This one is going to take a minute to fully suss out. You can tell, because I’m out here using a nihilist cigarette-exhale of a headline on a blog I haven’t used since … Well, since my own impermanence got a little too foreshadowy for my own comfort.

Anyway.

My kid is a senior this year. My other kid is in eighth grade. I’ve been on a couple of baseball road trips this month, and while I’ve been stuck in planes, trains and various passenger seats, my phone has been taking the opportunity to show me photos of earlier versions of those kids.

Like when my son discovered he could play harmonies if he shoved one recorder up each nostril, or when my daughter fully coated her entire face in diaper cream when we left her unattended for about 10 seconds.

I was on some highway in Missouri or somewhere, when a melody came back to me: the song I used to sing her when she was too full of emotions or applesauce to sleep. It never crossed my mind in those days that the song would outlast that version of the kid.

Don’t get me wrong. I love who my kids are now. But each new version shows up dragging a body bag with my babies inside. Give it another few years, and we’ll have two new deaths in the family. No funerals, just birthday cakes to mark the time of death, the time of life, the time of …

…The impermanence of everything (except loss), man.

This train of thought will get less morbid, but first it has to get a little worse: This isn’t just about kids. It’s about everything.

I miss my friends from when I was 20. And 15, 38, 9, 26… Some of them, we just drifted. Others I see online or shoot a text message every now and then. Some of them are dead.

(Well, they’re all dead if you use the body bag metaphor from earlier, but some of them are dead-dead.)

I miss believing I would be married forever. I miss my little brother. I miss a body that didn’t wake up each day under the cloud of concern that another spinal surgery might be in the very near future.

Tut-tut. It looks like rain. I feel it in my left ankle now, and it reminds me that someday, I will be dead-dead.

The Part Where This Thought Exercise Stops Getting Worse and Gets a Little Better.

I’ve always known that I am not wired to “live each day like it’s my last.” Taken literally, that’s how you find yourself waking up on a beach in Bali with six digits of credit card debt and no return plane ticket home.

I can, however, live each day with this nagging thought: The impermanence of everything, man.

I didn’t mean to become so aware of it. It just crept in, loss by loss.

But I’ve found a way to reckon with the thought. Where once it felt like the universe holding my loved ones at gunpoint making a threat—I swear, I’ll do it again—now I just see it as … what is.

Of course you’ll do it again. It’s how this all works. Everything must go.

The (acceptance of) the impermanence of everything

Yeah, I’m gonna die. My entire history will go away when this or that website or this or that civilization goes dark. If it’s a fight against the universe, I will lose. But what if it’s not a fight? What if it’s just a dance?

I get my one song. Some verses a one-time thing, other choruses a familiar refrain. But when it’s done, it’s done. So no matter how tedious or mundane I find this particular day, or that particular task … I try to love it.

I didn’t write the song, but I get to dance how I please. Some days my mosh-pit fists look a lot like fighting. Other days, I can almost waltz. And yeah, there are days when I just lay on the dance floor and cry.

But when I can remember … it’s not a fight, it’s a dance … I can bring myself back into the moment, be grateful that I am still, for the moment, here. And I can love you and me and all our friends, for however long we get them.

Has there been a worse time to be immobilized, with unfettered access to the entire whole internet?

I remember thinking the noise I was making was going to worry everyone. Especially my daughter, who is 12.

We were just outside the local library; she’d met friends there to go sledding, since the entirety of North Texas is frozen over and shut down.

“NNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHH”

I remember thinking the noise I was making was really embarrassing. I’m laying on the frozen ground and I can’t breathe. It feels like the wind has been knocked out of me, but that doesn’t even make sense: I had hit my head.

“I’m ok I’m ok I’mokI’mokI’mok” I grunt.

“You don’t sound okay.”

“RRRRNNNNNNHHHHHGGGHHHH”

I remember thinking the noise I was making was concerning. I’ve seen people injured, badly. And this sounds an awful lot like the sound they make.

It was my first trip down the hill — the really, really small hill, I should note — and I figured I would go about 10–15 feet.

So I laid down on my back, facing the sky, and went down head-first.

Apparently sledding on ice is a different calculation than snow.

