“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”

– Patricia (Meg Ryan), Joe Versus the Volcano

Imagine you’ve been a good employee. You’ve been showing up to work on time. You’ve been doing your job, and for a while. You’ve done your best to be a good friend while also exercising personal boundaries in the form of not doing everything you’re invited to. You’re committed to your family, the kind you’ve always dreamed of and still find yourself amazed to have. Life, for the most part, is going quite well. And yet, you find yourself hurried by things you can’t define. By deadlines you can’t pinpoint. By the tension that comes with reminding yourself to be in the moment while also realizing death will one day come and, yeah, you should probably get that story done at some point. Imagine that amidst all these things, a doctor walks right up to you and says, “Great news, we have an official diagnosis: you have a brain cloud”.

How many of us would nod and think that sounds just about right?

I imagine a lot of us would. Despite our best efforts, we are still reigned in by the demands of a capitalist society that values efficiency and hustle over self-care and meaning-making. This, to me, is part of the magic of John Patrick Shanley’s Joe Versus The Volcano. Joe (Tom Hanks) is feeling a bit stuck. He’s a good dude in a grey drone of a job. And when he gets a questionable diagnosis of brain cloud from a questionable doctor, he’s quick to accept it. He wants to be taken along for a ride. He wants a story he can not only live with but actually live.

A lot of crazy shit unfolds from that point on, not including the fact Meg Ryan deligthfully plays all four female leads. It’s a ride you must simply bob along with, like the suitcase raft Joe finds himself clinging to. When it all looks like this crazy adventure was for nothing, when he is literally lost at sea, he is awaken by an exceedingly large, exceedingly bright moon. How could you not believe in something outside of reality when you see it?

Bright Wall/Dark Room is one of my favorite sites of writing anywhere (the exemplary Brianna Ashby art to the soon-to-be-mentioned essay is what I was clearly – and poorly – trying to replicate with my drawing) and Chad Perman one of my favorite writers, period. With his Joe Versus the Volcano essay, “We’ll Jump and We’ll See” he describes the moon scene beautifully:

“About two-thirds of the way through the movie, in a scene as gorgeous and transcendent as any I’ve ever seen, Joe, adrift with an unconscious Patricia in the middle of an endless ocean, wasted away by dehydration and exhaustion, lips chapped and limbs shaking, watches the full moon rise above him in the middle of the night and realizes (or perhaps, at last, remembers) the vast enormity of the world around him and the true miracle of his existence within it. He struggles to stand up on his fastened-together life raft—the few square feet he has left to him after a lightning bolt destroyed the ship carrying he and Patricia to the island—and reaches up towards the giant white orb in the dark night sky, with a gratitude and sense of humbled awe that can only come from having every single thing stripped away from one’s self, every fear encountered, and yet continuing to breathe, to dance, to beat on. “Dear God, whose name I do not know,” he says with arms outstretched, “Thank you for my life. I forgot how big… thank you. Thank you for my life.”

When I think about songs of heartache, I think about my first car: a 1986 Honda Civic. It looked unassuming from the outside, a simple two-door coupe with a low navy-blue fade alongside the doors. But when I drove it, it felt like sliding along the street on a magic carpet ride. Smooth and low. And the depth of the seats allowed my tall frame to feel like I could really sink into them. I could really wallow. One of my favorite heartache songs is the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Dosed”, a song that works as both a metaphor for drugs and for being dosed on a person you cannot escape, someone who feels like such a perfect fit for you before they slip away. It’s epic and dramatic in its emotions, accentuated by the desperation in John Frusciante’s backing falsetto and his clanging, descending guitar notes. I would often play the song over and over, at first lip-syncing to it, and later on adding more of my own vocals than I cared to realize. I wanted it to hurt because I wasn’t ready to be mature about it. I wanted to coast along the highway, an aimless asphalt ghost. 

