One afternoon the two of us found ourselves walking down an orange dirt path behind the house. The dirt was hard, baked under the gilded heat of the mid-day sun, and it crumbled under our feet like carrot cake falling off the edge of a fork.
Before the end of seventh grade, Kurt Cobain was dead from suicide. It was announced one morning as we sat in homeroom watching Channel One news where Anderson Cooper got his start in journalism.
My sister recently gave birth. It was her second—this time a girl; small, beautiful, long fingered. Upon visiting her in the hospital, I was reminded of how delicate a newborn is. Also, in this post, I digress slightly on the topic of grocery shopping at Harris Teeter with my son Henry
Hardened bread crumbs burst into fine white powder, sprinkling to the ground. Seeds crack under the weight of jaws clinching, and in an imperfect circle the birds gather round the old man and strut mechanically, their fat necks jerking. They welcome him as if he is one of their own, and he in turn accepts their embrace
Big magic is what author Elizabeth Gilbert calls it. I like that, and I do feel as if extracting memories from within and making sense of them on paper is magic. And so I continue my magic tricks day by day, whether there’s an audience out there in the dark or not.
Every seat has a body in it. There are so many faces here in the soup kitchen. Black, white, young, old. A large Japanese man who requests more meat and bread. A young couple enters pushing a baby stroller, a small child in tow. And old man, an amputee, without his left leg, folded up into a square and safety pinned. A large woman with wall eyes. An eighteen year old with short dreads.
Jeremiah had this cat named Leon Phelps, named, yes, after the character from the movie The Ladies Man of the same name. This is the story of when Leon introduced himself to Cal Adams, Jeremiah’s new roomie (from “When the Lights Go Out at 10:16: A Memoir of Life and Friendship”)
Whether he goes by the name of doubt, fear, or some other moniker, we all have a negative voice burrowed in our head that reminds us of our limitations, be it intellectual, emotional, or physical. This voice tells us we aren’t good enough, we aren’t talented enough, skilled enough, strong enough, fast enough — we aren’t enough.
The ancient Stoics believed that to live one’s life to the fullest, to truly appreciate those you love and your own life, contemplating death was necessary.
Last night as I was reading my daughter a bedtime story, I heard an adult voice cry out in haste from the street just outside our home. Minutes later, sirens pierced into the night, closer and closer. There was an ambulance and police cars, a fire truck. First responders were descending a staircase that leads to a small lake at the bottom of the hill.
In this episode of This Is Me Being Uncomfortable, I mumble about launching a podcast by accident; why I decided to return to writing Jeremiah’s story; and how human beings are connected by story to one another, globally.
When we were little kids, I used to follow behind Robbie and Jeremiah—unbeknownst to them—as they made their way on foot to the pond in the woods off 727 in Phenix toward Red House way. They’d walk side-by-side with fishing reels in hand. I’d follow in the distance on my bike. As they set up to fish on the bank, pulling the black dirt covered worms from the styrofoam container and hooking them, I would watch from a distance at the tree line.
Fragile, she lay in my arms, as my wife placed the medicine dropper to her mouth. Like nursing an injured little bird back to health, I thought. Against my chest, I could feel her compacted warmth against me. She wouldn’t take to my wife’s breast in the beginning, so this is how we fed her those first few weeks of life.
Annabelle is home now. The crib is no longer empty. She stares into the camera, eyes wide. She lays in the floor, my dog beside her keeping her safe. She’s crawling now. Then standing. She stands proudly beside her first snowman.
“There’s nothing that makes me feel more like a failure than sitting down to write this story.”
“Maybe you need to reframe your mindset as to what constitutes failure,” my wife said to me. She sat across from me on the couch, a book open before her.
They say your odds of being involved in a plane crash are slim to none. So why is it I am scared out of my wits to fly on an airplane? And what does Brian Williams of NBC News have to do with this?
Now more than ever, my hometown of Phenix, Virginia, carries with it ghosts. The ghosts of my childhood. Almost fourteen years ago, I wrote these very lines.
In the rearview, I glance back at my son Henry. He’s wearing a black t-shirt that has on its front drawings of insects, different kinds, beetles and flies—bugs that shout, “I am a boy!” He moves the toy truck into the air as if it has wings and glides on air.
“Do you know what my favorite thing to do with my dad was when I was growing up,” I ask Henry.
Six years ago, I sat in my apartment with my dad and watched the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship. It was the last time we would ever be alone together.
My grandmother suffers from dementia. These are my letters to her. Your fingernails were long and well manicured. Long, gentle strokes you made on my tiny back.
“Lord, help me to be the type of person my dog thinks I am,” read an aged, yellowed plaque that lay atop the counter as I swiped my debit card with my free hand.
