A Black Dog in the Sun

2024 was a rough year for me.  Coming back to New England after my short vacation in Texas was a real challenge.  While I missed my spouse and my kid I did not at all miss suburban Boston and that dichotomy led to far more meltdowns in the cab of my truck than I’d like to admit.  This isn’t a depression blog.  It’s not my goal to make this an extension of my therapy and I promise I plan on writing some fun stuff, but I like this essay about finding peace on a bad day and wanted to share.  I promise, we’ll get to the brunette in Hawaii.  Swear.  

I was working on an essay about nostalgia and how, now that I’m reaching middle age, it hits harder than it used to.  My intent was to dust off a favorite old story about missed signals and failed romance, longing and regret.  I wanted to talk about how now, thirty some odd years later, I look back on a moment of time that could have been devastating but instead turned into a cherished memory.  I was going to paint a picture of soft darkness, bright stars, and tropical breezes with just the faintest hint of a chill.  I was going to try to find the words to describe the smell of the flowers and the ocean.  One day I’ll tell you what it was like, in the age of FM radio and bench seats, sitting, parked by the Pacific listening to “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.”  Just writing this intro, just painting the faintest outline of the scene leaves me feeling warm and happy and wistful for a time and place long since gone.

That’s what I want to write about.  Warmth and happiness.  The longing of young love.  The pains and pleasures of mixed signals, bad luck, fate, and the shocking realization years later that for one brief moment you had everything you wanted right there and you let it slip away.  I set out this week to tell that tale.

Fucking phone ruined it.

Or I guess, to be fair, I let the phone ruin it.

Because I know better.  I’ve read a bunch of the research on the way social media algorithms steer our interests and the affect that an endless stream of information has on our brain.  For the longest time I wasn’t a nose in the phone kind of guy.  It was a tool, like my pocket knife, to be maintained properly and used when necessary but otherwise kept in my pocket.

But being a stay at home parent is a lonely, lonely job and I live 2000 miles away from my friends and family.  Early on I fell into the trap of scrolling social media while the baby napped.  For a while, I kept the urge (mostly) in check.  Then came the chaos of the 2016 election and the Trump administration.  Then came the move from Louisiana to Massachusetts where I knew no one.  Then came the pandemic when, like far too many people, I found myself with a phone screen as my only contact with the outside world.  If I wanted to have a conversation with an adult, it happened on the phone.  If I wanted to watch an adult TV show, or read the news, it happened on my phone.  Damn thing became a lifeline to the outside world that I NEEDED to keep my sanity after long days locked in the house alone with a bored preschooler.

So every morning the alarm goes off on my phone and it’s the first thing I touch when I wake up.  I scroll the news of the world while I sit at the breakfast table and more and more that news is bad.  There’s a brutal, genocidal war in Europe, a half dozen in Africa, and at least two in the middle east.  There’s revolution and conflict in the South China sea.  Fascism is once again on the march abroad and at home.  People are openly talking about a second American Civil War and blood in the streets.  Far too many people are talking about violent revolution.  Every morning I peer into this abyss.  I can’t stop myself.

I woke up Tuesday morning wanting to write about a pretty brunette girl in a very ugly yellow dress sitting on the bench seats of a dirty pickup truck parked by the ocean on a moonlit night.  But the first thing I did was pick up the phone and check the news.  The Supreme Court had handed down another slate of decisions, none of them good.  I tried not to let it get me.  I felt that first little twinge of anxiety, that first hint of “oh my God shit is going to get so much worse” and I logged off.  I had places to go and things to do, so I rolled the window down on the truck, turned the stereo up, and listened to some good country music in the hopes of drowning out the bad thoughts.  It didn’t work.

It rarely does.

Part of the problem is the PTSD.  I can’t look away from any potential threat and my brain can quickly and easily connect the dots that link a conflict on the far side of the world in a place I’ve never been and couldn’t find on a map three years ago to my own family’s health and safety.  Part of it is the anger.  I like being mad.  It’s a drug.  It’s a monster I claim to keep caged.  The phone, the PTSD and the anxiety they create feeds it.  There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to look away.  There’s a part of me that likes to swim in the cesspit.  Fear and anger and rage have served me well in some desperate moments and it is a daily battle not to give in, let it take me, because the darkness feels better than the fear of darkness.

My schedule is another part of the problem.  Tuesday was my Crohn’s medication transfusion, four hours sitting in the VA watching as they pump chemicals into my blood.  IV needle makes it impossible to type.  I can only read my own work so many times before I hate it more than I already do.  So the phone came out and I scrolled through all the bad news and the horror and that beach in Hawaii seemed somehow further away in space and time.  That soft, warm feeling became harder and harder to wrap my hands around.  I hung in there though, resisting the urge for rage and despair for hours as the chemicals slowly drip, drip, dripped into my blood stream.  

In the end though, it was driving that broke me.

Seems like it always is.  The phone wears me down but the traffic is always the trigger that starts the spiral.  I survived my transfusion just fine.  After three years, I’m used to the chemicals now and they don’t make me sick like they used to.  I just feel run down and weird after, off in a way that I can’t describe, but I was smiling when I walked out of the VA, climbed into my truck and turned the stereo on.  Then someone cut me off on the way out of the parking lot and someone else crossed over into my lane before I made it to the highway.  

