Month: August 2025

I leave work, and the problem is that I have not actually left work in the way people imagine when they say “leave.” Physically, yes, I’ve evacuated the premises of my employer and am strapped into my little automotive cocoon. But mentally I’m still marinating in the day’s endless cycle of people who can’t decide whether they want this or that, which somehow means they want both simultaneously, and also can you “just put together a quick deck?” and maybe “loop in finance?” Which is shorthand for “turn your evening into a war crime against your own sanity.” And then you hit the highway and the entire concept of forward motion is replaced with what can only be described as a series of still-lifes in brake lights.

The people around me, and by “around” I mean literally boxed-in like I’m part of a giant human terrarium experiment where the theme is congestion, are not driving. They are performing traffic as an avant-garde art form. They are lane-changing with all the grace and deliberation of a walrus sliding off a rock, except slower, and with turn signals used as confessional statements: not actually meant to inform you but to soothe their own conscience.

And there’s this inner voice, not mine, reminding me that I too have probably been the walrus at some point, nose pressed dumbly against the glass, oblivious. Except in my case the glass is the windshield, and the dumb nose is still mine.

By the time I detour to the hardware store (because the pool-cleaning company has taken the novel approach of being in the business of not showing up at all, which makes firing them feel less like a punishment and more like releasing them to fulfill their destiny), I’m already simmering. And the store employees — lovely people, I’m sure, but in this context about as useful as origami canoes — cannot begin to fathom the thing I’m describing. “No, not that sealant. The pool kind. The one that actually prevents water from leaking, not the one that just makes you feel like it might prevent water from leaking.” Blank stares. Shrugs. One guy wanders off and doesn’t come back.

And of course, because entropy has a sense of humor, this is when my phone rings: my son at school. Its been a qeek since school started and he STILL csnt log.into.his laptop. The office ladies (plural, because they appear to travel in administrative packs) explain that it has been over a week since classes began and somehow he still can’t log into his portal, which is the portal, the gateway to education, the whole point of sending him there. I go in person because phone calls are clearly designed to deflect responsibility, and what I get is a buffet of platitudes: “first week chaos,” “we’re all adjusting,” “these systems are complicated.” What I don’t get is an actual solution. I am, in fact, made to feel that my frustration is the problem, like I’m some kind of bureaucratic Karen for daring to expect baseline functionality.

And so there’s this anger building, this catalog of human incompetence and indifference, the realization that everywhere I go people are obstacles, gum on the sole of my day.

But then (and I hate how trite this sounds even as I narrate it to myself) God interrupts. Not with a thunderbolt but with the casual aside of a friend in the passenger seat.

“That’s pride talking. Weren’t you the guy who left the garage door open last week and only realized when the raccoons got into the recycling?” 

He reminds me the commuters are exhausted too, the store clerks are undertrained and underpaid, the school office staff are drowning in a tidal wave of parental panic. 

“They’re not obstacles,” He says. “They’re opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what?

“For Caring. For Worship. For Love.” 

And of course this sounds like something off a church sign. The problem is it’s also annoyingly true.

I nod and say, “Yeah. You’re right.” Then immediately a guy cuts me off, and I shout words that rhyme with “duck shoe,” which sort of undermines the whole revelation. 

“It’s hard,” I tell God. “I want to be better, but I’m not very good at it.”

“My grace is sufficient,” He says.

“That’s one of your go-to sayings, isn’t it?” I mutter. “I bet you say that to everyone.” And I swear I can hear Him laugh, which is both comforting and slightly insulting.

By the time I finally reach the bar where my family’s waiting for Wednesday Night Boozie Bingo (yes, it’s a thing, don’t judge), the air feels looser. I hug my son, Breccan, and in that hug the whole day’s static dissolves a little.

I remember a friend from work who’s Mom had surgery, so I text him for a while. His mom is okay. We joke a bit. 

“See?” God says. “There you go!”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he says. “That’s all you need to do to be better.”

