by matt werbach

I decided to get healthier so I quit the gym. I live in an area that has long been known as the playground of Portland. We windsurf, kiteboard, SUP, kayak, raft, cycle, mountain bike, hike, trail run, mountaineer, paraglide, ski, snowboard.

The entry fee for these sports is usually prohibitive. I settled on trail running three years ago for the cost of a decent pair of the previous year’s NorthFace single track shoes. I enjoyed all of it except the really hard, taxing parts, but when you live in the mountains there are a lot of hard taxing parts, so I joined the gym.

I went loyally for three years. I improved my daily life. At its worst it was a necessary chore with decent air conditioning, and at its best it was an escape when my company closed and anxiety issues rose like flood waters.

I have to get outside more. Ever said that to yourself?

I’ve had a good year or so now. I started attacking and addressing the things in my life that needed that attention. I have treated my anxiety and slowly but steadily built my freelance business. I also started cutting the things out of my life that I did not need. Life is composed mostly of the things we do not need.

My Jeep hasn’t moved since Thursday of last week. My bike has seen more miles in a month than it had in three years. I live for warm summer drives in the Jeep with the top down and Ann in the passenger seat photographing the blur of surrounding orchards. She has to wear hats to keep the hair from her face. She is so beautiful in a ball cap.

I walked to the bank today. The mailbox. The store. In one trip. In less than an hour.

The downtown here is less than half a mile from my home but I am five hundred feet higher. When it snows lightly in my front yard, it is often raining in town.

I was wearing the NorthFace single tracks to the gym. They are tearing at the right toe. I told Ann it felt good to actually wear through a pair of tennis shoes. That should not be a rarity. Secretly I wished I had worn them through on the trail and not the treadmill or squat machine.

Sunday and Monday the trail was warm and covered in sun. My fear of rattlesnakes has subsided with more distance from my run-in two Octobers ago. The river is running high as the snowline lifts along the side of Mount Hood like window blinds slowly raised. Indian Creek was a shush until it joined the Hood River. They roared together past me and out to the silent and steady Columbia as I dodged pointed rocks and thorny new growth where small things made small sounds that did not startle me.

A peace has come. I do not know the length of its stay. It takes work to bring it on and even more work to keep it. There is mud on my NorthFace single tracks. Today, in my online philosophy course, I realized something, but I have since misplaced it.

Yesterday I cracked a Thich Nhat Hanh book on mindfulness that I’ve owned for years and never explored. I spent the rest of the day doing one thing at a time. Ann came home and found a bunch of silverware in the spatula drawer. I think they were from the day before.

Today I never turned the TV on. I am in the middle of Lena Dunham’s new New Yorker piece. It’s on dogs. Those are three great things. I was drawn to write. I left the magazine open next to me with a candle burning. The morning rain has given way to some blinding glare as the sun hits the wet rooftop of my neighbor. I don’t want to stand to close the shades. I am basking instead.

I really thought I would miss Facebook.

When I want social interaction, I ride my bike down to The Farm Stand and talk with Robert and Doug and whoever else comes in for a sandwich or for a beer or for reasons like mine.

I pulled the bike out of the shed and dropped forty hard-earned bucks on a pair of new pedals with straps to help me overcome the hills in this town. I have had the bike for six years now—didn’t touch it the last two. I’ve never had to replace a tube. I have a lot of trouble feeling relaxed when I have the helmet and the lock and a bag to carry my stuff so it doesn’t fall from my pockets while I ride. There is no easy way to look cool while locking up your bike in public.

I’m alright when I’m actually on the bike. I navigate defensively. I like to glide left and right around the potholes in gravel parking lots or take a curb standing, absorbing the shock effortlessly. I signal my turns when Ann is around, but during the week I do not.

Hanh shares a few simple anecdotes in the opening of the book. If I’m ever in prison I’ll turn to Buddhism.

I don’t like the way we are treating each other. I mean globally and in the neighborhood. Robert was talking about small town life the other day and he said, “When I’m behind someone here and they’re going really slow my first thought is, ‘Can I help them? Are they lost? Is it an old lady?’” That is not my first thought when I want to go somewhere and someone is making it difficult. Do you think Rob really sees it that way?

There is a lot of really fucked up stuff going on in the world right now. A lot of older people or people who think they’re older or those who hide behind simple skepticism will say it has always been that way.

Bradley Manning just did three years in prison before his trial started. He took a utilitarian philosophy into the military where absolute rights rein. He probably knew he would pay the price.

Guantanamo is still open. U.S. funding helped Islamic extremists who blame the West for their suffering gain an Al Qaeda-like hold in northern Mali. The U.S. Government—of the people and for the people—targeted and intentionally killed an American citizen without a trial from a drone plane that could not be seen, heard or tracked in the sky some 30,000 feet above Yemen, where we are not at war.

My neighbors have to be censored on the Hood River News website. Their comments are too rude, offensive and hateful. We live between Mount Hood and the Columbia River in a valley filled with flowering fruit trees.

My wife is going to call in a few minutes. I am going to put the computer down and listen to us talk. I am learning to count this daily lunch talk among the things I savor. It is not an exercise or formality but a privilege.

I will not be installing any more games or social networks on my phone. There are some things in life that matter and many more things that do not ever matter. Distractions, by their very definition, do not matter, but they are not benign.

photo: matt werbach

We arrived at Viento’s tasting room at the Gorge White House after a day of winery tours. I was the designated driver because of my indifference to wine. I am a beer drinker, and while I do understand what others see in wine, I have never been drawn to the taste. The girls were loosening up. The forty-something guy pouring for the group sported thick, square-framed glasses. He looked tucked-in and metropolitan for a Hood Riverite.

“Where you guys from?”

“Indiana, Chicago and here,” Mark said, pointing with his thumb, to Sarah, his wife Jamie, and Ann and me, respectively. I nodded. The pourer reciprocated.

“Are you from here?” Sarah asked.

“No, just summers,” he said. I would have guessed he was from Arizona or California on looks alone. I went from guessing to knowing when he started complaining about the dark, wet, rough winters.

“Oh,” Sarah said. He turned his attention more toward Mark and Jamie, and continued what he was saying. Sarah turned toward me. “So the winters are pretty bad?” Sarah had been to Hood River on a cloudy, rainy day in March two years ago. This was her second trip to Oregon. She spent the week at our place. The five of us had been playing and drinking under sun-filled Oregon-blue skies for a week.

“No. He’s just from California.” She smiled. Ann laughed.

People love to spout facts about the weather or climate but the truth is, where you are from has a lot to do with how you see the surroundings. Seattleites love to tell you that they get less rain than several Southern cities like Atlanta or Orlando. In The Dalles, Oregon, 25 miles and minutes to the east, they brag of 300 days of sunshine. Californians in Hood River see that the sun starts going down early in the dead of winter (like 4 p.m. early) or they count consecutive days of rain, even if it’s just a 6 a.m. drizzle. In their defense, the weather south of San Francisco is incredible, and the state is so varied there is a climate for every taste, unless you love the frigid cold.

It goes both ways too. In Cleveland, where I’m from, we brag of our miserable weather. They do the same in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Detroit, even Chicago. Everyone wants the strongest winds, the nastiest driving conditions, the blizzard with the highest snowfall or the summer with the most sweltering heat. They say that among each other, though, not among outsiders. When a Clevelander talks to a Portlander they’ll talk of how beautiful the summers are, how they prefer snow to rain. The Portlander will tell the Clevelander it doesn’t rain as much as people think, then he’ll whisper to his Northwest friends about how it rained every day in April.

