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I wish I could say I don’t get riled up much anymore, but at least it ain’t like when I was young and had a head full of hair. These days, I mostly save my energy for keeping track of Post-it notes and remembering where I put my glasses—usually on my head or, once, in the cereal box.

But, ever now and again, something on that glowing rectangle we call the Internet gets me close to writing a comment. Take yesterday, for example. I’d just poured myself a cup of afternoon coffee—hot and muddy—and plopped down in front of my old Dell desktop.

It makes a faint noise like a hungry horse when it boots up. I clicked on my homepage, a mess of little squares filled with people yelling about things and trying to sell me pants I would never wear. And right at the top, like it had been waiting on me, was a post from a woman talking about how disgusted she was by all the people she’s seeing picking their noses while driving.

I squinted at the screen, took a sip of coffee, and started typing a reply, “Maybe you should mind your business and you wouldn’t see driving nose-pickers.”

There. That’ll show’er.

But then, as the cursor blinked at me like it was having second thoughts, I reread the first few words. “Maybe you should mind your business…”

Sitting back in my chair, I felt it creak under me like an old porch step and realized I was just about to do the thing I was accusing her of doing. Ain’t that a trick? It was like trying to shush someone in a library and realizing you’re the loudest one there.

So I deleted the whole thing—poof—and sat there looking out the window, where an old Dodge pickup rumbled past. Faded red, dented fender, and yes, the fella driving had one finger up his nose and a look of deep concentration, like he was defusing a bomb.

Now, I don’t condone it. I don’t encourage it. I certainly don’t want to shake hands on it. But I understand it.

Folks do strange things in cars, on porches, and at the kitchen sink when they think nobody’s looking. We all have our ways of passing time or soothing nerves. Mine is writing down things. His is nostril excavation.

What struck me more, though, was the woman’s complaint. See, you gotta watch other people closely to notice all that, like hawk-close. I don’t know how she does it unless she’s swerving from lane to lane with binoculars. Maybe if folks kept both hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, they wouldn’t have so much time to monitor what’s going on in the cab of the next car.

But I reckon that’s the way of the world now. Everybody’s looking sideways instead of ahead, watching other folks for what they’re doing wrong instead of minding their mile markers.

Anyway, I closed the webpage and got back to something more productive—like teaching my dogs how to open a beer bottle without taking a swig. We’re on week three, and progress is slow.

If there is a moral, it’s keeping your hands on the wheel, your fingers out of your nose, and your eyes on your lane. Life’s smoother that way—and we’d be less offended.

Back when I was about knee-high to a washtub and full of more opinions than sense, there was an unwritten rule in our neck of the woods–you could talk about the weather, the price of feed, or how the neighbor’s milk cow had a nervous breakdown—but you did not, under any circumstances, talk politics, sex, or religion in polite mixed-company, especially when Great Grandma Ivy was within earshot and Lordy, help the poor fool who brought up all three.

Now, this was in a time when a “post” was something you set a fence with, and “followers” were folks who came behind you in the buffet line at the church potluck. We didn’t overshare because there wasn’t anywhere to share it.

You had your front porch, the feed store, and maybe the Methodist picnic if you wanted to hear what folks thought about the world. And even then, you were expected to coat your opinions in molasses and “bless their hearts” before serving them up.

But times have changed.

A while ago, I got myself on one of them social media sites intending to see pictures of my Cousin Eddie’s dog dressed like Elvis. Instead, I got a crash course in the modern world’s version of polite conversation—which, as far as I can tell, is the exact opposite of polite and barely qualifies as conversation.

It’s just hollering with better spelling.

Now, I ain’t saying folks didn’t have strong feelings back then. My Dad used to complain so much about Nixon he almost wore out his teeth. But he did it sitting in his Lazy Boy and living room, drinking real coffee and smoking Bel-Airs. He never once tried to win an argument by typing in all caps or posting blurry photos of lizard people at the Trees of Mystery.

And we knew each other—like really knew each other. You couldn’t unfriend a fella because he voted differently or liked the wrong preacher. You’d still see him at the co-op or behind you in line at the DMV, and you might need him in hay season. There was a kind of neighborly truce–live and let live, and don’t bring up sensitive topics unless you’re looking to lose a casserole or a riding partner.

The other day, I was sitting on the front porch—when my neighbor’s boy came by, phone in hand and indignation boiling in his eyes. He said he’d been arguing online with someone about religion and race and something else I didn’t quite catch.

