There are certain private events happening in my life right now and as much as I’d love to write a complete expose with names, dates and time stamps, I wouldn’t want to be dragged into court and have someone put a lien on half my nothing. I have nothing and I’d like to hold on to all of that if possible.These days, it would not surprise me to find out someone was challenging my rights to my nothing because I was six days late paying my last installment for nothing.

What I can do is make certain observations about my new experiences that may help you, too, if you find yourself to have been fortunate enough to date or (God forbid) marry someone who never does anything wrong.

Look, I get it if your initial reaction is, “Someone who does nothing wrong? Oh, I wouldn’t like that at all.” I think many people, at first blush, would feel the same way; but I challenge you to open your mind to the possibilities. And, if you are having trouble imagining all the benefits to such an arrangement (which I fear you might) I made it a point to compile a listicle of the very many advantages.

1-Joy of Eternal Moral Inferiority - Nothing is more unpleasant than a couple having an argument. If I remember correctly, arguments were really where a majority of my trauma was rooted. I’d hide and listen and wonder if my father was going to kill my mother. Or why she was crying so guttural and histrionic. One can easily avoid all of that messiness by accepting all the blame for everything all the time. If both parties accept their assigned roles, arguing becomes unnecessary.

2-Rubber Stamping the Apology Process-don’t laugh. Many businesses have discovered that, as unnatural and corny as it sounds, scripts work. Mine, and hopefully yours someday is as follows: Of course, you’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. Can I get you an ice cream?

3-Decision Making Absolution- I’m sure you’ve read somewhere that the world’s most successful people, good presidents, and billionaire investors all have one uncanny secret in common: they eat the same shit every day. Why? Because decision making is expensive and your brain goes out daily with a limited purse. Now, you’ll be freed up to pursue vast wealth because you won’t be wasting your time with the minutiae that goes on in the household.

4-Flawless Memory Retention- Remember that time in October when you said something curt and dismissive to your wife? Or when you could’ve been in a better mood at a social gathering around the holidays? No? It’s fine. This partner has it all down as a matter of record. Again, freeing up your capacity for more important issues.

5-Your Very Own Example of Objective Perfection- There are very few things left that can be considered perfect by all who witness it: the moon, Paris, the sound of the ocean at night, all very beautiful but also all too large to fit in bed with you. Not your spouse, though. They will happily provide the yardstick by which to measure all efforts.

6-Daily Performance Reviews-Let’s be honest: most of us have enough on our plate without taking on the deficiencies of other people. This can be inconvenient if one is uncertain of their own output and desire an honest assessment. Every. God. Damn. Day.

7-Instant Blame Distribution- Have you ever noticed how when someone screws the pooch, the first question people always ask is, “who did it?” It’s almost as if the process of repair can not even be started until everyone knows who’s fault something is. I see this at work every day. Now, with a fixed answer, repair can begin a lot quicker.

8-Win The Adoration of Family You Hate- Another thing that happens more often than not is how family—especially those members you truly can’t stand—reach out to tell you how perfect your perfect partner is. Then, they’ll throw in an absent minded “don’t screw this up, too.” Absent-minded because #7.

9-Never Having To Watch Someone Grow- Growth is unpredictable and growth is messy. It can arrive in so many different forms, too. Near Death Experiences. Car accidents. Most of it very ugly. With a partner who is utterly perfect, you can avoid having to see any of that. Leaving you to focus primarily on what you should focus on: the vast amount of growth you definitely need.

10-You Are Always The Dynamic Character- Perfection has its place, but in terms of movies and fiction, very few characters are this way. How can someone starting perfect go anywhere from there? They don’t. You, on the other hand, you are so unpredictable. One minute you can be the worst coward on the planet, the next, the most abusive. Your range will be incredible.

Which leads me to this final point: if you have been lucky enough to marry a perfect man or woman, show a little gratitude. Perfection has a cost. Remember the character Sidney from Tom Sawyer? Or Felix Unger from The Odd Couple? It’s not a very fun lot in life.

But someone has to do it.

Anyone who has ever owned a Keurig for more than five years knows there’s going to be that awful morning when you put the plastic shot glass in, push down the cover, press the button and viola! Steam and hot water go in five different directions.

There are stages to it, really. First, “F&%$, there’s hot water everywhere!” As you rush around trying to clean up, you notice you are quite tired. The second stage is “F&%$, I can’t even make a damn coffee.” This leads you to other things you can’t do. You check your pockets and realize (Stage 3) “F&%$, I don’t have $5 to go blowing on crappy store bought mud.”

From there, the fourth and final stage, “F&%$, I don’t have $85 to buy a new Keurig.” My guess is, with the way the economy is going, there’s going to be an awful lot of small French Presses and Chinese drip makers being sold in place of the Chinese Keurigs.

My soon to be ex-wife used to give our Keurig a long and cruel work day. Oftentimes I’d see the poor thing sweating, hiding in the corner by the microwave, screaming at me, “Can you ask her to have an ice tea every once in a while!” Now that she is gone, my new routine is to wake up, walk out to the kitchen, ask the seafoam colored machine nicely if she’s going to break, would she mind getting this one last cup out before doing so and then letting her rip.

I guess I feel exactly like that about the one and only marriage I was ever involved in, too. Like with the Keurig, you hope the marriage will last forever. And like with the Keurig, you know it won’t. But if you’re in love, the way my wife was with the Keurig, you don’t spend much time thinking about how and when it’s going to end. As far as why it’s going to end, I believe most of us can answer after the first date. Or the first cup, as it were.

My friend from Woodstock called to remind me that all pain is born from attachment and even though I’ve been a shitty friend to everyone for the last two years, they are all still there for me when I need them.

And he knew I needed them.

To be serious for a moment, I am having a “bottom” but it is one of the strangest I’ve ever had. I did not go off the deep end. With anything besides money. When I got myself up to six figures for the first time, I did not have that important knowledge that every Buddhist and every Keurig owner knows. Everything has an ending.

Let me just add how cruel the irony is that I finally reached that milestone and was able to continue that lifestyle for exactly one year. There is something that feels very unfair about that.

And speaking of unfair, I was millimeters away from having a better paying job doing Class A work, but when the company called the SAP counselor (who basically forced me to sign her on) decided to ignore them all week and they, in turn, told me they have to pass.

She wrote to me last night to tell me that she was in the hospital and my life decisions are not her fault.

Well, she isn’t lying.

That is, except for the decision to assign her as my counselor. Had I signed with anyone else, finding an apartment would be a little easier. Perhaps it’s God just telling me that He thinks I can do better than “easier.” Or maybe it’s Buddha reminding me that all pain is borne from attachment. Or maybe, the universe keeps trying to teach me the same lessons and I’m just not catching on.

I’m kidding. It’s none of that. The solution to the puzzle is that we live in chaos and the harder we try to fight against that chaos, the less peace we will have. “Embrace the complete senselessness of life,” I seem to hear the universe say, “You’re already dead”.

(I shoot a look at the universe.)

“In a matter of speaking.”

I ran into Joe Piscopo on Route 208 during the winter of 2016. I was getting a slice at Tosca’s and he pulled his Yellow Freight rig into the shoulder to do the same thing. We worked together twice in the past. I was a salesman at Heart VW and he was a service writer and later, when I moved to Johnson Ford, he began his job there as a service writer a few months later. So, of course, it made all the sense in the world that we were both Class A truck drivers at that point.

