Hugh's Blog

Frustration

NB: As I wrote about here, I am writing about the days I did street engagement work among the unhoused population as a way of dealing with the trauma I experienced there. – HH

I was frustrated.

I had been working on the streets of Raleigh for about a year, with no budget, no money, and damned little encouragement. How I had gotten there is another story for another day, but it was out of conviction and an honest attempt to reconcile my faith with what I saw happening around me.

When church folk wanted to talk about homelessness with me at all, they wanted to either pray for folks or get them to heaven.

There was a “street ministry” I encountered early on in my time out there that would take pictures of unhoused people they were praying with, and then post them on their blog to fundraise. No attempt to recognize their humanity, no realization that they had their own stories and pasts and preferences and agency – no, they would post a photo of someone crying with a caption like. “Another of God’s lambs is saved from hellfire!”

The big steeples were more the praying kind. A huge downtown church had announced they were spending 1.8 million dollars on a pipe organ for their sanctuary. I knew several unhoused folks who lived on their property, and so when I met the pastor of that church, I asked if he could help me get some resources so I could provide relational help and pastoral care to those people. He told me the best thing we could do for those folks was to pray for them, and trust God to provide it.

So I was frustrated. I knew people who were dying because they lived outside, ignored, in a wealthy city, in the shadow of huge steeples. Churches with multi-million-dollar budgets were content to ignore them, and hoped they returned the favor. Street ministries used them as pawns and fundraising tokens, their rich inner lives reduced to being extras in a movie about street preachers. And I was convinced they were made in the very image of God, and that Jesus meant all those things he said when he identified with the poor, saying that when we feed someone who is hungry, we are feeding Jesus himself.

Jesus is fucking hungry and these people with all their fucking Jesus talk are content to let him starve. Goddammit.

Have I mentioned how frustrated I was?

So, I did what I always do when I don’t know what else to do; I wrote.

Ashe, who is now my friend but then was not, ran a popular blog (now defunct) called Jesus Manifesto, which sought to be “a clearinghouse for propaganda meant to frustrate and disrupt quaint notions of Jesus”.

I dashed off a piece and asked Ashe if they would accept it as a guest submission. And they did.

I recently came across it as I began cleaning up my archives. I had been writing for a while about what I was doing on my own blog, but this was the first time I wrote about my work for a wider audience.

As I read it now, even though I would write it differently now, I’m proud of me for being bold, for turning my frustration into action, and for doing both storytelling and preaching in the same piece. The foundations of my personal theology – that it is not we who wait for God to act, but God who waits for us – is there, even in those early days. Later I would learn and then embrace the words of Miroslav Volf, who said that it is deeply hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to resolve. I did not know those words then, but I already knew the thought.

Anyway, here it is, warts and all. This guy was very, very angry. And it would get worse.

Evelyn and the failure of the church

Content warning – mentions of death and sexual assault, but nothing graphic.

A heavy girl, perhaps 250 pounds, Evelyn’s greasy, stringy hair only served to accentuate her poor skin. Her weight made her shuffle rather than walk and her head was always bowed, seeking not to offend, avoiding eye contact. At 23, most people her age are very conscious of their appearance, but Evelyn’s wardrobe consisted of thrift store finds and cast offs, leaning heavily toward stretch pants and sweatshirts that advertised events she had never seen and places she would never visit.

It was my second month in Raleigh. I was volunteering with a group that fed the homeless in the park on Sunday when I met her for the first time. She shuffled through the line, mumbling thanks for the watery mashed potatoes and chili-mac, eyes on the ground. Several times I tried to engage her, but between my maleness and her demons, it just was not happening. Like a dog that had been struck once too often, she flinched at contact, muttering secrets only she knew to people only she saw.

When there was an open bed, Evelyn would stay at the woman’s shelter, but more often then not she had to make other arrangements. On cold nights, she would trade sexual favors in exchange for a warm bed. To pick up spending money, she would give men oral sex for $5. Because of her weight and mental issues, often the promise of a warm bed was revoked, or the money not paid after the oral sex had been given. Several people later told me Evelyn was often sexually assaulted and raped, unable to resist her attackers.

The last time I saw her was on a Thursday in early November. I remember it was inordinately cold that day, with a sharp, piercing wind.. Evelyn shuffled down the sidewalk, huddled down into her jacket, oblivious to my wave, ignoring me when I called.