“NNNNNNNGGHHHHHHHHGGHH”

I’d been going for longer than I expected. This was a successful sled trip; I was going! I was really going! I was …. Not stopping.

I figured I was getting close to the street, and I heard a couple of voices making concerned noises that sounded a little like “Look out!”, so I tried to sit up, to stop myself.

Then I felt the impact.

For a half-moment, I thought it was a car, but it was just the top of my head. And I hadn’t heard a car, and there was no car around, so no, this was something else. I quickly realized: I had banged the top/back of my head into a firmly-planted yield sign.

But I couldn’t breathe, and not-being-able-to-breathe didn’t make any sense. And I just kept making that sound.

So anyway, it turns out that I had broken my neck.

The doctor said that — as these things go — it was the least bad kind: A “Spinous process” fracture of my C7 vertebra, and just a crack. No separation. (EDIT: ok.)

I’ll have follow-up appointments with the neurology and spinal surgery teams, but the doctor said he thinks the most likely outcome is: I take it extremely easy for the next 6 weeks while I wear this neck collar.

If you’d like to hear the type of humor that resonates with me, here’s the best text I’ve gotten today:

I’m going to be ok. Six weeks in a collar is super annoying. Everything still hurts (they said I might have also broken a rib, but the X-Ray was inconclusive) but I’ll take this over paralysis or death or neurological damage.

Do I feel lucky that my one time down the hill aimed me directly at a 2-inch by 2-inch metal pole? Not particularly.

But I do feel lucky it wasn’t worse.

i live a block away from a high school. every day i walk toward it and turn left to pick up my daughter from middle school. we drive by it every night when i take them home. it’s literally the middle ground between the apartment and the house.

“they shot a kid,” the woman said when i asked if she knew anything. “i heard the shot, and then the SUV just left his body on the sidewalk.”

“y la policia cerca,” an older woman said, gesturing with her hand and shaking her head.

“yeah, the police were like right there,” the woman translated. “they chased the suv, but…”

she trailed off. she was also waiting to pick up her son from the middle school; the one where my daughter goes.

“it’s on lockdown,” she said.

i texted my daughter to make sure she was ok, and if dance practice was happening as usual.

“uhhh i’m not sure, there’s a shooting outside rn,” she replied. a second later “ok i gotta go practice now.”

the helicopters are hovering now. police looking for the SUV, or local TV broadcasting our disgusting national re-run?

Shooting at school. More at 10. More next week. More and more and more until … until what? Until it happens to someone with enough money that we finally decide to something — anything—about it? More, for years, for decades, more bodies on sidewalks and in classrooms. More cleaning crews to mop up blood. More excuses about why we can’t do anything, just in case the government decides to be tyrannic—

oh right. i guess the jig is pretty clearly up on that excuse, isn’t it. likewise with the “save the kids” chants, since the leading causes of death from ages 5–24 are “unintentional injury,” “suicide,” and “homicide”.

The NIH isn’t allowed to say what gets used for all those injuries, suicides, and homicides. but i bet if you ask the mom on the corner i just talked to, she can let you in on the secret. i bet just about any honest person could.

more at 10. more next week. more and more and more.

stroller, 1:00

she will never watch you scan the placement of the other legs and spines and arms and eyes like a futuristic robot, the kind we should all be afraid of.
you calculate their pace
you trace their trajectory
you anticipate their movements and reactions

gap, 9:00, between the trash can and the guy on his phone

you deftly swing your hips
a liquid shimmy to the right, mom collision avoided by a solid three feet.
if you were worse at this, it would be so annoying
but your evasive maneuvers are sharp
nobody else even has to break stride as you walk at two, maybe three times the speed of the crowd

a spin move? do you dare? i mean, it would work. It would be so smooth. But no, not today. keep a little something in the tank.

she doesn’t even know
that you are halfback
that you are king salmon
that you are more apparition than man
she will never see it
because when she is with you, you hold her hand
your love is the superhero mask
hiding the anxious and hurried man
he seems so relaxed, so “here”, not so concerned about “getting there”

they don’t even know how fast i could get through them though

a man slides past your left side
he doesn’t see the oncoming scooter
he executes a perfect spin move
and you nod

Fine, I can afford that.

