Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: Time is a flat circle. Or square. Not really sure how it works.
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Course 1
A Word of Gratitude: Mid-Atlantic Clambake
As anyone living in the Mid-Atlantic knows, it has been ungodly hot for most of the summer. July was an absolute clambake, the steam pressure cooking the hinges on my skull until it opened up with a ding, unfurling a “dinner is served” banner for anyone who wanted to risk it all. I’ve singlehandedly went through almost an entire case of LMNT in that time.
And then came August 1. A day typically reserved for more broiling, it instead felt like a release valve. A cold front swooped in, dropping the morning temps into the 60F range. I opened the door and almost cried, 1) from the sweet relief, 2) because I know it’s a false fall. The fact that an 80-degree day feels like fall is alarming, but I’ll take a wilting jack-o’-lantern over another dehydration headache every day of the year.
It was glorious. The next day was a birthday party for my youngest son, and because we’re all about poor birthday parties, we do the Baltimore thing and just claim a picnic table at the Patterson Park castle playground, then haul a cooler from the car and pickup a bunch of pizza. The weather was the same, just truly wonderful.
That morning, as I was having breakfast, I was doing the Saturday puzzle for The New York Times. And wouldn’t you know it, on his exact birthday, I landed his name as an answer. I mean, can you ask for anything better than that? I really don’t think you can.
And for that, I am grateful.
Course 2
The Main: AYCE Chinese Buffet
A little over a month ago, we got a dog. His name is George, short for Sir Boy Curious George Washington Mikowski Reddinger, as designated by my kids. It’s not officially on his birth certificate or license or whatever, mainly because it changes every day.
If you’ve never done it, getting a dog is a major life event, on par with sacrificing yourself for your war buddy by jumping on a live grenade. It just kind of disrupts things.
I’ve been here before, dealing with disruptions and all. Having one kid was a major shock to my laissez faire approach to life, though I forget much of the first year. I look back at pictures or reflect on what I imagine happened during that year and think “Wow I really had no business taking care of that small child.” When our second one came along, I remember the day after he was born, and not being particularly happy about it. I loved him (I had to say that since he was my son), but I really questioned our decision to have another one. What have we done? We had such a good thing going on, just the three of us– why would we disrupt that? I had a feeling of dread, like I really messed things up and oh no I can’t fill out an exchange request and ship it back to the warehouse.
Of course, having a second kid was one of the best decisions we ever made in life, as he soon managed to pull into a first-place tie with my other favorite human in the world. I can’t imagine how boring our lives would be if he hadn’t disrupted them.
So it is with a dog. The first week (and maybe even every week until this one), I was going through it. On the first day, I texted my wife on multiple occasions to say I messed up and I’m sorry, that I can’t figure out my schedule and don’t know when to run or work and don’t know why we ever did such a thing. I had the same buyer’s remorse– knowing I can’t return it to the pawn shop (or paw-n shop, I guess). I did that thing where you introduce a living, breathing thing with four legs and a tail into a house with other living, breathing things, and there is no turning back from that.
Personally? I may have surrendered George Washington to the redcoats after he ate my Bose earbuds, chewed through my computer charging cable, snapped the laces on my kid’s baseball glove, and amputated the limbs on my quite healthy Monstera. But giving him back would require a decade of therapy for my oldest son, in addition to a lifelong turncoat designation for myself, so I figured the less painful option was to just keep the dog. Financially, it’s probably a break even proposition.
Nevertheless, the whole ordeal has put me into quite the spot. The everyday trials and tribulations aren’t really that annoying to me, since I’ve had children whose puppy stages lasted for 5+ years. I can clean up shit with the best of them. As a shoe reviewer, I have enough footwear to last three lifetimes, so a shredded heel collar isn’t going to set me off. Marie Kondo taught me to let go of personal possessions, even if I’ll regret it later on. I’m used to dog-eared pages in my books, and now I’m used to dog-eaten ones too. I actually love walks, so a 30-minute evening walk through the neighborhood is quite nice. Turns out that people on the street really, really love dogs too, which is great. Dog strolling beats doom scrolling any day of the week.
