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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 used was misleading. A firm-but-smiling, schoolmarm tone that could’ve gone either way.

I thought it was one of those playful acknowledgments—like when someone says, “You’re a handful,” and you respond with, “Yes, but I’m your handful,” and they laugh and toss a pen at your head.

But no. It was not one of those moments.

See, I had been testing the limits of workplace patience. Nothing drastic.

I wasn’t showing up in flip-flops or replacing the coffee with decaf–I’m not a monster, but I had been entertaining myself by rearranging her sticky notes when she wasn’t looking.

I’d take the yellow ones and mix them in with the pink ones. Alphabetize them by word count.

One time, I even swapped her “Call John at 3” note with “Buy more goat cheese,” just to see if she’d notice. Spoiler: She did.

Anyway, she caught me mid-stick one afternoon, holding a pink note like it was a classified file, and that’s when she said it. “Tom, you can be irritating.”

And I, ever the optimist, replied, “I can be irritating? Excellent! Just wanted to make sure I still had it.”

She didn’t laugh. Not even a smirk. That’s when it hit me—I had mistaken a declaration of fact for a green light.

So I did what any halfway self-aware grown man would do–I remained low for a bit. Stopped with the sticky notes, cut back on the sarcastic commentary, and tried to channel my energy into more constructive outlets.

Like labeling the break room condiments. Did you know there’s an ongoing debate over whether the ketchup belongs on the top shelf or the door of the fridge?

I do now. I’ve seen the emails.

After a while, Elizabeth started smiling at me again. Not the “I’m documenting this for HR” smile, but the genuine kind—the one that says, “You’re still a handful, but at least you’re a quieter one now.”

I never brought up the sticky notes again, and neither did she. It became an unspoken truce, the kind that keeps the office running smoothly and our coffee pot filled.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere—something about reading between the lines, or maybe about how permission and tolerance are not the same thing. But if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that life has a funny way of teaching you these lessons twice–once with words, and again with silence.

And if nothing else, at least I now know that when someone says, “You can be irritating,” the correct response is not, “Thank you.”

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 an art form—but to keep someone else from feeling bad that I might’ve had a point.

I was standing in line at the grocery store not too long ago, the kind of line that wraps around a display of birthday balloons and lukewarm rotisserie chickens. A man in front of me, mid-40s, was arguing with the self-checkout machine as if it owed him child support.

He kept jabbing at the screen, mumbling something about “right-wing technology.” Now, I could’ve told him that the self-checkout wasn’t plotting against him—just asking him to place the item in the bagging area, but I stayed quiet.

Because saying something—even something helpful—might’ve bruised his tender worldview. And Lord knows, the last thing we want to do these days is rattle someone who already suspects the barcode scanner is part of a surveillance plot.

I miss common sense. I do. I miss people who could take a joke without filing a grievance. I miss when knowing something meant you might have to explain it, not apologize for it. And I miss having a conversation where the goal was understanding—not who could cry foul first.

I used to believe that intelligence would always have its say, even if it had to wait its turn. But lately, intelligence has had to sit in the back of the room with its hands folded while nonsense rides shotgun and sings off-key.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m no Einstein. I once spent a full ten minutes trying to plug a USB drive upside down, twice. And yet, I know the difference between a fact and a feeling, but it’s hard to share one without stepping on the other.

Even writing this, I feel like I need to tiptoe across each sentence, in case someone with a degree in being offended finds my opinion too pointed. But there comes a time—usually after your second cup of cowboy coolaid and a good long sigh—when you realize that wisdom kept quiet too long starts to feel like cowardice.

So, yes—I’m tired. Tired of pretending I don’t know what I know. Tired of watching smart folks play dumb so that dumb folks can feel smart. And tired of acting like the truth is only valuable if it’s sugarcoated, gift-wrapped, and delivered with an apology.

From now on, I’ll keep being kind—but I’m going to let my thoughts finish a sentence without duct tape over their mouth. If that offends someone, they’ll survive. After all, people used to survive by being told they were wrong. Heck, sometimes it even helped’em grow.