$75 later, I walked out with a tank, a filter, rocks, fish food, water treatment solution, and some little black and white balls, the purpose of which I’m still not sure of.

We named him Frank Ocean. I wanted something that sounded tough (because he was a grumpy old git) and also flowy and beautiful, because look at those fins:

Talking about a fish named after a pop star is maybe the strangest way to make this announcement, officially, but my wife and I separated in October of 2022. I’ve been in an apartment since April of 2023.

You learn a lot of things when you fail that badly. Well, you have an option, actually: you either learn or you double down and repeat your mistakes. I’ve spent the last two and a half years learning, I hope. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, even if I’m not proud of how I got to the classroom.

For the first … very long time, my coping mechanism was a lot of solitude. I lost touch with a lot of friends, because I didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened. I didn’t know how to explain it. I was embarrassed, and horrifically aware of my own shortcomings.

Meanwhile, in the same week I moved into the apartment, my job changed. I was working from home full time, no longer absent in my own life. Great timing, huh?

So I dug in to work. I bought some cheap furniture (including the most uncomfortable couch I’ve ever sat on). I did art every day for a year. I quit drinking for a couple of years. I read some books, dug in to therapy, worked out at night after work. I picked my kids up from school every day — something I hadn’t been able to do when I was at the ballpark or on the road all the time. I started playing baseball again.

And last July, I bought a four-dollar ($75) fish.

Frank was a typical betta: grumpy. If anyone got too close to the tank, he would flare his fins out and try to show them that he was big and scary and not afraid, and I appreciated that. I was also trying to be brave. When I fed him, he tried to bite my hand. He loathed being taken out of his tank for water changes. Sometimes it took me 10 minutes to catch him.

The one thing he did seem to enjoy, weirdly, was when I would put one of those sea life YouTube videos on the iPad and leave it propped up so he could see. He didn’t try to fight the iPad, he just kinda stared at the screen. No big fins. It was like he appreciated seeing a world he wouldn’t ever get to experience.

So when I was going to be gone from the apartment for a few hours, I would put on his movies for him. It feels a little silly to admit this.

Anyway, you may notice I’m using the past tense. I went to feed Frank last night before I went to bed, and he was laying at the bottom of his tank. Not floating, but definitely no longer in the business of biting the hand that feeds him, literally or metaphorically.

I grew up too rural to be overly-sentimental about pets. I understand that they’re temporary. But I was — to a degree that surprised even me—pretty bummed out last night.

Frank was my grumpy companion in the worst season of my life. He didn’t want to be in this apartment, either. We got through it together — me with my baseball games, him with his YouTube videos.

Fish aren’t permanent. And — if you do them right—neither are seasons of grief. You don’t ever get to a place where the grief didn’t happen, but you survive long enough, you grow, you do the requisite work, and life goes on. Eventually, you even buy a couch that doesn’t feel like a movie prop.

Frank was the exact right pet for my bad couch season. A grumpy companion for a difficult time. I wish he’d been able to stick around for more of the Bravely Moving Forward era.

But I’m thankful my daughter talked me into spending that four (75) dollars. RIP, Frank.

That’s how I found out we were at war.

Well — we’re not at war. Me? I was sitting in a first-base dugout drinking a Gatorade. And the order wasn’t approved by Congress, so are we really at war, or is one guy just going rogue at the controls and dragging the rest of us into it?

But that’s semantics, I guess. When the bus drives off the cliff, the people who were sitting in the back don’t get immunity just because they were screaming “stop” instead of cheering on the impaired driver. Geopolitical apocalypses are not a tapas menu.

So yeah. We’re at war. We. Whether we wanted it or not.

I made three errors— drie vergissingen—after that. Part of it was that it was the end of a doubleheader. I’m old, and I was tired. I was playing third base, and the team we were playing was blasting pull shots at me. I wasn’t at war, but I was in the line of fire.

But part of it, I think, was that this has all caught up to me. Again. I keep thinking it has sunk all the way in—I’ve kept thinking this for almost a decade now—and it keeps sinking in even further.

Every day, it’s some new dumb horror. I miss when dumb things were funny.

Do you want to hear something dumb that is not funny, but at least not going to make you want to stare off into the nearest wall and wonder how we got here?

