Category: blog

I feel like words are cheap and sentiment is empty, but I can’t stop thinking about the people who have lost homes due to the fires that are raging all around my state.

I also can’t stop thinking about how much I respect, admire, and appreciate the firefighters who are risking their lives to stop the progression of the fires as well as protect the lives and property of their fellow humans.

I’m watching a man who has therapy dogs with him up near Thousand Oaks. He was asked to bring his dogs to Cal Lutheran after the mass murder a few days ago, and he stayed there so his dogs can offer comfort to people who have been displaced by the fire.

He said that he and his team gather every morning for devotion and prayer, and then they take themselves and the (this is my phrasing, now) ephemeral inspiration they take from their faith to help other people.

I am not a religious person, but I believe as strongly as I believe in anything that this man and his kind, loving, selfless help is what I believe religion should inspire people to be, not the hateful bigotry we so often see from people who claim religious faith as justification for their own absence of compassion and empathy.

I am not religious, but I want to say: God bless this man and his team.

It’s scary and upsetting to see so much destruction and know that it’s going to get even worse before it’s all over, but I am remembering Mister Rogers’s gentle reminder to look for the helpers.

I wrote this yesterday on my tumblr thing. I’m sharing it here for anyone who struggles with the same things I do.

I’m having a bad day. It happens. So I take my own advice for people who are having a bad day, and I get out of my house. I go for a walk. I work hard to push negative and hurtful thoughts out of my head, and I replace them with positive things. It’s little observations at first, like the trees are starting to drop their leaves, a dog has a cute beard, this person’s Halloween graveyard has tons of great puns in it.

I take this positive voice that’s enjoying things in the neighborhood, and I use it to talk to myself. I remind myself that my experience is valid, even if random strangers who know nothing about my experience tell me that it doesn’t, on account of my privilege and success. I remind myself that this terrible way I feel isn’t forever. I remind myself that my wife and children love me. I remind myself to make an appointment with my therapist.

I’ve walked a couple of miles by the time I get back to my street, and when I’m a few houses away from mine, I feel better. I still don’t feel good, but I’ve moved my day from a 1 to a 2 on my 5 point scale. It isn’t the 4 I am hoping to achieve, but it’s better, and just moving from 1 to 2 is enough.

I am enough. I am enough for my wife and my kids and my dogs, and I’m learning to be enough for myself. I’m learning to let go – trying to let go – of the pain I feel whenever I’m reminded that I’m not enough for at least one person who was until very recently in my life, because it’s not my fault.

One of my neighbors comes out of her house and tells me that her daughter’s English teacher is a fan of my writing, and when he mentioned it to her class, she told him that we’re neighbors. He was excited by that, and asked her to ask me if I’d come into the class to talk to them about writing and being a writer.

I tell her that I’d love to do it. I don’t tell her how humbling and overwhelming it is to feel wanted by someone because I’ve done things that matter. I hope she doesn’t see me squeeze the tears back into the corners of my eyes.

Her daughter comes outside, and we talk about me coming to her class to talk about writing and being a writer. She tells me how much her teacher loves me (those are her exact words) and I feel so lucky and grateful to have done something that somebody cares about, something that a teacher feels makes me worthy of speaking to a class of 11th graders.

So I give them my email address, and we resolve to coordinate with her teacher next week. I’ll probably go speak to her class sometime in December.

By the time I’m done talking with them, I have moved from a 2 to a 3 on my 5 point scale, and that’s a HUGE improvement over the 1 I was feeling when I walked down my driveway.

So I’m sharing this good news that I hope inspires and comforts anyone else who is having a bad day. It’s possible, through loving ourselves and allowing the kindness of others to get past our defenses, to turn a day that’s awful into a day that’s okay, and it can happen really quickly.

I’m glad I took my own advice, and I’m grateful that I have an opportunity to share it with all of you who are reading this.

This summer, when we had to get out of our house because of black mold, we used points to go stay at a friend’s house in Hawaii. I mean, if you have to be driven out of your home, there are worse ways to spend your time, right?

So they live in Hana, on Maui. We flew to Kahului, then took a little Buddy Holly killing plane up to their place. On the flight, I took this picture, which I love so much I made it my desktop wallpaper. I’m really happy with the accidental composition, and the colors bring me great joy. I thought about sharing this on Reddit or Imgur, and decided that, rather than put it someplace where nobody will see it, I’d put it here, in my own dumb blog, for anyone who wants to look at it, or use it for their own desktop or whatever.

Someone looked at a post I wrote on my blog about taking some time and making an effort to go out and look at the stars, and decided to do this.

It’s just tiny words, and if I were in a different place, emotionally, I’d delete it and move on. But because of where I am emotionally, it stung. I’m sure this person doesn’t see me as a fellow human, who is struggling with profoundly painful grief and loss, who doesn’t deserve to be treated with such casual cruelty.

I’m sure this person is young, is likely suffering in his own way (because everybody is going through something), and is trying to make himself feel better by being hurtful and cruel to someone he views as a safe target.

Look, I’m happy to take this, if it means that a real person in this guy’s life doesn’t become the target of his cruelty, but I’d rather not take it at all. I’d rather that this person stopped before they decided to be so casually cruel.

This person won’t get the public attention they crave (hence the pixelizing), and I doubt that they’ll even see this post, because they probably don’t spend much time away from 4chan and the toxic subreddits, because that’s where this person finds others who are as miserable and cruel as he is.

But I do hope that he matures, develops empathy, and when he has a choice about how he’s going to treat someone in the future, he chooses kindness instead of this sort of thing.

Life is incredibly short, and there’s so much pain and cruelty out there. Do your best to not be part of that.

Remember, when you were younger, all the times you would go outside at night, just to look up at the stars? Remember how happy it made you feel? Remember taking out a star chart, so you could find a constellation or a galaxy? Remember how cool it felt to know that, even if you couldn’t see the visible light from a Messier Object, you at least knew you were looking at it? Remember putting down a blanket and watching meteor showers all night long? Remember the first time you saw a satellite flare and convinced yourself you’d seen a flying saucer?

Remember how magical and humbling and inspiring it felt to just go outside specifically to look at the stars and planets, sometimes with a telescope, other times with binoculars, most times with just your eyes? Remember the first time you really thought about the reality of our existence? That we’re tiny little specks of life on an improbably perfect planet, speeding through space at incomprehensible speeds, protected by a thin layer of atmosphere from specks of dust and rock that are also speeding around in space, just like we are?

Does anyone else remember that? Or is it just me, getting older, rewatching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and desperately wanting to revisit a time when it didn’t seem like our improbably perfect planet was teetering on the brink of catastrophe?

When’s the last time you got away from your phone or tablet or TV or whatever, pulled your head out of the garbage fire we’re living in, and went outside, just to look at the stars, pick out some constellations, and feel the size and magnitude of our universe?

I can’t remember the last time I did. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been. That makes me feel profoundly sad.

So tonight, I’m going to do a some stargazing. If I’m lucky, I may even find what I’m looking for.