I’m kidding. It would be like working with someone as a roadie at Coachella and then bumping into them again at the Greater Rockland Fencing Club. Still, you will need to suspend disbelief for a minute and believe me when I tell you that I ran into a guy named Joe Piscopo at the pizza place across the street from the Wallkill Correctional Facility and he was now a truck driver just like me.

Well, the point of the story was that he was not just like me. I had just gotten fired from JB Hunt when a Long Island supermarket decided that my day cab tractor caused $70,000 worth of structural damage to their building. From coupling to a trailer. In February. On ice.

Don’t blame me. And don’t act all surprised that this kind of stuff happens. It happens every day.

At the time, I was taking home about $800 a week. Joe gave me the ol’ Jackie Gleason “a mere bag of shells” speech and told me what he was making at Yellow. $28 an hour. Overtime after eight hours every day. Free Blue Cross PPO for me AND the girls. Saturdays and Sundays off. And on and on.

There was one catch: in order to get a job with a company like that, you needed every endorsement. Even though most of them can be gotten with a written test, the Hazmat endorsement is no joke. It’s equivalent to any early college level test on Chemistry. Plus, it was a real commitment. You needed to pay for a background check and fingerprints and all kinds of Homeland Security scrutinization.

This was, of course, just to become qualified to work there. There was no guarantee that anyone was going to give me the job even if I did all that. The only guarantee that I did have was that I definitely was not going to get that job unless I had those endorsements so, I said to myself as I have said so many times in the past, get to steppin’.

This goal I put in front of myself gave me somewhere to put that love instead of leaving it stranded.

Total elapsed time from running into Joe Piscopo to being hired at Yellow Freight: four months.

I write this because I think it’s important for people to understand that sometimes the people closest to you — a partner, even family — will not love you the way you need. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, especially if other people in your life do love you well. It’s a strange kind of loyalty, pleading for love from someone who happens to share a name or a bed with you, while love that’s actually being offered sits there unused.

The only reason we’re on earth is to love others — not to make them love us back. If your love is rejected, spread it elsewhere, to whoever needs and appreciates it. Wasting your life trying to earn love from people who won’t give it is tragic. You could be doing something so much more important.

She knew, whatever it was, it was going to be interesting. Sammy had been stuttering and sweating for the last half hour.

“I’ll give you $300 to fuck me.”

She smiled and said she had a better idea.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Why don’t you give me $400 and I don’t tell HR you just asked me that.”

It’s been some time since I have written anything for Substack. Or worked on the second draft of my novel. Or wrote music. Or picked up the guitar. And if you know me—even superficially—you know that my stumbling onto this mysterious pattern (or lack of pattern) was exactly the sort of thing I loved to sink my teeth into.

I thought, “Let’s find a stupefying and heart breaking through line—an underlying reason for all of these blocks that expose the truth I’ve been artfully avoiding!

Is it substance abuse?

I wish. I don’t even have the access to establish a halfway decent dope habit if I wanted to.

Is it work?

No. At least, not in the traditional way that “work” robs us of our souls.

Ah, it must be the compensation.

What compensation?

Exactly.

I have been taking home a little more than half of what I was making at Tesla. But it’s not even just Tesla. Before then, Yellow Freight and JB Hunt provided between $85-95K per year, decent health insurance, benefits and pay.

This new job I have in Lake Katrine is…not that. It’s a $55K/yr job with useless health insurance that carries a $4000 deductible. This is what I reaped as a result of a failed drug test.

Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that the amount of stress I put up with as a Class A driver was of greater consequence than the pee test. In other words, if stopping THC was the lone barrier to my lifelong happiness, I could find the energy to rectify that.

I experienced a “Dark Five Minutes of the Soul” and came out of the closet as a non truck driver. Say it loud, say it proud. With the people on the road, the way they drive their cars, I just cannot put myself in such a no win situation day after day. Statistically, it was only really a matter of time before I witnessed or experienced something that would alter my machinery a little too much.

The problem with that is that I constructed a $105,000 a year life and that deficit is winding up on credit cards. A wonderful system of finance where the poorest of the population pay $2 for every $1 they borrow.

I don’t want to spend too much time lamenting how terrible it is that we are expected to work seven days a week if we want to survive, but that’s what it’s come to. I think that’s the hidden factor, really. Those other jobs I mentioned, while they may not have been seven days a week, they might as well have been. By the time you woke up and felt like doing anything, it was time to go back to work.

And I can feel this in my body. I’m not working enough to survive. Too much contemplation and not enough action. Unfortunately, it’s the action that keeps the landlord from hounding you in the parking lot every time you come home from work or go to get your mail.

Last week, my boss sent me a message regarding my working a few hours every single day to add to my schedule. I nearly cried with relief. This was obviously the answer to all of my prayers.

That idea lasted four days. Now he’s ignoring my texts. Me and Julie are just laying here in bed trying to figure out how it’s all going to happen.

If I learned anything writing for Elephant Journal, it was that one should end every piece with a payoff. A call to action. A lesson. A moral.

With this in mind, I will end this valiant effort by saying:

To be continued…

When I was growing up, I was taught (or, you might even say, indoctrinated to believe) that the choices my father made were completely normal. Expected, really. And because he never talked to me, I would receive all of this information about his life second hand. It was like I lived with this tribe, the leader of which was an evil and mythical figure. My mom served as this medicine man who sat around the campfire at night and told us numerous origin stories to explain, and more importantly justify, why our leader was to be pitied, revered and understood.

Factually, it goes like this: my dad, armed with no more than dumb luck, inherited a retail store as a young man in his twenties. For some reason he never paid his taxes. This led to federal and state agencies liquidating his assets and shutting him down.

Okay. Bonehead move. But the guy was young. I think he was only about 30 when he went Chapter 13. The legend we were taught came with the implicit idea that it was completely understandable for a man to give up entirely on life at thirty years old. There was nothing strange about it. Nor was it any surprise that he spent his remaining twenty years waiting to die and making life dark for anyone trying to live. She spoke of it like it was a matter of course.

Personally, if it was me, I am not sure I’d want to teach my children that giving up was a natural part of life. Unfortunately, teaching was not what my parents seemed to be interested in. Running a PR campaign to explain and excuse all of the terrible crap they did seemed like the priority. This is why your father never talks to you. This is why your father is so awful to be around. This is why your father comes in the house like a black cloud every day.

So, the end result was that I was expected to look past the inferno of resentment I was carrying by eight years old and, like I said, feel sorry for my father. And, of course I did. No one wants to be ostracized from “the group.” But I was always still a little angry. When is someone going to feel sorry for me? Where’s my advocate?

These are obviously not very evolved sentiments, but they seem perfectly natural coming from a child.

Almost anyone who has ever grown up in a less than desirable situation will say the same thing. As a child, the information given to you by your parents may as well have been etched into stone by God. Teachers, neighbors, outsiders — they could never understand private family secrets.

I’m finally beginning to understand why they would never understand. Because it was ludicrous and damaging.