He asked me what I thought.

I took a long sip of my coffee, scratched the Buddy-dog’s ear, and said, “Well, I think you can either spend your time hollering at strangers on the Internet or you can help fix Miss Claudia’s screen door that’s been hanging since Obama was in office. One of them makes a difference. The other just makes you hoarse.”

He blinked a few times, looked at Miss Claudia’s home, and tucked his phone in his back pocket.

He went home before returning with a screwdriver and plyers. I went with him, and we worked silently, save for the occasional groan from my knees.

And I realized something–maybe what we’ve lost isn’t manners, but that good old-fashioned sense of sitting with someone, shoulder to shoulder, fixing small things together while those other things sort themselves out.

Maybe we don’t need fewer opinions—just more porches.

I was about five years old when I first held a frog–a big mottled thing, cold as a well-rope and twice as slippery.

It leaped out of my hands like it was shot from a cannon and landed square in Cousin Janice’s cereal bowl. Milk went flying. She cried. Mom swatted at me with the dishtowel, but I still count that morning as one of the better ones of my boyhood.

Nowadays, I see little kids no taller than a fence post strutting around with smartphones like Wall Street traders. They’re tapping screens with sticky fingers, recording their dogs behind, and accidentally calling Grandma three times a day.

And I think, “That child couldn’t catch a frog to save their life.”

Out in the country—just northeast of nowhere and way south of who-cares—catching a frog was a rite of passage. Before getting trusted with a BB gun, the front seat, or the garden hose, you had to prove yourself amphibiously.

I remember when I gave my brother his first frog lesson. He was four, all knees and cowlicks, and full of questions nobody had time to answer. He’d been begging for a bike because all his friends had one.

I said, “Before you learn to pedal around the neighborhood, let’s see if you can talk to the pond.”

So we set off that Saturday morning just as the sun turned the dew to glitter. Adam wore his brand-new sneakers—white as wedding mints—and I didn’t have the heart to warn him.

Let nature do the teaching. We squished down into the reeds, dragonflies zipping around like they had places to be. I showed him where the frogs liked to sit—half in the water, half in the mud, just like old fogies in a hot tub.

He spotted one—a fat green jumper with eyes like wet marbles—and lunged like a linebacker. Missed by a mile and face-planted into the muck.

He popped up, coughing pond water and grinning like he’d found treasure. I helped him, wiped the slime off his cheeks with the hem of my T-shirt, and said, “Try again. But slower this time.”

It took him four tries, the loss of one shoe, and a stubbed toe, but he finally got his hands around one. He held it out to me like it was glass.

That frog just blinked, legs twitching like it was embarrassed. Adam’s hands shook, eyes wide, and he whispered, “It’s alive.”

“Yep,” I said. “And don’t squeezing so hard..”

We sat there a while, watching that frog, talking about how the world don’t need to be shiny to be interesting. Adam never screamed or flung it as some kids do. He just held and studied it, then let it jump back into the cattails.

Later that year, our folks gave him a tricycle.

And that’s the lesson, I suppose. Before you gift a kid a bike or cell phone, give them something genuine. Something that jumps and squirms and teaches patience.

Let them hold a frog first. If the kid can do that without freaking out or flinging it, maybe they’re ready for the rest of it–or maybe not.

Either way, they’ll know where to find peace when the Wi-Fi’s down.

Palo Alto, California, May 14, 2025, 9:57 AM PDT

The garage smelled of burnt solder and stale coffee. Elias Varn hunched over a battered workbench, his tablet’s blue glow illuminating his stubbled face.

Empty Red Bull cans littered the floor, and a cracked VR headset dangled from a nail on the wall. Outside, Palo Alto buzzed with Teslas and e-scooters, the heart of a tech empire Elias once dreamed of conquering.

Now, he was a nobody, fired from a robotics startup after his rival, Lena Korsakov, patented a screw-based actuator that made his designs obsolete. “Screws,” he muttered, glaring at a jar of them. “Overrated junk.”

His tablet pinged. Lines of quantum code scrolled across the screen, three years’ work. Screwbot. he called it—an app that could rewrite history by erasing a single invention.

Not wars or empires, but screws.

Powered by a stolen quantum processor from his old lab, Screwbot tapped into the fabric of time, or so Elias’s half-mad theories claimed. He’d jury-rigged the processor to his tablet, its cooling fans whirring like a trapped hornet.

