Presence
A Reflection
January 14^th, 2024
Joseph R. Hunt

Words of the year are something my friends and I have been involved with for about two years now. Essentially, everyone chooses a word for the year that they want to use as their guiding principle, objective, or mindset for the next twelve months, usually choosing something that will help them grow or develop more as a person. In our group, we choose a word, explain its meaning to ourselves, and our hopes and concerns surrounding its implementation for the year – usually in the cold, smoking cigars and drinking rye whiskey to stave off the cold breath of night. For the last two, our group has always carved out an evening to catch up, swap stories, and hear one another out on how they felt the last year’s word panned out and prod one another to fully detail their thoughts. Oftentimes these discussions will run the better part of an hour per person. Depending on how much whiskey’s been provided, it’s not uncommon for lulls to occur and dozing to happen.

I couldn’t remember what my word was for 2022, exactly, until I went parsing through my old essays and found it bolded as Action. Symbolic of all the growth I had experienced, no? Action, for me, encapsulated a few concerns and thoughts I had expressed previously on The Attic in two pieces, notably in “… And an Engine on Fire” where my introduction – let alone the rest of the piece - served as a lengthy navel-gazing session exploring some larger themes I had become aware of in my life during a breakup. The steady, mesmerizingly innocuous creep of months and weeks trailing unnoticed into the past, frequent near-anhedonic spells listlessly trailing around my living room, and occasionally excruciating stints of time at the dining room table spent dodging an emotional outburst. Forgoing my hobbies and interests in favour of mindless cruising and atrophy. These sorts of acute challenges and pains leveled out as I began writing “Honey From a Lion’s Skull”, where I again noted these old habits and patterns which I wanted to break out of. The year that followed was punctuated with frequent nights out swing dancing at the Mercury Café, an intense focus on growth in our group’s gym, a renewed interest in seeing more of Colorado, and an active attempt to learn, heal, and grow from the dual injuries of the – what appeared at the time as a rather sudden – ending of a long relationship, preceded by the truly harrowing death of my Aunt Pam.

My word for 2023 was Presence. Presence, I had hoped, would serve as a strong reminder to remain grounded in my daily life, as well as those of my closest friends and family. Our conversation came just before I met my now fiancée. Long known probably as the bookish, introspective, and inflammatory jokester to all my friends as well as a confirmed introvert, I wondered what I might come to learn and admire about my friends if I spent more time with each of them individually. What would I see and hear about the inner worlds of the people I’ve come to rely upon so much in the years following college? In what small ways could I make contributions, offer pieces of advice, provide support and sympathy, if necessary, or let others know that I both cared about and wanted to be part of their lives? In focusing more on the people around me, I had hoped primarily to deepen my relationships and strengthen the bonds that hold my friendships together, but I also hoped that turning my eye to others would help me quiet the raucous, anxious thoughts in my own head about my life and the struggles I had come to mull and chew over so thoroughly. I planned – not without the numerous helpful reminders of my friends, at times – nights out at cocktail bars, morning coffee outings, and eight-hour arthouse cinema viewings. What follows – in no particular order of preference – are only some of the thoughts I’ve managed to adhere together about only some of the many, many great interactions, talks, and opportunities to get to know some of the most important people in my life just a little better.