I hit my first home run today.

My first real one anyway. Last year, I hit a line drive that split the outfielders, and since there wasn’t an outfield wall-or-fence, I just ran and ran. This time, we were playing at the same wall-or-fence-less field, but I hit this one way over the left fielder’s head. It would still have been a home run if there had been a fence or wall.

I hadn’t ever hit one before that wasn’t speed-based. Not in Little League, not in High School, not in Sandlot or any other place I’ve played. I’m 45 years old; and I just hit my first ever real home run.

On the day we went to war.

I would love to stick to sports, but this has grown beyond that. While I was playing baseball at a field with no wall-or-fence, there was a protest being held at Dodger Stadium. That’s the same place ICE — no, the Department of Homeland Security, or maybe some other gang of extra-judicial masked vigilantes (how are we supposed to tell the difference, anyway?) were denied entry a few days ago.

Hard to “stick to sports” when even sports aren’t off-limits. Sports are in the back seat of the bus, too. We’re at war. Sports, too — whether they wanted it or not.

Every day, there’s some new devastation. Palestine. ICE. Iran. Transgender friends. Habeas Corpus. The Constitution. A politician murdered in Minnesota.

The wheels are coming off. We’re aimed at a cliff. Maybe we’re even partway over the edge, and we just haven’t landed yet.

It feels weird playing baseball. It feels weird doing anything. We’re in crisis. It has been a crisis. Now we’re at war, whether we wanted it or not.

I don’t think this means I’m back to writing every day, but I am back to writing today, so hello to all of you and to anyone who has reached out, I appreciate it; I’m good, I am.)

i am watching a live stream of some chickens hatching. two of them burst onto the scene around 3am this morning, apparently (I was not awake for that; imagine how concerned you should be about my mental health if i were though). around 12:30 this afternoon, I watched a third chick decide to see what was outside the shell.

the new one is doing nothing that isn’t a learning process. its wings are moving independently of one another, and when it kicks its little chicken legs it seems surprised to be jolted forward.

its head is wobbling around in a manner that conjurs up images of a blackout drunk attempting to hand over a ten-pound weight to a nearby fire hydrant. back and forth with no discernible rhythm, giving up and falling down occasionally before trying again.

mostly the new chicken is laying down. i guess hatching is hard work, and if its not, i certainly know that being alive is. it takes some getting used to. i’ve been around for way longer than one hour and i also want to lay down and take a nap sometimes.

the other two birds are being little jerks. they are walking over and pecking the new bird right on the head or on the butt. “welcome to the world, lemme just be the first to tell you that you are gonna get pecked around here,” they seem to be saying, but they aren’t even 12 hours old yet so maybe chickens are born with an innate instinct to be horrible.

i don’t know much of anything about chickens but i feel like i am learning a lot today.

when the third one hatched, i watched it go from being an egg — or at least schrödinger’s chicken — to being a clumsy wet birdlike creature. it was not earth-shatteringly profound, just the normal kind, like when a home garden gifts you a tomato or someone you know has a kid.

maybe it’s something about a new start that does it for us. one minute ago, you were safe and all you knew was the increasingly-cramped safety of the shell. and now you’re out here with the rest of us, learning to breathe, hearing your own sounds for the first time, getting pecked right on the head or the butt.

it’s about 1:45 now and the new kid has learned a lot. its feather-fuzz is nearly dry and it can almost stand up. most notably, it is pecking back at the two aggressors. i am actively rooting for it to get in some solid shots; the bully chicks are owed some pain at this point.

it never stops, little chicken. you keep learning things and flopping around and getting butt pecked until you get a little better at it, little by little. then one day you die and some other chicken is born to take your place: floppy and wet and uncoordinated.

welcome to the planet; i hope you find some good bugs in the meantime.

And then came this week, and out of the last eight days, I’ve written one thing off-line, and one barely-an-effort entry here. I hit a wall, and I couldn’t find the wherewithal to force it.

Here is a list of times I have started over of my own volition:

At 15, I stopped competing in rodeos and leaned into the fact that we started going to a different church — one in Fort Worth, with city kids. I ditched my wranglers and boots for khaki slacks and Tommy Hilfiger shirts. I went from playing a snare drum in my school’s marching band to playing a drum set in the praise and worship band, and tossed country music aside for the alt-rock radio tunes of the mid-90s. Baby steps, I guess.

