Journal of Fear and Hope

Previous Journal Entries

Prepare for Battle
January 23, 2026

My dad played chess. All my uncles on both sides of my family played chess. No matter whose house we visited, someone had a board. At least two pieces in every set was dog-chewed or missing and replaced with another of a different style. Every wooden set had at least once plastic pawn or a checker commandeered from the toybox. My dad made a heavy, chunky, wooden board with a tray on either side to hold the opposing forces. He and his brothers got drunk during their games. More often than not, the quiet, cerebral game of kings gave way to yelling and cursing and broken furniture. On my mom’s side, my uncles talked music. I remember a discussion about Springsteen’s Nebraska album. It was dark and dirty, my Uncle James said, better than the polished stuff that came before it. I had never heard a single Bruce Springsteen song at that time, but I already knew which ones I preferred.

As for chess, I’m terrible. I can’t think more than one move ahead. I fall for every trap and miss every potential good play I got. I tried to get better. I read books, but I couldn’t tell a gambit from a sacrifice. I learned that setting your knights out front kept most of your major pieces safe, but I had no idea how to stage an offence. Too many branching possibilities to memorize.

There was, however, one simple setup that captivated me. The Fool’s mate. If you can pull it off, it’s checkmate in three moves. Two if your opponent is the titular fool. I memorized it. Then I challenged my dad.

There exists, online and in log books, a record of just about every professional game of chess that has ever been played. Every one of them starts the same. As they stretch on, they mirror millions of other games, then thousands, then hundreds, till each one takes on a formation that has never existed on any kitchen table, park bench, or pro board ever in the history of the game. But that three-minute game I played with my father matched the illustration in my book precisely. Though I was not the first player to luck into beating an unsuspecting foe, it was the first time I’d ever done anything better than my dad.

I vowed it would not be the last.

A Shadow Cross My Heart
January 16, 2026

I got a lot of guilt. It’s built up over fifty years, like an unchanged oil filter. The system gets clogged, and it all chokes up sometimes. When I was a kid, I apologized to my stuffed animals when they got hurt. I cried when I broke or lost a toy my gramma gave me because she didn’t have much money. By losing her gift, I may as well have robbed her.

I still feel guilty for being an asshole to my first girlfriend. I feel guilty for lashing out at my brother once and using him as a proxy for our father.

I feel guilty for not seeing my friends as much as I used to, for not calling my best friend often enough. And even though I had to divorce my ex-wife, I hate myself for not being with my daughter every day.

I don’t know what to do with it sometimes. Some things I can improve on, but there are a lot of bells in my life I can’t unring. Is it part of being human? I have an amazing storehouse of joyous memories: playing games with friends, long car rides, vacations, kissing women, holding my baby daughter, making people laugh, walking out of Shawshank Redemption to see the most gorgeous sunset behind the Appalachian mountains. Is the price of all that the random sting of guilt in the dead of night?

I don’t know what I did to deserve all that beauty, but I know some of what I did to bring ugliness into the world. I know I have to work hard to make up for my misdeeds, and doubly so to earn the rewards I’ve already gotten.

Bright Images Flashing By
April 25, 2025

Ever seen Paula Poundstone's Pop-Tart routine? I'm the same way with YouTube and Facebook. I'll open up one of those for a little snack, a light amusement between work duties, and of course you can't just view one post. You gotta scroll to the next thing. The first was pretty good, let's have another. Then another, then you're an hour older.

You get up and pace, you go pee, you get some ice water. Time to get back to work. But you forgot what you were working on, and you stare at the computer waiting for it to come to mind. But your mind is hungry for another snack.

I say to myself "You need to stop. You need to stop," while I continue to gorge and sicken myself.

God help me, I can eat a box a day.

Hit You in a Soft Place
March 21, 2025

I was at our favorite Mexican restaurant. Except it wasn’t ours any longer, because there wasn’t an “us” anymore. I was twenty-three, in college, and suffering through the breakup of my first serious relationship. I have no idea why I went there alone. Why do people try to climb the Himalayas without oxygen? Because they can.

So I went, and it just happened to be Mariachi Night. I was not in the mood for mariachi. I was there to brood. But I thought, why not? Maybe it'll make me feel better.

The band roamed from table to table soliciting requests from a patronage of mostly college kids and their parents and other boring and Caucasian people, and in the late 1990s, there was one Spanish-language song that every single one of them knew. I heard "Macarena" at least six times in a row.

Of course they did the dance. Didn't matter if they were in the middle of appetizers or the main course, they all did the goofy arm movements in unison from their chairs. They couldn't sing along, but in between sips of margaritas, they would all shout "Heeey, Macarena!" whenever the chorus came around. They had a drunkenly fantastic time. But not me. I was mister depresso, alone and ready to be angry at anything that brought joy to other people.