It does rain a bit too much in Portland. It snows too much in Cleveland, but it is the grey winter skies that will get to you. Hood River gets a little too wet and cool in the winter unless you’re really into 41 and drizzly, and I prefer a more moderate summer, but I can’t scorn the endless sunshine.

I’m a promoter of the area. I’m able to do that without having to lie by understanding the perspective. My friend in Anchorage bellyaches over the weather, but when I interviewed a guy who grew up in Washington’s rain shadow, he longed for the summers he worked canning in Alaska. They are both right.

The guy went on for a good three or four minutes about grape growing conditions and wine varietal variation in the Columbia Gorge Viticultural Area. He was a smart guy. Everyone nodded their heads. He knew all the facts on rainfall from Underwood over to Goldendale just like he knew the facts about the 18 minutes of sunlight loss each day until mid-winter. We gain all of that back, of course, but he left that out. He had to have been tired after a full day of work. He’s down in California surfing; I can’t remember if he was wind or kite. A rare freeze is hurting citrus and fruit farms down there. It’s damn cold here too.

photo: matt werbach

photo: matt werbach

I should know better than to build a piece around the ignorant comments semi-anonymous readers leave on small regional newspaper websites. I’m going to ignore the voice beckoning me above the argument. It’s not about the comments.

I scan about thirty different news and magazine sites on a daily basis. Even if it weren’t important to my work, I would perform the routine. I can’t put a price on the fruit I glean from this thorough, regular exercise. It’s practically yogic. Story ideas flower before me. I save hours on background research because I already understand the context of the argument even if I am oblivious to the specifics.

I cut Facebook about a month ago. I have no problem with you enjoying the social network. I am a Twitter user, an Instagram-er. I decided that I wasn’t getting much personal good out of the site. I decided I would rather be where I am, at 10 Speed Coffee on 13^th in the Heights, than in the electronic coffeehouse. I work from home. The temptations to check Facebook far too frequently are ceaseless.

The nicest side-effect has been the reduction of ignorance in my life. The first thing I asked myself a few days into what turned out to be a painless abdication of my electronic life, was the question of why I was so calm? Not once in the last month have I had the desire to rant. I don’t know what I would rant against. Life has been serene.

I find plenty I disagree with in my daily news searches. I make a point to read the articles I don’t understand or the ones where someone is making an argument in conflict with my own. I learn more from those. Most of the things worth arguing about — which are the same things that are worth writing about — don’t have a single correct answer. Many lack any answers at all. I fortify with contradiction. I plug the holes in stories before they leak. I build a better dam to begin with.

Amicable disagreement stems from a desire on both sides to keep it so. I am not blind enough to think that most people want to be altruistically fair. I think most people want to be right. In order to be right, you have to be able to defend — passionately or dispassionately — your side of the debate. It’s far easier to defend a debate with no low hanging fruit. Your tree is safer if you eliminate the easy targets. That’s why we know immediately when an argument is absurd. The arguer created a big old bullseye just a few feet from the ground. Not only will we hit it, but it will be harder for him to make any further points because of the ridiculous argument we just shot a hole in.

So we don’t leave those easy targets. We as writers I mean. We as citizens in public — where there is no anonymity in which to take shelter — we too keep our crazy masked. We have all started an argument we immediately abandoned because it was about to reveal something about ourselves we wouldn’t want the public to see. In either case, as a writer or a public citizen, your thoughts have more than just your name attached. There is a live, real audience ready to laugh or blush or scream. We tread more cautiously. Bashful or Brazen, we all tone down, at least slightly, in public.

The social networks have a different affect. For the sake of whatever brevity I can muster here, I’ll leave this point more simply. Can we agree that people are much more likely to state a political opinion, a religious belief, a work complaint or a relationship problem in the confines of their 2,000 Facebook “friends” than in front of just a handful of the public? I would never argue loudly on my front lawn. I respect my neighbors too much. I care too much about what passing strangers think.

–

Website comments take the problems that come with anonymity and a lack of accountability and exacerbate them. The audience is also important here. The comments you find on the e-pages of The Economist differ greatly from those on The Huffington Post site. Whom you find yourself arguing with will influence your behavior in an argument. When someone goes low, or when someone stretches the boundaries of truth, you’re more likely to do it. When someone is calculated or complimentary, you are more likely to reciprocate.

I make the point because I know the audience of the Hood River News, while certainly not lacking in bright minds and powerful figures, is not immune to the small-mindedness that is so pervasive in America’s backcountry towns. We are isolated. We like it that way. That isolation grows deeper the farther you venture back in time. The highway didn’t come through until the 1950s. Hood River is not on the way to anywhere from Portland unless you’re venturing into the hours and hours of desolate desert that eastern Washington and Oregon offer. Boise isn’t exactly “close.” We don’t have Xfinity or Verizon TV. There is no Applebee’s. No mall. 95% of our bars, cafes and restaurants choose not to have TVs.

–

Someone wants to build a cell tower on their property in Hood River. I think that’s the gist of it. Those who live here don’t need to be told how hard it is for us to build something — anything. For those who don’t, we are in the heart of the nation’s first and largest National Scenic Area. We have the Gorge Commission, the Friends of the Columbia Gorge, the City of Hood River, the Marina in many cases, and the Hood River Valley Residents Committee to name a few. We are obsessive over our land-use — protectors of all things natural.

I won’t get political about it. I don’t know how I feel. I do not like windmills and cell towers that mar the best views you will find anywhere in the country, but I am a big fan of windmills and cell towers because they make my life here possible. My computer is powered by wind and water. You may be reading this on your cell phone.

I am not yet a property owner, but the libertarian in me knows that I want to do as I wish with the land I spend a fortune purchasing. I get the argument though. I wouldn’t want my neighbor just doing whatever he wanted with the land he spent a fortune purchasing.

One of the eleven commenters on the news story — hell, I’ll just post it here:

shadowjade posted:

…the majority of those residents are not true locals, but recent transplants who have taken over our community and twisted into something nearly unrecognizable and uneconomically sustainable by those whose families have lived here for generations.

And what us locals would really like is for those invaders to simply go the heck back wherever they came from.

They’ll never have the best interest of THIS community at heart, because they’re not truly part of it, not matter how much they pretend to be.

There is US, and there is THEM… and it’s like oil and water, though we dance around each other and have this silly little pretense of cooperation, it’s more closely akin to leeches, sucking the life out of what is left – and all we really want is the day they finish the bloodletting and leave.

–Hood River News, hoodrivernews.com

Julie Raefield-Gobbo Dec. 17, 2012

I’m going to call this person SJ. I would like to meet you, SJ. I would think, if we met face to face, you probably wouldn’t want yourself associated with these comments. I think you actually managed to dance the line of becoming hateful and bigoted, which I believe violates the site’s Terms of Service. I wish the paper would require the publishing of your real name.

I’m not going to get into all that I find wrong with this comment, lest I look like the fool who wrote it. Obviously SJ is not uneducated. The leech metaphor, while cliché, is reasonably expressed. Words like “pretense” and “bloodletting” don’t fall from uneducated mouths. Even the educated can be bumbling morons, especially when they are afforded the amnesty of anonymity.