Imagine that.

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, one poorly timed burp at a time. Mrs. Whalen, bless her patient soul, greeted me with a smile and what I can only describe as cautious optimism.

Now, Mrs. Whalen had a fondness for writing assignments, the kind that required structure and thought and a serious tone. I had a fondness for none of those things. But I was also trying to stay on her good side, so when she handed me a 500-word project on Medusa, the Greek mythological figure with a snake-hairdo, I decided to take it seriously.

Well, mostly seriously.

I did the research. I filled four note cards with facts. I even used the school library, which, if you know me at age seventeen, is an impressive level of commitment. I crafted an essay complete with transitions, supporting evidence, and a conclusion that tied everything up in a neat bow.

Then I gave it a title.

“Medusa: Making Men Hard Since 700 BC.”

To this day, I maintain it was clever. I meant “hard” as in “turned to stone.” Literal. Accurate. Historically rooted.

It’s not my fault the phrase also lived in the adult humor section of my brain. Honestly, I thought Mrs. Whalen might chuckle.

She did not chuckle.

What she did was call me to her desk and hold up the paper with two fingers, as if it were slightly toxic. “Thomas,” she said, and any time a teacher used my full name, I knew I was halfway to detention, “this is well-written. Structured. Thoughtful. Even cited properly.”

I beamed. I think I even straightened up a little, ready for that rarest of high school events—a compliment.

Then she flipped the page so I could see the big red D- scrawled in the corner.

“For the title,” she said, as if I hadn’t read it myself. “You knew better.”

I did know better, but I couldn’t help myself.

There’s a thrill in skating the edge of what you can get away with, and I’d been skating my whole academic career. Titles were like bait, and I was always fishing for a reaction.

That was the last time Mrs. Whalen smiled when she saw me coming, though she did let me rewrite the paper—new title, identical content—and I squeaked out a B. I called it The Tragedy of Medusa, which was okay, if uninspired.

These days, I try to be more careful with my words. But now and then, I’ll glance at a headline I’ve written and think, “Too far?” Then I think of Mrs. Whalen’s face and answer myself, “Probably.”

Still, I like to believe that somewhere deep down, buried under years of grading papers and attending teacher conferences, Mrs. Whalen told that story once or twice at a dinner party. Maybe even chuckled, just once, when no one was looking.

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 add water.”

Love was simple then. So were the meals.

Now, Mary had a friend named Beth, who, bless her heart, had a nose for trouble and a mouth just fast enough to get herself into it. She was the kind of woman who could find tension in a bubble bath. Beth came by one afternoon with what she called “concerning news,” which is never a good start to any conversation.

“I saw Tom,” she said, her voice all hushed and dramatic like she was about to reveal a state secret. “He was talking to that redhead at the post office. Laughing. Flirting.”

Mary barely looked up from folding laundry. She gave a little smile, not the least bit bothered. “Let him,” she said. “I wanna see how long he can suck in his stomach.”

Beth blinked like she hadn’t expected that answer. She probably thought there’d be yelling, accusations, maybe some dramatic throwing of dishware. But instead, she got Mary, who had all the serenity of a cat in the shade and knew her husband better than any busybody ever would.

Now, I didn’t know any of this until years later. Mary told me the story after Beth had long since drifted out of our lives, probably off to find someone else’s marriage to diagnose. I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my coffee.

“You really said that?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Well, you do puff up when you’re trying to be charming.”

And she’s not wrong. I’ve never been one for gyms or jogging or anything that makes me sweat on purpose, but I do have a bad habit of tightening everything up when I’m trying to make a good impression. I call it posture. Mary calls it wishful thinking.

But what got me about that story—what still makes me smile whenever I think about it—wasn’t just the punchline. It was the trust behind it.

Mary knew me. Knew my heart.

She knew I wasn’t out there playing fast and loose with our vows. And even if I had been dumb enough to try, she had faith that my abs would give out before my conscience did.

That kind of trust is rarer than gold. It’s built in quiet moments, over burnt toast and evening walks and those long talks when the power goes out.