Now, if you ever brought up The Brady Bunch or something, the stock answer was always that that was “fantasy” and “no family is really like that ha ha ha.” But think about what was being compared. I wasn’t getting on my parents’ case because I wanted to live in a luxurious home in Santa Monica. I was looking at parents taking a sincere interest in their child. I was looking at parents taking a moment from their day to walk to their child’s bedroom and ask them what was wrong. Apparently, this was too fantastic to expect from anyone.

I think this likely led to my constantly getting involved with people who didn’t really care about me. The common wisdom is that we subconsciously tend to seek out familiar pain when looking for a partner.

It makes sense. My kid’s mother was exactly like my parents in many ways. They have their priorities and they make no secret that you are not one of them.

All of this only came to me when I began to write about what me and Julie have been facing, at least financially, over this past year. The seed of the thought came from realizing that my parents would have needed to be committed if they were faced with what I’m facing now. Not because it’s so catastrophic — though it’s been genuinely hard — but because they had no capacity for difficulty that didn’t confirm their worst suspicions about the world. Every setback was proof. Every struggle was evidence. They were collectors of grievance, and they were very good at their work.

I think about that a lot when things get tight. When the numbers don’t add up and I’m doing that mental math at two in the morning that never, ever helps. I think: my father would have been insufferable right now. He would have made everyone in the house feel it. The darkness was always shared property.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Julie and I are still here. We’re not performing okayness for each other. We’re not pretending. And we’re not making the other person carry our resentment like luggage they didn’t pack. Somewhere in the middle of all this, we figured out how to sit with hard things without turning them into a mythology.

We came to realize that even when we’re behind the eight ball financially, it doesn’t really matter. We have something so valuable and precious, there is no business owner or boss on earth that could give it to us or take it away from us. We have the truest and strongest of all loves and, because of this, when we look around, we see a lot more than the multitude who have more possessions and money than we do. We see the millions who have less. This puts one in a place of gratitude instead of envy.

And this is the whole point.

There’s a certain kind of person who, when accused of something, immediately begins searching for the ways in which it might be true. I’m one of those people . I came by it honestly — years of recovery work will do that to a person. You get so good at owning your part that you become an easy target. Someone hands you a story about yourself and you believe it. Alcoholics Anonymous is just a masterclass in self flagellation and a good student happily accepts their myriad flaws from friends and strangers alike.

It took me two years to put down a story that was never mine to carry.

The story was this: I was the terrible father. The one who doesn’t call. Doesn’t send a card on his kids’ birthdays. The one who just disappeared.

Here is what I actually know to be true. I picked those kids up every single weekend for seven years. This was after working fifty hours a week driving for Yellow Freight. Every weekend. Two days. Activities planned, money spent, showing up.

A person doesn’t just stop doing that. It makes no sense. If you want to understand someone’s relationship with their children, don’t listen to what gets said about them in a difficult moment. Look at seven years of Saturdays and Sundays.

At any point, their mother could have helped. That’s not an accusation — it’s just true. She could have agreed to family counseling one of the seventy times I begged for that. She could have, at least, fostered goodwill. She has immense control over those children. She could have made it easier instead of harder. None of those things happened. And if a parent’s greatest concern is genuinely their children’s welfare, that’s a strange set of choices.

What I was told, essentially, was that I needed to win my children back. To pursue them. To demonstrate remorse loudly enough and long enough that they’d eventually let me in. What I was not willing to do was beg. And that unwillingness became the evidence against me.

But here’s what I want you to notice. Begging was the only method ever offered. There was no counseling, no facilitated conversation, no neutral third party. Just — grovel, and maybe something changes. That’s not accountability. That’s a performance. She also knows me well enough to know I’d never agree to that, so make of that what you will.

When I was still living there, I was heading to work at 2 am (like any other deadbeat dad) and I hit a patch of black ice. My Saab went into the mountain wall at sixty miles an hour. Totaled. Two hours later a family friend called and told me she had a Subaru with plates on it, and that I could pay her a hundred dollars a week until it was paid off. I had never experienced anything like that in my life.

I thought about that for a long time afterward. It made me painfully aware of how different people can show up in the world. On one side, you have the person with the parents, friends, community, and people who show up materially when things go wrong. And on the other side, you have the introvert whose parents are both dead who needed to become resourceful to survive.

Resourceful, as in, constantly making something out of nothing.

And please—I am not feeling sorry for myself. I prefer not to rely on anyone. That’s not even uncommon. My point is that when it comes to these sorts of banal wars of suburban America, some people are better equipped.

Narratives don’t write themselves. They get written by people, and people with more people behind them write louder ones.

It took me two years to see all of this. Two years of carrying a story that had been handed to me, turning it over, looking for the ways it might be true. That’s what I do. That’s what a lot of us do — people who’ve bought into the whole twelve step trip, who’ve sat in enough rooms to know that the first place you look when something goes wrong is the mirror.

That instinct is not a flaw. It’s actually good. But it has a shadow side, and the shadow side is this: it makes you vulnerable to people who know how to use it. Hand a conscientious person a narrative about their own failure and they’ll carry it for you indefinitely, free of charge.

If you’re someone who always looks in the mirror first, this is for you. At some point the mirror has to show you something true. And what’s true is not always what you’ve been told.

What the mirror finally showed me was seven years. Seven years of Saturdays. A person who shows up. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been. The story was never mine — I just carried it long enough that I forgot I had a choice.

Much in the same way that a dog experiencing flatulence is the harbinger of the leash and the doo doo bag, an article where I question the Deadbeat Dad narrative I’ve been anchored to for the past few years will almost always inspire my ex’s childhood (and childish) friend, who we’ll refer to as Prudence to create a Substack profile for her vibrator or her curling iron for the sole purpose of running me down in the comments section.

I imagine her sitting on her very intentionally selected sofa with The Kardashians droning in the background, composing the comment and taking all these self inflicted dopamine shots every time she believed she said something particularly poignant or cutting. All while soothing herself with the idea that she owned a hand selected Persian sofa.

Her husband takes the morning train, he works from 9 to 5 each day. He may wear a Brooks Brothers on the weekdays, but on the weekend, it’s a pair of perfectly fitted Levi’s and the Mercyful Fate Concert Jersey from the Melissa tour that he picked up on eBay for $500.

I give her credit. She was the only one out of her friend group who understood that no one ever accomplishes anything unless they’re 100% focused on what they want. Case in point, she wanted a split level colonial on the south shore of Long Island and she chose the one dude who could get it for her. Everything according to plan.

Opportunistic tendencies aside, I deleted the comment and Marisol Montoya’s fake profile and I kept it moving.

I need to try to explain Prudence to you. It’s quite possible you may never have seen anything like this in the past. I know I never did.

Prudence is the alpha in her clique and she grew up surrounded by girls her own age who worshipped her like she was an exalted cult hero. There was never too much in the way of tangible creative output or anything to warrant such pedestal putting, but it might have something to do with the fact that she’s famous. Word on the street is that her grandfather invented the Crazy Straw ™️; although, this can be neither verified or disproven just yet.

She has two siblings and when you get the three of them together at social events, you’ll find yourself turning green.

Not with envy. With nausea.

My amateur detective skills tell me that their childhoods were ablaze with positive reinforcement. A lot of it.

Have you ever seen people bask in delusional glory? It’s giving Barney Fife from the Andy Griffith Show.