Josiah Pohl and I opened the year at Union Lodge No. 1. We spent a great deal of the night discussing political philosophy, Trumpism, and the impending responsibility of fatherhood. Unflappable, Josiah’s cavalier – even enthusiastic – outlook on such a monumental life event impressed. Since I first met him years prior in 2018, when our gym was only just beginning, he’s never failed to guarantee that the newcomers to a conversation aren’t left unheard. Much of my progress in my private life processing my first major breakup, as well as my personal growth in the last five years, owes to his constant interest in the wellbeing of others around him. One of my fondest and earliest memories of Josiah: a short walk about the Punchbowl Social while celebrating Griffin Metz’ birthday a long while back, where he framed many questions surrounding my relationship at the time, my hopes for our long-range future, and my true thoughts and feelings surrounding the current situation. Moreso than many other people, Josiah put me at ease talking about very personal issues and topics, carving out space among friends or individually with a machete for helping people along the path to the emotional work necessary for growth. When the group learned the news that Josiah and his wife, Shelley, were leaving for New York, not one of us were left at least a little rattled: far from being the only person Josiah had made an impact on, I think everyone in the gym had felt at least a little shaken knowing that such a pivotal personality in our group would soon be absent from our regular lives. At his goodbye party, we took a group photo that remains one of my favourite pictures I’ve ever been a part of, and I know that many of us worried about how our group would adapt without the single person most invested in holding such a diverse cast of oftentimes anachronistic characters together. Forever the pathfinder among our friends, Josiah’s never shied away from being the first to dive into personal growth in life first as a husband, second as a professional, and now as a dad. Only a couple of years later, he returned to Colorado to the realization that our group had grown significantly closer in his absence, making his and Shelley’s return nearly seamless. For him, of course, the transition back into a new home and away from an entirely new set of friends and relationships was without difficulty. In every scenario where I’m riddled with self-doubt or anxiety, Josiah emanates cool. Despite our couple of outings, where I prodded him to learn more about his thoughts, beliefs, philosophy, and ideas, he remains as enigmatically difficult to pin down as ever. I often admire his outsized emphasis and focus on the people around him. I simultaneously wonder, however, about the extent he himself is known to everyone in our group, outside of David and Daniel Butler. To what extent, even, that it matters whether he’s well known by us at all, self-sustaining and perennial his confidence is. At the very least, I wonder about the – hopefully unlikely – case that I simply haven’t spent enough time getting to know him, even now. Perhaps my hardwired distrust of guiding figures predisposes me to take everything he says with more than a generous pinch of salt, and that itself prevents me from creating and maintaining the space necessary for our friendship to develop further.

Daniel Brandt and I met for the first time when a close friend of mine, Jon Helland, invited me to come with him one day after graduating college to a gym of new acquaintances he had made. Jon warned me that many of these people were ardent Christians – which struck me as an incredibly odd thing for Jon to be involved with – and that it might take some time to get used to each of them in turn. I met first Josiah, Daniel Butler, Matt Vail, and David, but Daniel Brandt came into the fold not long after I did. He struck me as a quiet personality, but Josiah and him had a clear and strong friendship that helped him quickly integrate into the gym. A few short weeks later when I was hauling myself into several teacher preparation courses I had enrolled in after completing my bachelor’s degree, I saw Daniel Brandt, just as surprised as I was, sitting in the room. We quickly learned that we both had goals of becoming teachers, and this, I think, helped jumpstart our friendship through the gym, however slow it would develop. Daniel is often, in my opinion, the quiet moral center of our gym discussions: when Daniel Butler or I would be going at it over some idea or piece of news amongst the din of the rest of the guys throwing in jokes or points for effect, Daniel Brandt remained the calm, collected, nuanced voice of reason. It is rare indeed that Daniel takes a hardline stance on any subject, quick as he is to spot and understand the flaws in any sort of ideological conversation. This same understanding of things pervaded his faith, which often struck me as at odds with every other Christian in our gym. Whereas Daniel Butler and Josiah struck me as dogmatically inflexible, Daniel Brandt would justify and explore the pitfalls, necessary history, context, and fine details that underpin what appeared then and now as the richest belief and faith that I’ve encountered. I was honoured to be invited to participate in his bible study group years ago when I had begun an abortive effort to read the entirety of the Old Testament in one summer, where I met several of his friends and enjoyed the privilege of confirming my suspicion that his faith did indeed fathom great depths that he was all too excited to explore and discuss at length. While I was not – and do not ever see myself becoming – a believer, listening to his thoughts and seeing him in action as he guided us through the finer details of some readings from the book of Samuel was an awesome window into the often quiet and personal inner world that Daniel sometimes shares