Everyone is a Bot
The overlords keep telling you it will be easier if you let them into your email and let them send messages on your behalf, but you don’t get it. Real people see through your laziness. If you want it to unsubscribe you from emails, great. But if you want something from somebody, just a tinge of effort is probably a better idea than relying on a summarization bot. Adult humans can tell the difference. AI isn’t as good as you think.
Impermanent Solitude
I like my own company. If you say that to an insecure person, they'll respond, “I like my own company, too.” But they don’t, and you weren’t talking about them anyway. This is why the stillness of being alone is a treasure to those who can withstand it. Any judgment on you happens outside your four walls. The world is an imperfect place. People are the fault line.
My AI Won’t Stop Asking Me If I Am Okay
I remember reading something a couple of weeks ago that said that Anthropic wasn’t going to allow anyone to abuse their AIs anymore. What? How can I abuse something that is artificial? Part of the fun of using Claude is lambasting it when it makes errors in a way that I would never do with a human. I quite like calling Claude a fucking idiot and knowing it will just say it knows it is and is sorry for disappointing me.
Performative
She once gave me a hundred-dollar bill after one of my Bad News Bears skits, and my mom and grandma put the kibosh on it, much to her dismay. They thought she didn’t know what she was doing and that she was “tipping” me too much. I thought I had just crushed my role as Tanner Boyle, playing shortstop and spitting in the ground before making a diving catch. Later, she would slip me some candy when no one was looking.
The Essence of Time
My grandma taught me how to crack walnuts, and it was way harder than I expected. When I did it by myself for the first time, I felt like I had won a Nobel Prize. My other grandma pretended like she was senile, but I knew she wasn’t. She just didn’t know how to deal with the loss of her husband. Everyone talked over her as if she was kind of there, but she would wink at me to let me know she was more than that. Then she would pee in the seat she was sitting in.
Rumpled
I don’t like wrinkled clothes, but there’s something comforting about picking up a rumpled sweatshirt from a pile of worn-once clothes and throwing it on for a morning walk, not caring who you might see or what they think of the creases across your chest. Wearing a sweatshirt once without staining it or sweating through it is sacrilege. Sweatshirts feel better the more you wear them over and over.
Hybrid
My favorite non-pet animal is a sloth bear. When we visited my sister, I used to take my kids to the San Diego Zoo, and they had sloth bears. There is something so weird about animals that somehow mated when you can’t really see the connection. A zorse makes sense because zebras and horses are pretty much the same size, but sloths and bears? Did someone encourage the sloth with a four-pack of wine coolers, or did they meet on animal Tinder? Either way, the animal is adorable, and it might rip my head off if I put it in the cage.
Crutches
I never used the deaths of my parents as a crutch. How would I have done that? I get pulled over by a cop for running a stop sign and just say, “My mom died two days ago”? Come to think of it, I could have used these disasters for such trivial things. Forgot my wallet when I really wanted a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos? Dead dad. I’ve been doing it all wrong.
All the Things I Will Never Do
I will never go 100 miles per hour again. I did it once, when I was sixteen. I was with my stepbrother, Erik, on Sunrise Highway on the way into the Hamptons, and we wanted to see if his red Toyota Supra would display 100 in its digital speedometer. It did. The lights went on behind us. The police officer asked if I knew I was going 90. At sixteen, I said, “I actually thought I hit 100.” He didn’t laugh. He asked Erik if he could drive home. Erik was pretending to be asleep.
Watching Movies By Myself
Even before Missed Connections existed, I had this fantasy: I would go to the movies by myself, and a beautiful girl would come in and sit one seat away. We were two of maybe six people in the theater. It would be awkward. I wouldn’t be able to focus on the movie. She would sneeze. I would say, “Bless you.” She would smile. I would do nothing. Even in my fantasies, I did nothing. I wouldn’t remember the movie.
A Slow Tumble
I’m in the waiting room of a pediatric dentist’s office in Park Slope. One of my kids must be inside with the dentist. I don’t know how I got here. A boy is telling his mom how badly he has to pee. She is scrolling on her phone. He walks over to the artificial plant in the corner of the room, takes out his kid wiener, and pees on the tree. It takes her three seconds to notice.
