Category: Blog Posts

On broadcasting grief in the social media and COVID-19 Age

Hey, can we talk for a second about something?

It’s really weird to watch a person’s funeral on Facebook Live.

Zoom funerals are one thing, wholly made necessary by the government’s continued insistence on fucking up literally every aspect of their pandemic response at seemingly every level (although that may be improving, hooray?). But when a funeral home can’t even facilitate long-distance mourning, it shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of the deceased’s children to broadcast a funeral live on social media.

Except that’s exactly what my cousin did for me and a few others who couldn’t attend my uncle’s funeral on Wednesday. I don’t know if the phone was on a tripod or if he was holding it in his hand, but I watched the sermon from my desk on Wednesday afternoon during my lunch break, a brief interlude of grieving stuffed in between two conference calls. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and prayed at the same time, scarfing down my meal so I could have time to prepare for the next mundane meeting.

You’re supposed to be able to take time off in a situation like this, and my company gives generous bereavement leave for family members, including aunts and uncles. But when you’re stranded in your home and state, unable to gather with your loved ones in an outpouring of solemn sadness, it doesn’t make much sense to take the days. So I did what I had to do: I went to work (in my basement office) and ate my lunch (at my basement desk) and I watched them bury my uncle on a broadcast that would be saved for future viewing, if that’s what the user wanted.

Juxtaposed with the absolute joy that was the end of Donald Trump’s reign of terror earlier in the morning, attending a funeral in the afternoon felt like a wholly alien experience. I didn’t even change clothes; I was wearing jeans and a sweater, my attempt at dressing business casual to maintain some sort of focus that flared out almost immediately after logging in for the day. Week. Month. Year.

It has been, to paraphrase from Beck’s 1994 album Stereopathic Soulmanure, a fucked up day. Week. Month. Year.

I pushed my keyboard away for a brief second on Wednesday to try to examine the absurdity of my anger over the situation. People can’t attend funerals for a variety of reasons every day. Why should my anger or palpable sadness be so different and unique? I can’t lie and say that my uncle and I were particularly close, but I am close with my aunt, who helped raise me over the course of several summers when my mom was busy working. That I couldn’t be there with her and my cousin and the rest of my family is just heartbreaking. Robbed even of this

But the fact that I really had to sit there and unpack that information, to sit and deal with it, before picking back up with work, speaks to the sort of dread destructivity of productivity culture. I know without a shadow of a doubt that my boss would’ve had zero problem approving any kind of bereavement or emergency leave for me, because we had that frank conversation earlier in the year when my parents were diagnosed with COVID.

The question is, however, what good it does, when you can’t go anywhere? When grief feels like sitting so far from home, helpless and hopeless.

I keep praying that no one else I know succumbs to COVID or dies while were’ in the final throes of this whole crisis, because worse than the sadness that would come with loss is the unbearable, hate-fueled anger I’d feel at being unable to do anything about it in the long run.

Instead, I suppose the only thing I can do is to face the future with some sort of diminished optimism. Things will improve because they have to, and the bald-faced competency of the past two days will be an indicator that things are moving forward, albeit sluggishly.

It doesn’t make it hurt any less, though, and it definitely doesn\’t make the anxiety fade away any faster.

Required Reading

I read a lot of Miles Klee because he’s really fucking good, and this piece about how it’s okay to be slightly pessimistic in the age of the Biden Administration is, as always, a real home run.

Just like MEL Magazine, I love the shit out of Luke O’Neil and Welcome to Hell World and the latest installment, a series of interviews and stories from people who have never been able to take a day off from work while sick, is as much of a gut punch as other pieces.

As far as books go, I am in the process of working very slowly (like a few pages a night) through the James Victore guide to creativity, Feck Perfuction. I don’t expect to have it finished by the end of the month because I’m reading at such a stutter-stop pace. Blame the internet.

