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…

Dear Young Writers,

You know who you are. You’re reading this on your phone, computer, tablet, or maybe a soggy newspaper you found in a gutter.

Maybe you’re in college or in high school. Maybe you’re a middle-schooler with a munificently grandiose vocabulary.

Either way, you’re a writer. And you know you’re a writer, deep inside. So I’m writing you. Because you’re confused. You don’t know what you’re doing with your life. You’re embarrassed to talk about who you are.

Writers are viewed as oddballs in our American culture. And it’s a shame because it’s not this way everywhere.

In Europe, for example, if you tell someone you’re a writer, the Europeans get dreamy eyed and converse about “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”

But in America, when you tell someone you want to be a novelist, they look at you as though you have just broken wind in a school board meeting. To many people, wanting to be a writer is like wanting to be an astronaut.

Thus, I am going to share with

you a few thoughts about the field of professional writing. Things many writers don’t want you to know. Such as, how to find a complete three-course dinner by rummaging through the municipal garbage.

Because, you see, professional writers are sort of like stage magicians. It’s all an act. These “magicians” continually try to pull literary rabbits out of their hats. Only, instead of calling them “rabbits,” they obsess over whether they should use the word “bunnies,” “hares,” “cottontails,” “lagomorphs,” or in extreme cases, “chinchillas.”

Thus, the first thing I can tell you about writers is that none of us know what the hellfire we’re doing.

I don’t want to generalize, but this is true for every single writer alive. Don’t trust any author who says they know what they’re doing. They are full of chinchilla.

Writers are not nuclear engineers.…

A few years ago. I met her in a hospital room. I arrived early, with my Scrabble game in tow.

I’ve owned this particular game board since my youth. My mother owned it before me. Her mother before her. This game is older than Methusala’s fixed-arm mortgage. The date on the box is 1949. It’s one of my most prized possessions.

I come from word-people. My grandmother was a voracious reader. My mother read Michener novels the same way some people pop Tic Tacs.

Often, in my family, we played Scrabble for money. Meaning, if you were to play Scrabble against the women in my household, you would have quickly found yourself humiliated, in financial debt and—in many circumstances—naked.

I knocked on the hospital room door. The girl was lying in a bed. She was 16 and lovely. Her head was bald. Her body was weak and lean. I’ll call her Ariel.

She began suffering from headaches a few days after her 16th birthday. It was glioblastoma. The prognosis was bad.

“She’s good at Scrabble,” her mother told

me in an email. “She read in one of your columns that you liked Scrabble, too. She would love to play a game with you.”

So I brought my game board.

But here’s the thing. In 20-odd years, I had never been beaten at Scrabble. Except once. And it was my wife who beat me.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying I’m “good,” per se. I’m only saying that, in many circles, I am a legend.

I set up the board. The girl opened with “cosmic.” A 24-pointer, and she used almost all her letters. Not a bad beginning.

“Your turn,” said Ariel.

Everyone thinks Scrabble is about large words and triple-word scores. Not true. The trick to the game lies in the two-letter words. Words like: “Aa,” “oe,” “id” “ka” and “xu.” You lay an “xu” down in just the right…

Dear Kid,

Don’t grow up. Don’t turn into an adult. That’s my advice. Resist adulthood. Be a kid forever.

Right now, a lot of adults are angry in America. To be fair, we have a lot to be angry about. But adults can behave badly when they are angry. So please forgive us.

Because the truth is—and I shouldn’t be telling you this—adults can be pretty stupid.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean we’re “stupid” in a negative sense. Truly, I don’t. After all, just because someone is stupid doesn’t mean you can’t love them. Take dogs. Dogs can be very unsmart, but we still love them. Hallmark Channel movies can be ingloriously stupid, but they are also wonderful.

Still, this doesn’t change the fact that we adult humans are, in fact, giant dipsticks. The problem is, of course, that we adults think we are brilliant.

Oh, sure, our species occasionally does some brilliant things. Beer is only one example. Humankind has also, for instance, learned to manufacture smartphones with touchscreens capable of flushing our toilets

from outer space.

But this doesn’t make us smart. Because we still don’t know how to listen. We don’t empathize. And even though our parents taught us, we still don’t know how to share.

You know what we DO know how to do?

We know how to kill each other. Again, I’m not being pessimistic. This is just a fact. We are among the only mammals who kill one another.

Tigers do not kill tigers. Squirrels don’t kill squirrels. When was the last time you saw cows killing each other?

But look at history. The Punic Wars in (164 B.C.), 2 million killed. The Jewish-Roman Wars, (66 A.D.) another 2 million. The Crusades (1095-1229) 3 million.

The Mongol Invasions, 40 million. The Conquests of Timur, 20 million. Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, 2.5 million. Spanish Conquest of the Incan…

Tonight, I am in a band. I am only a guest musician. But the guys on stage are my friends.

It’s a great night. Bright lights are shining in my face. There are happy people in the audience. And I can’t think of many things I love more than playing music with my friends. I am playing piano.

There’s an old saying about bands. The quickest way to get the band to sound good is to shoot the piano player.

Old joke. One I’ve heard many times. But then, I’ve heard them all throughout the years.

Q: What do you call a piano player without a girlfriend?

A: Homeless.

Q: What do you throw to a drowning piano player?

A: His piano stool.

I’ve been playing piano since age 9. The way I started playing piano was, my father bought an old spinet from the classified section.

One December afternoon, Daddy and three of his fellow ironworkers hauled the piano into our home and put the instrument into our dank basement, just beside the water heater, beneath

the framed embroidery which read:

“Watch ye therefore: ye know not when the master of the house cometh.”

My father bribed his friends to help him move this piano by paying them with beer. His friends were feeling no pain. As a result, by the time the piano got to the basement, the thing looked as though it had fallen down three flights of stairs. Because, of course, it had.

But it sounded great. I was over the moon to have MY VERY OWN PIANO.

Mama asked Daddy whether he was going to buy me piano lessons. He replied, “If the boy wants to play bad enough, he’ll play.”

Because that was the old-school way. It was an “if you build it they will come” sort of mentality. Daddy supplied the piano, it was up to me to do the rest.

So…