They will tell you.

So goes the old joke.

And how do you know if someone wrote a book?

They will tell you.

Well, keen readers will know I often confirm my authorship of “Everything that makes me happy makes me sad”, which would have been a NY Times best seller if only it had sold more copies.

I have previously shared an excerpt or two from my “holy shit my malignant pancreas and liver are going to kill me…damn chemo sucks….oh boy these medical trials are even worse than chemo….wait I might survive…holy shit I am still alive” memoir that I wrote for my children after being diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer.

Well, I hope you have appreciated those excerpts because I have decided to share the entire collection here, through the magic of Substack.

Why?

First, I poured over those words and I think they merit as much sunlight as possible. I hope you will agree. There are bits and pieces of the book which, upon rereading a few years later, I would certainly like to change. But I am not going to do that. The entire thing was as honest and close to the truth as I could manage during an incredibly difficult period, so I am just going to let it stand (or fall) on its on.

It’s funny and sad and difficult and hopeful, much like life, I guess.

Second, I think I want to try to start to maybe figure out how I might write another book…and I have found I can’t do that and write the type of gold I have been sharing on Substack, lo these many posts.

Most of the excerpts will likely include some brief reflection, update or at least introduction. But some won’t.

I don’t know.

Don’t try to tell me what to do.

I have never done this before.

Let’s just see how it goes, ok?

So without further ado, and just to be sure we break the “one chapter per post” rule right off the bat, here is the introduction and first chapter of the future cult classic, “Everthing that makes me happy makes me sad”.

Everything that makes me happy makes me sad

Fun life tips from death’s abyss

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow....”

Mark Twain

Health Warning

This book is presented to you merely as an attempt to convey one person’s perspective, one data point out of the eight billion which are currently stumbling around this plant. Some of what I have written here is true to my life. Like the cancer, for example. That part is true, and it sucks. Not the writing. The writing, even about the cancer, is pretty good. But it turns out that having cancer is not very much fun.

The cancer chapters were written more or less in real time. I began this project soon after my diagnosis in 2020 and completed it just after my second medical trial in 2023. Other chapters, like the one where I talk about the 1984 kindergarten class Christmas play at St Angela Merici, were written years later because I wasn’t working on this particular project when I was five years old.

Still other chapters are entirely fictional and are presented in italics to help you along. I did not, for example, live on the rooftops of Paris, although it would have been cool if I had. There are seven of these very short chapters and I have included them in this memoir because these stories are part of me too, and because sometimes difficult truths are easier to draft into fiction.

And then there are a lot of other areas where I am not entirely sure whether they are true or not. Honestly, that accounts for most of it, which I think is the reality of existing as a human being.

You may read these various sections and knit them together like threads of a unified garment. Or they may swirl around you in a mess of interesting but discordant notes, like some jazz music I pretend to like. Don’t beat yourself up if you fall into the second camp. It’s not a competition. This is supposed to be fun — but, for the record, you did lose. However, if you did make sense of all this, well done. Please email me the explanation at danmcnameebook@gmail.com because I would also love to make sense of it all. And myself.

Chapter 1: What is this book?

I am probably dead as you are reading this.

That sentence was harder for me to write than it was for you to read, believe me. But those are the odds and they are not in my favor.

The cause of death is probably cancer. I was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer at the ripe old of forty on June 30, 2020. Although I have the “good” kind of pancreatic cancer, “good” is extremely relative when placed in front of the word “cancer,” particularly of the pancreatic sort, and the fact that it is also in my liver isn’t any sort of “good.” The “good” kind of pancreatic cancer starts in the tail and gives the lucky winner a shot at living for a while. The other kind, the kind that starts in the head… not so much. Those people often die very quickly. Regardless, I am not a doctor and I never asked what stage of cancer I have, but I have seen enough sad cancer movies to know my situation isn’t great.

I have been told that I have a “good” (there’s that word again) chance of beating the cancer back for a few years with chemo. In the interim, some incredibly smart person in some incredibly sophisticated lab somewhere might come up with a new treatment that will buy me more years.

But they might not. In fact, they probably won’t. I mean, what are the chances that I am the guy who gets metastatic pancreatic cancer at forty years old, survives long enough to avail myself of some new-fangled treatment, and beats a previously unbeatable cancer? People have been trying to cure cancer for decades. No, centuries. Or millennia. Basically forever, I guess. So what are the odds that the cure for pancreatic cancer comes during the small window of time during which it is trying to kill me? Once again, not great.

Ignoring the reality that new-fangled treatments don’t come around very often, the fact remains that the chemo might not work at all. My first oncologist told me there was a 60-70% chance that the chemo would be effective at shrinking the tumors. Which, okay, I guess, except that leaves a 30-40% chance of it not being effective, the consequences of which he did not need to make clear during that meeting. I have read different statistics on mortality rates for pancreatic cancer, but one statistic that has stuck with me is that 90% of pancreatic cancer patients die within two years of diagnosis. That is not very many years.

I have struggled to wrap my mind around all this since my first scan on June 30, 2020, when a Parisian doctor pointed out the lesions. I have yet to recapture anything resembling my normal life or my normal self. I think that self is probably dead. I think it was the first thing to die. Maybe that is part of the process of dying.

But regardless, if the cancer doesn’t get me in the very near-term or even in the medium to long-term, I could still get hit by a bus as I am walking down the sidewalk minding my own goddamn business. Or have a heart attack. Or choke on a pretzel. Or fall down a poorly lit set of stairs.

But it really doesn’t matter whether I am alive or dead. Well, it matters to me. And it matters to you, if you are one of my sons or my beloved wife, for whom I am writing this book. But, otherwise, if you just picked this up in some overstocked bookstore (by which I mean some online retailer) because of the dazzling review in… let’s say the New York Review of Books (but really, online)… it doesn’t really matter to you. I suppose you don’t want me to be dead, and you must feel some sympathy for my wife and children. But be honest: It doesn’t really matter to you. My death won’t change your life.

So what is this odd little book and why did I write it? Well, it can be a lot of things, I suppose. First and foremost, one of my sons was three and the other just a few months old when I was diagnosed and, if I do die soon, I would like them to know who I was. I want to give them as many pieces of me as possible, and this book of letters and stories and other nonsense was the best way I could think of accomplishing that.

No one is just one story, and we are more than the mathematical equation produced from our DNA. More even than a compilation of our experiences. There is the self we present to the world, which is hardly our entirely true self; there is another self that we believe we see in the mirror, which we want to believe is the true self. There is yet another one we go to sleep with after the day has worn us down, another which wakes us up in the middle of the night, terrified, and yet another to start a new day, determined to be our best self. But none of those are who we are. Even the most enlightened among us — those who have convened with Buddha, smoked enough hallucinogenic toad to demolish their id, and/or found salvation through the guidance of their therapist or priest — even they are still in the dark about who they really are and why they do what they do.

Because we are as much fiction as non-fiction. We are the “true” stories that we lived, and many others that we tell ourselves. We can’t know ourselves entirely because we don’t even know the truth of many of the experiences we have lived.

In writing this book, I dug through the cupboards of my mind for old memories, some of which I had deliberately hidden away. Others were never far from my mind, but were too complicated or painful to discuss in detail, many of which included terrifying events with my father in the lead role. In trying to find some “truth” in what happened in my past in order to convey some “truth” to my children, I questioned my siblings about their recollections of the same moments. I found out there was no such thing as a single, shared, certain “truth”.

I initially thought their memories would be more reliable than mine, given that I was the youngest. But their stories differed and drifted away from each other so that, in the end, I am left with the impression that it is the impression that matters. The impression that an event has on the brain, the way that it is remembered, is a function of what happens at the time, sure. But it is also a function of the person to whom it happens. And not just at that moment, but the way that person remembers, mis-remembers, remembers again, and then lives that experience each day going forward. Cobbling together a “memory” that one can live with, or perhaps be destroyed by, depending on the moment.

This is as true for the traumatic experiences I lived thirty-five years ago as it is for those that I lived just a few years ago when I was diagnosed.

This is not to say that “truth” does not exist or that we should not seek it out. Certain things happened and others did not. I am not so post-modern as to believe otherwise. But it seems impossible to piece together truth from the shattered fragments of our memories. Maybe iPhones and the incessant recording of pictures and videos will change that, but I suspect not.

You might be asking why I went through the hassle to get this thing published and made available to an audience wider than my blood relatives. Well, if I am being totally honest, it must be that I have a slightly inflated sense of self. You see, I am a middle-aged white man, so my baseline operating assumption is that people need to hear what I have to say. I wouldn’t say I think my stories could change the world, but, you know… What if they do?

Let’s get to it then. First things first, if you are one of my sons and if I am no longer around, I am really, truly, terribly sorry that I am dead and not there to help you navigate this life. I loved two things in this life more than I thought I could ever love anything: being your mother’s husband, and being your dad. I think I am probably a better dad than I am a husband, even though I think more deeply about and try harder at being a husband. Maybe it’s because my parents’ relationship was such a disaster, but we’ll get to that later.

Regardless, I am well above average at both, if I do say so myself, although I am worse at both since my diagnosis. Anyway, I thought I would try to write down a few notes of things I’ve learned, or at least things that I think I’ve learned, before it all disappears into the mist.

If you are a random person who happened upon this or purchased it thanks to that rave review (or pirated it from wherever pirates pirate these days), I will try to make it worth your time. But no promises. I am not sure how this book will land without the emotional weight tugging at the familial heartstrings, but you’ve already spent the time to buy or steal it, so stick with me for a bit.

But this book is definitely not a self-help book. It’s not some list of rules I developed through divine providence, after having lived my one life (and then not even very much of it), that can act somehow as a rule book for everyone in this mind-bendingly diverse world.

First, I don’t think I really believe in divinity, even before the cancer, although I wish I did. Second, self-help books and the new fashion of providing twelve easy rules for a happy, healthy life is modern day snake oil distribution on a mass scale, except it’s probably more harmful than rubbing some lilac and whippoorwill oil on your eczema- tattered skin during an era when there wasn’t a decent cure for the problem anyway. All you lost there was a bit of money. But the western world’s addiction to self-help books steals time and, ultimately, hope, two things that are far more valuable. And it robs you of your own agency to boot.

So no, this is not a self-help or universal rule book that promises to explain you to you, along with your partner, your parents, your boss, and everything else under the sun. This isn’t a flashlight illuminating the dark corners of your soul, or the winding and dangerous unlit turns in the road ahead. Life is hard; living a happy life is harder. Nearly impossible if you look around at how miserable everyone seems to be. Maybe reading about someone else’s failures and successes at finding happiness, along with some (hopefully) funny stuff that happened along the way, can help relieve a bit of the loneliness as you search for your own path. You know—without being a self-help book, of course.

Or it won’t do any of that. This book may just go toward further ornamenting your already eclectic bookshelf. It might not even get that far. Honestly, I really don’t care, because I am probably dead. Or maybe I did defeat one of the most deadly cancers around. In which case your negative opinion of my writing, or even my perspective on life, really, won’t matter much to me. I’ll be too busy being alive to care.

Our team worked at a Boys and Girls Club in Tennessee.

We rebuilt storm-damaged houses in Lafayette, Louisiana, and if you haven’t worked on a roof in Louisiana in July, you’ve never really known heat.

We lived in trailers in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge on the border or Georgia, became certified wildfire fighters and burned out upland, wooded areas of the swamp in controlled burns.

We did a lot of cool stuff.

I am not telling you this to prove I am a better person than you. I wouldn’t just come out and say it. I’m not rude. And I don’t really need to be that explicit about it either.

Our first posting sent us to Neon, Kentucky, a tiny town of around 500 people in Letcher County, deep in Appalachia. It’s a three or four-hour drive from any town you’ve ever heard of, although Hazard, Kentucky is just an hour away. (Unless you’re driving with the Dukes of Hazzard, in which case it might be 30 minutes, even though the Duke boys were from Hazzard, Georgia.)

Our temporary home was a Christian service camp where we were the off-season occupants. We arrived in November. It was dark, grey, cold, and wet. Even Jesus himself was struggling to keep his flock warm.

If you’re not from Appalachia, it’s both better and worse than the documentaries and JD Vance’s semi-fictional memoir would have you believe. I’m from Cleveland, one of the poorest big cities in America, so I thought I had a solid frame of reference for hardship. But Neon was different.

The median household income in the US is about $82,000, which shrinks to $65,000 in Kentucky, $42,000 in Letcher County and all the way down to $34,000 in Neon.

They used to mine coal, but that’s mostly done now. About 1,700 people in Letcher County worked in the mines in 1988, dropping to 275 in 2015. Population in the county has essentially halved from its peak in 1940, from about 40,000 to 20,000 in 2022.

But even those numbers can’t convey the reality. Driving away from the highway, through thick forests and over the rivers that carve through the area, you see homes that must be abandoned, until you notice the quiet thread of smoke spilling from a chimney.

This deep-seated contradiction was summed up perfectly in the final piece of guidance from our program leader:

“If you like to run for exercise…don’t. You’ll either get run over by a coal truck, because they drive like a bat out of hell, or you’ll get bit by wild dogs. And if neither of those things happen, folks will just keep stopping their cars to ask what you’re running from and if you need help.”

I was not a big runner at the time, surprising, I know, given I won my division of the 2025 New York City Marathon, so I wasn’t too fussed.

But that warning captured the place: a landscape that felt almost post-apocalyptic, held together by a community so fiercely loyal they’d stop their car to see if a stranger needed help.

The folks there were also a lot of fun to be around. One evening, a few of us were looking for a beer in the otherwise dry county and we stumbled into a VFW hall one evening. We stumbled back out hours later, having paid for no beers, drunk far too many, and learned the basics of how to play the spoons as a musical instrument.

But I have been thinking a lot about Appalachia lately, sparked by seeing Tyler Childers in Paris of all places. He’s from Louisa, Kentucky, and his entire band, The Food Stamps, is from Appalachia as well. And goddamn do they sound like it. They are a collective expression of a specific place and its culture.

Listening to them, you can feel the weight and the joy of that connection. These men have been travelling the world, playing their music. Indeed, they were thousands of miles away, singing to a packed house of Frenchies (and a fair few expats hanging around too).

But their music was Appalachia. How is that connection so powerful? So primal? For me, the framework for an answer might lie in a book I’d recently read, "The Worm at the Core," by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski.

They study “Terror Management Theory,” which argues that our awareness of inevitable death would be paralyzing if we didn’t construct cultural worldviews, religion, nationality, value systems, that promise us a form of symbolic immortality.

Music is, of course, a beautiful expression of one’s particular culture, expressed with the knowledge that the music existed before us, will exist after us and we therefore may live on with it. But perhaps the most universal example is how we treat our dead. The act of burial, with all its rituals, is a direct refusal to accept that a person is simply an organism that has ceased to function. We affirm that they, and by extension we, are part of something that outlasts physical death.

Consider the physical nature of the grave itself. A grave becomes a physical anchor, tethering our abstract need for immortality to a piece of land. And in places like Appalachia, this isn’t an abstraction. Families often don’t use public cemeteries; the graves of parents and grandparents are on the family property, creating an almost unbreakable bond. How can you ever truly move away from that? Imagine being forced to (or choosing to) sell not only the family home but also your family’s bones in the process. Your roots are literally in the ground you stand on, not just some highfalutin metaphor.

I think the best fiction pieces I have written are about people sitting on benches, including the benches in Central Park, all of which are dedicated to people who lived and then, inevitably, as it goes, died. Those benches are effectively gravestones. And I find myself walking the streets and parks of Paris, often considering the idea of graves, roots and where I belong.

I am from Cleveland and I live in Paris. I have been uprooted. I am also a stage 4 pancreatic cancer survivor. For years, death was a clinical reality I lived with.

My experience wasn’t about finding a way to manage the terror through self-deception. I don’t believe in God or an afterlife, although I wish I did. There was no grand cultural history for me to cling to, because I had lost that with my emigration. Instead, I had to get comfortable with the truth of my own impermanence.

My response was to write. I wrote a memoir during my treatment, primarily for my wife and young sons, as a way to give them as much of me as I possibly could before I died. I told myself it was for them, but of course, I know some of it was for me, too. If the people of Appalachia tether their meaning to the land, I was trying to tether mine first to the page and then to the people I loved most, who would outlive me.

Perhaps that’s why the graves of Appalachia are so haunting to me now. The people of Neon have their answer to truth of mortality, written in stone and soil. They are tethered to the dirt that holds their ancestors. It may be a tie that binds and even traps them, it may be a modest response to the certainty of mortality, but at least it’s a response.

There is a profound freedom in being able to move across the world, but nothing in this world is free of cost. The cost of that freedom, the cost of making yourself a home in a new place, is severance from what you knew to be true and real. It is interesting and engaging and energising to live in and learn a new culture. But, in doing so, you can’t deceive yourself as to the permanence or “truth” of any aspect of culture.

Tyler Childers and his band seek their immortality in song. The Appalachian communities they come from place themselves and their faith in the earth. I placed mine in words on a page, hoping my children and maybe their children will find me there.

Whether the answer is sung, buried or written, we are all managing our terror and striving for hope in the darkness. Inquiring into the void, pleading with the silent, maybe eternal universe, for a piece of that eternity.

The flashing of the red alarm light in the center console destroyed the calm that had just set over the space capsule’s two passengers.

Both sat frozen, staring as the light flashed, violent in its silence. The astronauts were almost indistinguishable, with NASA and “Powered by Vanitus Inc” patches adorning their white suits. Only the center of their faces were visible through the glass domed helmets. Those faces were framed by white fire-retardant balaclavas and were themselves flashing red, in sync with the light from the alarm. Their heads were cocked towards the flashing light. Even their confused expressions were similar. Furrowed brows sitting above two sets of brown eyes. They could have been brothers.

The only notable differences were the moustache sitting above one set of pursed lips and the small mole sitting above the other set.