–

I have interviewed and studied over a hundred influential figures in this small town. On the waterfront, a man from D.C. with whom I share a Wittenberg University bachelor’s started a small vegan food company that now grosses over $20 million a year and employes over 100 “true” Hood Riverites. His neighbor, Full Sail, was started by an easterner and a midwesterner. They brewed and distributed 150,000 barrels of craft beer last year. Not far away, discretely labelled buildings on both sides of the river house the companies that invented and continue to innovate the drone airplane industry. Most are from California or educated at prestigious East Coast or Midwest colleges. Before these folks, before DaKine and Nash and Slingshot, before Double Mountain and CoGo, before the wineries and the breweries, the shops and the tourism, things were not so great.

Ask David Logsdon what downtown Hood River looked like when he arrived in the mid-80s. He and Jamie Emmerson of Full Sail used the same term to describe the town in the late 80s: “bombed-out.” Desolate. Diamond Fruit had already abandoned the canneries. Logging was halted in 1986 when the scenic act was signed by Reagan. Windsurfing hadn’t taken off; kiteboarding didn’t exist. Timberline Lodge still had a seedy reputation and faced closure. From Mount Hood to Mount Adams there were gorgeous rolling acres of pears in bloom, apples hanging heavy on the branches, hops and grapes dangling from vines, all under appreciated and underutilized.

Hood River’s agricultural success — the keystone of our local economy for a century or more — would have been completely wiped-out in the 90s with the invasion of cheap, readily available foreign-grown foods if it weren’t for the tourism element that helps sustain that fragile market to this day.

I don’t know what SJ’s Hood River is like, but she or he left a lot of low hanging fruit. I won’t decimate the tree. The fallacy and stupidity of SJ’s arguments and the fact that we can so easily shoot holes in them makes just about anything this person says irrelevant. I really do want to meet you SJ. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee here at 10 Speed and you can tell all of us leeches why it’s best for you and for us if we get the hell out of here. Something tells me you don’t have the courage even if you have the brains for that discussion. 

photo: matt werbach

I would like to start a conversation with no intention of ending it. I don’t even know the question I seek to ask. I think I want to know about how you see the world. I know that’s a part of it. I think I want to share my world with you. I am most certain of that.

My appetite for insight into how we tell stories and how we like our stories told grows more ravenous each day no matter the sustenance. I like questions that lead to more questions.

I carry out my own work as a storyteller for a living and for pleasure — or some kind of sadistic, narcissistic need to write realist fiction that manifests as pleasure. I know that is not the norm.

We all tell stories. I am obsessed with the ways we interact. Rob over at Farm Stand on 12^th and June is as loquacious as they come. There are plenty of days I leave my quiet house and head to his store simply to have the air filled by conversation instead of thought. That give-and-take is what is worth it. He tells a good story over a good beer.

I can dominate this page. My mind is all me and the page is all me. Writing is not social. I used to try to dominate conversations (ask my poor sister), but as I grow older I find no nourishment there. My appetite for time alone with my thoughts — I’ll just say I’m thoroughly satiated. That is not the norm.

I watch the conversations I have with people on rerun for minutes if not hours after meeting them. I think it’s where I draw my dialogue skill from. I think I’m skilled there. I’ve been told I should write plays. I don’t think I could work on the screen with everyone fondling what I create. I don’t think I could handle the frozen tundra of a monetary landscape that is modern play writing. I’ll stick with fiction and journalism.

Journalism gives me the other side. Accuracy, insight, research, interaction. I get to ask tough questions or incredibly cool questions of people ranging from scary-creepy to scary-influential, from budding celebrities and professional athletes to authors and innovative entrepreneurs. I get to delve deeply into a form of human interaction most never experience. I don’t like it more or less than fiction. I am grateful for the variety.

How do you tell stories? Are you aware that you do it? It can be awkward drawing attention to how we interact. When I think too long about how I see I convince myself of impending macular doom. When I try to picture the writing of dialogue over the conversations in great movies, I come further from the important part.

How do you listen to stories? If I consciously listen, which means watching closely too, I find a cache laying below what someone is saying. When I contemplate context that cache come into focus. I realize that may be a writer’s learned skill more than an intuitive one.

What we read matters. As my Uncle Will would ask, “Where do you get your news?” How we talk and what we watch and how we act while we are talking — these things matter. There is a dance we carry out. There are books on the art of conversation.

There is a question in there somewhere. I know that because I understand this form of storytelling; I have made my point clearly enough that even though I won’t ever touch the center of it, we are picturing the same target. I know it is science. I like the art and magic of it more, and it’s there too.

I want to see things your way. You are more interesting to me than I. I will always enjoy the self discovery of literary fiction and the professional pride of published journalism. The words do matter, but the forms and schemas we manipulate to tell our stories to each other — the way we see and share our worlds — are more interesting than the story itself. Is the plot as important as the way in which it’s delivered?

photo: matt werbach

“There is supposed to be ice on the roads. I’m a little worried.”

“Drive carefully.”

“Love you.” Her breath smelled of coffee and toothpaste.

“Love you too.”

“Enjoy your ‘No alarm Friday.’”

“Yeah. Eventually. As soon as I can fall asleep.”

It was still dark. She was gone before six. I didn’t know it had snowed. The room wasn’t as cool as it normally is because she had turned on the heat after her shower. The warm moist air carrying the soapy scent of her shampoo and the richer scent of lotion on damp skin was still discernible twenty minutes later when I flipped the phone to my side after reading through a handful of Twitter updates waiting for my eyes to get heavy.

She left one tearful voicemail and made four calls before I looked again at eight-thirty. I called her, rather than let my heart break further, as soon as she uttered, “I wasn’t in a wreck or anything,” and then gasped for air between choked, soft sobs.

She was shaken. She had been on the road for over two hours. It was heading toward nine before she cleared the Lewis and Clark Troutdale exit on her way into Portland.

–

“It gets exhausting defending it.” I had to shout over the music. The waitress dropped my second IPA off and asked again if we needed anything.

“Do you think you’re reading too much into it?” I looked at Ann. We agreed. I could see it in her eyes and the way her mouth went crooked in a half-smile. Mom always wanted to assume the best about people.

“No, I think people think they’re being tactful,” I said.

“They’re pretty passive-aggressive about the whole thing,” Ann added.

“Well that’s stupid.” Mom was only a quarter way into her Amber, but there was sloppiness in her tone.

“I love my job, and I love where we live,” Ann said.

“Yeah,” Mom said. “You guys are so happy there. Who cares what others think.”

“It just gets frustrating. Nobody asks us how work is going or how we’re doing or what we have been up to. The commute and the choice to live in Hood River comes first,” I said. Ann was nodding. The waitress set a basket of popcorn onto the table silently. Dad’s eyes never left the Bowl Game giving glow to the upturned faces in the room next door.

–

“I’m sorry. My phone was on silent.”

“Can we stop doing that?”

“Of course. Where are you?”

“Mile 28.”

“Wow.”

“It was so bad. The whole thing was ice. I was at a dead stop for an hour.” She was all even keel but then the choking came again. “I tried to put chains on but I couldn’t even stand on the ice.”

“I’m sorry, babe.”

“I can’t turn around. I can’t go over thirty.” A police officer had tried to make sure she was alright. A truck driver spoke with her, suggesting chains, before falling on the ice himself. It was supposed to warm up at four this morning. I flicked the tab on the side of my phone to take it out of silent mode.

