It’s just after 12 on a Tuesday as I write and I am not in a bar facing a giant car wash. (Shout-out to Sheryl Crow’s best song, one that lives rent-free in my head, and not just because I had an instant crush on her when I first watched the video lo these many years ago.)

But I’m not a day-drinker. Lately, only an occasional night-drinker. I just drink less. I eat less sugar, too.

That’s one of the reasons I weigh 200 pounds now (at 6’0”), even as I’m staring down my 60s in 785 days. I’ve done it with Zepbound and copious amounts of usually carefully thought-out exercise, emphasizing strength more than cardio but still doing plenty of cardio (Don’t come at me about using a GLP-1. I’ve always struggled with my weight and this has been life-changing in the best way. I’m aware of the controversies that surround these meds and I simply don’t give a shit. Keep it to yourself).

I’m firmly in the camp of those physicians and fitness gurus who say the most valuable exercise you can do in old age is strength training.

Last year I went to the doctor around my 57th birthday for a physical and discovered my health was shit. I basically knew that, but it was even worse than I realized at the time. I weighed around 270 pounds and my blood pressure and cholesterol were terrible. I’d done exactly as I’m sure both my late parents knew I might after they died six months apart in 2023 and turned to my old-time favorites for coping with profound, debilitating depression—food, drink, and lassitude.

I’m not even sure I ate much more than normal, but I felt trapped in grief’s clouded amber like never before. I’d experienced plenty of loss since my teens (beginning in my teens) and understood how it works inside me, and still wasn’t prepared. Is anyone?

When I say there were times I couldn’t move, it’s not drama. I parked on the long end of our sofa (it has a nifty chaise longue-like extension that also stores bed clothes for guests like our older kids or my in-laws) and stared at the internet. I stared at the TV. I stared out the window. Luckily the view is pleasant—see above—as long as I remember to mow the lawn.

I felt like a disembodied pair of eyes mourning the ability to blink.

In my defense, a lifelong genetic issue with my hips also went critical in 2023. It was exacerbated by multiple 1,000-mile drives between Massachusetts, where I’ve lived for 13 years, and my home state of Tennessee. I’m close to being in the best shape of my life now, but the issue, hip dysplasia, can still pop up at random. Even yesterday, after I’d worked out and jogged a mile and a half with no issues. I got home with the groceries and stepped out of the car and felt momentarily like someone had driven a knife between my left hip socket and femur. I later stretched, breathed, relaxed, and it faded, but I was on my butt the rest of the night just for safety.

So I had a solid physical reason for being parked on the sofa so much, too, but in the end the main issue was a yawning chasm of grief-related depression that surpassed suicidal ideation and went right into feeling like a ghost.

My wife Dana understood and put up with some of my less desirable traits being even worse than usual. I am not sure I would’ve made it without her love and patience, and I am eternally grateful.

It was a latent, lingering sense of self-preservation and love for my remaining family that took me to the doctor for that physical. The results were the exact wake-up call I needed after watching how my parents suffered physically as they aged. Mom had compounded things with smoking, but she was from a long line of tough farm folk and still actively gardening well into her 70s. Dad came from similar stock. He only smoked till he was 30 but he was a chronic drinker. Not an alcoholic, exactly—I guess it depends on your definition of that, but I can only recall seeing him flat-out drunk one time, and Mom later said that was the only time she’d ever seen him that way too—but Bob loved him a beer or six at the end of the day and was still tossing back whiskey shots with me at dinner a month before he died.

In my father’s final week he was mostly asleep in palliative care, but even then he’d sometimes cry out in pain when nurses bathed him with a sponge and changed his bedding. It was horrific to see this man who had been an avatar of masculinity and physical strength to me as a little kid looking so fragile and broken. Not that he was responsible for his state, exactly. In Mom’s case, it was miraculous she lived as long as she did, given she’d always suffered from a long list of health problems despite being active, including severe anxiety (something I should’ve guessed given her Valium prescriptions but didn’t know for sure until she admitted it in her early 80s).

No, age gets us all in the end. I’ve got the genes for at least one nasty form of cancer (though it’s curable if caught early enough), and the Emperor of All Maladies loves to take advantage of the aging body by showing up just when you need it least—your senior years. I have never been under any illusions about living forever.

It’s just that I can’t shake the feeling I’ve got more to do. Even beyond knowing how adult children often still need their parents, especially kids like my youngest daughter and son, who are on the autism spectrum.

In the last year, as I’ve recovered my health, I’ve also recovered my love of singing. That process really began ten years ago, after a ten-plus year break from it, but buying a home in a quiet neighborhood, with a largeish lawn, meant I could truly dig into things, vocalize as loudly as needed, without worrying about pissing off the neighbors on the first two floors.

