Truth Told Sideways by Mark Brent

08/02/2026

I spent years living in two places at once.

Replaying what already happened, and bracing for what hadn’t. Carrying old pain into new moments like it was still happening. Treating every future disaster like it was already decided.
I didn’t figure that out in a quiet room. I figured it out the hard way—while stuck in the same loops of suffering I wrote about in Idiot Factory.

Chapter 8 is where I finally sat with it: how we leave the present, and how that keeps the pain going.

The video of me reading from the book in this blog article comes straight from that chapter. Not polished advice. Just what started working when life was still loud and messy.

If any of this sounds familiar, here’s the full post where I breakdown what I had to learn about mindfulness to stay alive in the present:

https://www.truthtoldsideways.com/post/mindfulness-in-the-chaos-how-to-stop-living-in-the-past-and-future

07/27/2026

I’ve started making 4 to 8 minute videos of me reading sections of Idiot Factory.

This video is the beginning of chapter 8. It’s the introduction, with satire and my dose of philosophical memoir, of why Mindfulness is important to dealing with suffering.

https://youtu.be/4sGnZxdkfp0?is=quTxUx_zkB9Pz0Tw

The first 5 chapters of Idiot Factory show all the ways I know we suffer, because I tend to suffer in those ways. Chapters 6 through 8 gives us the tools to combat or mitigate our suffering, but we tend not to use them… because we are human. 10 and 11 are what happens, heavy memoir here, when we don’t get out of suffering. 12 is the door to the Idiot Factory.

Enjoy this video. Leave a comment.

Has mindfulness been hijacked by lifestyle influencers and corporat...

06/23/2026

Working on a graphic novel style audiobook reading of my book Idiot Factory… the Intro and Chapter 1 are done. Check out the Intro

A graphic novel style reading of the actual Introduction to the Idi...

06/23/2026

Check what I am doing now… been hard at work.

Explore the work of Mark Brent, author of Idiot Factory. Truth Told Sideways features psychological fiction, dark satire, magical realism, essays, and anti-self-help writing about suffering, shame, and the stories people tell to hide.