When I was 22 I was crushed between the front bumper of an Army truck and the rear of a water trailer.  Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the gory details, but for the purposes of this essay the recovery was long and painful.  For years afterwards I couldn’t stand between two vehicles, couldn’t even help my buddy Chuck back the truck up to the boat when we went fishing.  Even before I became a law enforcement officer, Vehicles were a trigger.  Then I became a cop and spent years training myself to pay close attention to every vehicle around me, and I just can’t seem to stop.  I see every traffic violation.  I see every dangerous move.  I see every instance of motorist disrespect.  I can’t do a fucking thing about any of it and it drive’s me crazy.

I hung tight though.  I almost made it home before I really started feeling the vibrations deep down inside, that angry, little fucking rage gremlin rattling his cage inside me, screeching to get out.  It was a white Mercedes SUV with a female driver and handicapped tags that caused the first cracks.  She pulled in behind me at a red light, and she rode my ass for the next six miles despite the fact that a large panel truck was clearly visible three car lengths ahead of me.  I shot daggers at her when she finally pulled beside me at a stop light and made an illegal right turn on red to get to the Starbucks, but I managed to hold the gremlin in his cage.  I even turned a stereo up.

I knew I wasn’t going to make it when I turned onto my street and saw a Fed Ex truck parked in my street.  It was  blocking the entire on-coming lane in the middle of blind curve and I just knew I was doomed.  My first thought was “some Masshole son of a bitch is gonna come flying around that and hit me head on.”  I just knew it.  It was as certain as breathing.  Despite having the legal right of way I slowed to almost a stop.   Good thing too.  The oncoming landscaping truck was traveling easily ten over the speed limit.  They didn’t look or touch their brakes, they just barreled into my lane and kept coming forcing me to yield or die.

So I stopped.  I ceded by legal right of way to avoid a head on collision.  They never touched the brakes, just blew past me like I wasn’t even there.  Never even looked at me.

And I lost it.  I motherfucked the driver.  I motherfucked the Fed Ex delivery person.   I motherfucked Massachusetts and the universe for allowing a place like fucking Massachusetts to exist.  I motherfucked the southern politicians who impoverished my home state, cutting funding until my spouse had to find work in a place 2000 miles away from the people I loved.  I motherfucked myself for coming off the gas, braking, yielding to the type of Masshole pricks who demand everyone yield to them.  I motherfucked the universe for telling me that if I did the right things and worked hard one day I’d be comfortable and happy knowing full well that was a fucking lie.

That cute brunette was gone.  That ocean breeze was gone.  Bench seats and dashboard lights were gone.  I’d fought so hard to stay with that warm and comfortable feeling, but between the phone and the VA and the fucking Masshole drivers by the time I got home it was all gone, replaced first with rage, and then the heavy, aching sadness that always comes after the anger passes.  There was no sense in even bothering getting my laptop out because I wouldn’t get past the anger, fear and sadness anytime soon.  It felt impossible to find that warm, comfortable, nostalgic place I wanted to write about.

But there are always chores that need doing, and first on the list was letting the dog out for a bit.

Me and Jack the dog come from the same place, or close enough.  A good Samaritan found him abandoned as a puppy on the side of a Texas county road somewhere near Texarkana, close enough to my hometown that they took him into Shreveport to get him fixed before shipping him North.  I paid six hundred dollars to transport a stray mutt from the ArkLaTex to Southeastern Massachusetts.  I don’t know if that’s hilarious or a goddamned crime.

Either way, Jack and I are both southern boys.  Both of us from that part of the world where Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas all collide.  Both of us now stuck, for good of for bad, in Massachusetts for the immediate future.  Jack doesn’t know the difference.  Like my child, he came here so young that New England is all he knows.  This is his home.  Which for Jack, is a good thing.  I’ve never seen a dog who loved the cold more.  Temperatures in the teens with snow on the ground and Jack will gladly stay outside for hours.  He’s still frolicking in the snow when the wind burn on my cheeks and the ache at the tips of my fingers drives me inside.  On a rare “hot” day, Jack melts.  Eighty degrees and all he wants to do is flop on his side and pant.  He’d hate a July afternoon in Northeast Texas.  He’s already not a big fan of July in Southeastern Massachusetts.

Yesterday, however, was the kind of New England July day that makes me sometimes think it might be worth it to stay.  Not here, in the suburban hell I currently live in.  Not in Southeastern Massachusetts.  Lord no!  But on days like yesterday Portland, Maine looks incredibly attractive.  Yesterday was the kind of Massachusetts day that makes people forget about February.  Sunny, cloudless and warm with almost no humidity and a steady Northwestern breeze bringing just the tiniest taste of cold Canadian air.  The pollen has slacked off and honestly, now that my sinuses aren’t killing me, late June/early July is absolutely lovely in Massachusetts.  

