On the last day of spring I walked to the lake in the morning, just past 5. It was light like it had been that way all day. I’d been up since 4, with the sounds of birdsong and fans running, my mind doing the same. Dawn said she heard a story about ‘high-functioning anxiety’ and it sounded just like me. It felt better to put a name to it, to explain why I was such an uptight ass. “Do you get to work early every day, dressed nicely, hair combed just so? Do you bite your nails and stress out over small things, and then soothe yourself with alcohol? Are you easily irritated by children, or your loved ones…?”

When I got back from the lake I did the same routine as I do every day: I took a cold shower, got my lunch ready, set the air conditioning, said goodbye…parked my car, logged on, ate breakfast, went to my 8 o’clock sync. We had a large hole in our backyard we needed to talk to the water department about: a friend thought there could be a water line break nearby causing it. And he said the soil is that way from thousands of feet of glaciers pressing down on it over time, melting, refreezing, weighing it down to a fine, compact consistency.

Lily’s throwing a party at our house in honor of a dead rapper but I’m desensitized by it, I don’t really care. We’re perverted by all we have, and where we live: we must have some kind of disorder to succeed in an environment like this. Sometimes I want to leave it all and move to the country with an old barn and a tape deck where I can play my Smiths cassettes and be left alone, to just write, and unwind.

Dawn and I sat out back in the sun with our Aperol spritzers watching a bald eagle circle above our house. Dawn got the cat inside, and then the eagle spiraled out of view, making a coiling pattern as it did. I can’t sleep this time of year, and it’s driving me nuts: with all this energy from the sun, it’s like my battery’s overcharged.

Maybe our summer solstice is like reaching the peak of a long mountain trek and tomorrow, we finally start the long wind down.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: American suburbs, high functioning anxiety, humor, Memoir, mid-life crisis, pacific northwest, suburbs, summer solstice, William Pearse writer