The Moustache made the first move. His gloved hand made a start towards the central control panel but hesitated, hovering over it for a few seconds, before starting towards this nob and then that lever. But he pulled away each time.

His full but neatly trimmed moustache stood at attention as he asked firmly, without looking at his capsule-mate, “Are you going to do something about that?”

“Ahhhhh!!,” gasped the Mole.

The introduction of sound into the stillness of his domed helmet had apparently startled him. He would have leapt out of his seat had he not been strapped in so snuggly.

The Moustache’s right eye furrowed aggressively as the Mole gathered himself.

“Oh dear me, you scared me there. What do you mean? Do something about what?”

“Sorry, what I mean to say is: is that a problem?” the Moustache replied, a bit less firmly now.

“Oh, I have no idea,” the Mole said, flatly. Only his arched left eyebrow conveyed his confusion, although the Moustache didn’t seem to notice.

Deep quiet returned to the capsule.

The red light flashed.

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The Moustache made a great effort to turn his domed head to look at his capsule-mate with whom he’d been rubbing shoulders since they were installed in the capsule by the ground crew about 45 minutes earlier. In the rush and confusion, the two men hadn’t exchanged much more than a glance and a quick ‘hello’ before the Vanitus rocket fired them into space.

The Mole must have noticed the Moustache was looking at him because the Mole urged his torso and head around as well and the two men got the first good look at each other.

“Maybe we should get Houston on the line?” the Moustache suggested.

“Yes, absolutely. Sounds like a good idea to me,” the Mole casually replied.

Both turned their domes to face forward and stared out the front of the capsule as it gently spun in the emptiness, alternately giving them a long glimpse of earth, then “nothing”, then the moon, then “nothing”.

A few moments passed before the Moustache asked, this time with the annoyance clear in his voice, “Are you going to open the line to Houston?”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” the Mole replied calmly, staring at the moon as it twisted out of view.

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The Moustache again turned his dome toward his comrade, trying to glare him into action, but the Mole was busy craning his head forward and to the right, away from the Moustache, to keep the moon in frame for further examination.

“Ok, right, I get it, gotta learn on the job” mumbled the Moustache, with a faint, poorly executed southern accent rolling under his breath and over the final four words of the sentence. He turned his attention to the control panel. Looking through his options, he saw, really for the first time, the vast number of switches, nobs, levers, lights and other gizmos that lay before him.

He looked through each option, studying them to see if any were marked “RADIO”. Then he thought, maybe it was something clever, like “COMMS” instead of “communications”, which seemed like something the engineers down on earth may have done to save time and space. He nodded his giant domed head and silently applauded himself for thinking through the issue so cleverly.

But he didn’t see “RADIO”. Or “COMMS”. Or even, less cleverly, anything like “TALK” or “LISTEN”.

The Moustache closed his eyes and tried to conjure up last week’s various training sessions. But the only communications-oriented information he could remember were discussions with his PR advisers around the three press releases to be distributed in connection with the mission: upon launch, after the moon landing, and upon the safe return of the craft to earth.

The first release was probably already public, he thought with satisfaction, announcing to the world the successful launch of the first private mission to the moon, “conceived, entirely financed and led by billionaire entrepreneur, CEO of Vanitus Inc, philosopher and space explorer, Charles ‘Chip’ Bert”, had gone off without a hitch.

The Mole interrupted Chip’s revery.

“Chip? Can I call you Chip?”

“Well, I’d rather…” Chip began to reply in the negative, only to be cut off as the Mole ploughed on.

“Chip, this is great. Seriously. What a view. My buddy Patrick was right, turns out the world definitely isn’t flat. I didn’t think it was but, you know, you never know, right? Either way, what’s the plan now?,” he asked, brightly.

“What do you mean?” Chip replied, staring again at the red flashing light.

“I mean, well, how much longer do we hang out here? You know, how do we get to the moon from here?” The Mole asked, his eyes again following the moon as it spun out of view.

“Ok Robert. Enough’s enough. Seriously” Chip said, trying to convey the forceful calm that had made him the darling of so many business magazine profiles.

The Mole turned his domed head, with great effort, to look over first his left shoulder and then his right shoulder.

After confirming only he and Chip were in the capsule, he asked, “Who’s Robert?”

“What are you….” Chip stammered, his anger, which he and his PR team were almost always able to keep out of those business magazine profiles, was now rising to the surface.

“You! You’re Robert. Robert Hernandez! Mr Moon! NASA’s most famous astronaut!”

“An astronaut?” the Mole answered, with a chuckle, “An astronaut?” he said, repeating the joke to himself, “ah, no, I’m the midwest regional HR assistant for AT&T. Or I was. I got laid off a few weeks ago. Bastards. But it worked out ok in the end, since I wouldn’t have had enough vacation time for this trip. We only get 10 days off during the year and we already spent a week camping up by Niagra falls this summer. It was really nice,” he said with a smile as he turned toward Chip, and added, “Have you been?”

“No no no, you’re Robert Hernandez. NASA astronaut. Veteran of six missions, including two to the moon,” Chip said, forcefully.

“Oh, well, no. I don’t want to be rude. This is your ship, after all, but I don’t think that’s right. I am Dave. Dave Martindale. From Cleveland, Ohio. Well not Cleveland, exactly. Between Cleveland and Akron. Closer to Akron, but people don’t know where that is, so I usually say Cleveland,” Dave said, ending with a note of confidence.

The two stared out the window.

The universe spun.

The red light flashed.

“Yes indeed,” Dave said, impervious to the awkward part of the awkward silence that was so clear to Chip, “I’m the biiiig winner.”

“What do you mean, big winner?,” concern forcing its way into the billionaire’s voice and a new feeling, which must be fear, creeping into his mind.

“Of the competition.” Dave said, but when Chip cocked his head in confusion, Dave stumbled on, “on Witter ….” and finding only silence, stumbled further with “the competition that you started a few weeks ago……when you Wittered that the moon shouldn’t just be for rich people and experts from NASA……”

But there was still nothing from Chip, so Dave clamoured forward further still, a bit nervous now that he was apparently explaining something to the man who had designed and financed the construction of the rocket he was sitting in. “And you would be happiest if you could go to the moon with a regular person chosen from your Witter followers.”

And with that, it all came rushing back to Chip. The extra glass of wine toward the end of the night a few weeks ago. The small bump of ketamine taken before bed, strictly as prescribed by his personal physician, of course, although those bumps weren’t exactly measured out in a laboratory and had a tendency to grow in size and, occasionally quantum, if Chip wasn’t vigilant.

And now he remembered, or thought he remembered, the resulting Witterstorm.

“But…but…” Chip stammered, “I wasn’t…wait...so where is Robert? Where’s Mr Moon?”

“Oh, Bob? He said I could call him Bob. Geez. I don’t know. What time is it? He could be sleeping. Such a nice guy. It would be nice to have him up here, you know, if we had space. Hey! You should build a three-seater next time!”, Dave said, chuckling to himself and continuing, “honestly, he seemed a little confused about why I was taking his spot, but I have to tell you, I am super excited to be here. What a ride! A few weeks ago I was doing exit interviews at work, then I was having my own exit interview and then boom, the Witter-world just found me, and here I am.”

“The Witter-world just found you?” Chip asked, bewildered.

“Yes indeed,” Dave said, the pride bubbling up in his voice, “@SneezingCat134 started a Witter poll….Do you follow @SneezingCat134? You should. He…or maybe she? Gosh, I don’t even really know! Isn’t that funny? Either way, that account has the best memes and stuff. OOOooooohhhhhhhhh” Dave paused, eyes wide, distracted as the moon came gliding silently back into view.

“I don’t understand,” Chip mumbled, mostly to himself.

“Well @SneezingCat134 said I was probably the most average guy on Witter and one thing led to another and here I am.”

“One thing led to another?”, Chip queried, now straining to control the panic.

“Yep,” Dave said, turning to watch the moon spin away, “Witter couldn’t agree on anyone else, but everyone pretty much agreed that no one hated the idea of me. So here I am. Ha!” David laughed to himself before continuing, “@Weedancer said he wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a line-up of one. Then my mom agreed with him. That probably put me over the top, but I only saw Mom’s reply when my brother tagged me later because my mom initially tagged the wrong Dave Martindale. I am @DaveMartindale4272, which is my birthday, but my mom accidentally tagged @DaveMartindale, without any numbers or whatever. He’s the lucky Dave Martindale to have gotten that handle. Or he was until I got this gig.”

“I can’t believe this” Chip said, shaking his dome.

“Me neither!” Dave gleefully responded.

“Well, how did you have time to go through the training? You did go through training, right?”, Chip asked impatiently.

“Yes! Definitely. Weeks of it.”

“Oh good, thank god,” Chip said, “so do you know what this red light means?”

“Uhhhmmmm” Dave responded, his eyes rolling backwards, searching, “to be honest, I wouldn’t say that I paid a ton of attention during the training. It was a lot of information and I sort of figured you’d been training for a while. Plus, it’s, like, your rocket. So I figured you’d know how to drive it.”

“Well I don’t know how to drive it” Chip blurted out. “And it’s a space capsule. And you don’t drive a space capsule. You — I don’t know — fly it. Or pilot it — or whatever. But you sure as shit don’t drive it!”

The dark long silence resumed.

The universe spun.

The red light flashed.

Both men tilted their domes down to get a better look at the offending light.

“So, uh, what’s the plan then? Take care of this little ‘check engine’ light and then head off for the moon?” Dave asked.

“Check engine light? Check engine light! Did you pay any attention to the training? Each of these lights indicates a very specific, potentially very serious potential problem for Vanitus 1.”

“Oh. Ok. What does this light mean?” Dave asked innocently.

Chip shook his dome, “I have no idea,” he said almost sheepishly, before regaining his composure, “I mean, I am Chip Bert for christ’s sake. I am the richest man in the world, depending on the price of Vanituscoin! I didn’t have time to sit through hours and hours and hours of training! That’s why I hired Robert ‘Mr Moon’ Hernandez. I assumed he would be doing most of the driving.”

“Flying”, Dave interrupted, “or maybe piloting “.

“What?”

“You don’t drive a space capsule. It doesn’t have wheels,” Dave said, proud to have a good point to make to such an important person.

The red light flashed.

The universe spun, maybe a bit faster now.

Dave strained forward, looking to left and right. “Hey, have you noticed the moon seems to be getting smaller?”

“Yes,” Chip said.

“And, huh, look at that. I guess the earth is too?”

“Yes,” Chip said sullenly, shaking his domed head.

But from the Gist List recently covered a story from the on his podcast that I missed and feel compelled to share and discuss.

I should be honest: I didn’t really miss this story by accident. More likely, I wilfully avoided it. The sheer weight of tragedy in the news these days feel too heavy sometimes.

But I’m glad Pesca forced me to look, and I encourage you to do the same.

Please read the whole article and/or listen to Mike’s discussion in the podcast episode, but the story poses questions:

Soon a photograph of a dead man was being beamed across the city to a sparse apartment brimming with dread. How could the government just snatch the family’s patriarch and then leave him to a winter night’s mercy? Why hadn’t they called the family? Didn’t they notice his damaged eyes? His inability to speak English?

What kind of country was this?

Indeed.

Read the article.

I believe America is capable of greatness. I believe it is capable of quite the opposite. This was always true and remains so.

Pesca diagnosed the first Trump administration as “malevolence tempered by incompetence, shot through with mendacity.” It was a brilliant lens. But the story of Nurul Amin reveals that chaotic formula has been replaced by something worse: a well-functioning system.

This new system no longer requires active malevolence. Instead, it runs on a trinity of Pervasive Indifference, Weaponized Negligence and Institutional Mendacity.

It is the Pervasive Indifference to a stateless man’s humanity. A “noncitizen” taken into custody who was “not amenable to removal” from the country…so was left to die instead.

It is the Weaponized Negligence that has its own procedure: drop a sick, half-blind man in prison-issue clothes near a closed donut shop in the Buffalo winter, and call it “release.” The neglect itself is the weapon.

And it is the Institutional Mendacity of the official statement denying responsibility: “This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released…”

A mostly blind man, unable to communicate, left to wander the streets for a week until he died in the cold of a Buffalo February.

The system worked.

We were right to be outraged when ICE was terrifying with militarized madness, busting down doors. This new system is quiet, meant to go unnoticed. A machine that achieves the same ends in silence.

But be careful. This machine is not run by “them”, it is run by “us”.

Americans like to say things like “he’s not my president”. But this is a lie told by those seeking absolution.

In a democracy, the government’s authority is ours. Their signatures are ours. We drove the van that left a sick man to die. We don’t get to opt out of responsibility for what is done in our name. We have to own it. And it’s our responsibility to change it.

Yes, this is difficult to do on an institutional level. That is what elections are for. But we are responsible and the final horror here is how the machine’s cruelty was mirrored on the street.

The architecture of the system is one thing. The fact that no one stopped to help Nurul Amin as he wandered toward his silent, lonely death is another.

A family friend in the story asked us to imagine if he could have just said, “Help me, I’m lost.”

This is where the story turns back on me, and maybe on you. I turned away from this story. It’s impossible to carry the weight of every wrong in the world. We can’t personally stop wars or solve global crises, and the sheer volume of heartache can lead to a kind of paralysis. It’s a defense mechanism.

But maybe avoiding the small pain of a news story is practice for avoiding the greater discomfort of helping a stranger in real life. Maybe it trains the muscle of indifference.

We cannot fix everything. But we can see the person in front of us. And if I am too overwhelmed to even bear witness on a screen, how can I ever trust myself to be the one who breaks through the public silence and asks, “Do you need help?”

I don’t have a simple answer, but I know I have to figure it out, because the machine is designed to be indifferent.

We must refuse to be.

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Maybe it’s because I moved away from home for college and eventually on to London and now Paris, trying to understand different cultures, languages and approaches to life. And having kids will, or at least should, challenge anyone’s notion they know much of anything about how humans should live. And then, of course, there is the malignant, angry gorilla in the room. A dire cancer diagnosis will take a sledgehammer to your sense of self.

Whatever the reason, I am less certain of how this world works, how humans work, how I work, than I was 20 years ago.

Which is why I found the recent Louis Theroux documentary on the Manosphere so interesting. I found it entertaining. I found it occasionally terrifying. And, in the end, I found it oddly comforting.

It suggested to me we are living through a modern version of a period that is not unique in the Grand History of Human Stupidity: a new technology laid over economic and social instability, seasoned with hearty helpings of narcissism, that most reliable of human constants.

We have faced all of this before. Many times. Maybe for all time. Including the bit about new, disruptive technologies, many of which caused enormous social upheaval. See, for example, the printing press, which arguably led to hundreds of millions of deaths.

Guttenberg and his printing press → Martin Luther and his 95 Theses → Protestant Reformation → War and war and war and war in Europe from 1525 until 1945.

Granted, that might be a slight simplification of 500 years of history, but not by much.

It’s also worth noting the printing press also led to the Enlightenment, modern science and the spread of democracy.

So, you know, strikes and gutters.

We humans always seem to come out the other side, although it often isn’t much fun getting there. We usually spend quite a lot of time trying to kill each other, and too often succeeding. Which is to say we should probably do what we can to avoid helping saddle up the Four Horsemen.

And although it would be tempting to place the goons who featured in Theroux’s documentary astride at least one of those horses, that gives them way too much credit. These children couldn’t identify which end of the horse faces forward.

There was their bald-faced pseudo-nihilism, spoken by people who have never heard the word the word “pseudo” or “nihilism” and needn’t fear having to learn what they mean. Nothing matters. There is no morality. This was explicitly stated. The only reasonable goal is to acquire as much wealth, fame, and random stuff as possible, by whatever means necessary, even though, by their own admission, none of it matters.

Say what you will about actual nihilists, but at least most of them had the intellectual consistency to renounce the materialist trappings of life. These beefcakes skipped the philosophy entirely. To their credit, they did find a sweet sleeveless Sartre t-shirt in the merch store on the way out.

Somewhere out there, Nietzsche is hanging out with Lincoln in the Bardo, cursing his timing. If only he’d been born a few generations later, he could have been a content creator. Then again, nothing matters, so, like, whatever.

But apart from the vapidity of the cars and the muscles and the fake breasts and truly horrific wardrobe choices, the most striking element was the certainty with which everyone operated.

Certainty is the fundamental element to the operation of idiots.

They don’t know what they don’t know. Ignorance is fuel and the engine. These fellas are the walking, talking, bicep-curling embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know, the more certain you are.

To be fair, it’s not just these idiots. It’s all of us.

We understand very little about our world and we are, as a result, terrified. Yes, we might understand more each day as science progresses, but we’re talking about drops in the bucket.

About 95% of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter, which is just a giant category of stuff we know exists and, well… that’s all we know. The smartest people on earth can account for only about 5% of what’s out there.

Or consider this: when an electron jumps between energy levels, it doesn’t travel the distance between them. It simply vanishes from one spot and reappears in another, like a tiny magic trick with no explanation. We have no idea where it goes in between. We don’t even know if the electron that reappears is the same one that disappeared.

I bet you didn’t understand that. Don’t worry, no one really does. Welcome to the club. We’re a messy bunch.

And so we silly, frivolous, ignorant humans are left to live in this terrifyingly complex world, uncertain about its most basic elements.

Ah, but there is one thing we know for certain.

We are certain everyone alive will cease to exist at some point. We are certain we will die.

I know almost no one wants to read that. I get it. And I recognise the danger in writing it. With the “Everything” blog on the verge of going global, I know I am lighting matches in a matchbox house. But it was a bad idea to build a matchbox house in the first place, honestly.

It isn’t fun recognising that death is our only certainty. And that sole certain truth is too terrifying to face. To sit with it, truly sit with it, is paralysing. Believe me, I know, I did it so you don’t have to.