Obviously you need to listen to Amanda Gorman read her poem, but if you somehow slept during the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President this week, you missed one of the most stirring recitations of modern poetry in recent history.

Musical Interlude

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of music from or immediately close to my high school years as some sort of comfort food or emotional support blanket, and inspired by that I made this admittedly terrible playlist full of power-pop anthems. Give it a listen.

Final Thoughts

We really do feel like we’ve turned a sort of corner in the past few days with the end of the Trump administration. I feel a guarded sense of optimism about things, as if there are actual adults in control and that we may have—for the first time in an actual decade—a real chance at compassionate progressive public policy that can make concrete improvement to people’s lives. The jury is still out on how badly the Democratic Party will squander that, but for now I’ll be content to crack a half smile.

Thanks, Bean Dad, for making me feel like a damn champion when it comes to parenting today.

So my original plan had been to write a new edition of just words, writing—complete with the usual recommended reading, music, and miscellaneous links—to go live on Thursday or Friday. Despite doing my best to write regularly, I didn’t want to inundate people with content.

Then this whole Bean Dad thing blew up and my son and I got into several yelling matches about topics including, but not limited to: nap time, bath time, potty time (x3), reading books, singing songs before bed, and other subjects I have long since forgotten.

So I wrote some stuff about parenting, being distracted, yelling, and generally feeling like a not great dad on a day when some real jerk dads decided to pull down their pants and expose their whole butts, present company included.

You know, there are days—a lot of days—where other dudes deciding to fuck up at fatherhood so much makes me feel a lot better about my own parenting skills.

Take today’s Main Character of Twitter, Bean Dad—also known as John Roderick—a dude I’ve never heard of before this morning and am only tangentially aware of. I didn’t even read the entire “Bean Dad” thread because I was up at 7:10 this morning with a toddler who just wanted to sit in the basement and watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and/or Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and play with blocks and Play-Doh at the same time.

But apparently he’s a real shitheel of a dude even when he’s not making his kids’ life unnecessarily difficult.

You can also take a nice long stroll through the specimens of parenting excellence that sometimes get collected in my personal favorite section of Reddit, Am I the Asshole?, where women will often talk about the thoroughly insane and often abusive shit their husbands inflict upon them and their children and then ask if, somehow, they are in the wrong. Occasionally these missives will be written from the perspective of the children themselves, either adults or teens. You’ve probably already seen the “best of” compilations available on Twitter and on other websites. Needless to say, on any given day where I feel that I’ve missed the mark when it comes to being a loving, compassionate father, I just head over there for some edification.

But the reason I’m writing today is not, in fact, to say that I’m the best dad on the planet.

I’ve spent a lot of time today raising my voice (read: yelling) at my toddler, who you may affectionally know as Benji/Banjo/my idiot son. Sometimes I tweet about things he does, or I post photos of him on Instagram because I think he is the singularly most adorable human being on the face of the planet.

He’s also two-and-a-half years old, which means he’s a raging sociopath.

I’m not gonna talk about the actual reasons for the yelling, because—as we have discovered—mining your kids’ actions for content with any specificity is a real dick move. Just know that it was consistently naughty behavior that created cumulative frustration. Posting a fire hose of photographs and videos to a public Instagram is bad enough, but going into details about his behavior could come back to be harmful or embarrassing later. That’s why I try to stick to generalities, such as complaining about the favorite song of the day, reasons he’s crying, etc.

The problem right now, however, is that parenting a toddler is hard. Parenting a toddler in the midst of a global pandemic is parenting on EXTREME HARD MODE+! Everyone knows this. Even people without kids.

I don’t like yelling for a lot of reasons, chief among them that it doesn’t seem to do a damn bit of good and—if anything—is pretty traumatizing for my kid. It doesn’t even make me feel that good. But today I found myself in a feedback loop where I just. could. not. stop. Maybe it’s the four days in a row of constant toddler-wrangling, but the back half of my vacation has not, in fact, felt like a vacation. I often joke that I refuse to take days off unless they’re days that my son is in daycare, because having him around is actually more stressful right now than work.

