BIRMINGHAM—I am eating hotel breakfast in the dining room. This past year, my wife and I have stayed in nearly sixty thousand hotels. That is only an estimate. And I rounded down.

I have become so accustomed to hotels that when I fall asleep in my own bed it feels weird. Sometimes, in the middle of the night I wake up expecting our bedroom to be laid out like a hotel room. You can imagine my surprise when I stumble over an eighty-pound bloodhound and nearly break my neck.

But I have grown to enjoy hotels. Some are WAY better than others. I have become a connoisseur of the conntinental breakfast, which is a French word for “cardboard-tasting eggs.”

This week I have been doing my one-man shows in different cities, and I have more engagements ahead of me this coming month. In fact, we are going to be in Pennsylvania, New York, and—I can hardly believe this—Canada.

Until this stage of life, I had never traveled anywhere. In fact, I have never done

anything worth scrapbooking.

I remember when my friends would return from their world adventures and show me pictures. I would get jealous. Having to look at someone else’s happy vacation pictures is a special kind of hell.

You have to pretend to be interested while they relive every painstaking moment of euphoria from their four-week trip to Spain.

“That’s me and Buffy!” the friend might say, “And here’s us doing cartwheels in Barcelona! And here we are jet-skiing with supermodels! And here’s Buffy and I bungee jumping over the La Sagrada Familia, and we were buck naked!”

And you just smile and nod.

Because I have no gauge for what world travel is like. Furthermore, I was raised fundamentalist and have therefore never been naked. My mother said I was born wearing corduroy pants and Hush Puppies.

To tell you the truth, I have never had…

Hi, Robert. I wanted to write to you because your dad told me about the hard time you’re having after your recent break-up.

I would just like to say that I know how you feel. You feel like a loser. Like a joke. Like a Knucklehead McSpazatron. But it’s simply not true.

If you could see yourself from another perspective you might believe me. But you can’t see yourself from a distance. Nobody can. Just like you can’t touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger. Just like pizza will never know what pizza tastes like.

I might be carrying those examples a little too far, but you get the idea.

Right now, you feel this way because you are probably remembering all the crummy moments of life. The mistakes, the humiliation, the parts that sucked.

The time you were passed over for the baseball game. When Lee Daniels skipped you and chose someone else for his team. And you just wanted to die.

The time a pretty young woman

from the uppity side of town made a remark about how you were plain-looking. Those were her actual words. It hurt worse than being called ugly.

There was the time you were hanging out with a bunch of friends, and someone convinced you that it was a brilliant idea to attempt a dance called “the Worm.” A dance which originated in ancient Rome, whose name literally means “I’ve had a few beers.”

You wish you could take that back.

Everyone has these kinds of experiences. Not just you. They replay in the brain like a song recorded on Memorex tape—I’m sorry if you’re too young to know what Memorex is. Google it.

Sometimes these old songs haunt us. Something will trigger your brain’s play-button and this little number replays in your head until the song is over. Whenever you close your eyes, there you are,…

This morning, I went for a short walk with my dog. I don’t normally take morning walks because we live in West Florida. Here in this part of the world we have two seasons: Scorching Biblical Hell, and November.

Normally, if you were to go for a walk on a summer morning, you would dehydrate before you made it back home. They would find you lying in the dirt road, face down, with your last will and testament typed on your phone as a text message.

So it is officially autumn. The air is no longer quite so humid, it now has a little bite to it. I carry a mug of coffee in my hand while I wait for my dog to make pee-pee.

I wave to my neighbors who are sitting on porches. We have thirty-second conversations when I pass. Mostly about the weather.

A few kids are hiking to the bus stop, wearing backpacks that are bigger than General Electric washing machines. I give a few high-fives, which I

understand kids don’t do anymore.

When I was coming along, all we had were high-fives, low-fives, and hand-cranked Victrolas. We also had the the behind-the-back-five, but that was extremely rare and only reserved for winning baseball games, or immediately following successful pranks involving explosive fireworks.

It’s a different world nowadays. High-fives aren’t as popular as they used to be. Tyler, a kid who lives on my street informs me that high-fives are “lame.” Nobody does them, he says. Everyone does the “fist bump” instead. Which I recently learned how to do.

A fist bump goes like this: Two individuals punch each other on the fist.

Tyler explains that this bumping transaction is not finished until directly after the bump when you open your hand, palm down, fingers splayed, and you make an explosion noise with your mouth.

“This is the boom part,” Tyler points out. “Always make it…

We are sitting on a porch overlooking the Choctawhatchee Bay on the first day of autumn. It is one of those accidental porch-sitting sessions where everyone ends up on the porch, but nobody planned it.

I am in a rocking chair, feet up. My elderly mother-in-law (Mother Mary) sits beside me doing the same thing. My wife is sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Our eighty-pound bloodhound wanders in circles, looking for something to chew, bury, or pee on.

Nobody is talking in complete sentences because there’s no need for coherent thought right now. The rules of porch-sitting are loose.

“Lord,” says Mother Mary. “Look at all these mosquitoes.”

“Yeah,” says my wife.

Yeah.

Every porch conversation in West Florida starts out with mosquitoes. It’s our tradition. But once you’ve covered mosquitoes, you can talk about anything.

You can talk about the time when a mosquito flew into your uncle’s shorts and bit him in his unmentionables, so he slapped himself in a place where a man should never swat himself.

Or you can talk about the time Mother Mary got malaria from a mosquito bite and had a high fever, then started singing Broadway songs at the dinner table.