The slower part of the process was recovering caring about this, what you’re reading. About writing, the thing I knew I could do from the time I first cracked a book. That I wanted to do all my life but figured I didn’t have the patience for, until someone hired me to do it in 2005.

We all have some things we feel we are organically meant to do. I believe that. And as much as I love singing and have always been told I have a gift for it (I’m loud. That’s sort of the main thing a voice like mine does well, but I can carry a tune and do have a sense of musicality; I digress), it’s something I acquired.

I am a writer in my bones.

Yet in the last few years, I didn’t want to. First all I could think about was what I’ve spent many words discussing here—grief. You can only go on about that so much before you drive yourself and everyone around you kind of crazy. Then I realized some of the things that fueled my writing in the past were gone.

A lot of good writing advice says “write for one person you know, not everyone.” When it came to true crime, I was at first consciously then later subconsciously writing for my Mom. When it came to covering anything else, both parents were my subconscious audience. If I left something out, it was something I thought Dad might not care about, or Mom might find too upsetting. They were gone. So now what?

Good writing says I have to answer that question since I posed it and out of pure contrariness I’m tempted to say I don’t have an answer . But the answer is now I have to write for me. It’s hard to communicate just how strongly the on-the-job training I gained in the last 20 years says NO, BRO, THE AUDIENCE.

Of course audience matters. I wouldn’t bother with this if I didn’t want someone else to read it and hope that they somehow relate. But my experience as a professional writer has been entirely audience-driven, and in the last ten years that has begun to rankle, independent of anything happening in my personal life. Huge losses only compounded the feeling.

I didn’t bury the lede here, though I will gleefully embark on doing just that in the future if I fucking feel like it. In recovering as much of my health as I could, in finding joy in singing again, I had to figure out what would make me happy as a writer. It’s something that feels selfish even as I write it out. And corny. Because the lede is the actual title of this edition of this newsletter. All I wanna do is have some fun.

I leaned into writing for a living initially because yes, I was having fun in a way, keeping myself constantly engaged in what was happening in the world and getting positive feedback that encouraged me and negative feedback that often really helped me improve. I was getting paid for it, too! Whee!

Somehow, my parents’ deaths reset how I see this craft.

In the article “The Ultimate Rite of Passage - The Death of Your Parents,” Gail Marquardt writes that within “all the sadness and potential regret [from losing parents], there is an opportunity to retell ourselves the story of our lives. Our parents can’t make choices that affect us any longer. The circumstances of their lives will not factor into how we spend our days, time with our families, or moods. In a certain way, at the point when our parents die, a new life begins, one in which we have more autonomy than ever before. We can take control of the narrative.”

I guess that’s what I’ve come around to. I’m finally taking control of the narrative. And when it’s appropriate to the subject, I’m gonna have some fun.

It snowed this morning. It melted fast, but there was enough to remind us of the winter just past in all its brutal, icebound beauty. By Monday, it’ll be spring again. That’s April in New England, y’all.

I’ve also been offered a job. Should all go well in the interim between now and then, I will begin on April 28. It’s an editing gig with a weird schedule, which is, unfortunately for my bizarre brain, right up my alley.

The editing isn’t hard news-related either, and I look forward to that.

And then there’s Substack.

Ugh.

Hey, I don’t like many of this platform's decisions. Some people get pulled into the spotlight and don’t deserve it. At the same time, there are still plenty of writers I like and even consider friends who use Substack daily, and they aren’t that different from me in politics or outlook. I guess the thinking is that this is truly a growing publishing platform, and the chances of gathering readers who support and love your work are greater than other choices.

I don’t know. I returned to good old-fashioned Blogger (Blogspot) out of sheer pique. Still, that venerable platform is badly hamstrung by an armada of phishing, spamming, scammy sites, meaning it’s damn hard to get anyone to take your work seriously as a writer unless you are one of those truly established types who has held onto his or her ancient blog out of sheer cussedness. (My wife has stewarded a WordPress education blog for about 20 years straight; she’s a real stalwart.)

I do take my work seriously, and I’ve felt real frustration at stalling. So I’m doing my best to stop that.

Grief

Also, grieving your entire family, save one sister, takes its toll, I have found. For me, some of the depression has manifested in a lack of motivation to work on any writing. I don’t know if that’s even changing, but I have grown old enough to know that sometimes you must force things a bit to get them moving. It’s like the way some older model car batteries might rev to life if you put the vehicle in neutral and let it roll.

So, I hope to start sending out Substack updates here and from my other newsletters.

Perhaps the key is to do it and not think about it too much after I’m done, for a while. So, if the content isn’t as polished as I usually present, give me a little grace on that for a while.

That’s enough of an update for now. Time to hit the gym for my sanity’s sake.