–

My job brought us to Hood River. Ann worked from home in the little guest bedroom of our quiet heights home. She was chained to the phone. I would come home to find her frazzled and in desperate need of a bathroom break. I was bound to my office on Oak and Seventh. I wasn’t allowed to leave. We actually saw less of each other then, working half-a-mile apart, than we do now.

Ann got promoted. My magazine closed. I started freelancing. I took the office next door to the bedroom and painted the wall a dark orangey-red. Mom bought me a nice new leather chair. I bought a Mac and hooked it up to our extra flatscreen. Ann began commuting 124 miles each day to a cubicle in a crowded downtown Portland office building.

She actually works better that way. That’s the first thing we tell our friends and family—the first thing we justify every damn time. Working from home wasn’t good for her. She needs feedback, social interaction, context. Working at home works well for me. I need silence, distance, time and space.

On the weekends we look at houses for sale and talk of the time in the not-to-distant future when we’ll buy a place in our neighborhood and start our family. We will be able to afford it because of her Portland salary. The irony is not lost on us. We have gone over it. The bumps have worn smooth.

We eat lunch at Double Mountain or Pfriem or Everybody’s and talk with our neighbors at the bar. We see friends everywhere we go. It makes grocery shopping even more uncomfortable. I try not to wear my neon green Crocs and Cleveland Browns fleece pants out in public too often. The guys at the Shell station in the heights see me at my worst, in my house-pants, flip flops, a winter hat, eyes bloodshot from hours of doing exactly what I’m doing right now.

We hike in the woods a block from our house. We know the people who grow or raise our food by first name. We don’t fear for a kid walking alone at nine at night in the summer; he’s safe.

I’m done justifying it. That wasn’t the point of this. You either live here and you get it or you don’t and you won’t.

–

“You did fine babe. We’ll go over how to put the chains on. You’re safe. You had tough calls to make.”

“I couldn’t turn around.”

“I know. It’s going to get up near forty here today—even warmer in Portland.” I knew it was the chains beating her up the most. She tried to watch a YouTube video from the highway on how to chain-up. We’ve only talked about it. We make mistakes. We are from the midwest. We are not new but we are still new to so many things.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine getting home.”

“My phone is off of silence.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll be fine. It will warm up. You did well.”

“I have to pee so bad.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.”

photo: matt werbach

There will be changes. This Hood Life will be further adopting the local aesthetic with timely new content in a wider array of forms.

The modern fiction and essay markets are largely prohibiting the submission of previously published works, and I want the journal’s authors and artists to be paid appropriately for their craft. I know I can’t always share my work for free. All in all, it’s a whole lot of nothing to worry about on your end.

As the Hood River community continues to stumble upon this site’s web address, the need for more pointed local content arises. I still want to read (and publish the best of) what you offer in fiction, art, poetry or whatever else you can come up with. There will always be a market for your creative work at This Hood Life.

I also want to publish your stories about our local culture. I want to run the photos from your last trip to Meadows. I want your review of New Year’s Eve at Volcanic. We want your opinion, your vibration, your spin. I want to see this place through your eyes. Share your hood life your way.

Thank you to those that have subscribed, laughed, cried, commented, shared. I think you will enjoy the more regular content. I think you will find yourself surprised by the personally relevant stories born and played-out in this small mountain town along the southern Columbia River shore. I know that the locals here will talk of your photographs, your writing and your essays.

We can have that kind of symbiotic relationship. We are often one and the same; we are the most creative of creatures. Our stories are the center of a ripple—waves rolling outward. There is a universal nature to our specificity. Life is crooked and ironic. Stay curious and explore.

photo: matt werbach

There’s a photo of my grandfather on a dock in Fairport. It’s the only one my grandmother still displays of him. He has a large coil of rope slung over his left shoulder and a cigarette—the hand rolled kind—dripping from the crook of his smile on the right side. He is bare chested. If his hair were darker it would look like he had a shirt on. His pants are pulled high up, stopping just below his bellybutton. There is a shape and form and firmness to him that I have never seen in myself.

I always thought they didn’t get along that well—my dad and his dad. My grandma never talks of her husband. My mom hardly knew him. The only photo of him that I have is from about six weeks before he died in a fight outside a bar where Fairport meets Painesville and you can see the lake between two old brick warehouse buildings and underneath the route two overpass. He and his brother in law got into it over something no one in my family ever talked about until my father told me about it last year when he’d had too much scotch on Christmas. In the photo my dad gave me that night, my grandfather is holding me under his left arm the way you might hold a puppy or a sack of potting soil if you needed the other hand for something. I’m face down, but I can tell it’s me because of the large birthmark enveloping my neck and my left shoulder. I’m in a white diaper. He is wearing a plaid short sleeved button down. His orange chest hair bursts through the cleave at the top. We’re on his boat. My mom is a blur in the background, but I can feel that she is OK with him holding me one armed over the edge of the boat as he reaches for a beer that an invisible hand is passing his way. You can only see the foggy ‘esee’ from the Genesee can. The brewery was on the edge of town outside my grandparent’s home.

“He’d had a few beers but he wasn’t drunk. None of it was his fault,” my dad said. I knew what he was talking about somehow, even without the segue. He stopped. I was afraid that was all I would get but he was just looking for the TV remote. It was on the channel where the fire is burning as Christmas carols play. He turned the volume down. I heard laughter upstairs. There was glassiness in his eyes, which I had only seen one other time, when my sister was born. “Your Uncle was one of those guys who thought he was connected.”

“Like mafia?”

“Yeah. There were a lot of Sicilians in Cleveland and on the east side suburbs. He gambled, I guess. We never saw it as kids.”

“Uncle Jim?”

“John. Jim was his son. My cousin.”

“Right.” My old man started to get up to grab another glass. I saw him look at the empty one in his hands. The large leather padded chair was hard to get out of. I took the tumbler. “Ice?”

“Neat.” I smiled then.

“Can I?”

“Help yourself. Uncle Pete left it here after Thanksgiving.” He reached out and took the picture of his dad holding me from the chair where I’d set it. I poured his glass slightly fuller than mine. That is what a son does. I dropped an ice cube into mine and added more scotch to his to make up for the rise. He set the picture down. He didn’t know I was watching. I put the photo on the table in front of me when I sat down. “He was a tough guy.”

“Yeah. He looked strong.” My dad laughed through his nose.

“Nah. Johnny. He was a fat short guy who got himself in a lot of trouble with his mouth. Wise-guy-tough-guy. Your grandfather was tough too, but you would never know that.”

“Did Uncle John ever meet me?”

“He was there,” he said motioning to the photo. “That was cousin Jimmy’s birthday, I think. Late summer.” I don’t know why I asked that. I liked the answer. The scotch hit hard but I held the cough down. “He wasn’t a bad guy. Isn’t I should say.”

“He’s alive?” I don’t know why that surprised me. I had never heard of him dying.

“I think so. There’s a family plot in the township. He’s not in it, last I saw.” The surprise at finding out I had a great uncle was gone because I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that my dad had visited the cemetery recently. “It was a few years ago,” he offered at the question I hadn’t asked. “Aunt Evelyn, Johnny’s wife, my blood aunt, she’s there.” The scotch should have made things more confusing but it was working the other way. The eight or ten beers I had slammed since the basketball game ended were like a buzzing low note now making a sweeter harmony with the brown liquor. I was looking at my glass and my dad was looking at me. He smiled. He doesn’t smile at me a lot. I turned a little red and hot. “You alright?”

