Our shower drain kept getting clogged. It was a big problem. We had to hire a plumber. He came out twice.

God love him, the plumber did not look happy the second time. Namely, because our house is 100 years old. Meaning, five generations of people have been bathing in this house. The drain pipes have been whisking away one century’s worth of funk water.

“No telling what’s in those pipes,” the plumber said in a quiet, ominous voice, gazing into the treacherous blackness of the drain hole.

The plumber and his young assistant, Charlie, spent an hour working on the problem. The plumber is not a tiny man. He did a lot of bending over while Charlie would laugh, pointing at his boss’s partially exposed gluteal cleft, and saying, “Crack kills, boss.”

They located the clog.

Charlie found me in my office. He was breathless and excited. “We found it!” Charlie said these words in the same weighty tones NASA engineers would use to say, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

Three of us stood in a tiny bathroom, looking

at the source of the clog, lying in the plumber’s hand.

“I’ve never seen a ball of funk that big before,” said Charlie.

The clot was a rat’s nest of human hair about the size of a golf ball. The hair was old, so it just looked black and green.

“Probably your wife’s hair,” said the plumber.

He’s probably right, I was thinking. My wife has the longest hair in our house. Moreover, I’ve seen the aftermath of her showers. Whenever she washes her hair, the shower stall looks like she’s just finished bathing a border collie.

So, I told my wife about the ball of funk. She became very defensive.

Her main defense was, “It wasn’t MY HAIR!”

I had to laugh. Her thick, brunette hair comes down to her mid-back. Who else’s hair could it be?

“What about…

Don’t shoot the messenger. But in America, one third of children have never handwritten a letter.

And it’s not just kids. Nearly 40 percent of adult Americans haven’t written a letter in the last five years, while 43 percent of Millennials have never sent a letter in their lifetime. But even if they had sent a letter, recent studies show that Gen Z can’t read cursive and has no idea what the heck Grandma’s handwriting means.

The New York Times says that “The age of proper correspondence writing has ended…”

“Letter writing is an endangered art,” The Atlantic said.

“The death knell of written correspondence has been sounding for years,” said the Chicago Tribune.

This is not new information, of course, unless you’ve been living underneath a slab of granite. Letters have been replaced by emails and texts.

But texts and emails are not letters. An email has no charm. A text message does not impart tenderness, and intimacy. You cannot smell the paper. You cannot feel the weight of stationary in your

hands. An email is temporary. An email will only last as long as your device is charged.

Plus, did you know that email is a leading cause of anxiety in this country?

Fact: Around 92 percent of working Americans feel anxiety when they think about their email inbox.

But a letter. A letter is real. A letter exists in physical space. A letter lasts. You cannot “delete” a letter unless you burn it. There are letters that still exist from 500 BC. Letters from early Romans. Letters from kings and queens, from soldiers of the American Revolution.

A letter is artwork. It is culture. It is tangible language. A letter represents years of handwriting practice in Mrs. Burns penmanship class, as she peered over her cat eye glasses at you, swatting a ruler in her open palm, bearing the same facial expression as a prison guard.

A…

I woke up, staggered from my bedroom, and made coffee. I pulled out my phone, and commenced to scroll social media.

On my screen, a young woman, in pajamas, dancing in her kitchen. She was maybe mid twenties, with a pierced nose, and extremely hairy armpits.

I wiped sleep from my eyes and tried to understand what I was looking at.

It was early in the morning. My brain could not piece together why my newsfeed was showing me feminine armpit hair first thing in the morning.

Who was this unshaven woman? Why was she dancing in her kitchen as opposed to, say, her bathroom? Why do people post dance videos on social media? And more importantly, why is this video on MY newsfeed?

This young woman is a stranger to me. We are not online friends. I’ve never seen her before in my life. Of this I am certain; I never forget an armpit.

Thus, I can only assume the bushy dancer

is on my newsfeed because of algorithms.

Which is probably why the next video on my newsfeed depicted quasi-naked Japanese people sliding down a waterslide into a vat of whipped cream. But hey, at least their pits were trimmed.

I remember when I first signed up for social media. Back then, we didn’t have algorithms or AI selecting what was in our newsfeed. In fact, we didn’t even call it “social media.” We called it “wasting time.”

In those days, you fired up your PC with a ripcord, then you used dial-up internet that took four or five years to connect.

Social media was still in its infancy, and was still an important application many middle-aged people used to discover whether or not their highschool sweethearts had gotten fat.

The main function of social media in those days was posting stuff. It was kinda fun. You’d make…

Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a great big old castle. She was very beautiful, with long, flowy hair, and her teeth were really nice, too. Nice and straight.