Gordon Lightfoot’s epic “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was part of the soundtrack of my childhood, as was his “Sundown” and several other songs. My Dad, Bob, loved the folk singer’s work and played it often. The first song, in particular, stuck with me for its poeticism, with fantastic imagery like, “Superior sings/In the rooms of her ice-water mansion,” and “…every man knew, as the captain did too/T'was the witch of November come stealin'.”

I don’t know if “The Witch of November” was Lightfoot’s invention, but his use of it testified to his skill with a lyric. Over the last five decades, newspapers have regularly appropriated the term to describe chaotic, intense storms that lash the Great Lakes in the late autumn, sinking untold numbers of vessels through the years. That’s why I think of it every November when I turn another year older on the third of the month, cold winds blow, and the night comes too early.

Over time, the phrase has accrued added layers of meaning—for me. It also describes a state of depression in which I can’t make decisions, I have trouble enjoying things, and I slowly become mired in chaotic thoughts that spin around the same drains daily, all conspiring to pull me into a melancholy void.

This state of mind is independent of treatment for depression. I take two antidepressants each day, and they do an ace job of keeping my moods relatively steady. Still, it’s as if the November Witch of the Mind slinks around those chemical barriers—and if the drugs don’t let me get fully, critically depressed, they don’t stop the heavy thoughts, either.

All of these are to say the first thing I meant to write here: Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, but I know I have to do it. The November Witch of the Mind has kept me from keyboards, from writing at length, and from caring about much of anything. Recently, though, I had to confront some health issues I’ve had for a while (nothing fatal or severe, but part of the aging process), and I realized I had to find a way to clear the storms in my head and start telling people things again.

To be much less vague: I have saved myself through writing before, on many levels, and will do it again. My favorite quote from Hamilton is, “Why do you write like you're running out of time?" That was how I often felt when writing in the past, and it gave me clarity on what I was doing and a sense of purpose.

Depression will not get the best of me. Part of that is making some concrete changes in my daily life, including how I write anything—which can be scattered and discursive on the best days. Also, most importantly, I need to write. I have some gifts as an opera singer, but this right here is what I do.

This is now perilously close to one of those “HEY GUYS, PROMISE I’LL BLOG MORE” pieces that people have published online for decades, turning good intentions into a running joke about procrastination. But all I’m saying is that I’ll keep doing this.

I make no promises about content. For the first time in quite a while (believe it or not), I will write anything I think other people might find interesting to read in some way. I’ll continue the story of my father, mother, and family, but that’s just part of the mix.

Sometimes, the only way to escape being trapped in an ice-water mansion of despair is to resurface and push through the storms. A great ship loaded with ore couldn’t do that. People can. It’s always worth the trouble to try.

Alive Hospice, 2023

The last time I saw my father, he was in a hospital bed in a warmly lit room in a hospice in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. It was 2 am on August 21, 2023. He was dead. His death certificate would later list the cause as rectal cancer.

With his booming tenor voice, razor-sharp mind, and forceful, intense personality, my father—Bobby Richard Huff, born in Franklin, Tennessee, in June 1936—had never been so quiet in life. Now, he didn’t look like he’d ever been alive at all. He was a detailed wax facsimile of a man, his mouth hanging slack, his bright green eyes closed, and his curly, still mostly rust-red, wiry hair slightly ruffled. Utterly still.

I loved my father. I was glad I could be with him at the end, but as I stood there preparing to leave so attendants could take him to the funeral home, I wished I’d been anywhere else, as I knew seeing him that way would be permanently seared into my brain.

Yet, for a moment, I was rooted in place.

I don’t know what went through my father’s mind in his final days. He was asleep most of the time, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was in a half-dozing state of inarticulate pain, waiting for a new dose of morphine to kick in. At one point, however, maybe 12 hours before he died, he appeared to be fully awake. When I spoke to him, he didn’t acknowledge me. He leaned to one side and slowly looked up at the ceiling. For a moment, his face held both wonder and fear. Then he subsided into unconsciousness again.

I want to think he saw my mother Margaret, who’d died on January 29 that year. Or my sister Sherry, who passed away at 58 in 2016. Maybe even my brother David, who committed suicide in 2000. Everyone was waiting to welcome him into whatever was on the other side.

I hang onto that because it makes me feel better, given how much I miss them all.

But the question that lingers and troubles me now is whether he saw someone else altogether—someone I had never met in life, as far as I know—who occupied Dad’s thoughts in his final months.

My parents married in 1956 when Mom was 19, and Dad was 20. They separated only once, in 1985, over an affair Dad had with a co-worker. The separation was relatively brief, though traumatic enough for the two youngest kids still living at home at the time, my sister Rhonda and I. Still, they recovered and remained side-by-side till the end, Dad holding Mom’s hand as she passed away.

