It’s a hot summer

 This is the Nebraska summer heat. I remember it wasn’t here last year. 

Maybe I just blocked it out. Maybe I was out of town on the right days but this dry hair dryer heat, this relentless hot air everywhere. 

It’s not a dry desert heat. It’s not a moist heat like Louisiana it’s a suffocating boring as hell heat.

I remember having a school called off in kindergarten at first grade because this heat was so oppressive and the school didn’t have AC and it was dangerous for the kids to wait outside for the bus even in the early morning. 

I had more school called off in Nebraska in two years than I did in the first six years of snow days in Minnesota. 

It’s an exhausting heat in a different way than a wet heat or a desert heat or even I’m Minnesota heat it’s dry. 

It pulls the moisture out of you. You can’t drink enough water to save your life. 

It’s relentless.

But the relentless feeling is something I’m used to - something that I have accepted. 

Depression is relentless, depression does not give any quarter it just keeps coming and coming and coming. 

Anxiety is relentless it doesn’t care what kind of day you have, it doesn’t care if you’re doing the right thing and finally going to the doctor for the first time and more years than you should probably admit. 

So your blood pressure is through the roof so they now want you to do blood pressure tracking for the next two weeks. 

Your blood pressure is fine when you’re not at the doctor you’re not having to face the fact that you haven’t done a good job of taking care of your body when you’re not having to face the fact that they might know you’re not a good student. 

Suicidal ideation is relentless. It doesn’t stop even when you’re having a good day even when you think that you’ve managed your symptoms you’ve worked on your anxiety. 

You’ve taken steps to minimize the impact that your depression has on you. It’s always just there. 

Everybody else misses a red light and I think man that’s a bummer. For some reason. There’s a tiny little voice inside of my head. That’s says, That’s a bummer. probably should kill yourself. 

That’s not a thing that makes sense and it knows that it doesn’t make sense. 

It’s just playing the numbers game. It’s gonna pop up time and time again and just say maybe this is an option or have you tried this and it never stops cause you know eventually maybe, maybe you will maybe you’ll try - maybe you’ll give in so the heat right now is relentless heat index of 105 to 110. 

As fate would have it the AC in my truck broke last week it finally gave out has been given out for about two years, but it finally gave up the ghost cause it was working real hard and I don’t have the money to fix it. 

So I put my windows down and I live in a town where I drive stoplight to stoplight night exit the exit. 

I don’t have crosswinds every time I hit a red light. I sit there in the relentless heat made the relentless depression with anxiety relentlessly building up in that relentless voice. 

It just says here’s the exit if you want, you could do it if you want, here are five different ways you could. 

so the heat sucks and the relentlessness of it is exhausting and I am drinking more water than I ever have in my life just to stay none pruned, but the relentlessness of the heat has nothing and the battle I fight every day inside my head. 

So I’ll take heat index of 105 and 110. I’ll take drinking a half gallon of water just to be able to pee because the other relentlessness in my life - the other relentless forces - haven’t got me yet and neither will the heat.

An Emotional Vomit - a childish vent

It sucks when you have a solution to a problem, but you can’t actually use it because of life. Or in this case. Death. 

I am on the verge of a spiral; I am maybe in the lowest place I have been in a couple of years. 

I know I need to call someone. I know I need to talk. 

But the only person I want to call is my mom and I can’t call my mom because she’s dead dead so I’m supposed to call the spirits. 

I am supposed to ask God for help. 

I’m supposed to trust in a higher power.

 I am supposed to go back to the same dry well that didn’t save her life.

 I am supposed to trust these imaginary beings. 

These Santa Claus motherfuckers who didn’t show up - who didn’t even allow me to offer my soul for her. 

What kind of shit is that, Satan? 

Literally trading souls is like your main thing, you were just out of the office for all of Summer 2023? Should I have brought a fiddle?!

None of you imaginary motherfuckers, showed up and saved her, but someone has the gall to tell me to ask God for advice. 

And I use the word motherfuckers literally. How is an entire worldwide organization going to say that father, the son and the spirit are one and then one fathered the other. Literally mother fucking in a spiritual sense. Right? 

You think I still trust him? Or you think I still trust in it? 

