from the Journal

Early June - 2022

The synth is softly audible from the drive, and I’m drawn around the back where it echoes across the yard and back off the neighbor's house behind. Although I can hear one song cross-fading gently into the next, I don’t truly hear it until I come around the corner of the house and see the light from the basement landing on the back lawn. The room is dim, and their bodies gleam with sweat. They are covered in it. It does not drip but coats their backs and shimmers in the light that comes out of the end of the room I cannot see. I’m standing on a small slope of the lawn, watching them diagonally, through an unshaded window in the basement. The screen in it obscures them slightly, adding to the vision. At first glance, it seems odd. Their bodies move randomly, and I find it gangly. At second look, it is instead very human. Some movements appear random, but most are not. Either in tune with the beat, or the vocals, or one another, the people inside are one. One day, I hope to find the same. To feel the same freeness and spirit that I can tell they do. I want to go inside. In fact, if they knew I was watching them, feeling this, I know they would tell me that joining them, that being inside that basement, is all it takes to become part of the group. But I do not. I stand on the sloping grass, and my feet begin to hurt.

 

8/24/22

The taillights bob down the short sandy road. Mimicking the motion, the headlights shine on the hill above. I sit in my driver's seat, the door half open, watching this melancholic light show, as the lump in my stomach grows into a pit. The engine noise fades into the background of the interstate a quarter mile below. Save one, my friend’s cars around me flick off their lights. The Big Dipper sits low in the sky, the bottom of the pan just visible over Joe’s camper and the juniper behind. This one last evening, while still all remain and most gather, marks the beginning of the end. And as I sit here and think through my feelings, I realize that when the end comes, it does not matter how much in the beginning you are experiencing it. It feels the same. It feels like the end. It is the same. It is the end. A whole is not a whole when half is gone, just the same as when a hundredth is gone. The pie may still be as sweet, but there is less of it. 

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They are leaving to Ohio. To Toledo and Dayton and Cincinnati, and if they wanted to, they wouldn’t have to get off the interstate. The same one I hear now. The same one their engine noise faded into and was absorbed by. All the way across and out of Colorado and Kansas and Missouri and Illinois and into Ohio. What an enormously large world we live in and what an enormously large country, and what enormously kind-hearted people live here. Despite the feelings of loss, and worry of future loss, and bittersweet acceptance of both, I am more grateful than anything. There are few opportunities presented to few people that enable them to have experiences and create friendships as I have here. I am so blessed to have met these people at this time. I could not imagine a greater honor than realizing that truth. Some of me would really like to thank Jesus or perhaps another higher power of a different name, but more of me, right now at least, wants to leave a quote that encapsulates this feeling to a great degree. 

 

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10/6/22 (and February 2026)

I am watching them, and they are laughing in the sun on a rock the size of a house on the other side of the river. It would be a challenge, but I think they would fit through the eye of a needle. I have been watching them for ten minutes, wishing I could be there with them, when Will spots me, and they begin to yell my name. Somehow, he always spots me. I do not respond. Tears pool, running into my eyes and down my nose until they fall onto my shirt, dripping once more, until finally absorbed by my shorts. I miss them. I feel detached. I feel like there were many moments this summer that I missed, and I wonder if I missed too many. I wonder how many would be too many? I am filled with hate and indifference and wonder and love and a longing to be in the sun as it sets and makes their skin glow like I wish it always did. I wish I had more acceptance in me. I am trying. The light is gone from THEIR rock. I left a quote for Megan that read “good without the bad ain’t no good at all,” and was reminded of the Forest Gump line that goes “Mama always said dying is a part of living. I wish it wasn’t.” For a few long seconds, I wish the same for my quote. Standing in the chaparral with tears and sweat dried and cool, I wish it could all be good. I wish that I talked with my siblings more and saw my grandparents more and had interesting talks with every one of them every time I did. I wish gas wasn’t $7 and the mushrooms Jake bought in Oregon worked, and I fit in better, and the acne on my back would go away and never exist ever again for anybody. For a second, I wish for these things and for the disappearance of all bad ones. I wish that I could be there with them, my FRIENDS, that it could be OUR rock, and that I could see them in that golden evening light and watch it die and fade and know their smiles and laughs even when it did. For a second, I wish these things and a hundred more, but then, I don’t. And when I don’t, Christ, I really, really don’t. 