But I couldn’t see it in that moment.  I was scared.  I was uncomfortable.  I was angry and full of hate.  I slammed my keys on the table and I threw my things on the couch.  I slammed open the kennel.  I got snippy when Jack wouldn’t sit still while I put on his collar.  I bitched that my wife and child were gone so I had to do this chore myself.  Poor, ole, put upon Jeremy, always suffering.  I let Jack out the front door and told him to do his business, then I plopped my ass on the concrete steps and I pulled out my goddamned phone.  I was just starting to scroll but out of the corner of my eye I could see Jack.  He’d been so excited to get out of the kennel, literally jumping to get his collar and rushing to get out the door like he was dying for a bathroom break, but once out the front door he stretched leisurely and then collapsed in the nearest sunbeam.

I couldn’t help but shake my head. “You motherfucker…”

Jack just looked at me with big sad eyes and wagged his tail.

“Whole goddamned world is falling apart and you’re just sitting in a sunbeam.”

If a dog could shrug Jack would’ve.

“Must be nice being a big dummy.”

Damn dog smiled.

 While I sat there on the steps, mad at the world, scrolling on my stupid phone and getting madder Jack sat on the lawn, one front paw crossed over the other, smiling that stupid mutt grin.  Every so often he’d catch a scent on the breeze and sit up, paying close attention, like he was trying to discern something important.  Other times he flopped on his side and just sat there sunning himself like he didn’t have a care in the world.  He just existed.

I was jealous.  Couldn’t help but be jealous, looking at that big dumb lummox too stupid to know that the whole world is shit, too pig ignorant to understand that horrible things happen every day, so goddamned dumb he didn’t even have the capacity to be mad about it.  I kept scrolling on my phone, taking in an endless stream of misery and hatred, and every time I looked up there was that stupid dog, laying in that stupid sunbeam like life couldn’t get any better.

“Wish I could be like you.”  I told him.

Jack didn’t even open his eyes.  He just lay in that sunbeam and wagged his tail lazily.

I dunno why I put away that fucking phone.  Maybe I was just tired of it, the constant drip of misery and rage bait.  Maybe Jack seemed so serene and content laying in his sunbeam that something deep inside me figured “might as well give it a try.”  Either way, I logged off, crammed my phone into my pocket, and for a time I just sat there on the porch.

It didn’t all fade away.  I could still see the traffic whizzing by too fast on my residential street.  I could still hear the drone of leaf blowers.   I was going to go to bed in Massachusetts and wake up in the same hated zip code the next morning and the Massholes weren’t going to learn to drive in the mean time.  The future still felt grim.   There was still a genocidal war in Europe, a half dozen in Africa, and at least two in the Middle East.  Bad news was still out there.  Bad things were still coming.  But the sun was warm, and the breeze was cool, and every so often Jack would pick up his head, look at me, and wag his tail.  So we sat there sharing a sunbeam on a warm summer afternoon.  I don’t know for how long, but I was smiling when my wife and child came home.  The world didn’t get any better, but I felt better.

Some days just feeling better is a win.

One day I’ll tell you all the story of a warm Hawaiian night, a brunette Army medic, and dashboard lights.  It’s a soft, warm, memory that I cherish and want to share.  But today I’m trying to remember a smaller moment.  I’m trying to latch on to the feeling of a black dog in the sun.  I’m trying to remember that I can look away from the horror and the hatred.  I can put away my phone and sit, quiet and still.  I can take a moment and just feel the warmth of the sun and the cool breeze.  If for only a minute or two I can learn to be a black dog in the sun then maybe the anger and the sadness and the fear won’t drowned out the soft, warmth that make the best memories.

There’s a delay between the writing of a rough draft and the edit.  I’m lazy and it’s hard to write and be the primary care giver to an elementary schooler in the first weeks of summer break.  It’s been three days now since Jack and I shared that sunbeam and the world hasn’t gotten better.  In far, far too many ways it’s gotten worse.  Fucking rage gremlin is still rattling his cage, trying to get out and run amok.  I still can’t make it from the house to the gym without some Masshole trying to kill me with their car.  I’m still struggling.  I think…I’m afraid…I know I’ll always struggle with the heaviness of it all.  The weather’s taken a turn.  It’s hot for New England, and humid, the kind of July day in Southeastern Massachusetts that offers up all the negatives of back home but none of the positives.  

I went to Target because I had to.  Three times people walked straight at me, pushing their cart head on, forcing me to step aside so they could pass like I didn’t even exist. My rational brain understands that they’re not doing this to me.  They don’t know Jeremy Hammett and they don’t care and in the grand scheme of things they shouldn’t.  Still it galls me, yielding to people who don’t even have the courtesy to look me in the eye and give me a smile and a nod.  I could feel the first tremors deep inside, the start of a spiral that I know ends with me feeling washed out, empty, curled up on the couch sleeping off the anger and the depression like a hangover.  

This isn’t who I am.  This isn’t who I want to be.

So I thought about a black dog in the sun, the warmth on my face and the cool breeze and the smile on my kid’s face when they came home to find me sitting on the front porch.  I’m still sad.  I’m still scared.  I’m afraid I’ll always be mad.  But I didn’t spiral, not today, and in the end that’s enough.

For Amanda: I still don’t have it right, but it’s closer.  Thank you.