We Need Community More Than Ever

The little neighborhood that could, the boys of summer, and the need for something more

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: being a part of something more than ourselves.

If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Suppertime! I promise to feed you only once a week, and never after midnight.

Ingredient List

🎵 : Here’s some of the songs I’ve been listening to over the past month.

📖 : “The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for The New York Times (gift link). This is a great long read that has all the hallmarks of a great story– unexpected twists and turns, personal reflections that don’t overshadow the main subject, and the peeling of layers off an onion that had previously been cooked to death.

This Past Week

I headed back to California this week for work, where we did a bunch of running related activities and shot a lot of content for Running Warehouse. It was my first time on the central coast, in San Luis Obispo (SLO), and I gotta say, it was really nice. The remains of volcanoes that extend into the sea, the temperate weather, the good food and drinks and the absolutely stunning sunsets.

I feel like it was the first time I really got California. Like, I understand why people live here despite the absurdly high cost of living, among other things. We ran in some cool places, including a morning run to the top of Mount Madonna, out and back on the Bob Jones trail, and a really cool race with Adidas Terrex on a private ranch, the first time anybody has ever run there. At the top, we got views of Morro Bay and the farm country that went for miles. Sandwiches at High Street Deli were superb, as was the kitsch decor of the Madonna Inn and its incredible cascading waterfall urinal (I’d pay $10 just to urinate in it again).

I also got an awesome souvenir at the SLO farmer’s market, a framed garter snake skeleton. Never saw anything like that for sale, so– as a resident of House Slytherin– I had to have it.

It was a good time with good people, but I’m glad to be home.

Some other things I wrote this week:

• Topo Athletic Specter 2 (shoe review for Believe in the Run)

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 manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, onto dinner service.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Guinness and Green

Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, my community consisted mostly of cows and relatives and two friends– brothers– who lived a mile away. We went to church three times a week, a place that generally fosters a sense of community, except the congregation was only about 30 people and we all lived in disparate locations. My parents didn’t go to parties, didn’t hang out with other people, didn’t really have a social circle of any kind. If I think about it, me and my three siblings were their community. We knew some of our neighbors, but we didn’t really see people too often outside of school or sports. It was a far cry from my community now, here in Baltimore.

I’m not sure why I was drawn to city life. There was just always this thing inside of me that wanted to go get out, go explore, be where the people are. Every couple years my family would drive up to New York City to visit a church off Times Square, which was really my first experience with a big city, and the whole thing was invigorating– the hugeness of it, the hum of everything, the people and the subway and constant motion of it all. I needed to know what it was like to be in the middle of that. I guess I just didn’t want to miss out on what was happening, and it seemed like important things were always happening in cities. These were the birthplaces of cultural revolutions, fashion trends, music genres, and life. The future happening in real time.

It took me awhile to establish camp in a real city, but eventually I ended up in Baltimore by way of marriage. My wife was from Annapolis and I was from Harrisburg, so Baltimore seemed like a good middle ground for the both of us. In comparison to places like New York and Los Angeles, Baltimore is a small city, but it still counts. In an extremely fortunate stroke of luck, I found a place to rent in Canton (which I wrote about here), one of the nicer neighborhoods in the city. I lived there for a short time, then eventually found a rental on Craigslist in the neighborhood of Brewers HIll. 

At the time, our house was on the edge of the neighborhood, surrounded by warehouses and sitting beside an abandoned parking lot. The lot was unlit and overgrown, which meant it was the go-to place for drug users or prostitutes and their johns. I’ve seen more than a few girls open a door and spit on the ground, and it wasn’t chewing tobacco or mouthwash. In short, it was where condoms went to die. One Christmas morning, my next door neighbors found one side of their Kia Soul on cinder blocks with both passenger side tires gone. 

Those neighbors, Zach and Justine, were my first taste of community in Baltimore. I moved into the house before Kimi did, sleeping on the floor while barbacking at Slainte, the biggest Irish pub in Baltimore. I had just worked 15 hours straight on St. Patrick’s Day and finally got home at 4 in the morning. Anyone who works in the restaurant industry knows that one does not just simply go to bed– a few more beers and cigarettes are always in order. I was smoking on the second floor deck and Zach saw me and told me to come down and hang out with them. Every year they threw a rager of a St. Paddy’s Day party and a few of them were still keeping the Guinness going into the wee hours of the morning. We hung out, threw some rings, drank some beers, and had a good time.

From there, we became friends, and though we were never super close, we were always down to party or hang out if the moment arose. Zach and Justine were the first, but eventually we met people up and down our block and throughout the neighborhood. Through cleanups or pub crawls, parking lot movie nights, general conversation, or package pick-ups, we knew our neighbors and they knew us. I helped organize the first Porch and Patio Crawl, which is still one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in Baltimore, neighbors moving from one house to another throughout an afternoon, hanging out and having drinks on each other’s patios. Our house felt like a home, so we made it one for good when we bought our house from our landlord back in 2018. 

