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Final Sale Part 3: Welcome to the Event Horizon Mall

They gave it a name, eventually. Of course they did.

Not the scientists. Not the journalists or the generals. The name came from a tweet posted by a 17-year-old in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had a thousand followers and a bedroom full of LED lights. She captioned a photo of herself in alien face paint, giving a peace sign in front of her mirror:

“ready for the big day at the event horizon mall 👽🛍️🛸💥 #interstellarsale”

By morning, it was trending.

The phrase spread like ivy cracking the brickwork of a once-stable mind. Politicians used it. Talk show hosts repeated it with wry smiles. Event Horizon Mall. It sounded whimsical enough to pretend it wasn’t terrifying. It suggested clearance racks and food courts. It suggested deals. It didn’t suggest what it really meant: that we had passed the point of no return, that something had crossed the stars to answer our call, not with contact, but commerce.

We kept listening.

The signals came faster now. Once a day. Then twice. They were no longer just a string of ad copy or nostalgic jingles. They had coherence. Narrative. Rhythm. They followed themes.

DAY 9: Beauty & Wellness
 “Because you’re worth it…”
“New year, new you!”
“Your skin, but better!”

DAY 8: Home & Family
 “Make room for memories.”
“A house isn’t a home without a GE refrigerator.”
“Mom said yes to Shake ‘n Bake!”

DAY 7: Travel & Adventure
 “Escape the ordinary.”
“Life’s a journey—pack light.”
“Book now, vanish later.”

The experts argued on panels that there was intelligence behind the structure. Someone, or something, was curating the messages. Not randomly. Not as echoes. But as something resembling a campaign: a campaign building, as all campaigns do, toward an inevitable launch. 

Somewhere in Geneva, a French linguist crossed herself in secret before a press conference. 

“This isn’t language,” she whispered. “This is liturgy.”

The Vatican issued a statement. The White House did not. Billionaires who’d once hawked crypto and climate bunkers now turned to God, or at least to image management with spiritual window dressing. They made donations. They gave interviews about humility. A few disappeared.

Religious fervor rose on both sides of the spectrum. Some believed the Event Horizon Mall was the return of Christ while others believed it was the end of human agency entirely. Many still wondered whether these were the same people.

On DAY 6, a man in Manila jumped into a crowd at a shopping mall and began screaming ad slogans until he died of a heart attack. The video went viral. One of the slogans was from a detergent brand that hadn’t existed since 1984.

Governments attempted coordination. The United Kingdom nationalized its advertising sector. Brazil banned all commercials for 24 hours and saw its stock market drop by 30%. China, it was said, built a wall of silence. It jammed signals, burned transmitters, tried to shut it out completely. Videos leaked from Xinjiang of televisions turning on by themselves, muttering in English:

“You’ve got a friend in value.”

In America, nothing changed. Black Friday-style riots erupted at outlet malls. Large, frantic crowds trampled a woman to death outside a Target in Sacramento. Her last words, caught on shaky phone footage, were:

“I thought this was part of it…”

DAY 5: Big Tech. The signal came through our smart speakers. Through baby monitors and broken pagers. A dead laptop hummed to life in Prague, reciting:

“Update complete. Prepare for installation.”

The lights in the house flickered. My son asked why the toaster was singing. He was nine now. Old enough to understand things were happening but too young to know what they meant. That night he asked if we could buy “the thing” before it arrived, whatever it was. I told him no. He cried himself to sleep.

Somewhere in orbit, telescopes stared into nothing. There was no spaceship. No anomaly. Just the ordinary blackness of space. But the messages kept coming.

DAY 4: Apparel & Identity
 “Dress for the end you deserve.”
“Your style. Your story. Your extinction.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?”

The last line hit like a joke told at a funeral.

The physicists stopped holding press briefings. One was seen standing on a rooftop in Geneva, drunk and shaking, muttering, “It’s all been pre-approved. It’s all been rendered and shipped.”

In a quiet lab outside Helsinki, a young woman named Leena filtered the broadcast through a machine-learning interpreter she built for her PhD thesis. What she saw terrified her.

