Our Old Dad

  Raven recently started taking photos to preserve memories and exercise her artistic abilities. This is one of her first staged shots that didn't involve photographing her little brother in uncomfortable poses.  That is Stuffy's cheese and cracker on the ledge. Raven muttered something about dreams being out of reach for most of us, but wouldn't elaborate too much. Here's to a long, creative career for Raven!

I'm on a train somewhere in Europe. Not actually—I'm in a pickup truck in Aurora, Colorado, sixty years old, half thinking about grading something I don't care about. But in my head I'm on a train, and there's a woman across the aisle, and we're about to have the conversation that changes everything. Inside the fantasy, age drops out. I'm just the guy across from her. And then I remember I'm in a truck and nobody's across from me. When I was eight or nine, my parents sent us to stay with relatives we barely knew. My dad's uncle Bob and his wife Earline, out in Normal, Illinois—flat, farm country, nothing to do. Cover story: go see how they live. I think my parents needed us gone for a night. We never asked why. Earline's mother lived with them. Ninety-something—slouched in a chair in the corner of a room that smelled like dust and menthol, a few stages short of puddling. We walked in. Introductions. You remember Grandma —whatever ...

I think about regrets a lot. Not in some grand reckoning kind of way. More in the ordinary way a person does when he gets old enough to see how small decisions turn into bigger ones, and bigger ones slowly become a life. I can look back on almost every stretch of my life and see where I should have been steadier, braver, less foolish. And if I’m honest, it doesn’t take many changed decisions to start changing everything. Even a few would have thrown the trajectory off. A different job taken. A different relationship held onto or let go of. A different move made earlier or later. A few degrees one way or the other, and maybe I do not end up here at all. But I would not trade here away. Because here means Raven and Xander. Not just children in the abstract, but these children. I was old enough by then to know that the best things don’t always show up when you expect them, or looking the way you expected. They were not part of some clean master plan. They were ...

I dream out loud constantly. See something I want and just announce it to whoever's listening. Not because I think saying it makes it real. Because once I've said it, I'm stuck with it. That's what happened one night in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, 1989 — Scott Kell and some girls, Harleys rumbling past, me announcing I'd own one. Kell didn't even pause. Just looked at me sideways with that flat Kell face and said I was full of shit. No malice. Just total disbelief that I was standing on a sidewalk on Belmont making promises to strangers about a motorcycle I couldn't afford. He was right to call it. At that moment, it was just talk. But that was the point. Now Kell had heard it. Now the girls had heard it. Even a couple of random people walking down the street heard it. Now backing off meant admitting I was exactly as full of shit as he said. So my brain went to work. Not because I willed it. Because I'd backed myself into a corner and the...

’90s me was sunk into a lopsided couch off 6th and Pearl in Boulder, a living room that smelled like bong water, thrift-store patchouli, and wet ski gloves. We’d flip between local news and reruns, argue whether The Sink or Dot’s Diner had the better hangover eggs, and swear we could see faces in the Flatirons if the sunset hit just right. That night, two stories bled together through the haze: pets getting microchipped and breathless chatter about barcodes for people . We were not “if you’ve got nothing to hide…” guys. We had plenty to hide. This was dial-up and pagers, a shoebox of Dead tapes— Jerry was still alive —and gravity bongs made from 2-liter bottles. In Boulder you could be a stoner and a citizen; in a lot of places it was a felony back then. Boulder’s acceptance made you lax when you visited anywhere else—you’d forget the rules changed at the county line. Our consensus was simple: no chips, no codes, no thanks —and besides, “No one would ever go for that, dude.” We a...

I remember the ’92 election mostly as a pile of commas. Clinton, Bush, Perot—and Perot’s money. Sources put his fortune around $3 billion then. At a plain 5%, that throws off $150M a year ≈ $12.5M a month ≈ $411k a day ≈ $17k an hour , without touching principal. Why keep grinding when the interest alone buys the world? Here’s where my brain went then (and honestly, often still goes): if I had that pile, I wouldn’t work. I’d live like a rock star—beach, planes, chasing the party, margaritas, following the Dead, dumb grins in new cities. Not a “serve the republic” phase. Pleasure, autonomy, no boss. So I couldn’t understand Perot: why would anyone with that kind of glide path choose more work? And then it clicked: that’s exactly why I’ll never be a billionaire—I don’t think like one. He wasn’t counting interest; he was counting the next thing. Not moral, not immoral—just different wiring. My default question was “How do I stop and enjoy this?” His was “What do I build next?” If y...

I was cleaning off my desk and found a quote I'd saved from the 2010 Will Ferrell film Everything Must Go . "Everything is not yet lost." In the film, it's exactly what it sounds like. Keep walking. Keep trying. Keep living. Things are bad. But not done. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's not the Will Ferrell you're expecting. Seemed like the right way to start a blog.