Every time I have gotten on my knees and begged for someone else’s saving or for someone else not to die - I got nothing. 

Somehow people still think that this is the one thing you say “Just ask God, pray to God”

Every time, I pray to God the line has gone unanswered. 

It tells me I’m either blocked or there’s no one home. 

God is at best an absentee landlord. 

Jesus is the original Nepo Baby, a special child - One who got saddled with way too much responsibility. 

It doesn’t know how to fucking deal with it.

It got told: 

“You gotta go down there and save everyone’s lives from eternal damnation. I also didn’t give you a whole lot of training, so my bad.”

Thanks Jehovah. 

And I’m now here again in a spot where we think well just trust God, trust God's plan.

I don’t trust that motherfucker at all. 

I don’t even trust people. 

I don’t even trust that he exists. 

Let us be honest every time I’ve needed him he’s shown up absent. 

So, maybe my faith isn’t strong enough maybe if I just tried harder, the Easter bunny would be real -the tooth fairy would show up - the God that loves you would exist…

Believe whatever you wanna believe. 

I don’t have any belief left. 

*he says while hoping the thing he hates he believes in will answer* 

The Wolf Within

In a quiet village at the edge of a deep forest lived a young man named Corin. Most days he was steady, thoughtful, and kind. He worked hard, spoke gently, and kept his promises. But once each month, when the moon grew full and bright, Corin felt a stirring inside him — a restless, aching pull he could not explain.

His hands trembled.

His thoughts raced.

His heart beat like a drum calling him somewhere he could not name.

The elders whispered that this was the Wolf Week, a time when even the calmest villagers felt a wildness rise in their blood — a longing for closeness, for touch, for something warm to quiet the cold inside. Some tried to outrun it. Some tried to drown it. Some tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Corin tried all three.

One Wolf Week, desperate to escape the feeling, he ran into the forest. But the trees only echoed his heartbeat back to him. Another month, he tried to bury the feeling in work, but his tools slipped from his hands. Another, he tried to ignore it, but the longing grew teeth.

Finally, Corin went to the oldest woman in the village — Mira, the storyteller — and asked her how to tame the wolf.

Mira shook her head.

“You cannot tame what is natural,” she said. “But you can learn to guide it.”

“How?” Corin asked.

“By remembering that the wolf is not here to destroy you,” she said. “It is here to remind you that you are alive. The danger is not the wolf itself — it is letting the wolf choose your path.”

Corin listened.

So the next Wolf Week, when the longing rose, he did not run. He did not drown it. He did not pretend it wasn’t there. He simply sat with it. He walked the village paths. He breathed. He let the feeling pass through him like a storm that knew how to leave on its own.

And when the moon waned, Corin found that he was still himself — steady, thoughtful, kind — but wiser. He had learned that desire is not a curse, nor a command. It is a visitor. And visitors can be welcomed without being obeyed.

From that day on, whenever the Wolf Week came, Corin nodded to the feeling, honored it, and kept his hands on the reins of his own life.

And the villagers said:

“The man who knows his wolf is safer than the man who denies it.”

In a quiet village at the edge of a deep forest lived a young man named Corin. Most days he was steady, thoughtful, and kind. He worked hard, spoke gently, and kept his promises. But once each month, when the moon grew full and bright, Corin felt a stirring inside him — a restless, aching pull he could not explain.

His hands trembled.

His thoughts raced.

His heart beat like a drum calling him somewhere he could not name.

The elders whispered that this was the Wolf Week, a time when even the calmest villagers felt a wildness rise in their blood — a longing for closeness, for touch, for something warm to quiet the cold inside. Some tried to outrun it. Some tried to drown it. Some tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Corin tried all three

One Wolf Week, desperate to escape the feeling, he ran into the forest. But the trees only echoed his heartbeat back to him. Another month, he tried to bury the feeling in work, but his tools slipped from his hands. Another, he tried to ignore it, but the longing grew teeth.

Finally, Corin went to the oldest woman in the village — Mira, the storyteller — and asked her how to tame the wolf.

Mira shook her head.

“You cannot tame what is natural,” she said. “But you can learn to guide it.”

“How?” Corin asked.

“By remembering that the wolf is not here to destroy you,” she said. “It is here to remind you that you are alive. The danger is not the wolf itself — it is letting the wolf choose your path.”