We cannot live with the fact that we are going to die. So we build monuments and religions and social structures and origin myths and legal systems and Instagram followings, all in service of the same desperate project: convincing ourselves we matter and that something of us will endure.

Ernest Becker called this our immortality project. We are all engaged in one. The guys in the Manosphere just happen to have chosen the dumbest possible version. And is it ironic that these pseudo-nihilists are busy constructing meaning through nihilism? Honestly, I have never been entirely clear on the definition of irony, but it’s definitely not sarcastic, so I think this fits into the irony bucket.

It is impossible to make much progress in our immortality project without a firm sense of place in our culture or society. And any challenge to that culture is a challenge to our immortality, such as it is. In times of uncertainty and upheaval, when we struggle to make sense of our world and our place in it, we do not gracefully admit to confusion or the limits of our knowledge. We do not surrender to the truth that we understand very little.

We thrash around in fear and seek certainty, any certainty, however illusory or irrational. Hence HS Tikky Tokky and the other rubes in this documentary. Hence, might I suggest, the comfort the 47th President of the United States provided to millions of voters.

The issue with the men of Louis Theroux’s Manosphere is not that they are ignorant or stupid. About half the people in this world are below average intelligence and I am pretty confident on the math there. The world has always been rife with idiots. The problem is with the rest of us. We are all desperate for certainty, and these men are nothing if not certain.

Certainty is the whole grift here, because certainty is what we reach for when the gods shake our snow globe too vigorously, when the ground below seems to be disappearing. We will take any worldview, however absurd, however transparently constructed by a muscle-bound twenty-year-old with the intellectual depth of a puddle, over the terror of having no worldview at all.

The Manosphere is offering a map and a flashlight, although the map was drawn by a five-year-old with a single crayon and the flashlight is hilariously dim. But any map is better than no map. A map towards somewhere, towards something, anywhere: material excess, performative confidence, tribal belonging, all designed to keep the worm at the core, that quiet, gnawing awareness of our own mortality, from eating through to the surface. And even the dimmest light gives comfort in the darkness

The tragedy isn’t that these guys are outliers or nihilists, that would be better. These are weak, mortal creatures, terrified by that mortality, just like the rest of us. They are desperately constructing meaning out of Lamborghinis and gym selfies and dominance hierarchies, because the alternative is to confront the void. And a great many will follow them because they are just as terrified and don’t have a better place from which to seek solace.

But we have been through this before. Every day, in fact. It’s just that some periods of human history are more destabilising and terrifying than others. Some periods challenge or destroy the structures we have built to keep ourselves calm. We survived the printing press, which did considerably more damage than anything a man with a ring light and a protein shake is likely to manage.

We should probably give Gutenberg and his printing press a great deal more credit for disruption than we give these boys, and we should allow for the possibility that we don’t need to follow these buffoons all the way down the drain.

HS Tikky Tokky probably isn’t going to start WW3 or the new Crusades, but if he does, that’s on all of us for failing to create a better alternative to performative nihilistic bullshit.

I am certain of almost nothing. I am certain that I love my wife and my kids, my family and my dear friends. I am certain I will die.

Aside from that, honestly, I am not fully convinced of anything else in this life. In this world. And the trick, if there is one, is to be ok with that, at least most of the time.

I am pleased to report that I am!

Another clean scan is in the books and I can breathe slightly easier, at least until the next scan appears on the horizon. The relief of a clean scan never seems to outweigh the anticipatory anxiety, the math doesn’t math, but I am incredibly lucky and grateful to be in a position to complain about math and not the tumors in my pancreas and liver.

So thank you to all who inquired. As for those who didn’t inquire, well, I don’t want to make you feel guilty, but you should all feel absolutely terrible about yourselves and your callousness.

Now, back to the inanity.

I watched the “Manosphere” document from Louis Theroux and I have thoughts. Quite a few thoughts, actually, and it is taking me a while to get them down in my usual “hilarious and penetrating style”.

(I bet you don’t see a lot of people use quotation marks when they quote themselves, do you? Well, that’s the kind of ground-breaking, boundary-pushing, not-at-all-redundant prose you get here.)

Anyway, I am pulling that post together and it reminded me I’ve already hollered about performative macho bullshit before, in my NYTimes (incredibly) long listed book published last year. I read the chapter again and I liked it, so I figured I would share it with you all. I wrote the piece below only 2.5 years ago and a few points struck me:

1. There are em dashes in the chapter below and now people are going to think I used AI for it, which I didn’t, because I wrote this a few years ago and I am a lot of things but I am not an “early adopter”.

2. This chapter was very much directed at my young sons. The entire book was, of course. I wanted them to have something from me in case my pancreas killed me before they were old enough to make lasting memories of me. But I really needed them to hear this chapter, particularly the start of it.

3. My thoughts on American exceptionalism were probably rose-colored back then and sounds positively Pollyannaish today. That said, I still believe America is capable of great things, it’s just very clear it is also capable of quite the opposite. Twas ever thus. Time struggles on.

But, whatever, here you go.

Please, never be that guy

We moved from Paris to Cleveland following my diagnosis so I could pursue treatment. The initial care I received in the US was no different than what I would have received in France, but we moved back primarily because of the comfort my family and I had with the US healthcare system. My siblings are all doctors; we have relatives who are doctors; and that results in a systemic knowledge that is invaluable when navigating a complicated new world.

During this time, I was driving around the west side of Cleveland and I saw a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boy driving a black convertible Jeep. It had spare tire attached to the back, with a covering over the spare tire. On that covering was the phrase: “She looks better topless.” The joke being that the plastic tire covering, that witty little devil, could plausibly say it was talking about the Jeep because it was a convertible and could therefore be driven without a top. But maybe — and here is where it gets really funny — maybe the reader would think the plastic tire covering was talking about an imaginary woman and how that imaginary woman would look better topless.

Do you get it?

Maybe read it again to really capture the subtle genius of it.

I know. So good, right?

This chapter is directed primarily at my sons, but should serve as a useful reminder to everyone. Please, for the love of god, in respect of my memory and for your own dignity: never, ever be the guy who drives that Jeep. I don’t think you should even be a passenger in that Jeep, unless maybe you’re stranded in Death Valley and your car breaks down and you’re out of water and that Jeep is the only car that passes, saving you from certain death. In that case, you should at least ask the driver if you can remove the spare tire cover for the duration of the ride.

It’s hard to know who to blame for that monstrosity. The kid obviously must shoulder some of the blame, but there’s a reason the law differentiates between adults and children. Boys, especially, are very stupid for a very long time. Sure, their frontal lobes aren’t formed, but there is some specific form of stupidity that grips men until their mid-twenties that isn’t explained fully by an unformed brain. And this young man was clearly going to be in the grip of that stupidity for many years to come.

I therefore turn to the parents, and to modern American parents in general. The “choose your own adventure” form of modern parenting in America has many benefits. It can, in the right circumstances, allow kids to discover themselves and what makes them happy, facilitating a confidence and independence and paths to happiness that might not be so well-trodden in any given family.

But there is a particular hesitancy in America and American parenting to draw lines for children or pass judgment on their decisions and actions. Young people in pretty much every Western culture seem genetically predisposed to ignore adults. That’s a truth, and likely a developmentally necessary one. But in America, adults often don’t even attempt to pass down lessons learned or guidance to younger generations.

We talk a lot about “helicopter parenting,” but most of that is just parents leaping in to solve problems for their children. American parents are much less willing to tell their young children their behavior is socially unacceptable, or to tell their older children the path they are taking is the wrong one. It’s not that there’s no love and support provided. There is plenty of that. But there is relatively little in the way of guidance.

My theory, completely unfounded in any of the social sciences given that I have studied none of them, is that this is rooted in America’s obsession with the individual rights which are set out in the founding documents and founding myths of our country. Our obsession with individual rights manifests itself in many ways, including in the idea that it is up to each generation to determine what is right and wrong, what works and doesn’t work, and to express themselves fully in and through those individual rights.

This has many virtues. The yoke of family history can be heavy. There is liberty in living without this weight and blazing your own path. There is freedom in deciding to ignore what happened in generations past, in creating and recreating or simply destroying your history. In deciding who your forefathers were and how they were. Or simply throwing all of that aside and just deciding who you are, free from all that.

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Years ago my brother Brian was backpacking around Ireland and decided to head up to where my father’s side of the family is from originally. Some distant relative is said to have left Ireland as part of one of the many waves of Irish migration, settling first in Butler, Pennsylvania, before moving on to Cleveland.

Somewhere along the way, someone on my dad’s side of the family went to the great trouble of producing a leather-bound book setting out the who, what, when, and how of the family’s history up to the 1960s or 1970s. It is a useful document, if not a particularly interesting one for non-blood relatives, and it is quite restrained in tone. Its purpose seems to be a reasonable one: It is a simple historical account.

But the oral history told by my father’s family is entirely different, at least when it comes to the generations of men that preceded my dad in America. According to family lore, each and every one of these relatives — particularly the men, of course — was whip-smart, witty, and successful. The reason why the extended family wasn’t swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s gold bullion was almost always the same: Our people had an independent, principled streak that got them into hot water. And as to the history which took place before anyone boarded an America-bound boat, we were said (by ourselves) to have been descended from philosophers and scribes. To the McNamee clan on the west side of Cleveland, the McNamee name was synonymous with intelligence and sharp wit.

Which was why it was so surprising for my brother Brian to learn, while sitting in the living room of some distant cousin out in the Irish countryside, that the McNamees from that area had always been known as a bit… touched. A bit slow.

Now, I don’t know whether the McNamees who stayed in Ireland are any smarter or dumber than the average bear. My guess, based on my experience with American McNamees, people in general, and the mathematical calculation used to generate an average, is that most of them fall somewhere near the middle in most categories.

But it doesn’t matter, because when you come to America you get to create whatever story you want, however untethered to reality it may be. The dullness of your grandfather’s mind doesn’t mean anything once you get on that boat. Nobody knows the stories about how he used to get so drunk he’d habitually get lost and wake up two towns over the next day. That baggage got tossed overboard somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.

This spirit infects American society in a lot of positive ways. Having lived abroad, I’ve become aware of a quality that still exists in America — one which allows people the freedom to create their own reality, regardless of how terrible or dumb their kin might have been. There is an optimism in that, some of it forced, but much of it real. This optimism can come off as naivete to cynical Europeans, but really it stems from the belief in the individual’s ability to control their own future. Whether or not that is actually true, whether America remains the best place to achieve the American Dream, whether or not that was ever more true than false — all of that is beside the point. The mere existence of that optimism is an asset seldom found in abundance in the other developed Western countries I know well. And that quality is so powerful that even my most cynical French friends look on it with admiration.

But there are costs to everything. And here you have a situation where a kid is driving around with that goddamn tire cover and you have to ask: Is it all worth it? Sure, rugged individualism is our founding myth and may help create a dynamic, hopeful future. But maybe we can have that while also allowing that kid’s parents to tell him that the tire cover makes him look like an asshole.

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So you’re on the train and it’s the weekend before Easter but also the weekend before another CT scan that will tell you whether 1. you don’t have pancreatic cancer again, in which case, my friend, you’re good to go, or 2. you have pancreatic cancer again, in which case you’ll probably be dead pretty soon and this time ain’t no Jesus in his big boy pants going to help you.

You settle into your seat and reach for your backpack, where you’ve stashed a can of Stella Artois pilfered from the lounge (again, you take this train A LOT). For some reason, your mind jumps to the upcoming scan, just a few days away. Of course, it’s not just some random reason: you already had stage IV pancreatic cancer, a mean bastard of a cancer with a 97% chance of killing you within five years. But somehow it didn’t kill you and surviving it this long feels a bit like being the newest Spinal Tap drummer a few days into the tour.

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Either way, here you are sitting in your seat with your can of beer and reminding yourself you’ve been cancer-free for over 2 years. Almost 3. You’ve been cancer-free and off treatment for almost 3 years. “You’re a miracle” is what people keep telling you, although that doesn’t make you feel as good as people think it might because it’s not great, relying on miracles to remain alive. Miracles don’t happen every day and you already got one, right?

But you deal with all of this fairly well. You remain mostly calm. You’ve been doing it for a while now, for almost 3 years. Sometimes the terror doesn’t feel too heavy, honestly. But then you allow yourself to think about what would happen if there’s a smudge on the CT scan and you are told that you do, in fact, have pancreatic cancer again and are almost certainly going to die soon.

And if you think about it in detail, you figure you’ll start screaming in that room with the doctor, screaming in a way you didn’t the first time, because now you know what that fucking diagnosis means. It means not only are you probably going to be dead soon, or at least a lot sooner than you had planned, but it also means the time between now and your final moments will be filled with way too much bullshit and, frankly, horror. You’ll scream at the doctor because you know you’re going to have to tell your young children you have cancer again and you’re going to go through some terrible treatment and, because they won’t stop asking you, yes you might die.

So you’re obviously going to lose your mind in the meeting with the doctor, when it happens, and now it feels inevitable, which makes you want to scream as loud as you can right now. On this train. Because what the fuck are all these people doing, just sitting here quietly on the way to Paris from London, pretending like they all aren’t going to die soon, or at least a lot sooner than they had planned? Fuck me, wake up people.

But you don’t scream. You can’t scream. People would not like that. People would not like you screaming in the middle of a quiet train and they really would not like you screaming about how everyone is going to die sooner than they expect.

So you don’t scream in the middle of the train but you reserve the right to scream in that doctor’s office. You remind yourself again that you may not have pancreatic cancer again. And maybe, if you do, those honest-to-god miracle workers in the laboratories and hospitals might have one or two left in the bag for you.

No, none of this really makes you feel any better because rational thought overlaid with wish casting is no match for abject terror, but then again, you’re nearly home to your wife and it’s nearly Easter and your kids are looking forward to an Easter egg hunt this weekend. So, you know, on you go, right?

The trees were just past budding and the flowers were exploding in ground-bound firework displays of yellow, violet, pink and white. Puffs of clouds sat low and so raced across the electric blue sky. The sun played peak-a-boo.

Someone was playing a saxophone nearby. Close enough so Marie could tell it was being played poorly, but far enough away so it wasn’t particularly bothersome.

She was sitting on her favorite bench in her favorite park in Paris. The bench was shaded by an Oriental Plane tree, 30 meters high and more than 170 years old, with a trunk that rolled over itself like a half-burnt wax candle.

Marie often wondered who she would have been, had she not lived so near to Parc Monceau, a few steps from this piece of heaven. And she felt genuine sorrow for the billions of people who have come and gone from this world without having had the opportunity to sit on this bench on a late spring day. So many souls who never had the chance to see the honey-colored light leave its long, languid shadows.

But even though this bench remained her favorite bench and Parc Monceau remained her favorite park, she had decided this was the last time she would visit either.

Marie Bernard was 76 years old. Dressed in black jeans. Sensible black ballerinas on her feet. Her silken ivory blouse hid a small gold cross on her necklace. A green eyed, gold bodied chameleon brooch playfully adorned her simple black jacket.

A small black plastic box sat on her lap. Her hands sat folded over the box.

Marie had been a widow for nearly 20 years. It appeared as if she had pulled the broken pieces of her life back together after the loss of her husband. She had not, to be sure, “healed”. The idea of healing from such a loss angered her. An absurd idea pushed by those who have never felt true loss. By those who have never been shattered into ragged, corrupted pieces.

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She had spent the past two decades since her husband’s second heart attack learning to pretend as if she were complete again. At first, this took enormous effort. A coffee with a friend was often more than she could handle. But over time, she had become able to pretend that she was whole, even over long stretches, with relatively little energy expended in the effort.

But Marie knew she would remain heartbroken and shattered for the rest of her life now that her daughter was gone. She knew with certainty she did not have the time left, the strength or, frankly, the desire to try to put herself back together again. To do so would be to lie, with every moment. To live as if the possibility of happiness had not been buried too.

Marie and Agnes had been close. They spoke daily and met at least weekly for coffee or dinner or a walk through the Marais. And Marie had sat with her daughter on this very bench for too many hours to count over the past few decades, including the past two years when Agnes was sick from the cancer and the chemo. Her already petite frame shrinking further. Her think brown hair, previously rolling almost naturally in Farah Fawcet curls when she wanted it to, was the first casualty of the medicine meant to save her.

Marie wished she could feel Agnes next to her on the bench now, she knew people often spoke to moments like that. But sitting on their bench again only made Marie feel alone.

A person reaches a certain age and realizes it might be impossible to truly know another person. An age where we realize we can’t even understand ourselves entirely. And Marie had passed that age a long time ago now. Even so, she felt as if she knew everything she could have known about Agnes, from the immaterial to the foundational.

She knew Agnes’ favorite color when she was six. Burnt orange. She knew Agnes had been afraid of flying and tight spaces, so airline travel had been pretty much out of the question. She knew the last time Agnes had flown, from Cape Town back to Paris, she was so nervous and got so drunk, in a poorly executed plan to manage the nerves, that she vomited in the plane bathroom and was desperately hungover before the plane even touched down in France.

She knew Agnes had her heart broken three times: when her father died; when her best friend from her early teenage years left her for another group of friends; and when the married man she had been seeing on and off for a few years in her late 20’s finally broke it off for good, in a series of cliches that Marie thought were beneath her daughter.

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Marie knew Agnes read nearly every Agatha Christie novel. She preferred to go to the cinema alone but liked to meet up with her mother or a friend after the film anyway, so they could talk about the movie she had just seen. She preferred Scandinavian movies to American movies and liked French movies least, preferring either bleak and grey, or naïve and bright, to dark and cynical.

But despite all of this time together, despite the love given and received, as Marie spent months emptying Agnes’ apartment after she died, there was much Marie did not know about her daughter. From the immaterial to the foundational, although it was difficult to know one from the other now.