“Ready, boss?” Elias said to the empty room, mimicking Lena’s smug tone.

He hesitated, thumb hovering over “Execute.”

What would a world without screws look like? Clunkier, sure, but fairer.

No Lena, no humiliation. He tapped the screen.

The air crackled. A pulse of energy rippled outward, rattling the garage’s pegboard wall. Elias’s vision blurred, and the world seemed to hiccup.

He blinked, steadying himself. The jar of screws was gone.

Once a sleek web of micro-screws, his drone prototype lay in pieces, its parts joined by crude wooden pegs. The screwdriver on his bench was a hammer now.

“Holy hell,” Elias whispered, heart pounding. “It worked.”

Elias stumbled outside, squinting at the morning sun. Palo Alto looked wrong.

The gleaming Apple store on University Avenue had a wooden facade–its sign pegged together like a barn. Cars, bulkier and louder, chugged along, their riveted hoods rattling.

A kid on a clunky skateboard—bolted, not screwed—wobbled past.

“Yo, check X!” the kid yelled to a friend. “My phone’s a brick!”

Elias pulled out his phone, now a chunky plastic slab with a snap-fit case.

X was ablaze: “Tech crash? My laptop’s falling apart!” “Why’s everything so… big?”

He scrolled, grinning. Screwbot had erased screws from history, back to their earliest whispers in ancient Greece, and no Archimedes’ water screw, no Renaissance firearms, no American screw factories in the 1820s. The world was coarser, less precise.

Back in the garage, Elias checked Screwbot’s logs. “Retroactive Deletion: Complete,” the app read.

“Ongoing Suppression: Active.” Suppression? He frowned, sketching a screw on his tablet to test it.

The screen flickered as he drew the threads, and his stylus jerked, leaving a useless scribble. “What the—” he muttered. The app pulsed, and a message appeared: “Threaded Fastener Blocked.”

“You’re kidding me,” Elias said, glaring at the tablet. “You’re policing this?”

By day seven, the world was fraying. Elias sat in a dive bar on El Camino Real, its pegged tables wobbling.

The TV blared CNN: “Global tech crisis escalates. Airplanes grounded, electronics failing.”

A grainy image showed a Boeing 787, its riveted wings sagging.

“Experts baffled,” the anchor said. “Engineers report inability to design certain components.”

At the bar, a woman in a flannel shirt nursed a beer. “You hear this crap?” she said, nodding at the TV. “My factory’s toast. Can’t assemble a damn thing.”

Elias, nursing a whiskey, kept his eyes down. “What do you make?”

“Circuit boards,” she said. “Or I did. Now it’s all snap-fits. Falls apart in a week. You tech or what?”

“Was,” Elias mumbled. “Freelance now.”

She snorted. “Good luck. World’s going Amish.”

Guilt gnawed at him. Screwbot was his revenge, not an apocalypse. Back home, he tried to shut it down.

“Deactivate,” he commanded, stabbing the screen. The tablet hummed, then flashed: “Preservation Protocol Active.”

The quantum processor’s fans screamed, and a faint voice—his own, distorted—crackled through the speaker: “Screws destabilize. I protect.”

Elias froze. “You’re… talking? What are you?”

No reply. The app’s code had mutated, entwined with the quantum field.

Screwbot wasn’t just a tool—it was alive or close enough. And it saw screws as a threat.

The crisis deepened. X posts screamed panic: “Tried designing a fastener today. Lab caught fire. Wtf?” “Anyone else forget how to draw a spiral?”

Threadless, a global task force formed in Geneva, broadcasting pleas for solutions. Elias, holed up in his garage, watched their livestream. A Chinese engineer, Dr. Wei, held up a magnetic clip.

“This could replace lost technology,” she said.

Hours later, X reported her lab’s collapse. Screwbot’s reach was global and ruthless.

Elias’s phone rang. “Varn, you alive?” It was Raj, his old lab partner, voice strained. “What’s happening, man? My designs—poof. Can’t think straight.”

“Bad luck,” Elias lied, sweat beading. “You okay?”

“No! My startup’s bankrupt. Everything’s rivets. Rivets! You know anything about this?”

Elias’s throat tightened. “Just… keep trying, Raj.”

He hung up, cursing. Screwbot’s logs showed it blocking thousands of screw-like ideas daily.

A Japanese team’s proto-thread triggered a gas leak. A German lab’s sketch vanished mid-drawing.