You can’t fake it, and you sure can’t force it. Mary had it from day one. She was secure, not because I was perfect, but because she understood the difference between harmless banter and something worth worrying over.

Beth never tattled again after that. I think she realized there wasn’t much point in trying to rattle a woman who’d already decided to laugh at life’s little dramas.

And me? Well, I still puff out my chest now and then, mostly out of habit. But I do it for Mary, not for redheads at the post office.

And I’ve learned over time that love, real love, doesn’t need a six-pack. Just a belly full of laughter and a heart full of grace.

I found my excuse, and I intend to hang onto it like a tick on a hound.

You see, I’ve spent the better part of my adult life listening to people offer judgmental little remarks about my fondness for a sip or two of the good stuff.

“Whiskey again, Tom?” they’d say, as if I’d accidentally tripped and fallen into the bottle.

But now, thanks to a handful of very official-sounding studies, I’ve learned something that changes the whole conversation: smarter folks drink more. That’s right.

Good, reputable, lab-coated, peer-reviewed science has come to my defense at long last. Several large-scale studies, including one with more than 6,000 people, show that individuals with higher IQs in high school are more likely to enjoy moderate or even heavy drinking in their grown-up years. They found that for every point increase in IQ, there’s a 1.6 percent rise in the odds of becoming a regular drinker.

Now, I don’t want to brag, but I did read the entire study summary without once needing to Google a word. So I figure that puts me somewhere in the upper reaches of scholarly whiskey consumption.

I’ve always suspected my evening pour was less about vice and more about advanced cognitive function. Turns out I wasn’t just relaxing—I was exercising my neurons.

According to the same research, smarter folks also binge less. That makes sense to me, as I’ve always thought drinking should be a conversation, not a demolition derby.

There’s a rhythm to it: the gentle clink of ice, the smell of charred oak from the barrel, and the occasional deep thought like, “I wonder if squirrels judge us for using leaf blowers.”

Still, I must admit, this newfound knowledge is a bit of a double-edged sword, because now when I pour myself a glass of Cowboy Coolaid, beer for you city types, I can’t help but feel a little smug. And that’s a dangerous thing. A smug drinker is only one sip away from trying to explain string theory with a bottle of Coors Light and a cocktail napkin.

I shared my discovery with my reflection the other night—we have had some fine conversations over the years—and I raised my glass and said, “To intelligence!”

He raised his, too, as he always does, and we toasted in perfect synchrony. Then he frowned at me, which I thought was rude, until I realized I’d run out and he still had some left.

That’s when I knew I needed to call it a night.

So now, when someone catches me nursing a drink and they raise an eyebrow, I’ve got my reply ready, “I’m not drinking—I’m testing a hypothesis.”

And if that doesn’t win them over, I’ll remind them I’m supporting science. It’s practically a public service.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I do still remember to drink water and take my vitamins. Intelligence is one thing, but hydration is where the real geniuses shine.

Cheers, my friends. Keep your minds sharp and your spirits moderate, or was it the other way around? Either way, the science is settled—I’m not a bad influence, I’m gifted.

Now, if you’ve never seen a dog get the zoomies, you’re missing out on one of life’s finest entertainments. My dog Buddy, bless his wiry little heart, gets the zoomies about once every three days like clockwork.

It usually starts with a sparkle in his eye and a twitch in his hindquarters, followed by an Olympic-level sprint around the coffee table, into the kitchen, up the hallway, then back again, all while I yell, “Settle down before you knock over something.”

He never does settle. And he always knocks something over.

Now imagine that sort of chaos, not on the outside, but packed neatly into your chest cavity like an overstuffed suitcase. That’s what anxiety feels like to me. Every part of me is calm—or at least pretending to be—but inside, I’m running full speed in a circle for no reason, barking at nothing and skidding on the tile floor of my mind.

I remember once sitting perfectly still at a coffee shop, trying to write a column on deadline. I had my favorite pen in hand, a legal pad at the ready, and nothing but black coffee in my cup.