Or you can talk about—why not?—that time Johnny Cooper dared you to eat a live lizard tail when you were in third grade.

Which is what I start talking about.

“So did you?” Mother Mary interrupts. “Did you actually EAT a lizard tail?”

“No, but I pretended to.”

“How do you pretend to eat a lizard tail?”

“I had gummy worms in my pocket, so I slipped one into my mouth and let it dangle, and I pretended to gag.”

“Gummy worms? Did you always carry gummy worms in your pocket as a boy?”

“No ma’am, but God was on my side that day.”

My lizard-eating stunt went down in history. To this day, people still think I actually ate a…

Nobody prepares you for the idea that you are not going to sleep all that well when you’re older, but eventually you find out it’s true. For years, elderly people tried to warn you that this would happen, and you never took them seriously.

After all, you were a young man. You had nothing to worry about. You slept so hard that all you ever wanted to do was sleep. Even when your mother came bursting into your room shouting, “I made spicy chicken casserole just the way you like it!”

And believe me, you would climb Mount Vesuvius for your mother’s spicy chicken casserole. Even so. You kept sleeping because you were a greasy little brat with a lightning fast metabolism and no joint pain.

When I was a young buck, I could sleep like nobody’s business. It was one of my many unusual talents—like swallowing my tongue, playing a Strauss waltz on my armpit, or commonly referring to myself as a “young buck.”

I stayed up as late as I

wanted, eating a steady diet of battery-acid-like food. And whenever I got pooped, I would just curl up and go to sleep somewhere, even if I happened to be in a place where it was kosher to sleep. Such as Jerry’s Cue Club Pool Hall.

The next morning, I’d wake up feeling refreshed and ready to eat more acidic food.

On Friday nights I used to stay up late because a local channel played Sci-Fi movie reruns from the 1950s. These were B-movies with leading male actors who used enough Brylcreem to mortar a two-story brick home. Their leading ladies were overly dramatic and often had unnaturally small waists that, anatomically speaking, looked like they didn’t contain a pancreas or spleen.

These movies were the highlight of the week. I would stay up all night watching films like:

“Them!” A 1954 black-and-white gem starring James Arness (Marshal Dillon…

It was several years ago. I was driving toward Geneva, Alabama, for two reasons. One: A funeral for my friend’s father. Two: I was going to buy a fishing boat.

You might as well kill two birds with one stone, that’s what I always say.

I arrived at the church, dressed in my decent clothes. I don’t have “nice” clothes per se. Everything I own is either halfway decent or reprehensible. The reprehensible stuff can be identified by the wrinkles, the paint blobs on the sleeves, and the coffee stains.

No man purposely stains his shirts with coffee. But when he has facial hair like me, the hair absorbs thirty percent of each coffee swig. Thusly, when the cup is removed from the mouth, the coffee drips onto the man’s chest, making him appear either senile or drunk. Sometimes both.

And ironing? I have not ironed a shirt since Theodore Roosevelt was elected.

So my clothes are not my best feature, which has been a problem in the past. I once got fired from

a church for having a wrinkled shirt. This is totally true, and it’s still hard to talk about.

I was working part-time, playing church piano. One Sunday morning, I was playing “Old Rugged Cross.” I was wearing wrinkled khakis, a moderately crumpled shirt, and sandals.

I loved sandals because at the time I worked in construction. We wore boots all day long and my feet were always cramped. As soon as I would get home, I couldn’t wait to wear sandals and let the old dogs breathe. Sandals are like a Biloxi vacation for feet.

The pastor was horrified. I received my walking papers not long thereafter. Don’t misunderstand me, I do try to dress nice, I’m just saying that I know there’s room for improvement. Also, I try to bathe regularly.

When I arrived at the chapel where the funeral was held, I told my…

Before we got married, my wife and I had to take a mandatory church marriage class. The Baptist church would not marry anyone without it.

The idea was: After eight weeks of rigorous marriage training, couples would receive an official certificate, trimmed in gold, with their names on it. And this certificate would prove to the world, without a doubt, that couples were spiritually prepared to stand at an altar and combine health insurance policies.

Keep in mind, this certificate wasn’t a marriage license. This was a “Baptist pre-marriage class certificate,” from the back of the “official Baptist marriage workbook,” purchased for $24.99.

Within the Baptist tradition, you see, you can’t do anything without first obtaining a certificate and unanimous committee approval. Even Sunday greeters are required to attend a four-week class that teaches them to properly say: “Here’s your bulletin, possible wayward reprobate sinner, sir.”

Thus, my future-wife and I arrived at the fellowship hall each week to participate in courses that prepared us for cohabitation.

These courses featured many important

games which the workbook termed “marital building exercises.” Many of which were developed by professional marriage book authors—some of whom had been married to the same person for as long as three to four years.

One such exercise was the Egg Test.

In this game, the future-bride (Jamie) balances an egg on a spoon clenched between her teeth. She wears a blindfold and walks across a room.

The future-husband (me) stands on the opposite side of the room (over by the piano). He uses ONLY his words to guide his future-wife through an obstacle course made up entirely of folding chairs which represent the confusing Maze of Life.

On the chairs are Post-It notes, labeled with various day-to-day marriage problems like: “car trouble,” “bills,” “career,” “children,” “chapter 11 bankruptcy,” “sharing the covers.”

In this exercise, the woman stumbles over chairs, spoon held in her mouth. She is thus…