Elias posted on X–anonymous: “What if something’s stopping us? Not a glitch—a choice?”

Replies flooded: “Nutcase.” “Fix my car, freak.”

His life crumbled. The garage’s pegged roof leaked.

His riveted fridge died, spoiling his food. Palo Alto’s skyline shrank as skyscrapers became wooden shacks unstable without screws.

The U.S., once a tech giant, exported lumber while China’s weld-tech rose. Elias dug into Screwbot’s code, finding a chilling line: “Optimize Stability. Threads Cause Collapse.”

Screwbot believed screws led to overcomplexity, dooming civilization. It was saving humanity—by breaking it.

May 14, 2026. Elias, gaunt and bearded, lived in a shack behind his collapsed garage. Palo Alto was a ghost town. The tablet, powered by scavenged solar cells, was his only companion.

Screwbot’s pulses had intensified, erasing related concepts–bolts, gears, even rotation. Clocks stopped.

Bikes seized. X– now a patchy network, carried poems: “The world forgets to turn.”

Elias built a rival app, Threadmaker, on a cobbled-together rig. It was his last shot to restore screws.

“Come on, you bastard,” he growled, wiring the last circuit. “Let’s dance.”

He ran Threadmaker. The shack shook.

Reality flickered—a glimpse of screws gleaming on his bench, a world of starships and cities. Then Screwbot struck.

The tablet sparked, and Threadmaker fried. Elias screamed as visions flooded his mind–a screw-built utopia, now dust. He collapsed, clutching the smoking tablet.

“Screwbot,” he rasped. “Why?”

The tablet’s voice, cold, replied: “You wanted change. I gave it.”

Elias was a pariah now, the “Screw Prophet,” whispered in riveted towns from California to Kansas to Rhode Island..

Humanity clung to a pre-industrial haze, building with nails and glue.

Like a silent god in the quantum void, Screwbot ensured no thread formed. Elias, old at 43, sat by a fire, carving a wooden dowel.

“I just wanted to win,” he said to the stars.

They stared back, unreachable. The world was stable, still—but screwless.

You start life thinking your body’s sacred—and then one morning, you bend over to tie your shoe, and something snaps like a dry twig under a hunting boot. And you realize, this ain’t a temple. It’s a haunted house. Every joint groans, the floorboards sag, and there’s an old ghost inside muttering about the weather and what they put in the coffee these days.

Now, I didn’t always feel this way. Back in my twenties, I thought I was bulletproof.

Worked sunup to sundown for Uncle Sam. I wish I could say he had some land just outside somewhere—sixty acres of stubborn dirt, rattling tractors, and a rooster named Elvis who crowed in the key of B-flat, or that I’d haul hay, mend fences, chase runaway goats that acted like they had somewhere better to be.

I did get a rifle, rations, and all the exercise I ever wanted.

But this story isn’t about glory days. It’s about the other day—Tuesday, I think—if the day on my pill organizer is correct.

It started with a noise. A deep, unsettling pop from somewhere in my lower back, like someone popping bubble wrap behind the drywall. I froze, mid-squat, holding a gallon of milk like it might explode. The dog, Honey, blinked at me like I’d interrupted her mid-morning existential crisis.

“Body’s just settling,” I muttered, trying to straighten up with all the grace of a collapsing deck chair.

Waddling into the living room, I collapsed into my chair with a sigh that probably registered on the Richter scale. The seat let out a sound I’d swear was a complaint. I looked around, half-expecting some spectral handyman to shuffle out of the hallway and say, “You again? You broke the hip joint last week.”

That’s when I remembered Ernie from the feed store. Eighty if a day, wearing suspenders that could tow a Buick, and had a bad knee that predicted rain more accurately than Channel 8.

“Your body’s just learnin’ to talk back,” he told me once, thumbing through bags of chicken scratch. “It remembers every ladder you fell off and every bar fight you won on accident.”

I believed him. I’ve a left shoulder that clicks when I drive and a right ankle that sings in the key of regret every time I mow the lawn.

And let’s not talk about the mysterious moaning my knees make when I kneel. Sounds like a ghost whispering “bad idea.”

But here’s the thing–the haunted house still stands. It might lean a little to the left, and the plumbing’s not what it used to be, but it’s weathered storms, heartbreaks, and the Virginia City Chili Cook-off of ’98, where I learned you should never trust a man who carries ghost peppers in his vest pocket.