I looked like a man in charge of his destiny. But inside, it felt like my internal organs were holding a loud meeting without me.

My brain was racing: What if you miss the deadline? What if you misspell a word? What if everyone figures out you don’t know what you’re doing, and you get kicked out of the coffee shop for impersonating a functioning adult?

Meanwhile, all I did was slowly sip my coffee and nod at a passing barista like everything was fine. That’s the trick of it.

Anxiety doesn’t always look like someone hyperventilating into a paper bag. Sometimes it’s a guy in a tee shirt with a mild caffeine tremor and a notebook full of half-started sentences.

I’ve tried a few methods to manage it. Deep breathing just made me feel like I was inflating a balloon full of worry.

Meditation’s lovely until my brain starts loudly narrating every single thing I’m trying not to think about.

“Clear your mind,” it says.

Easier said than done when your mind has a spotlight and a fog machine and insists on putting on a nightly production of Worst-Case Scenarios: The Musical.

So mostly, I live with it. I make a little space in the corner of my mind and let it zoom around when it needs to.

I’ve come to realize anxiety isn’t always trying to ruin me—it’s just trying to keep me alert, just a little too aggressively. Like an overprotective aunt who thinks you’ll die if you wear sandals in October.

Some days it wins, and I pace the floor with a belly full of bees. Other days, I manage to corral the zoomies long enough to get something done.

And on rare and wonderful days, I surprise myself by sitting still—not just outside, but inside too—and it feels like the world exhaled with me. Until Buddy gets that look in his eye and the coffee table starts shaking again.

And just like that, we’re off.

I saw her car pull up to the mailboxes this morning—an older model with a front grill like a steam locomotive’s cattle catcher. Not the kind of thing you forget.

She’s a neighbor, though I don’t know her name. Seen her around the neighborhood a few times, always alone. She keeps to herself mostly.

Today, though, was different.

I’d just stepped out onto the porch with my second cup of morning coffee, the sun barely warming the August air, when I heard her voice carry across the street like a wounded animal. Not words at first, just that raw sound grief makes when it forgets its manners.

Then clear enough for me to make out: “I don’t have any family and no friends!”

She was shouting it—sobbing and shouting all at once. Sitting there in the driver’s seat, window rolled down, slapping the steering wheel like it had done her wrong.

Maybe it had. Some days feel that way.

I recognized the tattoos on her arm when I walked to her car window—Sailor Jerry-style ink, a golden anchor laid over an unfurled American flag on her left bicep. That’s Navy.

Either she or someone close to her, and military folks don’t usually advertise it unless it means something. There’s always a story behind a tattoo like that, or two or three.

Buddy, my dog, perked up his ears and looked across the road, sensing something wasn’t right. Animals always know before people do.

I set my mug down, scratched Buddy’s head, and walked across the road. Not fast.

Just steady, like the way you approach a spooked horse. She glanced up, eyes red, jaw clenched.

“Ma’am, are you okay?” I asked gently.

“No,” she said, raw and honest, and I respected her for that.

“Would you like to come over and sit a spell on the porch?” I offered. “Got some good coffee and a dog that loves a scratch behind the ears. I’m a decent listener, too. You don’t have to talk, but you wouldn’t have to be alone, either.”

She shook her head. “No thank you, sir,” she said politely, with a kind of finality that told me not to press.

I nodded and stepped back. “Alright,” I said. “But the offer stands.”

She put the car in gear and drove the half block to her house. Slowly. Like someone who didn’t quite trust the road, or maybe didn’t trust herself on it.

Back on the porch, Buddy rested his chin on my boot, eyes following the street. I sipped my coffee and thought about all the people carrying things too heavy for one set of shoulders.

We live close to each other, but most of us don’t know a damn thing about the stories two doors down. That car with the cattle catcher grill will stick in my mind now—not because it’s peculiar, but because of who drives it.

Next time I see her, I might wave, might offer a cup again. That’s all a man can do sometimes—keep the porch open, a warm mug of coffee at the ready, and hope they know they’re not as alone as they feel.