When it came my time to pick a song, I knew exactly how to derail that fun train. I figured the band, if given the chance, would 180 away from the inebriated Americans and slow down the pace and play something a little more soulful, a little more, dare I say, somber. So when the violinist asked me what I wanted to hear, I told him to play anything they felt like playing.

They played the Beatles.

And not just any Beatles song. They played "Yesterday."

Of all the songs in the Fab Four catalog they could have played, they chose the Mount Everest of breakup songs. And like an unprepared mountaineer, I suddenly found it hard to breathe.

They weren't watching me. They were looking at the band. But they were all turned in my direction. I felt an entire room full of eyes staring at me as I struggled not to fall apart and start weeping into my salsa. I was on display like a dissected frog, only instead of my organs being labeled, my shame had been scooped out of me and taped to an index card, my lonelyache unspooled to the side and pinned to a Styrofoam block. I wanted someone to see me--to be honest, that's probably why I went there--but not everyone at once. All those happy, shiny people did not deserve to watch me crumble.

When the song ended, I thanked the band, the singer thanked me, and they moved on to the next table. I sat there in the restaurant that was now just mine with the emotions that were also just mine.

A Drink and a Friend
February 7, 2025

In the immortal words of that guy from Skydivers, "I like coffee." I have it every morning. Sometimes I prepare the grounds and water the night before so I can put it in my face that much faster when I wake up. I paid for a coffee maker to keep at work when the company stopped supplying the machine in the lobby. (That's gotta be some kinda labor violation, right?)

I've heard coffee referred to as the world's most popular drug, which I guess is technically correct, but I feel comparing the elixir of life to smack and crack and whack borders on sacrilege. The coffee mug warms your hands as the panacea itself brings the rest of you up to operating temperature. Coffee readies you for work. It fuels all-night study sessions and writing jags. It steams between you and your date as you slowly warm to each other. You pass your friend or your sibling a cup as you catch up on all the life that transpired between now and the last time you sat down for coffee.

My mom likes her coffee with just a sprinkle of sugar but drinks it scalding hot. Rollins only drinks his black. I like mine sweet and flavored with vanilla or caramel. Coffee is whatever flavor, hue, or temperature you want it to be. Boil the water in a kettle, a microwavable mug, or a tin cup over a hobo fire. Stir in the grounds or instant flakes or filter through a muslin satchel. Then ice it down or French it up. Across a millennium and a half, in homes or around campfires, people have been performing their own version of this ritual. Queens and paupers, monks and merchants, coffee has warmed both the blue and red blood of every possible profession.

We have entire houses devoted to coffee. Artistic subcultures thrive within them. I first leaned into a mic, read a poem, told a story, made a joke, at a coffee house. People applauded. I sat back down to listen as other artists approached the mic to do the same. I made friends and met women at coffee houses. I wrote. I brooded. I laughed wildly and sang badly. Coffee was right there at every table. It steamed. It cooled. It spilled. It asked for nothing and gave no quarrel. In fact, coffee thought all my jokes were hysterical and all my poems were deep. Coffee said, "Good job, Michael. We're a good team, aren't we?" Yes we are, coffee. Yes we are.

Lined Up for Glory
January 24, 2025

This gallop through American literature started out as an introduction to last week's poem. I was going to mention how my poem was in the ballpark of the Imagist movement but would probably be flagged for excessive wordiness. But something happened I hadn't expected. I started having fun. I stayed up past midnight shaking old college lit classes out of my memory and propping them up with information from a dictionary of literary terms. I had a blast describing literary eras and name-dropping my favs. It was the most fun I've had writing in a while.

It became obvious it needed to be its own essay, so I went to bed with it incomplete. Finishing wasn't as fun as starting, but I did finish it. I'm glad the need to see a project through is still there. Glad I could power through despite the shine having worn off. I found a good ending, too, a way to make all of history about myself, which is my usual. Like Walt Whitman said, Immense have been the preparations for me.

I turned 50 this week, despite the fact it's still 1994 in my heart. It's got me feeling down. Thinking about all the great writers of this country's past colored my contributions several shades of inadequate. But I am a part of that continuity, from Poe to King. It's okay to be a bit player. Might not be the hero, but at least I got a part.

More Heat than Light
January 17, 2025

I love a poem with a good lesson, but I’ve seen too many poems that are just aphorisms. How many ways can you reword “Don't give up" before you sound like Stuart Smalley at the mirror? I certainly can't write that kind of poem, as popular as they may be. I am not a qualified guru. Unless you need lessons on how to burn your life to the ground every ten years, I got nothin' for ya.

I can't tell you how to woo a lover, or how to lose love with grace. I don't know how to die. I got no great insights into being a father or being a kid.

But one winter evening a long time ago, a friend of a friend and his girlfriend moved into a new house. They were the first folks from my high school I knew to get a place of their own, to move in together, to step up to adulthood. I went with the connecting friend to the housewarming. The place was drafty. The heater didn't work. We wore our coats as we played Ecco the Dolphin on the Sega Genesis. As the night grew colder, they opened the oven and turned it on as a makeshift furnace.