The messages weren’t just a signal. They were a countdown. Not in seconds. In us. In our language, our longings, our history of desire looped back into us like a snake devouring its own tail. We were being counted down not by time, but by memory.

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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Final Sale part 2: Special Prizes Chosen Just For You!

It was spring in the northern hemisphere, the kind of day that makes you smile with your face to the sun. Blossoms opened on trees in London’s parks. Young couples strolled past storefronts in Tokyo where mannequins wore fashion two seasons ahead. In Boston, professors chalked equations on green boards, trying to remember what it was like to be wrong in public. And in Washington, a man in a blue suit leaned over a secure telephone, asking: “Is this a prank?”

But it wasn’t a prank.

By the second week, the signals had formed a pattern: new broadcasts every forty-eight hours, always at 03:17 UTC, always heard by everyone listening. There was no discernible source and no delay, just some undefined and indefatigable voice whispering in every ear at once, regardless of longitude.

The fifth signal included a full musical number. Strings and brass and an impossibly crisp baritone crooning something halfway between Sinatra and an early Apple keynote:

“Get ready, Earth … for something incredible. One planet. One chance. One. Big. Event.”

It ended with applause. It wasn’t human applause, exactly. It was something else, something layered. It was too symmetrical, too clean. It was less the sound of real hands and voices and more like cheers as recreated by a machine trying to imitate enthusiasm. 

The United Nations held a session that lasted nine hours and concluded with a resolution titled “Concerning Non-Hostile Extraterrestrial Broadcasting.” It was unanimous and meaningless. In Brussels, the European Parliament voted to establish a Committee on Interstellar Commerce, chaired by a Belgian woman who once led yogurt trade negotiations.

Scientists, philosophers, and advertising executives were invited to weigh in. SETI scientists, underfunded for decades, became minor celebrities. Dr. Rosalie Ng, astrophysicist turned signal analyst, appeared on The Daily Show, her careful syntax clipped by the laugh track:

“We are not receiving a message. We are receiving ourselves, distorted and reassembled.”

The audience didn’t know whether to laugh or applaud. So they did both.

In the markets, futures trading for luxury survival shelters spiked 11%. In Los Angeles, influencers began a trend of “cosmic minimalism,” deleting their social accounts with dramatic video tributes and farewell montages set to the Interstellar soundtrack.

Pastors preached on Sunday mornings, skeptical journalists nodded somberly on Wednesday night panels, and Reddit bloomed with theories like mold in a forgotten kitchen. Theories that it was aliens. Theories that it was God. Theories that it was late-stage capitalism, achieving sentience and crying out for blood.

No one turned off their TVs.

In our apartment, we sat in the dark and watched reruns. My wife had gone quiet. Our son, seven years old, began whispering jingles in his sleep.

“Red Bull gives you wings…”

“Have it your way…”

“Open happiness…”

At Langley, they dusted off files marked “Project Echo Mirror,” an experiment from the ’60s involving parabolic satellites and subliminal messaging. At CERN, a physicist ran a simulation showing how sound waves might wrap around the curvature of space-time. No one really understood what he meant, but the simulation was beautiful, and it made for good television.

Somewhere in Nevada, a team of ex-NASA engineers built a whiteboard big enough to fit every known jingle from 1950 to 2020. There were over 14,000. They color-coded them by product type and nation of origin. A graduate student cross-referenced the signals with historical ad campaigns and discovered an uncanny pattern: every message corresponded to a moment of collective disappointment: failed product launches, bankrupt companies, canceled shows.

“The world is being reminded of everything we tried to sell and couldn’t,” she wrote. 

Still, no one turned off their TVs. No one stopped listening.

And then, on the fourteenth day, the signal arrived early. It was shorter than the others, with no music and no fanfare; just static, then a single phrase in English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, French, Hindi, and Swahili:

“Ten days left. Everything must go!”

That night, in churches, bars, and online forums, the same question circled like smoke:

What happens when the sale ends?

*** *** *** ***

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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Final Sale part 1: Through the Noise

We didn’t notice it at first. That is to say, we heard it, but no one believed it was new. People in the observatories heard many things: pulsars, quasars, fast radio bursts. The universe was noisy in the way a sea is noisy when you’re drowning in it. You don’t listen for specific waves. You just try not to go under.