That’s…weird, right?

Speaking of daycare: We delayed daycare for three months and felt helpless as we watched our son struggle with speech development, and when we decided to finally roll the dice and put him in daycare in June, he almost immediately started thriving.

Now he never shuts the hell up, and it is alternately adorable and infuriating.

That is not to say that we have it bad, because there are plenty of parents who can’t even put their kids in daycare for safety or monetary reasons. Daycare’s hellaciously expensive, even for three days a week, and our decision to do so wasn’t taken lightly. Still, replacing three days of copious screen time with consistent attention and direction from childcare professionals has done wonders.

But I am not a professional educator, and I’m not a patient person. This is why Saturday and Sunday mornings are typically a nonstop cavalcade of cartoons while Daddy reads books on his phone. I’d try to read physical books, but he always wants to join in or rip them out of my hands. We honestly do pretty good at this point, because he’s generally pretty self-sufficient and I get to drink coffee and wake up slowly, and then all at once.

The thing is, I don’t know about the longterm damage of exposure to screen time, and I can’t tell you if watching a lot of (educational) television is really all that harmful. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and I think I’m okay, but I might not exactly the best sample to examine. Nearly two decades of steady internet use have essentially ruined my attention span. I’ve tabbed out of writing this essay at least five times since starting it.

What I can tell you, however, is this: It’s hard to create activities for someone who gets distracted two minutes after they start doing something. I get mental whiplash as we pinball from wanting to build a “real tall tower” with Lego to cooking plastic food at our IKEA kitchen.

As another example, I built a fort with this awesome kit yesterday morning and by the time I was done and had the sheet thrown over it, we didn’t want to play inside it anymore.

It’s a pretty amazing thing to watch your kid begin to engage with the world, to show intellectual curiosity and begin to make connections about circumstances; to make requests and asset their independence. It’s also really confusing to try to figure out why a desire to play with a new train set received for Christmas will evaporate in an instant, to be replaced by an arbitrary affection for peeling stickers off and slapping them on a blank piece of printer paper.

I don’t know if I have the elasticity to go back and forth between these activities like a rubber band, which is hilarious given my penchant for switching between apps on my phone on a minute-by-minute basis.

But let’s go back to the part about me feeling like a bad father for yelling and nearly losing my shit several times this afternoon, often over minimal stuff that snowballs.

What’s the remedy here?

How do you get someone who has difficulty registering consequences and connections between events and behavior to, well, register consequences for behavior? Bribery only gets so far, and there’s not enough shelf space in this house to put thrown toys in time out in perpetuity.

No one has all the answers, but I think we’d appreciate it if we could find an answer that seemed to work for longer than a few minutes.

Of course, no answer works for longer than a few minutes because—as Erin has rightly pointed out—short attention spans are normal and the remedy is to just deal with it. It’s totally typical for kids to move from one item to the next and not settle down and just fully exhibit the behavior of sub-atomic particles that just never, ever stop vibrating for one second.

There is no easy solution to this. It’s just—much like the way Banjo approaches the world—one minute at a time.

One. Long. Infinite. Minute. At. A. Time.

Next time on just words, writing, the subject of the day is an introduction to the Retail Therapy series, where I’ll start putting down all the ridiculous anecdotes I have from a decade of retail work. I’ll also hopefully, by that point, have read something worth sharing.

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being homebound for NYE? no big deal in THIS house.

We watched our steady flow of customers slow to a thin trickle as the clock wound down to midnight, and at around 11:30 or so Bruce slipped off to the back to go grab a bottle of bourbon he’d stashed in a backpack in the employee bathroom. The store manager was gone and our district manager wouldn’t be making an appearance, so we figured…what the hell?

We started drinking not long after, even though the store didn’t close until midnight and we’d all be in deep shit if we got caught. But we didn’t care. We mixed the Maker’s Mark—or it might have been Knob Creek, maybe—with Dr. Pepper swiped from the back of the store’s soda coolers and partially emptied in the bathroom sink.

