Defining the Topography of the Atlas

Because of the next book, I released this current one. Despite releasing Under a Black Rainbow five days ago, I've been deeply involved in the creation of the next book, which feels more immediate and has, like other projects worth completing, become its own maelstrom of things to contend with. 

Though dense in topicality, I've found a way to have a little fun with it (as I usually tend to do). Fictional locales of Latin-ized stages of grief, emotional landmarks on the map, incomplete fictions, potential GPS coordinates for signifcant places in significant moments, playlists that consumed my brain during particular stints...

Excited is the wrong word for this book, but there is a thrumming pulling me along and telling me it's worth telling. 

So I've been busy doing what it is that I tend to do best, which is make shit for other people to consume. Enjoy these fruits from your favorite dancing monkey. Works totally in progress.

May your 2024 be better than you expect, and exactly what you deserve. 

*    *    *

Depending upon how you look at it, this is either a love letter or a ransom note to my grief of the last few years. 

 

There are moments where my thinking was clear, but there have been far many more where it was not. There were moments where I was trying to clean up the messes made by that unclear thinking, and then there was fallout from just…everything. This is the perpetual and dependable chaos of life, just…turned up to 11. 

 

To be clear: there were some really, really exceptional moments in time during this multi-year period.

 

However. 

 

The majority of it has been fucking awful. Of all the eras I’ve gone through thus far, this is absolutely the worst one. The hardest one. The one where I really (I mean REALLY) tried to learn and still came out feeling like I flunked every lesson in the process. This shit was FUCKING HARD, and I’ve never tried so deeply or so thoroughly to keep myself and this rickety-ass ship that is my life afloat through all of it. 

 

As someone who learned how to navigate through some super dicey times pretty quickly, I have never felt so fucking adrift, and without oars or navigation of any sort. It was a new experience for me as it damn near magnified every single one of my insecurities (of which there are many). 

 

I never really wanted to write nonfiction. Not in any serious way, not in any way meant for widespread publishing other than on the internet in a blog virtually no one would read anyway. 

 

Not to knock those that do write in this style, it just wasn’t something I was terribly interested in exploring. I’m a fairly open and honest human being (I think; I hope), but there was a moment in time where I was perhaps too much of both and ended up weaponizing my writing as some kind of shitty retribution against one or two people who I felt had hurt me. While this isn’t an unusual occurrence for highly emotional and hurt people, when I finally came to my senses, I hated the person I’d become in those moments. I didn’t like the person who thought that was okay to do. I despise the manipulation of others, but never more so than when I’ve inadvertently done it to someone else. Not only is it a terrible thing to do to someone, it means I’ve lost control in some way. 

 

The longer I thought about the style, the more I felt that the nonfiction approach to writing has the potential to encroach upon the lives of people who had not given consent to my talking about them, despite the experience being uniquely mine to express. It simply felt wrong on a number of levels, so I vowed to fight against every urge to write about my personal life in ways that violated someone else’s privacy. This is simply my own personal philosophy; I don’t begrudge anyone else who writes nonfiction in opposite ways, I only say this to clarify why I don’t typically do it myself. Godspeed and good luck to all others making the attempt in their own ways.

 

And I don’t think this book is that. I hope it’s not that. I’ve tried to keep things focused on me more than anyone playing a part in things as much as possible. It is my exploration of things that I alone experienced (though others may have been of a particular influence at the time). 

 

So, this project is a bit of an indulgence in some ways. Like Def Poetry Jam poet Rives once spoke: “Me, me, me…I, I, I…doesn’t anybody tell a story anymore?” This is the story of me, me, me, and I, I, I. It is the culmination of what I know now after having experienced hard lesson after hard lesson after hard lesson slap me across the face in rapid succession. It is the culmination of personal musings, gray matter slices, heart scrapings, a metric fuck-ton of self-reflections, and me coming to some hard conclusions when all is said and done (with more work yet to be done in pretty much every regard). 

 

 

SOME CLARIFICATIONS

 

What this book is not: 

 

A guidebook, a set of rules, a strictly dogmatic approach to navigating your own grief, answers, solutions, truth (not yours, anyway), a set of beliefs, or full of answers. It is neither salvation nor forgiveness; whether earned or not, it may ask for the latter on occasion. 

 

What this book is: 

 

A deep examination of the self, an intense self-reflection and addressing of deep-seated insecurities (past, present, and future), a sounding board for the things you also might be experiencing, but maybe have no one in your orbit who can relate. Ultimately, what I hope this book becomes is something real, something relatable and helpful. 