“That’s easy. And it’s great because I want to.”

“Sometimes you won’t want to,” he says.

“What do I do then?”

“My grace..”

“..Is sufficient,” I say. “Yeah, I know.” I sound mad, but I’m not. This, too, is annoyingly right. If God has business cards, he could probably write annoyingly right a lot of the time on it. But he wouldn’t, because not doing such a thing is also the annoyingly right approach.

After a beat, He speaks again. “Just don’t write about it in the post you’re thinking of writing,” He says. “That defeats the purpose.”

“Sure,” I say, and I mean it. For a while, anyway.

 I order drinks, carry them back, and of course bump into someone, sloshing his beer.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry!”

He waves it off: “No worries, friend. We’re all just getting through.”

And then, as if curated by some benevolent DJ, Tears for Fears starts piping through the speakers. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Suddenly it feels like we’re in on some cosmic joke. The traffic, the store, the school, all of it shrinks down to background noise. 

For a moment, everything is exactly, absurdly right.

When I was in high school, my Grandpa on my dad’s side got sick. He was in his eighties then, in and out of the hospital often enough that part of me knew the end was near. But knowing and believing are two very different things. So when, in my sophomore year, Grandpa went into the hospital for surgery, my mom asked if I wanted to visit him beforehand. I said no, assuming he’d be back home in a few days. Same as always.

The day after surgery, his health turned. Before I even had the chance to regret my decision, he was gone.

At the funeral, I walked in next to my Grandma. As we turned the corner, saw him lying in the casket, she let out a sound that I first thought was laughter. 

“This is a serious thing, Grandma,” I thought. “Canyou not laugh?”

 Only then did I realize: she wasn’t laughing. She was wailing. For the first time in my life, I saw someone so overcome with grief that it swallowed the room whole.

Two years later, it was Grandma’s turn. Emphysema and lung cancer is what took her. This time, I knew the end was near, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

But when I walked into her hospital room, I nearly turned back. Tubes everywhere. Her mouth wide open as she struggled for breath, even with the machines. I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes, saw me standing there, and smiled. Not just with her face, with her whole body, with whatever strength she had left. It was terrifying and it was beautiful at once. And I lost it. I told her I loved her and ran from the room.

She died two days later.

By my senior year, I had become the field commander for my high school marching band. This meant standing in front of the band, along with the entire Friday night football crowd, every halftime show. I was a nervous wreck each time. But Chris, a freshman saxophone player, had this little ritual with me. Right before we started, he’d catch my eye, make a goofy face, and I’d laugh. That laugh carried me through. It was small, but it meant everything.

One Friday night, while my friends and I were probably at our usual post-game blues-and-barbecue hangout, Chris went home and took his own life. We got the news days later, and I remember asking God if death was supposed to feel this way: so unreal, so impossible to believe.

Whether it comes with warning, like my grandparents, or without, like Chris, some part of me always refuses to accept it. Weeks passed before I really believed Grandpa wasn’t coming home. Even after watching Grandma gasping for breath, part of me thought she might still make it. And almost thirty years later, I still can’t quite believe Chris’s young life just ended on that Friday night.

It feels wrong. Like it isn’t supposed to be this way.

If you’re a person of faith, and I try to be one as often as possible, there’s scripture that says the same. Death wasn’t part of the original plan. But even the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry, as the poet Robert Burns once wrote. And here we are, forced to live in this unexpected unreality whether we want to or not.

Just last weekend, a friend of ours passed away. He was still a young man with a wife and kids. It was completely unexpected.  I won’t share details because they’re not mine to share, but he was part of our lives and our kids’ lives for more than a decade. He was family in a way; not by blood, but by choice. The kind you build around yourself over years.