Since then, my attachment to the community has only grown. Our kids go to the public elementary school a mile away, which opened up a whole new world of friendships and relationships. Our church is in the neighborhood, as is the grocery store, the library, Target, and a slew of corner bars and restaurants. I’ve met friends through running, walking, fishing, and biking. 

Almost every time I go out the door for a run or a walk, I end up stopping to talk to someone for a few minutes, catching up on life or complaining about package thieves. My kids have a friend across the street whose door they knock on and ask if he can come out and play. I wasn’t sure if that existed anymore, but I’m happy to report that it does. 

This is the greatness of cities and the unrecognized strength of Baltimore. It’s not the shopping districts, the concert venues, the James Beard restaurants, the sports teams, or the nightlife. All the shiny objects are great, for a time. Maybe for a weekend or a decade in your twenties. I thought I wanted all that, but what I really needed was community. 

For all the warts and bumps, the catalytic converter thefts and public-masturbating fentheads, the trash-packed gutters and Amazon thieves, Baltimore shines bright because of its people. Without them, I would’ve been long gone. 

And look, I get it, it’s not for the faint of heart. In many cases, I stopped building relationships because I know they’re having kids and moving out of the city. No matter how good your intentions, when you move to the county, it’s the beginning of the end. So I try to build with what I have, for those who are still here and part of the community. 

I never had that growing up, but I can tell you that it does something for the soul that the suburbs cannot.

Also, it’s pretty awesome not having to mow a lawn.

And for that I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Junior Frosty and Fries

I know I talk about the band days quite often on here, but it truly was a seminal six years of my life. It really cemented who I am– how much I could believe in something, how hard I would work for something, and how much adversity I could withstand without giving up. It also taught me the value of deep friendship and community the way that few other life paths could. 

When we first started the band, we obsessively watched Band of Brothers. I don’t think it was intentional, it was just really good television and it had just come out on DVD. Having a local connection helped– Sargeant Dick Winters (the main character in Band of Brothers) lived in Hershey and I had just worked for a local newspaper whose editor was good friends with him. While I never met him, I did cover a story on a World War II veteran who was in the first group to liberate Dachau, and that’s something that will stay with me forever.

I should preface this next part by saying that in no way would I compare myself or ourselves to soldiers or those facing life and death situations on the battlefield. Their sacrifice and heroism is incomparable to anything I’ve done in my life. But after being in a struggling band, I get parts of what they experienced. Mostly, the community.

Before I was in the band, I never understood how soldiers would come back from the battlefield after seeing the most horrific casualties, experiencing hails of gunfire and tripped explosives, and immediately want to go back. Back to brushing shoulders with the grim reaper. Or how they wouldn’t want to talk about it, even couldn’t talk about it, with anyone but their friends who experienced the same thing. Like, you’re home, you made it, relax, have fun! Open up, get it all out!

Except, I felt the same way whenever I’d come home from the road. Our tours were not successful. Few made money and we only got paid on a couple. Most of the time I’m not even sure they were fun outside of the drinking and partying each and every night, especially the last couple years when we weren’t gaining traction, just treading water from one dive bar to another across the United States. 

When we’d come back home to normal life, to our families and friends and girlfriends and restaurant jobs or whatever other side hustle we could rustle up, we just didn’t want to talk about it. I hated when people asked me about tour. What do you want me to say? How we were so hungry we pulled a pizza off the bottom of a Domino’s dumpster and then followed a random drunk girl through an ice storm to her apartment, where we then reheated the frozen pizza in the same microwave used to warm up a mouse to feed her ball python? That we played to a mostly empty room in Kentucky and then drank ourselves to sleep in a Walmart parking lot? Our siblings and college friends were putting down payments on houses and getting 401K matches, and we were trying to figure out how to game the coupon system on the back of Burger King receipts. Pouring all our months and years into a sewer pipe dream. 

The only thing that helped was drinking with ourselves and other bands, commiserating together and telling war stories from the road. It was a community full of dreamers, of travelers, of kids just wanting to play an instrument and have others love them for doing it. The road called to us, because that’s where we met our people. It may have sucked, but it was home. 

Within the walls of our van, our friendships tightened and loosened and strained and broke and came back stronger. We knew the rhythm of our sleep, the direction our cigarettes faced in their packs, the places where we’d hide food. Which band member was walking towards me at dusk on a beach from a half mile away. A long time ago, I wrote this description of the band days as I attempted to close that chapter on my life, mimicking Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” as these were the things I carried.

