“Man, you’re fucking tall,” they’d say. Next was, “What?! You don’t play basketball?!” as if their minds were actually on the verge of exploding at the absurdity of it. Where can you hide when you dwarf nearly everyone in your town? How could one’s entire existence be distilled down to how far one’s head was from the ground? Nobody cared about the paper bag placed in the white plastic bag that he religiously carried with him. He was big enough to hold most grown men like babies, an urge he fought like the urge to let that paper bag go.
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This past couple years I’ve unplugged from the Matrix. Unlike 
Have you ever wondered why someone doesn’t just steal all those Christmas lights? Or what’s really stopping people from slashing our tires or breaking into our houses? Or worse? Yes, we lock our doors and some people have alarms—and we live in a type of police state, so certainly the fear of getting caught curbs a lot of negative behavior—but I find myself imagining all sorts of mayhem that I don’t think anyone would get caught for. Luckily for my fellow humans, and especially my neighbors, I’m a standup guy and tend to be more on the side of “neighborhood watch” than “neighborhood terrorist.”
I skipped writing last night because I was tired and really couldn’t land on a good topic. I tried to push myself to just write something, anything, and I did. And man, it really sucked. So I deleted it. I wrote another paragraph and that was even worse. Delete. I even tried writing a sappy poem. Um, yeahhhhh. Delete. And the whole time I was struggling with it, one of the #nerdlution mantras was ringing in my head, “If it makes you happy…” I was not happy. Forcing myself to write crappy stuff was making me the opposite of happy. So I quit. And I was mostly okay with it.
I parked the car and turned off the engine but left the radio on. A song was playing and it had that perfect balance of hopeful and sad. And we were both wrapped up in it, hands held together like we were two high school kids falling in love. Just us, in the car, the heat slowly dissipating around us as the music played on. There was nowhere else to be and nothing more important than hearing how it ended, together. We didn’t need to speak or maybe we just didn’t have anything to say that could be more important than listening. With the melody, my mind wandered from dinner, to the winding highway along the coast, sliding in and out of wisps of fog, and back to that parking lot. The hopeful parts of the song took me back to three kids sleeping a hundred miles away, our day together, and intertwined somehow in there too, was something like sadness. Like words left unsaid or regret. Then back to you, the car, the cold closing in and our hands getting sweaty together. A perfect moment that’s hard to let go of. The music stopped and we paused just enough for a breath, knowing that we eventually had to let go of each other’s hand and get out of the car.