Carlos Dávila, the man who found the signal, was a radio technician at Cerro Tololo in Northern Chile. He wasn’t a scientist, not really. He was a technician with thick knuckles and a love of poetry, the kind of man who would quote Neruda while re-soldering a control board. His shift began at 3:00 p.m. and ended when the desert night fell. On the fourth Thursday of April, during the southern autumn, he logged a signal with a sequence that sounded like a joke. A broadcast pattern no one had heard before. High modulation. Repetitive. Rhythmic. Almost cheerful.

He called it una canción sin alma. A soulless song.

The waveform didn’t match anything from known satellites. No standard pulsar rotation. No signature from Earth. Yet the cadence, repetitive and inflected, almost like speech, felt familiar. Like something made by us, but long forgotten, an old commercial jingle hummed in the dark.

When he played it back, it stuttered through a spectrum of languages and tones, none complete. A whisper of French. A tinny echo in Mandarin. A static-punched American drawl:

“Sale ends soon… Don’t miss it…”

Then, nothing.

The official response was slow. The observatory logged the event and sent it up the chain to the international registry. A month passed. Then came the second signal.

This time it wasn’t just Carlos. Eight observatories picked it up: the Canadian array, a dish in Johannesburg, the Vatican’s own facility in Castel Gandolfo. All at once, and all hearing the same impossible broadcast, somehow simultaneous across hemispheres, despite latency., each message different.

“Act now…”

“Limited time only…”

“Your opportunity is almost here…”

The pattern of signals was unlike anything we’d seen. It was as though someone had mined Earth’s radio archives, extracted every piece of commercial propaganda we had ever launched into the heavens, and began stitching it back together with uncanny cheer. Somewhere in the sky, we were being sold something. But no one knew by whom.

The world took notice. We were in New York then. I remember because I saw the ticker crawl across the bottom of the television at the bagel shop on 8th and 27th. MYSTERY SIGNAL FROM DEEP SPACE MIMICS HUMAN ADS. A woman in a parka spilled her coffee and didn’t notice.

The President didn’t comment at first. The Pope did. He called it the echo of Babel and suggested prayer. The internet pulsed with speculation. Elon Musk tweeted a meme of an alien swiping a credit card. Half a million people joined a Facebook group called “The Blowout from Beyond.” 

Then came the third signal. And the fourth. And so on. Each clearer and stranger than the last, each wrapped in the same manic pitchman energy that once pushed razors, cologne, and powdered drink mixes to a generation that couldn’t yet mute the ads. It was the music of our species reflected back at us.

A remix of us.

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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

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Love in the Time of Toilet Water

They say parenting is the hardest job in the world. But those people have clearly never tried to accomplish something while parenting five children, while ankle-deep in toilet water, while wondering whether an ER window replacement comes with a punch card.

Earlier this week, I had to remind myself multiple times, through gritted teeth and damp socks, that I do love my kids. I do. I have to keep saying it like a mantra. Like I’m trying to hypnotize myself into not running away to Montana and starting a new life as a fly-fishing instructor named Doug.

It started, innocently enough, with a toilet. A clogged one. Now, I’m no stranger to clogged toilets. We have five kids. I own a plunger like some people own a car, but instead of using it, my kids decided the solution was: more water. Just keep flushing. Over and over. Surely, if the water sees how committed we are, it’ll change its mind and go down.

Spoiler: it did not go down. 

It came up. Then it came out. Then it migrated down the hall like a cheerful salmon in a spring flood. Ten loads of laundry later (because of course it soaked into the towels, the rugs, and three of the kids somehow) I reminded myself again: I love them. I do. 

Then there was the root canal.

SK2, he’s 14 now, high-functioning autistic, and engaged in an ongoing Cold War with dental hygiene. It’s a contentious relationship. He brushes like he’s trying to gently pet a ghost. The result? A $1,000 root canal that doubled as a ransom payment to the Tooth Mafia. I could’ve spent that money on a new couch. Or a downpayment on next year’s vacation. Or enough plungers to build a raft and sail away from all of this.

But then came last night.