I know he loved Mom with as much of himself as he could muster. My mother was a beautiful, tall, yet delicate woman with subtle, dry wit, and she was far more intelligent than Dad likely realized when they met. No one ever understood him as well as she did.

In a journal I found after he died, Dad wrote that Mom’s death marked the end of the “best part” of his life. I believe that. Yet I know he also loved others and that the stories of those loves paint a far more vivid, sometimes perplexing portrait of my father than I ever imagined.

All these things, all that he was, all that I knew about Dad rushed through my mind at that last moment. Then, I couldn’t bear to be alone with the dead any longer. I went to him, kissed the top of his head, and left the room. I walked down the silent hallway to the exit and into the humid night. A train horn echoed in the distance. I got in Dad’s car and drove the 13 miles back to the house he’d shared with Mom in Smyrna, Tennessee.

About a mile from the house, I turned off the main road and onto a side road that passed by a hospital. It was the hospital where my oldest sister had died, and both my parents learned they didn’t have long to live. The hospital side of the street was brightly lit. The other side was a large, empty lot full of waist-high grass. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced over to see a young deer running along the hospital side of the road. I slowed to pace it, then stopped in the middle of the street.

The deer bounded through the headlights and across the road, leaping into the field. I rolled down the window to watch it disappear into the deeper darkness.

Bennigan’s, 1985

Dad and I drove in silence. We passed under Briley Parkway and then under a railroad bridge. We passed Mom’s favorite H.G. Hill grocery store on the corner of Murfreesboro Pike and Thompson Lane.

Mine was the silence of a shocked and angry 17-year-old boy. At the time, I thought Dad’s silence was guilty. But I’ve never really been sure—Dad’s moments of conscience were sometimes hard to distinguish from his moments of calculation.

I was mad because Mom had left after learning he was having an affair with a younger woman, a colleague at the construction company where he worked. I was angry at both my parents in that searing yet vague way only a teenager can feel: this churning mass of indiscriminate anger that, at the time, was beginning to curdle into depression.

I understood Mom’s response. Of course, she left. There would be moments in the years to come, even once they were much older, settled, and comfortable with each other, when I wished they’d stayed apart and divorced. That might have broken Mom’s heart, or it might have freed her in myriad ways. I’m unsure how my father would’ve handled it.

Despite understanding Mom, I felt abandoned. He and I didn’t exactly have a cold relationship. But at that point, it wasn’t much of anything. I could tell he was profoundly uncomfortable with me—his youngest kid by seven years—being in the theater and interested in the arts in general. Mainly because, in Dad’s mind, no one from our side of the tracks would ever make a living at bullshit like that. Even when I was in my thirties, he would say I should’ve sued my high school teachers for encouraging those interests—even though by then, I’d been a professional performer since my early 20s.

We were heading to a Bennigan’s Restaurant, located at 975 Murfreesboro Pike, so that he could talk to me about everything. I didn’t have an appetite or feel much like talking to him. I remember feeling queasy and awkward. Talking to my father was only easy if you were ready to let him plow through his monologues before responding, and by 17, I’d lost some patience with his motormouth ways.

If you’re a South Park fan, you’ve heard of Bennigan’s. It was an Irish-themed, prototypical 80s fern bar: low light, dark wood, vaguely antiquated decorations, signage fonts, and, yes, ferns. We liked the place as a family, and I’d taken dates to the one on Murfreesboro Pike, but this was the first time I’d ever gone to eat dinner with just my father. He immediately ordered a beer and said I could have one if I wanted, seemingly forgetting I wasn’t 18 yet, much less 21. He probably had forgotten—just the year before, he’d gotten me a hunting license and bumped up my age by two years. I just ordered water.

I don’t know what your mom told you.

She said you were seeing another woman.

That’s true.

(I’m recreating the conversation from memory, so it’s unlikely to be accurate, hence italics rather than quotation marks.)

It is?

Yes. But it wasn’t just one woman. There was someone before the lady your mom knows about.

I clearly remember my reaction to this. I need to go to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, I took stock of my state of mind. Could I deal with this at all? I wasn’t sure. Then, as I sat there, I realized a profound curiosity was overriding my anger and resentment. I like to think I was an okay person as a teen, but perhaps I did have too much of my father in me, for I also clearly remember thinking I wanted him to tell me everything in case I ever needed it to get my way.

I grew up fast on that warm, early spring day in Nashville, sitting in a bathroom stall in a fern bar with a nervous stomach.

I went back to the table, picked at the appetizer, and drank my water. Okay, I said, go ahead.