That I can tell you about.

Ill-Equipped to Act
January 10, 2025

The library gave out a flyer last year in the month of April. April is National Poetry Month. The flyer contained thirty writing prompts to encourage you to write a poem a day. I showed it to my daughter and asked if she wanted to write poetry together. She agreed immediately. She wrote poems at school. This would be easy.

I was suddenly scared.

What if the eight year-old could write a poem on demand, but the forty-nine year-old couldn't? This was just supposed to be a fun writing scrimmage where I was the seasoned pro and my daughter the new player in need of coaching. I wasn't sure if I was ready to switch roles.

I let her pick the prompt, since it was almost the end of April, and I hadn't taken up any of the challenges. She chose "music."

We each took a sheet of paper, and she got right to it as I gave my page a good starin' at.

The poem I eventually wrote turned out okay, but it was not easy to get going. My daughter's pace, however, was hampered only by her inability to spell a few words, though she didn't let it slow her that much. She wrote about the act of deciding what music to play. Then she wrote another poem about the act of writing poetry. I only produced one poem that day.

While I wrestled my poem onto the page, my daughter made up her mind to do a thing, and then she did that thing. Without fear or self-scrutiny, she just wrote one poem after another. That seems like a super power to me. What about doubt and hesitation? Don't you have to make time for those?

She almost always brings a book that she is currently writing and illustrating, and when she feels like adding a page or three, she does. I wish I could work like that. The fear that I'm doing it wrong or that my story won't make sense or be likable is always at the forefront of my mind. They used to lurk in the back of my mind, but they long ago gave up lurking and took up looming, instead.

Well, my daughter did ask me which of our two music poems I liked best. I said hers, because it was better. She wrote it without fear. Or maybe she wrote it despite her fear. Which makes it better still.

Can't Stop Moving
January 3, 2025

I really only wrote two journal entries last year? That does not make me feel good. I've done more writing, just not for the Kingdom. But even those other things don't amount to much. That's got to change. I spend too much time on YouTube or stuck in a depressive scroll down Facebook. Days dissolve like cotton candy in a carwash. I've got lots of projects in mind, and I'm coming up on that big five-oh marker that says "You're running out of time!" I need to set a fire, stoke the slowing engine, and get going.

My daughter is my prime mover. When she was three, I showed her a copy of a book I wrote. The cover featured one of her toys, a music box in the shape of Ernie from Sesame Street that plays peek-a-boo as it chimes its tune. She immediately said, "That's the best book in the world!"

I know she was just reacting to the sight of her last name and favorite toy on the cover of a book, but it made me feel incredible. For years now, I've been writing not just with the goal of being published, but of being a man my daughter can be proud of.

Last month, I showed her the bookmark images I was working on for the site, and right away she wanted to contribute. She drew a bookmark for the book we were reading, took pictures of it and the book with my phone, and insisted I put it up that moment. So I scrapped my plan of waiting till the new year to post the batch I'd prepared, and put them all up along with hers. Some things you can't refuse.

Today's post also contains one of her creations. I read the Wild Robot books as she read them with her class. It's about a robot that adopts a goose. There were certain passages that made me a little misty-eyed.

For the past five months, I've been programming a version of the Trogdor!! board game in JavaScript. When I showed it to Eleanor, She wanted to help. She typed in coordinates for the images and later helped photograph all the cards. She frequently playtests and finds errors I missed. She's invested. It's our program. Every time she comes over, she asks what more I've added to the game. It's her enthusiasm that's kept me engaged through almost a hundred thousand lines of code.

Concerning what I said two sentences ago: Last year was the year I filed for divorce. It was necessary, but the process and the current state of my life has taken a toll. Some days it's hard to get out of bed and harder still to do things. I've taken to writing myself a to-do list of what I need to accomplish on any given day. It actually works. I'm writing this right now because I put it on a list. Some days that list also contains reminders to shave and take a shower.

I don't always feel like writing, but I always feel better after I've written. It keeps the depression at bay. Keeps the engine turning. So does my daughter. She's written more books than me. She has at least two hundred-plus page, hand-drawn books that are too thick to staple. I'm proud of that kid. I want her to be proud of me. That keeps me going.

--Previous Journal Entries--

"Too many flames with too much to burn, and life's only made of paper" --Ronnie James Dio

"Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away
Across the universe" --John Lennon

"Bow to the paper Gods in a world that is paper thin
The fools in town are ruling now" --Duran Duran

"Here I sit writing on the paper
Trying to think of words you can't ignore"
--Alice in Chains

"Working for paper and for iron
Work for the right to keep my tie on
Working for paper and for iron
Work for the unicorn and lion" --XTC

"Sometimes I feel like a piece of paper.
Sometimes I feel like my own name." --Neil Young