Mixing the booze with the soda gave us just enough plausible deniability when it came to drinking on the clock. That’s what we tried to tell ourselves, anyway. At least up until the point where we’d drank so much that you could really tell that we’d started the party a little early. I called Erin and told her to come up to hang out so that we could share a kiss as the clock struck twelve.

She asked if I’d been drinking, and I lied.

When she got to the store about ten minutes later, she just rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “I can smell you guys.”

She still kissed me, though.

That was maybe the last New Year’s party I went to, I think, and I was paid to be there. But money aside, getting mildly intoxicated in a video store after hours doesn’t rank up there on the list of great days. It wasn’t the most depressing NYE ever, either, but it’s pretty damn close.

For example, one year in college I went home for the winter break with designs on getting back together with my lone high school ex-girlfriend, and all signs pointed toward that happening until sometime just before midnight, when she spirited away upstairs out of a mixture of apprehension and some weird feelings about Jesus.

We went to church the next morning and sat next to one another. It was fine.

The following year I was in the middle of a prolonged breakup, which was drawing out in one awkward death rattle. My mom wouldn’t let me go back to Cincinnati to visit my girlfriend, who I’d bailed on just a week and a half earlier because I got tired of sleeping on cat hair covered couch cushions in her sister’s living room. We fought on the phone a lot that week, which was hard because she was on a prepaid Virgin Mobile phone. Every text message and five minute phone chat where I begged for forgiveness added to the list of microaggressions I was guilty of; another check mark on the list of reasons to cut me loose.

Instead of making a last minute road trip, I ended up spending that night with some friends riding around Vincennes, eating Mr. Gatti’s pizza, and just having a good time.

In hindsight, it was the better decision.

But really I haven’t been to an end-of-year celebration in over a decade, and honestly it’s not that big of a deal? Nine times out of ten I end up playing video games on my couch until just before midnight, when I’ll flip the TV input over to cable and get reminded that Dick Clark’s been dead for a long time. Then I’ll go back to video games or—more accurately, since becoming a parent—I’ll just turn the TV off and go to bed.

Erin and I aren’t big party people anyway. We’re content to pass the time with books or movies or TV shows. And that was even before we became parents. Despite living in a decent-sized American city that hosts several NYE gatherings, we’ve never actually gotten dressed up to go out. What’s the point, anyway? It’s cold and dreary and expensive. I can get drunk in my basement for less than the cost of an Uber downtown.

I have more friends in Kansas City than ever, and ostensibly could very well host a game night or some other subdued activity, but I haven’t done that yet. And I sure as hell won’t do it this year, not with COVID-19. The temptation is there to try and get some friends together to play D&D over Zoom or have an internet-facilitated game night, but that just feels like too much effort to muster while on vacation. 

It really doesn’t matter, anyway. If anything I’ll end up in bed by 11:30 because my son doesn’t go to daycare on Thursdays and he’ll have me ragged by 9:00pm.

I am permanently tired.

With the pandemic in full swing (and probably getting worse), I’ll be spending a quiet evening at home with my wife, sleeping kid, and dog. We’ll watch Schitt’s Creek or Law & Order or maybe even finally catch up on The Mandalorian. I’ll be doing my best to get one final recharge in before starting work in earnest next week, kicking some ass and taking names for the biggest client projects I’ve ever worked on.

See? In keeping with my last letter, I’m tooting my own horn more.

Stuff I Enjoyed This Week

Essays/Blogs

I’ll 100% admit that I started following Heather Sundell a few years ago because she was featured in Me In My Place, that weird photography website where women posed for photographs in their own homes (and in various states of undress). But she’s a fucking phenomenal writer, and this week she talked about the struggles of navigating parenthood during the pandemic.