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut calls these kinds of families a Karass. These are the people bound together to do God’s will in your life, often without ever realizing it themselves. Vonnegut was not a man of faith, at least not in the traditional sense. Yet what I’ve always admired about him (which is something I also admire in many of my friends who wear labels like atheist or agnostic.) is that he carried a deep love for people: a love that, to me, mirrors the very kind of love God calls us to have for one another. A Karass, as I see it, is the embodiment of that ideal. And the friend we lost was, in every sense, the embodiment of it too.

Walking into the house last night, my wife shook her head. “I can still hear his voice,” she said. “I still expect to see him next week.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Everyone in this chosen family, this Karass, said the same. Shock. Sadness. And that sense of unreality that always lingers after someone’s gone.

So what happens next?

When my Grandma died, the funeral stretched on, people we didn’t know drifting in and out, saying all the things people say. That’s when my friend Sean Hinken called.

“You want to go bowling?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

And we did. Brentwood Bowl, the place where I wasted too many hours as a kid. We bowled game after game. We didn’t talk about Grandma being “in a better place” or “free from suffering.” We didn’t talk about my parents or the future. We didn’t talk about anything. We just bowled. And somehow, that made it better.

In the Bible, Job is remembered for suffering. He loses everything: his wealth, his servants, his ten children. And, he is struck with a debilitating illness. His friends come to visit. Later, they’re rightly criticized for saying all the wrong things about God. But at first, before they opened their mouths, they did something right: they sat with him. No talking. No lecturing. No empty comfort. Just silence and presence. In Jewish tradition, it’s called sitting shiva. That’s what Sean did for me when Grandma died. He did it again when my mom passed years later. He’s good at it. Everyone needs friends like that.

The people in our Karass gathered last night and, for the most part, simply sat together. A few stories were told, a few memories shared, but mostly it was an unspoken agreement to carry the weight together. And in that quiet, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps take the first small, halting steps toward healing.

Maybe that’s the point. Death will always feel unreal, whether it comes like a slow dusk or a lightning strike. What makes it bearable isn’t explanations or scripture or platitudes. It’s the people who show up. The ones who sit with you. The ones who bowl with you when words won’t do. The ones who make you laugh when your chest feels like it’s collapsing.

We don’t get to choose death. But we do get to choose how we live with it: together.

That’s what my Grandma taught me with her last smile. What Chris taught me with his mischief. What Sean taught me with a bowling ball. And what our friend taught us just by being part of our Karass.

The loss never stops feeling unreal. But the love? That’s as real as it gets

Back in my youth, coffee at the office came from a single, hulking metal beast that looked like it had been forged in the basement of a post-war shipyard. Its surface was mottled with decades of brown stains, as if it had been gently marinating in coffee since the Nixon administration. The pot itself was so infused with the ghosts of brews past that it probably could have walked out of the building on its own, perhaps hitchhiking to a better life, where the only demand on it was to hold rainwater for a modest rooftop garden.

And yet, there was something honest about that coffee. It tasted like it had fought in a war and lost. You drank it not because it was good, but because it was there, and it was hot, and you were too polite or too desperate to say no.

Then, the world changed. First came the one-pot drip machines, clean and plastic and smelling faintly of hope. Then the “multi-temp” contraptions, as if coffee needed the same precision heating as sous vide salmon. Offices installed enormous chrome monstrosities that could’ve been stripped straight from the deck of a steampunk airship. Each machine arrived with more buttons, more lights, more ways to look like you were preparing for liftoff instead of a morning meeting.

But this wasn’t the end. This was just intermission before the true revolution: Keurig-style machines. Suddenly, coffee was not a communal act. It was personal. A kaleidoscope of K-cups appeared, each promising a bespoke caffeine experience: Vanilla Biscotti, Dark Magic, Jamaican Me Crazy. The break room became a coffee Eden. Everyone had exactly what they wanted, exactly when they wanted it.

And then came the fall.

As in all Edens, there was a serpent. Or rather, several. People began taking K-cups home. Just a few at first, hidden in the lunch bag. Then a sleeve. Then whole boxes vanished overnight. The Keurig became a liability. The machines were replaced with “coffee packet systems,” devices so expensive that no one could afford one at home. They were safe from theft but developed … personalities.