“I don’t drink much scotch.”

“Good.” I smiled and cooled. “You’ve got to be careful with this stuff.” I didn’t want the thread of the story to end. It was like reading one of the those great novels crafted in a different time with details no one would think to include today. It was stranger than real life.

“Was Johnny a drinker?”

“I don’t know. I think they all were. Your grandfather stuck with beers,” he nodded toward the photo. “Always beers. Guys drank heavy then but he seemed to know something others didn’t. He worked out too. He boxed till the day he died.”

“The minute he died.” It drew a sad laugh from him and the glassiness was back under his eyes.

“Johnny wasn’t evil but he was an asshole.” That couldn’t be it. I couldn’t ask though. I didn’t know how. Even when I was a kid, I would wait all day to ask my mom for something. My old man clammed up with stuff like that. He said “no” before he even thought about it. It wasn’t to be mean. “Johnny was in trouble and Dad, your grandfather, was trying to help.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Not sure. It was always that way with his side of the family. Jimmy was that way too. They couldn’t move forward; they always tripped over themselves.”

“I remember Jimmy.”

“Yeah. We tried to patch this crap up after Aunt Evelyn died, but it was too late. Your grandma wasn’t having any of that.” He laughed hard enough to push a little snot out his nose by accident. He started coughing. I handed him a paper towel. I’ve always got one in my pocket. It’s the family nose. He waved me off and pulled the handkerchief from his shirt pocket. I heard my mother and Charlie’s footsteps overhead in the momentary lull. I’d forgotten they were there. I had forgotten where I was. I leaned back into the chair after setting the scotch on the table next to the photo. His glass was still more than half full. He took a practiced pull.

“So Grandpa was trying to help Uncle John?”

“Sort of. They were at Silvio’s place and Uncle John was in trouble with a guy or with Silvio.”

“He’s family too, right?” He laughed hard at that. I flushed a little and picked up the scotch. I tried to tell myself to stop interrupting but I couldn’t help it. The door was open for just a second. There was so much I wanted to know.

“His family is all gone. I never knew them. We’re not related. He just owned the town’s best restaurant. He gave guys work whenever he could and he tried to keep people straight. He’s the reason they ended up outside. No fighting at Silvio’s. The guys knew that. Johnny had to have been loaded to even try. Your grandfather could handle anybody any time.”

“Did he ever—.”

“No. He wasn’t a mean guy. I saw him lose it once or twice. He was tough on me and Aunt Carol but not that kind of tough.” I really needed to stop interrupting. The bouncing back and forth was getting confusing. I never thought I would hear this stuff. My dad talked about work and the Browns and almost nothing else. Politics every four years. I swore I’d stop interrupting. He leaned forward like he knew what I was thinking. Everything he was saying was so different and distant. It wasn’t my family. How could they be? We were sitting in a two story four bedroom suburban home watching a flatscreen fire from mom’s Pottery Barn furniture. “Dad was a lot like Silvio. He didn’t care if you were family or just a neighborhood guy, he just wanted to keep you out of trouble. That’s why he was so hard on us growing up. It was for our own good. I know people of his generation say that, but it was true with him.” Something about my own childhood grew less foggy. I took my scotch up again and leaned back with it this time. I held my breath so I wouldn’t talk. My dad’s eyes went somewhere beyond the wall mounted TV and the thick stone fireplace. He was leaning forward still, his elbows on each of his knees. His sleeves were rolled. The veins in his right forearm were sticking out. The hair on his arms ran to his hands and I noticed for the first time that it was creeping up on his knuckles. I looked at my boney, bald left hand. “Johnny was screaming or something and your grandfather dragged him outside. It was embarrassing. I think that’s why he did it.” The leather squeaked underneath me as I tried to set the glass down so I froze. “He turned the fight on dad and pushed him hard in the chest. Dad came back at him but as he went forward he caught a rise in the sidewalk and stumbled. He was off balance when John came back at him.” The chair he was in groaned as he leaned back. His eyes were still fixed on something I couldn’t see.

“And there was a car coming by?”

“A truck. A pick-up from someone coming through town. It wasn’t that guy’s fault. Silvio was there. That’s the only reason we know how it happened. Your mom and I were home with you. Johnny never talked about it. He never apologized to your grandmother either. Silvio said—” my dad coughed again. He didn’t reach for his handkerchief. His head dropped down. His forearm veins were pulsing now. The glass he held shook a little. I felt the push of my own tears. I heard Charlie on the stairs. I could tell because mom always wore shoes in the house. “Silvio, when he told mom and me, said that there was nothing he could do. His head had gone under the rear tire. His neck was twisted.” I felt like I might puke. I felt Charlie run his hand across my back. Dad coughed one last time and rose quickly to step into the kitchen. He was turned away from me. His glass was empty, but I never saw him finish it.

“It’s getting late,” Charlie said. I looked past him as I stood up. I stumbled a little and he wrapped me up in that firm, gentle way he always wraps me up.

“Dad?” I expected to see redness in his eyes when he turned around. Actually, I expected him not to turn around at all. He was in front of the sink where he’d set his glass. His face was calm. The wetness was there in his eyes but not the way it would have been for me. I would have lost it. I thought that just as I realized I was crying. It dripped out. I swallowed it back. Charlie got the hint and walked toward the coat closet at the front of the house. “Dad?”

“Yeah.” There was only the slightest crackle. He was coming back together if he had ever come apart.

“Thanks.”

“For what?” He tried to laugh but the confusion hung on his face. I shrugged my shoulders. Charlie held my coat out and I slipped my arms in one at a time. He patted me on the shoulders. I started to walk toward Dad. Something made me halt. “Your mom’s asleep I think.”

“I said goodbye for both of us,” Charlie said.

“Thanks for everything,” I said. I meant it differently that time. He knew that. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas. Thanks Ernie,” Charlie said. There was confusion holding his voice.

“You guys drive carefully.” I looked at Charlie looking at my dad. There was something passing between them. Dad leaned on the island where the carcass of the turkey sat torn apart on the cutting board. Charlie looked worried or surprised. It was hard to tell. My dad gave a slight shake of his head, which morphed into a nod toward the door. “Lock it on your way out, alright?” We both nodded.

We weren’t even to the car before I started to feel better. The cold Cleveland air bit hard through my corduroy jacket and the thick cable sweater underneath. Charlie waited at the open driver’s door. I thought he was making sure I sat down safely. He didn’t flinch when I went to duck into the car. I sat down hard. I meant to stand back up but I was too drunk. Charlie knelt down. “You sure he’s OK?”

“Yeah. He was just telling me about my grandfather. It was—.”

“No, I mean—.” He looked at my face and realized that we were on two different pages. Whatever he thought he had walked into he hadn’t. Or maybe what I thought had just happened hadn’t. “He wet himself, Marcus.” I turned quickly toward the house. My skin was red hot. I shot up despite my inability to do so a few seconds before and then I remembered the empty glass just as I slipped on the ice and face-planted into the foot of snow blanketing the front yard. I was laughing before I hit the ground.

“Marcus?” I couldn’t stop. “Marcus!”

“He’s fine.” It came out stuttered and short from laughter. I was stone sober.

“How can he be fine?” He started to move toward the house. I stopped him by raising my voice.