Corin listened.

So the next Wolf Week, when the longing rose, he did not run. He did not drown it. He did not pretend it wasn’t there. He simply sat with it. He walked the village paths. He breathed. He let the feeling pass through him like a storm that knew how to leave on its own.

And when the moon waned, Corin found that he was still himself — steady, thoughtful, kind — but wiser. He had learned that desire is not a curse, nor a command. It is a visitor. And visitors can be welcomed without being obeyed.

From that day on, whenever the Wolf Week came, Corin nodded to the feeling, honored it, and kept his hands on the reins of his own life.

And the villagers said:

“The man who knows his wolf is safer than the man who denies it.”

Standing in the Rain, Wanting to Help

It’s raining at this live theater production in the park — a show I’m not actually part of, except to announce that it’s starting. I’m here, but I’m not in it. And I desperately wish I could help.

For the last thirty minutes, I’ve been drifting around the edges of the crew, offering to carry things, move things, hold things, anything. But every time, I’ve just been in the way. It’s the emotional equivalent of walking into an operating room and asking, “What can I do?” Everyone has a role. Everyone has a place. And I don’t have one.

It’s not even like me to think I could step into a group that’s spent weeks building symbiosis and collaboration and somehow contribute. But given where I’m at in life — having just lost the most important collaborative experience I’ve had in years — I keep reaching for connection, usefulness, belonging. And every attempt tonight has reminded me that I’m not part of this team.

So now I’m sitting in the backstage room, sheltered from the rain with the electronics and gear, feeling useless.

When you dedicate years of your life to one thing — one relationship, one future, one imagined life — it stops being just a thing. It becomes a structure you build your days around. And when that structure collapses, you suddenly see all the places you could have put your time, even if you wouldn’t have chosen differently back then.

You look at the plate of experience and weight and wonder:

Why did I do what I did?

Why did I pour so much into one thing?

Why does its failure feel like mine?

Yet you can’t be a part of a production that doesn’t have a place for you. You shouldn’t. You aren’t invited and you’re likely gonna make things worse. 

I don’t know that I would have done anything differently. But when you put so much focus on one thing that doesn’t survive, it’s hard not to feel like you didn’t fail. 

And standing here, watching a team move with purpose while I hover on the outside, I’m reminded of how many other things exist — and how many of them I never saw because I was so committed to the one that slipped away.

Tonight, I’m just trying to sit with that truth without letting it swallow me.

Mother’s Day and Emotions

I planned on trying to mostly ignore Mother’s Day again this year. It’s hard enough some days dealing with the grief of losing Mom. But my lil horoscope app had a different idea. 

“Healing comes when you are able to hold grief, love, anger and sadness all in the same container.” 

Since my plans of ignoring those feelings are now sunk, I thought I might try and use this outlet as that container and write about each of these emotions today. 

Grief: 

Really super glad we get to start with the emotion that I understand the least. In fact, let’s come back to it. 

Love: 

I love my mom. I loved my mom. I know I was loved by my mom. I love the life and support and understanding she gave to me. I love that at the end she was ready and at peace with her next soul’s next step. 

I love how she impacted the lives around her. I love that she continually forgave me for my antics, mistakes, mean spirited moments and outright bratty attitude. 

Anger: 

Now this is in my wheelhouse. I know a lot about anger. Had a short temper more then not in my life. But the anger that erupted in my after my mother died has been the hardest to control. My mother gave her life to others. As a teacher, as a friend, as a mother - she continually gave to others. Sometimes to her own detriment. Far too often, I know she put the needs and comfort of others first. 

Yet when it finally came time for her to retire and have some freedom and comfort for herself, cancer took that from her. It was exceedingly cruel of life and proof that karma and god either don’t exist or really suck at their duties. 

Sadness: 

As kid, a therapist once told my parents that my normal level of happiness was naturally just a bit sadder than everyone else. That me at normal or base status would be sad to most people. I’m not so sure that was a great thing for me to internalize but I did. 

If normal me was just a bit below, each death in my life has knocked me down another tenth of a percent or two. 

I get sad when I can’t call my mom. I get sad at all the times I didn’t call her when I could. I am sad that she can’t see me doing something I really enjoy as a job again. 