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For so much longer than a second, though, Mr. Gump’s wish sits on my mind. I come down the hillside, meet them on the trail, and we begin the walk back to the car. The trail up to the road is steep and loose. I let the others slide by me. Will does the same. In speech class senior year, Ms. Mackoff assigns us to recreate a movie monologue, and Will chooses Forest Gump’s final words to his freshly buried Jenny. I can’t remember if he comes dressed in a suit, but I do know his rendition makes Ms. Mackoff cry. Finally back standing on level asphalt, the sun has exited the canyon and thickening clouds develop overhead. A month earlier, I am staying with a friend on the Oregon Coast when he calls, breaking down. His father is dead. I drive home the following day, and we embrace in my living room, sitting huddled, sobbing on the couch for twenty minutes. As dusk settles, we stare back at where we came from and embrace again. I tell him, “I’m not sure I’ve been there for you enough recently.” And although he assures me that I have, some doubts remain. We part ways the following day, me to Utah and he back north towards home. When we see one another again, depression has set its bit firmly in my mouth, and he has graduated from college with plans to spend the next nine months in Mallorca. When I visit him there that December, we play a made-up version of tennis, using a lifeguard tower as a net. The winter sun throws long shadows, but it is warm and wonderful, and I watch it die and fade, knowing his smile and laughter even as it does. 

 

7/27/23

I am 19 and working with my Dad and have no idea how to do many of the things he makes look simple. I am 6 and 11 and 13 and help him unload at Bestock’s and think we are done four times before we really are, and am bored in the truck. I force myself to be seven and sit outside Morgan’s, where my dad is inside looking for a toilet, and pick at a dried leaf. I come up with the following scenario. I am sitting, picking at a leaf on a field trip. I notice two girls, the quiet one of whom I’m attracted to, come up to make conversation and poke fun at my sitting alone. They ask me what I’m doing. Picking at a leaf and trying to come up with a funny response to impress you, I say. What have you got? They ask. Leaf me alone. Seven-year-old me would be proud, I think. (Writing this down now, it’s apparent I am not the first one with that punchline.)

 

At lunch, my dad goes down a rabbit hole of basketball players coming out of South Seattle but cannot come up with a specific player’s name. We move on, lunch ends, and I am inside with the shop vacuum sucking up excess insulation that has fallen from the attic access above. On the sine curve of how I feel about myself, work, and my will to live, fifteen minutes after noon on July 27th, 2023, I am very near the X-axis. I long for childhood and youth sports and less concern about my purpose, but all things considered, particularly the last two months, I know my head is not so heavy. My father comes down the hall, motions across his throat to cut the vacuum, and says, “Brandon Roy.” Brandon Roy is the local kid from Garfield High School who went on to the NBA. My father tells me he came from a family where both his mother and father were athletes at UW and his grandfather too and maybe an aunt. “Look at the athleticism of the kids you grew up with. Some were smooth and graceful, and some were clumsy and awkward.” He chuckles and turns to go, “Life’s like that.” I look down at the vacuum hose in my hand and my feet and the fallen insulation. Fuck. I flip the vacuum back on, and a smile creeps across my face.  

 

8/1/23

I remember one night when all the hatreds and regrets towards myself and my former selves came spilling out through my eyes while walking out in the backyard and looking up through the branches toward whatever light-polluted God existed and feeling tears land on my naked chest. I do not pray, but there is an answer. Three yards over, one of the IV bands is covering Killer Whales by Car Seat Headrest. When my own thoughts are quiet enough to listen, the lead singer belts out the chorus. “IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS, IT DOESN’T BE LIKE THIS.” I see the light. I believe. But, of course, I take no action. I am the man standing on his roof after Katrina, waving the helicopter off because I know that God will save me. I head inside; I was getting cold anyway. 

 

8/28/23

She is giving me life advice, having just admitted she hates her life. We are drunk on a couch in an otherwise furniture-devoid house at a party thrown just before move-out day.  She is telling me I am scared of failing. She is telling me how smart I am. She is telling me a hundred other things I cannot remember. She is telling me I am rocking back and forth, looking down at my shoes because what she is telling me is true, and it is making me anxious. I break into a smile. I laugh. I cannot stop laughing. I have not felt this drunken happiness since high school. Next to me, on the last remaining coffee table, a spinning disco ball projects hazy blue and red half-moon shapes that glide across the popcorned ceiling and drip down the wall. From the speaker in the next room, Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” plays. I allow myself to be absorbed into the sofa for a few long seconds before rising. “You’re leaving?” She asks. “Yes,” I reply, “I’m biking home.”

 

8/31/23

There are angels in our midst. Of course, not where I live. Across the pond. Across the misty pond, almost certainly where you live. When you want to see them, to show themselves, to be charmed by their precocious abilities, you will have to listen to 432 hertz. You will have to listen to Matt McCusker play a poorly practiced piece on his North African flute. You will have to listen to Ye’s self-titled album as you drive across Wyoming to become a cowboy, an American, a man, a child trying to become a man searching for His word. Careening across the rolling, dusty, water-scarce Wyoming plains just like Kerouac, but having the windshield replaced the day prior so you’re under orders not to exceed 70 mph, and so instead of balling along at 110, you only go 68; you will scream the lyrics to All Mine. You will scream, “I love your titties, 'cause they prove I can focus on two things at once.” You will summon the angels. They will emerge from the mythical tumbleweeds and from behind the scraggly, eroded hills. They will emerge from the rest stop bathrooms where inside, at any instant, are more people than populate the whole state. You will meet the angels in Rock Springs. You will meet them in empty, dark highway pull-offs. Some evenings, you might meet them in raw, gravel parking lots where the puddle-filled potholes are frozen over, but tonight, they are warm inside. You will meet them in the shriveling face, in the sad, staring eyes of the gas station clerk. You will meet them inside the gas station bathroom where, after all but the last two drops of pee shake off, it is silently, mutually agreed upon that no, we do not need to wash our hands. The gelid wind outside will kill the germs. Despite popular belief and the false, golden advertising atop many temples, you will not meet any in Utah. People are territorial with their angels. Who can blame them?