The princess had everything she wanted. Whenever she lacked, she snapped her fingers and said, “Bring me…!” and then she would name the object of her desire and her servants would fall all over themselves to secure the object of her want. If her servants took too long fetching the object, however, the king would become annoyed and occasionally mention the possibility of removing their heads.

On the other side of the kingdom was a village where lived a peasant girl who was not imbued with such fortune. She was the youngest of a poor family. She worked part time at Dollar General.

The peasant girl had wiry hair, since she did not use expensive shampoos but the cheap stuff. Her teeth were not super-straight. Her clothes were rags.

So anyway, one day, the princess was riding

her horse through the woods. Her servants were following behind, but she was galloping so fast that her servants lost sight of her. Soon, the princess was lost in the woods.

Then the worst thing happened.

A band of thieves fell upon her. They took everything of value that she had. They stole her fine garments, all her jewelry, and even her horse. They left her lying in rags, in a ditch, with a few broken bones. And worse, her hair was all messed up.

That same afternoon, an old beggar woman walked the woodland byway. She saw the princess lying in the mud, but did not know she was a princess. She saw only the ragged robes, and the mud on her face.

“Please help me,” moaned the princess.

But the beggar woman continued walking onward. She cast not even a glance toward the princess.

“I’m too old…

A crowded airliner. We were somewhere above Virginia. I was sandwiched between two passengers like Prince Albert in a can.

It has been said, if you’re a bad person in this lifetime; if you treat your fellow man poorly; if you live by the code of violence; if you are cruel to elders and children and UPS men; when you die you will wake up in economy class, riding in the middle seat.

Which is where I was.

The guy on my right was tapping on a laptop. The guy on my other side was scrolling TikTok. I had no armrests to speak of.

Throughout the flight, I noticed TikTok Guy kept staring at Laptop Guy. Like he recognized the man. Finally, TikTok Guy leaned over my passenger body to speak to Laptop Guy.

“Excuse me,” said TikTok. “Are you who I think you are, sir?”

Laptop nodded. “I am.”

“Omigod,” said TikTok. “Can I get a picture with you?”

And here is where things got awkward.

Because there I was. Stuck between them. Like a man trapped in hell.

Or worse, the DMV.

There was no way to snap a selfie without also capturing the buck-toothed, redhead in the middle seat between them. And I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you should wait until we get off the plane to take pictures,” I suggested.

TikTok gestured to Laptop. “Do you KNOW who this is?”

“Yes. He is a man who will still be here when the plane lands.”

“This guy’s famous.”

Laptop shook my hand and recited his name. He was a young guy. Dressed nicely. Matinee-idol smile. I’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything. I live under a brick.

Laptop gave his signature to a few passengers nearby. Then Laptop Guy turned to me. “Would you like me to sign anything for you?”

I smiled. “I left my autograph book at…

Backstage at the Ryman Auditorium. I am a fish out of water. What am I doing here?

It is the Gatlin Brothers 70th anniversary concert, and every Nashville A-list celebrity you can think of is here. I am supposed to do a song with everyone at the end. Larry Gatlin told me to bring my banjo.

But I’m experiencing a bad case of “tiny banjo syndrome” right now. I don’t belong here. I don’t know how to act around famous people.

I just had a conversation with Bill Gaither, for example, in which the first words I muttered were, “Did you know that you’re Bill Gaither?”

The 89-year-old man whose name I have only seen in hymnals just smiled his perfect chompers at me and touched my shoulder. He said, “Thanks for clearing that up.”

For most of the night, I am backstage, waiting to go on. I watch most of the show with the Oak Ridge Boys. We all stand in the wings watching guys like Vince Gill sing. The Gatlin brothers never

sounded so tight.

Now and then, I look into the audience. I’m looking for my wife. I am pretty sure I see Amy Grant sitting a few seats away from my beloved.

And I feel like I am glowing. But I also feel out of place. Like the guy who fell into the beer keg and drowned, but had to crawl out twice to pee first.

At some point, I wander back into the men’s dressing room to watch the show on monitors. I am alone in the room with empty guitar cases, all bearing the inscriptions of names I’ve only ever heard on the radio.

And I am thinking about the little boy I used to be. The kid who dropped out of school after his dad died. The flunky who hung drywall. The fool who finally received his high-school equivalency at 30-something.

What am…

I receive a lot of mail in the form of emails, letters, private messages, texts, Morse code, etc. It is impossible to answer all these messages, so I compiled some commonly asked questions:

Q: Hi! I am an angry Baptist/Pentecostal/Presbyterian/Methodist/evangelical/fundamentalist/fringe-group-religious-person-with-rigid-object-stuck-in-well-known-orifice-of-my-body, and you need to know that you’re way off base with all your talk about lovey-dovey stuff. There’s only one way to heaven, pal, and if you don’t proclaim the message exactly as I say you should, both the Holy Word and my pastors say you are going to the non-heavenly place when you die.