.And the fact that they gossip about celebrities using first names only. As if being remotely tied to the inventor of the Crazy Straw™️gives you eternal membership to the great green room of life.

I blame this kind of thing on the geography. When I moved here from Long Island in 1990, there were a few things about the place that I didn’t trust. First, they were all still into “punk.” Not Agnostic Front, Cromags and Crumbsuckers punk. 1977 Sex Pistols, Circle Jerks. Dead Kennedys punk. It was like time kept marching ahead without them.

The other thing was how nurturing parents were to their kids. They were so encouraging, it was nauseating. Going to their kids gigs at the local clubs, helping them flyer telephone poles, buying them decent instruments. None of it is fertile ground for creativity

Say what you will, but I am convinced that art created by children who were made fun of and discouraged has a depth and a beauty that a well adjusted denizen will never reach.. It would be like trying to reach the moon with a…Crazy Straw™️

All humor aside, I did notice something about the net effect of getting anonymously ambushed like that. It might have had a much bigger effect on everyone than the “writer” imagined.

I went to work overnight and ruminated on the three or four words I did pick up before I deleted the comment. This, as you might imagine, led to my making dumb mistakes. Any of those dumb mistakes could have resulted in my losing my job. Once that happens, I am fairly certain that it’s going to be a very long time before my ex sees any money. I’ll be 56 next month. I can promise, I will not be running out and getting the next job that comes down the pike.

With the way the world is right now, as satisfying as it might feel to twist one’s maladaptive knife into someone else, it will not be quite as satisfying as that money every week.

Now, of course, it would be tragic for me–but I would, at least, face my catastrophe all the better in the knowledge that Ms. Do Good did the worst thing one person can do to another: cut off their no strings attached supply of cash.

My days of engaging in this fight or caring what people’s perceptions of me, are long gone. At this point, I am satisfied that God knows all the players and all the sides to the story and I am not interested in trying to convince anyone of anything.

If there ever was a time in my life where belief in an omnipotent all-seeing God was necessary, this was it. Ask anyone who is or was being gas lit by unscrupulous partners or family members. You eventually reach a point where the only thing left that gives even a modicum of hope is that God knows the whole story. God sees all.

I’ve noticed, especially the few times I’ve sat in traffic at the George Washington Bridge this week, that people are usually their own worst enemies. Whenever traffic comes to a standstill, there are always a dozen drivers who use the highway entrance ramps or shoulders to try and cut the line by a few car lengths. This phenomenon usually turns a ten minute delay into a forty minute delay.

How can I be so sure? Because as a tractor trailer driver, I have used the enormity of my vehicle to block that sort of “cut the line” bullshit. It was shown to me by the instructor I was fortunate enough to have at my first trucking company. Every time I’ve been able to successfully block those line cutters, I’ve watched traffic start to magically dissipate until, after a very few minutes, the log jam begins to move at an ever-quickening pace.

The problem is you could never convince people that they’d be better off just staying where they are. All day long I watch people in cars dart from lane to lane like frenetic squirrels, tailgating, road raging, changing lanes—to do what exactly? I’m not sure. One only needs to pay attention to their GPS to see that the net result of driving like a complete maniac will save you less than three minutes on your arrival time. But it will increase your chances of having a D.O. in front of your A when all is said and done.

But this is just a colorful explanation for a much larger issue. Most of us have been at this crossroads before. The 2 am conversation with AI: why are people so stupid? Or, if we’re feeling more charitable, why are people so bent on self sabotage?

I heard a comedian once riff on the fact that dumb people used to live in “pockets” where wiser people would hear their ill informed opinion and ask them to politely shut up. With the advent of the internet, these pockets have transformed into “communities”. There is strength in numbers. The proof I offer–and I don’t even have to look this up–is the fact that there are more people who question the shape of the earth, the moon landing and the Holocaust today than there were, say, in the eighties. I’d go so far to say exponentially more.

One tin foil hat is comic relief, a million tin foil hats can blind people if the sun hits them just right. Still, if the average person sought out objective truth with half as much fervor as they seek out a viable sex partner, they’d be able to find it. You just need to know how to look. One can actually use Chat GTP to give them an unbiased and objective answer to a question. I do it all the time.

Why, just the other day I was sitting there typing “why are people so stupid?”

Insert Borscht Belt night club drummer doing a rimshot.

But seriously folks, it’s hard not to believe that we don’t live on a very silly and oftentimes, sad planet. If there weren’t so many beautiful souls walking around amongst us, I’d be convinced of it.

I often wonder if I see more love and community in places like Italy, France and Portugal because that’s what I’m always looking for over there. I have read enough self-help and motivational books to always question these things. I see acts of selflessness and kindness every day, too. That’s the national anthem I’d rather be singing. The one where you use your truck, or your hands or your two cents to move things forward for hundreds of people who aren’t even paying attention.

Working overnights in sub-zero temperatures has not been easy. Crossing my fingers and hoping to get to the end of the week before seeing the words “insufficient funds” has not been easy. Living with another person in a one room studio has not been easy. This winter has sucked. Bad. The fact that I have not been very impressive to my new employer has not been easy, either. Going without therapy because of finances has made it all a little worse.

So, when you take all of those variables and then add one more–that being a notice from the IRS that your refund is taking longer to process because it needs to be gone over a little more stringently–you can probably imagine what that might do to a person. From the outside, it might appear to people as mysterious how one notice from the IRS could send a person into abject despair, but that’s just because most people only see the tip of the iceberg and not the mountain underneath the surface.

Now with regard to suicidal ideation, like most people, I have a kind of lazy way of dealing with it. In other words, if there was just an on/off switch on my neck, I might have pressed it hundreds of times by now. I’m fairly certain that’s why humans don’t have an on/off switch on their neck. I think most people who live in squalid conditions feel that way. The only thing we have to thank for our continuance is how violent the act of suicide usually has to be. We’re utterly miserable but not ready to agree to that kind of commitment.

So, we endure and wait for things to get better. Which they did. The thing is, when that refund arrived, our one room studio did not become a Disney technicolor wonderland, nor did we dance a jig. Our marriage had suffered some substantial damage by then and it was in bad need of repair. I was suggesting that we take a little time apart and Julie had mentioned that when this happened last winter, she knew we’d be okay because she really missed me. She went on to say that she was interested to see if she’d miss me again.

The younger me would’ve been thrilled about the prospect of having a pocketful of money and no supervision for a week or two. I believe I have changed because I found myself texting words to her that I don’t think I have ever typed to anyone in my life:

I don’t want you to go.

It was only then that our marriage began to repair itself. We cuddled for a while and I asked her if she wanted to go to our special restaurant. The place we used to go when I was still at Tesla making a living wage. She agreed.

It was magnificent. We had these Street Corn Carrots (essentially carrots prepared like Mexican street corn) and I had Bangers and Mash and Julie had Scallops over Risotto. When we got back home, we cuddled again and listened to audiobooks and talked out what we had just gone through over the past month. We admitted things to each other that helped us grow. Kind of like muscles when you work out–how they tear, repair themselves and come back stronger.

That’s what I’m telling myself anyway.

