle fingers, to lightly draw out, to pull with softness, to not harm what is before you.
Every day I see recklessness with that which sustains, I see a refusal to allow that simple grace to come. I watch and witness seizing, I tense, I feel my neck muscles go taut, my shoulders become little balls of concrete, my fingers want to roll into fists to protect me. Breathe, I say to myself, breathe, and force them to uncurl again.
With open hands I hold the little things that seek me out for protection, the bees, the flies, the moths, squirrels, or fragile flowers bent over from someone’s stepping.
This month, this time of my mind racing back to what was felt then, the flowers planted in that youthful soil, this time of some things ending though I call it beginning still, I think of this again.
Open, I think to myself, stay this way, gentle, always gentle.
Pluck.
Like string for music, like resonance from stillness.
Pluck.
Like leaving the rest behind.
Carpe Diem. Pluck the day.
I love you all.
Be good.
Should we learn to pluck
and forget about seizing,
what joy we can find.
Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson

Song of the Week


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Happy Hump Day you goofballs. The intro to this goes very off the rails, as per usual, so if you like complete idiocy, do watch.
We talk about lots today, from us having to cancel a trip to shoot an elopement in Hawaii because of that a*****e Hurricane Lowell, to how we’re still fighting with SIXT and Expedia for charging us $100 for a car rental we couldn’t pick up because all flights were canceled because of the
AFOREMENTIONED F’ING HURRICANE.
So that’s fun. We also dive into the Question of the Week:
What are unwritten “rules” of life YOU need to Un-learn? What introductions do YOU need to rip out in order to live happier, healthier, more FULL lives?
We answer too, if you wanna see the way we feel about things.
Also, in case you forgot:
Official Date for the next Menagerie LIVE Google Meeting Hangout is scheduled!
September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!
Link to come, so don’t miss it!

We have the official date for the next LIVE hangout with ALL of us, where we read poetry, spread rumors, gossip probably, talk about cool s**t like tv shows and music and movies and generally help save the world and solve problems. It’s gonna be:
September 24, 2026 at 6pm Mountain Time!
So if you’ve been waiting for an excuse to join us, NOW is that time! Click the button below the prancing unicorn, join the family, keep this place alive. Revel in the glory.

Have a rad rest of your Hump Day, and do precisely that.
Here’s the little thank you the post generates at random for some of you lovelies who joined us live!
Thank you LeftieProf, Mara, pickingplumeria, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I love you all.
Be good.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe

Tyler Knott Gregson starts Part 1 of his Dead Poets Society Deep Dive. Starting with the introductions. RIP THEM OUT!

It’s this damn time of year, and it’s always been.
Autumn is nostalgia, it’s this strange ache that hangs in the valley my home looks out on from the mountainside like a fog. It rolls in from the West over the Continental Divide and the great Rocky Mountains that have held me all my life, and it settles. It swirls.
Every year, September comes and I am saturated in it, this heavy wet blanket of something that almost feels like sorrow, but isn’t quite as potent. It’s school starting, it’s the thought of first bells each morning calling out to students like a beacon. Some dread, some adore.
I was the first then, the black-cloud-dread of being forced to be in a school from morning til late afternoon each day, of being stuck, trapped, handcuffed to someone else’s rules on how to spend a day. Strange then, I think often, I’m so in love with this silly season still.
I remember the first time I saw the scene that made me feel understood, that gave me some tiny glimmer of hope that I wasn’t as broken as I always thought. Just not in the right place, I thought, just not seen by the right eyes.
It was the sound, too, the ripping of pages from the introductions to their precious textbooks. It was Keating telling the boys to rise, to leave their desks, to stand atop them to see the world in a new way. I remember watching, mouth agape and eyes wide, as the boys were told that all they were once told was wrong, I remember the rolodex of everything I’d been taught scrolling through my own busy brain. I remember thinking of the consequences of getting it wrong. As Keating said:
“This is a battle, a war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls.”

Dead Poet’s Society, the freight train of a film, the way I finally felt seen. Powerful enough that this is only Part 1 of 4, an entire month of essays dedicated to the things it taught, the way it moved, the lessons that stuck. To the opening of a door to more in my soul, in this world, in this beautiful, beautiful life.
I’ve always been a “rip out the introduction” kind of person, in truth, probably something even further out.
I was a “don’t even bring the textbook” kid, I was a bum a sheet of paper from a friend sitting close enough to whisper to, a Gel pen from another. I was the kid doodling on scrap pieces of their notes, college-lined and micro-perforated.
I remember the liberation of that scene, so early in the film, I remember being moved across the room, hell, the city I call home, the first time I saw it. For a kid that never fit into the rules others made, this triumphant tearing out of the introduction, witnessed just a few months from starting High School, was transformative.
To unlearn a rule is a risky thing, to push back, silently or with rebellious fervor, is to put it all on the line.
Until then, until late August blurred into early September and homecoming bonfires on the mostly-weed-filled field the football team practiced on, I’d been forced into following the rules. Even if I didn’t, I had to pretend I did. Undiagnosed Autistic, ferociously curious, strangely adept at masking internal overstimulation with external chill, I taught myself ways to navigate a world I didn’t, and didn’t want to, belong in.
Then Keating came and told me to unlearn the rules. Then the ripping. Finally, I think I made sense. If only to myself.
We are told how to measure value in this life, told the ways to quantify the beauty, to categorize it, rank it, hold it up against all we’ve seen before it. We are told the hierarchy of our curiosities, our passions, told of our talents and if they will, or will not serve us later. I remember my Honors English I teacher freshman year, telling me I should never attempt to become a writer, that some people just do not have in them what is required to follow the dreams they dream.
I remember being measured, long before I was even understood.
Keating, and truthfully, Robin Williams becoming Keating, taught me otherwise. He taught me, like he taught Todd Anderson in all his vulnerability before me, that what truly matters cannot be measured. It exists, as it is, as it was, and any attempt to do so steals it—the creativity in us, the worth, the magic, the art it all deserves to be.
This is how we love, this is how we live, he taught us, and I remember sitting in the glow of the old Magnavox and the dancing lines of a VHS tape that’d been recorded over multiple times to hold the bootlegged copy of Dead Poets from its airing on HBO, and understanding that it’s the ripping of the introductions in our lives, it’s the unlearning of the rules, that strips away the soulless expectations that are placed upon us.
That set us free.
Permission, then, I think was granted. To go into high school free, fresh, unchained by all that once locked me inside myself. Permission to think, even if it cost me, to believe, even when no one else did, to dream, even when first teachers told me to abandon them.
I sit to type poetry today, 30 years removed almost to the day from my first steps into Helena High School, and I am surrounded by ripped out paper from worn out books. Scraps of novels and textbooks, cookbooks and non-fiction tomes about topics already outdated, and I rifle through them to find one suitable for whatever new poem I am typing. I hear the sound when I tear them to fit into the old 1927 Remington Rand Seventeen typewriter, and I think back to Keating, to the Dead Poet’s Society that taught me to unlearn the rules, and it hurts.
It aches, and it will always ache this time of year. This perfect, nostalgic, desperate time of year that somehow always returns, no matter what else has changed.
I type the words, I turn the knob to pull the paper out, I fold, I crease, and finally, I rip.
I love you all.
Be good.
To unlearn the rules,
tear out the introductions,
and begin to live.
Haiku on Life by Tyler Knott Gregson

Song of the Week


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.tylerknott.com/subscribe