It makes me sad she can’t see her grandkids grow and be there for them. I am sad how much my relationship with the kids has deteriorated and sad that I can’t talk to her about it. I’m sad that I believe things would be different if she was still here. 

I’m sad every time I hear about someone missing their mother or getting to spend time with her. I’m sad that my faith has eroded to the point that I’m not hopefully of a magically reunion and pretty sure that if that is an option we might be in very different spiritual zip codes. 

The sadness hits without warning and while anger might get the blood boiling, the sadness has the greatest impact on me, in the moment and over time. 

Grief: 

Well shit. Time to try to define this one. I think that is the hardest part of death. I don’t really understand grief. I struggle with it daily and especially during holidays or anniversaries. 

I can’t really define it. I value love. I feel anger. I am engulfed in sadness. But grief. Grief feels like an action word, like a verb. I’m still learning how to do grief. To have grief. To experience grief. 

I feel like it’s a combination of the other three but somehow unique in and of itself. Yet the app tells me that if I somehow hold all these in a container I can heal. Like Corningware? A ziplock bag? Or does my heart count? 

I haven’t really thought of my heart as a vessel or container. And my thoughts and memories are too polluted and chaotic to be something that can contained or be contained. 

To me grief is best described as that container itself; that place I hold my love, anger and sadness about losing and remembering my mother. Yet it’s also supposed to be inside. 

Maybe it’s like putting Pandora’s box inside Schrödinger’s cat. Chaos wrapped in paradox. 

Yeah. That kinda works. 

It’s a puzzle that I lost the pieces to make whole.

One thing they don’t teach you in school—or in the media world where I learned most of what I know—is how to reconcile the past with the present.

Somehow that question led me to a bar with karaoke that started with Disney songs, moved into the most vulgar and aggressive sermon I’ve ever heard, and ended with a room full of half‑awake strangers singing an a cappella version of “Closing Time.”

Today began very differently. I woke up early, pulling myself out of a dream and into a reality I’m still struggling to accept and understand.

For years, I hated my life. My job. My situations and situationships. My problems and my prospects. I had people around me, but my personal economy of worth was, frankly, wrecked.

I had structure, but I kept missing the mark—at work, in relationships, everywhere. Still, I had people.

Now I’ve lost a lot of that structure. I’ve lost important people. I’ve failed in relationships in ways that can’t be fixed right now, and maybe can’t be fixed ever. And yet, for the first time in a long time, I have things I’m genuinely proud of. 

I have a job I love. I have prospects. I’m pushing toward new creative and event‑driven projects. I’m putting myself out there instead of just getting by. 

I’m in the most functional relationship I’ve probably ever had. It only took me until forty‑five to figure out how to be that person.

But the failures—jobs, relationships, timing, all the moments where I didn’t figure it out soon enough—don’t disappear. Some can’t be repaired.

I’m visiting family in Arizona with my dad, my brother, and my girlfriend. It’s been great. A genuinely good vacation. And still, my brain can’t stop circling the shadows in the room. 

I haven’t always been a good son. I haven’t always treated my dad with respect. I’ve been mean. Even if things are good now, the old stuff hangs there like frozen meat in a cooler I can’t stop punching.

I wasn’t a good brother either. I was so self‑absorbed I didn’t notice anything. My brother never came to me for advice when we were kids. That means either I had nothing to offer or I made him feel like he couldn’t come to me. That sticks.

Even though things are good now—better than they’ve been—we’ve all worked on it, and we’re still working on it, those shadows sit at the edge of my mind and poison every good feeling I have. It’s unfair. It’s human. And it happens anyway.

And then there’s the person I pushed away twenty‑six years ago by ghosting before ghosting even had a name. I was so wrapped up in myself I couldn’t even write a goodbye letter. 

Somehow she’s back in my life now, and maybe that’s the thing that makes me believe in God again—but not fully, because we still have a lot of unresolved history. All my relationship failures, most of my own making, all my communication breakdowns, all the selfish impulses I didn’t know I had but definitely indulged—they make me fear that I’m poison.

The overarching problem is the one everyone faces: how do we reconcile the present with the past and still believe in the future. 