glimpses of with us in the gym. Out of almost everyone – other than Josiah – I felt that I had the most to learn about Daniel as an individual: in a group setting, we had solidified as a strong friend group that often had him at the center providing food and venue for movie nights, Super Bowl games, and the gym itself (which he has, in large majority, amassed himself), but about his private world and his background I knew very little. We spent our outings this last year getting breakfast food and drinking coffee, where he shared at length his history before our meeting, his journey with his faith, his experiences with love, and his thoughts surrounding marriage. Both of us have had our own harrowing experiences in our youth around relationships that required each of us to see and address the unhealthy, toxic ways that we reacted to loss, without which any growth would have been impossible. Through our conversations I realized that we had a great deal in common with our fears and setbacks surrounding relationships than I expected, and I think the opportunity for us both to open up about our backgrounds and pasts has had an outsized impact on our friendship now. Daniel is one of the warmest and most enthusiastic supporters of many of our friends, and it’s uncommon – especially these days, as my fiancée and I have been finalizing our wedding plans – that Daniel isn’t grilling me about where my head is at and how I’m feeling about everything, usually accompanied by a massive bear hug and a heavy-handed, hearty pat on the back. I’m grateful to know him, for his outsized support and intensity, and his massive presence that, I think, in the absence of Josiah was the leadership that held our gym together for the pandemic years and saw all of us stronger, happier, and healthier than we could have been individually on our own. Daniel would never own it nor seek it, but to him are owed the credit and the gratitude of many of the great leaps and gains – physically and otherwise – each of us in the gym has reaped in the years that he’s been the quiet workhorse behind the scenes. As he processes the intense and lasting grief of losing someone dear to him, I hope he understands that he is not alone in his experience, and that however close to the vest he wants to play his cards, there’s at least one other person – most certainly several - around him that understands how deep that pain can go, and is willing to walk with him through it fair field and no quarter.

David Grisham and I had two major outings, both at cocktail bars around Denver I had never heard much of. Prone to long periods of rumination – often pre-empted by quarter-hour verbal processes in the gym and through writing – David has always struck me as someone with a keen interest for a rich and rigorous discussion of things. When David speaks at length, he often requires several moments to collect his thoughts and prelude a discussion with several prior ideas or notions relevant to a given story. What I hope to express after many hours in writing, David’s able to produce seemingly at will in the moment. Our conversations always dig deep into things, often to current and prior experiences of lasting importance to our individual lives. Rarely have I met someone so curious and inquisitive about the murkier functions of our thoughts and minds. Alongside Daniel Butler, David strikes me as a fellow traveler: despite a very different set of challenges, David, Daniel, and I all grapple, in our own ways, with the loss of our fathers at early ages. This connection became apparent during a hike to Crater Lake the three of us took in September of 2022, which saw us through some of the most picturesque and gorgeous Coloradoan high county I have yet seen, counting no less than six waterfalls as we followed the meandering stream upslope and overnighting at the foot of Lone Eagle Peak standing solitary in that glacial cirque inverted so pristinely in the water as to leave one wondering if the world had not turned itself over in your sleep. Apart from being the singularly greatest hike (and best use of a $200 fine I’ve ever paid to the Forest Service) I’ve had the pleasure of taking, the time we had together to talk frankly and candidly about our lives, our friend group, and our past experiences that night meant more than any number of pages here could express. For David, his troubled relationship with his father (to my observation) looked like a great deal of processing of anger, grief, and pain early in my acquaintance and later friendship with him as he came to terms with the setbacks left to him and his family, ultimately rising above to grow beyond the residuals left behind a difficult upbringing which he neither deserved nor earned. For either of us, this sort of difficult, painful, meandering growth presents challenges in unexpected ways, whether professionally, academically, or - especially - in relationships. At length in our first meeting last year, David and I discussed the Quixotic efforts he had put into holding his relationship together with his ex-fiancée, the extents of which left me concerned for him as he appeared set on a collision course with an unhappy marriage. No stranger myself to the dysfunction and mental gymnastics necessary for doomed attempts at holding things together, I had hoped that David knew through those conversations that whatever may come, he always had somebody in his corner. Spectacular though the parting may have been, I could finally let out a long breath and know that however rocky the road ahead may be, David had made the right decision for himself and his future in going ahead alone. Far from alone in my concern, As we parted from our second meeting – in which I heard more about David’s hopes for a newer, much healthier relationship – I knew, however hard the work, he was more than capable of reaching beyond his past towards a much happier future.