The thing that gets me is the schedule.
I like to think of myself as a spontaneous person, someone who can roll with it and let the small things stay small, never letting them disrupt the greater journey towards the destination. Wouldn’t we all like to be that way? And I was that person, probably for a large part of my life. That’s the life before kids, before marriage, when I could (and would) pack for a three-week road tour of America within 15 minutes. The van would roll up, the doors would open, and off I’d go. Things went wrong more often than they went right, but we just dealt with it. Nothing a six-pack of Busch and a pack of Camel Lights couldn’t solve.
All of that worked when my time was essentially limitless. Without any real responsibilities, there was no worry when things went wrong on the front end, because there was nothing to delay on the back end. Life was about l-i-v-i-n, McConaughey-style, each day. If I needed more money for gas or beer, I picked up more shifts waiting tables. Or just emptied out my change jar. Since I was deferring my student loans and rolling a snowball of interest for as long as I could, I had no bills outside of my $150 rent and car insurance. I was truly living in the moment.
That’s not to say it wasn’t stressful. Making below poverty wages for a full decade isn’t the best way to feel comfortable in life, and good luck impressing a girl on a date with that BOGO coupon to the AYCE Chinese buffet. But the stress was largely cosmetic. Even at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, I felt generally fine. I wasn’t going to die, I could survive on little to nothing, I had a college degree, and I could get a job waiting tables pretty much anywhere. At worst, I knew how to dumpster dive and survive.
Now, though? I feel it everywhere. I have a job that requires a good amount of office work, communication, and travel. I have two kids that must be fed and watered constantly. There’s school and sports and piano lessons and all of those things you know about kids because you were one. I have a wife who’s my teammate and I have to uphold my end of the bargain here. I have a 401k and college funds and a house to clean and cars to fix and plants to water and a Substack to write and groceries to buy (jk my wife is a saint) and friends to see and places to go and the years of time I had have somehow turned into months, months are now days. Days that go so fast.
Most of you are thinking: Dude, yeah, that’s just life.
I know it is, conceptually. I know I am in the thick of it, and that all these things take time.
The problem is that I don’t know how time works. Or, I just don’t understand how much time things take. So when I have a schedule that works, where the time aligns with what I’m doing, it’s all fine. But when that’s disrupted, it really throws a wrench into everything.
I never really heard of time blindness until maybe the last few years, and I believe it’s most often associated with people who have ADHD. I personally have never been diagnosed with ADHD, though every time I’ve read a book on it, it feels like someone is speaking to my soul (of course, I never finished those books).
In any case, it is super hard for me to discern how long a task will take, even ones I have done hundreds of times in the past. This includes getting ready for work, eating breakfast, doing the laundry – literally everything. Workwise, when I was younger, I was almost always 5 minutes late for every shift when I worked in the restaurant industry. When forced to, I can get to somewhere on time, but it’s almost always a stressful endeavor leading up to it Always forgetting one thing in the house and going back to get it, always forgetting my shirt was in the laundry, never remembering where I put my shoes/wallet/keys, wondering how this is happening again.
The situations where I can get somewhere on time are usually when I know it’s affecting someone else personally. I genuinely feel bad for wasting their time, so I always try my hardest to be there early so I don’t let them down. I’m not perfect, but I really do my absolute best in those situations and I can generally get there on time.
It’s very hard to describe not knowing how time works. You just have to take my word for it that it’s not laziness. It’s like, when I think about it, there’s this foggy spot, almost like a haze, that I can see in my mind. And the thing that I’m planning happens in that space, but I don’t know how long it could take, unless it’s something like, say… running a marathon. In spite of this, if I can manage to have a little structure and build a framework with concrete tasks and zero distractions (i.e. put on my Bose over the ear headphones set to an M83 playlist), then I can get into a flow state and I can annihilate a workflow. Like this newsletter, of which I can churn out 3,000 words in two or three hours, provided I don’t have interruptions.