Casting
I’ve never understood casting. I was watching a commercial this morning, and the father in the scene had to skip a rock into the water, and there is no chance he had ever skipped a rock. It seems to me that, even if you are selling a stay at a motel chain, the most important part of “acting” when skipping a rock is being able to skip a rock. I don’t think this guy, with zero lines, was THAT good at being a dad that they couldn’t have found someone who could skip a rock.
Warm Beer
My stepbrother, Nick, threw a warm can of Busch beer into the backseat to each of us. We were probably fifteen, and he was twenty. It was the first summer we were big enough to have fun with outside of sports. We were in Henry Flynn’s car and Erik and I, unbelted, were flying from side to side as he navigated the Hamptons’ back roads with the virtuosity of an old Formula 1 driver. The beer was disgusting.
Joshy
When I moved to Sarasota, I transferred from one State Attorney’s office to another. I made a couple of friends quickly, and one night we went out for a drink after work. I was happy to chop it up with some people in a new town, but I only had an hour because my kids were 4 and 2, and I had to take over dinner and nighttime play when I got home from my wife. I told them my kids’ names, Benjamin and Chloe, but we'd only known each other a week or so. I showed one of them a photo of my son, and he said, “Joshy,” in a voice I can still hear, thick with beer or two. I sometimes walk around the house and call my cats Joshy in the same voice.
The Pace of Life
So many people are propelling themselves through each day at maximum speed, like Tom Cruise’s cheeks hanging on to the side of an ascending airplane. I am more like the Molasses Swamp in the original Candy Land board game. It’s an interesting perspective on the world because, as I stand still, it twirls past me, then straps itself to a rocket and takes off. I shrug and go back to my matcha.
Rainy Days
Driving in power storms isn't much fun. I know what hydroplaning feels like, so I never drive fast in the rain. I never really drive fast at all, but other people fray both ends of the driving speed spectrum in a rainstorm. Petey drives his F-100 at 70 in the left lane because he can. Betty pulls over under an overpass in a three-drop drizzle fest. Everyone has their own shit going on.
Writing In Oblivion
My old journals were for me. Writing is for me. I lost my way so many times because of the rigors of the Internet and the FOMO one gets from being micro-successful in a niche product that exists to resell you your own stuff. Building this site and pouring my letters into it is the antidote. I still harbor odd wishes that someone from The Paris Review or The New Yorker will happen upon this asteroid of a site and fall in love. Here, I wait.
Best Laid Plans
Some mornings you wake up expecting to absolutely crush the day. Then your kid is sick, your dog barfs on your shoe, your cat gets out, and your boss reminds you that you said you would be in early today, and early is in forty minutes, so you throw an Eggo into the toaster, and it shorts out. But your partner comes in, handles all the home psychosis, and lets you rush out the door so you don’t get fired. You get to the corner and realize you forgot your wallet, so you try a risky U-turn to hurry up. You hit the curb, pop your tire, and have to call a tow truck. Also, your phone didn’t charge and is now out of battery.
Things I Happened Upon
We used to hide our money in our dressers, behind our clothes, at camp. We did this because our counselor, the greatest man to ever live, told us that the Lewis Savings Bank was a scam. It was a fake bank at the camp where they kept your money. It was totally legit and safe. Our money would disappear because, as Burke told us, bandits found it from time to time. Some nights, in the middle of the night, he would bring us home fribbles from Friendly’s and introduce us to a random girl. None of us will ever face the truth, and we don’t care because the guy was a legend.
When Summer Was All There Was
I can’t say I’m proud of what we did, but I am also not not proud of what we did. Kids don’t have fun today like we had fun. In some ways, that is very good, and in some ways, very sad. I don’t want someone else to wake up to their stepbrother at 4:18 AM telling them he “parked” his car somewhere in the woods and you need to drive him back to find it. When I asked him how he got home, he said he ran five miles barefoot in loafers. I drove him back in my underwear and found his car so far back in the forest that it was impossible that it was there. But it was. And we lived another day to tell the story.