It was late. I pulled into the campus after seven o’clock to attend my last class of the semester. My last college class. Ever. It was a night class.

In America, most self-respecting people my age were finishing supper, settling down to watch “Wheel of Fortune.” But I was in school.

I had been attending community college for 11 years. I had been taking a lot of night courses. Which meant that I had perfected the art of eating supper in my truck, on the way to class. I drove with my knees, ate with my hands, and controlled the radio with my big toe.

Supper often consisted of foil-wrapped tamales, purchased from Carmela, a middle-aged Mexican woman who visited our construction jobsites. Carmela traveled in a battered ‘84 Nissan Maxima that looked like a roving salvage yard.

Every time I’d buy a tamale, Carmela would pat my cheek and say, “Joo are very sweet boy, but joo need a bath, joo smell like goat butt.”

So parked my truck. I

rushed into class, smelling like the fundaments of a horned barnyard animal.

Eleven years it had taken me to finish school. Me. A middle-school dropout. My formal education ended in seventh grade, after my father took his own life with a hunting rifle. I simply quit going to school. I was a rural child. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody seemed to care what rural dropouts did.

I got my first job hanging drywall at age 14. I started working in bars, playing music shortly thereafter. I had a lot of jobs. I hung gutter. I worked as an ice-cream-scoop. I was a telemarketer. I was a nobody. I was white trash.

Until I enrolled in community college.

I enrolled as an adult, and my life changed. I became alumni at Okaloosa-Walton Community College.

I completed high-school equivalency courses. I finished the collegiate coursework. It took me eleven years.…

These aren’t my stories, but I’m going to tell them.

Let’s call her Dana. Dana was going for a walk near her home. It was a dirt road. Her high-school reunion was coming up, she was getting into shape.

A truck pulled beside her. He slowed down. He rolled his window open, he asked if she needed a ride.

Something was wrong. It was the way he looked at her.

Before she knew it, he’d jumped out of the vehicle. She tried to get away. He overpowered her and threw her into a ditch.

She landed a few good hits to his face, but he outweighed her.

He used a pocketknife. He pressed it against her. She screamed something. She doesn’t remember which words she used, but she aimed them toward heaven.

Something happened.

His body froze. Completely. He was like a statue, only meaner. She wanted to run, but she was too scared.

That’s when she saw another man standing above her attacker. He was tall, with a calm face.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dana,” the tall man said. “Go on home, sweetie, everything’s gonna be

okay.”

Here’s another:

Jim was dying. A seventy-something Vietnam veteran with high morals, pancreatic cancer, and a two-packs-a-day habit.

Doctors said his cancer would kill him.

Treatments were hell. Jim met a man in the VA hospital. A homeless man with a duffle bag. A fellow vet.

They shared a few cigarettes. They swapped stories. They understood each other. Jim invited the man home.

The man stayed in Jim’s guest room. He stayed for several months.

He became Jim’s caregiver. He wiped Jim’s mouth after episodes of vomiting, he stayed up late during sleepless nights, he helped Jim bathe. He’d pat Jim’s back when nausea got bad, saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

And he was there on Jim’s final day, too. He waited in the den while Jim’s family gathered around his bed.…

I was a kid. My father and I walked into the filling station. The bell above the door dinged.

Daddy was filthy from working under a car. He was always working under cars. He came from a generation of men who were born with Sears, Roebuck & Co. ratcheting wrenches in their hands. These were men who changed their own motor oil, who worked harder on off-days than they did on weekdays.

Old man Peavler stood behind the counter. He was built like a fireplug with ears. He, too, worked on cars all day. Except he did it for a living, so he hated it.

Daddy roamed the aisles looking for lunch among Mister Peavler’s fine curation of top-shelf junk food. In the background, a transistor radio played the poetry of Willie Hugh Nelson.

My father approached the ancient cooler, located beneath the Alberto Vargas calendar my mother warned me not to look at under threat of eternal hellfire.

The white words on the fire-engine-red cooler said DRINK COCA-COLA—ICE COLD. My father removed

the sensuous hour-glass bottle, dripping with condensation. Then he grabbed a plastic sleeve of salt peanuts from the shelf.