I had no idea what to expect. The co-worker made sense. Logistically—working with him in a Nashville office, late nights when developing projects or putting together bids for new work—emotionally, even physically. I had seen her at a distance, and she was attractive. I judged him for it and still judge him today after learning more about her. But I already knew it was the kind of affair people often had—tawdry, everyday stuff. My Mom deserved a man who treated her so much better than the man across from me. He’d had the kind of affair that, as my mother’s son, I could easily look down on.

What he told me next was nothing like that. He told a story that stretched from Nashville to Boston to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. It involved possible mob connections and industrial spies. That night, over his several beers and the burgers we ate, he only gave me a thumbnail sketch, but I would learn details much later that renewed my shock and dismay.

Writing off what he told me as some fantasy designed to puff himself up wasn't hard. I did exactly that to live with the story: I concluded it was an ego-salving fiction my father concocted to maintain some weird measure of awe in his youngest kid’s mind. It illustrates our dynamic if I note that when the movie Big Fish—about a colorful father whose tall tales drive a wedge between him and his journalist son—came out, I identified strongly with the skeptical son.

Until the weeks after Mom died of heart failure while holding his hand in January 2023, that was how I looked at the strange romance I first learned about in a fucking Bennigan’s: an elaborate, elegant lie wrapped around some grubby truth. After all, Dad had always been a compelling, colorful storyteller, and he had admitted to embellishing some things to make them funnier or more interesting.

The story he told me in Bennigan’s that day was all true. And when he ended the affair he first told me about that day, someone put a hit out on my mother.

A six-pack of Coke made me cry.

I was at Market Basket, a grocery store, with my wife Dana and our son Dylan. Snow was falling outside; bad 90s pop was playing on the store loudspeakers.

We were in the soda aisle waiting as Dylan deliberated (Starry or Sprite, a tough choice for him), and I remembered the store sold small, old-fashioned six-packs of glass-bottled Cokes. Picking them up and placing them in the cart (or "carriage," as they call it here), a vivid childhood memory tumbled out of some dry storage in my mind where it had barely aged since the 1970s.

It was a simple memory, but it carried the weight of all a little boy's love for his mother. I was standing in the soda aisle at Mom's favorite H.G. Hill grocery store at the corner of Murfreesboro Rd. and E. Thompson Lane, asking her why she always got the small Cokes, and she was telling me how they were the perfect drinking size.

Mom disliked excess. She balanced my Dad's big personality with her quiet demeanor and delicate tastes. She balanced his impulsiveness with a cool head. She loved small coffee cups, mini-Coronas, and 8-oz glass bottles of Coca-Cola. Mom also said Coke didn't taste good after you drank six ounces.

I did not realize until I was in my 40s how much I was like her that way. Dana was teasing me one day because I rarely use our large coffee mugs. I will search for a six-ounce cup I'd had for years rather than use something more suited to a hearty bowl of soup than coffee.

My response was that my cup was the perfect size. I probably said it with the exact tone and cadence my mother would've used.

So, a six-pack of bottled Coke made me cry today because it brought Mama back with such warmth and light. It was as if she were somewhere nearby, and I might step into the next aisle and see her grinding her favorite coffee beans in the store's machine, as she would do whenever we bought coffee at Hill's

I have always found those I loved and lost in their small things. When my best friend died in 1986, his parents said I could take anything meaningful to me from his room. I took a small red Frisbee we'd often tossed for hours at a nearby park on summer days. But what also stuck with me was seeing his watch and wallet neatly placed on his desk. The watch face was cracked but still ticked away the hours and minutes since his death. A jacket hung on his chair, swaying in the breeze from the old fan he kept beside his bed. It was as if he'd just left for a moment and would be right back. He was just a room away, perhaps, ready to come and coax me into joining him on some silly errand any minute.

And when I was cleaning out their house after Dad died, I lost hours simply reading through all the (mostly) mundane business and military records he'd kept. It was just fading and brittle old paper, but those pages carried so much of his life in them that I couldn't put them down.

Such glimmers sustain me on days like this when the grief of remembering is almost too much.

I think those we love never leave us as long as we remember that they aren't just in our memories, but in whatever small totems, tchotchkes, or ephemera they leave behind.

I'll have a rum and Coke with dinner tonight. I'll pour the cola from a small glass bottle. I'll drink a toast to Mama from a perfectly sized rocks glass her namesake, my daughter Margaret, gave me for Christmas.

I’ve decided this Substack will be devoted to what I can only call a serial memoir. Future posts will be paywalled.

I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to write here or anywhere. I’m 55, and until this year, I was fortunate—in a way I didn’t recognize soon enough—to have both my parents alive, active, mentally present, and emotionally available. Then, Mom died in January. Dad died in August.

They were flawed people and flawed parents, but they were good people and did the best they knew how. I believe that. I depended on them too much as an adult sometimes, but they never tried to cling too tight, even when I knew they wished I lived closer to them. They really tried to respect their kids’ rights to live their own lives and figure things out.