That night Evelyn made it into the women’s shelter. In here she could sleep, secure in the knowledge she was safe. In the night Evelyn died of complications from sleep apnea. At age 23, she was another statistic of life, and death, on the streets.

* * * *

I told Evelyn’s story in a church once, and when I was finished they prayed fervent prayers that Evelyn would be at peace in the loving arms of Jesus. They prayed that those who would injure and molest women like Evelyn would be caught and punished. They prayed for God’s kingdom to come and for shalom to rest on our city.

At the end of the talk, a lady came up to me, obviously moved by my story and asked me the question I dread most: “How could God have allowed this to happen to Evelyn? Was this all part of God’s plan?”

If you spend much time working in the inner-city, you try not to ask yourself those kind of questions–not because you don’t know what the answer is, but because you do. Because if you think about it too much you get mad and because if you tell people the answer, you will not be invited back.

What I wanted to tell that lady, but did not, was God did have a plan to take care of Evelyn; God’s plan was us. God’s plan was to put us here to be his hands and feet. We are to show mercy, to love justice. We are to show mercy, as he is merciful. We are to feed those who are hungry, with the assurance that when we do, we are doing it to, and not just for, Jesus himself.

I wanted to tell that lady God did have a plan and we screwed it up. I wanted to tell her that it is not we who are waiting on God, but rather God who is waiting on us and that what Evelyn really had needed was not this lady’s prayers but a safe place to sleep at night. What I wanted to tell that lady, but didn’t, is that it is very obvious that we have the resources to help invisible people just like Evelyn but we simply lack the will to do so.

I did not tell that church lady any of that. But often I wish I had.

Reclaiming my stories

Six years ago, in an effort to stay alive, I walked away from a decade and a half of work on the streets among the unhoused population.

It was good work, and I was good at it, if not good at being as loving to myself as I was to the people I encountered. It was, to use a buzzword, unsustainable.

I have a lot of trauma from that time. It took years to regulate my blood pressure, to sleep all night, to not have panic attacks every winter. My relationship to money will probably never be right.

Because my storytelling during that time was our primary fundraising technique, I have resisted writing about that time since I left. It began to feel exploitative of me – as if putting my wounds on display was the only way I was worthy of earning a living wage.

I imagined myself a barker, shouting, “Come see the street pastor have a mental health crisis! In exchange for donating 1 dollar a day, you too can enable his slow nervous breakdown!”

It was a wild time. I married a lot of people who spent their honeymoon at the homeless shelter. I buried a lot of people. I spent far more time in a soup kitchen and at AA meetings then I did in church. Because of my work, some folks who probably would have died did not die. Some laws got changed, and some folks in other states began to do similar work, and some folks I trusted tried to take me out, and along the way I almost died. It was a wild time.

After some discussions with my therapist, I have decided that over the next few months I will write some stories from that time – not to raise awareness of the plight of the unhoused, and not to get you to donate money to my cause and not to show you how spiritual I am – but to take ownership of my stories back.

I have essays I write each week for people who give me money – but none of those essays will come from this series. These are not stories I’m trading for money. These are the stories that shaped me, taught me, saved me, and almost killed me. These stories are mine.

It’s not a perfect world.

Content Warning: Mentions of trafficking and sexual assault, but no descriptive content.

It was Maria who made it clear to me that my middle-class sensibilities would not survive working on the streets among the unhoused community.

Maria was a natural leader, attracting the respect of the other folks who were in her circle, and eventually I would learn that when I needed support in that community for something that would be unpopular, winning Maria over would be an essential, early step.

She was attractive, vibrant, and intelligent. Her partner Jake beat her often during the more than three years they had been together. He accompanied her everywhere, constantly referred to her as “his woman”, and I knew of several occasions where he had beaten men who were a little too attentive to her.

I was one of very few men he allowed her to be alone with for any length of time. I think it was that I was a pastor – even people who are unbelievers often grant unearned respect to clergy folks. But maybe he just saw me – someone who taught nonviolence – as no threat to someone as overtly masculine as he was.

One day I ran into her in the park. She was sitting on the bench, alone, scrolling her phone, her bags beside her. I was walking toward the soup kitchen, and she saw me, and flagged me down. I sat next to her.

After some initial pleasantries, we sat there for a few minutes in silence as she worked up her nerve to tell me what was on her mind. Then I notice she has a bruise on the side of her face.