Very few songs of heartache defined my senior year of high school quite like Howie Day’s “Collide”. Released in June of 2004, it wasn’t the mainstream smash I always imagined it to be, only reaching as high as #20 on the Billboard Singles Chart in June of 2005, a full year later. It was just popular enough to be on the radio, but still not quite popular enough to feel like anything more than a disease we passed around our friends circle, infecting each other with this earworm we could unironically love.

The song was first recommended to me by a longtime friend and classmate who I saw as completely out of my league. She was beautiful and smart and witty and all the things I wasn’t convinced I deserved to be around. When I shot my shot that Fall and she accepted my ridiculous, elaborate Homecoming Dance proposal, I was as overjoyed as I was baffled. You see, she was Mormon, and there was this very unspoken (and perhaps naive) understanding in my Mormon-filled high school that they would not date anyone before 18. They might not date anyone at all.  And so every step towards something like a connection felt too good to be true. Surely the tape would be lifted off the floor, along with the only evidence of our journey: the footprints that came off with it.

I did everything I could to build the connection, hanging out in chat rooms until she showed up, trying to get in a good conversation whenever I could, asking too many questions and probably handing out too many compliments. Any media recommendation given to me felt like a welcome assignment. I couldn’t pass up the chance to tie us together somehow, even for a fleeting moment. 

“Collide” starts off with calm, deliberate verses – the kind I often had to listen carefully to and watch the music video for just to properly follow along with. But then the chorus explodes into its full earworm potential, stretching big and wide and loud:

Even the best fall down sometimes

Even the wrong words seem to rhyme

Out of the doubt that fills my mind

I somehow find You and I collide

Mind and collide, in fact, do not rhyme. But even the wrong words rhyme. At its best, it felt like our minds were reaching out to each other, colliding in ways our physical beings never would. We joked. We shot out references. We had deep conversation about deep wonderings. We were just two nerdy kids lost in a world full of cultural expectations we were still figuring out how to navigate for ourselves. Listening to “Collide” felt like listening to possibility and reality swirled together. At times, it made our connection feel fleeting and light, a simple case of two cool friends just enjoying each other’s company, and reminding me how wrong it would be to expect anything more. At other times, it felt like the end of the world, like some Romeo and Juliet shit, but without the suicides or warring families.

Another distinctive thing about Howie Day was his hair. Wild and artsy, it could only be supplanted by Ashlee Simpson’s one-time boyfriend, Ryan Cabrera, for its imitation of a head-grown collision. My mind felt full of combustive potential whenever I listened to Day’s hit. At times, that senior year  felt explosive and exciting. Other times, it felt like one wrong flicker away from completely imploding. In other words: it was like just about every teenager’s final year of high school. 

I enjoy listening to the song just as much now as I did then. The guitar strums with a propulsive rhythm. The chorus shouts and swoons in equal measure. I don’t consider it a heartache song these days as much as I consider it a song that reminds me of the big emotions I once felt and how thankful I am of the paths that crossed, if only in chat rooms and a Homecoming that yielded a pretty badass dance photo. My 1986 Honda Civic sits somewhere in a junkyard (RIP Albino Batmobile). There will be another day where I listen to this song and, while sitting a little higher, I’ll look back at my daughters and realize they, too, will have a chance to collide with someone and they, too, will tell me about all the wrong words that seem to rhyme. And that’s pretty cool.

Part of being growing up tall in your class is you’re expected to be good at basketball. It’s the first thing anyone thinks of. They’re not wondering if you have a career in playing movie henchmen or stocking shelves or working the carnival circuit – they wanna know if you’re gonna have a chance at basketball superstardom so that you may touch that rare thing so many are curious about: lots and lots of cash for playing a childhood game.