It was our night time trip to Shoprite that finally delivered us to a place of fun, celebration, and love. Believe it or not (and if you’re in the same boat financially I know you believe) the ability to go to the supermarket and pick out anything our little hearts desired was incredibly freeing. We hadn’t had that kind of freedom all year. And I’m not talking about devil dogs and hamburgers, either.

I’m talking about corn meal and gluten-free Bisquik and sheep milk ricotta and cannolis and a chunk of pancetta and fruits and vegetables. Between the two of us, we cover every food allergy known to man. So a lot of those things, as strange as they sound, brought us great joy.

But it wasn’t just what we bought, it was how much of it we bought. For the first time in too long, our refrigerator and cupboards were bursting with abundance. We went to bed feeling secure and safe and like we had enough to survive.

It’s sad to say, but that’s where we are in this country. I know for a fact that I am not the only one. Food security and the ability to pay for another month of shelter is the pinnacle of joy. It feels like victory.

So, for anyone who comes along and wants to study sociology, my personal essay is the result of wealth being distributed in ways that would embarrass the residents of Versailles before The French Revolution. A revolution, by the way, that was started by one of the last groups of “undistracted” people in world history.

Now, armed with iPhones, we’ve become a race of people who are still here only because they don’t have a button on their neck.

And that’s no small thing. The reward for pushing through is a day like Julie and I had yesterday. Beautiful and hard earned.

Well, as many of you already know, I finally landed a job. And, boy, is it a peach!

For people born after 2005, that expression used to mean a great position—not ass, though I do appreciate a good double entendre. In this case, let’s just say that compared to everything else out there, this is a decent gig. Sure, it’s overnight. Sure, it’s been negative seven degrees every night since I started. Sure, it pays less than I was making in 2017 and the health insurance is high deductible—but from where I’m standing right now, it’s a good gig.

I’ve been riding along with two different experienced drivers for weeks. One of them, we’ll call Dylan, is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. He experiences deep gratitude for being alive on planet earth—not in some hokey or religious way, but in a very unique and experiential way.

For the entire first night we worked together, he pointed out every topographical beauty, every artistic quality of everything from Bear Mountain to Scarsdale to the George Washington Bridge. He knows where the exquisiteness of the planet is located and wants to show it to you. The only issue—which has nothing to do with him—is that it’s so cold it becomes nearly painful to be outside for longer than three minutes. As luck would have it, I only got to work with him once a week.

The guy I went with all the other times was, through no fault of his own, a bit more exhausting. He emigrated to the US in the nineties and still has a pretty thick Chinese accent, so a lot of our conversation includes, “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

This would only be a minor issue if discussion was limited to need-to-know facts. No matter how many times I’ve reminded this guy that I’ve been driving a tractor trailer for fourteen years, he insists on training me in the principles of commercial driving every three minutes—everything from how to pull out of the parking lot to which turning lane to choose at an intersection. Initially, I found it amusing. But like most things we initially find amusing, it grows less so every day.

In addition, he likes to stop and take two-hour naps when he can afford to, which is a little off-putting when you’re with another dude in a straight truck. He also continually drifts into the right lane when he drives—especially in the city. All night long I watch people slow down, speed up, and move into the shoulder as he drifts and drifts. For these reasons and more, I talked management into letting me go out on my own.

Most of the night felt like I was stuck in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.

To Monday morning quarterback myself, I have to say I was relying too heavily on the infallibility of GPS apps. They’ve always worked magically for me. I drove a semi everywhere in the US with navigation and didn’t see a time when it wouldn’t be available and functional. So whenever Olly, the Chinese dude, began explaining how Route 100 runs into White Plains and 117 will get you into Briarcliff Manor—I paid very little attention. My geographic knowledge has only ever come from distinctions I’ve made through experience. I don’t learn much from people telling me what to do.

I believe this is by design. Our brains can only handle so much, and I suspect that people who burn resources trying to remember everything anyone has ever told them have little left for their own thoughts. You can either be creative or a rule follower. It can be very difficult trying to be both.

Well, the last day of my work week is Sunday night at 10:30 and usually I’m driving home at around 9 am. Like I said, this was the first day I did the route by myself. I was very nervous, but I felt like as long as I got the stuff in Jersey, Queens and The Bronx out of the way, Westchester would be a walk in the park. I spent many days of my life peddling freight around Westchester, so I did not foresee the slightest issue. Plus, I told myself that a straight truck was cake to turn around if I got into an issue. And it’s the middle of the night. Easy peasy.

I was wrong about all of that. The truth about how it all went down was so far from my predictions that I feel like I’m having an existential meltdown. I did manage to get the city done by 2 am but I should’ve realized when I was trying to head back up north and it gave me the wrong entrance ramp that all hell was about to break loose. The fact that I was hoping it was just a minor glitch tells you everything you need to know about human delusion.

Going from the first stop to the second stop, the gps recalculated three or four times. I couldn’t understand what the problem was but my dispatcher, who has cameras on us in the truck, was sitting at his desk watching me go the wrong direction over and over again. He also heard me screaming the foulest strings of words I could put together every two or three minutes. The more I was getting lost, the more I was panicking, looking at the clock, watching it get later, feeling like the walls were closing in on me.

My dispatcher kept calling and texting as I continued to get all fouled up but I was already in sensory overload from Google Maps running in the background (I abandoned that idea when it kept trying to get me to go on the Taconic) the truck app running simultaneously and the endless string of visual stimulation known as “I’m going the wrong way” and “where can I turn around.” Finally when I was just about ready to sit naked in a corner and pull out my beard hairs one at a time, the dispatcher told me to park the truck and wait an hour and a half for him to arrive. He then proceeded to have me follow him from stop to stop until we were finished around 1 pm.

I went home feeling so defeated. The world is not the same anymore. As a CDL driver, it was once possible to get a good paying job anywhere anytime.This was not going to be as easy as coming to the conclusion that the job just wasn’t for me. I have no choice. If my company is willing to keep me, I have to figure this job out

And for the first time in my life, I can see the world for what it really is. With the attendant hardships that this job has and the talent pool that’s available, I know for certain that it doesn’t make fiscal sense for the company to terminate me because I had one terrible, horrible, no good very bad night. For them, having a well trained, reliable, conscientious driver is an investment. That bread needs to get to where it’s wanted. With competition being what it is, service is what store owners generally base their decision on.

I could not possibly exaggerate the importance of my coming to that realization on my own. Very out of character for me to be so comfortable with such an extraordinarily uncomfortable situation.

I have friends who think it’s very quaint that I’m up all night delivering bread. They use that word—quaint—like it’s charming, like I’m some artisan baker from a simpler time. I can assure you, American business, by its very design, has surgically removed quaint from everything. Quaint is simple. Quaint is Mayberry, USA. Nobody was wealthy in Mayberry. Of course, nobody was starving or destitute either, but let’s not get bogged down in Andy Griffith’s secret socialism indoctrination. This was light years before the “I got mine, sucks for you” mentality became so ubiquitous.

Be that as it may, Julie and I have “quaint” in spades. It’s quaint how we are always three dollars short of having everything we need. It’s quaint that we are still so in love that it takes a backseat to everything else. And it’s quaint that we are surviving on pasta and free bread. For younger people, these things suck. For people like me and Julie, we are old enough for it to be quaint. Like Santa Claus and Mrs Claus trying to stay one step ahead of the stingy landlord.