My wife and SK4 were off learning CPR. They must have had a premonition because, back at home, SK3 decided to spice up our evening by tripping and falling through a window. That’s not a metaphor. That’s an actual thing that happened. One minute, we’re watching YouTube, and the next, it was Die Hard: The Suburban Years live and in person. 

Glass everywhere. Blood. Screaming. SK5 crying in the corner like an extra from a war movie.

Then something amazing happened. SK2, the dental delinquent himself, sprung into action. Calm. Focused. First aid kit like a mini paramedic. He kept his brother still, talked him through the pain, patched him up while I was still Googling “how to tell if your child is made of glass.” It turns out the real health and safety lesson wasn’t happening at CPR class. It was happening in my living room. 

They’re often like this. Beautiful in the chaos. This morning, for example, SK4 … sweet, responsible SK4 … helped my wife set up her classroom for the new school year. SK1 texted me from Philmont, all excited to come home. “Miss you, Dad,” he wrote. And I nearly cried. Until I remembered the window.

And yeah, SK3? As I sat with him in the ER last night, he looked at me, all stitched and bandaged, and asked, “Dad… have you ever done something like this?”

“Well, there was that time I lit my best friend’s house on fire.”

His eyes widened, and I told him the story: how we put the fire out, how my friend went to the hospital, and how I sat in a smoke-filled living room waiting for his dad to come home and decide whether to murder me or adopt me out of spite.

And we laughed. Right there in the ER. Me, thinking about smoke. Him, thinking about glass. Both of us, bleeding in our own way.

And in that moment, I realized: They’re gonna be okay. They really are. Even when they destroy everything. Especially when they destroy everything. They’re good people with good hearts. Somewhere under the bandages, the dental bills, and the gallons of toilet water, there they are. My kids.

And I do love them. I swear I do.

Even if I keep the plunger on a leash now. Just in case.

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Philmont

There are places in the world that feel mythic before you ever set foot in them. For some, it’s Paris. For others, it’s Machu Picchu, or that one Target that still has a working Starbucks inside. For me, it was Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico.

When I was a teenager, sunburned and underpaid, I worked at Camp Friedlander Boy Scout camp just outside Cincinnati. My job was mostly mosquito-based: attracting them, swatting them, then explaining to scouts the difference between “first aid” and “bad luck.” We had a staff t-shirt, a walkie-talkie that only worked when you weren’t holding it, and a collective dream.

Philmont.

Philmont was our Everest. It was where the real scouts went. The ones who drank iodine-flavored creek water and told time by the sun. We told stories about it as if we’d read them in The Odyssey. 

“Did you hear about Ryan’s cousin?” someone would ask, huddled around a lukewarm pudding cup. “He summited Baldy Mountain. Saw a bear. Came back different.”

A friend worked a whole summer there, once. He came back thinner, tanner, and with an expression that suggested he had seen God, pr at least someone who resembled Him, and smelled like freeze-dried beef stroganoff.

I, of course, never went. The opportunity just never aligned. There was always school, or a job, or a pressing need to gsther financies that never seemed to materialize. Eventually, Philmont faded from dream to regret, settling into the quiet cabinet of adolescent longings, somewhere between “owning a motorcycle” and “learning how to flirt.”

Fast forward a few decades. Five kids and, oh yes, 200 fewer pounds later, and my son is going. Not just going; returning. His second trip. Like he’s a regular. Like it’s his summer home in the high desert, and he’s just popping back in to see if the trout missed him.

He’s lean, strong, and almost sixtee . His backpack is bigger than my dreams. He’s not worried about anything. Not the altitude, not the weather, not the rattlesnakes. He texts me a photo from base camp. He’s grinning. Behind him: blue sky, mountains so sharp they could slice you, and a gang of scouts who all look like they know how to build an emergency shelter out of two sticks and a dirty sock.

I look at the picture and I feel the strangest sensation. It’s not envy, but something adjacent. Longing’s more mature cousin. I think they call it “joy.”

Because this is the thing they don’t tell you about parenting: it’s not just watching your kids grow up. It’s watching them walk through doors that were locked to you, and cheering instead of knocking.