“Are you OK?” I ask, pointing at the bruise.

She sighs. “Yeah. I just got too mouthy with Jake when he was high. I should have known better.”

“Oh, Maria. You should get away from him.”

She looked at me with sad brown eyes – eyes not filled with sadness for herself, but at my naivete.

“You really don’t understand, do you? The first month I was homeless, I got raped twice. Got groped dozens of times. It was hell. Then Jake told me that if I was his woman, nobody else would ever touch me again. And they don’t. Everyone is scared of Jake.”

I was beginning, unhappily, to understand.

“So Jake protects you?” I ask with a bit of snark in my voice.

“Dammit, Hugh. My choice was get fucked by random men who would always hurt me or get fucked by one guy who is mostly nice, and who protects me from everyone but him. And sometimes, it’s really nice. He will bring me flowers he picked in the park, or we will go for a walk in the Azalea garden over by the TV station. And he always smiles when he sees me.”

Sounding meaner than I meant to, I said, “And sometimes he beats your ass.”

She touches her face distractedly and says, “Yeah. But it’s not a perfect world.”

She looked at the time on her phone, and said, “I got to get to the soup kitchen if I’m gonna eat. You coming?”

I told her to go ahead without me, and I walked the other way, head down, lost in my thoughts. Because I still wasn’t sure why she had flagged me down in the first place – what it was she had intended to tell me.

But one thing was clear: I had a lot to learn.

Proverbs

My father was self-educated and a voracious reader, and was attracted to proverbs. I do not mean the book in the Bible found after the Psalms, purportedly written by King Solomon, but rather short pithy wisdom statements of the sort made famous by Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac. And he used them as a teaching tool all the time – almost as a form of punctuation, or as the moral of the story after something happened to illustrate the proverb.

For example, he hated to argue. Once, I watched him and another man talk about something they disagreed on. It was rather embarrassing, because I knew Dad was right, and yet Dad didn’t even really try to convince the guy that he was wrong. The teenage me was all about winning and dominating your opponent, and here my father was, literally refusing to argue. Later, I asked him why he didn’t try to convince the guy.

“It would have been a waste of time,” he said. “He wasn’t ready to hear it. You can’t convince a man to change his mind if he has made up his mind not to change it. It’s like wrestling a pig – you both get dirty, but the pig’s having fun.”

I laughed at the pig comment.

“Mark Twain said that.” Dad said. He loved to attribute the quotes he knew, probably as a compensation for his lack of formal education, and as an appeal to authority. As if to say that these are not just the thoughts of a working class man from rural Mississippi, but those of one of the great writers of our culture. Sometimes, his attributions were wrong, but always enthusiastic nonetheless. I joked once that all of his quotes were from either Benjamin Franklin or the Bible.

Like the time he told me, “Son, remember, like it says in the Bible, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“Dad, Franklin Roosevelt said that.”

He said, “Sure, but he was quoting the Bible when he said it.”

I didn’t argue with him. He wasn’t ready to hear it. After all, like Benjamin Franklin said, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

New Membership Perks

Trying to make any money as an independent writer is tough these days. Especially if you have scruples. And I do.

I don’t want people who read my stuff to be baraged by pop-up ads, videos that start playing automatically, privacy scraping cookies, or sponsored posts. I don’t want anything to come between me and my readers – not just graphically, but ethically. If I am holding a Yeti mug in a picture, I want you to know that it is because I chose that picture, not because I have a sponsorship deal with Yeti.

And I paid my bills for a few years in the early days of the web by writing marketing copy – I never want to have to do that again. I don’t want to write “teaser copy” to get people to click things they would not normally want to click. I don’t want to chase clicks, be sensational, or make you angry in order to increase my traffic or to curry favor with advertisers.

So, I have a Membership Program. It’s ~ 200 folks who give somewhere between $5 and $25 a month to support my various writing projects, such as this blog and my weekly newsletter.

What do they get out of it? Well, it’s sort of like NPR – there are perks, of course, but the major benefit is that they get to make sure there is more of my writing in the world.

But there are perks – and today, I’m adding a big one.

Beginning this weekend, Saturday the 17th of August, people who support my writing as part of my membership team will receive an original, unpublished essay in their inbox every Saturday morning. It will be around 800 to 1,000 words, give or take, and while the subject matter is flexible, there won’t be surprises – if you like my writing, you will enjoy this. I’m not going to suddenly take up writing romance or erotica or anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with romance or erotica. It’s just not what I want to write about.