The way old and unwashed jeans felt in the morning when I rolled out of a sleeping bag on a stranger's floor, filled with loose change, Arby's receipts, guitar picks, wallet, crushed cigarettes, Bic Lighter, iPhone, belt, and/or dice. How I would put them on and feel the last several weeks soaked into them and the next day waiting to fall onto them. How on some days the air of five different states would pass over them before being taken off and thrown in another random corner of another stranger’s floor. How the next day would start the same way, minus the loose change I lost to Timmy and Ali on the kitchen floor the night before.

The nights in the van, in a Walmart or hotel parking lot, or even outside the house we were staying in.  How we would settle into the dirty seats and homemade bunks falling down and how the crack of the first Natty Light gave us permission to forget or remember that night. How the van carried every piece of us inside of its stripped metal walls. How when we would sleep inside of it in the winter, our breath would drip down the walls and smear the ink from the “hello my name is” tag picked up at some show, somewhere, sometime last year. The Polaroid of us after the Margot show that hung on the wall, the kind of picture that is the last on a slideshow at a funeral. The "never, ever, give up" written inside. I still sometimes wish I could apparate to there and just talk, because that was the living room of our home, where friends would come in and sometimes stay, where we spoke in tongues of hope and struggle as we wore out the night the best we could. Those nights layered themselves, and somehow have become the sediment that so much of my love of good friends and conversation rests on.

We all shared driving responsibilities equally, but also knew our individual roles within the band. We laughed, so much. It’s honestly where I developed and honed my style of wit and humor, practicing it over and over again on long drives and late nights, all of us one-upping each other, just trying out best to make each other laugh. The craziest thing is, I’m probably the eighth funniest person in my friend group. We also cried, oftentimes alone in the van after a rough show or a crippling tour. Sometimes after a breakup. Sometimes just because it was hard and we were young and we were also working through things, deep things that followed us down the interstate, a shadow tailing that we just couldn’t shake. We talked, for hours and hours, every day and night. We would find a parking lot, open up the windows, settle into the seats, crack a beer, light a cig, and just talk. Many times until dawn. That’s all it was and they were truly some of the best times of my life.

When I left the band, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. It had run its course, we had a good time, and it was time to move on. I moved to Baltimore. I thought it was fine, but I didn’t know how much I was struggling.

I was so used to talking to my friends, to being with them, that I couldn’t handle the silence late at night. A TV wouldn’t do it, and neither did my iPhone. So I would just sit out on my back patio scrolling through my entire phone directory and call people every night, hoping someone would pick up. Bandmates, friends from other bands, family, friends from the road, from Jason to Michigan to Devon in Texas to David in Nashville– it didn’t matter, I just wanted to talk the way we used to. For so long, conversation had been routine and now it was gone. 

That went on for almost a year, until I realized that people just had other things to do. So I mostly stopped calling them. During the pandemic it picked back up when I was especially lonely and depressed and drinking too much again. 

Again, not to compare myself to soldiers and their units, but I get it. I understand why nobody understands. Because in different ways, we experienced the raw, unfiltered version of life and death, and we encountered it with others on the same level. That bond belongs to us and it can’t be replicated or even explained. I just can’t connect the dots for you, even though I’m trying to do it right now.

I still talk to some of those friends on the phone, some of them once every couple weeks, others once every few months. Still for an hour or two, sometimes three. Now I just drink an NA beer and don’t need the nicotine. Turns out we’re still best friends, still part of the best community I’ve ever been a part of. When we see each other in person, it’s like we never missed a day. 

We’re off the road, but we’re still on it in other ways, still trying our best to make each other laugh, still dreaming of the next adventure. We’re just older, though maybe not wiser, and we still get excited about Wendy’s coupons in the mail. Because you never know when you’ll be broke again.

Course 3

The Main: Cool Ranch Doritos

For much of my life, and even now, I’ve taken community for granted. The fact that I have many friends from many eras of my life is probably the key to me keeping it together for this long. 

My best friend in the world is still Andy, who has been my best friend in the world since 9th grade. My other best friend in the world is his brother, Brian, who played in my band and became my own brother over the course of those years. My other best friend is Mike, one of my best friends from college, who is now a doctor and is really great at catching up for an hour or so every couple weeks, in addition to picking up the phone when I have to ask him about another injury my kids’ sustained. There’s David, who is a brother from another mother whom I met in Nashville on our first tour. There’s Zac, my college roommate, and another Zach, who I met at church when I first moved to Baltimore. There’s CK, who I’ve known since first grade, there’s Luke and Marc and Timmy and Ali and so many more. Then there’s my wife Kimi, who’s my best friend of all.

I have probably another fifty or so very good friends from all different walks of life who have all meant something to me, who have really made my life story so rich and full.

