As a kid, I remember going to the beach. I remember walking the shore, wearing my little swimsuit. I remember the glorious and inimitable joy of having sand in my crack.

My biggest objective, of course, was finding seashells. All children care deeply about shells. This is the main reason you visit the beach as a kid. It’s about looking for shells.

What are you going to do with the shells? Nobody really cares. You haven’t worked that part out yet. All that matters is looking for them.

You do this if for no other reason than because, hey, we’re at the beach, y’all! Isn’t this great?! Wow, check out these shells! Whoa, look at that one! It’s orange! I call dibs!

It didn’t matter if the sky was overcast and foreboding. It didn’t matter if the water was muddy, or if the shore was littered with clumps of dead seaweed that smelled like a Port-a-John.

You’d find your little shell, pluck it from the sand, then dust it off like you’d just found a thousand

bucks.

I, personally, had no organizational system for collecting shells. No buckets, containers, or nets. Thus I was forced to carry my collection in my hands.

Which wasn’t a big deal until you had collected WAY more shells than you could carry. Soon, I would be walking along the shoreline with an entire armful of shells. Big shells, little shells, and all shells in between.

Then, at some point, toward the end of the day, reality would hit. You’d look at the beach and realize there were gazillions and gazillions of shells beneath your feet. There was no way you could ever collect them all. Furthermore, what the heck were you going to DO with these shells?

So, I would let them go. I would scatter the mass of shells to the wind, flinging them into the air, watching them disperse like rain. The…

Dogs know stuff. Yes, I know they’re just animals. I know their brains are only about the size of tangerines. But I’m telling you.

Take my dog Otis Campbell. I don’t often write about him, but I should. Because he’s our main dog. Our other dogs are his supporting actors.

Otis is the alpha of our family pack, ranking just below my wife. I am ranked somewhere near the rear of the pack. I eat supper last.

I wish you could see Otis right now. He is half awake, half asleep, sort of standing watch over me. That’s what he does whenever I write. He watches me, without moving.

And I’ve always wondered how dogs can remain deathly still, watching you, without falling asleep.

It reminds me of a guy my father once knew. The man could sit on the front porch without moving a muscle for days. The only way you knew he was alive was by his cigarette—it moved occasionally. My father said the man had been told by doctors to drink spirits to steady his

nerves. It worked. Sometimes he got so steady he couldn’t move.

That’s who Otis reminds me of. So that’s who we named him after.

Otis is a good dog. He has witnessed every random emotional event we’ve ever undergone in this household. He has been present for our entire lives.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly eight years since Otis came to us from an adoption center. We found him when a local pet shelter had a meet-and-greet.

The place was a circus. You couldn’t hear what any of the volunteers were saying because of the collective noise. Each kennel had a fanciful poster with the dogs’ names emblazoned in theatrical letters. Some of the puppies were dressed in little costumes to look like lion tamers and tiny Little Bo-Peeps. The volunteers referred to these costumes as “curb appeal.”

My wife…

The Girl Scouts were setting up a folding table by the doors of the hardware store.

“Omigod,” I said to the cashier. “It’s March.”

The cashier looked at me flatly.

“Debit or credit?” she said.

“This is March,” I pointed out again. “Don’t you know what this means?“

She said nothing.

“It means cookies,” I said.

She cleared her throat. “Sir. There’s a line.”

I paid for my wares, then hurried out to the Girl Scout cookies. I did a quick inventory check, using my cookie-sonar to investigate the boxes on the Scouts’ table.

I was not looking for Trefoils or Do-si-dos, Tagalongs, Lemon-Ups, or Adventurefuls. Neither Samoas nor Toffee-Tastics. I was looking for a uniquely mint-chocolatey cookie which is an American institution in and of itself; a cookie that tastes like I’m about to transition to wearing sweatpants full time.

“Do you have any Thin Mints?” I asked the little girls.

The girl who answered was very matter-of-fact. Her name was Mary Kate. And from the looks of her sash, she is an overachiever.

“Yes. We have Thin Mints.”

One of the

Scout moms whispered. “Ask him if he’d like some.”

Another Scout answered. Her voice was quiet. Her name was Amelie. She was also a highly decorated officer.

“How many boxes?” she asked.

I wanted to say, “I’ll take as many as you can sell me without losing your jobs.” But I showed restraint. I only asked for seven boxes.

I am a big fan of the Girl Scouts. In a modern age when nearly every classic American pastime is belittled and threatened, I like knowing the Girls Scouts are still kicking.

This nation has lost sit-down family dinners, newspapers, even the sport of baseball has undergone modern rule changes. (There is no clock in baseball.)