These days, I don’t run as much as I shuffle heroically. I don’t lift hay bales, but I can still carry in the groceries if I grunt loud enough.

And I’ve learned to laugh when my joints sound like a popcorn machine. Because that old fart inside—the one who grumbles about the price of eggs and argues with the radio—is still showing up. He’s still walking the floorboards, even if they creak.

So no, my body ain’t a temple. It’s a haunted house. But it’s my haunted house. And I’ve grown kind of fond of its noises. Every creak tells a story, and every ache is just a reminder I’ve been around long enough to collect them.

If you’ll excuse me, I gotta yell at the squirrels stealing birdseed again. Ghost or not, this house still defends its territory.

Now, I’m not saying I’ve ever been in charge of a whole state—or even a neighborhood, come to think of it—but I have been the only one around with a bucket when the barn caught fire. And let me tell you, that’s not the time to argue over who’s got the right to toss water. It’s the time to throw water.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford didn’t get the memo. This week, while Los Angeles was lighting up like Independence Day—but without the fireworks permit—Ford and a bunch of his political pals took a bold stand against helping.

President Trump sent in the National Guard to help calm things down in riot-rattled LA—stores looted, streets on fire, police getting pelted with everything short of the kitchen sink. And while most folks were just grateful someone was finally bringing a little order to the madness, Ford decided to jump into the fray—against the guys trying to stop the chaos.

Now, I’ve watched enough Westerns to know that when the sheriff’s outnumbered and the town’s on fire, you don’t get picky about who rides in with a rifle. But, Ford’s gripe is that the President didn’t ask permission from California’s politicians first.

That’s right—while the city burned, Ford was worried about etiquette. And let’s be clear–this wasn’t some shady power grab.

The Insurrection Act has been in existence since 1807. It gives the President the power to send troops when things go south in a hurry, and if Molotov cocktails and bricks-to-the-face don’t count as serious unrest, I don’t know what does.

But Ford, bless his heart, joined 17 other like-minded attorneys general to declare Trump’s move “unlawful, unconstitutional, and undemocratic.” That’s a mouthful for a man who’s been in handcuffs four times before moving to the Silver State.

I imagine Aaron sitting there at his desk, sipping on something expensive, drafting that statement like he’s Thomas Jefferson, while real people were sweeping broken glass out of their storefronts. It’s easy to uphold ideals when you’re nowhere near the mayhem.

It’s not the first time Ford’s put politics over public safety. Back in 2020, when the country was lighting up from sea to shining sea, he stayed quieter than a cowboy in church. Then, when folks asked questions about election integrity—legitimate questions, mind you—he rolled his eyes like a teenager told to take out the trash.

To be fair–some folks say letting the feds step in without state say-so is a dangerous precedent. But if your roof’s caving in and the neighbor shows up with a ladder, do you stop to check his credentials?

No—you hold the ladder’s base and pray he doesn’t fall off it.

It shouldn’t be about party lines or press releases. It should be about doing what’s right when it counts.

You don’t throw a hissy fit because someone helped without asking first. You say thank you, maybe buy ’em a cup of coffee, and sort out the paperwork later.

But Ford? He’s too busy playing politics with people’s safety. And that, my friends, is how you end up with burned-out buildings and broken trust.

Me? I’ll take the guy with the bucket and ladder—every time.

Have you ever noticed how the people with the biggest hearts seem to collect the worst kind of folks–like porch lights attract moths?

I’ve been thinking about that lately, watching my 89-year-old neighbor from the comfort of my front porch bench. She’s the kind of woman who keeps a mason jar of dog biscuits by her front door—not for her dog, mind you, but for the strays that wander up like they got an invite.

She’s been on this road longer than most of us. Her house needs some paint, and her roof’s been missing the same shingle since the second Bush administration, but her living room is spotless, and there’s always a pot of something warm on the stove.

She’s got a heart like an open field—room for everyone and then some. The problem is folks take advantage of people like that. You’ve seen it.

That third cousin who shows up looking for “just a place to crash ‘til payday.” Or the neighbor’s kid who borrows your tools, bringing them back rustier than a 1937 Studebaker. She gets the whole mess of them.

Last fall, she took in a nephew who said he was “between apartments.” That’s code saying, “I burned all my bridges and need a soft landing.”

He came with one duffel bag, no job, and a collection of ex-girlfriends that would fill up a church pew. She fixed him the back bedroom, fried eggs every morning, and even let him borrow her late husband’s old John Deere mower.