 

If we’re being honest, and I hope I am, this is me really trying to figure my shit out in one of the only ways that has ever made sense to me, and that’s to just flay myself wide open for critique and say “let’s take a look under the hood and see what makes this fucker tick.” 

 

It’s probably gonna get messy. 

 

 

THE TL;DR

 

My grandfather passed in 2006. I remember my mother waking me up in the early hours to let me know. My lack of experience and having just been brought up out of sleep, I didn’t know how to respond. This was my first close death, someone I knew and had spent a lot of time with, but he was her parent and I had no frame of reference for that kind of loss yet.

 

I remember bits and pieces of the actual funeral. I vividly remember the end of the ceremony, and how other reactions opened up emotions in me I didn’t realize were waiting there at the surface, ready to gulp their own air. My story “The Same Night Waits for Us All” from The Machinery of the Heart: Love Stories is (very) loosely based on his passing.

 

And then, like me, time moved on. I left Kansas City in 2009 for grad school in California and I remained so heads down on my education that I did nothing but focus on my studies. I didn’t really start noticeably feeling the effects of death until I left San Francisco and moved back home in 2015. 

 

Within that first year, two long-time friends passed, both situations hitting me harder than I thought they might. Though I’d always danced with the ideas of death and loss and mortality in my fictions, I really hadn’t experienced much prior in the real world. To be fair, the death of a family member going through horrific circumstances is different from that of two friends going out on their own terms. Neither is a great situation, but they are very, very different. 

 

I think it’s fair to say I got shook, and shook hard, with each death that came after my grandfather’s. Maybe there’s a correlation there, this focus on death and time and loss and me trying to do all the things before my time is up while trying to find someone to do all those things with and to help celebrate my successes with, because it’s always better when you can share it with someone else. Maybe I’m overthinking it and trying to find the perfect ratio of it all and struggling to find the joy in just the doing of it. 

 

In 2016, things began moving forward. I got a job as an editor the year before, I was living alone in my own apartment for the first time. I was DJing regularly again and I was working on a new book. Though I didn’t know it, I’d herniated a disc in my spine, which then ruptured. The pieces fell down my spinal column and lay heavy against my sciatic nerve, preventing me from walking farther than 40 feet without breaking into a sweat and needing assistance. 

 

I’d been hurt before; the entire upper right side of my torso (front and back) are shredded from my job in San Francisco. Torn muscles, strains, sprains, months of physical therapy, acupuncture, heat lamps, some of the most brutal deep tissue therapy I’ve ever experienced. Pain was nothing new, but this pain was crippling. 

 

Surgery scheduled. Two months of post-surgery recovery after being stuck on the floor of my apartment for four months. My first book gets published and I get promoted at work. Life moves ever on, the way that it does. 

 

I recognize that something is wrong with Mom when we go to Lydia’s for Mother’s Day dinner in 2018; the way she eats and reacts to things I cannot see is odd. She says nothing until later when she’s ready. At the same time, I’m conversing with my future boss through emails, waiting for her to tell me it's time to give my notice to my current job. Mom reveals to me in late June or early July that she’s been diagnosed with a rare form of carcinoma; I fall into the best job of my life a few months later in November. 

 

In this moment, it takes me all of two seconds to know that I’m renting a storage unit, moving out of my apartment and moving back into mom’s house for the foreseeable future.

 

In this moment, I know that I no longer have much control over this life of mine, but what I want also no longer really matters. 

 

In this moment, I know that things just got real heavy. It was the easiest decision I’ve ever made and I would make it again every single time. 

 

We fall into a rhythm. The initial months are exploratory, both in how our days will change and the things we learn about the shit ravaging her body. During chemo, she begins shrinking, but she’s the toughest broad I have ever known, so most days are fine (or at least she makes me think, because she is much smarter than me). This is the process, this is how it goes. 

 

And then there are the surprise visits to the ER because of fevers and lungs filling with liquid and then there are other surgeries to remove as much of the cancer as possible and then there are the days where she has no interest in food after and just wants to sleep. 

 

And then there is the phone call that comes in November of 2019. My father has passed. 

