There’s something about trails that I love. Dirt trails, blacktop trails, gravel trails… they make me feel comfortable, like I’m on track and know where I’m going. I could be in a completely unkown city or a new park, but the presence of a trail gives me some sort of bearing.

I was reminded of my love for trails during our neighborhood’s annual Fourth of July bash. The entire neighborhood is invited to a fairly large field right by our house. The neighborhood association always buys the meat for the cookout, a DJ, and hires a professional to shoot fireworks (which were actually set off from the backyard of the house directly next to ours).

The field is adjacent to a fishing hole, the term I have adopted for this body of water because it’s bigger than a pond but smaller than a lake. Around this fishing hole is a mulched dirt trail. This trail weaves in and out of the houses all around our neighborhood, a pleasant change from the typical sidewalk paths next to the street. Plus, it’s much easier on the knees of an old runner such as myself.

I was at the party a couple weeks ago, the sun hanging low above the horizon, watching my neighbors drink beer and dance and introduce me to their extended family members. Our neighbor Kellie was scrambling to get the food in order and to get the kids’ games set up. She then realized she had forgotten some sacks for the three-legged races. She asked her husband Tom if he would go to the house to get them quickly.

Tom stammered a couple protests, his big Fourth of July hat bobbling back and fourth and his beer sloshing around. But he realized it was useless, and began to head down the trail to his house, only about 50 yards away. His feet crunched down on the wood chips, and soon he was far from the noise and chaos of the party, following the path quietly beside the fishing hole. On his way, he passed our own house, which is only two doors down from his own.

I love that my neighbors use the trail instead of taking the street. It makes me feel like we are all familiar with each other, we are comfortable walking into each other’s backdoors instead of ringing the doorbells at the front, and we don’t mind (in fact we hope) to run into one another for a quick chat or to admire the landscaping at each other’s houses.

Sometimes I think life is like that. It might seem confusing, and we might feel lost at times, but if we can find that dirt trail… that worn-out, steady path of love and goodness and friends and family… we can hardly go wrong. It’s always there. Sometimes we stray from it, either on our own accord or just by accident. But that’s the path that will lead us to the places of utmost importance in life, so that’s the path worth sticking to.

So Michael Jackson died.

I realize that by this point, everyone is pretty much “Jacksoned out” (thanks to Kristin for the terminology, which I have taken out on loan). But I promise this isn’t one of those “How the person who just died influenced me” stories. I have no musical skill whatsoever. If there was such a thing as counter-talent, that’s me trying to sing or dance. As far as I can tell, he didn’t cause me to see the world in a different light or anything existential like that. No, the effect of Michael Jackson’s life and death to me really comes back to one memory, and that memory is exactly where my mind went when I heard the news.

I called my sister, who is four years older than me.

“Did you hear about Michael Jackson?”

She had. Her 8-year-old son had told her. But that’s not why I called my sister.

“Hey,” I asked her. “Do you remember that tape we used to have? The VHS with the ‘Bad’ video?”

“The one where he’s all dressed in black and in the parking garage? Yeah.”

I smiled. The King of Pop was dead, but a moment I hadn’t recalled in years was suddenly alive and well.

Some background is needed here. I don’t know where it came from, why we had no real details about this tape except that it existed. It was 7 minutes long, the music video that I’m sure you’ve seen a thousand times in the past three weeks. It was lacking the black and white intro with Wesley Snipes (which I didn’t learn about until much later). We watched the video, my sister and I, non-stop from approximately 1989 until 1994. That entire time, it may as well have been a #1 hit. We had no knowledge of MJ’s musical or personal past or his culture significance. We just loved the hell out of that video.

That memory gained a little more significance later that evening, and it got me to thinking about something that hasn’t left my mind since. It’s what I started out trying to write here. In the midst of Entertainment Tonight’s coverage, my girlfriend said sadly, either to me or to herself, “Our kids aren’t going to know who Michael Jackson is, are they?”

“Of course they will,” I said without hesitation. “They’ll know him because we’ll play his music.”

It was true. Michael Jackson was significant to me during my childhood, and not because MTV told me so or because he was internationally recognized as the King of Pop. He was significant to me because my family somehow acquired a homemade VHS tape of one of his videos, and I grew up wearing that thing out. It was the same with Dire Straits, Bruce Springsteen and Led Zeppelin. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I truly grasped the concept that The Beatles weren’t a current band.