Agnes had taken up skateboarding again, apparently, if the well-worn skateboard was anything to go by. It would, Marie considered, explain why Agnes showed up to dinner a few years ago with a broken arm but a very unsatisfactory explanation of how it had happened.

And Agnes had added photography to her list of hobbies as well. The pictures, mostly taken in the cemetery in Montmartre, were beautiful. Terrifyingly sad as seen through Marie’s eyes, the same eyes which had just taken in her own daughter’s funeral, but beautiful all the same.

The discoveries left Marie grief-stricken even further, realising a whole part of Agnes, or many parts, had died before her own mother could even have a chance to know them.

Agnes was, also previously unbeknownst to Marie, the person to whom you would leave your extra set of keys, in case of emergency. Marie learned this when she found in Agnes’ apartment, hidden away in the kitchen and now sitting in Marie’s lap, the small black plastic case holding 10 different sets of keys.

Ten sets of keys, each with the name of the owner and a phone number or email address written in Agnes’ neat penmanship on the small white card attached to the keychain. Certain of the cards had weathered with age. Others seemed new.

In a spasm of bravery, or lunacy, Marie messaged all 10 key owners. Marie already knew four of them, each close friends to Agnes for many years. Three of the others never responded, which Marie attributed to phone numbers changing and deaths occurring.

Marie had told each of the remaining seven, the four she knew already and the three she did not, that she would be sitting on this bench in Parc Monceau from 1 pm on this late-Spring afternoon, if they wished to recover the keys they had entrusted to her dead daughter.

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Having arrived at 12:30 to be sure she could lay claim to the correct bench, their bench, Marie spent the rest of the day, until the workers whistled and shut the gates of the park that evening, listening and occasionally talking about her daughter. Often but not always with tears in her eyes.

A man approached tentatively, a bit before 1 pm. In his early 40s, with a well-tailored suit and a beard to match, he was dressed like a man who wanted to be more confident than he was.

Marie asked him the same question she asked each person that day: “Can you please tell me something about my daughter?” And it was from this man, Sebastian — a man Marie had never heard of during any of her long walks with her daughter — it was from Sebastian that Marie learned her daughter had been engaged once upon a time. Long before the cancer and the fear and death. Briefly. “Before she came to her senses”, according to Sebastian, when she was a young woman in her very early 20’s. He spoke with sad eyes but tried to offer a small, wry smile. Marie wondered if the sadness was the cause of, or caused by, the broken engagement so many years ago.

Sebastian stayed only for a few minutes and left before others even arrived, the quiet goodbye telling Marie his heart had not yet healed from the loss of Agnes either. He forgot to take his keys with him and Marie did not have the strength to call after him.

So she sat quietly, waiting for others to arrive, as a stream of young men and women flowed past her. A path runs around the edge of Parc Monceau, the distance of the oval being almost exactly one kilometer, and the path turns into a one-way running track during the afternoon. An unceasing river of young and attractive men and women, almost all in their 20’s and 30’s, running counter-clockwise around and around and around. Running effortlessly. Casually. Each obscene, nearly vulgar, in their youth. Oblivious to the pull of gravity or the march of time. Ungrateful for their springing legs and taut skin because it has ever been so. Will forever be so.

Marie’s ole factory brain distracted the rest of her towards the magical scent of butter and sugar cooking, wafting over from the small stand in the middle of the park serving crepes and waffles with heaping helpings of whipped cream and Nutella to wide-eyed children and weary parents.

Marie watched a mother walking and holding hands with her young daughter, but a deep, painful chasm opened inside Marie at the sight. She closed her eyes tightly and counted her breaths.

When she opened her eyes, Marie saw an older woman, perhaps 10 or so years her senior, walking tentatively towards her, accompanied by a middle-aged man. Marie recognized Denise, her daughter’s downstairs neighbor, and David, who had previously lived above Agnes but now lived across town.

Denise arrived with a soft sadness in her eyes but her expression was otherwise neutral. Taken together, her countenance presented a woman who had lived through the intense desperation of loss and had come to understand, maybe even believe, there was no utility in pain, but no avoiding it either.

Marie learned that Agnes often cooked dinner for the three of them on Monday evenings, after which they would watch American reality TV together and laugh. “She had the most wonderful laugh”, Denise said. Marie knew this, obviously. She could still hear the laugh in quiet moments, but she was scared it might slip away. So she thrilled at knowing someone still held her daughter’s laugh. It provided a moment of hope that the joy of her daughter’s laugh might still exist in some way. But that flicker of light only made the inevitable darkness which followed – the darkness in which Marie now lived – the darkness was rendered somehow deeper. More bereft.

Marie could only sit still and quiet, distant from the conversation, until she had the courage to engage again. A few moments passed, more breaths, and Marie heard her daughter’s neighbors talking about some of the meals Agnes would cook for them, settling on a lamb stew as their shared favorite.

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This must have been the family recipe that Marie had learned from her own mother, though she doesn’t remember teaching it to Agnes. She wanted to ask for details on the recipe, to be sure. Did she use a bit of Worchester Sauce? Kidney beans? Did it have a slight kick from red pepper flakes?

But before she could interrupt their reverie, Marie saw Thomas, Celine, Julien and Juliette arriving together. The four of them had been close friends with Agnes and each other for many years. Thomas had a bottle of white wine in his hand and Celine held a bottle of rose in hers. Julien carried a wine key and a few plastic cups in the shape of wine glasses. Juliette had a paper bag with chips and carrots and dips.

All of them had also come with stories. Happy stories. Funny stories. Stories evidencing a deep friendship lived over decades, but each story, even told through rolling laughter, was now singed around the edges with sadness and loss.

Agnes had convinced Celine to cheat on a test when they were 19, certain she had a fool proof strategy for not getting caught. And neither were caught, probably because no one suspected them of cheating since they both failed the test so spectacularly due to a fault in Agnes’ system.

Agnes and Thomas had pretended to be fiancées looking for a wedding venue, driving around the Mediterranean coast, talking their way into free lunches and dinners for a week about a decade ago.

Juliette and Agnes had spent six months in Nepal, living and volunteering at an orphanage. They seemed to have spent half of their time teaching and caring for the children, and the other half battling lice and bouts of food poisoning. But somehow they spent the entire time laughing at their good misfortune.

Julien was the most reserved of the four, quietly laughing, but mostly just looking on. Tears perched at the corners of his eyes. And he also stayed the longest, sitting with Marie and watching the last rays of light disappear behind the Hausmannian buildings which sit along the outside of the park.

The air turned chilly and then cold. They heard the whistles of the guards, signalling the park was about to close.

Julien and Agnes stood to leave but both lingered, unsure. Marie was considering the reality of these being her final moments in one of her favorite places. She could not quite figure out what Julien was considering.

“This is a lovely place to sit”, he said, motioning to the bench and then taking a deep breath as he took in the final moments of day retreating from Parc Monceau.

It would be dark soon.

“It is. Agnes and I sat here many, many times,” Marie said, quiet tears now streaming down her cheeks. She couldn’t bring herself to speak the reality that this was her last time on this bench, sitting with her daughter, or what little was left of her.

“I still live just around the corner,” Julien said, pausing, then adding, “would you like to come back next week? Same time, same place?”

“Yes,” responded Marie, quickly, grasping for the hand reaching out in the impending darkness, “that would be lovely.”

Mike is a polymath with a stunning variety of guests, both in terms of expertise and viewpoint. You will get smarter by listening to The Gist. The only potential downside is you have to hear Mike sing occasionally. I personally don’t mind it, but that might be the audible Stockholm Syndrome talking.

He is also almost aggressively non-ideological, if that’s a thing, and pragmatic, which is somehow controversial now.

I don’t even hold it against him that I’ve never been on the show.

I am also a huge fan of drugs. Let me be more precise: I am a huge fan of medications. Wait, I should dig down a bit further still: I really like medications that materially improve and even save lives.

My all-time favorites are the medications that saved me when my pancreas went malignant and tried to kill me. I even look back fondly on the chemo, which is better understood and therefore much more effective than ever, and the anti-nausea drugs that have more than kept pace.

I am deeply grateful for the drugs I was given in my first clinical trial. A new-fangled PARP inhibitor (olaparib, approved in 2018) exploited a genetic mutation and prevented those sneaky cancerous cells from repairing and hiding themselves. Immunotherapy (pembrolizumab, approved in 2013), also new-fangled, then harnessed my immune system to seek and destroy the bad guys.

And I am grateful for the second clinical trial, in which I was the third patient, where they pulled out and treated me with my own stem cells and tested some pretty high-octane drug cocktails on me. It was not fun, not at all. Those were not fun drugs.

But I have been cancer-free and off treatment for about 2.5 years (and alive for over 5.5 years). Not bad, particularly when the 5 year survival rate for Stage IV pancreatic cancer is…it’s really not good.

Which is why I was so disappointed with Mike and The Gist recently when…just kidding, I wasn’t disappointed at all. But I think the algorithm ruling our universe selects for controversy so I thought I would throw that in.

Still, I take issue with one of his recent guests, Thomas Goetz, who was on the show to discuss his podcast, Drug Story, “about the disease business.” The gist (pun intended) of Drug Story seems to be:

1. Big Pharma creates drugs solely to generate profits,

2. yes some of these drugs are revolutionary and improve/save lives...but

3. the profit motive makes it all sort of icky and

4. Big Pharma are fat cat capitalists and boy-oh-boy do we all hate fat cat capitalists.

I’m writing this not because Goetz’s view is fringe. I am writing because I think this view is mainstream now, with support across party lines. No one loses votes by bashing Merck (which made my pembrolizumab—thank you, Mr. Merck!).

Goetz painted Big Pharma as exploiting U.S. patients, but conceded that the drugs improve lives —> profits from the US market fuel rapid advances because we pay a lot for the newest, coolest stuff —> and the US and the rest of the world (including developing nations) benefit.

Yes, some Americans can’t afford every drug. That’s unfortunate, and we should work to build a fairer system that expands access to the newest, best therapies. But some people can afford them, or the insurance covering the drugs1. That is good for those patients and, yes, also for drug companies, their shareholders and the people who work for the drug companies.

It’s not fair, I guess, but it’s also true that patents expire, competitors arrive, prices fall, and access broadens. That’s how progress spreads. And it’s not theoretical. The truth of this progress is not really debated, by Goetz or anyone else who honestly looks at how far we have come.

We’ve gotten so spoiled by the sheer velocity of medical progress that we treat miracles like entitlements and forget how recently they were thought to be impossible.

Penicillin debuted in the 1940s and went on to treat a lot of syphilis, from what I can tell. Not that I have personal experience therein. Just based on books and whatnot.

Either way, we went from the first antibiotics treating STDs for American GIs in WW2 all the way to drugs that keep your malignant cells from repairing themselves while immunotherapy infusions turn your T cells into your very own cellular Seal Team Six.

But what have you done for me lately, I guess…

And we can easily take this out of the cancer world. Until recently, Hep C meant months of brutal treatment that often didn’t work. The idea for a Hep C cure a decade ago was nearly unfathomable. We have that now and we didn’t get there by profit scolding.

People want to strangle the golden goose because someone else is making money? Honestly, that’s just silly.

Even Goetz admits that dulling financial incentives will slow innovation. New drugs aren’t abstractions. They’re time. Options. They are hope.

Fewer drugs and less hope in the name of lower profits is not a serious trade.

I am not new to this debate. I have been hollering on this corner for a while. Here’s a brief quote from a chapter of my NY Times best selling memoir (long, longer, longest list): Everything that makes me happy makes me sad.

PARP inhibitors have gone through long, costly tests and trials, but this treatment is now standard care for people in my situation, if they survive long enough to take it, and the cost of the drug is covered by most insurance policies. It would also cost on the order of $16,000 per month, if my insurance didn’t cover it and I had to pay out of pocket. These sums are well in excess of what people can pay. Unless the other option is death, in which case it’s a deal at twice the price.

Yes, make the system fairer. Yes, push for broader access. But don’t strangle the goddamn goose. I say keep feeding it. More is better (but not in a foie gras-making sort of way) and let’s keep harvesting those golden eggs for humanity’s benefit.

I am all ears for a decent argument to the contrary. If you disagree, I’d love to hear it. Holler at me (literally or figuratively, I don’t mind).

We were wrong.

This turned out to be a very bad idea.

Close your eyes and imagine a cross between a rabid wolverine and mad, howling banshee. Now condense that nightmare down into the body of an 18-month-old boy and lock yourself and the rabid WolvaBanshee in a small enclosure with 300 strangers for 9 hours.

My wife and I came out of it alive. But we were never the same.

Not least because I can no longer hear out of my right ear. My son screamed at the top of his lungs, inches away from my face, for the last four hours of that flight. I let go of him in terror at one point when he went full Exorcist, his head rotating the full 360 degrees, and he proceeded to levitate and fly around the cabin, fuelled by the fusion of fury and sleep deprivation.

I saw a grown man freeze in terror for a full five seconds as our WolvaBanshee hovered over him. The man was apparently hoping the demon’s eyes could only sense movement, like the T Rex in Jurassic Park, which is obviously ridiculous. WolvaBanshee was 18 months old with perfectly working eyes. I think he was just establishing dominance over the man and feeding off his fear before striking. My quick-thinking wife threw one of those thin airplane blankets over WolvaBanshee’s head, probably saving the poor man’s life.

Incidentally, we were sitting in business class for the flight, something we never did before and haven’t done since, because I figured out the price of two business class seats was nearly the same as three economy seats.

And do you know who was in business class with us? Former Utah Governor and, at the time of the flight, Ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman.

I’m not telling you Ambassador Huntsman was the man cowering in fear that day. I wouldn’t ever put that down in a lightly read blog, because I’m a lawyer and I know at least a little bit about libel law. Well, that’s not entirely true. I am a lawyer but I don’t really know anything about libel law. Regardless, I know enough not to mess with a Mormon millionaire.

But I will say this: Jon Huntsman’s wife, Mary Kaye Huntsman, was very kind. I spoke to her a few times during the flight when my wife had somehow Jedi mind-tricked the kid into turning down the volume for a few minutes. Maybe it was because Mary Kaye had seven children, one of whom must have turned into a rabid Morman Wolverine/Bansee at some point, so she could empathize.

I think it’s only the Scientologists who are immune to that sort of stuff. You know, because they are the traumatised “thetans” left over by Xenu, their galactic extra-terrestrial overlord who brought billions of them here 75 million years ago, before Xenu blew them up with hydrogen bombs in volcanoes and they attached themselves to the remaining humans.

And here you were, thinking the WolvaBanshee was a stretch, but you’ve been walking around with a Thetan attached to your soul for all these years.

A lot of people have asked me over the years whether I was embarrassed or felt bad about making such a disturbance on the plane. This question has never made sense to me. First, I wasn’t the one acting like an asshole. That was the kid. And it’s not like I didn’t ask him to stop. Believe me, I tried to get through to him, but he as having none of it, so that’s on him.

And second, I’m pretty sure we have all decided we want to keep humanity going for a while longer and, until the transhumanists finally get their shit together, making and raising human babies is really the only way. So I figured we were all in this together, even with the fancy-pants folks up in business class. Plus, they all had noise cancelling headphones and, save for the time WolvaBanshee walked right up to a sleeping passenger, removed his headphones and destroyed them like Animal from the Muppets, I think most of the passengers were mostly safe and sound in their noise-cancelled bliss.

It’s worth noting that those were my son’s first steps and, honestly, he walked completely unassisted right off the bat, rocking a 90’s gangster-type limp to magnificent effect. Honestly, I don’t see how that guy could have a peaceful night sleep ever again.

Anyway, I started thinking about this story when I was considering the idea of consciousness and how I think it must be an evolutionary accident. That led me to thinking how it’s wild that we choose to have children and therefore bring a conscious being into the world with no real ability to ensure happiness and contentment for that conscious being. And how it’s an inherently selfish act, albeit one I am incredibly happy to have made and encourage others to make as well.

I was wading through all the consciousness stuff, trying to figure out how to write it in a way capable of conveying this all in an interesting, maybe even funny way, without adding to the Age of Anxiety the world seems to be living. But then I remembered the airplane story, which made me laugh and I had fun writing it up and I decided everything is sort of a bummer right now, so fuck it, maybe bag the dreadful existential navel-gazing for a minute and write up a funny story for this small group of lucky subscribers.

You’re welcome.

The list is absolutely full of gifts which are both completely useless and outrageously expensive, making each the perfect modern Christmas gift.

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like a $120 yoga mat and a $500 sweater vest.

I would be so annoyed and, frankly, confused if someone in my life bought me $52 worth of Taiwanese dried fruit. Not least because I don’t know how much Taiwanese dried fruit I am supposed to get for $52.

There are 320 items on the list!

320 unique ways to say to the world, “I have a lot of money and very little sense”.

But you know what isn’t on the NY Times 2025 Gift Guide? Oh, just a little book written by a certain someone…ok, fine. I am talking about my book, “Everything that makes me happy makes me sad”.

C’mon, NY Times, your list is hundreds of items long.

There is a $100 a solar-powered WiFi camera-enabled bird house, which I assume is not a gift for those poor birds who are just looking for a safe place to crash but end up getting filmed by some perverted ornithologist.

There is a $199 Traditional Austrian Scythe Set which…honestly I don’t even know what to say about that, except it requires a very special set of characteristics in the gift-giver to pull the trigger on a $199 ornamental weedwhacker.

You have all of that, New York Times, but you don’t have room to add one heartrending yet often humorous tale of courage and perseverance in the face of insurmountable odds? (And, yes, you can use that tagline if you need a bit of help in summarising the book for your list…)

Now, some of you might think a memoir about almost getting killed by a malignant pancreas but then not getting killed by a malignant pancreas doesn’t really scream “STOCKING STUFFER”.

Well, you’re wrong, because the book also contains a real-life Christmas story from my youth and the story in question is not a terribly sad one. Indeed, it’s sweet and goofy and, if I may say so myself (since the goddamn NY Times won’t say it), it is actually pretty funny.

