If I get too close
And I'm not how you hoped
Forgive my northern attitude
Oh, I was raised out in the cold
If the sun don't rise
'Til the summertime
Forgive my northern attitude
Oh, I was raised on little light
These days, the light is pale like old cardboard, left out, forgotten, bleached by the sun.
It was mercilessly hot right up until it wasn’t. Then, one day, I stepped outside and stopped in my tracks, pausing to enjoy a cool breeze I hadn’t even considered possible.
The summer heat smelled often of petrichor, the heavy rains pushing the hygrometer towards hellish percentages. 79%. 85%. 92%. Humidity not fit for man nor beast.
When the heat finally broke, the air thinned, too, the slick film of unseen haze no longer fogging up the windows when the air conditioning runs. No longer making even your perspiration start sweating.
I’m a northern boy, born in November after the first snows, and though I’ve adapted as well as I can to southern summers, they will never feel natural to me. Give me 80 degree days and 60 degree nights any time. I’ll take rain half the year if it lets me savor dark moods. Give me the crisp cool air of early falls, where the snow sometimes comes at Halloween. Give me longer winters. I’ll deal with steel-grey skies and crusted, dirty snowbanks, pockmarked like acne scars, lasting almost until May.
I’m a northern boy, always suspicious of anywhere that gets too much sun.
An old colleague and friend of mine, brilliant and wild and utterly unconcerned with the things of this world used to offer me unsolicited, passionately-delivered advice. Among her sayings were, “If you want to be rich, work close to the money” (she never did) and not-unrelatedly, “Never trust anyone who is tan in the winter” (she never was). She talked about the artist’s way. She spoke her mind even when she was the only one willing to say what she was saying.
She died before I had any idea who I was, or how to apply these things.
But she saw me, really saw me, in a way few people ever have.
It’s a strange thing to be weird, to be smart and articulate and gifted in things that don’t seem to matter to most people at all. To keep an entire constellation of eccentricities and anxieties hidden behind a mask of calculated normalcy, only to fall short of normal expectations time and again.
My friend was never like that. She was big and loud and unkempt and a little crazy. She was creative and brilliant and observant and utterly alive. Nobody knew quite how to handle her. Everyone respected the hell out of her all the same.
She told me I was the best writer in the whole place, and considering the caliber of the people I was working with, I found that hard to believe.
But I never doubted for a second that she meant it, or that she was qualified to know.
The morning she died, I came into the office in a good mood, and immediately started joking around with co-workers who already knew she was gone. I remember the looks on their faces. I remember them saying through tears that she had died, the room heavy with grief and loss. I remember being embarrassed that I had tried to be lighthearted and funny because I didn’t have the slightest clue that someone completely irreplaceable was suddenly no longer a part of our lives.
I miss her. I wonder what advice she’d give me now. I’m older, wiser, my talents more proven, and yet I’m just as lost as I was then, 20 years younger than I am now.
I wonder how she’d make sense out of my completely discombobulated life.
I can only imagine she’d furrow her brow beneath the mop of frizzy, dark hair, and peer at me intensely through her rimless glasses. She would shout — not out of anger, but out of love and intensity — something I’d not even considered. Something I didn’t know I desperately needed to hear.
But I don’t have the ability to imagine what it is that she’d say.
I don’t have anything like a mentor anymore. No wise sage to guide me with the pearls of their hard-won experience. Just an overly talkative clanker on my phone and the whispering of dragonflies.
I drive through the outskirts of Wake Forest at sunset, on one of the first nights it actually feels like autumn. It’s beautiful and bucolic and there’s almost no traffic, which is as close as you can get to a small miracle on a Friday night. North Carolina feels like a lover who never fully lets you in. You orbit them, you soak in their beauty, you stay up late talking with them on the couch, but they never lean in for a kiss.
I could have stayed here for years. I could have made this my home. It was missing things I desperately needed, but there’s just something about it. Something I’ve come to love in spite of it all. I should hate it here, since this is the place where the old me came unwittingly to die. The place where the last fatal blow to the only life I ever wanted was struck. The place where the woman I loved for more than half my life looked me in the eyes and told me she didn’t. Not anymore.
But there’s a strange southern serenity here, the sticky summers notwithstanding. The big craggy oaks and the tall skinny pines and the soft rolling hills and the gorgeous kudzu creep. The vestigial vocal twang. The ubiquity of biscuits and cobbler and barbecue I never eat and sweet tea I never drink. The old neighborhoods with their sprawling Victorians planted between the soft light of Sesame Street lamps; the new neighborhoods with their sprawling McMansions done up in luxury farmhouse style. Everything is within reach. 30 minutes gets you just about anywhere. There are more decent coffee shops in a ten mile radius than pretty much any place I’ve lived. The trees here are this magical, deep shade of green.