I’ll admit, I Googled “Philmont adult treks” once. A flash of hope, maybe. I thought: You’ve lost the weight. You could train. You could do this. But the training would have to be so intensive that I’d have to quit my job, abandon my family, and maybe replace my knees with something titanium. I’m in better shape now, but I’m not in Philmont shape. I’m in “carry groceries without wheezing” shape. “Chase my kids one block and then gice up” shape. Not “twelve days above 8,000 feet with 45 lbs on my back shape.

So I don’t go.

Instead, I sit on my couch in Central Florida where the altitude isseven feet above sea level, scrolling through photos my son sends when he has service. I see pine forests and rocky ridgelines. A mule deer. A panoramic of Tooth of Time. And in every picture, he’s smiling. Tired, sunburnt, radiant.

I smile too. It’s enough.

Because the truth is, we all have a “Philmont.” A place we dreamed of going, a peak we didn’t reach. And if we’re really lucky, we get to watch someone we love climb it instead.

That’s the trick, I think. Knowing when to let go of your old dreams, and how to hold on to theirs instead. Not with bitterness, not with wistfulness, but with a quiet, campfire-lit joy.

Besides, somebody’s got to stay behind and wait for the stories.

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ChatGPT didn’t write this (but it probably could have—it’s very talented)

One of my biggest struggles as a writer over the years has been figuring out how to handle the cavalcade of “asides” that show up in my writing. My rough drafts are a dizzying landscape of ideas so haphazard, it would be like the worst, ADHD-fueled, Seth MacFarlane nightmare of a storyline that consists of a main character saying one thing, followed by a complex web of nested pop culture references that continued, Inception-style, all the way to the end. 

It’s bad.

To handle this, I would almost always use parentheses (like this, but with multiple ideas and paragraphs therein (which is a great way to confuse people (but can also be fun because it FEELS vaguely math-y (even though it isn’t because no numbers are involved (which is a great way to do math, if you ask me (at least until you’re trying to engineer something like a bridge or an airplane, because all these words and no numbers is how you end up killing people (and that’s bad (usually))))). 

To handle this – and cut down on parenthesis inception – I landed on the em-dash. I had avoided it for years, because it felt strange (and also: I didn’t really understand it all that well (my elementary school teachers did a poor.job teaching me that (they are all dead now, so I can say that without angering them (probably))). 

I settled into it, I figured it out, and my writing got better. 

“This is what growth is!” I told myself. I was happy. 

Then ChatGPT happened. Now, all those people who WANTED to be grammar Nazis (but never had the balls to do it (because they are cowards (stupid cowards (stupid, lazy, selfish, cowards!)!)) came out in force to let everyone know that any instance of em-dashes AUTOMAGICALLY means you used Chatty Geepts, Cope Pilot, Clawed, or some other AI to generate your post. 

How dare you!

Yes. I generated my LinkedOn, FaseBok, or InstantGram post – which got three whole likes (and a retwit from someone in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia!) – with [enter your AI], and will now use my newfound glory to take over the world!

Things are going to start happening to me, now! (*cue evil laughter*).

Here’s the kicker (<— a phrase of which our good friend, Chatty Geepts is quite fond).

I don’t use AI to generate content. Ask anyone I write with. Ask my bosses at my various jobs over the years who have suffered through my weekly status updates (one of them said “You don’t write updates. You write Testaments).

I LIKE to write. Why would I give that up?

But also: I use AI to evaluate some of what I write. It gives me good feedback, helps me see my blind spots, and in a pinch, it can help me spell words like “pulchritudinous” AND find ways to work it into a post! That works for me. 

I’m not judge-y. If someone out there can find a way to make their ideas make sense by prompting AI, so much the better. It’s just a faster and more efficient way for all the Stephen King clones or Stack Overflow Engineers that had already been flooding the market for decades to keep on doing what they’re doing. 

If you’re not using AI to help your job in SOME way, you’re going to be the guy in waist-high pants and thick glasses, screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn, and that’s going to happen fast. 

AI is innovative, but true, revolutionary innovation still exists solely in the human realm. It might evolve one day, but if we ever DO get to a point where the robots are more creative than us—hell, that sounds like a party to me. 