And yes, I know that sounds defensive, but where else are you going to read the phrase “I girded my Santa-costumed loins...” in the context of a kindergarten Christmas play?

Nowhere, except in my very reasonably priced book.

And, also you can read it below, where I have excerpted the chapter from that book, for free.

I am not good at capitalism, I guess. But baby Jesus didn’t come down from heaven’s chimney just so we can buy each other $148 pairs of sweatpants.

So go stuff your own goddamn stocking NY Times.

All I want for Christmas is a crippling bout of anxiety

The scene is Mrs. Cook’s kindergarten classroom at St. Angela Merici in Fairview Park, Ohio. It’s a standard classroom, with a handful of small round tables taking up a quarter of the room for the mini-students to sit while coloring or puzzling or whittling or whatever five-year-olds do; a “reading” corner with age appropriate books; another corner filled with LEGO and other building toys; and a large square set out in silver duct tape on the floor, around which the fifteen or so kindergarten children sit staring at Mrs. Cook.

The children are all well-behaved and attentive, because today is not just any day. Today is a special day as evidenced by the costumes they wear and the crowd that has gathered down the hall.

It’s the day of the kindergarten Christmas play. Although there’s no live action baby Jesus, the rest of the standard ensemble cast is represented. There’s Joseph, carpenter’s hammer in hand, sporting a brown cloth robe with a battered brown hood framing his round face. He is fingering the inside of his nose with one hand and considering the satisfying heft of the hammer with the other. Mary has taken her distance from her husband, due either to his persistent nose-picking or his generalized and incurable case of the cooties. She is clad in blue, calm and cross-legged on the other side of the duct-taped square. A clutch of angels have gathered together, eyeing each other’s homemade wings. The holy family’s donkey looks a bit glumly across the square at one of the trees and wonders who got the worse role. Two wise boys and one wise girl fidget with the gift boxes they’ll be presenting to baby Jesus in the middle of the second act.

The full cast of characters one would expect in the story of the Nativity are there but, this being the relaxed sort of Catholic school, Santa and his crew of elves need to make an appearance as well, although I can’t for the life of me remember how the secular and religious Christmas narratives are woven together. What I do remember is that Santa is the coveted role, the star of the show, which is no real surprise. Mary and Joseph are probably nice enough people, they are literally saints after all, but they’re the vegetables on this dinner plate. Santa and his elves are the chocolate cake and ice cream.

There is a potential conflict of interest in this description, because five-year-old Dan McNamee is the chubby little boy clad in red. There I am, tugging at my new white beard and the pillow stuffed under my shirt. Between these wardrobe adjustments, I am not paying attention to Mrs. Cook’s final instructions because I am keenly focused on another project. You see, the day of the Christmas play happens to fall during the very same week that I have learned to tie my shoes.

So as Mrs. Cook reiterates the running list for our much awaited ever-so-slightly-off Broadway production, I am busy ignoring her while I blissfully tie and retie my shoes, content with my latest achievement. I don’t hear a single word Mrs. Cook says as we all sit squirming around that duct-taped square, and I certainly don’t hear her announce that the play is ready to start. I only realize the cast is setting off once the rest of my classmates are on their feet and heading toward the basement lunchroom-turned-theatre.

Not wanting to miss my moment, I hop to my feet and set off with the full, confident stride of Father Christmas himself. Unfortunately for Joseph, who happens to be in front of me, this first step leaves me lurching forward as my feet come up short. Joseph breaks my fall, thankfully, although the pillow against my belly would have staved off the worst of it.

I gather myself and try to look down at my treacherous feet, but my beard and belly leave me seeing only fluffy white cotton laid on top of my red Santa suit. As I adjust to get a better look, I realize the terrible mistake I had made during our pre-production meeting.

To this day, I can still remember wondering, as I sat there, if I could tie the laces of my two shoes together. No sooner had I realized that I could, in fact, tie all four of my laces together than I had done it, and then my classmates began standing up and making their way to the play. My five-year-old brain struggled to process multiple inputs, one part of the brain telling the body to get up and go, while another part shouted to sit back down and untie my shoes. But the excitement of the upcoming spotlight overwhelmed that latter voice and I was ready to go.

So, when my classmates stood up, I forgot the need to untie the snakes’ nest I had created and, upon taking that first long step, I yanked the knotted laces together tighter than any knot any Gordon could tie.

The flight of panic was immediate, although my own mind was the only passenger because no one else had yet discovered that Santa had been hobbled like a filly in training. My five-year-old mind raced through the catastrophes that were about to ensue as a result of my mistake. Cancellation of the play and, at least for me, Christmas itself. Public humiliation in front of my stage-mates and entire kindergarten school community. Expulsion from kindergarten. An uneducated, Christmas-free life working in the coal mines of Eastern Kentucky. Black lung. An early end to a life lived in pain and squalor. Or something like that.

Then my five-year-old self did what most adults would do in such a situation: I pretended that the problem wasn’t a problem and soldiered on, hoping I could pull this off without anyone noticing that the best I could do was shuffle my feet forward five inches at a time.

I was making adequate if difficult progress and more or less keeping up with my compatriots, adjusting my big red belly as I went and staying on my feet. Until we reached the stage. The four steps up to the stage, which I had bounded up countless times, were intimidating now. I might as well have been standing at Everest base camp.

I girded my Santa-costumed loins, bent my knees, and successfully completed a two-footed hop up the first step with only a slight wobble. Only three more to go. As I pulled myself together for step number two, I looked up to see that Mrs. Cook was standing over me. Not mad, just confused, which in retrospect seems like a fair reaction to a five-year-old Santa with his shoes tied together attempting to bunny-hop up four stairs onto a stage.

As I prepared myself for the perp walk and the subsequent life in Appalachian exile, Mrs. Cook guided me to sit down on the steps, bent down and gave my shoes a few firm tugs until she was able to pry them off my feet. She then handed them to my Great-Aunt Eleanor, who was in attendance in the front row, and sent me on my way up to the stage.

So much has been written, so many questions posed, regarding the 1984 St. Angela Merici kindergarten production of the Christmas play, and I am happy to finally clear it up.

Was the introduction of Santa Claus into the Nativity scene a subversive commentary on the commercialization of a holy day, or was it merely crass blasphemy? The answer is that art is at its best when it lives dangerously on the line between what we know and what we only think we know. (Note: That sentence, like so much art criticism, definitely doesn’t make sense, it only sounds like it might make sense.)

But going further, was the sock-footed Santa a plea for the attendees to return to the simplicity of that first, shoeless Christmas when baby Jesus was naked, vulnerable, and bare-footed? To which I would respond with questions of my own: Does it matter? If that sock-footed Santa made the audience feel — feel anything at all — does it matter? If it raised questions, does it matter whether it was intended to do so? (The answers to those questions, if you’re keeping track at home — and to be clear I encourage you not to — are “no,” “yes,” “maybe,” and “no.”)

In the end, however, the choice was not a choice, but a wardrobe malfunction set in motion by a scared five-year-old. That isn’t much different from many of life’s malfunctions which are so often set in motion by scared humans; those human beings just tend to be a little bit older but are usually not much wiser, especially when anxiety is tossed into the mix.

The most remarkable thing about that day is just how clear my memory is of the moment I realized what I had done, and the seconds that followed, filled with anxious imaginings about all of the terrible things that would surely result from my mistake. But I don’t remember anything about the play itself. I don’t remember what roles my friends had. I don’t remember the avalanche of applause and flowers that surely arrived with the final curtain. I don’t remember the after-party, the autographs I signed, or even just one groupie harassing me for attention. Indeed, most of what I do remember, aside from the incident with the shoes, could be entirely a figment of my imagination.

But I remember the anxiety. I remember the certainty that I had made a grave error, one that could not be rectified, and one for which I would pay dearly. Even if my five-year-old mind had been capable of sophisticated risk analysis, the anxiety that seized my mind had left it incapacitated. And unlike the propensity to tie one’s own shoes together immediately prior to the start of the Christmas play in which one has been cast as Santa Claus, anxiety is not a five-year-old problem. It is a human problem.

It is a problem I have experienced acutely and nearly constantly since my diagnosis. I had been lucky in terms of experiencing and managing anxiety in my life prior to my diagnosis, particularly given that it has devoured so many people in my family, especially on my father’s side.

But that changed on June 30, 2020, and I began to understand intimately the struggle so many people have. The physical symptoms are difficult enough: lack of appetite which becomes nausea, heartburn, the feeling of a racing heart when at rest, headaches caused in no small part by a constantly clenched jaw, a tightness in the chest and the fatigue that results from all that. But the racing mind is the most debilitating. It is also the symptom most ripe for an endless string of metaphors. Imagine standing in the median of a busy highway and trying to maintain focus on individual cars as they speed by. Try reading a book while standing in the eye of a tornado as houses and cars and cats and debris turn and swirl above you with deadly ferocity. Do long division while standing naked in a swarm of angry bees (actually, just try to do long division).

But none of these can fully convey the powerlessness and the resulting incapacitation resulting from anxiety. One is miserable and terrorized, but the cacophony of half-truths and full lies shouted by every synapse prevents thinking about any one thing long enough to develop a solution, much less take any action to implement it. Here’s another attempt that can’t quite convey the reality: You’re frozen in space and time wearing virtual reality glasses while your most intense fears are run on a loop, without a pause, on fast forward.

Once we are able to act, if we are able to act, we are propelled forward by our animal brain. It is pure fight or flight. We rush to take any action that will relieve us from the terror, even just temporarily, and we therefore make the wrong decisions, at the wrong time, and only worsen the situation. Like snowbound travelers in the middle of a blizzard, we will tend to move in the direction where we are not facing the sharp, biting wind, often walking in circles as a result. We take flight, but remain in place. We turn down a professional opportunity because the anxiety makes us believe we are not capable of it. We break off a relationship because the commitment is too difficult to handle, or because the relationship might ultimately not work for any one of the many reasons our mind is spinning. We drink. We self-medicate.

Or the anxiety just makes us into angry little creatures and we fight. We fight with husbands, wives, and partners. We fight with parents and friends. We fight with colleagues. We fight with drivers who snarl up traffic in front of us. We live in a cloud of anxiety, condemned merely to survive, never able to engage the part of our brain that elevated us above the monkeys in the evolutionary race — you know, if you believe that sort of thing. We become unable to interrogate what we are actually anxious about, what the real downside cases are, how likely they are to occur, how bad those downside cases are, and ways we might reasonably be able to mitigate such risks. And we become paralyzed, which usually drives worse outcomes than if we had been able to think through the situation, settled on any reasonable course of action and moved forward.

On that fateful day of the Christmas play, once I realized what I had done, if I’d had the ability to think rationally and to consider the reasonable worst-case scenario and consequences, I might have realized I was unlikely to be sentenced to serve time in kindergarten prison. Indeed, I might have realized that Mrs. Cook wouldn’t have cared one whit that I had tied my stupid shoes together, and if she had indeed cared, she would have most likely just found it funny. Sure, she would’ve been confused, obviously — but in the midst of shepherding fifteen kids onto a stage, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to strip me of my Santa-related duties.

But of course, I couldn’t rationally work through the scenarios that might occur after I tied my shoes together immediately before I took the stage as Santa Claus. I was five, for god’s sake. I just assumed I’d get in a lot of trouble for my stupid mistake, and I failed to take action that could’ve helped my situation because I was scared of what I’d done. I literally made it worse with every step.

So, sure, I was only five, but we don’t actually get much better at this when we are older. I think maybe we get worse, not least because we get better at imaging all the terrible things that might happen. Like children, we often feel powerless in the face of challenges against which we can reasonably take some action. The mountain we’ve yet to climb seems insurmountable because we forget all the other mountains we’ve summited previously.

Or conversely, we believe we have control over, or should have control over, matters which are too large, too complex, and too unpredictable to submit to whatever feeble force we can muster. My father destroyed his life with alcohol and drugs, and for many years I believed that I could help. If I just applied myself, I could help push him in the direction of sobriety. But his anxiety, his despair, and his addiction were more powerful by a factor of 100, and neither I nor anyone else in my father’s life was any match for them. I couldn’t influence his trajectory any more than I could influence that of a passing comet by waving and shouting from Earth.

Then, as we age and the carefree irresponsibility of our youth falls away, we convince ourselves that every decision or action is so goddamn important, the repercussions could be disastrous and irreversible. So we place more and more weight on each decision, and we struggle under this weight. We too often become unable to make decisions or make mistakes, unable to move forward, or in any other direction, for that matter.

The reality is that for those who won the lottery at birth and ended up in the middle class of the Western world, we are lucky to have the opportunity to live a life that is a series of decisions. A few of them are big, but most decisions are immaterial. Think back to the things you were most worried about ten years ago. Did any of it really turn out to matter?

Furthermore, our control over our world is far more limited than we would like to believe — for example, my belief that I could somehow alter my dad’s descent into alcoholism and drug abuse. The idea of control can give us temporary comfort, because living in an erratic, capricious world is terrifying. On the other hand, if we come to grips with our lack of control, the idea of powerlessness gives us an excuse not to take action that we could take. We often hold these two ideas in our mind simultaneously, or alternate between them on a loop.

Looking at it through this lens, I think maybe I’m being too harsh on young Santa in Mrs. Cook’s class. Sure, okay, if I could go back, I’d want to avoid tying my shoes together in the first place. And it probably would’ve been better to take the shoes off or just ask for help before I got to the stage. Although I made a pretty clear mistake by tying the shoelaces together in the first place, the outcome could’ve been much worse.

I could have fallen apart into a puddle of cheap red velvet and tears, unable to take the stage like some tiny male version of a high maintenance starlet from the 1980s. I could have run for the exits and toward home. Well, not run, exactly, but I could’ve shuffled toward the exits. I could have blamed a classmate for tying my shoes together while I wasn’t looking, which is an idea I had just now as I am writing this, and I really wish I had done that. I would have gone after Jim Dunsden. That kid was really smart and never got in trouble; no one would’ve expected it.

But most importantly, I didn’t immediately succumb to my monkey brain’s default fight or flight mode. I didn’t smack good ol’ Joseph in the back of the head and accuse him of tripping me. I didn’t dissolve into a puddle of Christmas tears. I didn’t run away or quit.

I kept on shuffling forward until I couldn’t shuffle anymore, and damn if things didn’t mostly work out. That’s what the kids call “resiliency” these days, which I guess I sort of invented that day in the St. Angela of Merici basement. So, now that I think of it: good job, five-year-old Santa Dan.

It would be embarrassing even to mention it, if I weren’t so outraged (and if I were capable of embarrassment).

But fine, here it is: I should get a lot more credit for riding a non-electric bike than I currently do.

I know there are people reading this blog from every corner of our dear planet, so I accept there is likely a bit of variability in the usage of electric bikes, but Paris is awash in them.

People zooming around on e-bikes they bought for thousands of euros and e-bikes they rented for basically zero euros. Just cruising, all the fun and practically of a bicycle, without the nuisance of any measurable physical effort.

To be clear, I am all for electric bikes for getting around town. I do not begrudge the battery-powered bikers out there. Those of you pretending to peddle, dropping kids off at school or heading to work. You seem like you’re having a really nice time. Rolling along. Effortlessly. Those bikes seem incredibly fun.

It’s just that I have been powering my bike with my own two legs for about 42 years now. That isn’t particularly impressive, but now I am regularly carrying not only my 46-year-old (and slightly-heavier-every-year) self, I am also lugging around about 55 kilos worth of children as well. I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it feels like a lot.

And the two children comprising these 55 kilos aren’t exactly seated in a practical manner either. The “little” guy is on a little banana-type seat installed over my back wheel and his older brother sits on the regular bike seat, so I am left perched and standing up, whether or not I am peddling.

But that doesn’t matter much because, with all of that weight on the bike, I am pretty much always peddling.

I do get some breaks. I occasionally have to stop peddling to politely ask the two passengers to quit hand fighting behind me when they are destabilizing the bike and we need to squeeze through the tiny space between the parked cars and the speeding delivery truck, heading towards us, on the not-fit-for-bicycles streets of Paris.

When not obstructed by bikes coming the opposite direction or just by other humans casually stepping in as they jay walk, the unprotected “bike lane” is less than 3 feet wide. I don’t know how much that is in Celsius, but it’s not very big.

I don’t need protected bike lanes, however. I don’t need less traffic. And I don’t need a goddamn battery-powered bike.

What I need…No, what I deserve, is more credit for dragging my increasingly heavy children (and self) across town and up hills to school or rugby or soccer or birthday parties or whatever else.

Unfortunately, and this may surprise you, Parisians aren’t known for public expressions of awe and appreciation for an American riding a bicycle.

So I am coming to the one place where I know I can find unqualified support. The place where people don’t just reflexively judge, based on the sum of their preconceived notions and how angry they happen to be that morning because of traffic, or whatever. The place where people come together to support one another. It’s a cheap ploy, perhaps, but I am coming to the internet, the one place I know I will be fully understood and appropriately venerated.

Look, I don’t need a parade, although that would be nice every once in a while. Not a whole ticker tape-type of deal, but maybe just a few hundred people clapping and cheering me on, showing appreciation for the triumph of the human spirit I am putting on display on a daily basis on the streets of the 17^th Arrondissement of Paris.

So, yes, a parade once a month or so would be good, but I recognize that is unlikely. Everyone knows parade permits are hard to get in Paris. And who has the time to build all of those floats?

But it would at least be nice to receive a word or two of encouragement from an electrified rider as he breezes past while I am Lance Armstrong-ing it up a hill with my sons wiggling back and forth behind me. Maybe even just a smile from a pedestrian as they accidentally step in my way mid-way up that hill, forcing me to stop and then watching as I am unable to restart, given the weight and the incline. Just a bit of appreciation for the fact that they are lucky enough to witness a man battling the irrepressible march of time and the inescapable laws of physics, not to mention good ole common sense.