I think a lot about how weird it is going to be re-introducing my own son to so many of the things I took for granted prior to this year, including eating in restaurants and visiting shopping malls. While he still goes to daycare three days a week and sees his grandparents on Thursdays and Fridays, his world is still comparatively small, until it’s not. In this essay, Heather talks about that feeling of engaging with all the tiny details that blow her son’s mind and reevaluating her relationship with them.

Books

Because I was a weird kid, I had my parents rent Nobody’s Fool—the Paul Newman movie—for me when it came out on VHS in 1995, although I think it may have been because I just wanted to see Melanie Griffith’s bare breasts?

Anyway, I don’t remember anything about the movie, but I have seen Richard Russo’s novel (which the film is based on) on a handful of recommended book lists, so I decided to give it a whirl. I’m a handful of pages in and I haven’t stopped reading it yet.

Music

A few nights ago I had to spend some time on client work that was urgent, and the best way for me to get a lot of writing done is to zone out with a solid playlist. Spotify gets a lot of well-deserved flak for its payments to artists and the way it’s turned music curation from a personalized behavior into something that’s guided by algorithms, but the Lo-Fi Beats playlist they created is really good. I’ve been using it for over a year now when I need to be head down without lyrical distractions. And because there’s over 16 hours of music, you won’t have to worry about tracks repeating through your work day.

Other Things

My gaming group is looking to reconvene sometime in the middle of January, and I’m thrilled as hell to run them through the campaign provided with the Alien RPG quickstart, Chariot of the Gods. My physical copy of the kit arrived last week, and even though we exclusively play online, I really like the idea of having the physical materials here in front of me so I’m not taking up valuable screen space with PDFs. Like most gaming materials made by Fria Ligan, I’m finding it’s some quality, well-produced stuff. It doesn’t feel cheap. Which is good, because it wasn’t.

Because I’m a hoarder of this kind of stuff now, I’m also reading through the rulebook for Kult: Divinity Lost, which is a super fucked up Swedish RPG that’s geared toward body and religious horror, among other aspects. It’s one of the most beautiful sourcebooks I’ve ever picked up. As much as I like the portability of digital files, it’s really nice to be able to thumb through high-quality books, and this one is no exception.

Final Thought(s)

I’ve been trying to decide what kinds of stuff to regularly write about in this space, and whether or not it’d serve me creatively to throw fiction up based on prompts, to use it as a workshop of sorts for non-fiction pieces, or…stuff like what I’ve done the past few times I’ve clicked the publish button. I’ve also been kicking around the idea of working through some stories about my life in retail—thank you, Anthony Bourdain—but I’m not sure how many people would be entertained by reading about the worst that customer service has to offer. Then again, the Tales from Retail subreddit has over 600,000 members.

Anyway, if that’s something you’re interested in reading and you haven’t already, consider subscribing with the button below.

Just talking about New Year\’s Resolutions and some stuff I read this week that I liked a lot.

Well, I haven’t written one of these in a while. 2021 is next week and one of my goals—which I’ll talk about below—is to write more. So that’s what I’m doing. If you want to see how long this lasts, go ahead and subscribe so I can spam you every now and then.

Here we go:

Shit to Fix in 2021

Christmas is over. I’ve just finished scarfing down a bunch of cookies, ice cream, and a sleeve of crackers, so let’s talk about New Year’s Resolutions.

They’re garbage.

Every year I set out to do a thousand different things—most of which I either half-ass or abandon a few days in—and fall into the same old routines and comfortable habits after a while. I start working out (either at home or in a gym) and then something happens (hey, COVID-19 and wisdom teeth removal) and I fall off the wagon. Owing to screen time notifications and the desire to be a more present parent, I’ll delete social media apps from my phone and reinstall them a week or two later.

Or, in another development, I say I’m going to read more books. But I end up distracted and fail to pick up more than a handful of books over the course of a year. Maybe I tell myself I’m going to write more blog posts or email newsletters that aren’t client-related, and then I never write a word outside of work hours for over a month or I start an essay or story, give it a few minutes, then give up and go back to playing video games or watching Law & Order reruns.

