Tuesday comes every seven days, I thought
Like a therapist in training—but I wasn’t waiting
She died in my sleep
Like the first frost or
All the matriarchs in our family
Like a child, afraid of my own fingernails
I laid in the field overgrown with goldenrod
Someone could use this, I thought
Although I didn’t know
If it would help
*originally published by The Garlic Press (2025)
Because I’m dreaming in blue
Sweat sweet, tires worn, worried when
The dog stops eating human food
But film is dying, you said
Another tornado watch sirens go
The Quaker Oats factory closed again
Cult leather cut, fabric sewn
Take your oath at the door and remember
We don’t know you
Paid for in a drop of blood
Half-finished is never-started
Scripts poems stories, a memoir!
It’s worth it, you said
When you’re not dead yet
A heart on velvet stairs
The sun leveled with dirt
Feel the air static
Between fingers wet from rainwater
And rosemary, reduced marinara
White flour softened with rest
* originally published in Southern Champaign County Star Today
I have lizards in my house
Like the side of Grecian urn
Move your body like the blood
Off an ascot, made for moonwalkers
Ruined on the forth of July
Another month in paradise
And I’ll ride my motorcycle
From Michigan to Rio, stopping
Wherever there’s a beach
Bar bands and blood
Breathing free without cigarettes
At twenty one
*originally published in Southern Champaign County Today (2025)
A few nights ago I watched a movie alone. This is not something I do often, but when it does happen, I make sure to take time with my selection. And for this, the criteria is simple: pick something I don’t think Sunny wants to see.
When we watch movies together, we prioritize films we both want to see, or at least filmes we think we will like, while seeking creativity, variety, and soul. This looks different every night, but the rules remain the same— if we are going to pick one movie, we start with three. There is not always a theme (for instance, one night last week the theme was thrillers—another night the theme was 80s animation), but there is often some line between the three selected films that we can draw ever so slightly without watching them. It could be a simple as “these three movies are all on Hulu” or as complex as “coming-of-age films about musicians during the early 60s in the American west.”
Either way, we have fun with it. There are movies we keep in mind for rainy days, cold winters, and slow mornings, and yet, every time we decide to watch something, we savor it. Like a ritual sacrifice to the gods of art.
As I buried myself in pillows in our newly acquired couch, I opened up a few apps to decide what to watch. Even though I would be viewing alone, I still managed to pick three.
“Something sad,” I thought.
Scrolling past horror films, revenge tales, old school animation, historical epics, French New Wave… These films would not be appropriate for a solo watch party. Many that fall in these categories I would want to share with Sunny, whether I’d seen it before or not. Plus, any epic would be far too long at this time of night.
It was just after nine, and I wanted to be in bed before eleven.
“Simple criteria,” I thought.
The longer I searched, the more I found films I wanted to share with Sunny. Countless names crossed my screen: Mike Leigh, Lena Dunham, Robert Redford, Godard, Joanna Hogg, Tarkovsky! How could I possibly decide? Then it hit me. I wanted something sad. Something slow. Something soft. And I knew just the thing.
I’d never seen a film by Kogonada, but I felt his style (or the style I percieved from my awareness of two of his films) fit my feeling for the night. And the three films I was already contemplating all went to the wayside. I quickly found Columbus (2017) starring John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson on Kanopy and projected it across the tea light wall.
I don’t want to go too far into the film, in the case that you want to watch it, too, but Columbus is about an estranged son, an uncertain daughter, and the college town that is Columbus, Indiana. The entire film was shot on location and features countless examples of modern art and architecture that make up the backdrop. It’s a movie about grief. And it was relatable in many different ways.
Not only did I go to a small school in Indiana, but I am the estranged son; I am the uncertain daughter. Seeing a college town like this, and running again in the days that preceded my first watch, brought me back to a time where I was first trying to figure out who and what I am. Like Casey, I felt lost, and unsure, and obligated to do what was expected of me. And like Jin, I felt angry, and sad, and nostalgic for a time and place that never existed. As I’m writing this today, I seem to be asking the same questions.
It’s difficult for me to think about school, or to think about my past, without thinking about running. Running is what got me interested in art, it solidified my interest in music, and it’s how I met Jim. As an incoming freshmen for the men’s cross country team, I was added to a facebook group in July of 2011. I was instructed (by one of the team captains) to “meet the guys” before we all convened on campus in mid-August. I was a captain of my cross country team and track team in high school (which was not unique, as I found out later), so introducing myself online felt inauthentic, rushed, and in 2011, just plain weird. A small group chat was started amongst the freshmen runners, but nothing substantial. I noticed what my future teammates looked like, and that’s all.