So I felt the pressure early on. I would emulate my hardwood heroes. Their plays, their moves, their very essence. And if I did it all in the right order and in the right combination, I’d be fast tracking myself towards building some generational wealth. The problem is that I emulated the wrong players. I had the lanky, awkward body of a center when I wanted to be the local Spokane hero, John Stockton, dishing dimes and knocking down heat-seeking treys. The fact I started playing soccer in the 2nd grade meant that by 5th grade, I had enough footwork to fool myself into thinking I was capable of streaking up and down the court like a steady, Stocktonian point guard. I was so resolute in this vision that I begged my basketball coach to once, just once, switch me from the body-banging, frustrating position of center (the 5, as we called it), where I felt like a gawky bird with clipped wings, to the graceful, visionary position of point guard (the 1, of course). That’s when I learned to never fuck with art teachers moonlighting as basketball coaches again. Their wisdom isn’t always in their art; it’s in letting people catch themselves in their own lie.

My first few possessions as point guard were my last. Everything felt more scattered and cumbersome. I could barely keep possession of the ball. The enemy’s limbs seemed to stretch into tree branches, waving in the wind, taunting me into another turnover. When the coach finally called a timeout, we didn’t need to say anything. We knew. It was a mistake that had to happen. I’m grateful he gave me the space to stumble into my own bullshit. Like I said, I will never underestimate an art teacher again.

Middle school reminded me of how important my size was, but in a rather dispiriting way. On what I’m assuming was the pure merit of being one of the tallest kids in the class, again, I made the varsity 7th grade basketball team. But I rode the bench most of the season. The few glimpses of the court I got only reinforced how much I didn’t belong. I tried to make the moves of a 1 while playing the 5, showing the creativity of going baseline for a reverse lay-in, but lacking the grace to do anything other than hit the underside of the backboard. I convinced myself I was a streaky shooter. But I knew the truth: I’d never get enough reps in a game to truly catch fire. The most flammable thing of all? My internal conversations about my own game. It’s a miracle I, a middle school boy, did not burn up my own playing career before it even started.

The fact I made JV in 8th grade when there were no discernible changes in everyone’s height just proved the point I had internalized all along: I was there for my height. Not my shotmaking. Not my passing. Certainly not my swift, smooth moves. I spent a lot of time being fouled and then getting called for a foul because my anger at the situation had become too combustible. Why did the refs swallow the whistle when I got whacked from all sides? Why did they brandish them like new toys whenever I bumped into others? It was the first and only time in my life I’d completely relate to Shaquille O’Neal. Here we were, two men determined to show we were more than our size, but weighed down by the misunderstanding that just because a bigger body can absorb more punishment doesn’t make it any less of a foul. At least, unlike Shaq, I could make my free throws.

When it became clear I would never be a leading scorer on my team, I gravitated towards defense. There, hustle won the game. There, you could be tall and lanky and big and you could show your worth. And I was taught to do this by standing in the middle of the key, like a lighthouse halo effect, and hold my arms out, pointing to my main one one side and the ball on the other. Often, I’d yell at my teammates to do the same. It felt, if only for a moment, like you could finally control something within the game. You couldn’t always control whether you made a shot or not, especially when limbs and sweat and hostility surrounded you. You couldn’t always control whether the ball would bounce in your favor or reflect into someone else’s fortunate hands. But you could always control when and how you raised your arms on defense, pointing to the ballcarrier and your defensive target, convinced you were really going to blow this possession up for the other team and get the ball back.

But there was a limitation to this system. And it came when your arms would need to resemble a compass. When your arms were at different angles, looking like clock hands, you could manage everything. But when they came towards you with the ball, the man you were marking would often slide in behind you. You were suddenly standing perpendicular to line that went from the front of you through the back. Game over. The pass would squeak through you. They’d lay in the shot. The frustration would only build.

At some point I realized basketball would never be my game and that soccer, despite its valley-low odds of superstardom, would allow me to put my best feet forward. Lacking the offensive skill to really wow anyone, I once again gravitated towards defense. I would go whole games playing what my coach considered to be pretty outstanding defense only to be done in by the same goddamn cross or corner kick. In those plays, my arms would form a truly straight, 180 line from the tip of my left index finger to the tip of my right. On one end would be the player about to kick the ball. On the other end would be the player I’m defending. I would have it all figured out until the ball became airborne, and once again, a player would slip behind me and make a play I could not stop. They’d head or kick the ball into the goal, and the coach would give me a look that wondered when I would finally play some defense. It was demoralizing. To be doing everything right only to be outdone by the simple fact I cannot spread my arms wide and know exactly what goes on behind me. I have my limits.