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3/29/26

Google Photos tells me it is nine years since Valparaíso, and I have no choice but to believe them. It is almost seven years since my graduation from high school. Time screams by faster than I can seem to comprehend. When I am dying, old or not, it will be hard to admit to others how quickly it has moved. The NFL draftees are three or four years my junior. The medical school applicants are no longer applicants but instead nearing residency. I keep getting drunk on weeknights and going skiing with my grandmother's money. Nowhere near a quarter-life crisis, I still wonder how people end up so different and when in their lives it occurs. I stare at the bassist from Linda from Work and win three rounds of Cambio. When we go back downstairs, I tap my feet, I sway my legs and hips, but I am not entranced. Despite the alcohol and mushrooms and screaming crowd, I am left analyzing the differences between my brain and that of my dancing friends. This moment feels like those when I am standing on the sloping grass in some backyard in Colorado, watching them all through the window. Present but distant. When the lead singer yells, “In the name of God, let’s dance till dawn!” I think only of my girlfriend and what might happen to us this summer. I don’t dance. I go to the bathroom and sit at a back table and wait for the songs to end. When they do, we leave for home. 

 

4/24/26

The Mountain Gazette sticker on the back of my father’s F150 reads: WHEN IN DOUBT, GO HIGHER. And so we do. Artemis 3’s launch is delayed until 2028, but all is well. We watch AI videos of five million Mike Tysons fighting 1000 Iron Mans on Mars. The Mike Tysons win handily, with more than two million remaining by the time they win. In the end, I’m not sure if we are more advanced than our homo erectus cousins, or even the Saxifragales. It is hard to know whether we are going higher or what that might even mean. In the end, if we are not looking for happiness, then what are we looking for? I don’t chase the same meaning some of my kind chase, but they and I chase it all the same. We are lost looking for something which we can never know and never gain. In the end, I hope to be closer to God, and closer to those around me. 

 

7/15/26

I'd like to think that I am as happy as I have ever been. I am social and outgoing and, despite my recent breakup and even more recent crash on my bike and the associated, separated AC joint, terribly excited about most things. Resilient, I want to call it. I drive back to McCall, speak with Benji on the phone, and try to edit some writing. I watch one of the World Cup semifinal games in a bar by myself. I shout with joy when Argentina scores their go-ahead goal in stoppage time. I sit in the park, on a bench overlooking the lake, and try to distill my thoughts into something worth reading. It is clear to me now how unhappy I have been at some points in my life, and how, despite those feelings, lucky I am. It is true. There but for the grace of God, go I. Perhaps, if you are reading this, or I am reading this to you, then I should instead say: there but for the grace of YOU, go I. I write all the time these days that, “I don’t know what to tell you, I don’t know what to say.” But, really, I do not. There is no order of sounds or syllables, no words or sentences, no human mind-constructed ideas that can well express the feelings I hold. It is a big world, and it is a small world. I am in love, and I am insane. I am enveloped by the world and, still, I attempt to explain it. Of course, Dylan was right. We all contain multitudes. That is nothing new. But perhaps my increasing awareness of my own multitudes, as well as those of others and of the world around me, is. It remains elusive, however, how to better descriptively mesh them together. Although, of course, the lived experience is different than that of the written one, they appear rather distinct when I attempt to sort through them. Perhaps this is innate to the notion of sorting. Like when using sifters to sort rock, the ideas must separate, each according to their respective characteristics. When grouped, these ideas of similar character spring to life, but when solitary, or single-celled, they lack the organ(nelle)s required to do so. 

 

All the while, we spin onward. The kids fight for and jam the button at the fountain on and then scream and splash when the water spews freely. The adults walk by, overweight and wearing T-shirts that read: Are you an American, or are you a Democrat? Or others that say: 100% That Beach! The little dogs continue to yap at one another and are soon lifted off the ground by their leashes. I sit on my bench feeling content and humored, if not a little superior. I am much the same as I always was. Perhaps more sunburned, but still a little alone, spending too much money on food and, more than anything, still a hater. That is not to say I am not in love with the world, but rather that, through analysis or criticism, I only fall more in love with it. What I mean to say, however, is thank you. Although we are likely more shaped by genetics than most would like to believe, I know I am also a result of those around me. I sincerely appreciate your presence, your perspective, and your time. We all seem to have too little of the latter, and I will be forever indebted to those who gave me some of theirs. Until next time, vaya con Dios.