We wanted to be adults so bad. I mean, who doesn’t remember those wide-eyed dreams of independence—the freedom to eat cereal for dinner, stay up late, and buy all the soda we wanted without anyone telling us “no”? We thought adulthood was a ticket to the good life. Now look at us: stressed, broke, tired,…

Buddy and I tried to sit out on the porch this morning, but we didn’t make it far past the first cup of coffee. The air was so thick with smoke you could chew it. I swear it smelled like somebody had tossed a wet pine log on the world’s biggest campfire. Now, I grew…

I was out on the back porch yesterday afternoon, sipping a cold beer and throwing the ball for Buddy, when it hit me—not the ball, thankfully, but the absurdity of it all. We own our home. At least, that’s what the paperwork says. The deed’s in our name, the mortgage is up to date, the…

As I get older, I’m trying my best to live my life in a way that “feral” gets used in my obituary. Now, I don’t mean feral like biting folks or rooting through trash cans—though I admit there was a stretch in my twenties that could have gone either way. What I mean is the…

One of my wife’s friends—let’s call her Kim, because that is her name—once asked Mary, “How did you meet Tom?” Now, Mary didn’t blink. She didn’t crack a smile or offer up one of those polite chuckles folks use when they’re buying time to tell the truth gently. Nope. With a face so flat and…

It turns out that when my supervisor, Elizabeth, said, “You can be irritating,” she wasn’t giving me her permission. That took me a couple of days to figure out—well, more like a week if I’m honest, but I like to round down when it comes to personal shortcomings. Now, in my defense, the tone she…

I don’t know when it happened, exactly—somewhere between growing up and growing old—but there came a day when I realized I was editing my thoughts before they ever had a chance to see daylight. Not for clarity, not for decency, not even to avoid the occasional foot-in-mouth moment, which I’ve honed into a bit of…

Back in high school, I took Mrs. Doris Whalen’s English class for a very strategic reason: she was the only teacher left who didn’t actively flinch when she saw my name on her roll sheet. I’d already worked my way through the rest of the department like a slow-moving wildfire—one bad joke, one unfinished assignment,…

When Mary and I were newlyweds, we didn’t have a whole lot—not much in the way of furniture or savings or good sense—but we had each other, and that seemed like more than enough most days. We were in that spot between poor and blissful, and dinners often came out of a box labeled “just…