A few weeks later I was standing in a crowd in Grant Park in Chicago. It was Lollapalooza weekend, and the last weekend with my high school friends (all runners) before we went to different schools. I don’t remember the stage where we were standing, just that it was Sunday, and it looked like rain. We were waiting (maybe ten thousand of us) for Cage the Elephant. In the great anticipation of what would be a killer performance, minutes passed by like seconds. A low hum of bass drops present even in this silence. Before we knew it, the band took the stage.
Like a tidal wave crashing the boardwalk, after standing motionless since the last show, the crowd rushed the stage, and, suddenly, large gaps where filled with bodies on the concrete floor. Guitars, drums, and shouting in all directions competed for attention, with EDM stages not far off to the south.
I remember hearing “No… No!… NO!!!”
As I looked to my right, I saw a tall, thin, buzzed cut boy, probably my age, pushing his friends away as they sent him up, crowdsurfing on the first song. Looks like a runner, I thought. In that instant, I knew I’d seen that face before. And before I could even process what was happening, I shouted back.
“Jim?! JIM!!”
“What are you doing?”
“I know him! JIM!!!”
From a pixelated profile picture on an early version of Facebook, I recognized Jim in the crowd of people. I watched as his flailing body was pushed to the stage atop sweating drunken hands of ten thousand strangers. Soon after, lightning struck, and the next hour was a monsoon. Cage the Elephant went on to play their best songs, but the festival was cancelled, at least until the storm passed. We were rushed out of the park and found a table on the second floor of the State Street McDonald’s, like most everyone else it seemed, except Jim. I was still in a state of shock.
A couple years later, after spending countless hours as teammates and roommates and classmates, we hosted a radio show together while serving as the Music Directors for WGRE, our school’s student run radio station, and “your sound alternative.” We called the show IndieHour(s), just in case the faculty advisors only gave us a one hour show. Thankfully, we locked in a weekly two-hour show, Tuesdays 10pm to midnight, for three years straight. Jim and I both ran cross country and track, and we were involved in different clubs and classes around campus. Tuesday nights, late, seemed to be the only time that worked for us. And we made the best of it.
We had various catch phrases, jokes, and weekly features that made up our couple hours of indie and alternative music for our peers, including starting every show with a classic “jock jam” off of the ESPN Jock Jam CDs of the late 90s. We only had one real rule: never repeat a song.
Since WGRE functioned as a real radio station, I always thought of the long-haul truckers and the local townspeople that would tune in by chance and hear an early track from King Krule or the new Death Cab for Cutie and just think, “what in the hell is going on over there?” But of all of our antics, my favorite was always the fifteen minutes after 11pm, where we intentionally played sad songs, the saddest ones we knew. We called it crytime.
Our shared interest in music of all kinds brought Jim and I closer together as friends. Our first “meeting” seemed destined to me, and it was no surprise it came through a concert, instead of the first day of cross country where we’d meet out teammates and coaches and trainers, let alone the faculty, the students, the staff of what would make up our home for the next four years. I don’t know if either of us would have stood out if not for Cage the Elephant, and the crowd, and the rain.
Jim told me later that his friends egged him on all weekend about crowd surfing, something Jim had no interest in doing. So, as Sunday afternoon rolled around, his friends ambushed him, and sent him soaring into the air the moment the show began.
As the first few months of freshmen year went on, Jim and I found something in common with the type of music we liked. Yes, it spanned multiple genres, be it indie, rock, electronic, folk, hip-hop, bluegrass, and jazz; but there was one common thread: it was sad.
We were recommending songs to one another and realized, seemingly for the first time, how depressing they were. As if we’d never once listened to the lyrics until now. So when we started our radio show, we knew this was worth exploring.
I often asked myself, “why do I like sad songs?”
And at the time, I didn’t know. I was 18 years old. I was in school. I had friends. My parents were still together. My grandma was still alive. I had all the things I was told I needed to be happy. What did I have to be sad about?