The Boy Scouts have been the victim of culture wars and bankruptcy. Dr. Seuss has been taken off the shelves. But the…

Our shower drain kept getting clogged. It was a big problem. We had to hire a plumber. He came out twice.

God love him, the plumber did not look happy the second time. Namely, because our house is 100 years old. Meaning, five generations of people have been bathing in this house. The drain pipes have been whisking away one century’s worth of funk water.

“No telling what’s in those pipes,” the plumber said in a quiet, ominous voice, gazing into the treacherous blackness of the drain hole.

The plumber and his young assistant, Charlie, spent an hour working on the problem. The plumber is not a tiny man. He did a lot of bending over while Charlie would laugh, pointing at his boss’s partially exposed gluteal cleft, and saying, “Crack kills, boss.”

They located the clog.

Charlie found me in my office. He was breathless and excited. “We found it!” Charlie said these words in the same weighty tones NASA engineers would use to say, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

Three of us stood in a tiny bathroom, looking

at the source of the clog, lying in the plumber’s hand.

“I’ve never seen a ball of funk that big before,” said Charlie.

The clot was a rat’s nest of human hair about the size of a golf ball. The hair was old, so it just looked black and green.

“Probably your wife’s hair,” said the plumber.

He’s probably right, I was thinking. My wife has the longest hair in our house. Moreover, I’ve seen the aftermath of her showers. Whenever she washes her hair, the shower stall looks like she’s just finished bathing a border collie.

So, I told my wife about the ball of funk. She became very defensive.

Her main defense was, “It wasn’t MY HAIR!”

I had to laugh. Her thick, brunette hair comes down to her mid-back. Who else’s hair could it be?

“What about…

What if I told you that you are enough?

Moreover, what if you woke up this morning and, for the first time ever, you actually felt like enough. What if you loved yourself? And I mean really loved yourself.

Do you love yourself? Let’s find out.

Are you a perfectionist? No? Yes? Have you ever asked WHY you’re a perfectionist? Have you ever wondered why you strive to be flawless so that nobody will find a reason to judge you?

Or are you a people pleaser? Ever wonder why? How did you become a doormat? Why do you fall all over yourself to ensure everyone will like you? Would showing them the real you be that bad?

Or maybe you’re critical. Maybe you nitpick those you love. Heck, maybe you nitpick yourself. Maybe you look in the mirror and think, “I’m so fat and ugly.”

Perhaps you see photos of yourself and react with true disgust, thinking, “I’m so old and wrinkled. Look at all this flab underneath my neck, jiggling like Jello salad.”

Maybe you don’t like your nose. Or

your teeth. Or the shape of your bootymus maximus.

Then again, maybe you dislike yourself in much simpler ways. Maybe you’re embarrassed about your bank account. “Omigod. Is this ALL you have in savings? What a loser.”

Maybe you don’t like where you are in your career. What a freaking disappointment you are. You should’ve been MUCH further along in your field by now. Instead, you’re just a supporting actor in someone else’s made-for-TV drama.

Maybe you don’t feel smart enough. Maybe you are socially anxious. Maybe you think you’re too much of an introvert. You’re a classic procrastinator. You feel invisible. You hate your hair. You wish you were prettier. Skinnier. Funnier. Happier.

Either way, your inner critic is always screaming,“You’re not enough!” You’ve tried to shut up this blowhard for years. But it doesn’t work. The inner…

Don’t shoot the messenger. But in America, one third of children have never handwritten a letter.

And it’s not just kids. Nearly 40 percent of adult Americans haven’t written a letter in the last five years, while 43 percent of Millennials have never sent a letter in their lifetime. But even if they had sent a letter, recent studies show that Gen Z can’t read cursive and has no idea what the heck Grandma’s handwriting means.

The New York Times says that “The age of proper correspondence writing has ended…”

“Letter writing is an endangered art,” The Atlantic said.

“The death knell of written correspondence has been sounding for years,” said the Chicago Tribune.

This is not new information, of course, unless you’ve been living underneath a slab of granite. Letters have been replaced by emails and texts.

But texts and emails are not letters. An email has no charm. A text message does not impart tenderness, and intimacy. You cannot smell the paper. You cannot feel the weight of stationary in your

hands. An email is temporary. An email will only last as long as your device is charged.

Plus, did you know that email is a leading cause of anxiety in this country?

Fact: Around 92 percent of working Americans feel anxiety when they think about their email inbox.

But a letter. A letter is real. A letter exists in physical space. A letter lasts. You cannot “delete” a letter unless you burn it. There are letters that still exist from 500 BC. Letters from early Romans. Letters from kings and queens, from soldiers of the American Revolution.

