We’re reading the script I’ve written when someone 30 years my junior asks me what a character means when he says, “I got my hearing checked and it’s good. I have an After Care Report and everything.”

I’m confused. There’s no subterfuge written into this line.

He got a report after he visited the doctor that’s titled “After Care Report.” Every time you visit the doctor you get sent one.

I have half a mind to show them emails I get whenever someone in the family has any medical consultation.

“AFTER CARE REPORT” the email subject line says.

Almost, scoff at the question, but instead I ask: After Care Report from you doctor, you know, summarizing what happened.

My inquisitive actor snorts. Oh, she says, that’s not what that means to people my age, For us it means care after sex.

Now, I snort: What?

You know, after sex, how do you care for your partner.

I’m thinking, I try not to fall asleep, so I get up and cut some fruit and bring water over the bed so we can talk. (In the old old days, it was a shared cigarette and her head on my chest.)

But I say: Oh, that isn’t what I mean at all here. Let’s cut that line.

He didn’t see his first avocado until he was 21. He’d gone out for a pub lunch on a Friday in Birmingham and woken up at the end of an airport runway in the Canary Islands the next day with a cotton mouth hangover.

For two weeks he slept in ditches and between rows of banana trees and wished he’d brought more money.

The first one he saw bounced off a passing truck loaded with them. The friend who’d shared the airplane ride with him smirked at the luck.

Oh, I love these, he said, and sat down to open the dark oblong object with a pocket knife.

The deep green flesh was buttery and good, refreshing and filling at once.

It was a gift out of nowhere, a sign of goodness and abundance despite the careless way he’d been living.

40 years later, when his wife made the bowl that had the deep colors of the Milky Way in it, he knew just what to fill it with.

When I saw her midriff, it was just a flash.

She had a flat stomach, so flat it made her innie almost an outie.

But it was the flash of the small diamond stud that gave me pause.

I took a breath and remembered the funny waitress in Minneapolis who I fell in love with when the office went out for drinks.

She had a navel piercing that we talked about and I gazed at.

Then I was funny and then sloppy. And then not funny.

I paid the $300 bar tab and came back the next day to apologize and ask her out.

I smelled like hangover and desperation.

Everyone at the office looked at me sadly for a few days.

I was lost and thought I knew who I was.

Now, 35 years later, I’m looking at a 40 year-old’s midriff thinking about the woman I wanted to fuck way back when and the loser inside who really wanted to connect.

As I drive down the 101 to the school pick up, my mind drifts from the Boston song on the radio and how fast I’m going to the kid I’m picking up. His summer freckles and sneaky prankster smile peak through an arbor of memories that’s grown thick over the years. There he is hiding a can of coke under his bed and telling me he’s ready for bed. “You can go now, Dad. Really, you can,” he says with just enough delight to make me suspicious. “Really, Dad, I’m tired.” Now he’s eating a plum in the old apartment, digging into its ripe sweetness with abandon. I indulge in the stream of consciousness that opens like an endlessly blooming flower. And then, somewhere, between passing a dirty white pick up truck and being overtaken by a sleek dark-windowed Tesla, I somehow imagine losing him. There is no event. No visual. Just grief spearing mercilessly into my chest. The bleakness is full and complete and my insides dissolve to dust with with an imagined but nameless tragedy that runs to measureless depth. I’m tearing up when I think, “What the fuck is this? Why am I doing this? Why am I conjuring such loss?” And I get hold of myself and come back to the road. I convince myself it’s a sign of how much I love him as I turn into the school circle and see him yacking with friends, laughing under the brim of his scuffed baseball hat. He loads his bag in the back and comes around, all 14 years of him trapped in a gangly body that he wants to stretch out to over 6 foot. “Hey, Liam,” I say, heart still full of the memories of him as well as the terrible loss of him. “How was school?” And he turns to me: HIs smile gone, face impassive, eyes almost wooden. “Whatever,” he says and begins thumbing through his phone. “Seriously,” I say, “How was school?” And without looking up he says, “It was fine, Dad. Just like always. Now can you get off my back?” And I wheel the car out of the school drive, past all the other parents doing the same thing I am, and press my lips white because I just want to rip his face off.

It occurred to me today.

If I were just a little stupider or a lot smarter I’d be happier.

But I wager stupider would be better.

I had lunch with a friend today who says after some medical issues he’d been given some drugs to combat infection. A side effect was decreased libido.