Or just one of those chin up-nod motions we do when we want to say, “I see you there brother. I see you battling. And we both know you’re not winning, we both know gravity and time will win in the end, but goddamn you are taking it to the man.”

I don’t need the validation. I am going to keep going until the pedals fall off, but I think I deserve it.

Yeah, I get it. There are people out there doing more spectacular things. Walking up Everest barefoot or whatever. Ice skating across the Bering Straight. Eating 300 hotdogs in seven minutes.

Sure, those high-performance athletes are putting their lives on the line, not to mention the lives of underpaid sherpas who are carrying all of their stuff (and a not-so-occasional corpse) up and down the mountain.

But what about the humans among us? Those of us out here, day after day, fighting for our goddamn lives as our 6-year-old turns around to wave to one of his friends on the way to school, thereby nearly throwing all three of us into a fleet of rental e-bikes parked on the side of the narrow Parisian street?

What about us?

Keen readers of “Everything” might say this isn’t even my most spectacular physical accomplishment. After all, I did win my category of the 2024 New York Marathon. And my pancreas turned malignant in 2020 and tried to kill me before I wrestled the bastard back into its box a few years ago.

Well, first, goddamnit, I don’t remember any parades for those accomplishments either. And three wrongs don’t make a right.

No, they do not. My mom taught me that.

They make three wrongs. That’s just the math.

And, second, you’ve obviously never seen a grown man power his bike and two medium-sized children to school at 8 o’clock in the morning, three backpacks strapped to the front rack of the bike, dodging dogs and kids and scooters and baguette delivery trucks. Huffing. Puffing. Sweating like a 46 year old man screaming at Father Time to get off his lawn.

But if you are lucky enough to see it, do the right thing. Give that man a little love. A little respect. A golf clap maybe. A nod. Even a smile.

It’s not too much to ask. The struggle is real.

1. Humans are irrational creatures, when taken individually;

2. Humans are downright insane, when acting en masse;

3. We have always been this way; and

4. I am pretty sure we will remain so for the next few millennia.

These contentions will either comfort or depress you, but I doubt they’ll surprise or confuse you.

There’s buckets of electronic ink spilled every day, lamenting the devolution of humanity. But, and I realize I am not going to win many new subscribers in the Substack user-engagement casino with this take, I just don’t believe devolved into anything.

Every generation has been capable of compassion and beauty. Every generation has been capable of base, animalistic horror.

But we stare into our phones and it’s pretty hard to believe humans are still just as capable today of both beauty and horror as we have always been.

Because if you live life through Instagram or TikTok, you will come to the conclusion that we have devolved into a species of Karens and Kevins: an angry, screaming, spittle-spewing people.

Taking our rage out on teachers and students and cops and uber drivers and cyclists and bus drivers and people parked in cars and people driving in cars and people filming other people in cars and pretty much everyone who has worked for an airline or in an airport or ever seen an airplane.

The world is a dumpster fire when you scroll through it; but I believe it’s still full of pleasure and joy when you stroll through it.

Then again, two real life human life women once nearly kicked my teeth in as I was waiting for treatment for pancreatic cancer in a cancer ward waiting room.

So I do recognize my theory of app-driven reality vs. reality-reality may not be completely airtight.

Anyway, the full story is below, as excerpted from my New York Times bestselling memoir (prospective, long list).

It’s 100% true and, because it features humans, it is replete with top-notch socially aberrant behavior.

Chapter 22: Cancer wards can be hilarious too

I think I may have given the false impression earlier that cancer wards and waiting rooms are always terrifyingly depressing places to hang out. That is not entirely correct. They are nearly always terrifyingly depressing places to hang out. But they are occasionally, very occasionally, just as full of the possibility for the wonderful diversity of human madness as any other place where humans gather.

Before we get into this, let me be clear about what I am NOT talking about. I am not talking about the depth of kindness I have experienced from loved ones, long lost friends, and even strangers since I was diagnosed. Letters of support came from all different directions. So many people in my life contributed time and money and everything else imaginable in an effort to ease my and my family’s burden. The nurses and doctors with whom I have interacted at my various hospitals have been, nearly universally, great at their jobs, and great at being caring human beings.

But I am not talking about any of this. Yes, I probably should. They all deserve an entire chapter. But no, what I intend to discuss here is just how insane human beings can be, even when they’re just sitting around waiting for cancer treatment.

The fourth-floor waiting room at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital on the corner of East 53^rd and 3^rd Avenue in New York City is a large two-thousand-square-foot rectangle. Squat tables surrounded by armchairs made of light brown wood and maroon fabric, a bit worn but not overly so, are scattered around. The wall along the street-side of the building has windows running down its length, and is lined by narrow benches/couches built in below the windows. There is one regular, relatively comfortable couch tucked into a corner.

I had been coming to sit in this room, first every three weeks and then every six weeks, for nearly two years on the day the events unfolded. I had started this medical trial with a tumor in my pancreas and a number of tumors in my liver. I am not sure how many, I didn’t ask. Sometimes you don’t want to know. Over the course of the trial, the tumors appeared to respond positively to the treatment, which is to say they shrank. Given the paucity of data around this trial, the doctors were understandably reluctant to be too positive about my results or too specific about what they thought was working. Oncologists are a cautious bunch, preferring to under-promise and over-deliver if they can. Or maybe that was just the way I thought about it. The treatment was too recent, the data too limited, to get very excited about one or two good scans. But although we couldn’t be sure what was working or whether it would continue to work, something was shrinking the tumors, and that was a good thing.

The trial was intended to run for two years for each patient, and the room was busy on my last day of treatment (for this trial) in early 2023. My vital signs had been taken, my blood had been drawn and processed, and I had met with my doctor. I was set simply to wait for my drugs to be sent up so they could be infused, after which I would be set free. That second-to-last step, the approval from the pharmacy and distribution of the drugs, in my experience, could take anywhere from thirty minutes to four hours, although I was never able to figure out why.

And so I settled in — along with my brother Shane, who had kindly come to New York City to pass the time with me — for a long or short wait, finding a seat near the couch which sat in the corner of the room. I noticed, but did not consider in any particular detail, the two women who were already sitting on the couch. I believe they were sisters, talking with their mother who was sitting on the bench built into the wall under the window. The mother was in her sixties or seventies, I think, and clearly the patient. The sisters were somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, although it was very hard to tell. Both were tall. One had shoulder-length dyed-blond hair; she was heavyset in a muscular, imposing way. The other had longer, brown hair, and was lean to the point of gauntness. They were speaking a heavily New-York-accented English, with the occasional word or phrase from some Eastern European language which I couldn’t place.

After a few minutes, their conversation — a wild roller coaster of calm moments of banality, loud laughter, and periods of cursing and intense argument — eventually petered out. The two sisters took the opportunity to recline fully on the couch, with their respective heads on each side of the couch.

I found this remarkable, given that I have never seen anyone lie down like this at any of the cancer ward waiting rooms I visited, save for the very sickest of us. And even then it was rare. But I wasn’t planning on sitting on that couch, and I’d never see these people again, so I left them to their discourteous behavior. After all, this is America, people basically get to do whatever the fuck they want, whenever and wherever they want. It’s in the Constitution somewhere, I think. I’m not sure; I haven’t read the whole thing. I’m honestly not really that good of a lawyer.

After a few minutes one of the sisters, the gaunt one, began playing videos on her phone without headphones, at a high volume. And this… well, this is just something I cannot abide. I have politely asked people in more than a handful of countries to please use headphones in public places, and none of those places were cancer ward waiting rooms. Given the near silence of the room, the entirely understandable and appropriate silence, since many of us were in the process of dying, and the volume of the videos blaring from that phone, I am certain they could be heard on the other side of the two-thousand-square-foot room.

And so I leaned over and — you’ll just have to believe me here — very politely asked, “I’m sorry, but could you please use some headphones or turn down the volume on your phone?”

Do you see what I did there? I even spoke in British. I didn’t use a stupid British accent or anything, but having lived and worked in London for so many years, I always appreciated their ability to apologize for something that wasn’t their fault while asking for something to be done.

Anyway, my neighbors did not realize that little trick either and, as God is my witness, my words sent electric shocks of rage through these women the likes of which I have never seen. Both their heads whipped toward me instantly and from their mouths spewed absolute torrents of vitriol.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY?”

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?”

“DO YOU PAY HER FUCKING PHONE BILL?”

“SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH.”

And again, “DO YOU PAY HER FUCKING PHONE BILL? YOU THINK YOU CAN TELL HER WHAT TO DO WITH HER FUCKING PHONE?”

As the wave of very sensible and sensibly relayed questions washed over me, I said, calmly, “It’s not that, it’s just that it’s very quiet in here and your phone is pretty loud.”

I could copy and paste all the questions from above here again, but I won’t. They simply worked their way through the same questions and arguments, until the blond one finally stood up, took a step toward me, looked me in the eyes, and said, “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

I was pretty confused by this because I had never actually seen a fistfight while waiting for any of my doctors’ appointments, so I chose honesty and replied, “Uhm, nothing.”

Let me be totally clear here: I am a coward and I have no interest in being punched in the face. I like my face just the way it is, and I am certain both my nose and jaw would be made of glass, if ever tested. I have never been in a bar fight, but this woman definitely had, that was certain. It was early in the afternoon, maybe even late morning, but she might have already been in a bar fight that very day, from what I could tell. Either way, she was definitely inviting me to saunter out back of the roadhouse saloon for a good ol’ brawl to settle our differences.

I wasn’t sure that her beating the shit out of me would’ve settled anything at all, and certainly not our differences, so I remained seated as she took another step toward me, like an angry grizzly bear defending its territory in the goddamn Canadian Yukon, and asked again, “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

To which I replied, again sincerely, “Nothing.” But I thought I needed to be clearer, so I added, “I am not going to do anything about it. I am definitely not going to get into a fist fight in a cancer ward waiting room.”

She took yet another step closer, and it was at this point that the mother piped up with, “I am just trying to save my strength to fight the cancer. Just trying to fight the cancer.”

“Yes, I know, ma’am,” I said. “You have cancer. I have cancer. WE ALL HAVE CANCER. That’s the problem,” and I waved my arms to include the now-attracted public in the waiting room.

Shane had eventually heard enough and figured it wasn’t a great idea for me to get my ass handed to me before my immunotherapy treatment and gathered me and our belongings to sit a few tables away. Far enough to keep the bears away, but not so far away that I could not hear the women’s phone still banging away, in part because she had turned the volume up even higher. We were also close enough to hear them talking loudly, obviously, about both how big of a “pussy” I was and how, in this particular legal jurisdiction, I didn’t have any right to tell her what she could and couldn’t do with her phone. Although I actually am a lawyer admitted to the bar in New York State, I admittedly was not as up-to-date on the relevant case law as these ladies, so I decided to let the jurisprudential element of our discussion drop. I had already been exposed as a “total pussy”. I couldn’t risk also being made to look foolish professionally.

I took my new seat, gathered myself, and tried to work my way through that experience. If given the opportunity and if Shane had not interceded, I swear, I could have spent hours talking to those women (assuming they hadn’t ended up putting me in the hospital). I was, I am, desperate to know how they could possibly go through life like that. How could they live a life where nearly every interaction is friction and conflict? It seems absolutely exhausting to me. I mean, if they were willing, eager even, to throw punches in a cancer ward waiting room with some stranger who politely asked if the volume on a phone could be turned down, how many of their family Christmas celebrations ended in fistfights? Don’t worry, I have the answer: It’s 100%.

But time passed, they eventually quieted down, the waiting room started to clear, and Shane and I were left with our combative friends to the left and another small family of women, again a mother and her two daughters, immediately to my right. They were busy chatting and laughing with each other: “Oh, this is long. Next time we should bring board games,” etc. They were sweet and it was a pleasure to see them interact. But at some point, their conversation too found a lull and went quiet.

And then, obviously, as one often does during a lull in conversation, one of the sisters began to sing her a capella version of Don McLean’s usually (but not always!) intolerable classic, “American Pie.” She clearly loved to sing and did it often; her voice was practiced if not particularly pleasant. And she seemed to know most, but not all, of the words to the song. A few lines in, right about at “But February made me shiver…” her sister and her mom began “harmonizing” with her, although they knew fewer of the words to the song than the lead vocalist and none of them actually knew how to harmonize. They all stumbled along until the first chorus, which was sung rapturously, their voices rising together — not tonally, of course, just in volume, like the smoke from three candles burning together on a table. But then they finished that first chorus and, as if someone had switched on a ceiling fan above those candles, those voices dispersed and discombobulated again into humming and the occasional word or two of mistaken lyrics.

This didn’t make me mad. I don’t even know if it was rude, but it was completely lacking in any sense of situational or self-awareness. Mostly, I was confused. Had I just experienced the two extremes of American social behavior? One boorish and violent; the other kind but wildly irrational. Both entirely self-absorbed and unaware of, or uncaring for, the people around them.

Or was I the odd man out here? Were these not the extremes but the norm in an America, always a nation of individuals, now a nation of individuals desensitized to any sense of decency through the Balkanization and self-sorting of our communities, juiced by the malevolent streams of data downloading into our brains from our cell phones?

My time living in Cleveland had given me much hope that most of America was the America of my youth, but with progress having been made. One in which the vast majority of people were just trying to go to work, earn enough money for their family, have their kids go to decent schools, and maybe have a BBQ on the weekend. I was met with so much kindness during my fourteen-month stay in Cleveland during all that treatment. Maybe it was because I was living in the middle class of middle America. Maybe it was because it was during Covid, I wasn’t working at the time, and pretty much everyone I hung out with knew that the cancer in my pancreas and liver was trying to kill me.

And given the times we live in, there are even more caveats that need to be made. I understand that these have been and continue to be terrifying years for so many Americans. If you’re in the majority, the center of American culture and society, you’re fearful (consciously or not, right or wrong) that your world is changing, and you are losing your power and position. Or that your kids will. And if you’re a minority — either racially, ethnically, or based on your sex or sexuality — you may well feel the friction in life and fear for your life on the relative margins every moment. If you live in an Appalachian community or a burned-out city center, in each case living through a tsunami of opioid and other deaths of despair, my life experience of fourteen months on the west side of Cleveland doesn’t mean much to you.

But my point is not that America is fair or just. I would, however, argue that America is fairer and more just today that it ever has been before. There is more room for difference. There is more room on the margins. And I believe we will continue to progress as such — by fits and starts, yes, but our children will be freer to be who they are, freer to pursue happiness than their grandparents were.

Whether they will be more successful at finding happiness — that is beyond me.

But, honestly, that’s not my point either. If I have a point in all of this, I guess it’s the fact that America, as it is portrayed in the media and even in the minds of so many people, is a country rife with conflict. Angry people out to destroy someone else’s life, or at least their way of living it.

I’m not sure though. Most of what I saw during my time in America was a bunch of decent people, doing their best, sometimes under difficult circumstances, in a country that is largely peaceful and prosperous. It may be that Americans just have no idea how hard things can be elsewhere and we have become ungrateful of the progress made. Frivolous. Greedy even. Needing an enemy or enemies to explain the anxiety that lives within each of us, but which we are unable to face.

And as I sat there and waited for my name to be called for my final immunotherapy treatment, I tried to figure out what the “real” America is, and I hoped it’s the one I lived in during those very difficult fourteen months in Cleveland. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I guess, the truth is not one or the other, because all of America, its dirty underbelly replete with angry women trying to fight me in the cancer ward waiting room and its neighborhoods filled with people trying to help, all of this is the real “real” America.

But goddamn, the country does contain multitudes, the full spectrum of the human experience, bumping into and rubbing up against each other. And if I’m wrong, if those two families in that waiting room are the clearer picture of what America has become — a country filled with people who either want to hold impromptu and unrequested a capella concerts or bare-fisted brawls in a cancer ward waiting room — we are well and truly fucked.

I therefore went out for 34-minute run recently. I'll do this once, sometimes twice a week, if you can believe it. It's that sort of dedication and intensity that keeps me only slightly doughy in the middle and tickling the leaderboards2.

Whilst running at my the usual blistering speed, my algorithmic overlords at Spotify spun Sam Cooke's piece of perfection, "A change is gonna come", into my earbuds.

If there is a more perfect opening line to a song, a more perfect song, it might only be "Ain't no sunshine" by Bill Withers, which also played during my very long 34 minute run.

Anyway, as I was effortlessly sprinting along the Parisian sidewalks, dodging stray baguettes and cigarette smoke, I thought to myself: "dear god, I am glad I am not a musician. How could a person ever hear those songs and think, 'wait a minute, I know you heard that piece of honeyed heaven, but I have something you really need to hear'"?

It would be way too intimidating. Everything done before and after seems lesser-than. Yes, including you, Mozart. And definitely you Chopin. You know what you did.

But then, because I am so cultured and sophisticated, not unlike yourself, I remembered Steinbeck's line: "I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.".

And also, "I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found..."

And I thought, “what the hell am I doing with this writing? Trying to say something Steinbeck or Vonnegut or Shakespeare didn't already say. And, you know, like, better?”

It’s probably futile. And it’s made even more difficult by what I am trying to write, by what I am trying to convey.

I think I am running into not only the limits of my only talent, modest as it may be, but also the limit of our ability to communicate with each other. And maybe to the limit of what humans are able to understand without the benefit of personal experience.

We have a vast capacity for empathy and sympathy, but they are not limitless.

As physicist John Gribbon wrote: “Nothing is real unless we look at it, and it ceases to be real as soon as we stop looking.” This might be just as true on a personal level as it is in quantum physics.

If you've ever gotten a little stoned in a friend's college dorm room, someone would have inevitably asked the question, "How can I be sure that the blue you see is the same blue I see?"

