Friend asks, "Life, is that all there is?"

(535 words)

My friend could no longer conceal his melancholy. He set down his craft beer, looked at me plaintively and asked, “I wake up everyday, wonder about the world and ask myself, ‘Is this all there is?’”

The sentiment is baffling to me because I have one of those indestructible egos that has me thinking having Friday afternoon porch drinks with me should be plenty.

Sure, there’s pandemic mayhem, racial unrest and the prospect that soon Trump and Biden will at a combined age of 151 years soon begin pandering to 18 year olds over things like the new Taylor Swift album, but being defiantly alive is still pretty cool.

Is this all there is?

Baseball’s back, there’s encouraging vaccine news and somewhere crowded with shiny supermodels Mick Jagger just turned 77.

Is this all there is?

Yes! So let’s be thankful for every hug, giggle, sunset, friendship, cuddle and moment of the day when we deliberately choose to listen to music instead of watch the news.

I don’t remember the instigation, but I once challenged myself to compose the most depressing summation of life there’s ever been.

Why there have been days when I challenge myself to think of things like that instead of challenging myself to earn actual income is a philosophical puzzler for another day.

But here it is:

“Life is a series of disappointments, each one greater than the last, leading inexorable to the grave.”

Now, that’s morose.

I have to say, it was fun to write something so out of character, like Adam Sandler must feel when he plays someone with a brain.

There’s two reasons I didn’t share that with my melancholy friend.

First, we were on the second floor porch overlooking the Tin Lizzy parking lot. I thought the devastating line may have caused him to jump and I didn’t want him denting my car.

Second, it’s utter nonsense. Hoo-ha. A life without any light or laughter? Has that ever happened  even once?

We’re all right now understandably spending time on the front pages. It’s all crisis, death, disruption, tumult and lots of cross words.

But we still live our whole lives back deeper in the paper, clear back on the pages where they print the comics, birth announcements, and the benign kind of crosswords.

Our daughters are 19 and 14. I spend a lot of time trying to conjure the words that will let them still pursue big dreams in a world that momentarily seems godforsaken.

Is finding happiness even possible anymore?

I’d say yes, but it’s wise to seek it in smaller increments.

I tell them to do something they love to do each and every day just because it’s something they love to do each and every day. 

It can be playing with the dog, spending time laughing with friends, learning a musical instrument or writing in a journal. 

You’ll be amazed, I say, at the things those kinds of recreational devotions can lead to.

Because life is a series of unrelated giggles with people you care about leading inexorably to simple human happiness.

It may not be all there is, but it can be enough and that’s all that matters.

A hometown funeral & "The Art of Living Suddenly"

(667 words)

I’ve been at this fatherhood thing long enough I figure I can BS my way clear across any vast canyon of factual oblivion.

Merely appearing wise conceals authentic foolishness — and that utterly pointless 6-word statement practically proves the point of the whole daddy baffle.

But my high school senior stumped me the other day when she asked me to help her with something that had been troubling her sweet soul: What does she say to her friend whose Mom just died?

Gee, I’m sorry? Tough break? Hang in there?

Which godforsaken cliche might Band-Aid a tender heart that is exploding into a million tiny pieces?

I didn’t know the woman.

Everyone else in town did.

Val and Josie waited in line 2 hours at the funeral home visitation service on an afternoon that was as sunny and cheerful as the 52-year-old mother of two they were all there to mourn. 

That right there fulfills one of my bedrock lessons of a life well-lived. It’s no. 42 in “Use All The Crayons!” and one I always share with audiences who are there to — and it sounds crazy to me, too — hear my thoughts on colorful living:

“Try and do something each and every day that’ll ensure parking at your funeral will be a real bitch.”

It’s great advice, really. Want people to show up at your funeral and comfort your loved ones with honest stories of how much you mattered?

Make your own list, but include things like …

Make eye contact. Be optimistic. Be generous. Laugh easily. Avoid petty political fights on Facebook. Treat the guy who works on your car the same as you treat the guy who works on your heart.

And, c’mon, treat everyone nice.

I’ll bet doing all that was second nature to Mrs. S.

This all happens at a time when I’m immersing myself in thoughts of sudden death, legacy, and the elusive meaning of it all. I’ve spent the last few months constructing a book proposal I’m calling “The Art of Living Suddenly: How to Deal with a Parkinson’s Diagnosis (and other things that suck).”

Losing your ever-loving mother in high school certainly qualifies as something that sucks.