So I was lucky they lived so long, and I took it for granted, too. Yet I wasn’t so dependent on Mom and Dad that I could not handle adulthood.

And yet here I am, almost exactly two months after my father died, unable to walk right.

My writerly instincts wanted to end the preceding sentence with “walk.” But I’d be exaggerating. I can walk like normal, but ever since Dad died, it’s been painful. Like I’m not quite doing it right. Every day I struggle with pain and tightness in my hips and random pain in my knee and ankles. Oddly, sometimes the thing that clears it up is walking a bit, but my range of motion is limited, and I can’t recall any other time in my life when some level of pain has been a daily challenge like this. It makes walking at all a test of my will sometimes.

Of course, I’m about to turn 56. I have a congenital disorder, hip dysplasia, which has caused me problems off and on for years. I also worked physically hard while getting my parents’ house ready to sell. I had one flight of steps to climb there and climbed it so much that by the end of the day my Apple Watch thought I’d traversed 21 floors. So maybe this pain and stiffness is natural, and it was always there, but it feels different with my folks gone. Additionally, it’s possible I injured myself in a way I didn’t quite recognize at the time when I was helping move things from my father’s home after he died.

It’s too on the nose for my parents to die and for me to feel like I have to learn how to walk again…but here I am. And it’s not just my actual feet, knees, and hips, but there are days this feeling is perceptual. In mid-late middle age, I must find out who I am in a world where my parents are gone. Of course, I’m sad, and I will miss them until I’m gone myself, but I was also one person while they were here, and now I feel different.

Maybe I always will.

It’s a new week as I finish this. It’s a reflection of this unsettled feeling inside that I’m not sure any of this was worth writing, but I wrote it and committed to sending it out to the world. Consider it my proof of life for October 2023.

In one corner of my father’s backyard is a small rock garden shaded by a young cedar tree. My sister Sherry’s ashes are buried beneath the tree, per her wishes. A plaque engraved with her name, birth, and death years on it leans against the base. 

The day after my mom died earlier this year, I was pacing the yard in the cold and was drawn to the small green iron lawn chair my father had placed by Sherry’s resting place a year or two ago. I sat and stared at my sister’s name. Then I did something I never do. I said, “Sherry, I wish you were here. You’d know what to do.” 

I have never talked to myself or the dead aloud, but I meant those words. She was ten years older than me and the very model of a capable oldest sibling, even though she sometimes hated that sense of responsibility. Confronted by our mom’s death, I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss and, worse, facing it without the sibling I most often looked to for guidance when I couldn’t figure out what else to do. The sister who understood me better than anyone else in the family.

I never told anyone what I’d said aloud that day. It was such a small moment and so personal; why would I?

Yesterday my two youngest kids, Maggie and Dylan, were in my Dad’s yard, looking at his colorfully painted fence, crepe myrtle tree, and tomato patch. They went to the cedar where Sherry’s plaque is and stood looking at it. Then, according to my daughter Margaret, my son Dylan said aloud, “Sherry, I wish you were here. You’d know what to do.”

Again, I am sure I never told anyone what I’d said alone on that chilly February day. But my son, who is on the autism spectrum and rarely speaks without a good reason, had somehow said the exact same thing, completely unbidden.

I don’t know what to make of that. I really don’t. But I welcome the sense of wonder it brings.

My mother died on January 29th.

I’m 55. She was 85. I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve had both my parents this long. I’m incredibly lucky in general. My brother committed suicide at 41. My oldest sister died from sepsis in 2016. She was 58. I have one sister left. When just the two of you are left standing, it’s hard not to feel alone, guilty, and lucky.

Sometimes I think about what happened to many people I knew, including some relatives in my generation, and I realize that it’s amazing I’m alive from that perspective too.

My mom’s death prompted a lot of introspection. Ongoing introspection, really. I did not have a complicated relationship with her. Not on her end. I knew she loved me, and I loved her, and she was a gentle, caring person. Again, I was lucky. She was also, like me, melancholy and anxious, but she kept a lot to herself, something I’m not good at doing.

Or I don’t seem good at it. Here’s a magic trick some of us who have been very online for decades learned fairly early: the art of appearing to lay it all out without telling folks much about who you are. Smart, perceptive readers will read between the lines and glean a lot. But most people are skimming along.

That’s my way of saying I’ve kept a lot to myself. I always will. You give everything away, and what’s left for you?

But I received a package from my dad in the mail today. A note in his spiky handwriting and a dozen photos of a trip he took with my mom, grandmother (his mom), and sister in 1996. “None of this should be forgotten,” he wrote.

It hit me then that I need to do this. I need to write about my family. I’ve been doing it for years in my head and have mapped out how to do this so it isn’t navel-gazing or the textual equivalent of watching some friend’s slideshow of photos from their long summer vacation.