So I think about that a lot when I think about this compass and this particular drawing. Balance is an illusion. We can hold our arms up and point to whatever we want, doing our best to convince ourselves that hey guys, we got this shit covered. But there will always be something that sneaks behind us and catches us unaware. You hope it’s for something as simple as a lay-in or a goal. But you know won’t always be so lucky.

One key sign of advancing age is how you become your own Risk Manager. Without your parents physically nearby (although their voices are always in your head), there’s no one there to keep you from doing something exceedingly dangerous. Wanna jump off a too-high bridge into frigid water? Take the plunge. Wanna speed down a sparse highway with too much horsepower and not enough common sense? Hit the petal. Wanna jump off a plane, hoping that parachute does its job and expands your chances of a safe landing? Take flight. There’s nothing getting in your way. The Risk Manager’s job – a role you’re playing, remember – is to say, “Hey man, you got a kid coming on the way. Might wanna keep those legs healthy and moving,” or “The odds of you surviving this unscathed are pretty reasonable, but the odds of you getting hurt are just a little too high, my friend.” If you’re gonna have your life irreparably changed, the Risk Manager suggests, why not have it be something unavoidable rather than a clearly avoidable decision of your own?

I think about this role a lot when I drive through Austin and see someone on a bike. The explosion and steady slight decline of electric scooters, flimsy machines of injury that never come with a helmet, have emboldened the public past a dangerous point. Too often people are riding alongside cars in the bike lane, fully convinced of their ability to keep their balance in the face of turbulent winds. And it seems to have affected bike riders. There have always been too many bike riders rolling around without helmets. But the scooter scene has exacerbated the problem. Risk Managers everywhere are sitting down on the job.

When I was about twelve years old, I went to stay with a family friend of ours in a mobile home park. It felt a little bit like a homecoming since my parents’ first home, the first one I ever grew up and played with neighboring kids in, stood just a few blocks away. It was a park that felt enormous in my younger years. Now it felt like a curvy racetrack with too many hills and speedbumps. In other words: the perfect scene for a daredevil bikerider like our family friend. He’d pedal furiously down the hill before getting some serious (to me, at least) air off a the collision between his bike and the massive yellow bumps in the road. I’d keep reminding him he needed a helmet. He was partaking in some daredevilry! But he insisted he didn’t need it just as I insisted to myself I’d never be as cool as him. I kept my helmet on and eased my way through the same tracks, trying to strike a balance between street cred and safety.

I never really found that balance because as I rolled – slowly, mind you – down a particularly steep hill, I found myself airborne. To this day, I have no idea what instigated it or what I even hit, if anything. All I know is my body flipped over the handlebars, over the front of the bike, and scraped the asphalt with ferocity. Bleeding from each and every joint in my body, I ambled back to my family friends’ home, where I laid down in pain and embarrassment, waiting for the ziploc icepacks to come and ease my agony.

The best part about this incident is it got me out of a potentially more dangerous one: an invite to roller-blade with my friends. I could barely mange roller-skating, and only in perfect conditions: on flat, hardwood circles with nearby walls to cling onto. Falling on my ass allowed me to avoid embarrassment I’d never recover from. I knew my family friend didn’t think I was that cool. I didn’t do any of the cool shit he did. Nothing that would move the radar in any favorable way. But to fall in front of my peers, the ones who I’d have to face 6 days a week – 5 weekdays at school and soccer on Saturdays – was more dangerous than any joint I could have bent or scraped. You can heal a broken bone. You can’t always heal a broken heart.

So when I think about the helmet, I think about how wearing it emboldens you to do a little more than you’d usually do. Wearing a helmet, I’d be willing to try riding a dirt bike, even if my anxiousness with it causes me to fly up a short hill and into bushes (true story – advance apologies there’s no video footage of this hilarity). Wearing a helmet didn’t just save my head from getting scraped that day – it probably saved my life. If only it could have helped me get out of a ticket for the time I ran a red light on my bike.