“He’s fine. I’ll tell you in the car.” Charlie looked back at the house. The front light went out and we heard the lock click. We’d forgotten. He probably knew we would.

“Are you making a snow angel?”

“Just help me up.” I grabbed his arms and caught him off-balance. I pulled him down on purpose. I didn’t even try to make it look like an accident.

“Jerk.”

“Kiss me.”

“Your dad is probably watching.”

“So what?” I knew he was watching. I could feel it. I felt him smile too.

“Marcus, what the hell is going on?”

“I’m having a moment.” The light from the upstairs window went on and painted the front lawn from white-grey to a soft, glowing yellow.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m my father’s son.” The way Charlie’s brow furrowed drew me to him. I felt my cheek scratch his. My hands were red and ice cold. He flinched as I clasped them behind his neck.

No, it’s not an essay about ice cream. I got in a Facebook argument the other day—a quick pointless spat really—that later woke me up at four in the morning and prompted the deleting of my post. I wasn’t worried that someone would know my true thoughts about Mitt Romney, but I was mad at myself for my sparring response to a comment on my post. I went quickly to the personal and, though I pulled punches and only told my wife what I really thought, I still shouldn’t have been so rude. Maybe.

Ann asked that same night, as the status updates were flowing and the President and Governor were appearing in staggered interviews on 60 Minutes, “What do you say to people who think that way?” She didn’t mean it rhetorically. I won’t get into what was said. I’m not interested in your politics just as I’m sure you’re not interested in mine. We’ll get to that. My response was terse because Ann knows how I feel, and we’ve had this conversation before in a dozen different contexts.

“You don’t say anything.”

“What?”

“They won’t get it. You don’t get them.”

We had enough IPAs in the bloodstream after a day of football viewing on the old couch to drift off to some other subject, almost immediately forgetting the important question she posed. I, of course, was not taking my own advice. I said something. I was not exactly out of line in what I said. It fits with what I believe—most of it at least. My choice of words expressed how I felt, though factually they could not be accurate. My choice of metaphor was poor and intentionally sophomoric. Facebook is supposed to be fun, right? I was having fun.

Four-thirty in the morning was not fun. Neither was five. Six was OK, but by seven I was regretting the fact that I regretted the fact that I’d deleted a post that I regretted writing. Aren’t our minds beautiful? Isn’t the anxious human condition just glorious?

It prompted a line of thought that I can’t say was new to me, but I started thinking of it differently. What I actually did was think of it more as I would have five years ago.

I’m not one of those thirty-year-olds who thinks he’s an old man. I know that I’m growing and maturing and changing all the time. I feel like a child afraid to raise his hand in class half the time. When I’m not being bashful I’m being hyperbolic or perverted or childish or I’m trying really hard to be mature. You know why the things that come out of kids’ mouths are so damn cute or so damn original? They’re not trying to be something they’re not. They’re just being.

At twenty-five or so I think I started to realize that permanent damage could be done with words. I was opinionated and passionate and sometimes down-right vitriolic. Life had color—vibrant, bursting color. Life was black and white too. One of those great contradictions. There was a right and a wrong. George W. Bush wasn’t a bad president in my opinion, he was a criminal who should have been imprisoned for war crimes. Dan Brown wasn’t a writer whose work I didn’t appreciate, he was the worst writer on the face of the planet and we would all have been better off if he had never touched a keyboard. The Steelers were not a team I didn’t like, they were the worst group of human beings to ever—well, some things never change.

Somewhere in there I grew up a little. I made a semiconscious decision to keep a friend, even if they thought Sarah Palin was a decent Governor and VP candidate. I decided I would rather love what I love than hate what my enemies loved. I no longer care if you want to wear skinny jeans or read Twilight. It is your life and it is not hurting mine. I could rail about the lack of cultural value in certain things and try to play it off as if I’m some brilliant intellectual because I’m reading Infinite Jest while you are reading 50 Shades of Grey but I stopped trying to change minds a long time ago. I’m honestly just glad you’re reading; it means you’re in the market for my product. And I watched—nay, I thoroughly enjoyed Bachelor Pad, so really, what ground do I have to stand on?

I’m just not certain that all of that is necessarily a good thing. I stopped talking politics with friends—even family really—after the ugly ’08 election. I stopped chastising pop fiction and pop music fans. I even stopped making girls from Pittsburgh cry. They can’t help where they were born. I’m sure they’d prefer to be from Cleveland.

So maybe I’ve remained friends—distant at best—with a few extra people, but is my newer, more “mature” attitude actually doing me any good? Is it doing the culture any good? It might not be. Maybe we’re supposed to share and state our opinions because we’re finding balance, bridging gaps or simply learning to get along better as humankind. I’m not saying I’m grabbing breakfast with a guy in a Roethlisberger jersey, but I no longer think of pouring my oatmeal on his head. Is that really how I feel, truly, when I’m honest with myself?

I don’t mean all of this in jest either. There are times when ignorant people like Todd Akin are allowed to perpetuate their stupidity because no one stands up to make them look like the idiots they are. His opinions actually damage the fabric of our democracy. He thought this way for a long time before he said anything. If he had made that comment earlier, wouldn’t he have done us all a favor?

I’m a passionate guy. I try to stand up for what I believe in and I try to speak my mind. I’m not seeking to answer all of my questions here. I think time and distance are important factors in arriving at anything that resembles a permanent truth, but what finally allowed me to sleep the other night, just before my wife kissed me goodbye and left for work, was the fact that sometimes we have to be a little less mature—sometimes I need to make the sophomoric joke and stick by it—because it’s how I feel. People knowing how I feel, whether they agree with me or not, can’t do any damage right? What I did regret, and what I am sorry for, is responding on a personal level. After all, the commenter was just telling me how he feels. I know now that I don’t much appreciate his outlook. I probably knew that before, though. I could have let it be.

I don’t know that there is much value in being politically correct or taking the middle-ground. We should not apologize to each other for how we feel. We should not apologize to ourselves for how we feel. We should value the color we add to this grey world. We should try not to hurt each other on purpose. That doesn’t help anyone. We should be thankful when the village idiot speaks his opinion because he’ll put his foot in his mouth eventually—he will seal his own fate. We find friends and enemies in the same way, so if speaking my mind means learning, meeting people and making new connections, but it also has to mean that some people won’t like me or that I’ll be mad at someone for a while, well, that’s life. I don’t have a favorite flavor of ice cream. I appreciate vanilla and chocolate. Mint chocolate chip is my usual. I’m open to suggestions on what I’m missing out on. I won’t get mad at you if you say bubblegum, I’ll just wonder what it is that could make you so different from me.

For twenty nine years I talked of writing a novel, but I had nothing to write. I know, it’s fiction. You can make it up. You can create faraway universes like Douglas Adams or make the benign impotence of life interesting like Jonathan Franzen. You can twist things just slightly, like Junot Diaz and Adam Levin, or you can pervert things in true Updike-ian fashion. There are a million ways to draw an audience, and there’s no blueprint for art. That’s the beauty of fiction, but you still have to have lived. I’m not talking about seeing the world or forcing yourself into dangerous situations. I’m not talking about giving up electricity for a year so that you have a book to write or moving to a farm and leaving your city life behind so that those who’ve dreamed of doing what you’re doing will shell out the $19.95 for your pedestrian musings on the simple life and the direction in which the world is heading. That’s the stuff of bad journalism and the stuff of even worse fiction. I’m not talking about having to have an alcoholic father or to have lived as a gay man in a mormon community. We can’t control those things. I’ve had a beautifully normal life. Your characters, if you know what you’re doing, are alive, and they’ll live lives of their own, but how do you know what they’re supposed to do—what living is—if you haven’t lived yourself?