I’m still reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’m almost done with Karl Ove Knausgård’s first book, My Struggle. It’s taken a while. Both can be slogs. And I’m not doing that here if I can help it—save that you can consider this all fiction from here on out. I want the reader to see why I find any of it interesting enough to write about for public consumption rather than navel-gazing old white guy solipsism. For example, we’ll begin long before I was born. I wasn’t around then, so how could I know for sure any of what I’ll write about happened as I was told?

So hey, it’s a novel with my name and many family names inside it. Online.

More soon.

As I’ve hinted already, one of my goals here is to not limit myself as to what I cover. I mean that.

But last night Dana and I were listening to Michael Ian Black’s podcast, Obscure. He originally titled the podcast after the book he read in season 1, Jude the Obscure. He kept the title for reasons of his own but as I listened to him read Frankenstein, the book he selected to cover in season 2, I had this random sequence of thoughts:

Why did he keep that title if he’s reading Frankenstein? He could’ve changed it to Frankly Obscure or something. Oh. Maybe because he reads these books because they were also brand new to him, therefore—in Michael’s life as a reader—obscure.

I suspect I’m totally wrong, of course, but something about the word “obscure” and its dictionary meaning clicked in my head.

At that moment I found a focus for this here Substack.

I’ll write whatever I want (I’m totally talking to myself, by the way), but it struck me last night that I am good, sometimes, at unveiling the obscure. Stories forgotten or missed. Personal anecdotes that might seem unconnected but lead to a cogent conclusion when tied together. I have tales of my own and tales I know of that few others have touched upon—at least in recent years—that are intriguing, worth examining. Yes, some of them are straight-up unsolved mysteries and/or historic true crime.

In fact, I have an organized mental list of such stories. Some began life as book ideas and in one case I’m not dropping the prospect of a book-length treatment regardless of what I do here.

Here’s the plan:

• I’ll begin with one story I’ve known for years and I’ll tell it serially, for free.

• Once that story has concluded—again, these are all true, and remarkably, some of them have almost no coverage online—I will evaluate the response and tee up the next one, which is bigger and wider-ranging and frankly a lot of work—and that will be for subscribers who pay a monthly or yearly fee.

• When I snagged this Substack subdomain I had no intention of offering paid content, but for several reasons, I have changed my mind. And I think it will be worth it for the reader/subscriber.

• Ultimately I believe I will add a podcast. I’d concluded I might never go the extra mile and do that because I know how much time and work they take. But some stories need that audio element. And there is so much I dislike about what people do in podcasts (especially true crime) I know the ideas I have are pretty damn original for that format.

• But I’m primarily a writer. I just believe there are many ways to tell a story and the web has been providing an unparalleled chance to tell stories in mixed media, in a variety of kaleidoscopic ways, for decades. It’s time for me to dive in and make some old ideas a reality.

Okay, what the hell is next?

Soon, readers and subscribers will begin learning about an unsolved series of crimes that occurred at the beginning of the Great Depression. They were supposedly committed by one person and in many ways presaged a much more famous series of unsolved crimes many years later. I suspect there was a hoax element at work, but…that doesn’t detract from the story’s eerie power. It travels through great cities at night and on lonely buses and trains. It’s a story that will walk us beneath the streetlights as a bizarrely courtly killer ensures a terrified and bewildered young woman gets home safely. It will, perhaps, leave you a little creeped out, haunted, and maybe mystified as to what really happened.

You might want to start doing some sleuthing of your own. I won’t discourage it.

More soon.

We bonded over reading and writing—still big elements in who we are as a couple. But then I moved in with her and one day had to borrow her laptop for some reason. As I was writing I copied some text to paste in a document. I discovered my control plus C didn’t take, and what was left on the clipboard was something she’d copied—text from a blog of her own, one I didn’t know she had.

It wasn’t some huge breach of trust issue like another guy or anything—she’d simply been really pissed at me (probably with good reason) and blogged about it under a pseudonym. Likely to vent and avoid a fight. If you are a writer of any kind, I dare you to tell me you’ve never done the same.

Still, I was 33 and still new-ish to the internet in general, and really we were new-ish to each other and both of us perhaps a little too fresh out of unsatisfying marriages to other people. I was hurt, as anyone would be.

So I responded like the bitter and hypersensitive little boy I am inside and started my own blog, nyah-nyah. I don’t remember the sequence of events, but I’m pretty sure I even bitched about her in an early post. However, we soon decided to have a rule between us: We’d deal with our bullshit with each other or with a therapist or trustworthy friend. Not online.

I think we’ve both adhered to that pretty well.

