Comet died, we went to Berlin, they boarded Portland up, we went to New York, we went to Los Angeles, I started training again.

This is a song I've been writing for a few weeks. I've never tried to write songs before, but sometimes I'm playing guitar and I sing something and I'm surprised how true it feels.

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The most recent emergence of the Brood X cicadas was 2021, the last summer we were in Michigan. I would go to the nature preserve every day, sometimes with Comet and sometimes alone, to look for the holes in the ground they were digging. After the emergence I would run along the Huron River and the trees around me were buzzing with cicadas.

We moved at the end of the summer and I decided I would come back to Michigan for the next emergence. Brood X are 17-year periodic cicadas and it hit me how long that is. I first lived through a Brood X emergence when I was 10, a kid in Pennsylvania, then 17 years later when I was an adult living in a different state, getting married in two months. I struggled to imagine the next time I'll see the Brood X emergence. I'll be 44 years old. I remember realizing Comet would be dead by then. Who knows what else will change.

Brood X cicadas get a few months in the world every 17 years. I think about that perspective, what the arc of my life will look like if I just see those 5 or 6 summers before I die. I used to do a thing when I was feeling really terrible where I'd wish for knowledge of what one second of my day would be like in 5 or 10 years or whatever. Imagining that life continued at all would be enough perspective. That's what I was thinking about when I was singing this song, the beautiful parts in the arc of my life as I accumulate the weight of living and how small that all looks to a cicada brood that emerges every 17 years for thousands of years.

I took a train down to Eugene to see Mount Eerie a few weeks ago. I had 6 hours to kill in town and I just walked around with a backpack on all day. I was on the University of Oregon campus for a while, a real "oh, I'm 29 and balding" experience. A student wearing cargo shorts and Doc Martens walked up to their friends and said "Ugh, the weather is nice but I'm still sad."

Two of the people sitting near me at the Mount Eerie show were one-upping each other to see who was the bigger fan. Both said they'd bought Tintin in Tibet, a comic Phil mentions in a song about his wife dying. At a Joanna Newsom show a few years ago this guy said he was going to Joanna's hometown. I asked if she was playing a show there, and he said "no, I just want to visit her home to understand her music." Fortunately I am a good fan and I do things the right way.

Here's a song I started singing on the porch when we had a really sunny couple of days.

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Comet has cancer. In December we noticed he was drinking a lot and peeing a lot. He'd skim a little bit off every puddle we passed, taking us on longer walks than we'd ever been so he could pee all over town. We took him to the vet, but he had no other symptoms, so we'd just keep an eye on it.

He started getting sick around Christmas, then got really sick the next week while we were stuck inside during in an ice storm. We were driving him through the snow to the vet every few days for more testing. He stopped eating his kibble, so we soaked it in water. He stopped eating that, so I'd make a little soup out of his treats with boiling water. The floor of our house was covered in bowls and plates of cold, wet food. It all smelled awful. He was sleeping for 22 hours out of the day, waking up and drinking urgently, then regurgitating water on the floor. If he ate his food we'd cheer.

I was sleeping with him downstairs on the couch at night so he could get up to use the bathroom every few hours. He'd melt holes in the ice on the back porch with his pee, then try to find a way back inside avoiding all the spots he'd already melted. His joints were stiff and his legs hurt, and I'd stand there in the doorway in my underwear, getting blasted by freezing rain, and watch him slip and fall. As we fell back to sleep I'd tell him it was okay if he needed to die tonight; if it was too hard for him to keep living, I would understand.

We were trapped in the house by 2 inches of ice, first without heat, then without electricity, with a dog who was dying, and we were always looking for signs that things were getting better: if he ate more one day than the last, or if he picked up one of his toys. Instead we had just been stepping down into worse and worse outcomes. His thirstiness was probably from a UTI, then the urinalysis was negative, then the urine culture was negative, then the blood test showed elevated blood calcium, then the ultrasound didn't find a mass on his parathyroid, then the blood test for parathyroid hormone was normal, then they found a tumor on an x-ray, then the biopsy identified it as lymphoma, then the oncologist confirmed it was the "bad kind." We learned he was drinking a lot because his blood calcium was so high; his body was leeching calcium from his bones, which made him thirsty. He was essentially peeing his bones out.

