Regions Field was alive with people. The theme for the night was Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift music was playing overhead. The ballpark was almost completely obscured by a cloud of estrogen.

The opposition was on the field, playing a game of pepper, while random clusters of teenage girls wandered the park, exchanging friendship bracelets.

Exchanging bracelets, I am told, is what Taylor Swift fans do when they encounter each other in the wild.

I felt like Grandpa Walton.

I met a few girls in the stands. They were maybe 11. They wore T-shirts with Taylor Swift’s face on them.

“We’re Swifties,” they pointed out.

“I would’ve never guessed,” I said.

“We have been listening to Taylor since we were little kids.”

“Time flies.”

One girl nodded. “I was nine when I first got into Taylor.”

“That long?”

They nodded in unison.

I asked how they became Swift fans.

“At first, we just liked her music. But then we sort of discovered a community of friends.”

Another girl explains, “We

all kind of believe in the same things. That’s what unites us as a group.”

I asked what sorts of things those were.

“Kindness, and love.”

Her friend added: “And we also believe in being strong, and standing up for what you believe in. That’s why we do the bracelets.”

My buddy, Aaron, wore a smile and asked what I believed in. I told him I believed I would have a beer.

I got a beer and made my way through the Swifties crowding the park. They came in all ages. All sizes.

“I have actually been following Taylor since my divorce,” said a middle-aged woman I met in the concession line. “I went through a bad period and the community of fans helped me through some hard times.”

I noticed the bracelets on her arm. I asked whether her…

It was the dogs. The dogs are what got me. A few years ago we visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum, and we saw a lot. Twisted steel girders. Baby-faced portraits of the deceased. Mutilated emergency vehicles.

But it was the dogs that wrecked me.

The dog exhibit is pretty small. Located in the far corner of the museum, with photographs of search and rescue dogs.

You see dogs nosing through rubble, wearing safety harnesses. You see them in their prime. They’re all deceased now. But they were spectacular.

There was Riley. Golden retriever. He was trained to find living people. But, he didn’t find any. Instead, he recovered the remains of firefighters. Riley kept searching for a live survivor, but found none. Riley’s morale tanked.

“I tried my best to tell Riley he was doing his job,” said his handler. “He had no way to know that when firefighters and police officers came over to hug him, and for a split second you can see them crack a smile—that Riley was succeeding at

doing an altogether different job. He provided comfort. Or maybe he did know.”

There was Coby and Guiness. Black and yellow Labs. From California. Surfer dogs. They found dozens of human remains.

And Abigail. Golden Lab. Happy. Energetic. Committed. Big fan of bacon.

Sage. A border collie. Cheerful. Endless energy. Her first mission was searching the Pentagon wreckage after the attacks. She recovered the body of the terrorist who piloted American Airlines Flight 77.

Jenner. Black Lab. At age 9, he was one of the oldest dogs on the scene. Jenner’s handler, Ann Wichmann, remembers:

“It was 12 to 15 stories high of rubble and twisted steel. My first thought was, ‘I can't send Jenner into that…’ At one point, [Jenner] disappeared down a hole under the rubble and I was like, ‘Ugggggh!' Such a heart-stopping moment..."

Trakr. German Shepherd. Tireless worker. Worked until he couldn’t stand…

The weather is great. Meteorologists call it “fake fall,” when summer weather, for whatever reason, undergoes what the local weatherman called an “identity crisis.”

Perhaps this means summer starts looking into buying a sports car, getting a facelift, or begins shopping at Lululemon. I don’t know.

Either way, this glorious weather doesn’t last for more than a few days, but it’s a nice break from the summer agony.

During fake fall, you can sit on your porch and wave at your neighbors without sweat stains beneath your arms. And your neighbors are actually outdoors to wave back.

“Hello!” you say, waving your arm at your neighbor.

“Hello!” comes the response.

“How do you like this weather?” you ask.

And everyone usually answers that they are content. And we ARE content. Because faux autumn is great.

Last week, Alabama’s temperatures were akin to the Fifth Circle of Hell. Last week you couldn’t check the mail without seeing buzzards overhead.

The Alabama heat can

be oppressive. You start sweating within seconds of exposure. Your drawers get soggy. Your feet squish in your shoes. The humidity can reach the triple digits, which means that if you have curly hair, you will look like you forgot to take your psychiatric meds.

Take me. I have curly hair. Humidity is not good for my hairdo. In high humidity, I look like the love child of Bozo the Clown and Eleanor Roosevelt.

But with fake fall, everyone’s hair does what it’s supposed to do. Also, birds are singing. The sky is blue. Kids are riding bikes. Distant leaf blowers are singing their encore chorus.

And suddenly, you’re grateful for little things. Like honeycrisp apples, or the sound of children playing tag in the distance. For iced tea in sweaty glasses.