Now, before you could brew a cup, you had to engage in a humiliating checklist. Empty the packet bin. Refill the water tank. Clean the drip tray. In some offices, the machine made you sign a pledge of loyalty before dispensing Colombian Medium Roast. One intern told me he had to swear fealty while kneeling, though to be fair, he’s the kind of kid who’d kneel if a printer jammed.

If this continues, I see our future clearly: the office coffee station as an American Ninja Warrior course. You start on the warped wall, sprint across the foam lily pads, and dangle from the monkey bars over a pit of decaf. Then, jousting with senior leadership (foam lances only, because HR), and finally strapping on a jetpack to soar over the cubicle farm and press the Brew button before your competitor does. All this for a cup you could’ve made with a $15 Mr. Coffee at home.

Is this who we are? A people willing to strap into corporate jetpacks for the privilege of mediocre caffeine?

I yearn for the days of the old pot. Yes, the coffee was burnt. Yes, the last inch at the bottom was mostly radioactive grinds. But if you drank it, you stood a decent chance of developing superpowers by lunch. And that, my friends, is worth more than all the single-origin artisan roasts in the world.

The week before school starts is not so much a week as it is a campaign. There are logistics, supply lines, financial planning, and the kind of last-minute crises you’d expect if we were invading Normandy instead of sending children back to public education. My wife, who teaches, has been moving what I can only describe as an entire school supply section at WalMart into her classroom, one tote at a time. The sheer volume defies reason. I’ve been in that room. It’s like any other classroom. And yet, everything she brings in disappears into it, as though she’s found the doorway to Narnia and is slowly filling it with laminated posters, mechanical pencils, and paper towels.

Several of the kids apparently decided to spend the summer growing like bean sprouts, because suddenly every shoe in the house was a size too small. This required an emergency pilgrimage to various stores where, I’m convinced, the school shoe market is run by the same people who control diamond prices. Except that diamonds last longer than three months before someone’s toes start curling over the edge.

Then the washing machine joined the back-to-school festivities. It began flashing cryptic error codes: strings of letters and numbers that looked like they’d been randomly assigned by a drunk Soviet engineer. I spent hours disassembling it, crawling around on the floor, making little puddles of water like a human fountain. The machine beeped at me softly, as if to say, “I know, buddy. This life thing is hard.”

That’s when Eliott wandered in.

“Need some help, Dad?” he asked, in the same tone you might use with a neighbor struggling to carry in a heavy bag of mulch.

We ran through possible fixes together, searched online for what I imagine is the internet’s only Mandarin-to-COBOL translation tool, and, miracle of miracles, got it working again.

Eliott grinned, and in that grin I saw the problem with time: it’s rude. He’s a junior now. We’re entering the season of SAT prep books, college tours, and financial aid calculators that give you an ulcer just by looking at them. He doesn’t need me the way he used to. These days, our talks are less father-and-son and more man-to-almost-man, which is fine, except I didn’t realize how much I’d miss being indispensable.

Micaiah isn’t far behind. He had his sports physical yesterday. Six-foot-one, 250 pounds, and trying football this year. He’s a freshman in high school, and he’s already enrolled in a Health Science program that will have him spending part of his day at a community college in two years. He’s barely started and he’s already halfway gone.

When they’re little, you assume their need for you is permanent. The constant “Dad, Dad, Dad” is exhausting, yes, but it’s also the air you breathe. Then one day, without much warning, you look around and realize you’re standing there holding a half-empty oxygen tank.

This morning, for the first time in years, I didn’t have to bellow through the house like a deranged town crier to get them moving. Eliott and Micaiah were up when I was. Dressed. Ready. Helping the younger kids find shoes and zip backpacks.