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The Oath of Humane Intelligence

As we stand on the threshold of a new era defined by artificial intelligence, we must recognize that the tools we create are not neutral. They reflect our values, our blind spots, and our ambitions.

Inspired by the Hippocratic Oath of medicine, this oath is a call to conscience for those who build, shape, and deploy intelligent systems. It is not a legal code or a technical specification, but a personal and professional commitment: to put humanity at the center of innovation, to wield power with humility, and to ensure that intelligence, no matter how artificial, serves the common good.

This is The Oath of Humane Intelligence.

I swear to uphold this oath with honesty and humility, to the best of my knowledge and judgment, and in the service of humanity:

I will not create or deploy artificial intelligence systems that cause unnecessary harm, knowing that power without purpose invites destruction.

I will treat data as I would treat people: with dignity, care, and respect for consent, privacy, and the stories behind the numbers.

I will design, code, and deploy AI with humility, acknowledging the limits of my knowledge, the complexity of human systems, and the unintended consequences that may follow.

I will seek collaboration with ethicists, artists, philosophers, and the communities most impacted by the technologies I help create, recognizing that intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is not neutral.

I will not allow my tools to be used for oppression, manipulation, surveillance without accountability, or war without conscience.

I will champion transparency, interpretability, and fairness, and resist the allure of black-box power that cannot be explained or controlled.

I will measure success not in profit or efficiency alone, but in how the systems I build expand human flourishing, protect the vulnerable, and enrich our shared future.

Should I fail to live by this oath, I welcome scrutiny and accountability from my peers and from the public I serve.

In all things, I will remember that intelligence without compassion is merely calculation, and that the true test of wisdom is not what I can build, but whether the world is better because I built it.

— — —

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be” – Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

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The Suspenders of Time

Every few years (usually when I’m already teetering on the edge of emotional ruin) this picture pops up in my digital memories like a ghost in a thrift-store frame. It’s from my Aunt’s wedding: a time when perms were plentiful and the color blue was available only in “electric.”

There we are, my sister with a hairstyle that’s classified as its own municipality, my mom in mid-floral renaissance, my dad channeling Tom Selleck if Tom Selleck had worked in corporate accounting, and me, front and center, with a bowl haircut so hemispheric it could’ve doubled as NORAD’s backup radar dome. My outfit, which I can only assume was chosen by a rogue haberdasher on the run from the fashion police, included teal and turquoise color blocking and suspenders so wide they had their own zip code.

For years, I used to share this picture every time it resurfaced. I’d post it with captions like “The Hair That Ate Cincinnati” or “When Moustaches Ruled the World.” Friends would laugh, strangers would comment “iconic,” and someone would inevitably ask if the picture had been Photoshopped (now, AI-generated) to look “extra 1980s.”

But lately, when the photo pops up, I don’t share it. Not right away, anyway.

Because these days, I don’t just see the comedy. I see the loss. My dad, still sharp, still funny, is now in his seventies. We talk every weekend. He always picks up whenI call, but it still feels like we should talk more often. He lives iwth my sister and her family a thousand miles away. She’s busy raising her own family. Neither of us are the kids we used to be.

And my mom? She’s been gone for five years now. Some days, I can still hear her voice in the back of my mind, clear as a bell. Other days, I have to dig through old voicemails or grainy videos to conjure even the sound of her laughter. That’s the part nobody warns you about, how even voices fade if you don’t keep them alive somehow.

The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away, yes. But the Lord doesn’t hold a candle to Time. Time is a petty thief with excellent patience and no sense of remorse. He’s the kind of houseguest who doesn’t just steal your silverware, he takes your stories, your smells, the way your mom’s perfume used to linger in the hallway. All of it. You don’t even notice at first, until you look up and realize everything’s been rearranged and half your furniture is missing.

So I hold my kids tighter now. I listen to their nonsense stories about Minecraft and fart jokes as if they were poetry. I smile more often than I want to, which is saying something for a man whose resting b**** face looks like it was rear-ended in traffic. And I pose for the pictures. Every one of them. Silly ones. Unflattering ones. Photos where I’m wearing a Star Wars shirt and crocs with socks. Because one day, I want my kids to have something to look back on, to laugh at, to share. I want to be their moustached memory, their suspenders-wearing dad in a photo that’s both ridiculous and deeply, achingly dear.