But the truth was I was sad. And only after exploring the caverns of my psyche, did I start to understand why. I can’t speak for Jim, but running found me because of this sadness. I tried to convince myself I started running because my brother did, too. Or that my dad was a runner. That it was in my blood. But in reality, there was something about me, something about my home, something about my life, that I was running from. Like my earliest nightmare, swimming through rock and mud from the dinosaurs buried beneath the earth, and not breaking free.
Crytime* was a weekly occurrence for IndieHour(s), and, amongst our friends, it started to gain some traction. Even the music-loving president of our university tuned in. I remember being told that it was a reason to listen late night during the week. For us, it was a ritual: to play the eleven o’clock AP news, and to go straight into three depressed songs, blaring throughout the station studio, as we listened, together, in silence.
I liked to think anyone tuning in was doing the same.
As I finish this week of running, my week one in my training schedule, I feel this sense of return. In the past, I have strayed away from who I am, or who I was, as I searched for who I thought I was to become. But running is reminding me that I could be found right where I left off. I am running, but not from something. I believe this time I am running toward it. And over the course of the next eight months, I think I am going to find out what it is.
I reached out to a college friend and asked “what do you remember about crytime?”
“Absolutely nothing,” he said.
Ultimately, I’m not sure we made the impact that I believed we did at the time. Either way, crytime was a chance to come together and listen. To each other and ourselves.
And if we were doing it right, it was a time to cry.
-Brian
*For those interested, here is a playlist of songs featured on crytime. There are many more, but these songs we remember playing: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/crytime/pl.u-MDAWv0jI3pyKgY
I don’t remember when this feeling came over me, but I noticed something was missing from my life. As a lifelong drummer (who currently does not own drums), I assumed what I needed was music. Or writing, and the hopeful accolades that can come from it. But even after writing new poems and playing drums in a garage on a hilltop neighborhood of Cincinnati, there was an absence that was still noticeable.
“Maybe you should start running again,” she said. This was a helpful note, especially in the aftermath of being governmentally unemployed. But I felt resistance. Or just the overwhelming curiosity as to why?
My relationship with running over the course of the last twelve years has been distant, only falling into it as a necessity of good health. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, in 2020, I ran for the first time since quitting my college cross country and track team seven years prior, and I remember liking it. The streets of East Los Angeles were empty still, and we lived in a hilly neighborhood. Something about that combination reminded me of when I first started running. But my body was not the same.
We moved to Hollywood and I stopped running. A new neighborhood, without hills, and more traffic and streetlights, made running seem impossible. It was almost three years before I ran again. Once I figured out a route in our residential yet chaotic Hollywood neighborhood that felt safe and allowed me to run without too much stop-and-go, we were moving again. This time to Joshua Tree, California in the High Desert. Out of fear of twisting an ankle, or suffering from potentially lethal dehydration, I never ran a step while we lived there.
Last summer, after we bought our first house, I started running the country roads of Eastern Illinois. It was simple: I wanted to learn the lay of the land that was our new home. I kept at it for a few weeks, but when the weather changed, and I was hired to work in an office a half hour commute from home, I lost touch with this practice. I couldn’t get past why?
Ten days ago, I was overwhelmed with the desire to read. I am embarrassed to say that reading has never held a substantial part of my life, at least in recent memory. I made a joke that the last book I read, I didn’t finish.
“Why not?”
“Because I got a job.”
Holding both, let alone running too, was not something I understood how to manage. So without a job, and a noticeable absence in my life, I decided to pick up where I left off and finish the last book I ever started: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I will speak more on that experience later…
What is important is I finished it. I can recall many titles of books I have started and not finished and for that I can only blame myself. But finishing a book, and maybe in particular, this book, changed something in me. I knew that If I wanted to write, I had to read. It was no longer advice from someone older and wiser and more academically impressive. It was a truth. A truth I understood in my bones.
I grew up in a family of “academics” which I put in quotes for a number of reasons. My father went to medical school. My mother graduated high school early. I grew up saying she was a nurse, but the truth was she stopped doing that almost five years before I was born. I never knew her to have a job, which did not stop her from belittling me and my siblings for various inadequacies she found in our jobs, personalities, attitudes, or our studies.
I was told I was not good at reading, and even further, that I couldn’t read. So it was no surprise to me that I just stopped reading. In high school, I shied away from advanced classes and drama, thinking I had to meet a certain standard of reading comprehension that I was told I was not capable of. In college, I fell behind in almost every class. Thankfully, my stubbornness came through and I spent most of my time enrolled in English classes, theater, and film studies. All places that required I read or, at the very least, understand what I was reading.