It does not matter what membership tier you are, either, Whether you are a $5 a month member or a $25 a month member, you get the same perks, including the weekly essay in your inbox. I am a big believer in the idea that we support the things that matter to us based on our capacity, so I’m intentionally not going to differentiate access because of the amount of money you send me. No matter your membership tier you get access to this.

You can learn more about becoming as member, what perks there are, and so on by going to this page.

Writing against the clock

It’s 5:30 AM, and the sky is still dark outside, but not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago when I woke up. As I write this, it’s Friday, but it really doesn’t matter, as most days, the same thing happens. The birds are singing the song of their people, letting their friends know they made it through the night. The kettle is almost ready, and the coffee grinder just finished. My kingdom for a quiet coffee grinder.

After making a cup of coffee in my Melitta (best $6 purchase, ever), in my Fiesta bistro mug (this one is Poppy colored, but the Meadow Green one is my favorite), I walk, cup in hand, to the room at the end of the hall that once was the bedroom of six different foster children, but is now my office.

I have a hard time writing in silence – my ADHD won’t let me – but I also have a hard time writing when the music has strong lyrics – my ADHD won’t let me – so I end up mostly writing to instrumental jazz, classical or, rarely, techno. My audio setup is a bit of a hybrid of an old school stereo tuner (a cheap bookcase-sized Sharp) paired with my phone on bluetooth, via which today I am streaming this playlist from Amazon music.

Now it’s 5:45, I’ve been up for 30 minutes. Daylight is breaking through, and the birds are much louder, and the music is playing and the chair is adjusted. I shut the door to the office (we have cats who will want to get on my keyboard otherwise), open Google Docs, open a new doc, and begin to write for the next hour.

Hopefully.

I don’t mean that I write hopefully, although I generally do. I mean that hopefully, something to write about will occur to me. Some days, it’s like a firehose, just pouring out of you, the words are. On those days, it’s hard to keep up with the flow, especially if you are a three finger and a thumb typist, like I am.

On other days, nothing goes right. Nothing is interesting to you. You have nothing you want to say. You are bored with the world, and with the people in it, and have nothing to say to them, and wish you had not committed to yourself that you would hold this time sacred, this first hour of work each day. On those days, the words do not come.

There are a variety of ways writers deal with this. Some people have word-count commitments. They apply their ass to the chair and stay there until they have 500 words, or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is. I think this makes sense, assuming you have control over your time and are working on a specific project.

I’m more of a time-based writer. This is the amount of time I have to write, and so I write, or try to, during this time, and how many words I get is just how many words I get that day. Some days, I might get 1200 words during that hour. Most days it’s 700 or thereabouts. Some days, when it’s particularly bad, it’s 50 words.

There are times I wish I was a word – count writer, with the ability to just sit there, ass in the chair, staring at an empty page until the words come. But alas, the writing I do only supplies a portion of my income, and the mortgage must be paid, and the cat kibble purchased, and the living earned, so if I am to have words on the page today, they must show up before 7AM, or else they will just have to wait until tomorrow morning, unless time gets stolen from other obligations. It’s like having homework you are behind on, everyday, for the rest of your life.

Because the time available to write is limited, and the words must show up then if they are to show up at all, you take pains to be careful with your words – or at least, it does for me. Sometimes, my limited writing time is spent staring at the screen, not because I do not have the words, but because I am forming the next sentence in my head, repeating it over and over, listening to the rhythm and the meter, because writing is for me just transcribing the words I already hear in my head. On the better days, it’s much faster, like transcribing the words you hear as they are being said.

But it also means the words seem more valuable, more scarce, more precious than they would otherwise. It makes revision particularly offensive – striking out a paragraph that you spent 30 of your precious sixty minutes on is viscerally painful.

I turned 52 this year. Every time I mention this, folks older than 52 love to tell me how young I am. I realize 52 is not old, per se. Although, I was reading an Agatha Christie novel not long ago and a character described someone as an elderly man in his early sixties, and I put the book down, as I was not ready for that sort of violence.

However, I turned 52 this year. Somewhere around my mid-forties, something shifted. Instead of the future seeming wide open, my dreams began to be accompanied with a Use-By date. Instead of thinking, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps one day,” it became, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps while I am still healthy enough to do it.” Instead of enjoying the first day of Summer, it became, “I might, if I am lucky, get to do this thirty more times.”