Spoiler alert: I am watching Law & Order right now. It’s the one where Elliott Gould is an accountant who guns down some would-be robbers. I have seen it at least two or three times in the past year, but I can’t actually tell you what happens. Given that I’m writing while watching it? Still won’t have a clue until the next time it’s on.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah. The resolutions.

There are two competing schools of thought regarding aspects of personal growth and any associated projects. One of them says that you need to keep your shit secret, because telling people about your goals or work immediately puts pressure on you to do that work. The other one—which I am very clearly fond of—is to show your work: To share your processes and to let people know what you’re doing because people might be interested in helping you get it done, or at the very least be interested in the work itself.

Let’s say I’m in the latter camp.

There are some things I’d like to do this year, but I’m not calling this list a batch of  “resolutions.” One reason is because I’m starting a few days before the end of 2020. The other is to avoid tempting fate. If it’s not a resolution for the New Year, there isn’t as much pressure to perform, right? I can quietly go about my work. Or, in the case of 2020, I can tread water and survive and be pleasantly surprised when I’m promoted to a new role with even more exciting things on the horizon.

But because I want to talk about goals, let’s get to it. Here’s my list of shit to work on for 2021:

Confidence

I’m really fucking good at my job.

You wouldn’t know it if you asked me because I tend to wander around with something that could be mistaken for either modesty or insecurity, but I’m ridiculously good at it. I can turn around just about any piece of content a client needs in a day; sometimes I can push out a blog post in a little less than an hour, especially if it’s a topic that I know a lot about. And given that I work with three specific client verticals, I’ve done a lot of research into topics specific to them.

But something happened a long time ago, probably owing to that time I got kicked out of the school of education at UE. Maybe it was the time I got fired at Fossil or laid off from my last two major writing gigs. Either way, I kind of stopped believing in myself for a while. I started requiring a lot of external validation for proof that I’m good at what I do.

You know what, though? I’m an absolute monster when it comes to developing meaningful content strategies for my clients. There are people who trust me with the management, formation, and implementation of digital content for multi-million dollar companies.

That shit is wild and will never cease to amaze me.

The least I can do is to listen to people like my boss and my coworkers and believe it. Buying into my own hype is going to pay huge dividends in 2021.

I can feel it.

Time Management

Despite the fact that I get my work done, I am atrocious at time management. I’d probably get a lot more work done if I didn’t spend so much time reading tech news or shopping for RPG rulebooks or learning about obscure Scandinavian speed metal, which is a subject that has literally never come up in a conversation. Maybe I’ll spend less time reading Wikipedia and more time reading books to make me a better writer.

Writing for Fun

Speaking of writing, I’d really like to do more of it for my personal enjoyment. Screenplays, short fiction, nonfiction…it doesn’t matter. I’d just like to spend a little more time doing it. Nothing crazy, maybe 2000 words a week that aren’t related to storage, banking, or pest control.

The other part of this puzzle is publishing more. Whether that’s in the form of email newsletters or self-publishing or—God forbid—pitching to outlets and literary magazines, I’d like to push my writing out in multiple directions or venues. I owe it to myself to improve and do that.

More Intentional Reading

Time is the most valuable currency a person has, and reading takes a lot of it. So it’s not great to waste it reading books you hate. Look, I’m not in school anymore. Assigned reading—for the most part—isn’t a thing I have to worry about. I started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing last night before bed. I got about 35 or 40 pages in and was bored as all hell. Look, I love some of his work. I think he’s a powerful writer. But I’m not going to spend time hating something I’m reading because I’m bored. So I put it down and moved onto something else (Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce, if you’re curious). Is it the highbrow kind of philosophical, intense writing McCarthy does? Hell no. But is it fun and entertaining? Yes. Will I pick something up from it that I can use in my own work? Probably.