Five years ago, my wife’s water broke. It was 2:30 AM. Two hours later, she woke me from my slumber, and said calmly, “Get your clothes on, I’m in labor. We can stop by McDonald’s drive thru on the way to the hospital so you can get something to eat first.”
At its most basic level, anxiety is an evolutionary trait tied to our survival (“fight or flight”). It’s primitive and automatic. Anxiety is normal — except when it’s not
I remember her, too. Not well. Her face has been clouded by time. Her voice, I remember it was gentle and kind. She used to give me jellybeans when I went into the bank in Phenix with my mom. She worked there. Her hair was shoulder length if I recall, some blonde to it. Her cheeks a little rosy. She always made sure I didn’t get the black licorice jellybeans.
Robbie is my second cousin, a little more than a year and a half older than me. His grandmother, Elner, my Papa Hamlett’s sister and my great aunt. Though our blood was inextricably linked through kin, there is more to it than that.
An excerpt from Sleeping Birds Do Not Sing, a novel about mental illness and friendship that I wrote a decade ago that only one person has ever read—until now.
A large stainless steel cooking pot with its lid removed sat with us at the table like a mute friend, as did a paring knife. Before us a bucket full of raw green beans.
In this new series, Text Messages with Friends, I will examine the relationship I have with my friends via text messages. The poor soul whose phone I blew up in this demonstration: Andy Dirks.
Blue jeans and flannel shirts and ratty white Reeboks adorned bodies that twisted in mid-air for a lay-up or a rebound ricocheted off the rim. Young women in short shorts and sundresses laid on the hillside and watched their boyfriends.
The thin, lanky figure stepped to a chink in the gray-black pavement that opened like the veins of a broken waterway, spilling horizontally across the basketball court. He bent his knees. His eyes searched for a direct line to the back of the rusted hoop, and he released a jump shot. The flick of his wrist made a popping sound as his fingers pointed straight ahead. Textbook release.
Recently, I spoke with the executive director of the Southside Virginia Community College (SVCC) Foundation about relaunching the Jeremiah Hamlett Memorial Scholarship Fund. WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT AT 10:16, a memoir I began in July 2003, will be the vehicle which helps fund the scholarship in Jeremiah’s memory.
Getting this scholarship fund back off the ground is something I have had my heart set on for a while. Continuing our story of childhood and friendship is also something that has been on my mind for quite some time, and I’ve struggled mightily with how to share it with others but in a way that it is more than just a story—a way that gives it purpose. So, I decided to marry the two ideas in this initiative.
After all, it wasn’t until the summer of 2003, the night Jeremiah had his first seizure and subsequent diagnosis of brain cancer, that I ever began writing stories—WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT to be precise. Jeremiah’s diagnosis was also the reason I decided to return to college; and Southside, by way of a class assignment from Ms. Judy Lloyd, is where WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT really took off and went from a few random paragraphs in my green notebook to what it eventually became and is today.
Find out how you can help support this worthy cause by clicking the link below.
The portly woman had her own path to be exact, worn white into the grass that led to her car. After this curiosity, I reached into my coat pocket and retrieved a folded copy of “The Last Leaf,” by O. Henry that I had printed prior to my departure from Charlottesville earlier in the day. “Don’t laugh at me,” I said to my then-girlfriend. “I’m going to read you a short story.”
At first, I didn’t like the new kid. I resented him actually. That would all change in time as Jeremiah grew to be one of the best friends I would ever have.
Sometimes he would cry uncontrollably as he told me these things. Sometimes I would cry after the phone call was over. I’d sit and stare at the white wall in my bedroom, helpless. I’d think of the beautiful person he once was. I wanted to fight his demons for him, but his demons had no interest in me.
HE WOULD DO this little shimmy waist down, inching closer unbeknownst to you what the hell he was setting you up for, and by the time you realized it, it was already too late. He’d anchor the weight of his lead foot and mash it down on your helpless toes, and you were stuck there like a bug in mud, unable to retreat, and he’d take that sharp knuckled middle finger of his and bend it in his fist and drive that sucker right into the hollow point of your bicep and he’d dig a little at the end, twisting it as if a key opening a door, as he locked and loaded another round in the chamber.
I open the door of the car which swings open freely, and set my feet on the ground, run for the tree line. There is a path in here somewhere, the hayfield, I know it. There isn’t. I will have to create my own path. This is where the adventure starts. Where the snakes hide in wait. Where the flowers form at the root and the weeds do all they can to strangle the beauty. The road is not paved before me. It never was. This is where the children of my past run freely. Where the thorns snag at shirts and acorns fly through the air like bullets piercing into skin.