“If you make Dad late,” Micaiah warned, “he will throw you to school instead of driving you.” Everyone laughed, which I took as a good sign that my children still find me occasionally funny instead of merely annoying.

We have one more First Day of School like this with everyone at home, all five kids crammed into the same daily launch sequence of chaos and misplaced clothes. One more morning when someone screams, “I can’t find my pants!” and someone else, without missing a beat, shouts back, “Then go without them!”

After that, the house will start emptying. After that, they’ll be gone.

That’s the way it’s supposed to go. It’s not tragic. It’s just different. And I’ll still be here, fixing the washing machine when it breaks, deciphering its cryptic messages. Only instead of a kid beside me with a grin and a solution, it’ll just be me and the soft beep of a machine saying, “Yeah. I feel your pain, buddy.”

After losing 200 pounds, people expect the changes to be seismic. They expect fanfare, balloons, a scene from Rocky where I sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, arms raised triumphantly above my now-visible waist. And yes, there are obvious benefits. My knees don’t scream like a haunted Victorian child every time I bend down. My back no longer files daily complaints with Human Resources. And I can walk up a flight of stairs without clutching the railing and wondering whether I’m experiencing cardiac arrest or just dying of shame.

But there are subtler changes; changes you don’t read about in Men’s Health or see on an inspirational Instagram reel narrated by Morgan Freeman. Like how people look at me now. Or more accurately, how they don’t.

At 5’11” and over 400 pounds, I used to have what polite folks might call a presence. I didn’t walk into a room so much as materialize: an eclipse of man. Mothers would draw their children close as if an impending storm had just rolled into Target. Men would eye me with caution, unsure if I was going to buy socks or body-slam them through the seasonal aisle.

I was a teddy bear, of course. A hugging, apologizing, perpetually-aware-of-my-body-in-space teddy bear. I tried not to be in anyone’s way, but when you’re the size of a refrigerator with opinions, avoidance has its limits. Sometimes collisions were unavoidable. And when it came down to it, between me and some 145-pound dude with a vape pen and something to prove …. well, physics has no loyalty.

I’d knock people over. Not maliciously. Not even often. But once in a while, usually after they attempted to assert their presence through the sheer force of misplaced confidence, I’d bump into them and watch them bounce off like I was a pinball bumper in a bowling shirt.

“Sorry!” I’d yell after them as they tumbled backward, wondering what it felt like to have been hit by a wrecking ball with social anxiety.

My favorites were the tiny, furious men. The kind who walked like lowercase bulldogs, arms bowed wide, as if perpetually ready to either fight or enter a body-building competition for ants. They had what I like to call “budget Vin Diesel energy.” They took up more space than physics allowed and aimed directly at me like we were in some kind of unsanctioned boss battle.

I don’t see those guys anymore. More accurately: they don’t see me.

Because now, I’m average. No longer big. No longer scary. Just some guy. Which is oddly disorienting. You don’t realize how much of your identity has been wrapped in “presence” until it’s gone.

I walked into a hotel lobby today (my family and I are staying there while we wait for the AC in our house to be resurrected), and came face-to-face with one of those formerly-beloved angry chihuahuas in human form.

He squared his shoulders and walked straight toward me, the way they used to. I tried to move, but my knee had other ideas and locked up like a reluctant safe. He slammed into me and, to my shock, I stumbled back a step.

He fell. Of course he did. Physics still leans in my favor.

But it hit me then, like he hit me now: I’m not who I used to be. I’m still bigger than average, sure, but no longer looming. No longer a walking colossus that makes children wonder if they need to say “excuse me” or call animal control.

And it’s nice. Mostly.

Nice not to feel like a novelty act every time I walk into a room. Nice not to be the before in someone else’s imaginary weight loss ad.

But also, it’s strange.

Because in losing the weight, I also lost the armor. The perceived power. The ability to part a crowd just by approaching it. Now I’m just a middle-aged guy with knees that only occasionally betray him. I don’t make people nervous anymore. I don’t make them anything.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now I’ll be seen for who I actually am: mostly kind, sometimes funny, occasionally winded, and deeply afraid of hotel buffet eggs.

