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Mindfuckery.
That’s how she described the cognitive dissonance of sitting in the waiting room while her son’s wisdom teeth were being extracted–doing one of the most motherly things a mother can do–while her husband sat it jail.
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I wish I could deliver a message to my younger self. Many messages, really, to many earlier versions of me. Like that the penis my college friends drew on my forehead with permanent marker when I passed out would not, in fact, impact the rest of my life. Or that leaving my sales-manager job at a steel company that was for sale upgrading to a steel company that later declared bankruptcy was not, actually, the stupidest move ever. Or even more recently, that the knee injury I suffered playing soccer last summer was not the end, and that I was not yet relegated to the chair workouts Instagram feels are age appropriate.
Those tips would have been useful. But in mid-March 2026, I am thinking about the advice I would give a late 20-teens version of me about Saint Patrick’s Day.
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Before they served us our farewell dinner, our neighbors of twenty years, while enjoying the evening sun of newly saved daylight on their back deck, asked our youngest two boys what their fondest memories were of the house we are leaving behind.
I froze in a mini-panic. “The time Drunk Dad got so mad that he punched a framed picture spreading glass all over our bedroom.” “Listening to Mom and Dad whisper-fight well into the morning through the heating ducts.” Those were the traumatic memories that flooded my brain as I waited for our sons to speak.
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Is having enough about getting more or needing less?
I was at a casual lunch meeting with six people and two eight-slice pizzas. I ate one slice of pepperoni and one slice of margherita. I was still hungry, and the pizza was really delicious, but you could not have force-fed me a third slice.
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It has been going on since the beginning of humanity. Why am I surprised?
I have been undergoing a psychological transformation for the past couple of weeks. I have always heard that the horrors of war are too much for the human brain to process, and that PTSD and the elevated addiction and suicide rates of veterans are the predictable results. The contents of the Epstein files released on January 30th are too horrific, too shocking, for my human brain. I am not an empath. I work in the field of emotional abuse. I have aced grad school classes in sexual assault that required a lot of case-study critical analysis.
And yet, I was not remotely prepared for this.
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I touched her shoulder and her back a lot. My connection to her, and our comfort with each other, was evident to anyone who cared to pay attention to us in the crowded bar. Her husband definitely noticed. We had recently traveled together, she and I, and her husband’s mind was swirling with anger, jealousy, and questions.
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My wife, Sheri, and I just spent a long weekend with three couples. It was interesting to hear that we had all shared the same clear and decisive experience, without which, none of our marriages would have survived.
All four of us men were drinkers. All four of us men begged our wives to let us back in emotionally, and to comfort us as we tried to get sober. All four of our wives, after multiple attempts to be our soft pillows–to cushion the impact of early sobriety, finally stood by a hard boundary.
All four of our wives said enough was enough, and forced all four of us men to do it on our own.
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My daughter’s hands get cold. Not like normal cold. Really cold. They turn a splotchy blue and white, which is visually concerning as a parent. It has to be some kind of circulatory thing.
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I turned off facebook notifications because every time I put my phone in my pocket, it would ding about ten seconds later. Without fail, the ding was a facebook notification. Like a dog who sticks his nose in your crotch when you stop petting him, facebook demands attention and isn’t interested in the other things you have going on. We all know that we see ads for things we converse about within our phone’s earshot. We know that the intricacy of the techno-web designed to paralyze us while their venom finds its way to our bloodstream is vast beyond our capacity for conceptualization. But this particular tactic is particularly despicable to me. It is evil incarnate. Are you engaging in direct, face-to-face human interaction? Fuck you! DING! Pet me with your eyeballs.
***
I drank vodka and watched television news like it was my job in the days that followed September 11, 2001. Airplanes crashed into buildings. Nothing resembling that fresh horror had ever happened. Not in my lifetime. Not ever. America was angry, America was shocked, and America mourned the loss of our fellow citizens.
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While watching football over the holidays, my youngest son asked me why all of the sideline reporters are hot women, and all of the play-by-play commentators are variably attractive men. “Sexism,” I responded without hesitation. “It’s bothered me for years. These broadcasts are just money-generating engines, and I’m sure the networks have done focus groups. I think dudes are just uncomfortable being informed about football from chicks, except the cute ones who fawn over the winning quarterback.”
“Exactly,” my daughter said from behind the couch to which my fanny was semi-permanently adhered during bowl season. I didn’t even know she was in the room. Had I known, I might have used a different word. Females in their early-to-mid twenties have strong opinions, and they are pretty unified about reserving the word, “chicks,” for babies with feathers. Other than that, my message would not have been different had I known she was listening. Either way, it is hard for me to describe how it felt to have her agree with me.
At first, it was like the jolt of joy you get when you put on your jeans for the first time in the fall and find a five-dollar bill in the back pocket. But the more I have thought about it, the more her one-word reaction means to me. It has been a long time since she felt comfortable endorsing my opinion.