A: Thanks for your comment. I’ll see you there.

Q: This world is a mess, why don’t you ever address the political upheavals of our society? It seems irresponsible to not cultivate awareness especially in light of what’s going on in the news. You’re a coward. Why are you pretending that humanity is one great big happy family, and everything is hunky dory? This isn’t helping our country.

A: I think someone needs a nap.

Q: No, I’m serious. Don’t gloss over the question with your glib, sophomoric attempt

at ill-timed humor. Don’t you see what’s going on on this country?

A: This country needs more love. Not more opinions from keyboard warriors.

Q: Hi. I just want to know: Is Sean Dietrich a real person, or just a secret team of a bunch of wannabe writers pretending to be one guy?

A: We aren’t wannabes. We’re never-weres. Big difference.

Q: Ginger or Mary Ann?

A: Lucille Ball.

Q: Come on. That’s not fair. Please comment on this age-old debate.

A: It’s not a debate. Not really. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island,” former Miss Nevada 1960, received more fan mail than Tina Louise (Ginger) and nearly every other actor at CBS Studios combined.

Even after Wells’ heyday she still received some 5,000 fan letters per week from hormone crazed post-pubescent boys,…

There I am, watching him. He sits on the steps of the Shell Station. A backpack beside him. His skin is rawhide. His beard is white.

His name is Buck. He’s from North Carolina. He says he completed two tours in Vietnam.

He’s not here begging, he’s resting his feet.

“My old feet hurt more’n they used to,” says Buck. “Hard getting old, buddy.”

There is a half-smoked cigar next to him. He dug this used cigar from an ashtray. It still has life in it, he says.

He’s sipping coffee.

“First cup’a joe I had in a week. Fella gave me a quarter a few minutes ago. Piled my coins together to buy me a cup.”

A quarter.

When Buck went inside to buy it, there were only cold dregs left in the pot. He asked the cashier if it were possible to brew a fresh pot. She told him to get lost.

“But I’m paying for it,” he insisted.

She escorted him to the door.

So, he’s drinking dregs for which he paid full price—for which he is grateful.

There are holes in his shoes. He

found these sneakers in a sporting-good-store dumpster. Buck estimates he’s put nearly eight hundred miles on them. Who knows if he’s exaggerating or not. Buck has a flare for the dramatic.

Still, his bloody toes poke through the fronts. His middle toenail is missing.

Buck explains, “God says, ‘Don’t worry what you’ll eat, drink, or wear.’ And I believe it. But it’s hard sometimes. ‘Specially when you ain’t eaten and you don’t have [cussword] to wear.”

So I walk inside the gas station on a mission. I ask the aforementioned cashier to brew a fresh pot of coffee—I tell her it’s for me. I am very polite about it.

She smiles and says, “Sure, sweetie.”

Ain’t she sweet.

I buy a hot cup, an armful of snacks, and a pack of Swisher…

I’d say the biggest problem facing this country is typos. Typos are cropping up everywhere. In advertisements, in emails, and even within the very words your reading now.

The main reason for this is your phone, which thinks it’s smarter than you. Your phone will automatically correct your text without your consent.

As a writer, typos deeply affect my life. Whenever an error is found in this column, I usually learn about it in the form of irate emails, direct messages, and ransom notes.

I received one such email this morning, which read, verbatim: “...It’s unprofessional for your article’s title to contain such a glaring typo. Franky, I cannot believe this happened.”

I can only assume that I am “Franky.” Which means this emailer was name-calling. Which, honestly, is something I will not Stan for.

Americans make billions of typos every minute. And that’s not an exaggeration. On average, Americans send 250 million texts per hour. Over 60 percent of our texts contain serious topography eros.

You can also find major-league typos in most printed material that

is around you.

One such typo I will never forget occurred when a public library advertised a summer reading program. The billboard used the library’s catchy slogan, which read: “This summer, it’s time to go pubic.”

Talk about a nightmare for pubic relations.

Another consequential typo happened within a eulogy my cousin wrote. This was published in the printed order-of-service handout. The eulogy began: “Charles will always remain my deadest friend.”

Do you want to know why there are so many typos in written content these days? Do you want to KNOW why typos are occurring in major published works more than ever before in history?

Autocorrect, baby.

See, long ago if you wrote something, say, on a typewriter, whenever you made a mistake you were usually aware of it. You’d just correct the mistake later.

But then, autocorrect came along, instantly altering…