 

For the next three weeks, I am in Phoenix, trying to figure out exactly what it is that I feel because I am torn between my love of a parent that’s passed and my love for one that’s struggling to stay afloat and I only have so much headspace and finally have to return home because the living require more work than the dead, but I am so, so tired and this new job of mine requires an abundance of brainpower (which I am THANKFUL for) and it is simply a lot, and all at once. 

 

Two months later, she and I are sick with what I believe to be the first wave of COVID. We aren’t just under the weather, we’re sick-sick. For weeks, the both of us. Once healed, she forces me out into an apartment, citing reasons related to my not having a social life. I didn’t care about the social life, but I didn’t put up a fight either. The place I chose was between her and the hospital, and that wasn’t by accident. 

 

Bare weeks after, the pandemic hits and I find myself alone in my apartment for the next year. I’m not allowed in the chemo ward for obvious reasons. I start slowly unraveling because this forced solitude is different than the one I experienced the years before; it is more permanent, more serious. I legitimately have to stay away from other people in order to keep my mother safe, which I’m happy to do, but it remains tough mentally and emotionally.

 

The pandemic continues on. I'm in the process of closing on my first home the day I move out of the apartment a year later. The movers are ten minutes away from arriving when my sister calls. Mom dies in the living room of our only home here in Kansas City. My sister and godmother are both there to see her off and I can't help thinking what an amazing and singularly beautiful experience my sister gets, telling my mother that it's okay for her to stop fighting, that it's okay to pass over. Heavy, but wow.

 

After this day, I am in a permanent tailspin for the next several years. I am in uncharted territory and every day is a new batch of fuckery that I am probably not prepared for, but have to manage anyway. 

 

This atlas has got some deep scarring to it. It’s still readable, but it’s been aged and seriously bruised in the process. Some of the locations are written in blood. Others are starting to fade away. There are random stains across its surface; coffee, liquor, tears. 

 

Time and distance are the only ways to erase an emotional connection, and you’ll come to understand why that concept terrifies the hell outta me later on in the book. Neosporin heals wounds; time doesn’t give a single fuck about them.

 

 

THE SECTIONS

 

While the stages of grief aren’t chronological, I’ve given the titular sections of this book the stages that most appropriately fit my headspace for those years. But because this is an ‘atlas,’ and because I like to think I’m clever, I’ve done a few things within these pages. 

 

“The Lost City of Innocentia” is a bit of a summary of the years leading up to the ones mentioned above, the word innocentia being Latin for innocence.

 

“The Map of Negatio” is me figuring out my place in things, both emotionally and in terms of the blog I’d restarted, which began as one thing and turned into something much different. Negatio is Latin for denial. 

 

“The Pactus Isles” are me set adrift, trying to figure out my new normal in the real world. Pactus is Latin for bargaining. 

 

“The Southern Continent of Ira” is the time of mothers dying and houses buying and so, so much rage trying to find a way out and not finding anything to cling to or punch or destroy or ruin. Ira is Latin for anger, of which there was (and remains) plenty. 

 

“The Depressum Fields” are where I ended up for the majority of 2022. I have never known a depth of darkness the way this year served that shit up to me and forced me to choke it down. This was probably my hardest year on record. Depressum is clearly Latin for depression here, of which there was, again, plenty to go 'round. 

 

“The Poles of Acceptiatio” shouldn’t give you a false sense of closure; ain’t nothing closed here, and I sure as shit haven’t accepted much else. But this is where things began coming back into focus, where I began to feel like I was coming back to the person I was before all this shit started. This is the year the writing and the reading came back to me, though I was still in desperate need of a jumpstart. Acceptiatio is Latin for acceptance, but again, we aren’t exactly there yet.

 

Save for the first ones, each section is a single year of life. This seemed to make the most amount of sense, categorically, but also helped with placing the fiction pieces somewhere appropriate amongst all the blog pieces I wrote. My hope is that you get both a very real and honest look into my headspace with the blog posts, but then you also get a taste of the fictional headspace. A bit of both worlds here – what I’m experiencing in real time coupled with how I tend to process it creatively. 

Were all the stories finished during those years? Absolutely not, but they were either started in those years or their original intent (which remains intact) is more suited for that particular time period. Truth be told, I’m finishing most of these stories in late 2023 or the majority of 2024 as the book ramps up into being, though several of the fiction pieces were already 10 pages or more in length. Honestly, take the fictions with a grain of salt, but know that they are appropriately placed and that most of them were completed with their original intentions firmly in place; some just manifested in better ways with the knowledge that came after their inception.

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