When I finished Motorcycle Maintenance, I already had a book queued up: Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I do not know how I came across this book, but something, or some being, required that I buy it and read it as soon as possible.
“If I am going to start running again, I am going to read this first,” I thought.
The same day I closed the book on Zen, I opened Murakami’s meditation on running, writing, and aging. Four days later, a few minutes before midnight, I finished it. And today, I woke up and ran two miles for the first time since last September. To say that this book changed me is an understatement. It inspired me wholly; it made me want to write, to read, breathe, and listen to my record collection. It made me want to move to Japan, or New York, or Hawaii, if only for a season. It made me want to travel roads I never knew existed and drink espresso on the Mediterranean. This memoir awakened something in me. It made me want to cry. But above all else, it made me want to run.
Before I set out this morning to run my planned two miles, I made a decision: I am going to run a marathon. I remember training for cross country in high school and college, running in the early morning all summer long, then working days managing the snack bar of the local private swim club. I was a swim coach, too, for the same club. I’d run from 6:30 to about eight in the morning, then make my way to the pool to teach kids thirteen and younger how to do flip-turns and relay starts. By eleven, I’d open up the snack bar and grill burgers for moms, dads, babysitters, teens, and lifeguards alike.
I remember being asked what I was training for, since local moms and dads saw me running on their way to work, then grilling burgers at the pool when they came to join their kids.
Proudly, I’d say cross country.
“Not a marathon?”
This response bothered me then. It wasn’t that I understood these two versions of running to be different, but the way he said it left me unnerved. As if training for a singular event was to be viewed as better or higher than that of a year-round, sustained season. Anybody can run a marathon, I thought.
At eighteen, I remember thinking I would never run a marathon. Years ago, I remember saying I had no interest. Even when my former teammates and friends started to get back into it, started to run faster times, qualify for bigger races, I held my ground. But right now? It’s as if I had been wandering around in the darkness of a cave of my own carving, searching for the tips of my toes. And someone (in this case, Murakami) turned on the lights.
And then I was confronted with another truth: it was always with me. I needed to rediscover running on my own. And in doing so, rediscover myself. I am one day into this journey, so it is impossible to know what I will find in the back roads and trails of my new home, but today, I found this.
These bones are what remains of a deer that probably died last September, hit by a car, and tossed far from the road in the high native grasses, only to be revealed after a new path was mowed, crushing the skull and ribs of what must have been a beautiful mother deer in the flesh. I picked up the jaw bone, and these two bones of what is probably the hind legs, to remember what it means to be alive, what it means to run, and what it means to be a part, albeit small, of this natural world.
I am excited. I am going to run tomorrow. And I am going to start a new book.
I wonder what I will find next.
-Brian
They wouldn’t give me your transcripts
Because I’m not you
Even though you died in October
Twenty-four years before I was born
They said you were in key club
And played football, you were taking
Intro philosophy and general psych
I wonder how far you got
After practice, driving north
I wonder how dark it was
In the rearview, when you flipped
I play your guitar still
Even though I don’t know how
It’s all I have left without your picture
Or a prayer
To fall for
Where did you go?
Mom won’t tell the truth
But I finally saw your face today
In my eyebrows
*originally published in Southern Champaign County Today (2025)
Every nightmare starts the same: I’m walking south on Poplar. The grass overgrown— no one lives here anymore. As I approach the yield that forks the asphalt road, I can see around the elms into my childhood bedroom. Shutters open but the blinds are drawn. The red door with a gold handle is closed, the driveway empty. I step between the crabapple trees that border the lawn, and notice a figure in the living room window. The bricks of this house are darker in my memories. When I get to the door, it is locked.
And it always will be.
We met Kyle at Garth’s
They were close in age
But more like father and son
To see him you had to look up
Passed the boulders behind peacocks
And roosters tucked away
So the mountain lions couldn’t find them
Pulling to the center of a drum
He’s probably watching a movie
Or something but where does truth begin?