Time began to move quicker. I notice this especially in my writing, where words are already valuable because of the lack of writing time. If I get an hour a day to write, and I live to be 82, that’s only about 10,000 hours of writing left.

The words are precious, and time is scarce.

And tomorrow, I will do it again.

When people choose to leave

There is a popular internet meme that makes the round from time to time that says something to the effect of, “You are going to be too much for some people. But it’s OK – those are not your people”.

And while I really want to cheer the sentiment, and applaud the self-confidence the idea pushes us toward, the cold hard reality is that, sometimes, the people we are too much for are our people.

Almost twenty years ago, in the beginning of my work around homelessness and hunger, there was a couple that was nearly always by my side. We had all moved to this new town at the same time, and none of us had any friends here, and so we latched onto each other.

We all became friends. We were often at each other’s houses, we ate together, we supported each other vocationally, and they both played a part in my wedding. I still own a coffee cup her mother gave me at Christmas. He had gotten me plugged into some churches where he had connections, and I played a part in his journey of deconstructing the religious fundamentalism he had grown up with.

We were, by any definition, friends. Close friends. And then we weren’t.

How the thing fell apart was epic, and a conversation for another day. If we are ever in the same room sharing a beverage, ask me and I will tell you about it. But for today’s purposes, just know that they are the ones who left me and that I am still proud of how I handled it.

But at the time, I was really confused and hurt. Eventually, I came to understand that at the core of the disagreement that led to our “breaking up” was the simple fact that, despite our having begun at roughly the same place, I had become far more radical in my view of the world than they were. And that was a threat to them and their belief systems, and so if it came down to sticking with me or holding onto their belief systems, they had to choose, and they chose, well, not me.

Years later, I was telling Brian McClaren the story, and he looked me in the eyes and said, “Hugh, not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.”

While that seems self-evident, at the time it was a huge relief. Eventually, I came to peace with it. Sometimes the people who can’t journey along with us are family members, or romantic partners, or just good friends who have known us for years. And when they leave, it leaves a jagged hole in our lives and we wish they had stayed.

One of the hardest things for us to remember is that not everyone learns, grows, or develops at the same rate. And sometimes, when we grow or learn faster than our friends, they resent that. Or they have reasons for not being able to accept what you have come to see as self-evident.

In fact, that last sentence I wrote is often it. Sometimes, they do the math and realize that if they went where you went, it would cost them too much in terms of relationships and social standing, and so they must reject what you offer because it would simply cost them too much. And as Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends upon [their] not understanding it”.

People are endlessly complex, and while their actions and motivations don’t always make sense to us, their actions always make sense to them – there is always an internal logic that supports their actions, even though the logic eludes us on the outside.

But again – it will happen. Not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.

We all must figure out what lines we will draw, and what is a bridge too far, in keeping with our values and internal logic. But one useful tool I have settled on is that, barring abuse, I won’t be the one to end the relationship. (I may, however, decide to invest less in the relationship.)

So, for example, in the example of my friends who left – they were the ones who left. I was OK with us not being at the same place. I was OK with them believing different things. I was OK with us disagreeing. I won’t pretend that it wasn’t sometimes hard to be in a relationship with them, but it was, on balance, worth it to me.

I’m not telling you that is the right line, or boundary. I’m just saying it’s mine.

But when people decide that they can’t be in a relationship with you, when they write you off for your beliefs or convictions, when they decide you have gone too far – please don’t take that personally.

Some folk who started with you won’t finish with you.

And that’s OK.

Touching Grass

If you spend enough time in the weirder parts of the Internet, you probably know the admonition to “touch grass”. Basically, it is most often used in response to someone who is really out there – who has spent way too much time online and has lost connection with the “real world”, and so someone responds to their wild, inane ideas with the advice to go outside and “touch grass” – to get offline and connect with nature, because they have lost touch with reality.

It’s often used dismissively and somewhat meanly – a way of shutting down conversation. But I think it’s also really good advice.

This morning, my alarm went off at 5:30, like it does every morning. My cat hears it too, and hops up on the bed to make sure that, instead of turning it off and falling back asleep, I pet her instead. I slipped into shorts and my sneakers and sort of shuffled to the kitchen, where I made a cup of coffee and saw the condensate on the windows. I check and it’s 75 degrees and 93% humidity outside.