Either way, I’m working on reading more things that I like. I’m not setting a numerical goal, though. I just want to read more books of all stripes. And since we’re talking about books and reading…

Stuff That Stuck With Me This Week

I read a handful of books this week, in keeping with getting a head start on that last goal. I finally finished Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, which is parts hilarious and sad and a stark reminder of what we are all missing by his absence. I also took some time to dig into two books by Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artistand Show Your Work!, which are two pretty great meditations on creativity that you can read in the course of an afternoon if you don’t have a ton of interruptions.

I also spent some time with this recent Welcome to Hell World by Luke O’Neil, in which a bunch of different writers grappled with the most batshit moments of the Trump era, including the fast food banquets and the Muslim ban. If you’re not subscribing to Hell World, you’re missing out on lots of great writing. It’s worth the price of admission.

I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Helen Petersen, whose work on Millennial burnout has just been vital this year, especially given that the barriers between work and home have eroded for so many of us professionals. She has a piece in the New York Times about office culture and what it might look like on the other side of the pandemic. It raises some really good questions about what we really want when it comes to “going back.”

While writing this post I actually stopped watching Law & Order and instead finished up the HBO Max documentary about Heaven’s Gate, whose website is still a thing you can visit. It’s a wild, wild ride and definitely worth the four hours or so if you can’t think of anything else to watch. Or if you’re not interested in streaming Wonder Woman 1984, which was a decent enough movie to check out on a Friday night.

If you’re looking for something to listen to while working next week or even this week, I suggest checking out the Persona 5 soundtrack. If I haven’t been listening to evermore or Christmas music this week, it’s been that. It’s really good in all kinds of fun ways.

You can buy it through the Apple Music store or you can just listen to it below.

Final Thought(s)

I’ve pretty much given up Twitter for now because, as I’ve written before, being logged in for too long tends to turn me into a meaner person and it also acts as a major distraction. In the past few weeks I’ve started winnowing down my other social media feeds, too, deleting something like 150 Facebook friends who have either died, deactivated their accounts, or I’d fallen well out of touch with. Instagram’s harder to parse, but I’ve cut down on the accounts I follow there, too.

Something I’d like to do in 2021 (or when it’s safe enough to do so)  is to be more intentional with my relationships, both online and offline. Hopefully meet some of the people I’ve known in Kansas City for the past decade but have always been too chickenshit to get together with.

If you’re the kind of person who makes New Year’s Resolutions, I hope you do well with yours and that you have great success in 2021, or at the very least that you’re able to keep your head above water long enough to come out better and stronger on the other side.

home is where I want to be but I guess I\’m already there

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Facebook is really good at lots of things, from turning your relatives’ into completely unlikeable cultists to giving yourself an inferiority complex when you compare yourself to other people, but for my money its best feature is definitely the Memories function. That’s where it shows you on a daily basis what you’ve posted or been tagged in for the past few years, and as someone who joined Facebook in 2005 mine goes back pretty far. I like to look at the Memories tab because I like to see all the cringeworthy stuff I’ve said online since joining. It’s like a carousel of bad posts and jokes.

Anyway, according to Facebook—which is apparently my primary method of remembering things—it’s been 10 years since Erin and I packed up the contents of our short-lived apartment in Cincinnati and moved out to the suburbs of Kansas City. It wasn’t a hard choice to make, but it was a big one, and in the past decade it’s one I have never once regretted.

what makes a home?

I don’t know if it’s true for other people, but after you live in a place for long enough there is a subtle shift that happens within you; a quiet sort of acceptance that transforms into happiness. It honestly happened the same weekend that Erin and I moved to Cincinnati. We’d just finished cleaning up our Evansville apartment, and she’d gone on ahead while I handled a few final things in town. By the time I got back to Florence, KY, a few hours later, there was an overwhelming sense of giddy excitement. Even though I didn’t have a job or any immediate prospects, I knew I was coming home.