We approached the counter.

“Howdy,” said old man Peavler. Only it came out more like “Haddy,” because that is how real people talk.

Old man Peaveler looked at our items, did some mental math, and told us how much we owed by rounding up to the nearest buck. The old man’s cash register hadn’t worked since Herbert Hoover was in the White House.

We exited the store and sat on the curb in the all-consuming sunlight. There, my father and I counted cars. For this is what people did before Olive Gardens and Best Buys ruled the world.

Daddy used his belt buckle to pop open his Coke. He used his teeth to tear open the peanuts. Then he carefully dumped the nuts into the mouth of the…

Everything really is bigger in Texas. The sky. The hamburgers. And of course, the oversized tourist cowboy hats found in gas stations.

I sat in a bar located not far from the Dallas airport. There were several tourists wearing ten gallon hats that were roughly the size of traffic cones. I talked to them, they were visiting Dallas for a conference. They were from places like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and the man wearing the tallest hat was from Yokohama, Japan.

When they exited the bar, the guys all walked out, single file, hats grazing the door jamb, designer tennis shoes squeaking on the floor like the senior basketball lineup.

“God love’em,” said the lady bartender, stifling a laugh. “Texas has that effect on people.”

It’s true. Texas does something to your brain. It makes you feel like you are a little bigger than you are. When you’re here, you get high on Texanism.

Maybe it’s the low air quality.

At least that’s what my cab driver thought.

“Texas is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the United States,” my cab driver said, doing 90 mph while keeping one finger on the wheel.

“If we were a country, we’d be the eighth-largest emitter of pollutants in the world.”

Well, what does he know? Maybe the air isn’t exactly pristine, but I remind him that Texas can’t be as bad as, say, Los Angeles.

“Yes it can,” he replies. “Texas ranks first among all states for total toxic pollutants released to air, land and water.”

Okay, fine. So I asked the driver why he still lived in Texas if this state has so many environmental drawbacks.

He smiled. “Dude, this is the greatest state on earth. There ain’t nowhere better than Texas.”

And that’s the general attitude of Texas. You will hear locals complain about it, but they gripe using the…

There were no cashiers. Only computers. We customers stood in line, waiting for the official person in the official vest to guide us into the official computerized self-scanning area so that we could engage in an intimate relationship with a machine.

“Thank you for shopping with us,” the computer greeted me in a voice that was female. “You may scan your items now.”

I don’t know when stores made the ceremonious change to self-checkout lanes, but I resisted this switchover from the beginning. I will stand in line for 15 minutes just for the privilege of someone else scanning and bagging my groceries.

Namely, because I don’t want to scan or bag my own groceries any more than I want to visit Pep Boys and rotate my own tires.

So anyway, I began scanning my products. The computer would inevitably get fussy and start repeating, “PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE,” until a teenage employee would finally quit playing on her phone, stride over to me, and helpfully inform

me that I was an old guy.

No, I’m only kidding. She would usually tell me I was doing it wrong.

The first few items I scanned went through fine. But the third item caused a problem. A beacon light on my station started blinking to signal an error.

“PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE,” the machine said.

So I did.

I waited for nearly five minutes until an official employee came over and punched a few numbers into the machine, and I was up and running again.

No sooner had the employee left than there was another problem.

“UNKNOWN ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.” The computer voice seemed really mad this time.

“It’s a box of cereal,” I said.

“PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.”

The computer just kept blinking its red warning light as though I had attempted to steal a German U…

The airport was slammed. We checked in at the kiosk. Checked our luggage. Then stood in a four-mile line so that TSA agents could fondle us. Then we rushed to our terminal, hauling our baggage, just in time for…

Our flight to be delayed.

So we wait. Because that’s what you do in airports. You wait. Airports are a lot like nursing homes in that regard, with the main difference being that in nursing homes at least you can look forward to your funeral.

But in an airport, there are no funerals. Only waiting. Hundreds of thousands wait in airports every day, playing on phones, sleeping in the upright position, standing in long lines, or just generally weeping and gnashing their teeth.