Because in the end, it’s not about how we looked. It’s about what we still see.

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Colors That Curl Into Smoke

The invitation read:

“Flag Retirement Ceremony. 10am. Bring your old, worn flags and your sense of gratitude.”

Gratitude I had. Several worn flags I had. What I lacked was a sense of how exactly this would go. The words flag retirement ceremony sound official, vaguely military, and not entirely suited for a man like me whose idea of ceremony is remembering to stand up during the National Anthem while balancing a cup of overpriced ballpark beer.

But my wife, ever the optimist, saw it as an opportunity: “it’s service,” she saif. “It’ll be good for the kids,” she said, loading the car with all the enthusiasm of a woman who has wrangled five children into church pews, dentist chairs, and trips to Disney World without losing a single one.

So there we were: me, my wife, and our five children, arriving at a small local park like the opening scene of a patriotic sitcom. The Florida sun was in full, blazing glory, hitting its peak over a row of pines. The local scout troops were already there, my kids now among them, organizing a stack of folded, faded American flags that looked like they’d seen more history than most of the people holding them.

Flag Day gets short shrift in our country. It’s lost in thw shuffle between the end of school and the beginning of summer. The 4th of July gets all the attention with loud fireworks, parades, hot dogs, and the kids arguing over who got to wave the biggest flag at the parade route. Flag Day is different. Quieter. The kind of quiet that makes you nervous at first, until you realize you’re supposed to feel something. Then, you do.

A Vietnam veteran with a silver beard and pressed slacks talked to my kids as we presented our pile of flags for returement. His voice was gravelly but warm. 

“These flags have served their purpose,” he said. “They’ve flown over homes, schools, and cemeteries. They’ve seen weddings, funerals, homecomings, and heartbreak.”

I looked down at my kids, standing in a row like Russian nesting dolls. The oldest trued looking stoic. The youngest cartwheeled around like she had discovered a new form of transportation. One of the middle kids mouted the Pledge of Allegiance as it was being recited, the words half-learned, half-invented.

One by one, families stepped forward to deliver their flags. Some were frayed at the edges, others nearly pink from too much Florida sun. Person after person carefully laid each flag onto the fire, where they folded into themselves, flames curling the fabric, their work done, an exhalation after a long shift, the end of watch. 

Our turn came. We stepped up together, each holding our flag across our hearts as we had been instructed in accordance with the proper procedures Official ceremony

We placed our flags on the edge of the flame. For a moment, they resisted, like they wanted to cling to existence. Then they surrendered, red, white, and blue curling into orange and black.

There’s something haunting about burning a flag. You’re told all your life to treat it with respect, to never let it touch the ground, to fold it with precision as though your mistakes might dishonor the nation and the sacrifices if thise who gave their all for the freedoms it represents. Now here we were, watching ours go up in smoke, not out of disrespect, but as an act of reverence. An ending done the right way.

The kids stood quietly. Those in scout uniforms saluted. I don’t know what exactly they were feeling. I barely knew what I was feeling. Pride, certainly. Sadness, maybe. Gratitude, definitely.

Summer holidays often trick us into thinking patriotism is fireworks and cookouts, that loving your country means singing along to Lee Greenwood and wearing flag-print board shorts. But standing there, watching our flags retire into flame, I was reminded that it’s also about endings. About change. About remembering that this nation, like the tattered flag I retired, has been through a lot, is going through a lot, and that burning amd retiring a flag properly is not erasing its story but honoring the fact that its story was worth telling in the first place.

In the moments after the ceremony, the kids buzzing again with energy, I glanced at my wife and said, “That was actually kind of beautiful.”

She smiled. “See? I told you it would be good for the kids.”

It was good for me, too.

Maybe this is how we shoukd remember our origins, not just with the noise and the parades, but with the quiet, with the letting go, with the understanding that even in the act of retiring an old flag, we’re recommitting ourselves to the idea that this country, for all its frayed edges and faded colors, is still worth standing up for. 