Sometimes my favorite drawings come from a simple equation:

picture + surreal twist = a pretty rad thing to draw.

You can’t quite look at it and say it’s not realistic, because it’s not meant to be. That alone relaxes the expectations of my own illustration skills. But you also can’t deny the concept at hand. It’s right there, waiting for you to connect the dots. And when you do? You’re looking at the piece for what it makes you think of far more than what went into pulling it off. That, to me, is the dream. The drawings I love the most aren’t something to admire, but to make you feel something. To think. To leave you to digesting everything long after your eyes leave the page.

When you’re a new parent, working full-time, and trying to finish one of many writing projects, the tick can be shark-like, moving slowly, yet menacingly through the water. If you ever watch the seconds hand in a public school classroom, you know where this is going. The way the hand moves without any ticking – just one steady, ongoing wave around the clock. It’s a predator in motion, waiting for its prey to make a mistake.

But anyone who’s ever seen a sundial knows it can be misread. If you’re looking at the shadows in the wrong way, from the wrong direction, you can easily be fooled. All of which is to say: the ticking of time is often an illusion that speeds up our heartrate, that compacts stress an extra few degrees beyond what we feel we can handle. It creates a sensation I can only describe as a crunch. Perhaps it’s the sundial shark’s jaws sinking into you, meeting the weariness of your bones. Perhaps it’s a shadow you’ve misread. Perhaps it’s both.

My dad showed me Jaws too early. I only knew it from the famous poster, the one with a giant shark’s mouth open wide, ready to consume a flailing, floating woman at the surface. I knew the theme song before I knew the movie, as my dad hummed it often, each time with a little twinkle of gentle menace in his eyes. I needed the repetition because the theme song notes were often too low for me to truly hear.

What I remembered about Jaws far more than anything in the movie itself is how it changed me. Specifically, how it made me terrified to be anywhere near water I could not clearly see all the way to the bottom. When we went to California a short time after seeing this terrifying film, my new fear presented itself in two key ways. The first came when we walked into a dimly-lit section of Seaworld with tanks of black water. I was so sure a shark would drag me to the depths if I ever put in an inch of my body near it. It didn’t matter if it was far too small a tank for such a shark to fit – let alone thrive – in. The imagination filled in the gaps. The second came shortly after at the beach when I dragged my feet into the ocean as the waves crashed and swirled around. At one point, something grabbed me and I screamed something, “It’s got me!” and sprinted out of the water as fast as my 4th-grade heart could pump. The laughter from my parents clued me in. It was no shark. It was fucking seaweed. That’s how badly Jaws had scarred me.

From then on, the fear become more subtle and more gripping all at once. Whenever we’d go out in the boat at Long Lake, we’d have a ritual of anchoring the boat somewhere not too far from the coastline and then hop out and swim around before eating our homemade lunches. It didn’t matter how many times I assured myself sharks were saltwater animals and we were at least 300 miles from anything approaching that kind of water. It didn’t matter if I knew alligators or piranhas or orcas were not native to Spokane. Whenever I’d swim out from the boat, I’d always, always swim back as if I was being chased. The feeling, even as I eased into my 30s, never left me. Something, somewhere was just waiting for me to relax. Just like the unsuspecting woman on the Jaws movie poster.

I think about that feeling a lot when I think about time. The way it feels you’re being chased by something that’s not quite tangible or easy to explain, that carries a heat of danger you cannot cool. Time can be like that. The way the seconds pivot in one continuous, unerring motion, around and around and around again. But like the fear of a saltwater shark chasing you in a freshwater lake, it’s not quite real. Time doesn’t have to be so compressed. The crunch doesn’t have to have any bite. The seconds can transform from an unrelenting shark to a natural, steady rhythm of life. It can be what we make it. We can find other things to make us tick.