Thank God for Joe Rogan.

I don’t care what your opinion of him is, the fact that he is willing to call out what’s happening in this country right now is actually a lot more powerful than anything a democrat has done. By far.

Going for a pithy sound bite on TikTok, specifically designed to add to the myriad voices all saying the same ineffectual things, does nothing for anyone. Maybe it gives the average simpleton something to cheer about. But my voice is not for the average cable news watcher. The cranky ass who watches CNN and the one who watches Fox are really the same to me.

Ain’t much different between the two.

We all know that Rogan is a person revered by much of the right. The fact that he is pointing out something that is not very safe for him to point out is commendable. It certainly isn’t meant to reinforce any echo chamber. It is a lone, rogue voice. And to my way of thinking, that’s far more valuable.

The narrative that is being pushed by the Trumposphere is that these poor, beleaguered, federal officers are just trying to put in an honest day’s work and the radical nurses and lesbians are leaving them no choice but to slaughter them in the streets.

You literally need to be protecting your identity to allow yourself to believe what they’re selling. Every single human being on earth with a pulse disagrees with you and you don’t have enough imagination to at least ask if maybe you’re on the wrong side? Not possible. There’s something deeply psychological about this refusal to accept reality.

Anyway, it’s the most hopeful thing I’ve seen in awhile. And it would be even more super duper if it did anything. Unfortunately, it seems like nothing is doing anything. That, of course, for most people is the head scratcher.

How are they able to jail American citizens for unlimited amounts of time? How are they able to then make these citizens work for $1 a day and then charge them $5 to call their families? Isn’t that slave labor?

Ding! Ding! Ding!

All of these claims have been verified by multiple sources. This is truly happening. But here’s a more pertinent question for someone like myself: what is to prevent me from turning down the wrong street in Brooklyn in the middle of the night, just doing my job and getting caught up in a bunch of random arrests?

And don’t tell me that isn’t possible. It’s more or less probable. Word on the street is that Uncle Fester Stephen Miller wants to extend “operations” like Minnesota into California and New York. And since it’s been proven that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a citizen or not, whether you’re protesting or not or whether you care or not, it’s open season on EVERYONE. Off duty cops have been arrested, correction officers have been arrested—and I’m supposed to walk around feeling safe because why? Because I deliver bread?

Hardly.

So to anyone who thinks I am tone deaf for appreciating what Rogan is saying on his podcast, I say “show me anyone doing more to help me to stay safe” and I’ll be right there with you. Resentful and angry about how he helped put him in the Oval Office to begin with.

Right now, I don’t feel like I have the luxury to be resentful of anyone. Except, of course, the millions of people in this country who find glee in the torture, misery and trauma of people who don’t look like them or act like them or talk like them.

There will be a day of judgment. Make no mistake. And whatever you believe in, you will be held to account for where you were standing during this period of world history. Did you show up for your brothers and sisters or did you laugh, or even worse, feel superior because of where you were born and what color you came out?

God doesn’t like ugly.

And it’s getting very ugly.

The more I think about it, the more I am finding that it’s very easy to sit around and be angry about the state of the world. When I was growing up, even the shoe salesman at Thom McAnn owned his own house and had a family. These things are gone. As wealth has become concentrated more and more at the top, there are only a few avenues open to home ownership and it generally requires two successful highly paid people. The high school teacher and his wife, the massage therapist, do not own a house anymore. Of course there are exceptions and stories where people overcame this reality, but for the most part, you don’t really have to leave your chair to figure this out. Go on Zillow. Go on Indeed.The story is right there in black and white.

That being said, did I really want to own a house? No. So, why would I focus on what I can’t have if I don’t even really want it? Because the internet tells me to. The internet tells me to get mad about the terrible job market, about people living in their cars, about the cost of groceries and healthcare and electricity.

And true enough. I’ve been touched by these things. The cost of food. Electric. The rejections from Staples, Medline, McKesson and other companies that use algorithms to shut out anyone not within their “programmed parameters.”

But I did eventually find a job (the day my unemployment ran out) and, as is usually the case with me, it’s better than any of the ones I couldn’t get. It’s a non-CDL job and it pays a bit less but all in all, I couldn’t have wished for anything better.

The thing is, if I spend any time on social media, I start believing that we should all just give up. We have a terrorist for a President and he has no regard for anything besides getting revenge on the many millions of people who hate him. Which really leaves him little time to do anything else. Running up to every brown person, beating them up and making them disappear is excellent for optics but these bumbling idiots are deporting less people than previous administrations.

I think the most rebellious thing I can do right now is just completely drop out of knowing or caring about any of it. I will live my life and do my thing and pay as little attention to the shit show that has become the United States of America. Why?

Because when authoritarianism becomes a reality, one of their key features is to beat down the public physically, emotionally, financially and every other way. To unplug from the reality show of the American government is a way to defend oneself against this. If they can’t get to your eyes and ears, if they can’t keep you fighting on X and Facebook, they’ve lost control.

After seeing those pictures of Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer yucking it up while Minnesota looks like a dystopian civil war, I felt like I knew everything I needed to know. I’m going to spend my time on earth arguing with a pimply faced incel from Dogwood Patch, South Carolina when Chuck Schumer is tying Marco Rubio’s tie and giving him paternal advice?

You must be nuts. None of this is real. Sure, Trump is completely unhinged, but the people around him are committing the exact same atrocities they’ve been committing for years.

And unless I am willing to get myself killed as a martyr for civil rights, there’s not much I can do to help. Sure, I can write to my congressman etc etc Let’s be realistic. Social critics online, people who make melodramatic reels, protesters—how much is any of this helping?

Because I can tell you how much it’s hurting. For me, watching common Americans getting shot and beaten every day is leading to depression. It’s dragging everyone in the country into a pit of despair and despair leads to inaction.

Perhaps that’s where I saw myself going. I care too much. It all hurts too much. I can’t even tell if things are any worse now than they were in 2003 or are we just being made to feel that way. I need to back up, live life, work, and dig myself out of credit card debt.

I’ll be true here. When the things I am seeing everyday have me wondering if it’s worth being alive, it’s time to back up. Perhaps if my misery was helping, I’d think differently. It’s not.

So, to paraphrase Voltaire, I need to get back to tending my garden.

I remember back in the Covid/George Floyd days when I was writing for Elephant Journal, I wrote an article after Twitter Idiots cancelled Garrison Keillor (yes, Garrison Keillor) because he may or may not have brushed up against a woman who may or may not have misconstrued the whole thing. I made the point that Gen Z’s inability to show any discernment for the battles they picked is what got us to where we were at that moment.

The criticism was what you might expect. Everybody trying to out self-righteous everyone else. One woman, who I imagine was just trying to be purposely obtuse, said, “So the ‘Me Too’ movement led to our losing our civil rights?

BTW, the answer to that question was “yes.” Like Sherlock Holmes pointed out, if you take a series of causes and effects and then remove all the inferences in the middle, you will get a startling, though meretricious effect. The commenter obviously stalled out just west of “startled” and never quite got to meretricious. Me Too, while started with the best intentions devolved into ridiculous. Ie: Garrison Keillor

But dig it: when everything becomes a major issue, regular folks become exhausted. The left, as a whole, lost sight of how ridiculous things were getting. You take someone like Robin DeAngelo taking fifteen grand from colleges to come in for an hour and tell every single caucasian that they are congenitally racist and you can expect pushback. This is how the word “woke,” a word that by its definition should possess only positive connotations, became a curse word. I can not see how anyone can defend “Nice Racism.” I promise that book will not age well btw.

