Our Old Dad

  Talking It Into Existence I used to dream out loud constantly. Walk around Chicago, see something I wanted, and just announce it to whoever was listening. "I'm getting a Harley." That's what I did one night in Lakeview—Scott Kell and some girls, Harley's rumbling past, me declaring I'd own one. Kell called bullshit immediately. Said I was full of it. And he was right to call it. At that moment, it was just talk. But something about saying it out loud—especially to someone who'd hold me accountable—made it stick. Once it was out there, my brain wouldn't let it go. The idea kept pulling my attention back. The hows and whys started working themselves out without me forcing them. Eventually I owned not one but two Harleys. This wasn't a one-time thing. I've done it over and over. The pattern's always the same: announce the thing, lock myself in publicly, remove the wiggle room, then watch my brain figure out how to make it real. The tri...

’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...

My dorm room freshman year at Purdue, 1983 I began my college career at Purdue University in the fall of 1983. I had a disastrous academic career, if you gauge by most typical academic standards. Before I fell into many of my harmful patterns, I signed up for an extra one-credit class run by TAs from psychology 101. I don't remember anything about it except for the story I'm about to tell, but I'm assuming that they did lots of unethical experiments on us throughout the semester.  If you are math averse, it is almost 40 years since I started at Purdue. I've been exploring the idea of memory, so here are a couple of things about my memories of that time that are interesting to me: I only spent five years at college, even with my stalling and mishaps. I've now had 11 distinct five-year periods in my life, but that time of debauchery holds a lot of space in my memory. Not the actual memories, but the weight I give to that time. It's true that when I was, say, 28, c...