A letter is artwork. It is culture. It is tangible language. A letter represents years of handwriting practice in Mrs. Burns penmanship class, as she peered over her cat eye glasses at you, swatting a ruler in her open palm, bearing the same facial expression as a prison guard.

A…

I woke up, staggered from my bedroom, and made coffee. I pulled out my phone, and commenced to scroll social media.

On my screen, a young woman, in pajamas, dancing in her kitchen. She was maybe mid twenties, with a pierced nose, and extremely hairy armpits.

I wiped sleep from my eyes and tried to understand what I was looking at.

It was early in the morning. My brain could not piece together why my newsfeed was showing me feminine armpit hair first thing in the morning.

Who was this unshaven woman? Why was she dancing in her kitchen as opposed to, say, her bathroom? Why do people post dance videos on social media? And more importantly, why is this video on MY newsfeed?

This young woman is a stranger to me. We are not online friends. I’ve never seen her before in my life. Of this I am certain; I never forget an armpit.

Thus, I can only assume the bushy dancer

is on my newsfeed because of algorithms.

Which is probably why the next video on my newsfeed depicted quasi-naked Japanese people sliding down a waterslide into a vat of whipped cream. But hey, at least their pits were trimmed.

I remember when I first signed up for social media. Back then, we didn’t have algorithms or AI selecting what was in our newsfeed. In fact, we didn’t even call it “social media.” We called it “wasting time.”

In those days, you fired up your PC with a ripcord, then you used dial-up internet that took four or five years to connect.

Social media was still in its infancy, and was still an important application many middle-aged people used to discover whether or not their highschool sweethearts had gotten fat.

The main function of social media in those days was posting stuff. It was kinda fun. You’d make…

Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a great big old castle. She was very beautiful, with long, flowy hair, and her teeth were really nice, too. Nice and straight.

The princess had everything she wanted. Whenever she lacked, she snapped her fingers and said, “Bring me…!” and then she would name the object of her desire and her servants would fall all over themselves to secure the object of her want. If her servants took too long fetching the object, however, the king would become annoyed and occasionally mention the possibility of removing their heads.

On the other side of the kingdom was a village where lived a peasant girl who was not imbued with such fortune. She was the youngest of a poor family. She worked part time at Dollar General.

The peasant girl had wiry hair, since she did not use expensive shampoos but the cheap stuff. Her teeth were not super-straight. Her clothes were rags.

So anyway, one day, the princess was riding

her horse through the woods. Her servants were following behind, but she was galloping so fast that her servants lost sight of her. Soon, the princess was lost in the woods.

Then the worst thing happened.

A band of thieves fell upon her. They took everything of value that she had. They stole her fine garments, all her jewelry, and even her horse. They left her lying in rags, in a ditch, with a few broken bones. And worse, her hair was all messed up.

That same afternoon, an old beggar woman walked the woodland byway. She saw the princess lying in the mud, but did not know she was a princess. She saw only the ragged robes, and the mud on her face.

“Please help me,” moaned the princess.

But the beggar woman continued walking onward. She cast not even a glance toward the princess.

“I’m too old…

A crowded airliner. We were somewhere above Virginia. I was sandwiched between two passengers like Prince Albert in a can.

It has been said, if you’re a bad person in this lifetime; if you treat your fellow man poorly; if you live by the code of violence; if you are cruel to elders and children and UPS men; when you die you will wake up in economy class, riding in the middle seat.

Which is where I was.

The guy on my right was tapping on a laptop. The guy on my other side was scrolling TikTok. I had no armrests to speak of.

Throughout the flight, I noticed TikTok Guy kept staring at Laptop Guy. Like he recognized the man. Finally, TikTok Guy leaned over my passenger body to speak to Laptop Guy.

“Excuse me,” said TikTok. “Are you who I think you are, sir?”

Laptop nodded. “I am.”

“Omigod,” said TikTok. “Can I get a picture with you?”

And here is where things got awkward.

Because there I was. Stuck between them. Like a man trapped in hell.

Or worse, the DMV.

There was no way to snap a selfie without also capturing the buck-toothed, redhead in the middle seat between them. And I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you should wait until we get off the plane to take pictures,” I suggested.

TikTok gestured to Laptop. “Do you KNOW who this is?”

“Yes. He is a man who will still be here when the plane lands.”

“This guy’s famous.”

Laptop shook my hand and recited his name. He was a young guy. Dressed nicely. Matinee-idol smile. I’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything. I live under a brick.

Laptop gave his signature to a few passengers nearby. Then Laptop Guy turned to me. “Would you like me to sign anything for you?”

I smiled. “I left my autograph book at…