The summer when I was 20, I joined a missions organization. I spent a summer in Guatemala, then Peru. I dropped out of school and stuck around for two years; I got to see Latin America and Europe. I mostly ditched the drums and picked up a guitar. I started listening to bands that weren’t on the radio (not good ones, but… more baby steps).

When I was 22, I moved back to my hometown and worked at my dad’s church. I was pretty well de-cowboy’d by then, but still comfortable enough in the culture, as long as they didn’t try to make me conform. I started listening to good bands, and started a couple of bad ones. I went to shows in Dallas and tried to figure out how people ever found a bridge from where I was to where I wanted to be.

At 25, I broke up with a band and a girlfriend, quit my job and moved to England. I started the process of realizing that there were other ways to have faith that weren’t the Republican version I had grown up on. I made the best guy friends. I started recording my own music. I landed a tour that launched my music career.

At 27, I moved back to the US, and married a girl from that church from when I was 15. We moved to Nashville, and I spent the next seven years trying to make a career out of music. We had two kids, and when I was 34 I decided I couldn’t be away from them that much, so we sold nearly everything and moved into an RV, traveling together for a year. Every day was the best or the worst, with no real in between.

At 35, on the verge of moving to Seattle, we made a last-minute change of plans. She’d been offered a job in Dallas. I swallowed my promise that I would never move back to Texas, and we agreed — it was only an 18-month commitment, after all. In April, this will have been 10 years ago.

At 36, I quit music and became a baseball writer. The first two years were really difficult as I learned a new job and tried to make a name for myself, making next to nothing.

Around the time I turned 38, I started my own company, which existed for about three months before it was bought by a start-up. All of a sudden, I had a real sports journalism job. But it meant being away a lot, again. When my daughter was four or five, she asked if she still had a dad. That was the day I started looking for a way to do something different.

In 2023, that something different came. I stopped covering a team and started writing our newsletter, which I could do from home. I pick up the kids from school every day. I am (finally) more present than I’ve ever been. But that has also coincided with another starting-over. One I don’t truly believe I’ll ever fully get over.

Starting over was an exhilarating adventure when it was my decision to jump to the next branch, trusting that my hand would grasp it. But you can’t just Tarzan from branch to branch your whole life without tending to the roots.

The latest start over was, for all intents and purposes, a 29-month crash to earth. The tree got brittle. A branch snapped. I landed this week, officially. The hard ground knocked the wind out of me. I’m probably bleeding or concussed, but I’m alive.

But I needed a few days (after the last two-plus years) to just… not say anything.

Maybe tomorrow, I can get back to writing science fiction or stream-of-consciousness-all-lowercase thoughts. But today, I needed to at least lock eyes with the future and nod an acknowledgement that it’s another start-over. Not one I wanted.

But if there’s one thing my life has prepared me for, it’s the ability to start over. I hope I’ve got one more good one left in me.

Does anyone else feel like they are walking in slow motion through a war zone and the explosions are going off all around you and your face is getting dirtier and once in a while a nearby blast wobbles your stride but you keep walking, with no expression on your face and you’ve dropped your gun and your backpack and you’re not entirely sure where this path leads but at this point you might as well take the next step because what’s the difference and maybe somewhere up there is a safe zone or you might hit another country altogether and then you can lay down and probably not sleep but just stare straight ahead for a few days until someone leans down and asks if you’ve eaten and you realize you forgot all about eating but you won’t know how to explain that so you just say “no” and they pick you up and put your arm around their shoulder and you’re too tired to resist so you walk wherever it is they’re leading-slash-dragging you and it’s all still in slow motion and you can still hear the bombs and your face is still dirty and you’re not sure but what it might be permanent but maybe there might be a bed in your near future so that’s a nice dream.

No? Just me?

Anyway, sorry I didn’t write anything in here the last two days. Friday I did write, it just wasn’t for public consumption. Yesterday I just forgot. I guess that is going to happen once in a while this year, but this isn’t about perfection, it’s about consistency, so here is today’s entry, now if you’ll excuse me I have some slow motion steps to get in.