Griffin Metz and I parted ways this year after several years sharing a house in Littleton. Despite our introverted personalities, we shared many good conversations headed to and from the gym, most memorably our drives in March 2020 when we humorously noted the complete absence of traffic on South Sante Fe Drive during rush hour, or the price of gasoline falling below two dollars. Even more so, we fell back frequently to discussions surrounding technology, the internet, and the challenges that the more quiet-minded half of society has in getting out and involved in the world around us. I first met Griffin during our freshman year at the Colorado School of Mines – in a gregarious attempt to find friends and ground myself before the year was out, I remember bombing into Griffin’s dorm room on occasion drawn to the deep cuts of various classic rock albums most wouldn’t think to listen to. His near-encyclopedic knowledge of music and music history never ceased to impress, and I always left thinking to myself that I needed to get to know that cat better. Well over four years later, we became roommates. At first anxious about taking up a lease with someone I hadn’t known very well, I quickly learned that we were, in fact, a well-functioning pair of introverts. Eternally humble, generous, and considerate, Griffin always has and continues to strike me with how insightful and conscientious he is in everything he does, especially as he navigated the prickly Denver dating scene between 2019 and 2021. Utterly perplexed, I spent many nights wondering how Griffin wasn’t snatched up by women: genuine and earnest, it’s rare you meet a person with so much quiet talent and humility. Some folks have it in spades, and some of us don’t have it at all. Many were the night that he came home from a date in which audibly wonder what in the ever loving hell was going on that this guy wasn’t snatched up. Part of the issue would likely be Griffin’s standards for others – which are at least as high as those for himself, and that alone meaning a nearly impossible hurdle – and it took a long time before Griffin finally found a partner, during which he turned a corner and his more confident, gregarious, and adventurous side really shone through. Less than two years later, he experienced a shock in the sudden ending of that relationship, and many were the night that the gym wrapped around him to help him heal. As for our house, Daniel Butler and myself talked through his progress in understanding, healing, and growing from the loss more than a handful of times around our dining room table sipping whiskey. Difficult though it was for him, he never shied away from the work and committed himself to a period of personal exploration and growth that gave rise to a transformed man of much cherished wit and wiles among our group and a burgeoning confidence in his identity as a musician with the drums. The week or two before he was scheduled to leave our lease, Griffin put on a farewell show with his band Elevate (which includes Daniel Brandt on lead guitar, among several other friends of our group), closing with a cover of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby”. I can’t speak for others, but I can say with certainty that there may have been more than a handful of those unable to keep a dry eye hearing him say goodbye to us in that way. When we parted ways in February at the Lazy Greyhound, and again as he packed his U-haul bound for Austin, Texas, I could hardly choke down the emotions that came up from saying goodbye to one of the most genuinely good people I’ve ever met. Sitting alone in that silently cavernous living room of our rental, I reflected on the incredible history of growth and camaraderie we had shared in that house individually and as roommates. I knew then, and believe now, that his time away from Colorado will see him developing a great comfort in his own skin and coming back to the guys from his continued journey well-rounded and much more seasoned in knowing himself better.