Like when a lightning bolt strikes sand
Bone and coral make up Earth’s gravel lots
After poachers march on
Take the baking soda back to where it
Belongs because it too has a place here
And if you drink tea of this plant you know
Whether or not magnets even work
In water Ancient instruments made custom
From PVC pipe and fiberglass pulse
With the lava flowing beneath my feet
Pianos wrapped in plastic drift into dreams
And more dreams and it’s dark now
And every star is moving closer asking
If it’s the right time to press down and
Pull apart rock to reveal Truth’s end
If we haven’t met before
We have now
So follow me to the edge
And you’ll hear what’s been calling
All along
*originally published by The Horizon Magazine (2023)
I never met my Grandpa Charles.
I heard he was a butcher
And a drunk and he cried
When they found Elvis.
He wrote secret letters
To his daughter estranged
Telling her how proud
He was and that he wished
Things were different.
But they weren’t, so
He stopped writing.
*originally published by The Horizon Magazine (2023)
Yellow buds blooming soon
Woven with grass not dried yet
Resting like a midwestern penguin
Surrounded by first world soy beans
Taxed in rows, how much
Gasoline will burn the barn down
To make it to the county line?
Despite the commercials—
Local love, pigskin is used for cooking
A blue heron, resting too
In brown water from another
Million miles of mud
Leave and return, the sun will glow still
awakened by wind
Sounds of water
Flowers reach trees
No ground ivy left
To hold them
*originally published in Southern Champaign County Today (2025)
Push mud without mathematics
Sludge, pus
All holes overflown
With humanity. We came here
And brought music
Told stories of gods
To the rumbling ravages torn
Cloth stained in earth
It will be centuries before I leave here
Forgotten promises lost
Beneath wooden wheels barely built
To function
Rain soaked structures made of rock
Bound to fall if pressed, believing
In prayer like a sea of dirt
Black between eyes, white
Every villager survived on roots
And lake water
If the sun ever comes back
I will find another planet
Made of rock
And take my stories with me
* originally pubished by BRUISER MAG (2023)
I was in a thrift store with Sunny sometime within the last 14 months,
She picked up a book and said “I want you to buy this for yourself.”
“Okay,” I said.
When we got home, I put it on our mirrored bookshelf. I remember looking at the acknowledgements on the inside cover and found a quote from Ray Bradbury.
He said “He gives me Flight. He keeps me Young.”
And even still, it sat on the shelf, untouched, and unread, like many of the books I have purchased secondhand over the years.
A few weeks ago, while in the most chaotic Goodwill I’ve ever been, I perused the book section. I was specifically looking for vintage cookbooks and baking recipes.
I have developed a fascination with baking and cooking since moving rural. It’s as if only now, deprived of the food diversity I took for granted living in Los Angeles, do I have a profound interest in what we eat, how we prepare it, and what it means. But I will go into that another day.
A small paperback in black with bold white letters stood out to me: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach. I pulled it off the shelf and brought it to Sunny.
“Isn’t this the author of that seagull book? The one you got for me?”
“I think so… Yeah, maybe,” she said.
I still hadn’t read Jon Seagull, but this discovery felt like a reminder to do so.
So I bought Illusions and brought it home. Then I found Jon Seagull and put them on the mirrored shelf together.
A few more weeks went by. I got fired from my corporate sales job.
And I started reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
This “story” is 80 pages, split evenly between text and the black and white photography of Russell Munson. It’s short, but anything but a quick read. Simply put, it’s the tale of a seagull who loves flying. But rich with themes of grief, death, politics, religion, dreams, and aerodynamics.
I was immediately inspired. Not only to fly, but to be myself. In the days after reading, I created this website and started this blog. I submitted more poems to various literary mags around the country. I cleaned my closet and unearthed writing projects I thought would be buried forever.
In the story, Jon Livingston is outcast by his flock for pushing the limits of flying. At first, he feels as though he is born in the wrong time, living amongst gulls that only care about eating; and flying only serving as an agent of food. But through his exile, he learns his true powers are to lead, to change, and to fly.
He wasn’t born in the wrong time, he was born at exactly the right time to change the world in which he lived. He is a once in a ten-thousand-year bird and it takes exile, loss, confusion, and enlightenment, to understand why.
In another life, I would break down upon not reaching my goals. As if failure was a sign post for doing something else, instead of a reminder to keep going.
I exiled myself, I moved to another world, I changed. I have lived many lives, both publicly and privately, and this book, this bird, and this blog are a reminder for me to keep going. I just had to find my own Jon Livingston Seagull. And I think he’s here.
All this is to say: I’m not going anywhere, so stick around.
-Brian