So five or ten years from now when I’ve got kids of my own, they’ll know exactly who Michael Jackson was. We might not play his music on constant loop the way we have the past few weeks, but they’ll grow up with his music around them. They’ll have access, and I guess that’s the point. And if my kid wanders across a mysterious Foo Fighters MP3 when they’re 5 years old, it will be because I planted it there for them to find. I wonder if my parents did the same.

I love those goosebump moments of recognizing kindred spirits. In the best cases, this happens in person, but very often it happens with individuals I come to know more distantly – through their writing, artwork or music or through stories someone else shares about them.

Over the past year or so, as my creative work has shifted from visual art to writing, this has happened more often with writers, and I have learned that when I sit down to read, I must always have a pen at hand to mark passages, quotes and excerpts that tug at my soul. I’ve recently marked pages in The Art of the Personal Essay, The New Yorker, Plant Dreaming Deep and Sun magazine. I’ve nodded my head and folded small corners, always feeling a unique combination of relief and joy that I am not alone with certain thoughts, ideals and longings.

My latest experience of falling in love with someone I will never meet happened when I read an article in The New Yorker about the tragically brief life of writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer born in 1892 and killed during the holocaust in 1942. I had never heard of Schulz before reading this article, but his book The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories now sits on my desk, having just arrived in the mail not five minutes ago, having been ordered on Amazon.com not five minutes after I finished reading the article about him.

The author of The New Yorker article was David Grossman, a writer himself, and it was this passage of his article that made me wish I could reach through history and hold Schulz’s hand, if only for a moment:

“The Age of Genius was for Schulz an age driven by the faith that life could be created over and over again through the power of imagination and passion and love, the faith that despair had not yet overruled any of these forces, that we had not yet been eaten away by our own cynicism and nihilism. The Age of Genius was for Schulz a period of perfect childhood, feral and filled with light, which even if it lasted for only a brief moment in a person’s life would be missed for the rest of his years.”

It is hard for me to comprehend how a writer with such beautiful, thought-provoking dreams and ideas could be taken from this world as brutally and inhumanely as he was. Then again, this has been the fate of many a writer, artist and philosopher, from Franco’s victims in 1940s Spain and all those who disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1980s. Writers and artists tend to be outspoken free thinkers, and have been targeted throughout history by regimes wanting to dictate every thought and action of their constituents. Schulz was targeted because of his religion rather than his vocation, but the result was the same: The world lost a great artist, as it has lost many artists at the hand of those whose goal is antithetical to every artist’s deepest mission: The goal of annihilation — of ideas, of beauty, of life.

Much has been said of the importance of the work artists and writers do, how our unique interpretation and expression of all that exists in the world — from birth and trees to war and water — is necessary for humanity to continue evolving, and I have written much about my emphasis on sharing work that is positive and inspiring. Even with a piece of writing such as this one, which discusses murderous dictators and the creative lives cut short at their hands, my underlying goal is to offer a spark of hope — a ray of light that can shine on “the power of imagination and passion and love” that Schulz so fervently wanted all of humanity to be able to capture and create.

There are sad stories in this piece of writing, but in their midst lies hope and encouragement for all of us to create beauty, write stories and sing songs, particularly those of us in the United States, where we are free to pretty much do as we please. We need to draw, write, sing and dance because we can, because so many cannot and so many will never be able to; we need to put our mark in the world in whatever way enables us to vibrate along that frequency where passion is pure and our voices are strongest, where Schulz still lives and breathes and whispers his words, where the bullet that took his life away is nothing but an illusion.

I had a really bad day last week. The kind where you have to leave the office, walk around the block and remind yourself to take deep breaths. The kind where you aren’t free for lunch until 3 p.m. And when you get home, you head directly to the neighborhood liquor store. I tried to shake the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day feeling, but it was impossible to overcome, especially when I didn’t get home from work until 9 p.m.

The glass of red wine wasn’t hitting the spot, so a few sips in I switched to milk. Then I craved the comfort of Natalie’s creamy breakfast and made it for dinner. Oatmeal in hand, I curled up on my bed to find an e-mail from my dad with the most recent videos of the new puppy my parents brought home days earlier. Zoe, a six-pound Wheaten Terrier/Poodle mix (enjoyably enough called a Whoodle) has become the object of my father’s affection, necessitating a 23-minute video recap of the puppy’s Fourth of July. Over the course of the holiday weekend, I received 27 pictures (not including ones from text messages) and 10 videos. I’ve seen Zoe sit and sleep and pee. I’ve seen her explore and play and eat. I’ve pretty much seen her do everything a puppy does.