Or maybe I’ll get mugged. Who knows?

When we lived in Ohio, a 95-degree day was the stuff of local news alerts and ice cream shortages. I’d step outside, inhale a lungful of wet, corn-scented air, and say, “Whew, it’s a scorcher.” Our air conditioning would wink at us, wheeze like an asthmatic pug, and promptly give up. Sometimes it was a Freon leak. Sometimes a clogged return vent. Sometimes it just needed “a little kick,” which is Midwestern for “percussive maintenance by someone in Crocs.”

But Ohio was child’s play. Ohio was one of those little ball pits at Ikea where your toddler gets a rash and a new worldview. Florida? Florida is The Show. Florida is what happens when the Earth leaves the oven on and forgets to set a timer. It’s the big leagues of atmospheric despair. It’s like getting called up from a single-A ballclub in Omaha to pitch against the Yankees in The Bronx, only every player is the sun, and every pitch insults your will to live.

Our first Florida house was a rental owned by a couple in the UK who’d apparently studied thermodynamics by licking the inside of a tea kettle. The AC unit never really worked. It leaked through the ceiling like the house was weeping with us. When we asked the owners to address the issue, they recommended we not use the AC at all, except for a few weeks in August. “That’s when it gets hot,” they said, from their foggy perch somewhere in Sussex.

He added, “If you want real heat, try a London heatwave sometime. Twenty-seven degrees!”

Celsius. They always say Celsius. Europeans measure things in Monopoly numbers. Kilometers, Celsius, kilograms, days since their last war with France. I did the math: 27 degrees Celsius is about 80 Fahrenheit.

“That’s what we try to cool it down to,” I told him. “In winter.”

Our next house was another rental. The owner lived just up the street and fancied himself a DIY savant, the kind of man who believes duct tape, twine, and faith can build a bridge. This would have been fine, except he was in New Jersey for most of the year. At one point, our AC had been dead for two weeks. When he finally stopped by, he discovered the filter was the wrong size and lectured me on the importance of using proper supplies.

“You’re the one who installs the filters, dumbass,” I reminded him. “You explicitly told me not to intervene.”

“Oh,” he said, as if meeting me for the first time. Then he vanished to Canada for three weeks. We called a service. Again.

Eventually, we bought a house. This is the part of the story where hope flutters in like a moth toward a porch light. It’s also the part where that moth bursts into flames.

The windows were bad from the start. Insulation? A suggestion, not a feature. Our AC unit sounded like a 747 crash-landing into a Walmart parking lot. It leaked. The ductwork came undone like five-year-olds at a birthday party, expecting candy from a paper mâché piñata. The inside coil clogged up. We fixed it again and again, each repair a whisper of impending doom. It had that familiar feeling you get with an elderly pet. No one says anything, but everyone starts googling cremation options.

Two weeks ago, the drain pan started leaking. Again. We cleaned the coil. Flushed the line. Sacrificed a goat. Nothing helped. A tech came by and said it needed an acid wash, which – let’s be honest – sounded more like a Metallica song than a maintenance plan. I pictured the xenomorph from Aliens melting its way through our coil, hissing with approval.

We scheduled the wash for Friday morning.

Last night, the external unit let out a sound I can only describe as a scream from the soul of a wounded wildebeest. Then it clicked twice, like it was trying to remember something. and went silent

This morning, the technician gave us the verdict: Dead. Not “resting,” not “in need of parts.” Just Dead.

And so, we will now spend the GDP of a small European nation (one of those tiny ones that make goat cheese and resentment) on a new AC system. Hopefully, it will bring peace, if not to the world, then at least to our living room. The cool comes on Tuesday.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t. This is Florida, after all. Where the lizards outnumber the thermostats, and your only true weather forecast is: “moist.”