For crickets and cicadas. For the Latino music hovering in the air, blasting…

Pelham, Alabama. The year was 1927. Coolidge was president. Gas was 21 cents per gallon. Beer was illegal. Charles Lindberg crossed the Atlantic. Henry Ford unveiled the Model A.

And way down in Alabama, the Twenty-Second state bought 940 acres which included Double Oak Mountain and parts of Little Oak Ridge. The foothills of the Appalachians.

It was such magnificent country that years later, the National Park Service got involved with its development. The NPS acquired 8,000 acres of additional land.

The federal government was going to turn this place into a national park, on par with Yellowstone and Yosemite. They were going to call the park “Little Smoky Mountain National Park.”

But then some guy named Hitler screwed up the world, started a war. Construction ceased. Every able-bodied male was sent overseas.

Today, what remains is Oak Mountain State Park. Otherwise known as “My Office.”

I hike Oak Mountain a lot. It isn’t far from my back door. And whenever I visit, I feel my shoulders lower from my ears.

This morning, I

hiked with my dog, Otis (alleged Labrador). We hiked for hours. He sprinted ahead, while I struggled to stay oxygenated.

“Slow down, dangit!” is what I was saying for most of the day.

And I met a colorful mosaic of human beings on the mountain.

Three older women, hiking together, using walking sticks, singing hymns aloud. They were from Alabaster.

“We’re Church of Christ,” they told me. “But we drink like Catholics.”

I passed a young man who was hiking with a newborn baby strapped to his chest. A single dad. His wife died in a car accident. He is raising his infant daughter alone. He feels peace on this mountain.

I met a woman hiking with her teenage daughter. The daughter just graduated college and is joining the military. She is about to ship out for training.

I passed a family from Denmark. They are…

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 Facebook 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 AI algorithms.

Which is probably why the next video on my newsfeed depicted Japanese men and women on a Japanese game show, sliding down a waterslide into a vat of whipped cream. But at least their pits weren’t visible.

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, lawn-mower-style, then you used dial-up internet that took four or five years to connect.

Facebook 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…

Air travel is not my favorite thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not my most hated thing. My most hated thing is slow internet. But air travel is up there.

I am not afraid to fly, it’s waiting in lines I don’t like. The airline even recommends that you arrive two hours in advance so you will already be in line when they announce that your flight has been delayed.

Also, I’m not crazy about passengers who snore. I just finished a flight where the man next to me admitted beforehand that he snored.

“I’m just gonna give you fair warning,” he said. “I snore really loud.”

What was I supposed to say? Mazel tov? Should I have thanked him for this information?

The man beside me did indeed snore. So I wore headphones to listen to music. But there was a problem. Apparently, my cell phone was only able to access one song during the flight, which was “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” I have

no idea how this song made it onto my phone.

Thus, I had two options: I could either turn off Meat Loaf and listen to the hyperventilating grizzly bear beside me. Or, I could do something that would cause an air marshall to subdue me.

When we reached Atlanta, I had to go to the bathroom, and I had only fifteen minutes to catch my connecting flight. There was a line for the men’s room about the size of a rural school district.

“You know why we’re waiting in line?” the man ahead of me said.

“No.”

“Because there are only two bathrooms in service in the entire airport.”

Men in line were gyrating, pumping their legs, groping themselves, wincing in pain. A four-year-old boy had to go so bad that his father marched him into the bathroom and held him up to the sink.…

There were two little boys on the beach. Maybe six and seven. One was collecting seashells. The other collected sand.

Lots of kids collect shells and sand. But these kids were different. The boys were dragging five-gallon buckets behind them. Within these buckets were hundreds of shells, and gallons of sand. The buckets were too heavy for the boys to lift. So they dragged them.

An old man saw the kids. He watched the boys inspect seashells, then toss them into the bucket. He watched them struggle to muscle the buckets through the wet, compacted shore, cutting troughs into the sand.

Foolish boys, the old man thought.

“Excuse me,” the old man said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

The boys were covered in perspiration. Out of breath from the effort.

“We’re collecting sand and shells,” the elder kid said.

The old man smiled. The old man was, after all, a former boy himself. He knew about boyhood eagerness. He knew, intimately, how all kids overdo

things. One of the great lessons of adulthood, one could argue, is learning how to pace oneself.

The foolhardiness of children is astounding, that’s what the old man was thinking. Youth is wasted on the young. When you’re a child, you try to eat the whole birthday cake. When you’re an old man, you learn not to eat sugar past 4:30 p.m.

“Don’t be silly, boys,” the old man said, using this opportunity to teach the children an important life lesson. “You have too many shells for two little boys. And there’s no good reason to collect all that sand.”

The boys looked at their buckets. Shells brimmed over the top.