It’s a weird mix of bougie upscale city and charming small town vibe. It’s everything I ever wanted from a place to live except for the fact that I don’t have people here. It feels like it should have worked out, except for all the reasons that it didn’t.
I need to start looking for places to live in Virginia, but I don’t want to go. Mostly, I’ve been distracting myself from being now-constantly alone. It’s too far to go see my kids more than once a month or so, and my lease here runs through mid-December. I need to start looking for places to live up that way, but I don’t want to live up that way.
Makes it pretty hard to get focused.
I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want another move to somewhere meaningless; a place to live that can never be a home. I don’t want to further formalize my disenfranchisement from the only place I’ve ever belonged: within the same four walls as the woman I married and the children we gave life to. I don’t want to go back to Virginia where it all started, to drive through towns where we used to live together, see the church where we were married, the stores we used to go to. I can’t walk into the crypt chapel beneath the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC without seeing myself on the kneeler there, before the tabernacle, putting a ring on the finger of the woman who would become the mother of my tribe.
I don’t want to be forced remember what it felt like when there was still hope.
The trees there are wrong and the landscape is wrong and the stores are different and the traffic is too much and there are foreigners everywhere now and the data centers fill the landscape. Going back these days feels somehow both like driving by a place you used to live with brand-new tenants who cut the tree down in the front yard and painted the house a different shade and going someplace alien that you’ve never ever been. Like it’s somehow both home and a fever dream.
It’s too much to process, so mostly I just don’t. I procrastinate by being busy. I work. I write. I research. I record and edit my show. I think big thoughts that wouldn’t be missed if I stopped thinking them altogether. I lie in bed with a drink on my nightstand, watching stuff on the TV I don’t actually care about until the wee hours, telling myself it’s fine, because nobody expects anything from you at that time of the night anyway.
I’ve made progress this year, it’s true. But I’m still me. My heart is still shattered into a million pieces, I’ve just got it packed more carefully in custom-crafted protective foam so I can carry it around with me without it falling apart. As soon as I think the grief is over, it finds new ways to arrive. As soon as I think “I’ve got this, I can do this,” I’m reminded that I’ve got maybe 30 years left on this planet, and I can’t think of a single way they are going to feel like they’re worth living when everything I ever wanted is already gone, and there’s nothing I can even imagine wanting instead.
I’m a character in someone else’s choose-your-own-adventure book. I didn’t pick this storyline. It’s just the one I’m stuck in, and I’m decidedly not a fan.
I find myself in the checkout lane at the grocery store, and I can’t get the code on my phone I need loaded to load. The lady working there asks me if something is wrong with my app.
I tell her yeah, it’s not doing the thing for some reason.
“Technology, it’s the devil.” she quips.
“No,” I reply, fumbling with my device. “It’s worse than the devil. You can at least bargain with him.”
She laughs. I laugh. But I also mean what I said.
Can’t bargain with tech. Can’t bargain with a lot of people. Can’t bargain with the universe. And Jesus is not picking up the phone.
I pass a sign for a place called “The Church of God of the Prophecies.” I wonder, absently, how people come up with these names.
I deliver some groceries to a farm with a gate code. The woman sitting on the porch waiting for me smells like she’s already five drinks deep. Her chickens are gathering around the steps behind me, and she anticipates that this will somehow make me uncomfortable, but it doesn’t.
“When you leave, just walk towards them, and they’ll get out of your way.” She says.
“I’m not worried,” I say. “I used to have chickens. Raccoons got to them all. Little suckers could actually open the latch on the coop.”
She registers this information with alarm, but when I turn to go, she repeats herself as if I haven’t just told her it’s not a problem.
“Just walk.” She says again. “They’ll get out of your way.”
“Got it,” I say. No point reiterating.
“Hello ladies,” I say to the chickens. They just cluck and bob out of my way.
“You need to put in the gate code to leave, hon.” The woman says over the porch railing as I’m almost to my car.
Good information. I hadn’t even seen the code box on this side.
“Thanks for that,” I say. “Remind me what the code is again? Now that I’ve dropped off I can’t see that information in my app anymore.”
She does. The code works. The gate is so slow the movement is almost imperceptible at first, and I want to enter the code again before I realize the hydraulic arm has shifted ever so slightly. So I wait.