It is my contention that anytime we hear of anyone dying suddenly, we need to commit to living suddenly.

What’s living suddenly? Well, it may be self-defeating for me to say so, but if you’ve read this blog this far you’re probably not doing it.

I’m kidding! Your reading and encouragement gives real meaning to my life — no real income, but real meaning.

I’m still not sure what it means to live suddenly but for me it involves laughter, conversation, family, friends and other priorities that keep professional stability an unattainable goal.

But living suddenly is something you need to define for yourself and I suggest you do so right away.

Because you just never know when your time is up.

I was talking about all this to a bartender friend of mine — and that is redundant; every bartender is a friend of mine. His father was killed when he was in high school. He was riding his motorcycle when a senior citizen without a license ran a red light and wiped him out.

He was 55. My age.

“I was just devastated,” he said. “He was the greatest Dad in the world. I miss him every single day. It was just so senseless.”

He meant the death was senseless, but the same could be said for life. It rarely makes any sense to me.

I audaciously believed by the time I got this far I’d have conceived something truthful I could tell my daughter to share with her friend, something that would bestow profound clarity to her grief.

I was mistaken. 

Instead, all I have are questions: Is life ever fair? How do we help the hurting to heal? What’s the point of so much pain?

And if we’re not living suddenly, are we really even living at all?

Related …

Small town funeral etiquette

Hire me to ensure a memorable funeral

Death to boring dinner deaths

RIP Arnold Palmer: A lucky local says goodbye

The day I staked out Charles Bronson’s Mom’s funeral

Church rules on cremation & what we did with Dad

How much living in 54 years?

(592 words)

It was toward the end of the family birthday festivities when Josie, 16, observed that, man, 54, is getting up there.

Understand, she wasn’t being at all snarky or mean. She’s not that kind of kid.

I think it was more a reflection on mortality and the realization the number of years I have ahead of me are fewer than the number I have behind.

I thought about her comment and brought it up the next morning as I was driving her to school.

“You were right about 54 being old, but you were mistaken about one crucial point,” I said. “I’m not 54. I’m 100.”

Years are convenient, but poor ways to gauge life.

I’m 54 years old, but I’ve lived so much more.

It’s why I told my wife on our 20th anniversary it felt more like 40 years. Do not mistake that for a slam. Not at all. Our situations have bestowed us with more togetherness than many busy working couples can justify.

We share common interests and enjoy being together — just us or with the kids. For many, many years we had lunch together every day and dinner most nights. 

You can be married for 50 years but only be together for five.

My own parents for example were married, I think, for about 18 years, about half of them during the four years before Dad died when they were together a good bit and seemed to enjoy one another. Once they became empty nesters, they began sleeping in separate beds.

I sleep slammed up against Val all night, the sole exception being nights when our rat-like yip dog burrows in between us and leaves me sleeplessly fearful this’ll be the night he decides he wants to begin nibbling on my nuts.

As for being a Dad, geez, the only time I’m not there being their father is when they’re in school. We’re together all the time.

It’d be impossible to underestimate the years I’ve logged being buddies with so many friends on golf courses, in saloons and at ballgames. The memory catalogues are thick as old big city phone books. 

I’m at an age when many friends are contemplating retiring. And there in lies the rub.

They’ve worked — truly worked — many, many years.

I’ve worked about three.

It’s been unintentional, for sure. Who in their right mind would plan for their entire career to be one long sabbatical? It's utterly preposterous.

I feel in many ways like an intern with a promising future. Put me in coach.

It’s like if Roger Goodell suspended Tom Brady for four regular season games so the QB’s body would be rested and his vital game reactions wouldn’t peak until the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl.

Not that that would ever happen.

The only problem with feeling like a 54-year-old intern is if the failures continue to crest, there’s a very real chance I could wind up back living on the couch with Mom and, boy, will this blog take a dark turn if that ever happens.

So, you see, time is elastic and measuring your life in brute years is pure folly.

Really, the only time years are an accurate unit of life’s measure is when you’ve been convicted of a felony and the judge sentences you to a bunch of them without parole.

Fear not death.

Fear instead the death-bed realization that you never really lived.

Insinuate yourself into enough hearts and you won’t just live to be 100.

You’ll live forever.

Related …

I turned 50 and no one noticed — me included!

Happy 25th birthday to our 12-year-old daughter!

