So Much Has Happened

This is a long essay. I’m aware of that. You can listen to it here, or hop over to my podcast feed and listen wherever you find podcasts: Spotify, Apple, Podbean, etc.

Our dog killed our cat.

She was walking between his legs, and he reacted, lunging and biting. He broke her neck.

She didn’t die immediately.

I wasn’t in the room.

I was looking for her, to give her some chicken water.

My wife began to scream.

I ran to the screaming, and the floor was soaking and the dog was standing there, and my wife was weeping, and she was hyperventilating.

Something came into me. The animal that is in all men. I was engulfed in mindless calm. “Go sit down, Ashley. I’ll handle this.”

The rest, I’ll spare you the details

of.

I know my body was flooded with adrenaline that in the critical moment the conscious thoughts were, My wife needs me, and, Keep her safe, and, I have to do this.

Angus needed me in that moment in a way I never wanted to be needed.

Whether You Want It Or Not

This life is going to deliver pain.

I have a friend, a dear friend, it turns out, who carried me in ways he doesn’t perhaps fully understand over this past month.

You, reader, are part of the story. I think of you often.

I was listening to a podcast yesterday, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. He and Monica, his cohost, were discussing mood in the fact-check, post interview, with Josh Gad, in “Josh Gad Returns.”

Dax and Monica were disputing the role of their podcast. The California fires have been raging for weeks now. Billions of dollars in real estate have burned. Rich actors and successful businesspeople have lost everything.

People with less money and fame have lost everything too. No one can afford to lose so much, and still they’ve lost everything.

I should note, I’ve listened to every episode of Armchair Expert. It’s among my favorite shows.

Dax stated in the fact-check that he felt it was his professional responsibility to bring levity and positive-vibes to the listeners. He based his belief on the idea that his podcast is an escape for listeners who’ve got enough of their own stressors and anxieties. Monica took the contrary and felt that it was beneficial to be honest and raw concerning her own stress and anxiety.

At the heart of their dispute was a conflicting worldview. Do we bare all and risk weighing others down with our troubles or do we perform a kind of alchemy by setting aside our troubles to entertain and lift our listeners?

I don’t recall just when it started

or how long I’ve been wrestling with the onslaught of challenges in life. Last June seems to be about right. June of 2024 is when I had my first big setback. Or perhaps it was earlier. January of 2024 is when Chewy left me.

Maybe it started even earlier. February of 2023 is when my pops lost his battle to Alzheimer’s Disease. Because of how my father dealt with that situation, and because of a lifetime of tension, I confronted him, and we haven’t spoken since that time.

My writing business had been going slower than hoped for long enough by that point that Ashley and I decided it was beneficial for her to get a W-2 around that same time.

Her going back to work after ten years away delivered a real blow to my ego. Over the next year we lost Princess then Chewy then Karl.

It felt like I came limping into 2025 with a blade suspended over my head, in part because of my own poor decision-making.

Though I’d given up alcohol and adopted a healthy-for-me diet that resulted in significant weightloss, I’d foolishly substituted one addiction for another by using Kratom, and so the week leading up to Christmas, I chose to quit Kratom, which plunged me into one of the worst depressions of my life.

I had my first real moment of questioning the purpose of life. It was a drug-induced fugue, but no less frightening for that.

And it was on the heels of kicking the Kratom and its withdrawals that our dog killed Angus.

Just a couple weeks later, I was driving to New Orleans for FanEx—a comic and culture show where I’d sell books alongside my friend David. Outside a small Arkansas town, Ravenden, a deer leapt out of the forest and collided with my van.

People will say, I hit a deer, but there’s also, strange as this sounds, a deer hit me, and the difference bears defining.

If you look at my van, the passenger fender is destroyed. The headlight and the windshield washer reservoir are obliterated. The hood is slightly crimped as is the bumper, but the vehicle, after a few zip ties were affixed, is drivable. Drivable but unsalvageable.

So I’m at a crossroads

where I have to decide what comes next.

Whether you’re religious, spiritual, agnostic, or even an atheist, moments like these are cause for pause. The forces of resistance are such that even the stoutest of persons will wonder how to move forward.

Returning to my friend,

I have to say that help has been near through every stage of this journey. My friend’s brother lost the battle to cancer a little over a year ago. I’d like to think I offered comfort to my friend in that time, but compared to what my friend has offered to me in my times of trial, I feel both silly and small.

He bought my tables at two consecutive shows and sold his own books and mine in my stead.

He’s supported this memoir and the production of my forthcoming audiobooks. He’s lent an ear when I’ve needed to vent.

We met through Twitter. It wasn’t X at that time.

He and I have sold books together in Milwaukee, Omaha, and Chicago. Without people like him, where would I be?

Thank you to my friend and to all those who’ve shown support to me in this time. Thank you to you who’ve subscribed to All Things Novel. Thank you to my readers.

Come to think of it,

this began the summer of 2019 when my sister came down with COVID. She was among the earliest cases, a victim of a sickness we had no clue how to treat.

Set aside your political leanings and know that her life was in the balance because doctors had no idea how to treat COVID.

My sister was a victim of medical ignorance, the kind no one is to blame for. She got sick. Her lungs were compromised. They gave her steroids and sent her home. He respiration continued to worsen. Blood/oxygen levels tanked. She was put on oxygen, eventually on a respirator.