I was quickly hooked on blogging, though. It was the writing medium I’d always wanted, a medium that fed what I would later find was my oh-so-ADHD-fueled need to do something that rendered immediate feedback and results. I’d always been a writer but never had faith I’d go professional because learning the pre-internet process of becoming a pro, I concluded I couldn’t deal. I didn’t have the patience.

Blogging was a perfect fit for the way my brain works. And within 5 years of launching my resentment blog I was earning money as a writer. Today I’m the staff Deputy Digital Editor for a men’s magazine. If you could travel through time and tell me 21 years ago that this would happen one day the younger me would conclude you were high or insane and call the cops.

My wife Dana gets credit as my blogging mentor in very positive ways, as well. In fact, the early true crime writing I did that gained attention and led to solid work owed a lot to learning digital research skills from her. I reminded her of this the other day and she said, “bitch, where’s my money?” or words to that effect. Then I gently reminded her the 2016 Toyota we bought brand new four years ago was partially purchased with proceeds from my books.

In the process of going in five years from just another of maybe a few hundred thousand bloggers on a site with a rather adolescent-sounding name to a professional writer, I developed some ideas that I think actually got in my way.

One was I grew very hesitant to write about my life. I bored myself. If you follow me on Twitter you know I’m not all that hesitant to get personal, but for a time my feeling was that whatever strange subjects I was into or obsessed with—you name it—produced much more interesting reading.

And that may still be true.

But I also felt that personal writing like this was extremely self-indulgent. And even worse? Because I entered the business as a true crime writer, I eventually grew intensely aware that I both had a core readership and that they weren’t necessarily interested in me writing about anything else.

So my efforts to blog about anything that’s just a singular, personal interest or about family stories or whatever have been damn unsatisfying for a long time. I’ve started a lot of sites with good intentions—just like this here old Substack—only to eventually abandon them, or port old entries from one site into the new one then stop bothering.

The Stuff Substack (“Stuff” is the only nickname any friends ever made stick to me for any length of time and also a good name for a catchall site) is, in my mind, kind of a reboot, or a return to something that’s probably old school.

A site and newsletter for whatever I think is worth writing about but can’t figure out who might buy the writing. And I come up with stuff all the time that interests me intensely but never end up more than tweeting too much about it.

Two other things contributed to me launching the Stuff Substack: One is I got the URL I wanted, which felt like serendipity. I follow a ton of writers and many have Substacks, so I got the impression this service was turning into a Thing. As a result I was shocked when my short and easy-to-remember last name was available still—the last time that happened with a site that was taking off but I didn’t know it was Instagram. And that felt like a squandered opportunity; I ultimately deleted the @huff Instagram because it became a premium address and people were trying to hack it to take it over or leaving shitty comments on the few photos I had there. The other reason I launched this newsletter/blog was I found myself doing a lot of tweet threads, where I’d previously avoided that, finding them tedious.

So it seemed like I was trying to tell myself something.

I can’t rule out adding paid features here, but it’s free for now. This post is a good example of why: It’s just me illuminating something subjective and personal at length, and if I got that from a newsletter I was paying for I’d be annoyed.

That said, when I do something that is initially broadly-focused, subjective, very personal, I inevitably end up narrowing down the field of subjects I think is worth writing about. My impulse to research and report, to really dig deep just takes over.

Even though I initially created this space with a true crime newsletter in mind, making it less specific doesn’t mean I’m going to avoid that, either. My scary Google alerts are plenty of evidence I’m still very interested in the subject.

The point to this Substack for me is to not avoid anything if my instincts say it’s worth writing about. It’s to get comfortable with sometimes being uncomfortable in print. I haven’t done that in a very long time.

It’s also an opportunity for me to have a space where I don’t bother with a lot of the annoying “best practices” I have to use in my work. Little rules like there must always be an image, or I need to think in SEO with every paragraph. There are times I don’t want to follow those rules. Times when I don’t want to give a fuck if my post title is search-engine friendly. I won’t break those rules in my professional life, but something in me needs to break them sometimes to feel free as a writer.

There it is, my fuller introduction and a thumbnail sketch of my history as a writer. I will in the future be more concise—adding editor as a job title has made me a big fan of precision and brevity—but I’m not making any rules as to what I’ll talk about.

I need to be uncomfortable sometimes. So I’ll just do it here.

I first thought I’d do a true crime newsletter. Then I recalled setting up a true crime blog 16 years ago, it taking off in a big way (not a bad thing), and realizing I was kind of stuck in that lane. Yes, true crime is a primary interest of mine and more popular today than ever before. May even be the thing I’m best at covering, for a host of reasons.

But I don’t want to bore myself or you. And I have come to trust over time my ability to find and discuss the interesting and unique. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like a weirdo for my curiosity, but I don’t anymore. Stick around. Let’s get weird together.

In the meantime, tell your friends!