After we knew he was dying, Alyssa and I were both plumbing the depths of our grief, turning over every rock we could, trying to see if it might hurt worse than it already did. Against our will we were looking through old pictures of him as he was lying sick next to us, remembering when his life felt boundless and unending. We would take turns being the one who was handling it better than the other, and sometimes neither of us was. I kept cycling through the thoughts "this isn't fair" and "there's no reason it has to be." There's some baloney thing I saw on Twitter that a teacher said to someone's pre-school aged kid, something like "Think of your emotions as a fish. Be the pond, not the fish." It really hit me, standing in the kitchen looking at my phone and crying, and I could clearly picture "Comet is dying of cancer" as a koi fish, then it would swim away and I'd see some other fish.

Eventually he was put on steroids, we got a referral to an oncologist, and he started chemotherapy. He started eating the gross wet food we'd make for him, then started eating his kibble, then started asking to go for walks. We were so happy the first time he let out a piercing bark because he was mad at something. Chemotherapy is working, and now that he's acting like himself I have to remind myself those two weeks in a cold dark house with a dying dog were real, and we probably only have months left with Comet. I think the knowledge that he's dying is too much too carry with me every day so I just ignore it. I hope that when he does die I'll be ready for it.

For now we're just living our lives as normal, which is all Comet ever really wants. He's a very routine-driven animal, to the point that he hates when one of us stays up too late or puts our feet somewhere we usually don't put our feet. He's become a gigantic pain in the ass since steroids made him hungrier and we stopped having the heart to tell him he can't do things. At least once a day he takes us on a walk to a pet store for free treats.

When we moved in together, Alyssa wanted to get a dog and I didn't, mostly because I was imagining this grief. At that point the freshest memories I had of pets were of all of my childhood pets dying. We got Comet anyway, and I have loved him more than I ever thought I would. Every day of my life with him has been so incredibly full. There was still a part of me that was always thinking of his mortality and I was always obsessed with making sure he was healthy. I'd notice if he was limping a little, or if he didn't seem like he had an appetite. If he ate a chicken bone off the sidewalk I'd be worried sick until he passed it. Now that he actually is dying I feel completely free from that worry. He's had a bloodshot eye for like 6 months since he smacked his head on my leg when a cat scared him. I used to look at him and only see that red eyeball, but now I just see him.

A coworker's cat passed a year or so ago and they shared something heartbreaking and said "make sure you love your pets today." It's such a hard sentiment to get to penetrate someone, at least until this kind of grief hits you, so I won't bother saying that even though I feel it. If there's one thing I want to be the actual lesson from this it's to get pet insurance. We hit our maximum deductible like a week into this whole thing and we've been cruising, just paying 10% of all medical expenses. This all would be so much harder if we were paying out of pocket.

In Pennsylvania or Chicago or Michigan it stayed frozen until April, but it feels like the world is still alive all winter here, always green and damp. We had an ice storm, then after it melted the ground really smelled awful from all the berries and leaves that were rotting under the ice.

I haven't played guitar all winter, it's more of a Front Porch Activity, just because it feels so imposing to make Alyssa listen to me sing the same songs over and over again in the house. Ideally I lie on my back on the porch on a hot night and the guitar vibrates on top of me. We've had a few warm days, so I've been sitting on our porch swing and playing, which I've missed. I got a nylon string guitar recently, a really small cheap guitar I can swing around with one hand and not worry about bonking on the door or whatever.

I've been having vivid dreams where I write a song or hear a song, and I hung the guitar next to my bed so I can try to write the songs down when I wake up. The most significant songs I've dreamt have been a jingle for an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant and a song called "Mind of a Cat," but a few weeks ago I dreamt a song that just goes "I hit my hand this morning, it was good," and I recorded it as soon as I woke up. You can hear Comet patting around behind me then me running the faucet to brush my teeth, sorry. I did it again later with the guitar.