“Too many shells?” one boy said.

The old man knelt to the boys’ eye level. He affected his most wizened voice, preparing to impart his awesome wisdom to the reckless lads.

“Think…

A very serious issue we all need to be concerned about is the presence of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives, and we will get to that shortly, but first we need to discuss how I got stung by a bee.

At the time, I was sitting on the dock at the lake, with my wife, drinking an ice-cold can of Ovaltine.

I saw the little bee, flitting through the air. He looked so busy and diligent. Almost cute, even.

Generally, I don’t worry about bees. Bees hardly ever do any harm. I vaguely remember thinking to myself, “Gee, I hope that bee doesn’t land on me.”

But anyone who knows anything about bees, however, knows they are deeply attracted to redheads. Bees, you’ll note, are the ONLY creatures on the planet attracted to redheads. God knows, girls aren’t.

I learned this in middle school when kids started playing kissing games wherein they would draw a circle on the floor and make a boy stand in

the center. The girls would either kiss the boy or pay a fine. I made $21.34.

The bee landed on me. Specifically, it landed on my hair.

That’s when I yelled: “It’s a bee!” I said this for the benefit of my wife. I’m sure the bee already knew it was a bee.

My wife, who was reading a magazine, saw the bee in my hair and a crazed look came over her.

“I see it,” said my wife. “Don’t move.”

My wife was inching toward me, with an eager grin on her face. The same excitable, almost insane glare she gets whenever she finds a pimple on someone’s body. My wife loves pimples. She is obsessed with pimples. Whenever she sees one, she has to pop it. This pimple could be on anyone’s body. It could be on the chin of, for example, Meghan…

The old man was in Walmart. He was wearing pajama bottoms and an Eagles T-shirt. The band, not the football team.

He also wore slippers. I knew they were slippers because they were fuzzy and white. Ballcap, crumpled and stained with sweat and grime. He hadn’t shaved in a while. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin.

There were tattoos on his forearms. Not the new kind of fancy tats, multi-colored and expensive. These were a few grades below battleship tattoos. Crudely done. Almost like the inkwork inmates give themselves with guitar wire and BIC pens.

He wore an oxygen tank, contained in a fanny pack, strapped around his waist. A rubber cannula snaked from his pack, securely set beneath his nose.

The old man checked out at the self-checkout kiosk. He loaded his own plastic bags. The machine spit out his receipt. He grasped his aluminum cane and began shuffling toward the door to present his receipt to the receipt checker.

Consequently, I

remember the days before receipt checkers. I remember the days before self-checkout kiosks, too. In fact, I remember a time, boys and girls, when—hard as this is to believe—you walked into a store and there was an ACTUAL person behind an ACTUAL cash register, who, after they rang you up, ACTUALLY told you to have a “blessed day.”

Those days are gone.

The old man, unsteady on his feet, walked toward the door. I was afraid he was going to fall. By the time he reached the receipt checker, he was teetering badly, on the brink of collapse.

He fell into the Walmart employee, holding the employee’s shoulders for support.

“God, I’m sorry,” the man said to the employee. “I’m so sorry.”

The receipt checker looked like a manager of some sort. Maybe even a high-level guy, stuck working the door. He was well dressed. Pressed khakis,…

“Dear Sean, are you a Christian? Sometimes I can’t tell. There is only one way to heaven, and your ‘tolerance for all,’ and ‘just be a good person’ philosophy sounds fine, but it leads to hell.

“...Hell is real, Sean. I read about your affinity for alcohol, and how you condone flagrant sinners. …As a Christian, I find your feel-good writing to be misleading and disgusting to Believers. There is only one way to heaven… and I believe you know this. I am not saying any of this in judgment, I am only saying this as your brother. Repent, friend. The time is at hand.”

Dear Friend. Gosh. First of all, your concern for my soul humbles me. I am honored. You sound like someone I could be friends with.

Thank you for taking time to write such a stirring and unsolicited email.

It’s funny, I used to know an elderly retired preacher who said that someone’s eternal soul was like their groin region. To just walk up and start talking about someone’s

groinal region is rude and downright uncalled for. But congratulations to you. You just jumped right in there.

The writer in me needs to tell you that your letter was extremely well written. Not one grammatical error. I am verry empressed. I actually counted your total words. There were 912. It takes me hours to write 900 error-free words.

Ergo, you spent at least an hour out of your day writing to me. How unselfish.

I’ll bet you spend the same amount of time worrying about children who are born to crack-addicted parents. I’ll bet, each day, you visit those drug-addicted babies in their lowly states.

I’ll bet you are also a frequent volunteer in the NICU, holding motherless and fatherless babies, so they don’t die of neglect. Kudos to you, sir. I wish I could be like you.

You probably also visit the homeless shelters and…