Maybe that’s why I pushed out two books in seven months. Maybe I started living life, or living through life, depending on how you understand it. I don’t believe life is endured. I believe life is experienced, and at its best, good or bad, it’s savored. I used to wake up everyday to swig the bottle of water next to my bed, washing out the remnants of a mild hangover, and then flip on SportCenter over a breakfast of peanut butter toast and strong coffee. Then it was off to work, where I read, edited and wrote stories about the wonderful community and natural world around my home. After that, maybe the gym. Often the brewery. Home for a nice dinner. I’d swing by Farmstand and pick up something fresh and local. Ann would already be home. We’d pour a beer or a vodka soda and watch crappy TV while we vented about things we thought mattered in our day to day lives. Some of them did; many of them didn’t. I enjoyed just about every minute of it. I still enjoy elements of that time. We share funny or infuriatingly stupid Facebook status updates from our feeds and make fun of the losers on The Bachelorette or laugh at the illusive, discreet, brilliantly-subtle humor of Community, feeling like we’re getting most of it, and not worrying about the stuff that’s over our heads. It’s simple. It’s life. Sort of.

That was before I understood what anxiety is. That was before we saw Ann’s beautiful, vibrant grandmother transformed into an almost alien life form—dehydrated, stretched out of shape, kept alive by machines, and then suddenly lifeless in a wooden box. That was before I’d had the experience of writing my first novel after losing my first job. That was before Ann took on the challenge of commuting one hundred and thirty miles a day to make a better life for her and for me. That was before I really started to understand pain. And as soon as I started to understand pain the sadness came. The irrational anxiety-driven madness came, though they weren’t related. There is no cause for that madness—this madness. The ability to stop time came. I started to understand. A strange thing happened. A lot of very strange things happened. In the end, I’ve come to find that life isn’t so much more than the stuff of great fiction. Life isn’t art, but maybe I see it that way, and maybe that’s OK for me. It probably wouldn’t work for you. Who reads fiction anymore anyway, let alone writes it? Don’t lie. I’m not talking about the recent book turned movie or Oprah selection. I’m talking about the good stuff. The classic and the soon-to-be-classic. I’m talking about understanding that the sweetness in life comes from not understanding something. The simplicity in life is actually boredom. Sadness brings richness. Pain is important.

I wrote a book and I celebrated it here and hundreds of you showed up in one day at this site and on Facebook to share your words of encouragement with thumbs pointed upward and a deluge of exclamation marks. I tried to share some of the anxiety that I’d thought was born out of that experience. I was wrong. And I didn’t share enough. I always thought I understood my friends and family who suffer through the debilitating difficulties of anxiety or depression. I knew nothing. Jack shit. Zero. I hadn’t lived it. My mom wrote me shortly after the I FEAR I MAY SUCCEED essay was published to say she was sorry she hadn’t realized what was causing some of my anxiety. Well, I hadn’t either, until I started to write that. It got worse as I edited We Are Not Now That Strength because there was so much I wasn’t happy with, but so much of what I wasn’t happy with was correctable if my brain would turn off for just a second and stop telling me the terrible things it was telling me for days that turned into weeks and then into months—half a year. Paranoia ensued. Sleepless nights. Tears. Rage. Deep sadness. I called my mom about six weeks ago because Ann was at work and couldn’t get to her phone and all I could do was sit on the couch and cry. I couldn’t turn the TV on because I’d see floaters in my vision, caused by stress and my obsessive compulsion to stare at the bright white parts of the screen or into the sun in the background to confirm that I was, indeed, seeing a floater. I genuinely thought I was going blind. Ann and I went out to dinner the night after my book was finished. We ordered fancy cocktails. They had something with a Hemingway twist, the Old Cuban, I think. Most of what I remember was trying to smile and trying to tell myself that the bright candle behind Ann’s head was not going to cause permanent vision damage. Some of you are laughing. Some of you are nodding your head. Both are OK. “I’m not doing so well,” I told my mother. Tears washed my voice. I searched for a reason. We talked for over an hour in the middle of her work day. I have wonderful parents.

I had seen a lot in a couple months. I’d seen a job I loved disappear. I’d watched a woman I loved die. I finished a book and felt the pain and fear of success. A screenwriter, Richard Rush, in the movie Tales From the Script described writing as pushing constantly against a wall and success as the wall being removed quickly when you least expect it. I know exactly what he meant. I started to write again. It was all I could do. I couldn’t edit. I couldn’t reach out to editors with story pitches because rejection was crushing. I mean that. I don’t waste words. Crushing. I couldn’t eat right. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get through a quiet afternoon without having to call my mom and my wife. I talked to my father. He told me the science behind what I’m going through. He told me I wasn’t going blind. I wanted to believe him and I wanted to understand it but my brain wouldn’t let me. I had cancer, I was now certain of it. I was going to get evicted for not trimming the two large pines in our front yard. Someone was going to read my essays and sue me for something I knew nothing about. My book was shit. The voice would never turn off. It only amplified. Real stresses, even the subtle ones, weren’t distractions, they were hands reaching out and turning the volume knob up. I ran into a photographer friend of mine at the grocery store and spent the entire conversation blinking and looking past him, trying to tell myself that it was normal to have a little trouble seeing after staring at the computer screen and now standing under the nasty UV lights of Safeway. I could go on forever. Celebrations ruined. Conversations forgotten. I sat through whole movies and I remember only what was running through my head, not what was on the screen. I could write. I could do that. For whatever reason, I’ve always had that one singular gift. Ann thought it was a good idea. My mom agreed. I was going to write a second novel. Who cares if it was shit. This voice in my head was going to become a character.

The first day, I wrote ten thousand words that made me cry. I looked through foggy eyes at the screen. Floaters danced in the white spaces. The text was hard to focus on, but the writing, it took my brain somewhere else. I read the first few paragraphs to Ann. I had gone six full months on the first book not sharing even the name of a character and here I was reading fresh, untouched prose to my wife. Something was different. This book was alive. It was the book that was living inside me, not just my attempt to complete something I’d hoped I’d be able to do my entire life. Both of those are great accomplishments, but this book was writing itself. Day two ended at eighteen thousand words. A month later, a book. A novel that talks about the things no one wants to talk about. It talks about the things we have to talk about. It talks about the potency of time. It talks about our darker thoughts. Our compulsions, anxieties, sex lives, drug use, drinking, hate, love, fear, panic, depression, erections, lusts, turn offs, ejaculations. It talks about the way the world smells and tastes to one man, a boy really, and through his differences, his interpretations, his anxiety, his habits, and his ability to freeze the moments of his life that he wants to freeze so that he can distill and share them, we come to talk about and explore ourselves. It’s potent. It’s dark. It will make you sick to your stomach. You will want to punch this kid in the face and by the end you will want your daughter to marry him. It all takes place in one day. It is the inside of a character’s head written by a writer who is learning to savor even the sourest parts of life.