Some days I listen to audiobooks when I go for a walk, but I’m wrestling with a gnawing low-level problem and need the time to think about it, so instead of putting in my earbuds, I turn off the alarm and head out the door. The humidity slaps me after coming from the cool, air-conditioned house. The chickens in the backyard are singing their “I laid an egg” song, the slight breeze activates the windchimes in our magnolia tree, and the cicadas are singing the song of their people.

My neighbor has put out his trash, reminding me that today is trash day, and so I drag the can to the curb, and begin my walk, looking at my watch as I step onto the road – 5:53 am.

Over the next 45 minutes, I will walk some two and a half miles. I will see the red headed woodpeckers, the mockingbirds, and hear, but not see, the Carolina wren. As I said last week, our neighborhood has feral cats, and I see the ginger tom that I suspect was one of the fathers of our current litter of kittens. I lecture him on his parental responsibilities, and he looks at me with interest, before walking off into a thicket.

As I walk along the small creek, I see a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate, swimming just below the surface, and am fussed at by a squirrel that I startled. I notice the red buckeyes on the tree at the corner have already fruited – “is it early for that?” I ask myself, and debate looking it up on my phone, but decide to do it later. Truthfully, I will probably forget.

I see other animals that live in my neighborhood – the college professor getting in his car, the physical therapist in her scrubs, walking her dog before leaving for work, the lady with steel-gray hair that always waves at me from her porch does so again, for perhaps the 300th time. The house that had a tree fall on it a few storms back is covered in workmen instead of the blue tarps – a welcome sight for all concerned after a lengthy fight with the insurance company.

As I approach my own driveway, seeing the nearly six foot tall colorful rooster that guards my driveway loom large as I approach, I feel a bit of regret. I’m not quite ready for this time in “the real world” to end. As the door closes behind me, and the sounds of outside – the cicada, the wrens, the windchimes and the roofer’s nail gun – fade away. Today is going to be a good day. Because it already has been.

The Love List

100 things I love – a not-exhaustive list.

A cup of coffee in a quiet house, before anyone else wakes up.

The sound birds make just before dawn.

Windchimes

A breeze on a hot day

Gravy

Coming over a hill and seeing the ocean.

A crisp, sour apple.

Lemon drops

Dark chocolate with sea salt on it.

The brief gasp you make when coming in from a hot humid day and the air conditioning hits you

The way my muscles ache after a long walk – not exhausted, but pleasantly stretched and filled with the sense that I did something

Women vocalists

A perfectly done medium rare ribeye steak, cooked over charcoal

A baked sweet potato with butter, and nothing else

Waffle House

Carolina Beach, NC

The smell of a freshly blown out candle

The sound of the Pacific Ocean crashing on the rocks

Falling asleep to the sound of ocean surf

A date night that includes a bookstore

A Diet Coke with cherry syrup in it from Sonic

A freshly made bed

The smell of freshly ground coffee

The smell of fresh cut grass

Sitting on the front porch during a thunderstorm

A long hardwood floor hallway

Plum jelly

Strawberry preserves

A hot biscuit with melted butter dripping from it

Cats – all of them

A long, slow meal with friends

Cooking for people I love

The way my friend Brian runs his hand up and down my back when he hugs me.

Orange daylilies

Deep burgundy roses

Chickens

Any room with a wall of book-filled shelves

The act of sharpening my pocket knife. It always reminds me of Dad.

Going for a walk immediately after a rainstorm.

Our neighborhood

My city

The smell of lavender

Gardenias in bloom

Southern Magnolias in bloom

A good all-beef hotdog, with chili and cheese and yellow mustard.

A pond full of goldfish

Watching birds bath on the edge of a pond.

Walking into an office supply store.

Seeing the dust motes dance in the sunlight streaming into a dark room

Button mushrooms sauteed in butter

The movie Harvey

When you go to a Mexican restaurant, and they bring you chips and salsa, and the chips are still warm.

Murder She Wrote

Pulp mystery novels from the 1920’s-40’s.

How Renee has every card or note I have ever given her over the last 17 years

Opossums

Anthropomorphic animal illustrations

Large bodies of water

The southern Appalachian mountains

Tart, cold lemonade

The way my daddy would fry potatoes and onions in a cast iron skillet

The way Dad would answer my “Hey, Daddy?” with “Hey son.”