The problem is when life tasks are just floating out there as “things that need to get done at some point.” In this way, you can probably imagine if I have a thousand tasks that I don’t know how long they take but still need to get done, then it gets very overwhelming, because I’m constantly failing to complete them, or procrastinating on it all because everything is swirling around in my head and I’m not sure what to do first. It comes and goes, but in its worst way, that is what it feels like.
Even so, I felt like things were somewhat calm in the first half of this year. I had gone on a lot of work trips last year, at least once a month, and while those trips are always great in the moment, they had begun to leave me feeling mentally fatigued, and somewhat disoriented. The whole living out of a suitcase thing is awesome when you’re single and young, but it became burdensome to manage general life. Missing out on my kids’ activities and family stuff was the biggest part, but it was also the constant disruption to any life schedule. Every time I got home, it felt like I was starting a new job and trying to find my footing.
My bosses who sign the paycheck are always gracious and know how much time with my family means to me, so all work trips have been optional. However, I want to be a good employee and I do enjoy seeing and meeting our followers and running some of the greatest races in the world, in addition to meeting designers and product managers at the headquarters of some of the biggest brands on the planet. Cool things, for sure, and high levels of fun.
Despite all those positives, it all became too much, so I asked if I could dial it back this year. To date, I’ve said ‘no’ to a lot of amazing experiences, including Western States and the London Marathon, among others. It helped, for awhile. It felt like I could breathe, like I finally had a solid schedule nailed down, where I’d take my kids to school, which was on the way to our office, then head to work for the day. Eight hours later, I’d pick them up. Run in the morning or after work, spend time with them in the evening. Good, great, excellent.
I still had some work trips, but I finally felt like I had some space to start gaining traction, even if there were still some things on the back burner (like the 300 pairs of shoes in my house that I needed to sift through and donate).
And then we got a dog.
This is where my time blindness comes back into play. Again, conceptually, I knew what a dog entailed. Obviously he would need to be walked a lot, and there would be accidents, and I would have to dedicate time to training and playing with him and all kinds of other things. I knew this, but I couldn’t plan this.
So when the dog came, the schedule went to hell, and so did my sense of structure and mental well-being. Because when my schedule or balance is thrown off, I get lost and start walking in circles, like a cat that just came out of a microwave (sorry, a f***ed up kid in middle school did that and I can never get the image out of my head). That’s me though– walking around in aimless circles, opening Instagram over and over again, checking Facebook, Substack, The New York Times – anything to make me forget that I don’t know what is happening. A malaise kind of descends upon me, where I don’t want to write or run or even take a shower some days (sorry, co-workers). I get anxious and depressed and I’m pretty sure I almost had a panic attack a few weeks ago.
Eventually, it all becomes too overwhelming and I recognize that it’s not going to get better until I make a change.
That’s where we’re at right now.
So I’m figuring that out, and my wife has been pretty great about it. Also, my bosses at my job have been super cool, and they’ve always been really flexible with family life, which I have always appreciated.
I want to be that spontaneous guy that I once was, just say “hey, let’s get a dog” and then hang take him to a brewery and put a bandana on his neck and take him camping and hiking and paddleboarding and fishing. But I’m just not.
I need a sense of stability so I can be a foundation for my family and my kids.
So that’s where we’re at, and I’m working on it. I appreciate the patience that my wife has, and also that you have as a subscriber.
This is a bit of a sideways entry this week, probably a little deeper into my personal life than I tend to go, but I wanted to put it out there. Maybe I just want it to serve as an apology because my inspiration levels have been down for the past month or two.
I appreciate you all and want to keep it real, so thank you for taking the time to be here and reading each week (or every other week in this case).