We now know respirators were the exact wrong treatment for COVID. More people died because of that protocol than any other medical treatment. For months, my sister fought for her life in a hospital bed. Eventually, she was so compromised, the choice was made to put her on ECMO.

A man named Jon was the technician who performed her procedure. He is still in my phone as ECMO Jon. I don’t know if ECMO saved her life, but I know it didn’t put her at greater risk, and I know that while respirators were deadly for COVID victims, ECMO was at least neutral. I also know all the ECMO machines were taken at the height of COVID, and had my sister fallen ill at the peak of the pandemic prior to the improved treatment protocols, she would’ve died.

But she survived.

Her lung function, to this day, is impaired.

My mother-in-law has impaired lung function because of a fight with COVID.

Over the span of six years

I went from being a young man who’d never witnessed death to becoming a middle-aged man who has lived with death on my doorstep, never far from me, never settled, never quiet.

After listening to Dax discuss the importance of giving people something of an escape through professional entertainment, I evaluated my podcast, my writings, my public-facing persona, and I felt enormous shame.

My Life In Cats, Becoming A Household Name (formerly cre8 collabor8, The Reluctant Book Marketer, TRBM), much of my social media, have been diaries of wounding.

My friend who lost his brother, he said to me the other day, I listen to your podcast for motivation, because your journey inspires me that I can do this thing too.

It got me thinking. Am I responsible for the alchemy of overcoming my pain, of finding the hope and light inside this darkness? Who is it helping if I bare my pain? Is it helping me?

As I search for a way to close this reflection,

I look to the right, over my shoulder. Goose, our black and gray striped tabby, four months old, sits like a breadloaf, on our unmade bed. I’ve wondered so many times if he misses his sister, Angus. They were litter mates, and playmates.

Goose often seems lonely when I observe him. But I wonder if I’m anthropomorphizing. In the wild, kittens are killed by coyotes, starve, freeze, any number of fatal finales. Yet, in a household full of love, they should not meet violent deaths.

I’d be lying if I said I never meant to kill the dog. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. I can’t walk the dog anymore. Just this past week I’ve gathered enough strength to accompany my wife on walks with him. I can pick up his shit, but I can’t hold the leash. I haven’t touched him since he murdered Angus.

On the rare occasions when I’ve let him out back, I reach for his collar like it’s a diseased strip of fabric, careful not to touch his fur.

People have said, the few we’ve shared this situation with, he was behaving as a dog will behave.

I’m not so foolish I believe he acted maliciously, but I do believe he acted out of his nature, and I’ve known for his whole life that he is a fearful, aggressive, violent animal. He’s broken my wife’s finger, her toe, and concussed her at least once. He’s bitten children and attached dogs both in our small town and as a puppy at the dog park.

There was never a moment when I though our dog was a good dog, though I did come to cherish our walks. They gave me an excuse to step away from the desk and be in nature, outdoors, alone with my thoughts.

It is true, that at one point, I told Ashley we would probably always have a dog because I liked the excuse to go for long walks.

Perhaps I will return to that way of thinking, but I doubt it.

And yet I wonder. Do I hate the dog because the dog represents the me I most loath?

Last night—

I’ve written this essay over two days so far—Ashley asked me how I was doing. Frankly, she’s scared for me and of me at this particular time. I don’t remember exactly the context, there was some specific topic at hand, but my answer was truer than sometimes my answers can be.

What I said was, “I want to be cuddled. I want to be held and comforted.”

This is perhaps the least manly response I can imagine, and it brings me shame to admit, but more often than I care to confess, I want someone to hold me and tell me everything is going to be okay, and I want someone to tell me I’m a good good boy.

I want someone to recognize me for my massive output of energy.

How often do I awake in the darkness of the morning feeling like excrement warmed over? How often does the two-o’clock hour confront me with its fatigue, begging me to curl up in bed and nap? How often do I wrestle with the silence of an unresponsive audience of readers and want to give up.

This essay, like most of the others, will earn perhaps one like on the Substack platform, if that. Maybe one or two people will email me to share condolences or relate with hardships of their own, and I’ll hold in my heart the knowledge that my words are not healing anyone, least of all me.

But at the same time, I will choose to send these words into the world because I must. And the must that drives me to do this is a kind of resilience I long to be recognized for. Just hanging in there is more than most people can ever do.

I want awards and fireworks and cheers for bearing up despite the cruelness of the world. Something tells me I’m not alone in this desire. And something tells me this desire is for all its failure to be masculine, the very best part of me.

The very best part of me

is my weakness.

There is a man, Ben Patrick, who’s knees were so destroyed that he failed to achieve his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Out of his weakness, he created a program that is now so well known, Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Rick Rubin, and many other celebrities talk about it regularly. You might know Ben Patrick too.

He’s the Knees Over Toes Guy.

From his weakness, he created a fitness paradigm that has changed the way NFL, NBA, MLB and MLS athletes train.

Today, I have about as much in common with Ben Patrick as Josh Allen has with Jim Kelly, which is to say, we play for the same team, and we have the same goal—to put a dent in the world—but while I have achieved something decent, he has already left his mark.

Today, I embody both senses of he phrase, “I’m not going anywhere”. (1) I’m staying put, and (2) I haven’t made any visible progress, i.e. I’m not moving, it would seem.

How’s that for a motivational speech?