If you've never gotten a little stoned in a friend's college dorm room or had smarter friends than I had, well, bummer for you. You missed some good times, if not necessarily the most intellectually daring conversation.

The answer is: we can't be sure our blues are the same. We can measure wavelengths and therefore identify which sources of light will look similar based on those measurements. But we can't be sure of exactly how those wavelengths are interpreted by any other brain than our own.

So, more fundamentally, how can we even begin to be certain our perception of reality is a shared experience?

We humans are peerless in our communication. We are the best communicating animals on our planet. And don't @ me with whales or dolphins or tree fungus or whatever. I am not saying we are the only species to communicate, I am only saying we are the best at it.

Maybe even the best in the galaxy.

Good job humans.

The idea that any of the gibberish above made any sense to you, assuming it did, is further proof of the truth of my argument. We humans are adept at communicating, even when it comes to communicating some pretty odd stuff.

But even with these skills, our ability to communicate with each other is limited. We can explain factual events in terrific detail. Have you ever listened to a hockey game on the radio? Probably not, but it’s amazing.

And we can communicate other simple stuff effectively as well. I am pretty sure I know what happiness feels like to you. Sadness too, I guess. Thanks Elliot Smith. But those seem like shallow, superficial emotions. They live somewhere on the surface of ourselves. Like the ocean, laying across the globe. Tidal. Breathing rhythmically, visibly.

No, I am talking about what lies at the earth's core. Our core.

At our core is the fact that we are self-aware. We are aware of our own existence. Joy, wonder, bliss. These all result from the fact that we are conscious.

But this gift is not free.

According to William James: “There’s a panic rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness” and that rumble is existential dread. It is our knowledge, despite our best efforts to ignore and deny it, of the certainty and reality of death.3

I spent years staring at this malignant terror, marinating all the while in chemotherapy drugs meant to keep it at bay.

I am now free of the immediacy of that terror, free of the cancer, and I have spent hours and days and months and years, trying to come up with a few sentences capable of even scratching at the truth of what I learned.

Most days I despair at the futility of the task. Give me a thousand Shakespeares sitting at a thousand typewriters and I am not sure it can be done.

But then I hear Sufjan Stevens sing “Should have known better”. Or Damien Jurado sing “Ohio”. Or The National sing “Daughters of the Soho Riots”.

And I can begin to think maybe we humans are indeed able to communicate and understand something deeper than just the superficiality of the life lived by others and its tides.

I see “Nighthawk” by Hopper…

…and I understand what modern loneliness might have meant to Hopper.

I see “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear”…

…and maybe I can understand not only what depression and shame meant to Van Gogh, but also persistence and ambition, with the panic rumbling beneath it all.

I can read the incomparable Carl Sagan and begin to understand how life might be if I were smart enough to understand the beauty and terror of quantum physics: “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”

And Sagan again: “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.”

And I think I can believe again. I can believe it’s possible. If I can understand. If I can understand the rumbling panic, but also the joy and beauty I am now capable of seeing, maybe I can come up with some form of words, some form of magic that is uniquely human, capable of communicating these fundamental truths to others in this world and be sure of this shared experience.

[As predicted, the Everything community received the famous Jeannie Ewing bounce via my guest post there and we now have a fair number of new subscribers. Given this is likely the second thing these new folks would have read from me, I want to make it clear that what follows probably does not detail the “greatest” current scandal in American life. I feel like that should be obvious, but, well, one never knows these days.

Also, if you came here for my hot takes and cool meditations on life after pancreatic cancer, don’t worry. I am sure I will turn back to the subject soon enough. It is, unfortunately, a subject to which my mind returns frequently…

Ok, on with the show.]

Let me clarify what this post isn't, before I get into what it is.

This post is not an examination of why many Americans wear pyjamas to the airport. It's also not a post about why other Americans wear full-on yoga gear to the airport, as if a vinyasa class might break out in the skies over Topeka.

I know my audience too well for that. I know you are a classy bunch. A deeply thoughtful bunch. You are a classy, deeply thoughtful group of people not interested in clichéd banalities — or any other combination of fancy sounding French words that are synonyms for "hackneyed bullshit" — even when dressed up as comedy.

Nor will I waste your time with 1,000 words on why some adult Americans feel the need to bring full-size pillows on airplanes. Or full-size, real-life dogs.

And I'm obviously not going to attempt to understand why we've all decided it's ok for people to start drinking cocktails at 9 am at the airport. Or why Americans bring chicken wings onto airplanes.

Again, you are too classy — too thoughtful — to find such low-hanging fruit interesting enough for interrogation on a free blog.

I am not even going to tell you the story of when, marooned at Newark Airport during a Christmas blizzard, I inadvertently flirted my way into a United Airline employee's hotel room at the airport because every hotel was full due to the storm. And I won't be getting into how I thought this gentleman was a pilot who was only being kind, given the Christmas season. Or how I found out after a few drinks at Chilis he was actually a flight attendant and all he wanted for Christmas was a Christmas snuggle with me. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.) I won't even to try to convince you of the truth that those drinks were Apple-tinis because it sounds made up. There's also no need for me to explain exactly how my platonic flight attendant friend expressed his interest in taking our relationship to the next step. I will, however, be sure to clarify that he was still kind and considerate enough to let me sleep on the floor, even after I had spent the previous two or three hours COMPLETELY INADVERTANTLY leading him on.

I know you all aren't interested in that kind of tawdry nonsense, so I am not going to waste your time.

No, I want to talk to you about something more important. Something far more pressing and, I think, confusing.

I want to talk to you about American escalator etiquette and, specifically American escalator etiquette at the airport.

America is a hard-working place. Americans have places they need to go. People have jobs to get to. And side hustles too. And maybe a side hustle to the side hustle. Kids are late for school or sports or violin lessons or 1,000 other after-school activities. America is in a hurry. We are the nation which invented the fast-food drive-thru lane, perhaps the most consequential invention since Henry Ford invented the automobile and Eisenhower invented the interstate highway system.

Do you think we have time to park the car, then get out of the car and then use our two legs to walk into the restaurant just so we can stand there like a schmuck to order a hamburger and French fries and a second hamburger and 72 ounces of Dr. Pepper?

We do not have that kind of time. This isn't some European country dawdling August away on an endless vacation. America is not a place for dawdling.

The escalator is the one glaring exception to this. And the glare is at its most blinding at the airport, which is not usually a particularly chill place.

Drive towards any American airport and there's a decent chance you'll get rear-ended by someone hauling ass on their way in. A few years ago, I saw a grandma use a prison spoon to shank an orphan who tried to cut the check-in line. The crowd was mostly upset at the child for getting her blood on the wheels of their rolling suitcases.

I've seen too many divorce processes commence at the security line to provide an accurate count. Completely incidentally: has my wife’s bag ever not contained a spare bottle of lotion and required additional screening?1

There are even wild animals, living among us like regular humans, who try to destroy the orderly — albeit maddening — deplaning process by which one must wait for the people in the preceding row to gather their bags and phones and giant water bottles and full-size pillows and small children and large dogs before one can shuffle off the plane behind them.

But somehow that Mad Max reality exists within a stones throw of the first escalator in the airport: an alternate reality where Americans become Italians and we all just stand around like we don't have anything else to do.

You'll see people Usain Bolt-ing through the airport. People obviously not accustomed to running full speed. Or any speed. Huffing and puffing. Grabbing at their chests. Checking their ticket for the fifth time to confirm the boarding time before setting off at full speed again. Sweat soaked athleisure gear finally getting a chance to do its job.

But get them to the escalator and, goddamnit all, they are going to let that thing take its sweet old time on the way to the top.

Will they assist with a manual escalation of even a step or two? Not a chance.

Will they take advantage of the force of gravity and take a step down? Absolutely not.

Will they move to the right so you can use the room provided, more than enough for two people, to sneak by and move on your way? Fuck off.

American airport escalators exist in a different plane of existence. An alternate reality where we become a casual people. An unhurried people. A casual, unhurried people just patiently standing in the middle of an escalator until the ride ends and we are returned to the plane of existence where we are prepared to run over a prison shank wielding grandma if a new lane opens at security.

What does all this mean? At a deeper, more profound level?

Honestly, I have no idea. Not everything has to mean something. Also, this is just a free blog so if you're expecting something more, that's on you.

I want to let you all in on a secret: I have pretty high hopes for this blog. High expectations, even. We may only be an intimate community of about 64 subscribers as of the date of this post, but I think we could get to 70, maybe even 75 subscribers by the end of the calendar year. Who knows?

My friends, I am telling you, the sky is the limit.

That said, 80 is probably a stretch.

Regardless, one way I plan on fuelling this rocket ship to the moon is by using my other email addresses to start Substack accounts and subscribe. But I only have two other email addresses, so the upside there is limited.

Since Step 1 of the plan isn’t going to move the needle, I reached out to Jeannie Ewing a few months ago to see if she might be interested in having me guest post and, for some reason, she agreed. I wrote a piece for her Substack a few months ago and it's running over there today.

Please go and check it out.

I just reread the piece now. It made me cry (again). Honestly, it's pretty good.

And when the flood of new subscribers starts hitting, when subscriber numbers start tickling the low 70's, you all can brag about how you got in on the ground floor, like one of those early Bernie Madoff investors who ended up doing so well.

But before you go check out this week's piece on Jeannie's Substack, you might be thinking, "boy oh boy, Dan talks a lot about cancer."

Well, first, it was kind of a big deal. My pancreas tried to kill me, nearly succeeded, and I still haven't forgiven that six-inch tadpole-shaped little bastard.

And second, don't worry, there will be some pleasant randomness sprinkled liberally on the Everything sundae, including my upcoming post in two weeks. See the short excerpt below:

"….I am not even going to tell you the story of when, marooned at Newark Airport during a Christmas blizzard, I inadvertently flirted my way into a United Airline employee's hotel room at the airport because every hotel was full due to the storm. And I won't be getting into how I thought this gentleman was a pilot who was only being kind. Truly living the Christmas spirit. Or how I found out after a few drinks at Chilis he was actually a flight attendant and all he wanted for Christmas was a Christmas snuggle with me. I won't even to try to convince you of the truth that those drinks were Apple-tinis because it sounds made up. There's also no need for me to detail exactly how I figured out my platonic flight attendant friend was interested in taking our relationship a step or two further than I was willing to go. Free hotel room or not. I will, however, be sure to clarify that he was still kind and considerate enough to let me sleep on the floor of the hotel room, even after I had spent the previous two or three hours COMPLETELY INADVERTANTLY leading him on…"

More on all of that in two weeks!

Ok, ta ta for now.

PS: Do you know who likes Piglet? No one. No one likes Piglet. He is insufferable.

If you are lucky enough to be diagnosed with certain types of cancer, they might put a "port" in your chest so they can tap that bad boy whenever they need to give you a dose of poison. Sorry: "medicine". It's like tapping a keg, only in reverse and with platinum-based chemotherapy cocktails destroying the fast-growing cells throughout your body, instead of a light, summer-time lager to be enjoyed amongst friends.

The port is made of rubber or plastic or some material we will eventually use to build space helicopters. Quantex^TM, let's say.

The quantex port is useful and likely necessary to get the poison in there good and quick. But it's also a constant reminder you have, or just had, cancer. Or it amplifies the little whisper in your ear telling you might have cancer again soon. All of that is a serious bummer.

Also, it's physically uncomfortable when your wife or one of your young sons lays their head on your chest. Or when one of those young sons leaps off the couch as you're lying on the floor, minding your own goddamn business, and he drops one of his knees onto your chest.

So it's best to get that quantex port removed, if your doctors say you don't need to dump poison into your chest for the foreseeable future.

Statistics vary but I read once that 90% of patients die within two years of their pancreatic cancer diagnosis. I was diagnosed on 30 June 2020 and I am incredibly, wildly fortunate to have survived stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer for as long as I have.

I don't have the right adjectives to describe how fortunate I am to have had stage 4 metastatic pancreatic cancer, go through treatment, and then have a doctor tell me I can get my port removed because I won't be needing it anymore.

I am also sort of an idiot who doesn't pay much attention to dates or the calendar in general and I therefore didn't realise I was having my port removed on the 5-year anniversary of my diagnosis.

Exactly 5 years, to the day, and yes, I know that's exactly how anniversaries work. Nine months of chemo and two medical trials in the books. Three solid years of treatment and two more watchful, worried years waiting. And now I can finally lose the unsightly and uncomfortable reminder of how thin the margin is between life and death.

Not that it was all bad.

No, that's definitely not true.

It was all bad.

I wish it never happened, and I hope to hell I never have to go through it again. I wouldn't wish it even on my worst enemy…and if you know my worst enemy, you know that's saying something because he is THE WORST. Or is it a "she"?

You know who you are.

People often ask, or rather say, "well you must have such a different perspective on life now". As if learning how fragile all of this is; as if seeing first-hand how little control we have over the aspects of life that matter most; as if truly knowing and being unable to forget those lessons are somehow positive things. As if the weight of that knowledge isn't overwhelming. As if it isn't too heavy to bear.

Give me carefree any day. Serve me round after round of blissful ignorance until I stumble out into the afternoon sunshine, free to bumble along, intoxicated with the folly of youth, until old age teaches me the lesson I learned at 40 years old.

There was, however, a simplicity to the life I lived over those years. Somehow, every moment was insanely complicated, but life itself was something approaching simple. I never understood how I could have pancreatic cancer, much less bear the pain and fear with any sort of grace, but I understood the mission and I understood the strategy.

The mission was to remain alive. And the strategy was to keep moving forward. Relentlessly forward. Linking one day up to the next. One round of treatment to the next. Dump that chemo into the port. Wake up. Move. Eat what I could. Move. Get to the next treatment. The next scan. More chemo. The next appointment and the next trial and the one after that. Keep going. Stay alive and keep going.

It was simple, if difficult. Stay alive, move forward, find moments of peace and even joy where I could. Allow those moments to give me fuel. Hope. A desire for more life and peace and even joy.

I imagined it was similar to being sent away to shooting war. Now, I need to be careful on this because I've never been in a war and it's unlikely I ever will, due entirely to these pesky bunions and not at all due to the particular strain of cowardice with which I am afflicted or the fact that I would make a pretty terrible soldier.

But the persistent feeling — no — the reality of death being so present. Always just around the next corner. Capable of arriving, if not quite with the speed of a sniper's bullet, then at least at the speed at which a pancreatic cell can go malignant or a radiologist can type the words "lesion" and "pancreas".

They say that war changes a person. That's certainly the foundation of all the movies about soldiers coming back from war.

Like Rambo. I am just like Rambo. Well, I am like Rambo but without an actual war or pesky local police who won't leave me alone for some unexplained reason and without abs or, really, any toned muscle anywhere. And without the hand-to-hand fighting skills. Or any survival skills at all.

So maybe not that much like Rambo, I guess.

Regardless, they say war changes a person. The pressure and stress and fear creating new, different neural pathways in the brain. Changing both the chemistry and the hardware.

I know I am not the same person I was before I was diagnosed. Nor am I the "me" who was stumbling around in the darkness, terrified, chemotherapy ravaging my body and my soul.

I have changed, irrevocably. But five years out from my diagnosis, two years off treatment with a healthy pancreas, and I can still see the battlefield. I can see it in the scar on my chest. I can hear the echoes of war from the traitorous voice in my head when I am left alone and allow myself to be quiet. I can smell the ultra-sanitised hospital room I laid in post-stem cell transplant. I can still taste the hollow metallic tang on my tongue from the chemotherapy.

But just as I know I am not the same person I was on 30 June 2020, I know I will not be the same person five years from now. The changes are irrevocable, but that does not mean the evolution has stopped. Thankfully. Because experiencing change means I am alive.

So I do not know who I will be in five years. Maybe I will have forgotten some of what I have learned. I hope so. If knowledge is power, if experience is wealth, sign me up for blissfully impoverished impotence.

But it's too late for that now, so the question lying before me is what to do next. Laying on that gurney, rolling down the hallway to have my port removed, exactly five years after my diagnosis, mostly what I wanted to do was go home. Hug my wife. Hug my sons. Call my people. Tell them I love them. Simple.

Either I am going to win a Nobel Prize for this nonsense and become a public intellectual, waving around a pipe and wearing an ascot, or I am going to run out of ideas and disappear from public life entirely, possibly to a cabin in rural Saskatchewan, ranting about moose etiquette and fishing.

Some may say the ideas are already getting a bit thin. Others might say there is no decent fishing in landlocked Saskatchewan.

Either way, something has to give and since I didn't see "Best Random Substack" on the docket for the Nobel Prize ceremony this year, we're going to need a Plan B.

Luckily for all 55 of you, I have been wrestling with two pretty good options for the next stage of this thing. We could go in a few directions, but I have settled on one of the following:

1. Mobilise this group into cult; or

2. Launch ourselves into a multi-level marketing scheme.

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First things first, I have to say, I never thought I would have so much power. Fifty-five subscribers on a relatively unknown blogging platform? Just think of it: if every one of you recruited 55 other people and if each of them recruited 55 other people, and then if all of you recruited another 55 people, then we would have, I don't know, 1 million people or something like that?

This should not be your “go to” math blog, by the way.

Whatever the numbers say, it's more power than I expected to have at this stage. Well, I guess I always hoped something like this would happen. And I knew I was capable of it; I just needed a way to get my voice out there.

Ok, fine, this isn't really a surprise to me. I always knew I would eventually have the nearly unchecked power derived from a lightly read blog .

I do not, however, take the responsibility lightly. I've seen the great power / great responsibility calculations and have been struggling with the decision of where this all goes next.

Cults can obviously be pretty awesome and being the leader of a cult seems tough to beat. I could set it up so that I would never have to empty the dishwasher ever again and people could get bonus points if they cleaned up my bathroom after one of my trajectorially-challenged boys made a mess of the place.