And then six months later, Erin took her job out here, and I came along. I didn’t have anything lined up this time, either, but I knew I wanted to be with Erin and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, so I moved out to Kansas—a far cry from the Chicago and New York post-grad lives I’d seen myself living as high school senior—and immediately fell in love with it. Maybe it was the fact that the city was just big enough without being overwhelming, or the fact that Erin’s whole extended family invited me in with open arms, but there was never a moment—even in those first few months when I made shit pay at two retail jobs—where I didn’t feel like this place was home.

In fact, visiting my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles in Indiana for four or five days at a time did more to underscore that fact than anything else. You get used to a certain standard after a while, and I’m not just talking about reliable cell service or an abundance of chain restaurants and upscale retail. I used to drive 25 minutes for Taco Bell or to go to Walmart. After living in Kansas City for a few months, that kind of a commute felt like a real hassle.

(This is stupid, by the way. With traffic, it can still take me 10-15 minutes to get to Taco Bell. And I still get stopped by trains on the way to Target.)

The first time I needed Google Maps to help get to a place I’d been at least a hundred times before, I felt a real sense of shame. I’d walked and driven on these streets thousands of times. I knew the way by heart, if not some degree of trial and error. And yet I needed my phone to remind me.

you are a tourist

It’s more than that. If it were simply about getting lost on the way to a bar downtown or needing a quick map to jog your memory, it wouldn’t be so strange.

But it’s not just about navigating spaces from your past by some degree of memory and intuition. You don’t just question the surroundings. You must examine yourself among them. Time has passed for both parties—the space and the person inside it—but it has done so by varying degrees. You no longer know if the Mexican restaurant on the highway still exists. You did not watch the old grocery store close down and get boarded up, and so when You pass it by on your way through town and see that it is closed, but you do not know when it happened. You lack the context of your former home’s recent history. You do not recognize the place. It is alien, just as you—with the experiences you’ve had outside its confines—are alien to it.

You are no longer just a visitor, you are a tourist. And much as a tourist making a seasonal pilgrimage to your former haunts and finding them boarded up or closed, your old stomping grounds must adjust to you. There is a rubber banding that happens for those you come in contact with when visiting. They ask about your wife and kids, your job, how you like it “out there.”

It’s great, you say. You love it. And in fact, as you’re awkwardly making small talk over a cash register or in the thin aisle of the liquor store, you think about how much you cannot wait to slingshot back out into orbit. Back to the relative sanity of places that are more intimately familiar to you; that you can navigate a combination of sheer touch and muscle memory.

Or is this just me? Am I the only one who can’t remember how to get to Walmart?

If you had told me ten—even fifteen—years ago that I wouldn’t just move to the suburbs in Kansas, but that I would love it here, I would tell you that you were crazy. I wanted to go to film school! I was going to be a big time writer! Fill in the blanks with all kinds of other dreams, as if I can’t write a script on my phone or stay up late penning a long, meandering essay about how much I love living here.

But you wouldn’t be crazy. Not really. I can’t imagine myself anywhere else. I love our football team and our baseball team and our soccer team; I have met some very lovely people here, and I have not met (physically) some very lovely people but have talked to them regularly, just the same.

Like with any place, there are ups and downs. I have built and cratered a promising retail career here, but I’ve also started a whole life in digital marketing and parenting here, too. I am thriving, I think, despite the existential malaise of living in a pandemic and wondering when I will see my parents again without the cold separation of a fuzzy FaceTime or video call. When I will give them a hug.

Home is a weird thing right now, to be frank, because it is so tied up with work. I move between the spaces on a literal set of stairs several times a day. Sometimes the division is fuzzy and feels a little like a prison. But I’m doing my best. I have done my best for the better part of a decade, building this quiet little suburban life.

This is my beautiful wife. This is my large automobile. This is my beautiful house. I know exactly how I got here.

Anyway, here’s a different Talking Heads song. Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/JccW-mLdNe0