How do we stop punishing ourselves for the mistakes, the missed chances, the shame that haunts us, without letting it ruin what’s good right now.

These five days with family have been great. But every night when I try to sleep, I think about the people who aren’t here. The failed relationship with my children, now adults. The fact that my mother is gone. The things I don’t get to fix. 

I push it away, take a walk, try not to let it ruin the moment—but I also don’t want to forget it, because it’s true. It’s real. And the worst part is that I can’t rationalize a way to fix it. I can’t accept it.

Which, in a ridiculous chutes‑and‑ladders way, brings me back to karaoke.

I walked in and people were screaming—well, singing—“I Hate Myself for Loving You.” Later someone did “Friends in Low Places.” And then there was the woman who had the worst karaoke experience I’ve ever seen, and yet the one I understood the most. 

She requested an eight‑minute worship song, and we all got eight minutes of therapy instead. It turned into a sermon, then a grievance, then something like a chaotic musical monologue. At one point she used words I don’t even know how to repeat. She was struggling. And there I was, just trying to decompress, while her trauma milkshake splattered across the entire bar.

It wasn’t enjoyable. Some of the words were indefensible. But I understood it. She was everywhere at once—emotion, memory, pain—pouring it out in a way you don’t usually hear on a karaoke mic. 

I’ve been going to karaoke for twenty‑seven years and I’ve never seen a host take the mic to argue with a singer about just singing the song. But in a lot of ways, it felt like my inner brain made visible. Messy. Uncomfortable. Borderline inappropriate. But honest. You could hear her consciousness spilling out.

And it reminded me: life is messy. Life is hard. Life gets worse when people die or when people decide they don’t want to be in your life anymore, even when they have valid reasons. 

But sometimes people don’t leave. 

Sometimes they come back. 

Sometimes they keep trying.

And just like that woman who turned karaoke into her personal pulpit and therapy session, that’s what it means to be human. We don’t get clean endings. We don’t get consistently happy stories. We don’t get what we expect. 

Sometimes you find yourself identifying with the person having a psychological breakdown in the middle of a praise song at karaoke, and that’s ok. If a bit awful in the moment. 

Like putting a puzzle together when you know you’ve lost some vital pieces. 

Take a walk

 About a month ago my truck wouldn’t start. It made me spiral. I didn’t know why. I didn’t have the money to fix it. But it was safe in a garage and I had planned my life to walk here before I was lucky enough to have a vehicle. 

For the last month I have been forced to walk more. To work, to the store, to go out. 

I have found it is the best thing that could have happened. 

When the truck broke, I began to spiral, so much of my personal freedom has always been tied into having a vehicle. 

Getting a license is a rite of passage. It is the first time as a youth you can have self determination. It is a societal demand, a badge of honor and a badge of shame when you can’t drive. 

The American dogma loves the car, the truck and all that it entails. You aren’t a real adult if you don’t drive. Jobs that don’t even need you to drive will not hire you if you can’t drive. They don’t trust you can make it to work without a vehicle. 

I felt a lot of shame when the truck broke and I couldn’t immediately fix it. 

But then in the midst of my spiral. I started walking again. 

Walking was a big part of me surviving during COVID and unemployment. I went almost 4 years without a car. No cost of insurance, garage, gas all that. 

But I saw so much of the world different when I started to walk. I slowed down and saw things differently. 

In the last month I have discovered that again. I moved here thinking I wouldn’t have a vehicle. I picked my apartment thinking I wouldn’t have a vehicle. 

In the last month I have seen more of my local community through walking than I did in the 13 months of driving. 

It has reminded me how the simple act of walking is a natural therapy. It provides perspective, exercise and peace. 

I am a better me after a walk. After seeing all the vilification of technology and screens over the past several decades, I think that we as a society have missed the point. 

The screens are the red herring. The inherent problem is that we stopped moving, stopped being physical beings, became click and stick. 

I have been better for the walking in the last month. I need to walk. It helps me regulate my darkness, my chaos and makes me breathe. 

Maybe. Maybe. It’s not technology that is killing us. But our lack of connection to being a physical being. Take a walk. See the world that you can’t see when you’re paying attention to the road. 

Forget the shame of shiny vehicles and status. And just take a walk.