Some people get so fed up with waiting they go stand in line and wait to speak to the manager. As though this will un-delay their flight.

Most stalled passengers will at some point have a phone conversation in an airport, speaking in the same volume

you might use if you were taking a phone call during a Who concert. Nobody knows why they do this.

“DID JOHN CALL THE OFFICE YET?!” a junior businessman might shout into his phone. “HE DIDN’T? WELL, HE SAID HE WOULD! OH, YOU DID!? WELL WHAT DID YOU SAY?! YOU DIDN’T! OH, YOU DID!? WHAT DID HE SAY?! HE DIDN’T…?”

These are the people who will run the nation someday.

So anyway, that’s what we’re doing. Waiting in an airport. I am writing to you, with my laptop, perched on my knees. But I’m not complaining because I love airplanes.

When I was little, my mother said I was obsessed with airplanes. I’d run into the yard and point to the sky and shout, “Air-pane! Air-pane!”

“Isn’t my son smart?” Mama would exclaim.

“Well,” Granddaddy would reply, “he’s fourteen years old.”

I was raised on porches. I love a good porch.

Especially old ones. The haint blue ceilings. The swinging ferns. The skidmarks from when I rode my bike off the porch for a New Year’s Eve party.

I like it when neighbors walk by your porch and wave at you. I like it when feral cats creep up the steps to say hello. I like how the windchimes ring.

On my particular porch, there are a few elements I like best.

I like the chairs my wife got me for Christmas. They have thick cushions that allow me to spend hours sitting on my fat aspirations, writing long paragraphs that are wordy and bloated and yet make no actual contribution to the overall endeavor of the human race. Take, for example, this paragraph.

I like the elephant ears in the corner. I like the jute rug beneath my feet. The rocking chair which belonged to my wife’s great-grandfather. The ring-and-hook game which party goers sometimes play while

I am busy riding my bike off the porch.

I also like the four fishing rods leaning against the wall from my most recent fishing trip.

“Get those stupid fishing poles off our porch!” my wife keeps saying.

I haven’t gotten around to it. Although I will because I’m very considerate. Whenever my wife tells me to do something, I always consider it.

I like the way young neighbors who are out for evening walks, pushing strollers, walking dogs, gather near my porch at sundown, and watch me play an old fiddle.

“We heard you playing from a few streets over,” they say.

And I’ll blush. “You did?” I’ll say.

“Yeah,” they reply. “We thought maybe a cat was stuck in someone’s chain link fence.”

I like the way the people who pass by my porch say things like: “You know,…

I was at a barbecue. There were lots of people around, eating, and at some point one of my cousin’s kids rode their Schwinns into the yard.

One boy leapt off his bike and sidled up to me.

“It’s so quiet out here,” the boy remarked in stupefied wonder.

At that moment, I realized the kid was absolutely right. All the barbecue goers—and these were mostly older people—were playing on their phones. Numbed by the opiate glows of their touchscreens.

Everyone was thumbing away on their respective devices. I was horrified. Namely because I, a lonesome voice in the wilderness, a simple man longing for a less technological era, was currently ordering cat food on Amazon.

Because phones are what we do.

Not just us Americans. Everyone. Phones are just who we are now.

I was in Europe recently. I stood in the Galleria dell’Accademía di Firenze, inches from the statue of Michelangelo’s David. And almost nobody was looking at the statue. They were all

take a selfies posing in front of David’s you-know-what-ie.

Shortly thereafter, I left the gallery and I saw an Italian woman and her children on the street, begging for food from English speaking tourists. She held up a sign which read, “God Bless” She too was scrolling TikTok. So were her kids.

Each time someone put money in her basket the tourists took a selfie with her.

Scientific evidence isn’t good. Research shows that the average human attention span is shrinking by a lot.

Twenty years ago, for example, brain researchers measured attention spans in adults. They were shocked to realize the average attention span had been reduced from 10 minutes to two and a half minutes.

But that was 20 years ago. Things have changed in two decades. Recently, similar research measured our current attention spans and discovered that on average we only…