Perhaps the most surprising of my friendships over the last few years, my relationship with Daniel Butler is the least likely at first glance, but upon deeper thought seems the most natural. Very little did I initially think I’d have in common with a staunchly Libertarian, Christian, gun-toting dude with a vision for his life which included (at least in my estimation) a maximally traditional white-picket-fence lifestyle and a vocally anti-liberal political stance. Everything I heard, saw, and discussed with Daniel I immediately knew would be anathema to my own beliefs, experiences, and ideas about the world and the people around me. Where Daniel was – and still is, in some limited scenarios – absolute in his beliefs in oftentimes dogmatic fashion, I found myself at least as equally and oftentimes more naively inflexible and fragilely clinging to beliefs of my own. From very early on, we diametrically opposed one another predominantly in politics, but the most refreshing thing about our initial conversations at the gym was the underlying genuine, good-faith nature we both took to that sort of conversation: neither one of us, then or now, argues in bad faith. Each of us, in our own way, attempt to understand the other on the strongest merits of the other’s views leaving a great deal of room for examining the ways that such apparently incompatible belief systems have once we define and describe the axiomatic values that, surprisingly, we both share in plenitude. Apart from our natural inclination to healthy and invigorating argumentation, Daniel also embodies and practices the same beloved, cavalier impetuosity and enthusiasm that lands both of us occasionally in hot water, much to the chagrin of the people around us with a little more foresight and a lot more common sense. Foolhardy though we may both be, I like to think it lends us both some charm-in-the-rough that ensures, despite our most roguish adventures, a great story to tell and plenty of fodder for jokes among our friends. Especially when those misadventures result in a hangover and a conspicuous absence from Sunday morning Easter services. Daniel, also a former roommate of mine in Littleton, gave me – at least initially - the most cause for concern in the last year. Daniel moved in with Griffin and I in November of 2022, reeling from the implosion of his first marriage. A thoroughly religious and devout Christian, he had to hold in each hand two incompatible facts and find the path forward to redeem himself and his faith in lasting partnership. Griffin and I knew immediately (aside from having an already vacant room in a three-bedroom house) that having Daniel around us and the gym in our garage would be best to help Daniel mend. When we got him into our house, he quickly became the catalyst necessary to bring all three of us together for long, raucous discussions at night around the dining room table. In the years Griffin and I had known each other and enjoyed our friendship at the house in Littleton, Daniel made it possible to actively engage as a full group and come together into a much stronger unit than we had ever been before. Whether it were camping trips, nights gathered around the television watching trash TV, or simple conversations on the couches together, I certainly cherished the opportunities to bond more closely with both of my friends. Individually, Daniel took the time in Littleton to feverishly process, grieve, and heal. Often was the night that Daniel would leave in the dark, only to return hours later mulling over a new thought or emotion. As often as he pushed Griffin and I forward, I like to think we gave him the support, camaraderie, and space he needed to process his grief and – at times, at least, it appeared to be - shame surrounding the end of his first marriage. We reminded him alongside a chorus from the rest of our group as often as possible that despite his views on redeeming his trust in love and in himself, that no redemption, in our eyes on this front, would ever be necessary. The last year has seen him grow exponentially into his new relationship – which by all measures pours as generously into his life as he pours into others – and a renewed mission in his faith and personal growth and redemption. I would, however, be remiss in not saying that this growth has occurred largely from without our group, with many of us, myself certainly included, wondering to what extent this growth might develop into a prolonged absence from the lives of people who have cared deeply about him for so long. At the very least, I worry that however strong our unusual and unlikely friendship may have been, the coming years may mean that all the growth, happiness, and good fortune I had wished for him in his darker moments before he moved in with us in Littleton come among a new group of friends from which I can witness everything from outside.