”It’s like it’s completely removed,” he said.

He seemed well-adjusted, if not pacified.

And it occurred to me that those who see the truth of life do one of two things.

Get really well adjusted.

Or kill themselves.

Though I suppose there is a third way: Wobble back and forth between believing it and not believing it; between being fine with it all and being angry at it all — until you just fall down and die.

Everywhere I go, I see muscle.

A lack of generosity.

A desire to impose will.

To control rather than explore.

Callous. Small minded. Selfish.

I am important. So important I cannot be ignored.

What I say goes.

If you disagree, I will throw names at you that suggest rocks are next.

Because in this time of uncertainty, it’s the only way to achieve certainty.

Meanwhile, the rest of us smile and hope the longer we ignore it, the faster it will go away.

AA bijillion years ago, I started making coffee table-ready photo books of our year to send to grandmas at Christmas.

The first one was really marveled at and appreciated.

Its size and effort and quality was unexpected, so maybe I should’ve expected the way every year brought a little less marvel and appreciation.

Obviously, I resented that.

Not only because the work never got easier with each year, but because it made me feel like the recipients had lost the point: To see their grandkids go from toddlers to young men, ready to take on — and take in — the world.

So I didn’t make one this year.

But I’m still going to make one. For me.

Because I still marvel and appreciate that.

I don’t know what it is about watching my kid play baseball that I love so much.

There’s probably a book in it.

Because I know I’m not alone.

I mean, it’s clear other parents love watching their own kids play ball too.

Maybe it’s just the simple joy of being unabashedly FOR your kid.

Unabashedly proud in ways you can’t be elsewhere.

I dunno. But I like it. A lot.

I started a new decade in life.

The 7th. (I’m 60.)

Interestingly, it’ll be the one in which I stop working, put two kids through college, maybe (MAYbe) pay off the house.

Can’t say for certain how it’ll really turn out.

Could all come crashing down.

Might be I got enough sleep last night, but it feels like it’ll be okay.

I certainly don’t recall thinking about what the last decade would look like when I’d just started that one.

But here I am.

Let’s blow out the candles.

I’ve been asked to write an artistic statement.

I guess it’s meant as a little manifesto about the purpose I find in writing.

Or a vision I write to.

Perhaps it’s a test to see if I’m serious.

Whatever it is, I don’t get it.

It could be perfect and powerful and make you think, “Wow, we have the real deal here.”

But what difference does it make if you get to the art and the art falls flat.

And that very may well end up being my artistic statement. You read the play, you get what I’m doing. If you need an artistic statement to tell you too, you don’t get it.

I can’t help but feel that the therapists I’ve trusted have opinions on what I tell them.

Judgements about who I am.

They will deny it, flatly.

It’s their professional imperative to do so.

But it’s also a direct denial of their humanity.

I hate the pretense.

Tonight, I got rid of books.

Not just any books. All my business books. The ones on how to run a businesses better. The ones on innvovating your way to the top of the pyramid, the market, the consumer’s mind. The ones on entrepreneurial dilemmas and self-discovery in the name of the almighty dollar. The ones on managing people and bosses and boards. The ones on paring it all down to just the essentials and what matters (assuming it’s measurable) most.

Yep. All of them. Even the ones on managing up and down and sideways.

Good To Great
The Little Blue Book of Advertising
The Making of Manager
High Output Management
Built To Last
Behind the Cloud
Trialblazer
Spreadable Media
Essentialsim
The Coaching Habit
Growth Mindset
Let My People Go Surfing
The Silo Effect
The Resilient Enterprise
Googled

Even the great Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last and Start With Why.

Why?

Because reading them was like trying to learn how to ride your horse by watching a movie of someone who is not you riding a horse that is not yours. Or understanding how Rocky Road Ice Cream tastes by listening to someone eat a Rocky Road Ice Cream Cone. Like trying to comprehend the meaning of colors when you are blind.

After dinner, we traded starfucker stories by the fireplace.

I hate starfucker stories.

They’re proof of your smallness no matter who comes out on top.

Six months ago I got “laid off.”

To be honest, it felt more like a firing.

The team didn’t like me. They were either not mature enough for me, or I was not wise enough for them.

They heard very little of what I said. And gave me no credit for what I did.

An internal survey made it clear there was no trust between us.

My leadership team wasn’t much help. They relied on management philosophies that are popular these days about coaching.

It was not just awful for me.