The downside is equally obvious: nearly every cult eventually becomes a sex cult or death cult, and, honestly, neither work for me.

I have been way down on the idea of an untimely / early death since my pancreas tried to kill me.

So it's a "no" on the death cult.

But, for the record, if I did run a death cult, I would definitely dress up as a big red water jug and smash through the cheap wood panelled wall of the bunker when it came time for the poisoned cool aid.

Fortunately, my palette is too sophisticated for poisoned fructose and if I am not down with drinking the cool-aid, maybe I shouldn't be mixing it.

So we’re left with the sex cult option and, as cool as starting and running a sex cult might sound, it also presents its own issues. For example, my wife leans traditional. It's unlikely she would be cool with the first, fundamental tenant of a sex cult, so a sex cult would only work if I don't get involved in the sex part. But, again, I am a "lead by example"-type guy, so leading a sex cult but not being down to clown won't work either.

That brings us to option 2.

A multi-level marketing scheme provides all the power of a cult but with money instead of orgies and/or poisoned cool-aid. Yes, I know money isn't everything. Being rich does not inevitably lead to happiness. Look at Elon. He seems sort of miserable.

And if we can all agree on anything in this dystopian present in which we live, I hope we still have room in our hearts to feel sorry for sad Elon.

Anyway, I wrote a whole book about it. Not about Elon Musk, there are enough of those. No, I wrote about pursuing happiness in the short time we are given (yes, there are a lot of those books too). It's fairly straightforward: spend as much time as possible with the people whom you love and who love you. And if this pyramid scheme takes off, I would have plenty of time (and money) to spend with my family and friends.

Sorry, it's not a pyramid scheme; it's a multi-level marketing scheme. Definitely definitely not a pyramid scheme. Either way, it's not complicated.

It doesn't matter what the product is; we can decide that later. Let's go with vitamins for now. No, not vitamins. Those are probably regulated. Let's go with, say, “supplements”.

The only thing you will need to begin your journey to health, happiness and financial freedom is to buy just a few of our life-changing supplements. Now, you can eat or drink or insert these supplements yourself if you want, and doing so will almost certainly lead to health and happiness, because these will be the best supplements. They will supplement a lot of stuff.

But if you want a good dose of that sweet, sweet financial freedom to go alongside your health and happiness (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to take the opportunity to resell some of those supplements, thereby making a tidy little profit for yourself.

But that's not all. Not by a long shot.

Do you want to celebrate your financial freedom, health and happiness on big ass boat or something? No sweat, we have you covered.

In addition to selling supplements yourself, you can actually give others this incredible opportunity too. All your friends and family need in order to get on that highway to health, happiness and, yes, financial liberation, is to buy just a few of our life-changing supplements. And it won't just be your family and friends who benefit, because you get a commission on whatever they buy!

Now, if you're thinking, well this sounds just like bitcoin, you're only half right, because this is way better than bitcoin.

Bitcoin is just a basic ponzi scheme or maybe a two-level pyram…marketing scheme. With bitcoin, you just make money off of the other, uhm, investors who bought in after you because they help increase the “value” of the thing you bought (and eventually want to resell). I am talking about MULTIPLE levels here because the people you bring in, well they can ingest our amazing supplements, which are guaranteed to supplement a lot of different stuff, or THEY can resell them to their friends and family.

Sorry, it might be difficult to understand this without a visual aid:

This is a time-tested structure. I am pretty sure the Egyptians invented it, they loved certain geometrical shapes and “leveraging” the labor of others, from what I understand. Regardless, it’s still a can't miss financial opportunity.

On the downside, the most successful multi-level marketing schemes seem to involve a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic bullshit. I do not like paperwork. There is also the small possibility that this would result in a short stay in prison. And prison seems like a real drag.

So, I am honestly torn. Each of these options have huge potential upside but aren't without their complications.

I suppose I could just keep coming up with engaging, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heart rending, usually slightly bizarre nonsense to write about and go about my day with my wife and kids.

But we are all in this thing together. You have all at least put your email into the little Substack box-thingy, or been brought here by The Algorithm, and it's your future too. So I've included a poll below. Let me know if you have an opinion on the matter.

It's important to note that this isn't exactly a democracy. But I think it's important everyone in this cult/sales machine/blog community has a place to express their opinions in a way that appears to matter.

Or maybe you don’t want to see how the sausage is made, which is only a pun if we are talking about cults, unless the multi-level marketing scheme somehow involves sausages. Maybe we can sell bit-coined sausage blockchains?

Anyway, here's the poll. Holler with thoughts. Or don't, it's fine either way.

This Substack (aka "a blog"), should turn into:

1. A sex cult

2. A death cult

3. Any sort of cult

4. A "geometrically shaped" scheme / sure fire path to fortune and happiness

5. I don't care

6. No one cares

7. No one knows who you are

8. I don’t think this is a good or proper use of polling

9. Other

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For the record, it's the oysters I don't understand, not the wine. Wine can be enjoyed on pretty much any occasion. But oysters should only be engaged if you can reduce to near zero the chances of food poisoning. Oysters served up in a school courtyard by parental volunteers on a sunny day in late May is not optimal from the "I want to avoid puking up my soul" perspective.

But what the hell do I know? Thinking I'm so smart, not eating school oysters. Not believing in deity-induced miracles. Meanwhile, those half-sober parents were jamming dull knives into off-season shellfish and I don't think a single person went to the hospital. Loosen up a little bit, right?

As for the cultural appropriation, each class performs a dance routine, duly costumed, according to a theme. My oldest son's class performed a Bollywood-inspired dance to the music from Slumdog Millionaire. His little brother and classmates danced around as pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean. But not Johnny Depp, which is unfortunate. More like the random extra pirates you'd see in the background of those movies. It would have been fun to watch a bunch of 5 year old French kids prancing around and mumbling about rum and gold bullions.

You can probably guess which of the two would have raised considerable hackles had it been performed at Berkely or in Brooklyn. Trick question: the answer is "both", obviously.

But before you get upset, please note that one class went with a Rocky-inspired performance, and I don't think there was a single American in that class, much less any punch-drunk Italian-Americans. So there was a little bit of racism for everyone, which I think maybe evens it out.

Regardless, very predictably, I cried more than a little bit as I watched my two boys do their best to keep up with the choreography. I'd missed a few of these performances over the years, due to treatment schedules. It must have been in 2022 when, also in tears, I stood watching and wondering how many more I would be alive to see.

Now it looks like I might be around for a while and the tears this time were of the joyful variety, although there remains quite a bit of fear rattling around in there too.

The tears of sorrow and horror and pain came the next afternoon when my brother called to tell me that our brother-in-law and friend had passed after his own battle with cancer.

During my treatment and since, people accused me of bravery and strength and courage. I am not normally one to avoid a compliment. I have thrown more than a few bouquets of flowers at my own feet over the years, but those words never made sense to me. Bravery and strength and courage imply an affirmative choice is being made. They imply stiff upper lips and grace.

I had no choice. My diagnosis destroyed the light in the world. And with each round of chemotherapy and each medical trial, I was dropped into a deep, dark hole; forced to climb out, again and again, if I wanted to see my friends and my family.

I was not filled with grace. My upper lip never stiffened. I was sad and scared and probably not great to be around a lot of the time.

But my friend? Now, he was brave. He was courageous. He was a doctor and knew the swift, grim certainty of his diagnosis. He knew the cancer in his brain would take bits of him. Slowly at first and then so quickly you could see the change, day by day, like the ocean clawing at a sea wall, bit by bit, until it breaks through and the wall collapses.

In the face of this destruction, understanding the certainty of the destruction, my friend found moments of joy, I think.

No, I know he did.

And I know he brought joy to the rest of us. He was kind and funny and graceful, even in the darkest moments. Even through the pain.

Nothing I can write will do any of this justice. He was too remarkable. Or the loss is too painful. Or I am not talented enough. All of it, I guess.

And I won't be able to make sense of it either. Honestly, I don't want to make sense of something so violent and vicious. I don't want to believe there was a reason for it.

Bullshit.

This better not be part of someone's plan.

The call that day from my brother came in around 2 pm. At some point in the afternoon, I was sitting on the edge of my bed and watching as the courtyard behind our apartment building bathed in the soft, late afternoon sun. The trees waved occasionally in the warm breeze.

It felt like the world was breathing.

My wife joined me on the edge of the bed and our boys followed. We all sat and looked out the window. Wet cheeks and red eyes. The world looked different. Maybe we just knew there had been a fundamental change to it.

After a while, my older son asked, "How am I supposed to live knowing I will never see him again?"

I didn't have an answer then.

I still don't.

And I don't expect to come up with one any time soon.

1. I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and thought (with good reason) it was going to kill me;

2. Shortly after my diagnosis, I began writing a series of letters to my young sons so they could know me in case I wasn’t around to love them — and occasionally embarrass them in front of their girlfriends when they are teenagers— and those letters became a book; and

3. I won the men’s long jump and 1500 meter steeple chase at the State Championships in Ohio in 1998.

Just kidding, everyone knows the first two items on that list because I won’t shut up about them. And the last one isn’t true, I have never chased, or been chased by, a steeple.

Anyway, pancreatic cancer tried to kill me but it didn’t and the book is called “Everything that makes me happy makes me sad”. The title should be familiar.

I thought I would share chapters of the book here occasionally because, honestly, I am pretty proud of how it turned out. Also, I am cashing in to the tune of something like $0.36 per book and my future second home in Corsica won’t pay for itself, so I need to keep milking this cash cow.

I wrote the first draft chapter below a few months after my diagnosis and continued writing through my entire three year course of treatment. The first sentence is a heavy one but, while I don’t want to spoil the ending, I can say there is a very good chance I am, impossibly, alive as you are reading this.

Without further ado, here is the first chapter of my USA Best Book Award nominated book (long longer longest list).

Everything that makes me happy makes me sad

Fun life tips from death’s abyss

Chapter 1

I am probably dead as you are reading this.

That sentence was harder for me to write than it was for you to read, believe me. But those are the odds and they are not in my favor.

The cause of death is probably cancer. I was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer at the ripe old of forty on June 30, 2020. Although I have the “good” kind of pancreatic cancer, “good” is extremely relative when placed in front of the word “cancer,” particularly of the pancreatic sort, and the fact that it is also in my liver isn’t any sort of “good.” The “good” kind of pancreatic cancer starts in the tail and gives the lucky winner a shot at living for a while. The other kind, the kind that starts in the head… not so much. Those people often die very quickly. Regardless, I am not a doctor and I never asked what stage of cancer I have, but I have seen enough sad cancer movies to know my situation isn't great.

I have been told that I have a “good” (there's that word again) chance of beating the cancer back for a few years with chemo. In the interim, some incredibly smart person in some incredibly sophisticated lab somewhere might come up with a new treatment that will buy me more years.

But they might not. In fact, they probably won't. I mean, what are the chances that I am the guy who gets metastatic pancreatic cancer at forty years old, survives long enough to avail myself of some new-fangled treatment, and beats a previously unbeatable cancer? People have been trying to cure cancer for decades. No, centuries. Or millennia. Basically forever, I guess. So what are the odds that the cure for pancreatic cancer comes during the small window of time during which it is trying to kill me? Once again, not great.

Ignoring the reality that new-fangled treatments don't come around very often, the fact remains that the chemo might not work at all. My first oncologist told me there was a 60-70% chance that the chemo would be effective at shrinking the tumors. Which, okay, I guess, except that leaves a 30-40% chance of it not being effective, the consequences of which he did not need to make clear during that meeting. I have read different statistics on mortality rates for pancreatic cancer, but one statistic that has stuck with me is that 90% of pancreatic cancer patients die within two years of diagnosis. That is not very many years.

I have struggled to wrap my mind around all this since my first scan on June 30, 2020, when a Parisian doctor pointed out the lesions. I have yet to recapture anything resembling my normal life or my normal self. I think that self is probably dead. I think it was the first thing to die. Maybe that is part of the process of dying.

But regardless, if the cancer doesn’t get me in the very near-term or even in the medium to long-term, I could still get hit by a bus as I am walking down the sidewalk minding my own goddamn business. Or have a heart attack. Or choke on a pretzel. Or fall down a poorly lit set of stairs.

But it really doesn’t matter whether I am alive or dead. Well, it matters to me. And it matters to you, if you are one of my sons or my beloved wife, for whom I am writing this book. But, otherwise, if you just picked this up in some overstocked bookstore (by which I mean some online retailer) because of the dazzling review in… let's say the New York Review of Books (but really, online)… it doesn’t really matter to you. I suppose you don't want me to be dead, and you must feel some sympathy for my wife and children. But be honest: It doesn't really matter to you. My death won’t change your life.

So what is this odd little book and why did I write it? Well, it can be a lot of things, I suppose. First and foremost, one of my sons was three and the other just a few months old when I was diagnosed and, if I do die soon, I would like them to know who I was. I want to give them as many pieces of me as possible, and this book of letters and stories and other nonsense was the best way I could think of accomplishing that.

No one is just one story, and we are more than the mathematical equation produced from our DNA. More even than a compilation of our experiences. There is the self we present to the world, which is hardly our entirely true self; there is another self that we believe we see in the mirror, which we want to believe is the true self. There is yet another one we go to sleep with after the day has worn us down, another which wakes us up in the middle of the night, terrified, and yet another to start a new day, determined to be our best self. But none of those are who we are. Even the most enlightened among us — those who have convened with Buddha, smoked enough hallucinogenic toad to demolish their id, and/or found salvation through the guidance of their therapist or priest — even they are still in the dark about who they really are and why they do what they do.

Because we are as much fiction as non-fiction. We are the "true" stories that we lived, and many others that we tell ourselves. We can't know ourselves entirely because we don't even know the truth of many of the experiences we have lived.

In writing this book, I dug through the cupboards of my mind for old memories, some of which I had deliberately hidden away. Others were never far from my mind, but were too complicated or painful to discuss in detail, many of which included terrifying events with my father in the lead role. In trying to find some "truth" in what happened in my past in order to convey some "truth" to my children, I questioned my siblings about their recollections of the same moments. I found out there was no such thing as a single, shared, certain "truth".

I initially thought their memories would be more reliable than mine, given that I was the youngest. But their stories differed and drifted away from each other so that, in the end, I am left with the impression that it is the impression that matters. The impression that an event has on the brain, the way that it is remembered, is a function of what happens at the time, sure. But it is also a function of the person to whom it happens. And not just at that moment, but the way that person remembers, mis-remembers, remembers again, and then lives that experience each day going forward. Cobbling together a "memory" that one can live with, or perhaps be destroyed by, depending on the moment.

This is as true for the traumatic experiences I lived thirty-five years ago as it is for those that I lived just a few years ago when I was diagnosed.

This is not to say that "truth" does not exist or that we should not seek it out. Certain things happened and others did not. I am not so post-modern as to believe otherwise. But it seems impossible to piece together truth from the shattered fragments of our memories. Maybe iPhones and the incessant recording of pictures and videos will change that, but I suspect not.

You might be asking why I went through the hassle to get this thing published and made available to an audience wider than my blood relatives. Well, if I am being totally honest, it must be that I have a slightly inflated sense of self. You see, I am a middle-aged white man, so my baseline operating assumption is that people need to hear what I have to say. I wouldn't say I think my stories could change the world, but, you know… What if they do?

Let's get to it then. First things first, if you are one of my sons and if I am no longer around, I am really, truly, terribly sorry that I am dead and not there to help you navigate this life. I loved two things in this life more than I thought I could ever love anything: being your mother’s husband, and being your dad. I think I am probably a better dad than I am a husband, even though I think more deeply about and try harder at being a husband. Maybe it's because my parents' relationship was such a disaster, but we'll get to that later.

Regardless, I am well above average at both, if I do say so myself, although I am worse at both since my diagnosis. Anyway, I thought I would try to write down a few notes of things I’ve learned, or at least things that I think I've learned, before it all disappears into the mist.

If you are a random person who happened upon this or purchased it thanks to that rave review (or pirated it from wherever pirates pirate these days), I will try to make it worth your time. But no promises. I am not sure how this book will land without the emotional weight tugging at the familial heartstrings, but you've already spent the time to buy or steal it, so stick with me for a bit.

But this book is definitely not a self-help book. It’s not some list of rules I developed through divine providence, after having lived my one life (and then not even very much of it), that can act somehow as a rule book for everyone in this mind-bendingly diverse world.

First, I don’t think I really believe in divinity, even before the cancer, although I wish I did. Second, self-help books and the new fashion of providing twelve easy rules for a happy, healthy life is modern day snake oil distribution on a mass scale, except it’s probably more harmful than rubbing some lilac and whippoorwill oil on your eczema- tattered skin during an era when there wasn’t a decent cure for the problem anyway. All you lost there was a bit of money. But the western world’s addiction to self-help books steals time and, ultimately, hope, two things that are far more valuable. And it robs you of your own agency to boot.

So no, this is not a self-help or universal rule book that promises to explain you to you, along with your partner, your parents, your boss, and everything else under the sun. This isn’t a flashlight illuminating the dark corners of your soul, or the winding and dangerous unlit turns in the road ahead. Life is hard; living a happy life is harder. Nearly impossible if you look around at how miserable everyone seems to be. Maybe reading about someone else's failures and successes at finding happiness, along with some (hopefully) funny stuff that happened along the way, can help relieve a bit of the loneliness as you search for your own path. You know—without being a self-help book, of course.

Or it won’t do any of that. This book may just go toward further ornamenting your already eclectic bookshelf. It might not even get that far. Honestly, I really don’t care, because I am probably dead. Or maybe I did defeat one of the most deadly cancers around. In which case your negative opinion of my writing, or even my perspective on life, really, won't matter much to me. I'll be too busy being alive to care.

End of Chapter! Do you want to read more? Oh, I bet you do…Here’s a link to a small online book and widget distributor where you can get the entire book delivered right to your door.

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