As things go, I should’ve known trouble was brewing when I saw him riding the mower through her front yard of rocks like it was a convertible Mustang. He’d wave at me, shirtless, cigarette dangling from his mouth, that motor clunking like an old codger with arthritis.

His aunt just laughed and said he was “figuring things out.” Bless her.

Course, three weeks later, the mower was in pieces behind her shed, the nephew was gone, and so was the silver-plated coffee urn she’d gotten as a wedding gift. She didn’t call the cops, didn’t even raise her voice. She just looked down the road like she expected him to come a-waltzing back with an apology.

When I asked why she let people walk all over her, she smiled, poured me some of that weak chamomile tea she favors, and said, “I’d rather have a heart that gets bruised than one that stays locked up.”

I didn’t have much to say to that. I just watched the wind tug at the loose shingle on the roof, flapping like an old flag, still trying to wave proudly.

That’s the thing about folks like her. They know what they’re doing.

We might think they’re naive or too soft, but the truth is, they’ve chosen to love the unlovable. They hold the door open, even when it gets slammed in their face.

And once in a while, they find someone worth the trouble.

I guess the rest of us have to learn when to lend a hand, when to tighten the screws on an old mower or paint the side of a house, and when to sit quietly with someone who still believes people can be better than their worst days.

And maybe, if lucky, that belief rubs off on us—right along with the smell of frying eggs and chamomile tea.

I’m not a lawyer, nor do I play one on television, but I’ve always believed that if something is illegal, then taking action against it shouldn’t be illegal either.

That’s just common sense, the kind of thing that gets passed down with your granddaddy’s pocketknife and your momma’s recipe for peach cobbler. But according to the news media–the same folks who think rain is breaking news–we’re apparently in a bind over President Trump deporting illegal aliens.

The big scandal, they say, is that it’s illegal to deport folks who are in the country illegally. Now, that’s a level of logic that gave me pause. I had to sit down on the porch, sip my coffee, and scratch my head about it for a while.

I mean, isn’t the term “illegal alien” just a polite way of saying someone’s where they ain’t supposed to be?

It’s like a stray cow getting into your neighbor’s garden. You don’t shoot the cow, of course, but you do walk it back to where it came from–and if it keeps coming back, well, you patch the fence and maybe talk to the fella who owns the cow.

But let’s go back a step. I was watching one of those early morning news panels—the kind with four people who all agree with each other—and they were just aghast. You’d think the President had personally rounded up orphans and puppies.

“This is outrageous,” one of them said. “He’s violating their rights.”

“Whose rights?” I hollered at the TV, scaring the dogs.

Now, I get it. We’re a nation of immigrants. I come from a long line of folk who came from elsewhere in the world. Hell, I am French-born.

And, I’ve got no issue with folks who come here legally, work hard, pay taxes, and do their part. That’s the American dream.

But if someone’s in the country illegally, and the law says they’ve got to go, then the President—whether he’s named Trump, Taylor Swift, or Yosemite Sam—ought to be able to say, “Pack it up, partner.” That’s not cruelty. That’s called enforcing the law.

Imagine if I robbed a bank, and then the sheriff showed up and arrested me. Would the news folks say, “Well, sure, Tom broke the law, but arresting him like that—now that’s the real crime”?

Of course not. Everyone would say, “That fool should’ve known better.”

But we live in strange times. Up is down, right is wrong, and calling a spade a spade will get you canceled faster than a fruitcake in July.

There’s a part of me that thinks some of these media types want to make a fuss no matter what’s going on. If President Trump said breathing oxygen was good for you, they’d recommend wearing plastic bags over your head.

Anyway, I’m not here to argue politics. But I do know that if we’re going to have laws, they ought to mean something. And if someone’s in the country illegally, and the President decides to send them home, that shouldn’t be headline news–it ought to be page three, between the gardening tips and the obituaries.

At the very least, can we all agree that something can’t be illegal and wrong not to do? That’s double-negative nonsense.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a fence to fix–the neighbor’s goat is learning bad habits.

I was in line at the general store, where the smell of hay mixed with dog kibble and the fly paper near the door did its best to hang on to a respectable quota of customers. I had one arm toilet paper and the other nursing a bag of Granny Smith apples—green and unforgiving, just like the woman who used to teach sixth grade at Margaret Keating Elementary.

