the_block_@_the_bottom

The substance abuser can name their dysfunction and find remedy in decades of equally named solutions; groups, sponsors, rehab centers, and a myriad of paths through twelve steps or abridged versions, simply exchanging the substance for something more tolerable to their friends and family. But what happens when the substance of your dysfunction isn't sold in a back alley, through "I know a guy," or any other back channel?

What if the substance is quite simply you, and the way you think.

If in this very moment you're looking for an exhaustive list of scenarios that fit your specific dysfunction, or better yet, the one that names someone else and their specific wreckage; then you're exactly who this was written for. But you have to answer the fundamental question first...

Can you handle the truth?

the_block_@_the_bottom is a nonfiction book about the structural inability to change minds. Not as a character flaw. Not as a political pathology. As architecture. Built over a lifetime, maintained below the waterline of conscious awareness, and nearly impossible to examine from the inside.

Think of everything you believe as a tower of blocks. At the bottom of that Jenga tower sits the block that holds everything else up. The one you cannot remove without risking the whole structure. This book is about that block. Not to pull it out. Not to prove it wrong. But to ask an honest question about what it is actually holding, and what it has cost you to keep it there.

Phillip Anthony Gornail; The Recovering Know-it-All, is a first-generation Haitian American, New Yawker, and transplant recipient; who spent years inside this question before he found language for it. What emerged is a ten-chapter examination of the mechanisms that keep human beings locked inside their own frames of reference, drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, film, scripture, and the lived experience of a man who has had another person's heart beating inside his chest since August 2023.