In this episode of “This Is Me Being Uncomfortable,” I mumble largely about writing, creativity, and the influence of life (and death) experience on how you see the world.
In this episode of This Is Me Being Uncomfortable, I mumble about seasonal affective disorder, low level depression, my son, and walking away from society’s norms
The year was 1997. I sat in the backseat of a tiny Toyota Corolla with my perfumed, slightly purpled hair Granny Hamlett as my neighbor. She was seated directly behind my dad at the wheel whose eyes searched for fellow road warriors and interstate truckers to shake his head at.
In the mid 1980s, there was a makeshift skate park on the tennis court off Church Street in Phenix, Virginia, where long haired, zit-faced teenage boys would do kick flips and ollies on their skateboards and smoke cigarettes under their perfectly constructed wooden quarter pipe while listening to The Ramones and Motörhead. These kids formed a rough and tumble street gang known as The Aces. See end note.
I’ve had ups. I’ve had downs. I’ve felt the victor. I’ve felt defeated. But I’m still standing, and each day I learn more about what my anxiety triggers are
Big magic is what author Elizabeth Gilbert calls it. I like that, and I do feel as if extracting memories from within and making sense of them on paper is magic. And so I continue my magic tricks day by day, whether there’s an audience out there in the dark or not.
I look at it this way: with my last name alone being so comforting (“Pillow”) it’s, to quote Darth Vader, “my destiny” (to publish a children’s book).
That’s going to be part of my pitch at least.
“There’s nothing that makes me feel more like a failure than sitting down to write this story.”
“Maybe you need to reframe your mindset as to what constitutes failure,” my wife said to me. She sat across from me on the couch, a book open before her.
There is something about being a writer, or wanting to be a writer, that also brings with it a certain amount of self-doubt in one’s capabilities. It’s not good enough. Nothing, perhaps, brings more self-doubt than not feeling accomplished.
A reader of fiction wants to be inside the point-of-view (POV) character, seeing the world through his or her eyes. To see that world, first you have to create it.
I made some updates to my short story “The Lady Next Door” which is available for purchase as an ebook on Amazon. The cost is 99 cents. “The Lady Next Door,” for those who haven’t yet read it, was written in 2003, and is about a child’s love for his elderly neighbor.
Or, your dog doesn’t know what you are doing, your cat thinks you are a complete and utter dumbass either way, and no one else really cares, so what do you have to lose?
In this episode of This Is Me Being Uncomfortable, I mumble about my thoughts on memoir and memories, projects I have in queue, and ego and why writing is not a selfish act but a giving act.
Sometimes I feel like I’m just writing to no one. Into the ether, if you will. Other times, I feel like I’m writing a letter to my future self. Other times, to my past self; and yet others to an audience of readers, that, by and large, I don’t even know.
I’ve decided to try something a smidgen different on my blog. That is, offer you the author’s point of view on writing a full length memoir such as When the Lights Go Out at 10:16. Writing can often be a lonely process, so this is me opening the door of my world to you. Today’s perspective relates to why I chose the title I did for When the Lights Go Out at 10:16. But first, a short summary of what the book is about.
I don’t want to be the guy on the side of the road dressed up like a cloud, dancing on the sidewalk, holding a sign that says, “50% off all mattresses. Today only!”
Serani continues, pointing to humans’ basic need to understand, citing research that to begin the healing process we must tell our story: “Our personal narrative offers us a chance for not just understanding, but for reorganization [of] our sense of self. A self that was wounded, broken, frightened or lost—but can now be reclaimed.”
Being a parent means rediscovering your inner child, and a child’s imagination is something to envy. Their curiosity is magical. Their cynicism is non-existent.
So, whoever you are, because I don’t know any of your names, let’s go out there and have some fun and kick the ball in the other goal a bunch of times, and DESTROY our opponent. No mercy! Cobra Kai!
On the drive there, she sits in the backseat, her Barbie between her knees, talking to it, making it dance or sing or just be her friend or plastic confidant. I listen. I watch her in the rearview. I see her smile. I hear her giggle.
A brief book review of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, by Dr. Laura Markham, and why every parent should throw away all of their other parenting books and un-bookmark all of their favorite parenting blogs, and just buy this book—like right now
Four years ago today, my son Henry came into the world. It was a rather spectacular entrance being that the attending nurse and doctor for my wife had just left and gone upstairs to eat lunch when my wife looked at me and said, “He’s coming.”
I feel like I need to make this a series of some sort… some ongoing diary cataloguing the usually hilarious, sometimes insightful things my three year old son says. Well, here goes.
It’s the day before Halloween, and my three year old son sure did come through for me in “Stuff My Three Year Old Son Said Today: Volume Two (A Halloween Special).”