To Jon Helland do I owe many things, not the least of which is the opportunity to join a gym of new friends shortly after graduating that developed into the last six years of friendship I have enjoyed with every member of our group. Jon and I are old friends from college: I first met Jon while prowling the second floor of our dorm rooms, looking to meet and say hello to as many new friends as I could possibly reach before the beginning of class. When I popped my head into his room, Jon was hunched over his desk reading an academic journal article talking about research in fluid dynamics and turbulence, next to an absolute monster of a computer. I remember popping my head in to comment on his rig which had turned me green with envy, but once I saw what he was reading and working on, I knew that however smart I thought myself to be, I was next to someone inestimably sharper than I was or would ever be. In every subject that I thought I knew well, Jon could go further: in mathematics, philosophy, music, film, art, and even literature and in writing, I had met not just my equal but someone far, far more knowledgeable who inspired me to take my thinking further. I often thought, too, that Jon and I shared a similar melancholic personality that led us to appreciate the same things in music, reading, and film. Along every step of the way through college, I came to know Jon as perhaps the single hardest-working person I had ever met. Jon is preternaturally gifted with talents in many domains, but I have never met someone so willing to forgo all else in the relentless pursuit of knowledge and mastery once he sets his mind to a task. It’s not enough for Jon to perform or complete a task. Jon stops at nothing short of a totality of understanding and mastery that makes allowance for nothing short of complete perfection and rigour. It was so common a sight to see him sacrificing sleep, food, hobbies, and social engagements to grapple with some Herculean mathematical problem or computer programming challenge that I often worried whether what I admired most about him was not simultaneously some self-inflicted, destructive habit or a curse laid on his head by some evil archon. Many years later we formed a book club during the pandemic which was one of the most fulfilling groups I had the pleasure of talking literature with. Jon’s insights, direction, and eclectic taste in all things fringe had us travelling down strange and fascinating paths that I still often think about today. I also have incredibly fond memories of listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F#, A#, ∞ on vinyl at midnight, our many chats about Cormac McCarthy when I read Blood Meridian for the first time, or our meandering walk at the end of college where Jon showed me a wrecked car in a ravine along Lookout Mountain and Clear Creek, recounting how he himself had stumbled upon it in the mist and fog some cold day prior. We’re both prone to long periods of quiet and solitude; it’s not less than a hundred times that I’ve thought Jon and I would both benefit from taking time with a therapist to rule out some long-running flight from a doggedly pursuant depression. I hope in the years that I’ve known him that Jon knows that he never has to tackle those blue spells and quiet nights alone. When he left for Pittsburg alongside another close friend of mine, Jacob Ratzlaff, it was during a large period of change and growth for him that saw him withdraw further into himself than I had ever seen him do before. Not long after he departed, I found myself grappling with how to fill a very large, Jon-sized hole in my life that took months to process. Thankfully, he returned to Colorado several years later, and we’ve had many opportunities to reconnect and enjoy hanging out for eight hours straight in a basement watching Béla Tar’s Sátántangó, listen to glacial, soul-crushing metal bands, and continue talking about the transcendent quality of McCarthy’s prose. Jon himself becomes visibly uncomfortable at my overt and frequent declarations of admiration, but in the last couple of years that he’s been back, happier than I think I’ve ever seen him – and in a new, awesome relationship, too! - I hope he knows and feels that not only am I always here to remain his ardent admirer and friend, but that a whole group of guys wait to see him open up and join us – even if at the point of a pry bar and a great, collective, heaving shout.

As I wrap up the year, I can’t help but think that even in spit of all this that I have come to know and understand about the people around me, I remain one of the most disjoint members of our group. Many were the weeks where my absence was noticed from the gym, and despite my goal, I had only planned and created space to meet each of my friends in turn only a handful of times throughout the year. There is only so much time in the year, after all, but even knowing that starting a new job, beginning the second half of a master’s program, moving to a new apartment, and getting engaged to my fiancée, I can’t help but think that there were many, many more opportunities I could have taken or spaces I could have found in my schedule to spend time, one-on-one, with each of my friends in turn. Presence was, for me, a success in the sense that I did indeed learn a great deal about my friends. I think that I’ve taken a much larger role this year in recognizing that it’s partly my responsibility to maintain and cultivate the friendships that have poured so much more into my life than I’ve deserved or can ever thank them for. We must tend to our garden, as Voltaire notes. Daniel Brandt’s wife, Jenny, pointedly stated as much not too long ago during a cocktail party at my place, and I appreciate her insight more as time goes on. Her charge has stuck in my mind ever since, and as the year draws to a close and the time comes around again to reflect and decide on a word for the coming new year, I can’t help but think my work around Presence really can’t be encapsulated in small efforts I’ve made in one year. As we all settle into our lives together, I hope that all of my friends continue to stick around – despite all my best efforts – in my life as I can’t begin to imagine where I would have been without them, and I hope that, in however many small ways they’ll allow me, I get the opportunity to continue looking through the keyhole into their inner worlds and hopefully adding some small positive contribution towards a constellation of such great men.