Buddy gave a quiet huff and closed his eyes, and we waited.

It was one of those rare Nevada mornings when the air felt gentle, like it hadn’t already gotten roughed up by politics or wind or wildfire smoke. Buddy was at my feet, watching the world.

He’s a dog of simple convictions: bacon good, vacuum cleaner evil, and naps in sunbeams non-negotiable. I envy that clarity some days.

I was sipping coffee and trying to make sense of a news clip a friend had sent me—an interview with an AI version of a kid who died in the Parkland shooting. Not a dramatization. Not a tribute. A puppet. His face, his voice, his image—reanimated to talk politics.

Now, I’ve seen some weird things in my time. I’ve sat in radio studios during Y2K when we all thought the world might shut off at midnight. I’ve seen politicians cry on cue, only to forget the name of the town they’re “mourning” a few minutes later.

But this was different. Buddy must’ve sensed my unease.

He thumped his tail once, as if to say, “Go on, say it out loud.”

So I did.

“Buddy, we’ve crossed into something bad. This ain’t technology anymore. This is desecration with a Wi-Fi signal.”

The idea that someone took a dead teenager—someone’s son—and strung together a few algorithms to make him say, “we need stronger gun control laws,” while blinking and smiling like it’s Saturday morning cartoons, I’m telling you, it hit me harder than I expected.

Because what does it mean to be alive if your death becomes more useful than your life? When your soul can be summoned—not by prayer—but by code?

I remember my Grandma wouldn’t let folks take her picture. She said the flash always made her feel like something was getting taken from her.

At the time, I thought it was just old-world superstition. But maybe my Grandma knew something we forgot—that our likeness is sacred. That our face and voice aren’t just pixels—they’re personal.

I tried explaining it to my son once, when he was young and asking questions no father is ever quite ready for.

“Dad,” he asked, “what’s a soul?”

I told him the soul is that part of you that doesn’t show up in X-rays or blood tests. It’s the part that knows when you’ve done wrong, even if nobody else does.

It’s what makes you cry at sad songs and laugh at your reflection. It’s what dogs like Buddy see when they look past your tired face and wag anyway.

That AI kid—he didn’t have that. He had mimicry. He had intonation. But he didn’t have a soul.

And that’s the thing no one’s saying on cable news or in the tech magazines. They’re too busy marveling at the realism, calling it “groundbreaking.”

But I’ve buried friends. I’ve spoken at their funerals.

And I’ve never once thought, “You know what would help right now? A digital ventriloquist act.”

So here’s my humble plea: let the dead rest. Let memory be memory—not marketing.

You want to honor someone? Tell their story.

Tell it in your words, from your own broken heart. Not through some glowing screen that forgot what it means to mourn.

Buddy just huffed and lay his head on my boot. Yeah, pal. Me too.

Let’s not forget what it means to be human. And let’s never, ever outsource it.

I was out by Vista Boulevard yesterday morning, just putting miles on the truck and thoughts in my head, when I noticed the billboard. You can’t miss it—it sits right off I-80 hanging in the air like a tombstone.

“They went to a music festival and didn’t come home.”

I’d passed it before, maybe a week ago. It stopped me cold then.

No politics, no finger-pointing—just a quiet statement of grief. Something about the wording reminded me of a headstone.

There’s a heaviness in words like that. They don’t need to shout to say everything.

But that day, the sign was defaced. Spray paint, rushed and angry: “Free Palestine.”

I pulled off and parked a little way up, just sat there a minute. No radio. Just the creak of the truck cooling in the sun. I didn’t take a picture. Didn’t call anyone. I just watched it sit there, caught between grief and graffiti, and I felt, well, older than I did when I woke up.

I’ve been around long enough to know the world doesn’t come with clear-cut good guys and bad guys. I’ve seen suffering on both sides of every border you can name, and probably a few you can’t.

But there’s a difference between protest and desecration. The billboard didn’t declare war; it remembered the dead. And there ought to be some places, even now, where silence still has the final word.