Me (& ‘Ticket to Ride’) turned 49 today

Sound fathering at 22 mph

Marching on Gettysburg with daughter, 12

The summer I ran away with the carnival (from '13)

(1,058 words)

We were in the midst of the gaudy sensory overload known as the Westmoreland County Fair when my wife surprised me with a career suggestion.

She thinks I should write a book about the summer I ran away with the carnival.

I was surprised for two reasons: One, her career suggestion didn’t involve me giving up writing entirely to become a plumber; and two, I’d never really thought of it.

I guess because it seems too cliche.

How many self-involved books have there been about writers who’ve foolishly run off to chronicle war, the latest fad diet, or the loss of their precious virginity?

I’ve kind of hoped the summer of ’83 would just be one chapter in the great, big book, but not the whole book.

But, man, what a chapter.

It was all just so lurid.

And fun!

We were juniors at Ohio University. My buddy Doug had a speedball game and an entrepreneurial bent. Growing up in Athens, his family had been a fixture at the annual county fair where he’d set up the speedball game and give the local hicks a chance to throw three pitches for a buck: guess the speed of your third pitch and win a crappy 25-cent batting helmet.

And that’s basic carny economics, patently unfair yet mutually acceptable.

His experience had given him an idyllic view of the fair circuit, because that was part of the pitch he used to entice me into joining him in what wound up being a four-state swing through the upper Midwest.

He told me it was a cinch the carnivals would be filled to lots of pretty young co-eds.

That may have been the case with some bucolic carnivals, but not the ones with whom we trucked.

Our carnival was populated entirely by junkies, sexual deviates, ex-cons, and Ohio University Bobcats -- that was me and Doug and Bob.

Bob is a footnote in the story. He started out with us hoping to make his fortune selling soft pretzels. Understand, this was long before the era of the deep-fried Twinkie so don’t hold his lack of imagination against him.

He lasted just two weeks.

True story: he became a congressional aide for an ultra-conservative Ohio U.S. representative and today works closely with Ohio Gov. John Kasich administration.

Me, I stuck it out and today am delighted anytime I get a chance to shoot the bull with any junkies, sexual deviates, ex-cons or ol’ Bobcats.

There’s plenty of evidence to dispute the contention, but I think I, the underemployed blogger, turned out the better of the two.

There’s a lot of tedium involved in traveling from town to town with a gypsy carnival.

The fairs and festivals didn’t really get busting until about 6 p.m., about six hours after most of them opened.

So Doug and I would take turns sitting there baking in the sun. If I took any life skill away from that summer it is that I became an adept juggler. Doug, too.

Think about it. You’re sitting on a box with nothing to do for about 30 hours a week. You’re surrounded by baseballs. Learning to juggle was the only sensible thing to do.

That and read, of course. In fact, I believe I’m the only carny in history to have read “War and Peace” in the shadow of the Tilt-A-Whirl. My buddy back home was about to leave for the Navy and told my mother to tell me he was reading Tolstoy.

I, of course, figured he meant “War and Peace.” I was wrong. He’d read “Anna Karenina.” So I read the 1,440-page “War and Peace” by mistake.

Oops.

And I learned to be a pretty slick talker. You had to.

Every town had a hotshot pitcher who believed he could throw 100 mph. And maybe he could. Just not while drunk in tight jeans and cowboy boots. 

It happened about once a night. They’d get right in your face and scream that the game was fixed. They didn’t care about winning the cheapo batting helmet. They just wanted the big number to impress all the hometown on-lookers.

You’d need to make a snap judgement over whether the best way to proceed was to either calm them down with logic or respond with bombastic ridicule. Guess wrong and they’d want to kill you.

I’d scream at Doug at least once a week to re-calibrate the damn radar gun so it would show that even 8-year-old girls could out-fastball Nolan Ryan, but he’d refuse.

He, too, became a conservative, albeit a warm and cheerful one.

The best part was after the shows closed. Doug and I would take our fake IDs and run to a local liquor store to score beer and booze for all-night parties behind the fun house ride we wound up calling the Wicked Witch Saloon.

And the carnies all were welcome and all would come.

We heard everything about their lives: Who was divorced, addicted, on the run, on parole and who they’d kill if only they could.

And when we were good and drunk we’d all turn loose out on the midway. I remember riding the giant sliding board -- wheee! -- at about 4 in the morning with Randall, who’d just gotten out from the Illinois state pen for a 10-year manslaughter stretch he got for killing his boss. He swore it was an accident.

I can’t believe we made it through the whole summer without anyone trying to rob or kill us, especially Doug, the pretty one.