But the video in my inbox Monday night was just what I needed, despite my overflowing archive of Zoe footage. The video of the day, entitled “Zoe’s First Monday,” included lots of attempted jumps on furniture and playing with toys. I replayed the four-minute video, laughing uncontrollably every time she leapt up, only to tumble over, which was the majority of the clip. Then I cried, because I was tired from working late, upset by the way I’d been treated that day and jealous that I couldn’t play with this dog in person.

As I sat on my bed, feeling silly for crying while watching a dog play, I recounted the people in my day who had comforted me and tried to make me feel better. Then I got out my box of thank you notes I kept meaning to use but always put off, and I wrote to people at work who were nice to me. I had dwelled enough on what had upset me and that wasn’t going anywhere. I took writing breaks to watch Zoe unsuccessfully get up on the couch, and I meandered on youtube until I found a cover of 9 Crimes by a woman whose voice just pierced my heart.

I thanked people until my heart was a little less heavy and was my soul was a little less sad. And then I went to bed, finally feeling like I’d made my peace with the day and that a huge weight had been lifted from me.

I live on a little blue island in the middle of one of the reddest states in the union. Politics aside, I sometimes forget that I live in Texas. Aside from the used cowboy boot store down the street, there are very few reminders that my neighborhood is in fact in the Lone Star State. Texas prides itself for being able to fly its flag at the same level as the United States flag, but in my neighborhood, rainbow flags are more common than anything red, white, and blue, unless you count Obama campaign signs.

Let me make this disclaimer: I love living in Texas, but what I love about it are also the same things I love about my neighborhood; namely, the rich cultural diversity and the incredible weirdness. The last couple weeks have provided plenty of incidents to remind me of these two things both in my neighborhood and the rest of the state.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife was rear-ended near our house. She called me, and I drove over right away. When I got to the gas station where she was waiting, I parked in front of a homeless woman who was not very happy with me for parking by her. She proceeded to rant at me for the next 10 minutes, but then forgave me and started serenading me with Elvis songs until the police arrived. Before I had arrived, a guy on a bike had already asked Lauran for money, oblivious to the fact that the back of her car looked like it had been struck by a meteorite.

As we waited for the next 30 minutes, we saw someone walk into the gas station barefoot. He had probably just come back from the beach. Finally, the police officer arrived. We stood next to his car and gave him our information. While we were doing so, a middle-aged woman approached us and asked us if we knew where any good bars or clubs were. I replied that I didn’t know because I was a little surprised by her question. Lucky for her, you can’t go a mile in any direction from that gas station without passing a few clubs or bars. The guy on the bike also returned, but when he saw the police officer, he pedaled away without asking anyone for money. To top it all off, we also saw a friend of ours who works at the church next door to us and is a former student of Lauran’s. Houston is the fourth largest city in the country, but it is rare that I leave the house and don’ t run into someone I know. Most of the rest of the night was uneventful, but I must say that in our neighborhood, this could have passed for a fairly quiet night.

Shortly after that night, we went to visit Lauran’s parents who live just north of Houston. The area they live in is a developing suburb, complete with Starbucks, Applebee’s, Target, and a Chick-Fil-A. However, they live right on the edge of the suburbs, where Houston ends and the East Texas forests begin. In some ways, they are straddled between two worlds — suburban America, which looks just like the rest of suburban America, only with more trees and deer, and a place best described as the heart of Texas, where people drive pickup trucks and dress like cowboys and speak with a drawl.

While we were staying with Lauran’s parents, they took us to a diner in the next town over. This place served the kind of food Texans pride themselves for: burgers, chicken fried steak, and some Tex-Mex, all served in portions that could probably feed a horse. Our neighborhood has its fair share of these of restaurants, but the coffee shop next door also serves vegan pockets. This restaurant also had a wall of fame for those who had eaten the Holy Grail of greasy burgers, composed of six beef patties totaling 1 and ½ pounds, plus 1 pound of bacon, ½ pound of cheese, and all the regular burger trimmings. Cows and pigs have nightmares about this burger. One guy managed to finish one in nine minutes. I am sure he is now a local legend and in my mind resembles Jabba the Hut. In the same weekend, we also went to an organic chuck wagon barbecue that served delicious and nutritious steaks and veggies (all covered in butter of course). While we were there, we got to listen to live country music and pet a horse.

Later that weekend, we headed home. Just as we pulled into our neighborhood, we saw a tow truck barrel through the intersection in front of us towing a pedicab behind it and being chased by a police car. Lauran said, “I am not even going to try and guess what happened there.” I just laughed, happy to be home, where my own weirdness doesn’t seem so out of place.