  I didn’t build this system. I asked for it. I have wanted a world class group of advisors for every aspect of my life, and I was tired of waiting. 🧠🧭 The Frustration 😤 It started like this: I was using ChatGPT regularly and getting a lot out of it — more than most people, probably. But over time, things got messy. Conversations would drift. Memory would fill up. I'd lose context, or worse, start preserving the wrong kind of context: fragments of specific details that clogged the system while the important, core parts of me — the way I think, the values that drive my decisions — got buried under domain names and test scores. It wasn’t that ChatGPT was broken. It was doing exactly what I was asking — just not what I wanted . So I stopped. And I asked it a simple question: "What if I want a team of world-class advisors who think like I do, but who each specialize in a different area of my life? What if I’m not the same person in every domain, and I want AI that re...

  Not Everyone Should Teach — And We All Know It There’s an uncomfortable truth we rarely say out loud in education: you can’t teach someone to outthink you. At least, not when it comes to developing the kinds of skills measured by cognitive or reasoning tests. If a teacher struggled to break an 18 on the ACT, what makes us think they’re well-positioned to coach a student toward a 30? This isn’t arrogance — it’s logic. If the teacher knew how to score higher, wouldn’t they have done so? Test scores aren’t everything, but they are a flashing signal. They indicate something about your ability to read complex material, to recognize patterns, to sustain abstract thought. These aren’t just test-taking tricks — they’re core thinking skills. And if you don’t possess them yourself, your ability to cultivate them in someone else is… let’s say, constrained. We pretend this doesn’t matter because admitting it would collapse the myth that all teachers are equally capable of teaching ...

  Here's the deal: I'm done making a mess of things, especially my workouts. So, I'm trying a new tactic: I'm letting AI take over my exercise regimen. Crazy? Maybe. But when your push-ups look more like a belly flop, it's time for a change. I'm giving the power to the algorithms. It's like having a trainer who never messes up, never forgets your weak spots, and always knows just when to push you harder. And if this goes well, I might just let this digital genius make more of my life decisions. Why trust a robot? Well, if you saw me in the gym, struggling through another set of whatever-the-hell I'm trying to do, you'd understand. That's me, the poster child for "help needed." So, I'm taking a leap into the AI abyss, where my left hamstring is more than just a vague concept. Sure, there's a bit of a rebellion from the human touch enthusiasts. But when you've got a track record like mine, a little robotic precision might be j...

  Here goes: I'm finally buckling down to document this wild ride I've signed up for. The idea of starting a blog hit me back when we were waiting for our daughter Raven to arrive in the winter of 2021/2022. I messed around with the idea, put it off, and honestly, didn't get much done. This has been a familiar story of mine for about 30 years. I've wanted to journal and write with a lot of starting and a whole lot of nothing to show for it. Wouldn't you know it, the universe has its own sense of humor, throwing another baby into the mix, due March 2024. Looks like I've got a second shot at this. A lot has changed since I first thought about what life would be with Raven in it. I was freaking out, unsure about everything, and questioning whether I could hack it. Just yesterday, a friend caught wind we were expecting again and had that same look of disbelief—like, why would I go for round two (actually 4)? I get it. I've asked myself the same questions. When t...

 My old, dark friend, the end-of-year winter depression that I fight against every year, is finally clawing back into my thoughts. Despite it, I convinced myself to write this entry at 1 am on Sunday night/Monday morning of the one-week countdown until school and work start again. This is my attempt to fight back.  The mood has seemed to take off since I started teaching, but I think that it's always been there. In the teacher version, the most depressing and dark days of the year for me are toward the end of winter break. It's an all-consuming dread that I'll never do justice to in writing and sounds like privileged whining when I listen to myself. But every year, right on schedule, I dive into a deep funk.  It's the anticipation of something awful that I can't reason myself out of and can't give up hope of avoiding. There is still time for a miracle in the constant calculations of my delusions, but the inevitable backing into a corner is imminent. I feel too f...

Fortress by Queens of the Stone Age 2017 Before I officially became one, back when I only imagined being a parent, I had all kinds of ideas about how it would go and how my kids would respond to my wonderful parenting. Then reality hit. I constantly screwed up, said the wrong things, got upset at stupid bullshit and just generally disappointed myself regularly. I looked forward to other chances and opportunities. I measured the time left until my kids moved on as adults or, much sooner, stopped listening as teenagers. That time used to seem so far away! "I have 12 years to make up for saying/doing ______" has been replaying continuously in my head during my time as a parent. I've had a feeling since we moved back from the Philippines that time was slipping away. I grasp at it, but it's like trying to catch smoke. The 12 years to make up for everything is down to a number that I can easily count on one hand. It kills me. I try to motivate myself to be a better person a...