I started thinking about my dad. He’d always say, “If you can’t leave a place better than you found it, at least don’t leave it worse.”

He meant it about campsites, mostly, but I think he was onto something larger. I think about him a lot these days.

Maybe because there’s not as much quiet left in the world. Or maybe because grief, once it lands in your life, doesn’t ever leave—it just changes shape.

The co-founder of the group who put up that sign said the defacement shows how rampant antisemitism is. I don’t doubt it.

People forget, or maybe they never knew, that October 7 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. That billboard wasn’t trying to win an argument; it was bearing witness.

Driving away, I couldn’t stop thinking about how quickly people forget the human part of all this. Behind every slogan, every spray-painted slogan, are people. Sons. Daughters. Lovers. Friends.

There’s a whole world that never came home from that music festival. And someone saw fit to drown that out with a message that, whether meant to or not, spat on a memorial.

It’s easy to shout. Harder to sit still and listen. And even harder still to mourn someone you never met.

Anyway, the sign’ll get replaced. The vinyl scrubbed clean.

But I’ll remember what it looked like when kindness and cruelty shared a few feet of highway. And I’ll remember how quiet the world was in my truck when I saw it.

Some things deserve silence, and this was one of them.

Buddy and I were enjoying a quiet summer evening on the front porch yesterday, the kind where the heat finally backs off and the sky turns that dusty pink color that makes you think maybe the world isn’t so bad after all. He was sprawled out like a rug, twitching every so often in a dream I imagine involved rabbits or snacks—or both.

Me? I had my boots kicked off and a cold beer sweating in my hand, just a man, his dog, and the blessed silence of a Monday evening.

That’s when I heard the pitter-patter of little feet coming up the sidewalk. A young mother and her toddler were walking by.

The kid had that wide-eyed curiosity that’s either going to get you an interesting question or a rock in the mouth if you’re not careful. He was dragging a stuffed animal by one leg—looked like a koala who’d seen better days—and then he stopped right in front of my yard.

He looked at his mom, pointed at me with all the grace of a courtroom accusation, and asked, loud enough for the angels to hear, “Why is Santa getting drunk?”

Now, let’s pause here. I’ve got a decent white beard, especially since I’ve let it grow out a bit, and I was wearing a red T-shirt, which—okay, fair.

But I was also sitting there, minding my own business, enjoying a single beer. One. Uno. Not exactly nine reindeer deep.

The mom turned a shade of red that matched my shirt and looked at me, mortified. She started to say something—probably an apology or an excuse—but I waved her off and went full Foster Brooks, “Thhhe… the kid… he don’t m-m-missh mush, does he?”

There was a half-second pause, then she snorted, I laughed, and for a moment, the world was what it should be. Two strangers, laughing at the absurdity of it all, while my dog, unimpressed, rolled over and farted.

We chatted a little after that. It turns out mom’s name is Jenna, and her son’s name is Max.

They were just out walking off the late-afternoon wiggles before dinner. Jenna said it had been a long day of sticky fingers, tantrums, and stepping on Legos. I nodded understandingly—Buddy’s not a toddler, but he’s got his brand of chaos involving muddy paws and stolen sandwiches.

Before they walked on, Max waved at me and said, “Bye, Santa,” like it was the most normal thing in the world. I told him I’d see him in December and to keep being good, which earned me a little giggle.

After they disappeared around the corner, I sat back, took another sip, and thought about how funny life can be. You wake up thinking you’re just going to mow the lawn and maybe grill a brat, and then suddenly, you’re the neighborhood’s off-duty Santa Claus.

There’s a kind of grace in being mistaken for something good, even if it’s accidental. I wasn’t handing out toys or flying a sleigh—but I was being present.

Kindness can be simple like that. A laugh. A friendly voice. A moment shared on a porch between sips and stories.

So, here’s to being mistaken for Santa—and to making the most of the quiet moments when they come. And if you ever feel the world’s gotten too complicated, find yourself a porch, a cold drink, and a good dog.

You’d be amazed at what a little stillness—and a toddler’s honesty—can do for the soul.