I got help. I take a little pill each day. I’m not going blind. I still lose some sleep. I still get some cold sweats only to have to toss the covers back and take a few deep breaths, then pull them back over my shivering body. The panic lasts only moments now. It may come back. They say anxiety ebbs and flows quite a bit. That’s OK. I’m learning how to handle it and I’m being proactive. I can get excited when I feel it coming on; it might mean I write another book. It’s not perfect, and I think I prefer it that way. I can honestly say, though I can’t necessarily explain how in under a hundred thousand words, that I prefer life this way. Things seem richer now. Sadness still comes. Sometimes its the irrational stuff that haunts my mind while I sit alone in this empty house waiting for my wife to come home and fill the living room with her voice, her laugh, her smell. Sometimes it’s the real kind of sadness, but even that I feel better equipped to handle.

One of Ann’s best friends from college and one of my close friends since moving to Oregon was at our house on Sunday when he got a call that his father had died. I can hear his sobbing voice through the open kitchen window as he leaned against the side of our house even now. I can feel it in my chest. I can feel the short stubby hair on the back of his head as he was embraced by three of his friends, but none of us could reach him then. Tragedy is real. Because it’s real, it’s a part of our lives. We tried to say the right things. We tried to help. You can’t help in helpless situations. His best friend was also with us. He drove him home. The funeral is today. We’re all thinking of you, friend.

Ann picked up the phone to call her father as soon as their car was pulling away. I called my mother in tears again. I had talked to my dad a few hours before. It was father’s day. Our friend said exactly that. “My dad died,” came out choked and curt—louder than expected. A few moments passed. Nothing could be said. Hugs. Tears. Distant, confused looks from minds that were rolling to their own fathers, their own lives, what the next hours and days and weeks were going to be like all of a sudden. “God, It’s father’s day,” he said. He stood up. He took a deep breath. Time was stopped. He went on.

We’re thirty. All four of us that were here Sunday. We’re not supposed to be losing our fathers. Even grandparents are hard enough. Those of us in the Wittenberg family, we lost a classmate and friend a few months ago to a stupid fucking bar fight. I’ve lost peers and friends to cancer, heart attacks, drug overdoses and suicides. I wasn’t the best of friends to one of my best friends when his mother died while we were in college because I didn’t yet understand what that meant. It’s not an excuse. Maybe I wanted to duck my head in the sand—hide in a year’s long cloud of marijuana smoke. But it wasn’t just avoidance, it was a lack of understanding—a lack of empathy due to a lack of experience. It was not knowing or getting that that day, that one day, would come to define huge swaths of my best friend’s life. I won’t forget Sunday. None of us will.

Why is today one of the best days I’ve had in weeks? It’s not the pill. It’s not that easy. If it were, I’m not sure it’d be worth it. I’m beginning to come to an understanding. I’m coming to realize that I’m younger and less experienced and dumber than I thought I was. That makes me feel better. Yes, better. When Ann’s grandmother died I can count a hundred moments I’ll never forget. They were moments born out of the emotionally raw, exposed feeling we were sharing with her family. I’ll never wash away the feeling of Rob’s hand on my back asking me if I was OK. I’ll never forget the way the bright lights made it hard to look at my new family, my in-laws and cousins, sharing beautifully written stories of their grandmother at the podium. I’ll never forget that more people laughed than cried at that funeral. I’ll never forget the typo that slipped into the obituary I wrote for her, but I’ll also never forget my words being used to sum-up someone’s life. They weren’t my thoughts. Those belonged to my mother-in-law, Phyllis, to her sister, Ruth, to Jerry, Kevin, Ann, Rob, Andrew, Heather, Blaine, Davis. They were closer. They knew her best. Now I know each of them so much better. My life is better because we shared one of the most difficult challenges in life together: saying goodbye to someone you loved. A forever goodbye.

I cry and smile at the same time a lot now. I understand my favorite movie, American Beauty, more than ever. I try to be a better friend, a better son, a better husband. I need to try to be a better brother. A better brother-in-law. I don’t think I’d have gotten here if it weren’t for the sadness. The anxiety would have come no matter what. It’s a chemical inevitability given my family history. The sadness, though, that I can be truly grateful for. Bring on the pain.

I wouldn’t have this second book that I can’t wait to edit and share. It’s going to get picked up by a major publisher. I hope McSweeney’s editors are ready for what I’ve crafted. I can’t wait to get back to the first book and to add in the human element, the experience, the weirdness and the esthetic that I’ve learned to craft since the first draft’s completion. I can’t wait to give our friend a hug when he gets back to Oregon after the funeral. I wouldn’t have landed a story in a major, reputable publication if I hadn’t started to understand and stare-down the fear and anxiety and the richness of life born from the tears shed in tragedy. I wouldn’t be hugging my wife tighter. I wouldn’t be writing so well. It’s not easy to admit all these things, and I wouldn’t be able to do that either.

I’ve been given a gift. I’ve been blessed in many ways, and I always would have told you that, but I wouldn’t have meant it in the same way if it weren’t for the last half-year of my life. My anxiety disorder is a gift. My writing is an outlet for that gift that allows my words to dance through the minds of others. I can change moods. I can crystalize life. I can stop time, or at least I can manipulate it. Moments can stretch on for days and even lifetimes; I get that now. Forgetting isn’t always an option. Nothing really slips away. The waves take a piece of the shoreline each time they kiss the sand. I can’t say I don’t still long for the moments wasted in front of the TV. Now that I can watch a basketball game or The Challenge without my internal voice screaming at me to run for cover, to hide, to fear, to call the doctor—I can enjoy the quiet time. I laugh more now that I did a month ago and a hell of a lot more than two months ago. More things give me goosebumps. Kids make me smile. Death doesn’t scare me. I can look beyond myself more because I’ve looked within myself more. I’m not afraid of digging deeper. The only regrets I have are all born out of not coming to this sooner, but time is irrelevant—at least I’ve come to it at all. Maybe my life had to become the stuff of great fiction before I could write great fiction, but I think it’s more in the interpretation. Nothing happens for a reason. The world is random and cruel and beautiful at all at once and no one is controlling that. I control how I see it, though. I control how I capture and share that. I don’t control the anxiety and I don’t control the sadness and I can’t even control my reaction to it, but seeing the world a little more as art and a little less as a daily endurance certainly helps to sweeten the bitter.

At the end of American Beauty, Lester Burnham’s voice, which has narrated the whole movie from the grave, returns. Kevin Spacey plays his character, and the actor is face down in a pool of blood on the kitchen table. He’s been shot. There’s a smile on his face. Not a happy, bright smile, but a slight upturning at the corners of his mouth. He’s lost his job, his wife, probably his daughter, and then his life. The narrator is looking back on the final days in the life of this one mixed-up, unimportant man, and to close the movie, as the camera jumps around from character to character to show where they were at the moment the gun went off, the voiceover says it better than I can say it myself. As the final shot zooms out above the street where the Burnhams live, where so much of their sadness, anger, rage, love, hate, confusion, lust—as the movie leaves us, the viewer, breathless and teary-eyed in contemplation of our own miserably wonderful, puny existence, the last line is, “And I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.” Well maybe I can’t say it better myself, but I can say it in my own words, I feel so fortunate for all the sadness, anxiety and tragedy in my insignificant, splendid life. We can’t ask for the gifts we’re given, but we can control how we use them. We can’t change what happens in the flashing moments of our lives that come to define so much of who we are, but we can take comfort in our shared experience. We all have sadness, and I think, maybe, we’re all better for it.