To give you a better taste of what was going on at the time, on International Woman’s Day that year, the Dalai Lama posted about the wisdom and foresight of women and I saw a comment where this young person went off on him–I mean tore him a new cassack–because he was ‘feeding into the expectations that women have to always be the ones who are fair and equitable and men continue to do whatever they want and how dare he…etc”

The Dalai god damn Lama. I was starting to think we jumped the shark as a country when they were mad enough at Garrison Keillor and Al Franken to effectively render them unemployed. I was convinced that if Fred Rogers were still alive, he would’ve been cancelled. That’s not sarcasm.

And here we are today. An unarmed 37-year-old mother gets shot in the head by ICE, we’ve started a blatantly illegal war with a country in South America and we’re getting ready to annex Greenland. And that was just Wednesday..I am fairly certain that even all of the people who were alienated by the cancel police are probably ready to take another look at voting in that direction again.

These ecosystems we all live in are getting so closed off, there are two separate and identifiable realities happening at once. The objectively horrific things that are happening right now are happening because they are no longer “objective.” This happened because this person should’ve done this instead of that and we aren’t committing human rights atrocities, we’re finally getting “closed borders.” And it’s about time someone stepped up and stopped that endless supply of prescription Fentanyl that Venezuela is streamlining into the US. And Greenland, that’s like Connecticut. Big deal.

Every single time you think you have seen the worst you’ve ever seen, there’s a blatantly dishonest narrative that gets memorized and disseminated faster than the Fixodent flies off the shelf in Tennessee.

It’s got to be a Boomer thing. Growing up, my parent’s initial response to a sad, angry, disappointed or traumatized child was a defensive counter-assault. “You’re too sensitive. You really have to lighten up.”

That was shit parenting. First, they never even investigated the needs of their child. All of their energy was placed into the creation of some kind of gaslighting reframe of what children know is bullshit. The only thing one gets with plausible deniability is a resentful kid who second guesses themselves in everything they do. That’s the weird thing about humans. Most are three dimensional. They can know you’re full of crap and still question if they are seeing what they are seeing and feeling what they’re feeling.

When that becomes what the government is, it’s time to start exploring the birthplaces of your grandparents. This person in Minnesota was not even human anymore. With a straight face, they tell us that she was a domestic terrorist. A minivan lesbian with stuffed animals in the glovebox? Now, there are these TikTok jerkoffs doing deep dives into her parenting and dating history. Obviously, all of these people have lived perfect lives and only enjoy exposing the private life of others because their strict morality leaves them no choice.

Do you see the correlation?

Oops, we killed this 37 year old woman in a minivan, but I have this darling explanation you can have in her place. There is no reason to think we’ve seen the worst of it yet.

And if this sounds as if I’m making a case for centrism, you’re reading it wrong. I’m all for a massive overhaul of whatever system of government we’re misnaming the US today. I’m saying that there is a segment of the population that are just looking for common sense. As I said, there will never be “common sense” anymore because we’re fresh out of “common” and it’s not looking too good for sense, either. If 30% of the population can look at that video and say that woman wasn’t murdered, then we live in separate realities.

Which, of course, sadly, we do.

I’ve reached a point where I feel like anyone who engages in *performative* political discussion—the kind that happens on social media, in comment sections, parroting cable news talking points—doesn’t have anything real enough in their life to occupy their time.

Because that version of politics isn’t real. As Frank Zappa said, “It’s the entertainment branch of the military industrial complex.” The News has become a perverted version of Variety, each side showing their audience carefully curated atrocities designed to trigger maximum rage. Each consumer trapped in their own ecosystem of false information and rage bait customized for their individual intellectual shortcomings.

A nation of people being led around by the nose but still partially confused because wait—that’s not an enemy of the state, that’s Dan in Logistics. And that’s not a Klansman, that’s Dennis in Production.

And that disconnect is actually crucial. It’s the friction that prevents total tribal warfare. The rage baiting and the community spirit people witness when someone gets a flat tire, when someone’s dog is lost, when their kid runs away—these are happening in different parts of people’s brains. And something is telling them not to believe the narrative. When all is said and done, the demonization just isn’t believable when you actually know the people.

But let’s be clear: politics *is* real. What happens at the polls has real consequences. For some, it means family members disappearing without a trace. For others, it means gloating on Facebook. For others still, it’s the quiet relief of not having to see the same Fox News footage of migrants on loop, not having to perform outrage anymore. They’ve been temporarily pacified.

The way most people who voted in 2020 felt until 2024—four years of not waking up to check if the nuke dropped yet. Four years of not seeing the chaos front and center. The cost, of course, was not looking too hard at what was still happening. Palestinians dying, Ukrainians being blown to hell—but it wasn’t being shoved in your face as aggressively.

And that’s the real drug everyone’s addicted to: the peace to get a good night’s sleep. The algorithm knows exactly how much outrage you can handle before you tune out, and it calibrates accordingly.

Here’s what’s concerning: no one wants to admit where they get their information. Mention Fox or CNN or MSNBC and people will swear they don’t watch. They’ll insist they’re not in an echo chamber. The misinformation they’re spouting in perfect lockstep with their tribe just materialized from thin air, apparently.

This is a problem because you can’t fix what you won’t acknowledge. And it’s worth too much money to the platforms and networks to keep people enraged and clicking for this to change from the top down.

So here’s the actual solution:

Not apathy. *Discernment.*

First: Recognize the difference between the spectacle of politics and the mechanics of power. The spectacle is designed to keep you emotionally exhausted and materially powerless. The mechanics—policy, funding, regulation, local governance—actually shape your life.

Second: Radically limit your consumption of political performance. Delete social media or use it only for direct communication. Stop hate-watching cable news. Stop reading articles designed to make you angry. If you can’t tell whether something is informing you or manipulating you, assume manipulation.

Third: Redirect that energy locally and strategically. Find out what’s actually happening in your community. Who runs the water treatment plant? What’s in the school board budget? What did your city council vote on last week? Who’s your state rep and how did they vote on your insurance rates?

This isn’t retreating from politics—this is engaging with *actual* politics instead of the performance. The stuff that’s boring, unglamorous, and requires reading meeting minutes instead of tweets. I realize that sounds a lot less sexy than reposting that a school shooter was in his middle school’s Young Republican club, but sexy is trying to kill you.

Fourth: Build real community with people across political lines. Not by avoiding disagreement, but by doing things together that matter—neighborhood projects, mutual aid, solving actual problems. You’ll find that Dan in Logistics and Dennis in Production are complex humans, not cartoon villains. That doesn’t mean you’ll agree on everything, but it means you’ll have a basis for conversation that isn’t mediated by algorithms designed to make you hate each other.

Fifth: When you do engage with larger political issues, do it strategically. Pick one or two things you actually have leverage on—where your time, money, or voice might make a measurable difference. Then act on those things consistently rather than performing outrage about everything.