I also don’t want this to be a “woe is me” type thing. My life is really great, I’m surrounded by people I love and care about, and things are going better than I ever could have imagined. I mean, it feels ridiculous to even write this because my life is for real so good, just incredible. So many people have so much bigger problems in life! The fact that I even have the time to write this in my air conditioned living room is such a luxury.
But hey, it’s all relative, and we’ll create problems even when there aren’t any.
Imaginary monsters are still monsters, you just have to tell yourself when to wake up.
Just don’t be late for work.
(But you probably left your keys in some random pocket and are running up and down the stairs trying to remember where they are and now you left your coffee mug on the counter and forgot you still have to feed the dog and you didn’t even pack your lunch so now you have to find your wallet but that’s in a totally different backpack and now you’re ten minutes late. At least you still have your phone so you can distract yourself– nope, you left it in the bathroom. What a start to the day.)
Course 3
Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week
As already mentioned, we had some birthdays, as well as the end of Summer GRIT party with Believe in the Run on the same day. Lots of fun for a 12-hour block of time. The day before, our lead trail reviewer (and close friend) Taylor came into town, and we got in a really nice trail run on that first cool day of the summer. It had rained the night before so everything was lush and green and muddy and wet. Very nourishing to the soul of a country kid living in the city.
Unlike every other person in the city of Baltimore, I did not see the Savannah Bananas at Camden Yards, but apparently it was pretty great.
Speaking of the city, I was in New York City the previous weekend for 24 hours, where we did an event with New Balance in Queens. Lots of fun, never ran on Roosevelt Island, so that was kind of cool and a great view of the city.
If you recall from the previous newsletter, I was in Florida for a whole week as well. I made it a mission to find some shark teeth, and I did end up finding a small handful, including a really nice tiger shark tooth.
Got in a pretty hot and humid and interesting long run on Amelia Island, where I found my most money of the month (among other things). You can watch that short recap here.
I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.
I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this week’s episode here.
Ingredients List
Things I enjoyed this week.
🎵 : “Snipe Hunter” by Tyler Childers // Aside from the fact that I love the album title because my grandpa once tricked me into nighttime snipe hunting as a kid, I was also interested because it had been produced by Rick Rubin. There’s been a lot of divisive talk about this album, mostly from people who just want Tyler to keep recording “Purgatory” B-sides for the rest of his career or are convinced he’s too woke because he doesn’t play “Feathered Indians” anymore. Same kind of people who thought Rick Rubin destroyed The Avett Brothers when he spiritually guided “I And Love And You.” Personally, I was always a big fan of that album, and I’m a big fan of this album as well. I think the better comparison is to Sturgill Simpson recording “Sound & Fury” five years after “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.” Artists evolve, sounds change, it’s exciting to try new stuff. And “Snipe Hunter” is still very much country, even if the production is a little slick compared to his past albums. The standout track for me is Oneida, an absolutely beautiful ballad of a young man falling in love with an older woman. It was always a live favorite, but finally saw a recorded version. The arrangement is incredible, the multiple instruments are layered but still seem to all stand out on their own, and the vocals are just perfect. It’s a true stunner and will likely go down as one of the best country love songs this decade.
“Talk About That” by Lukr // As some of you know, Lukr (just Luke to me) used be the lead singer in the band I toured with in my twenties (Farewell Flight). He’s been putting out new music lately, including this song, which is legit one of my favorite songs of all time. He recorded a demo of this song several years ago and sent it to me, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it since then. I think me annoying him helped get this one across the finish line to a fully recorded version. It’s such a beautiful and heartbreaking song about life and death and growing up and change, and it makes me feel a lot of things.
You can find some of my favorite songs right now on my ongoing Summer 2025 playlist.
END OF MENU
Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.
It’s all balance right? That’s why vacations are always too short and all good things come to an end.
Loved it. "Nothing a six-pack of Busch and a pack of Camel Lights couldn’t solve." Is my favorite line you've ever written. Joking but only kind of.