I make my way to the end of the long driveway, and reach the main road just in time to see the sun slipping below the horizon through the trees.
The light is so bright, I don’t notice the moon hanging low over the little brick house across the street. Within the hour, that moon hangs large and ephemeral in the early twilight, its figure obscured slightly by the swaddling of diaphanous wisps of cloud.
On a suburban dropoff somewhere in midtown after dark, I notice two whitetail bucks standing in someone’s front yard. For a moment, I think they’re just extremely lifelike statues, until I see one of them dip his head for another bite of whatever landscaping foliage drew him to that particular lawn. Neither of them run when I pass slowly by, which is odd, considering how close I am.
I swing a U-turn to go back for another look and maybe, if I’m lucky, a photo. But by the time I make it back, they’ve both vanished somehow into the sparse vegetation of a dense residential area. This is way too far inside city limits to normally see any deer.
On a different road, under a starless night sky, I see a bird dramatically flapping large white wings to slow its descent to the curb. As I approach, it swivels its head to stare at me, and I see the face of a Barred Owl.
It doesn’t move, just stares.
I have never in my life seen an owl just land on the side of the road and look at an oncoming car at night. It feels surreal. Almost symbolic somehow. What it could mean, though, is anyone’s guess.
And that’s kind of the theme these days, come to think of it.
What any of this means could be anyone’s guess.
What is your life for if its not for the people you love?
What is the purpose of suffering if it doesn’t redeem?
Strip away a man’s faith and career and family, and what’s left? The continuation of metabolic processes just for their own sake?
Raging against the dying of the light is a lot more inspiring when you don’t already live each day fully in the dark.
What am I for?
The question rings endlessly in my head. A problem. A puzzle. An indictment.
No answer ever comes.
On the days when I feel most hopeful and optimistic, it’s because I’m not asking that question. I’m just dealing with what’s in front of me, right in the moment. No looking at the future. No trying to find a way for it to feel like it isn’t just a perennial humiliation ritual; an orgy of perpetuated loss.
I’m writing this thing or delivering this order or running this errand or making this meal or doing this podcast or reading this book or….
Eventually, though, you have to pick your head up and look down the road. You can’t just keep driving distracted through life forever or you’re going to crash.
My uncle had to have heart surgery last week. One of the healthiest, most physically active guys I’ve known. Blocked artery. He’s OK. In recovery. But it got me thinking about where I’ll be when I’m his age.
I’ve got nothing. No assets. No retirement fund. No likely access to social security. No real estate. Nobody who will take care of me when I no longer can.
I can’t even afford to withhold money for taxes when every dollar I make comes through a 1099. Things piling up in the dark, waiting to come back to bite me.
I’ll be 49 this November. Which means 50 next year. I don’t have health insurance. I haven’t seen a doctor since 2019.
It’s one thing to strive and grind and hope and pray. It’s another thing to actually get somewhere. We love an underdog story. We love it when someone loses everything and manages to get back on their feet and writes a book and does the podcast circuit to tell us how well it’s all worked out for them in the end.
We don’t hear from the people who get smacked down by life and never recover.
I’m a Schrödingerian conundrum. A complete and total failure at two-thirds of the way through this existence, or a comeback story nobody saw coming?
This is the stuff that isn’t fun to talk about, write about, or think about.
This is the stuff that makes me terrified to spend the rest of my life alone.
I never wanted to be all things to anyone, let alone myself. I need love. I need care. I need someone looking after me who isn’t me. I do an absolutely terrible job.
I am a man without purpose or mission. A rusty tool hanging in an abandoned shed.
No matter how hard I bust my rear end working, I come home to silent emptiness. Nobody to greet me and ask about my day. Nobody to put their arms around me and remind me why doing all the shit I don’t want to do is actually worth it. Just an endless treadmill of pointless maintenance.
It’s not enough. I don’t know how people do this. It’s like being dead while you’re still alive.
I need more out of life and I am so pissed at myself for not being able to figure out what I want, let alone how to get it. I’m not afraid to do the work. I’m afraid of not knowing the work I need to do. I’m getting pretty tired of surrendering to the freaking storm. You can’t get to a destination you can’t identify. If you just start driving without a plan, you’re only going to wind up hopelessly lost.
And when you’re hopelessly lost, that’s when you most need someone to give you directions.
That’s what I’m looking for.
Directions.
To get them, I don’t want to have to bargain with the devil. I’d much rather strike up a deal with God.
But I’ve got to find him first.
And to do that, he’s going to have to meet me halfway.
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