Happy Flag Day.

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Rites of Manhood

When I was a child, my Saturdays were not filled with joy. No cartoons. No baseball. No running through the yard with a stick I had declared to be a sword, a lightsaber, and an anti-zombie defense device all in one. My Saturdays were reserved for a sacred ritual known in our house as shopping.

Not just any shopping; Mom and sister shopping. You have not known endurance until you’ve spent five hours trailing behind two women comparing fifty shades of beige shoes. 

As a child, I believed shoes came in two styles: ones you put on your feet and ones you didn’t. But apparently, there’s a third style: ones you almost buy and then leave in a pile next to rack, muttering, “I wish they had these in taupe.”

I remember one afternoon at JCPenney that felt longer than most presidential terms. My mother and sister tried on everything – skirts, tops, dresses, shoes, belts, possibly a toaster oven – while I sat in a plastic chair shaped like a broken promise. I was ten. I had needs. Like pretzels and air conditioning. But instead, I was stuck there, trying to disappear into a rack of discounted scarves like a traumatized meerkat.

That afternoon was an eternity. 

Eventually, I grew up, became a man,  discovered deodorant and cynicism. Shopping with mom and sis became less frequent. I found freedom. I entered stores that catered to men. Dark, quiet places that smelled of cedar and body wash with names like “Thunderwolf” and “Crisis Response.”

I thought I was safe.

Then I got married, and the torture began anew.

Only this time, it was more sophisticated. Gone were the days of Claire’s and Limited Too. Now, I was subjected to Williams Sonoma and searches for cast iron Dutch ovens that cost more than a semester of college.

And I cared. That’s the terrifying part. I actually had opinions now.

“No, babe, I don’t think the eight-piece ceramic pan set is worth it if the handles can’t go in the oven. I mean, what if we want to sear and roast?”

Who had I become?

Then there were the questions. The questions no man is prepared for. The kind that make you feel like you’re defusing a bomb.


“Does this skirt make my hips look bad?”

Internal monologue: What is the correct answer? What is the safe answer? Is there a safe answer?

I would answer delicately, diplomatically, only for her to buy the exact opposite of what I had suggested.

“I just wanted to see what you thought,” she’d say, handing the cashier the dress that I said looked like it was designed by a hungover pilgrim.


And then I’d carry the bag.

Over the years, I grew numb to it. I’d mastered the art of standing quietly in the corner of some oddly named department store or biutique, holding a purse and trying to look like I belonged. I found ways to cope: pretending to text, counting ceiling tiles, seeing how many times I could hum the Knight Rider theme song before anyone noticed.

At least I’m not being asked to waste my Saturday replacing a perfectly operational ceiling fan, I argued to myself. That felt like growth. Maturity. Marriage.

And then, we had sons. Little boys. Innocent spirits. Joyful, Free.

Until one Saturday, I watched as they followed their mother into a candle store. They made it two steps in before their eyes glazed over like cinnamon rolls at a state fair.


“Why are there so many smells?” one whispered, clutching my leg like a child in a haunted house. I knelt down and looked him in the eye. 

This is how it starts.”

I realized then that life is a cycle. Once, rites of passage for men meant hunting, battle, building fires with flint and rage. Now it’s about enduring Marshalls on a Saturday. About pretending to be excited over shams. (Pillow shams. Not like, actual lies. Though honestly, they feel like both.)

We don’t track game anymore. We track sales on cookware. We don’t bring home meat. We bring home area rugs.

It’s a rite born not out of necessity, but out of love. And I suppose that’s somehow beautiful. Maybe. 

But sometimes, when I’ve been wandering behind a cart in HomeGoods for an hour, trying to understand the metaphysical difference between “seafoam green” and “ocean breeze,” I find myself yearning for a lion to fight or a mountain to climb. Anything that doesn’t involve decorative gourds.

And then I see my son, ten years old, holding a candle labeled “Autumn Whispers,” looking like he just lost custody of his soul, and I put a hand on his shoulder.

“This,” I say, “is the cost of love. Hang in there, buddy. Someday, you’ll care about ceramic pans too.”

“On that day, you will be a man.”