It’s me in there, obviously. My hands and eyes and a pen dutifully take dictation. So if I have a day where I eat a lot of sugary crap and additional stuff between meals and another little something after the kids have been put to bed, I come to find out the next morning that the failure of this is what’s on my mind. 300 words in a morning about how easy it should be and how weak I must be. I am a little tired of that guy taking up the pages of my one precious morning journal. And, look, it seems obvious that it’s my hands moving my pen and I could just put something else in there. But on those mornings if I try to escape what’s honestly smoldering in my head, asking to be poured out, if I don’t write the tired “I did it again” confession, complaint, whining, whinging, complaining, complaining, snivelling song that we’re all so tired of, I find myself staring at the blank page. The loser in me has a song that no one wants to hear, but he is actually very good at making sure no one else can be heard either as long as he’s in the room.

And so I have to try to have good days. In the moment I try to recall that if I wait to be alone in the kitchen and secretly shove a piece of the kids’ Halloween or Christmas or Easter candy into my face like a heist, I’m inviting in the sad sack. I’m courting another morning where my mind, which might have come up with something beautiful and profound, or at least something that makes me smile to myself, is going to give me nothing but the old shit. A grown man’s ramblings should be about parenthood and courage and the president and leaking pipes and old paintings and the pits of isolation, not cookies, not marshmallows, not instant oatmeal. Not lists of everything I eat with green checkmarks next to the acceptable items.

I’m trying to think of something to call that version of myself, because all I’ve come up with is “Whiny Little Bitch.” And that’s crass. Maybe a name that’s neutral enough that its association with this character is all it needs to be come pejorative. Like with bands, even a bad name for a band becomes a perfect name if the band is good enough. A good name for someone I don’t want to let into my house. Daniel or Jeff. Dracula or Sue. Get him the hell out of here. I’m trying to think.

A giant viburnum lives in the yard. I’ve crawled through the brush to see behind it and can verify that its trunk is thicker than my thigh. Its green branches bear millions of green-white flowers. To walk to the shed beside it is to walk through the JC Penney perfume department. I wake up with my eyes glued shut. Red eyes all day like I’ve seen horrors. The insides of my ears and the way-back of my mouth’s roof crawl, just out of reach of the scratching pinky nail, the probing chopstick. One thing I do is take in a mouthful of seltzer and tip my head back, trout mouth open, letting the bubbles accrue and scrub the palate back there. That helps for a minute.

The girls hide in that bush. They creep through the east side and come out the west side, happy to have a secret spot, the perfect hiding spot. Bigger than the swing set. Bigger than their rooms. I can’t cut it down. It’s so big I don’t know where I’d even start cutting it back. So every year it’s bigger and more harmful and a better hiding spot and dearer.

I used to wonder if you could itch to death. Not necessarily scratch yourself to ribbons and bleed out to death. I think I can conceptualize how that would do the job. I mean the itch itself. The mean the itchself. So much itch, pure itch, that it bends your skin unnaturally and your brain fails to keep up with all that badness that’s not quite pain, so much that pain would relieve it. I think instead of black everything would go electric green. I think next year I might find out, like it or not.

Photo by Michael Nerrie