The air was orange tonight.

It was an ominous glow as I stepped out of the door and into the night sky. The glow that hints at a coming storm; a tornado that will disrupt everyday life. A glow that brings fear, unrest. As if the current political turmoil or other civil unrest might actually loom around the corner, waiting to tear us apart.

And the aroma rose and stank and lingered. It was bizarre and unique and terrifying in its own way, directing one’s attention even more to the strange and uncertain feeling that hovered around the neighborhood.

If one allowed themselves to get lost in the moment, then there is no telling where that road could take you. You could imagine that lurking nearby was some sort of zombie outbreak, or that the bombs might fall at any moment and looting would begin.

It was ominous, it was eerie, it was hanging thick in the atmosphere.

But at that moment, a light broke through. Specifically, it was the Little Caesar’s sign that I was standing under, which I then realized was the root of the strange orange glow.

And the woman in the car in front of me was smoking weed, so that’s why it smelled funny.

So I drove home and ate some pizza.

Later this year, I will get married on a golf course on the other side of the country.

I keep coming back to that statement because it’s a really hilarious one to me. It’s one I’m very excited about to say the least. But hilarious because golf has no significance to myself or my fiancé, it’s just a really good spot where her parents live that is pretty and we have access to. It’ll be a simple service. We’ve planned it as such. Simple and purposeful. We’ve tried to be that in our relationship. We’ve tried to take hold of the absurdity. We’ve tried to take hold of the opportunity every day to be purposeful for each other.

There was a moment in an airplane earlier this year where Atlanta seemed to stretch on forever. I really do think we were in the sky for over an hour and we were still above city lights. I’m sure what I was actually seeing at that point was somewhere in Alabama but after a day of flying from Seattle at 4:00am to Atlanta and then back west a time zone, everything was just blurring together. Read More…

People are essentially the same everywhere you go, but more so if the situations surrounding them are similar. Seems stupid to say, but I’m going somewhere with it.

If you go to a smaller city anywhere in the country and eat at a a small local favorite diner, you’ll encounter the same people. They will all wear hats and shirts supporting the local sports team, there will always be a at least one booth that’s a couple of older friends you can tell have been eating there together for years and years, and the waitress is 100% likely to call you “honey” or “sugar”. Obviously you can’t go to Chicago and expect it to be like Topeka, but you can go from somewhere like Jackson, Mississippi, to Everett, Washington and in some ways it’s the same. Sure, there are mountains right outside the window of the diner as opposed to the normal view in Jackson of a parking lot where nobody knows how to park. But it still feels a tad bit like home. Read More…