As a small child, when I would wake up it and would be foggy, and Dad would say it was froggy outside.

Sitting in a dark quiet bar, around 4:30 in the afternoon, with a pint of draft Stout

The sound of rain on a metal roof

Walking alone in a strange city

A long, hot shower

Implicit affirmations

Feeling known

Thick crisp bacon

Cut flowers

That people like to read things I wrote – it blows my mind, but I love it.

Sipping a Cafe Mocha while browsing a bookstore

A long solo road trip

Facebook memories (but not Facebook)

Family pictures

Watching children play

Watching birds scratch in piles of dried leaves

My sage green Fiestaware coffee mug

Cooking on a gas range

Blue Bell Vanilla Ice Cream

Earth-tone colored clothes

Being early

Oreos and ice-cold milk

A raucous cottage-garden flower border

Being asked for my opinion

Watching someone I trained thrive.

Being trusted with someone’s stories

Clothing without logos

Long vistas

The sound a canebrake makes when the wind blows.

Accent lighting

Daffodils

Handmade quilts

Boiled cookies

Live oak trees – bonus points if there is Spanish moss

People talking about things they are into

Inside jokes

A fire in a fireplace on a cold day

Me. Finally, at long last, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary – me.

What about you?

What are things you love?

The Writer

When I was 15, I wrote a short story. It wasn’t very good. But as a first story, it was awesome.

I showed it to three people, desperate for validation. They were all concerned about how violent it was, and even in those pre-Columbine days, I set off alarms, and ended up with a visit to the guidance counselor as a result.

It didn’t stop my writing, but it did stop me from showing it to people. I wouldn’t share anything I had written on my own for another 16 years, when I wrote my first blogpost on my first blog. I’ve only been writing in public ever since. To be clear, I do have a motley collection of half-assed ideas and tidbits scattered in both physical notebooks as well as digitally – should I ever hit the big time and some future archivist wants to delve into my papers, she will have her hands full.

But for the most part, I write in public. Maybe it’s wanting the validation, the oooohs and ahhhs, the “that’s amazing” that 15 year old Hugh was seeking from those trusted adults. Or maybe it’s lack of confidence, my unwillingness to trust my own opinion.

But I prefer to believe that we all have things deep inside us that we don’t share and don’t talk about, and because we dare not speak of them, we think we are the only ones who feel these things. My hope – in this rationalization of mine – is that if we can be even slightly vulnerable and share a sliver of our experience of those things, then the people who read those stories feel slightly less alone, and the world becomes an incrementally kinder place.

And I want to live in a world that is somewhat kinder than the one in which I currently reside. So I share my stories.

Yeah, it’s either that or lack of confidence.

In any event, I love to write, and to write in public.

In a bit more than 10 weeks, I will turn 52, and have been pondering things I have done, and things left undone. I have written a couple thousand blog posts, many of which are lost to history and the ephemerality of the internet, written before I learned to save what I wrote in my own archive.

The undone list is longer, filled with things I thought I would have done, and have not.

Had kids. Been to Europe. Ran a marathon. Written a novel.

Not that I now wish I had ran a marathon, for example. 51.9 year old Hugh hates to run. It’s just that 22 year old Hugh, who ran 20 miles most weeks, would have assumed it would have happened by now.

I also thought I would be a “writer” by now.

If you ever want to start a fight on the Internet, announce your definition of who is a writer, and who is not. I make a portion of my living from my writing, thanks to my Members. In fact, I make more per year from my writing than most people who will publish a novel this year will.

But when people say, “He is a writer”, they don’t mean the guy who writes ad copy for cigarette companies, and neither do they mean a stocky, introverted, middle aged man with a newsletter read by less than 5,000 people and a sporadically updated blog filled with comfort food recipes, aborted dreams, and sad memories.

Instead they mean someone whose things can be ordered from Amazon, who has maybe won some literary awards, and probably has an agent. Maybe we will see your stuff in The New Yorker or more likely, The Atlantic after The New Yorker passed on it. You were probably interviewed on obscure podcasts to talk about your book, and people love to talk about your “voice”. And, hopefully, when you die, there are people who never knew you that are sad you are gone, and who will lament the fact your voice has been silenced.

I’ve never been that kind of writer. But part of me wishes I was. Another part of me wants to try it. To put out some queries. Seek freelance work. Enter some things in some contests. Try to get an agent.

You know – be a writer.

I’m thinking about it.