All of these relationships were built over time, from conversations over dinner to tequila-fueled late night talks to long runs during marathon training. Road trips, spring breaks, bikepacking adventures, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, work trips, and regular old get-togethers. I have friends from all walks of life with completely differing viewpoints, from pro-choice to pro-life, from MAGA Trumpers to ultra-progressive liberals. Believe it or not, it’s possible to love someone independent of their political preferences.

The one common thing between all of them? We invested back and forth, over and back again for years, the smoothing of a stone by the waters of time and place. We built a bond that can’t be broken. 

You may have heard the Yogi Berra quote: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Swap out community and it works just the same.

Community isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. 

We saw clear evidence of this during the pandemic. I saw it clearly within my own life. Though I wasn’t totally isolated– I saw my friends and family quite often and went on plenty of work trips– there was a pervasive disconnect that swept through our society. Instead of going outward, we went inward, into social media, Netflix, alcohol, weed, nicotine, and whatever else would distract us from the fact that we were alone and apart. 

There’s a reason that solitary confinement is the worst punishment you can put on a prisoner. We’re not meant to be with our own thoughts. And yet, we’re told that our own thoughts hold the key to happiness, that the postmodern celebration of self and the outward manifestation of our own lived reality trumps all else. But what if it doesn’t? What if us, left to our own devices, are the worst versions of ourselves?

In reading the news stories about Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, I came across an interview with someone who lived in the shooter’s neighborhood. He said he didn’t know the kid, that none of the neighbors talked to each other. I found that to be so tragic. They had a community, right there, but they lived in isolation. I don’t know enough about the shooter, other than– like every other shooter– he was a loner and was relentlessly bullied in high school. Left to the internet and his own devices, he ended his own life and another man’s on the aluminum roof of a storage building in Western Pennsylvania. I don’t know for sure, but I can probably guarantee you he wanted to be loved and accepted by a community, and found one online that would do one of those things. 

Trees can stand alone, but when they do, it’s a lifetime with limbs bent to the wind, exposed to the elements, fighting to reach the sky. A tree thrives in community, when its roots reach out beneath the soil, grasping for the tendrils of others nearby. They talk to each other, feed each other, keep the community alive so that the forest can flourish. We’re no different. We may grow, but without community that growth will be stunted.

Right now, people are starved for connection, for real community. A steady diet of distractions has left us with social scurvy; we’ve basically been living off Cool Ranch Doritos and french fries and hoping that holds us over.  It doesn’t and it hasn’t. Instagram friendships aren’t real, Zoom meetings suck, and working remote is an oxymoron. The social disconnect that started with the smartphone and peaked with the pandemic has become the winter of our discontent. Stress and anxiety have become the baseline and it’s not normal, healthy, or sustainable.

We know something feels wrong and we want it to change. The good news is that we’re agents of that change.

I’ve seen this first-hand as the running community has blown up over the last couple years. Between run crews and run clubs, group runs, meet-ups, and races, the space has exploded. It’s been a perfect storm of sorts– running was one of the few things we could do during the pandemic, which became a new hobby for many. From there, they joined clubs or crews, they ran a mile then a 5K then a half marathon. It’s also a fantastic way to meet new friends with similar interests. Obviously, I can give a direct testimonial on that end. Running has brought so many wonderful people into my life that it’s hard to even quantify its effect over the years. So many rich memories and conversations and times spent together. 

Maybe your thing isn’t running. Maybe it’s attending church or helping with the PTO at your kid’s school. Maybe it’s joining a sports social league or taking a class at your local community college. It should be something though. Life is too short to spend it alone. Build relationships, give people grace, find out what it means to build deep roots in a community that will give back more than you can put in. 

Trust me, I know it takes a lot to break out of the mold of isolation. Loneliness is a warm and welcoming place in the day to day order of operations. But we’re not meant to be with ourselves and in our own heads. We’re part of the bigger picture, a brush stroke in the final masterpiece. Find your people, whoever they may be. They need you and you need them. The world needs it too, now more than ever.

Course 4

Your Choice of Dessert

Again, I feel like this one went a little long, so maybe I’ll just reserve this section to ask another question:

Where have you found the greatest sense of community?

In a way, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here. Personally, I feel like the running community has been something special, but I also loved the music community when I was a part of it. At its best, the church community is something special, but at its worst, it’s the worst. I’ve had some great, life-changing experiences, but the church can be a petri dish for self-serving ideologies or just general beliefs that go against what the church should be about. Anyone paying attention to the American church over the past couple decades knows this to be true, especially as its fallen victim to the current politics, of which I want no part of. It’s the definition of building a house on sinking sand.

Would love to hear your thoughts on where you’ve found community or even where you’ve lost it.

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.

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