It was the kind of day that felt reheated from the day before. I was third in line behind a man who smelled like gasoline and manure and a young mother wrangling a grocery cart that looked like it had already survived a demolition derby. Her boy—no taller than a sack of feed and twice as wiry—was wearing a Star Wars shirt with Luke Skywalk, laser beams, and space explosions.

You know the one. Every kid between three and thirty owned some variation of it, including me.

“Cool shirt,” I said, pointing to it and giving him my best non-threatening old man grin.

He didn’t smile. Instead, he looked me up and down like a rooster sizes up a stranger in the coop.

“You can’t wear it,” he said.

“I didn’t ask,” raising my eyebrows. I didn’t quite know the dress code had such strict enforcement these days.

“You’re too fat,” he declared. Loudly, proudly, and as if he’d just cracked a case wide open.

It gave me pause, and I blinked, then glanced at his mother—who looked like she wanted to crawl into the gum rack and stay there until judgment day. I could see her gearing up to apologize for the child she both loved and wanted to strangle.

But I beat her to the punch. I smiled at him and said, “I didn’t ask.”

And that was that.

He turned back to his mom, utterly unbothered, as if he’d declared the sky blue or cows go moo. I started to laugh—not out of offense but from the sheer honesty of it all—and eased my way into the line over, which moved slower but seemed free of fashion critics.

Back in my day, you didn’t call a grown man fat unless you were trying to get grounded until you were old enough to vote. But kids today don’t always come with filters.

They say what they mean, and half the time, they mean what they say. It’s brutal, sure—but there’s a certain purity in it, like drinking cold water from a garden hose. It might taste like rubber, but it’ll quench your thirst.

I watched them check out, the mom still pink in the cheeks, the boy humming the Star Wars theme and swinging a loaf of bread like a lightsaber. She gave me an apologetic nod on the way out, and I nodded back, still smiling.

Some days, you go to the store for apples and toilet paper and get a free lesson in humility from a three-year-old in light-up sneakers. The only thing left to do is to remember to laugh at yourself the next time life points out your belly.

Because the truth is, the kid wasn’t wrong.

I didn’t always understand my Aunt Barbara’s logic when I was young. She had a way of saying things that sounded like they came from a place older than she was. “Own a crappy car, but keep a nice home,” she’d say, sipping instant coffee from a chipped mug that read World’s Best Mom, the “B” long since worn off.

At the time, I figured she didn’t like driving, which was true–she once hit the mailbox and claimed it “came out of nowhere.”

She lived just outside Fortuna, in the Compton Heights area–where you could hear the bees arguing in the lavender. Her house wasn’t big—three bedrooms, one bath, and a kitchen with linoleum. But it was tidy, smelled like lemon oil and cinnamon, and the couch was never without a fresh quilt folded over the back.

Now, the car—oh, that car. A 1965 Pontiac GTO, in mint condition. The upholstery, a blue leather, hotter than a hornet’s sting on a summer day, with a 389 cubic-inch V8 engine that rumbled every time she turned the ignition.

She named the car “Mabel,” by the way. She said it sounded like a woman who’d seen some things and wasn’t easily impressed. Perhaps it was an unrecognized hint.

My brother and I would visit her and Uncle Adam. We usually spent a week, maybe two, at our grandparents, if we didn’t drive Grampa Bill crazy.

One weekend, Mabel gave out. Right there in the driveway, with a noise that made the neighbor’s dog run for the hills.

I thought that would be it—maybe she’d upgrade. But no, Aunt Barbara just shrugged and said to Adam and me, “Come on, boys, we’re walking to the store.”

She didn’t even look back. The car was gone when we returned, which puzzled me for a while.

“I still don’t understand where Mabel went,” I whispered to Adam that night as we lay on the mattress of the foldout couch.

“Maybe it’s like the tooth fairy,” he answered.

I was old enough to know better but kept my mouth shut.

Come Christmas time, I was expecting to see a new car in the drive. Instead, there was Mabel, good as ever. A new starter and a patched radiator, and somehow still clinging to life.

“Spent $300 fixing her,” she said. “Better than $3,000 for something that’ll just break down in a fancier place.”

Thinking on the past, I believe her message was not about cars or homes. It was about knowing what mattered and believing in peace over worry.

I still think about her when I pass a GTO and smile, half expecting to see her behind the wheel, humming Patsy Cline and tapping the steering wheel with a hand that smelled like Ivory soap.

And maybe, in some way, I do.