And then there were the girls. I told Val there were just two.

I’m coy, of course, out of respect for her feelings. She suspects there were more and -- hallelujah -- she is right.

But really there weren’t that many. Carnies, even ones who can boast they’ll soon be successful newspaper men who’ve read Leo Tolstoy, bear an indelible stigma.

It was a difficult pedigree for available young single women to overcome. As for those who managed, well, bless their hearts.

So maybe one day I will write a book. It’s a dear and rich part of my past.

Today, you’ll just have to settle for a blog.

And that there’s just one more example of carny economics.

Related . . .

The splendid folly of life’s roadtrips

Santorum’s right! Man marrying dogs in Wisconsin!

The prisons we construct around ourselves (from '12)

It was 24 years ago this weekend I quit my last job and began shacking up with Val. I last wrote about it in '12. Still feel the same so it's today's re-run.

I thought about commemorating the 20-year anniversary of my doing mostly nothing by doing more nothing, but that seemed too obviously redundant.

This weekend marked 20 years since I quit the last salaried job I ever had. 

There’s more. It wasn’t just the last day I ever had a steady paycheck. It was also the last day I had what I guess you could call a steady girlfriend. This weekend in 1992, I took the step beyond steady.

While I was becoming less committed to stable employment, I was becoming more committed to the fair Valerie.

If you judge my life on the wisdom of those two life-altering decisions undertaken within 24 hours of one another then I’m an absolute genius.

First, I left daily newspapers, an industry that in the next 20 years would shed profits, payrolls and prestige.

Second, moving in with Val was the best decision of my life. Our 3-year shack-up commenced on July 1, 1992, and led to an escalating progression of love, marriage and eventually our two darling daughters, Josie and little whatzzer name.

So in one 24-hour period I went from being a single guy with a job to being an off-the-market guy with no job. Everyone thought I was crazy, including the woman who today is, in fact, diagnosed with a form crazy herself.

My mother was flabbergasted that I would leave what seemed like a stable newspaper career to work full-time doing oddball features for America’s most notorious publication, The National Enquirer.

Why would I even consider such a thing? What will I tell my friends? Aren’t you worried about your reputation?

“Mom, you just don’t understand,” I said. “This will make me a much more interesting person.”

“But you’re already interesting enough,” she wailed.

She was mistaken.

From 1992-1999, I wrote more than 1,000 swashbuckling features for Enquirer, many of them involving the world’s most fascinating people and places. You can check out a nearly 4-year-old recap here.

It’s impossible to calculate how much prestigious and profitable work I passed up in favor of work that would be fun and interesting.

This has been to my financial detriment, but will I in the long run be better off?

I remain surprised I’m not yet a successful novelist. I have for five years been pitching a novel that gets great reaction from top people throughout the publishing hierarchy. I reprise the premise here in case any of you are powerful literary agents or publishers who’s been reading my blog strictly for the fart jokes.

The book is called “The Last Baby Boomer: The Story of the Ultimate Ghoul Pool.”

It’s about a 117-year-old man who in 2079 is identified as the last baby boomer. By then people are so sick of baby boomers they will put him in a museum suite and charge contestants $25 each to spend 15 minutes with him in the room.

If they’re in the room when he dies, they win the jackpot.

One problem: He won’t die.

It’s a coming of old, old age story.

Because everyone has to die, but only one of us gets to die last.

I know what you’re thinking: I can’t believe that’s never sold. I can’t believe it either.

Maybe I should rewrite it and add parts where the old man has sex with zombies.

But “Use All The Crayons! The Colorful Guide to Simple Human Happiness” is showing signs it may flourish, and I’m getting interest from important people on two non-fiction proposals.

“We are born free and spend the rest of our lives constructing prisons around ourselves.”

That, I believe, is the most profound line I’ve ever written. It sounds almost Biblical, or like something that could have been written by ageless sages like Plato, Socrates or Jeff Probst.

But it’s mine and I truly believe it. In fact, I live it.

The prison I’ve constructed for myself has no security. It’s cheerful, nurturing and filled with love.

Ironically, for a place with no security, it has a lot of bars. For the last four years I’ve done most of my writing right above one of them.

As I look back on the last 20 years, I thank God for the decisions I’ve made.

My life has been interesting with interest compounded.

It takes my breath away to think the next 20 years could be even more interesting. 

I’ll be content if it’s even half so.

And it’ll be nice if it pays just a little bit better.