A summer day can feel like a blizzard even when it’s not cold. A sack of hammers landing on your big toe. A jellyfish sting that won’t stop stinging. Poison oak. Running fast around the corner of Old Man Jones’ abandoned garage and catching your inner forearm on a rusty nail. Grief is a sharp arrow.

I’ve never had coffee, other than a sip here and there. When people hear this, you would think I just called them a child molester. I can say that because I spent more than a year as a prosecutor in a Sexual Battery and Child Abuse unit. It was called SBU on the inside. It would have made a good television show. I could rarely sleep at night with what I read every day.

Car rides with other people aren’t always “driving pleasure”. Small talk is a hangnail in mittens in ten-degree weather to me. It can be fun, but there’s still something about traversing the roadways alone. It’s a form of extreme freedom, and often, an escape from the pettiness of our world.

I used to love working out. Now, I’d rather read a book. I don’t know who I would be impressing. How can I think I am fit and fat at the same time? Somehow, it’s possible. Maybe it’s more about forgetting how to have fun. I focus on things to avoid other things. What am I trying to scale, and why does the scale matter?

I was a stepchild. My stepbrothers were stepchildren. Half-time here, half-time there. Two rooms. Actually, I never really had a room at my dad’s. I just had a bed in my stepbrother’s room. I guess that was okay. My room at my mom’s was my haven. No child needs two havens. I had nightmares at my mom’s. I thought Creepshow was under my bed at my dad’s.

The hair falls down Bobby’s neck in the barber chair. He sees hair from three people merging at his feet. He tells his mom he will be late for dinner. He tells a story to tell a story because everything else seems so beige. The real story is that there is no story. Bobby is just bored.

I left Brooklyn Heights right as puberty was having a strong conversation with me. I left North Hollywood right after I got my driver’s license and was free to explore Southern California. I left boarding school for college right after my mom told me she was going to die. I left my first college before I ever played a second of varsity basketball.

The universe loves to lay bets on a seesaw. Watch for it the next time a bird takes a flying dump on a pedestrian’s head, and you laugh. Yours is coming when you least expect it. Splatter. The clock turns, and we start all over again.

Nothing is quite like the sound of a woodpecker. Peck, peck, peck. Horns honk in unmoving traffic. Jimmy chews his gum in rhythm with the off-center clock in the corner of Math class. The last water on Earth is a kiddie pool.

I let my tears run into a jar that I hid under my desk in the back corner of my new room at a new college. I ate giant oatmeal raisin cookies at the mall with my stepbrother, and bought video games at Babbages, to assuage my inner turmoil. I pumped iron over and over until I looked like someone new. I didn’t cut my hair for a year. I was pedaling in place.

My mind wanders constantly while my body sits in an Article chair at work, staring at a gigantic screen while sunlight pours through my front windows. Cars pass. People yammer. Lights go red, then green. Everybody is on some path.

Tea snackered with white sugar. Danish sugar cookie tins. Bench seating in the kitchen. Why did I sell this house? Low carpet. Shag carpet. Linoleum floors. Pink cabinets. Pink house.

Trying to explain to people the abstract machinations of my life has been hard. I was in the room…no. I was holding both of my parents’ hands…no. I was right next to both of my parents when they died. Separately. Thirteen years apart. An avalanche of despair.

Hammer me until nails no longer feel like anything. Head hung. An ocean of tears pooling in my belly. Grief. Catatonic, yet walking.

It would be nice if you did this. I understand the sentiment, but I politely decline. I don’t go to parties. I don’t dance. I don’t know how to ride a bike. I don’t show up unannounced. These particles of preference are the atoms of my fleshy knapsack. My effort is a sidecar to that.

Late at night, dreams intersect. A caterpillar inches up a leaf. A dew drop forms on your front lawn. We are all one second from failure.

I once rubbed poison ivy all over my body at summer day camp because the girl I liked said the plant in question was not poison ivy. She was smart, and I showed up the next day with Calamine lotion all over my body. Side note: I love the smell of Calamine lotion. I once slept over at her house, in a bunk bed, when I was less than ten. I can see the room. I have a photo of her and me on the beach. It’s sweet. I believe this story to be accurate, but I worry about what happens when it fades.

I played a lot of sports growing up. Basketball, tennis, baseball, football, soccer. What’s the one thing that they all have in common? Boundaries. Courts, fields, or pitches, with lines that mark in or out of bounds. It’s lovely. Why can’t I keep my life set up like that? The answer is, I can. I will. I will create a framework for my work and stick to it. I have earned that right.

I used to think I was more disconnected than most. I’m not so sure anymore. I think I’m connected just the right amount to the people and things that I care about. The rest are dust particles blown into the next town by one of those new twenty-nine-minute power storms. I’m not sure everyone else is noticing. I’m walking amongst a crevasse of disconnected people.

Jonathan Greene. Lame. Jonnie. Jon. Lame. Why couldn’t I have been Jox Hundred? What were they thinking? And what was I thinking when I named my kids? Basic. I am so basic. What’s in a name? Do you want to be rescued in a superhero movie by Zee Thousand or Jon Greene? No contest.

A turkey sandwich on a kaiser roll on the back lip of a car’s rear drawbridge. The smell of suntan lotion and the feel of sand sticking to your skin. A revolving door at our house; never knowing which guests would sleep where and when. The summers before, when we were shipped away for two months of absolute bliss on our own in the Berkshires.