I hit my hand it was good (brushing my teeth version)

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I hit my hand it was good

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I've been running more, helping Michael and Kolter get ready for the Eugene Marathon. We ran on Sauvie Island a few weeks ago and I saw a dead beaver on the road, the first time I've ever seen a beaver at all. It was way bigger than I expected, its tail was so thick and scaly, and it had gnarly claws on its back feet. There's no shoulder on Sauvie and trucks blow past us going 70. There (dead beaver) but for the grace of God go we. I signed up to run a 5K in March, the first 5K since I've worked on being fast, and it's daunting to set a date when I know I'll feel bad. Like: check the calendar, there's the day my legs are going to be screaming and my brain's going to be out of oxygen and I make myself run anyway.

I started running in college because I had an eating disorder and wanted to lose weight. I ran myself into the ground as literally as I could: I had shin splints in both legs and tendonitis anywhere I could get it. I was bulimic and got Tums for my acid reflux, but I was so hungry I ate handfuls at a time. I had blood in my pee after running on the treadmill once. I have no idea what that was about.

I found an online fitness forum and decided I wasn't just too fat, I was also too skinny, so I started lifting weights. I learned how to squat and deadlift and went to the gym at 6 AM every day in the pitch black and freezing cold. I made friends with the old professors who were the only other people at the gym that early: Carl the Egyptologist and some guy whose name I don't remember who offered to get me a job at the Apple store because I told him I studied computer science.

I started eating more, and I gained weight back, but I kept running. Running started as a punishment, but it became the only part I liked. I felt untethered when I ran. A lot of people I went to school with shared an experience: we got to college because we were exceptional, but then we were surrounded by people who were all as talented as we were. Running was the one thing I had that no one else I knew did. I ran places no one I knew had been, and I didn't want to share it. I'm sure I was an asshole about it.

After college we moved to Michigan and I started running on weekends with a group from a local running store. I had never really run with people before and I learned the rules, like how close you should run to each other and how the pack becomes a singe-file line when a car passes. There's a really free and un-self-conscious way of talking on long runs; you're isolated with near-strangers for 2 hours, blasting snot onto the ground, and you talk about anything. I met a lot of older men, a bridge between me and people my parents' age. It was the first time I saw an older person and thought "oh, that'll be me someday."

One of the things people always ask on long runs is "what are you training for?" and I never had an answer. They'd tell me I was fast, so I should race. I didn't put it together at the time, but I think I was afraid racing would spoil the joy of running. I'm a naturally competitive person, which has ruined a lot of other hobbies I've had. Running had become a refuge for me and I didn't to risk that.

We moved to Portland, to a house 2 blocks from a public track, and I showed up one night and joined a track club. I'm gifted to be a good runner and to look like one, so I fit in quickly. Running a track workout was like holding my hand over a candle. I rarely felt that close to the edge, and I liked it. The fast group was all marathon runners, and they invited me to come run long workouts with them on Sauvie Island on the weekend. At some point I realized I'd effectively been doing their marathon training block with them, and that I could run a race I was proud of. I ran a marathon, then another a year later, and qualified to run in Berlin this September.

There's a really shitty attitude about running that you hear from shoe commercials, Instagram reels, and your uncle who runs. They all say "running is so easy, all you need is a pair of shoes." It ignores how much running asks of your body, the stress on the ligaments in your feet and tendons in your legs and all the muscles we don't think about. So you expect it to be easy, then something hurts, and you run through it because you want to change your body and running seems like the answer. Then it only hurts more, it doesn't get easier, and you hate running more.

I started running as a way to only subtract, to undo food I had eaten or lose weight, and it was a one-way ticket to peeing blood in the gym bathroom. Some time in the past 10 years I accepted that running is hard, and that if I want to run, I can't do it in spite of my body. Running makes demands I have to repay with food and rest and patience, but the more I've given to running the more it's given me. I've gotten to run beautiful places, meet people I would never otherwise meet, and have rare and strange physical experiences. When I started caring about the actual running part of running, I stopped counting calories, then stopped weighing myself, then stopped pinching the fat around my stomach.

Here are some more pictures of beautiful things I've taken while running!