Other leaders often came to me in tears. And most of the key players didn’t make it a year, either quitting, getting exited, or pushed into roles they weren’t hired for. Almost no one seemed happy.

And it was no fun.

Some things just don’t work out.

The shelves are lined with voices frozen in wood

Turned out covers scream for attention

Touch me

Open me

Bring my tongue to life with your inner voice; your inner ear

Take me into your mind

Where I will become part of you

Carried like an ember of memory

An invented life lived in dimensions that cannot be measured

Like love and hate and sorrow and elation.

There are so many speaking to me

Too many to hold onto any of them

Who has time for all these makers

Lovers, murderers, friends, teachers, thinkers, predictors, nurses, reconteurs

I resist the feeling that my own story is diminished

By this ocean of words

But I can’t stand too long

Without feeling like it’s vain and useless

To throw my own wooden voice

On this store of Babel

Most years, our Christmas card — I mean, Holiday card — is a multi-photo, multi-page extravagant affair.

Included, free of charge, is my attempt at giving people an idea in writing of what the year was like and how our mental framework has developed. It also serves as an invitation to our friends to come visit us and share their stories and lives with us.

It’s normally about a paragraph long and it’s a serious invite though few take us up on it.

I work hard on it to make sure it doesn’t come off as a humble-brag. I’m not sure it’s always successful in that way, but I don’t think it comes across like the “Christmas Letter” that gets folded into so many other cards. It’s not a full page list of milestones achieved by the kids. And I know I successfully avoid the cliches and tropes usually found in these things that amounts to a newsletter that comes off as a desperate record of suburban middle-class American life.

It’s also, traditionally, not just a card with some pictures and the pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: “Here’s to Cheer”; “Wishing You A Merry”; “Joy To The World — And You!”.

Except this year.

This year, frankly, has been too complex to find words for. Job loss. A broken sister. Slower walks up the steps for my mother-in-law. Financial fears after the arrival of a tax bill. A realization about our age and our long-term prospects. Social insecurity about the world we moved to. A decision that a career had ended and anger about it spilling into everyday things like loading the dishwasher and folding laundry. An understanding that we never had a real vision for the future and now we don’t have as much future to work it out.

So this year, when I sat down to do the card, I just didn’t have the energy to find optimism.

And I let the pictures do the talking.

Which is to say, our card is just a select set of Instagram posts in cardboard format with pre-written copy from the staff at Minted: Wishing You A Great 2024; Liam, Grady, Heather, Malachy.

That’s it.

I love my kids. I love my wife. We are better off this year than last. We are lucky.

But I really don’t know that I have much more to say about it.

So… no poetry in the card.

Self-reflection is a waste of time if all you’re doing is looking.

I talked to my eldest son about reading tonight. About books. Turns out he’s a reader.

I asked what he might be into next. He confessed to having some trouble with some late Kerouac someone had given him.

I said maybe he should try something else. Books can be returned to. We talked about Rushdie and Marquez. But those are big books. Great but big. And he’s got a lot of commitments — a play he’s in, a film he’s trying to make, a guitar he’s trying to master.

So I said, maybe a short story or two.

He’s going to give some Tillie Olson a try (“Here I Stand Ironing”), maybe O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.”

Afterwords, I thought about Raymond Carver. I’d recently been grousing about the misogyny of some of his stories, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have something to say. Something beautiful.

I pulled this off the shelf, “A Small Good Thing.” It pulled my heart out of my chest and said, Look, look at this. This is yours. Don’t just take care of it. Take care of it in others.

Now I’m going to run lines with my younger son. He’s M-Beth in the middle school fall show.

Every day I plant a seed. I never know what’s going to grow from it. A tree. A weed. A flowering vine. But every day I get up is a day I am planting. And if I plant well, and I tend to it over time, the most amazing things can grow. Redwoods that will live longer than me. An elm that will take care of me in my age. A cypress that will stand against the wind and time. Violets and clover that I can lay in to watch the clouds from.

I can plant with anger or love or indifference or intention and care, but I’m breathing, I’m planting something to add to the garden of my life.

The longer I live the more chance I have to see the things I plant today offer what they to the world. But even when the days grow shorter, it’s still worth it. To plant. To imagine what a sprout may do.

And yeah, I’m lucky enough to live in a place — most of the time — where the ground is fertile and ready to give. To try. It’s not that way for all.

So I’m not squandering my days. No fucking way.

I planting every day I got.