The people who benefit from the current system don’t fear apathy—they count on it. What they fear is people who can see through the manipulation but stay engaged anyway. People who can’t be distracted by culture war nonsense because they’re too busy monitoring the actual water supply or organizing their neighbors or primarying a corrupt city councilor.

The path forward isn’t checking out. It’s checking out of the *performance* while checking in to the actual work. It’s less exciting. There’s no dopamine hit. Nobody’s going to give you likes. But it’s the only thing that’s ever actually changed anything.

The phone-scrolling forklift driver commenting about people dying isn’t participating in politics—he’s participating in his own pacification. Real participation looks like showing up to the zoning meeting. Reading the bill. Calling the rep’s office. Organizing ten neighbors. Running for school board.

It’s boring. It’s slow. It’s mostly failures punctuated by small wins. But it’s real.

That’s the path.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I had reached about 30,000 words in my new novel when I saw some reel by an agent that asked writers if their major event happens in the first three hundred words of the book. At that point I began to rewrite each chapter separately, realized I was making a total mess of the timeline and, finally, figured out a way to weave in a bit more movement. It was not fun. Not any of it.

Not the realization that my 30,000 words were already doomed. Not the rearranging of the timeline. And not the period where I scrapped that idea for something a little less taxing.

I will admit there was a distinct feeling of satisfaction when I was able to puzzle my way out of starting over from scratch. Nothing is ever one hundred percent one way or the other. Every bad scene has a redeeming scene later in the movie and the feeling of accomplishment was that very redemption.

(I just did that thing they used to do in the old television shows. You know, where they put very little effort into trying to camouflage the need to provide backstory.)

“I told you that Joanie was already going to the Prom with Carl Wurtzel.”

“Yes, of course. And I know Chachi asked her, too.”

So yes, my backstory is that at one time, during the course of moving back to New York, I battled against one flat tire. I got another one recently as I was getting close to the forty-thousand-word mark. I went from barely being able to stay in bed past three AM, writing a thousand words at a clip, to either staying in bed and not writing or, on my very productive days eking out three hundred words.

I thought it was because I didn’t know where the novel was going. I’m what’s known as a “pantser.” I’m a guy who likes to create characters, put them in situations and let the plot unfold naturally. James Patterson outline writers will tell you this is why I didn’t have a Socko! Blammo! beginning. To me. I’d rather have something that feels like life.

I don’t know if I haven’t gotten far enough away from the Florida experience to write about it with any clarity or the fact that it’s very uncomfortable to write honestly about it, but something felt like I crashed into a brick wall at 38,000 words.

I gave the issue time to sit still. Unfortunately, in that period, I was spending my all too abundant downtime scrolling my phone. And as I found myself doing that, I was getting fed more and more rage bait. I do take the time to fact check shit through AI before I even allow myself to form an opinion, but when I felt like something was objectively bad enough to be angry about, I got angry.

I think what every one of my friends and family, who believe I’m just another dime a dozen bleeding heart liberal, fail to understand is that humane treatment of human beings is not a political difference. It’s not even about politics. I understand that I was very lucky and that I could’ve been a Nigerian born in Africa who had a whole life in front of me and hopes and dreams and I’ve just had my arms blown off for no reason. I could be a kid from Central America trying to escape certain death when regime change destabilizes an area. When you can make yourself really know that it was a geographic lottery that separates you from those people, you internalize the fact that they are people. My imagination tells me that it is easier for some people to dehumanize the other and prevent themselves from feeling bad about them, but it’s a lot harder for others. But this is a subject for another time.

Or better yet, not.

I deleted Facebook off my phone, and I began to read. After picking up a copy of “In Our Time” by Hemingway, the idea of vignettes hit me like a (make up your own cliche–like a ton of bricks–but not as tired). I kept reading the vignettes. The way they are so concise. So economical with language. That whole tip of the iceberg magic that Hemingway perfected.

Now, of course, I never claimed to be Hemingway but when you go into something that inspired, sometimes a brick wall can turn into a faucet. And that’s exactly what happened. I am turning the year in Florida into a series of disparate vignettes that tell a story without trying to cram it down anyone’s throats. It made the feel of the novel a lot lighter right in the place where it could’ve become a bore.

Better still, it turned the faucet back on. I am immersed in reading and excited about writing. And I am ignoring all the suffering of the world. Because, you really think there’s a boy somewhere in Venezuela thinking about me?

I doubt it.

My story of finding twelve step recovery is similar to a lot of other people’s stories. Many people, like me, hit their lowest point, get a sponsor; and the sponsor, in turn, helps them assimilate into the world again. They find a humble job that they are grateful to have and learn that the sweetest happiness that we will ever find in this life is from the warmth of love and human connection. In the real inspirational versions of the story, the person falls in love and creates a little household with someone equally as spiritual and grateful and the two of them go on to be a beacon of light for others to follow. I love this story.

Then there’s a different way of looking at the story. The person working for a company where the CEO makes 4,734 times what they’re making, health insurance premiums that are about to equal two of their entire paychecks, rent increases that make even a story like this humble one seem out of reach and the fact that the current government may or may not see them as a target (depending upon how they registered last election.)

It can truly blow a person’s mind to realize that both of these realities can be true simultaneously. I know because I, personally, vacillate between those two states. I can attest to the fact that it is entirely possible to feel humble and grateful while still recognizing that your humanity is being diminished by an economic system that insists on you having to trade your time on earth for warmth and bread.

I’m in that strange headspace where I have had enough idle time. Not working is becoming bothersome. I get a flat sum every week and I will admit, it’s likely more than a lot of people get who actually have to go to work, but it’s not work. You don’t feel yourself contributing to the greater good. Well, rarely, at least.

Still, there’s something about the excitement of getting overtime and making a little unexpected dough or even just the satisfaction of lying in bed after a particularly arduous shift, that cannot be simulated with a free check. I only wish I could keep the cynical part of me in check long enough to feel that contentment.

I’m in a much better state of mind than I have been for the past two weeks. This is mainly because I received my first callback after an in-person interview I did last week. I am, by no means, a shoe in, but I am in the running and just being in the running feels like a relief. A lot of these companies now go through these HR apps like Workday that insist they’re not ageist but feel like they suspiciously are.

As Christmas drew to a close, we had the Tesla take us to the movie theater to see Avatar 3. I say it like that, because for the most part, the new iteration of FSD (full service driving) is pretty much Waymo. You get in, tell it where you’re going and it does the rest.

The guy at the concession stand told us to budget our popcorn, it was a three-hour ordeal. We made it through two hours before we both admitted that we didn’t have a clue about the plot, the character arcs or even the language. This, we both found somewhat hilarious and laughed about it as the Tesla took us safely home.

It was cold enough out where it nipped your nose bitterly and the air threatened inevitable snow. Our apartment was as warm as a sleeping kitten, and we were both glad in our own silent way. Glad for the warmth and glad for each other.

And as I laid there in bed and Julie was beginning to doze, I thought about every birthday cake I couldn’t even taste and every penny I threw into a fountain because my wish was so serious. It would make my chest feel heavy. My wish was always that I’d be lying in bed some Christmas night with the person I had always dreamed about lying next to.

And there is no cake that tastes as good as that feels when I close my eyes and fall asleep to the sound of her breathing.