For the past few weeks, I’ve been adapting Big Head on the Block into Spanish.

The project is part of a workshop I joined with Hernán Casciari and his publishing team in Argentina. It is not easy to translate oneself into another language—hence the existence of Spanglish, Chinglish, Portuñol, or any other pidgin/creole you hear among our immigrant communities. “Oye man, ¿tú me puedes pasar that thing over there?” “Can lah, no problem.” “We go mangiare first?”

But beyond the language, carrying over a reference—let’s say a place, like McKay’s Used Bookstore and the pleasure of walking through its aisles on a rainy Saturday afternoon in February, or having your parking spot stolen by a vaping teenager in their daddy’s pick-up truck at Target—is just as difficult. In this case, the speaker is left with the option of leaning into the universal (e.g., used bookstores are a time warp; teenage dudes are turds) or cutting the reference altogether for the risk of losing their listener’s attention.

The worst response to anything you write is not anger or disagreement but a scrunched nose and short pause followed by the verbal death sentence: “Wait…what?”

Adapting my work for an audience of people who don’t know me from Adam has exposed my tendency to weigh down my stories with details. I blame my obsession on journalistic training, but it’s really the product of indiscipline: having too much to say and not knowing how to say it. If I were grading my work neutrally, as I do my students’, I’d call this overwriting.

“So tell me again why I need to know where every cousin at the barbecue was sitting before your grandfather said the thing that ruined dinner?”

“What is the value of outlining the full inventory of condiments in your parents’ fridge?”

Since I launched this Substack in 2021, I’ve pelted you with minutiae. Taken you down countless rabbit trails rather than expressing, leanly, the universal human themes I’m most interested in: coming to terms with failure, longing for more from life, missing childhood, and finding joy in the ordinary so that you don’t smash your head into the wall.

Lacking boundaries is a culprit in my literary crime. There is a happy medium between restriction—“do this, and do it exactly this way,” as our fathers taught us—and coloring outside the lines in the name of self-expression. When I’m hired for a freelance piece, or my Spanish editors tell me I can’t go a lick over 24,000 words, I must abide because they sign the check and make the rules.

“Heavy is the head who wears the crown,” the idiom goes. I’m the business owner who can’t stop dreaming up new products before perfecting the ones people showed up for in the first place, all because I’m the one in charge. What begins as creative abundance becomes confusion. And confusion is a recipe for being forgotten.

Today, I have no story to tell you.

I spent weeks rebuilding briancanever.com into a storytelling-for-hire service to make up for my lost teaching income over the summer. I’m waiting on my editor to tell me how much rewriting I must do for this book about being stuck between worlds that I suspect only a few bilingual friends and my aunt will buy. I’m also trying to enjoy going to the pool with my kids each night, eating watermelon outside, and seeing the sunshine.

There remains a possibility that I archive or significantly alter Storytime with Big Head in the coming months. Maybe writing about something other than capital-M Me will make it easier to stay on point. Or maybe I need better boundaries: “no more than 500 words,” or “if you complain about lack of time or money one more time, you must immediately delete this and start over.”1

But I no longer feel right fiddling for hours with a blank page instead of hanging with my wife and kids, learning jiu-jitsu, or smoking a pipe on the porch with a neighbor who’s asked to hang out for two months and whom I still haven’t invited over. Oh yeah, and the World Cup starts this week!

If you’re interested in the Spanish adaptation, Casciari’s publishing house put up a pre-sale link this week. If you have thoughts or ideas for Storytime, shoot them over to me.

Until next time, my friends.

Before you leave, you can support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $50/year, buying me a coffee, or ordering a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella. But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend, or drop me a note to tell me you enjoyed it. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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I am afraid of what is soon to overtake me. Unlike in November 2022, when I published a version of this essay just hours before the men’s World Cup kicked off in Qatar, the build-up to this summer’s tournament has been quiet, eerily so, at least in my home. Though I fear, this is a trick. In a few days, a sleeping giant will awake, and I will be thrust headfirst into the madness that is the world’s greatest sports tournament.

Nearly four years ago, I believed I was writing a goodbye letter to Lionel Messi. Because sport is wonderful as well as cruel, that story did not come to pass. Instead of days of anguished mourning on the bathroom tiles, I was released from my purgatory and welcomed at the pearly gates of football heaven.

Now another World Cup is here, closer to home and with equal levels of drama and absurdity. The tournament has expanded to 48 teams, despite there being only three or four with a real chance of winning it. (Only eight nations have ever won it before.)1 The U.S. will play at home, though the messy run-up since Gregg Berhalter’s too-late sacking has given new coach Mauricio Pochettino less than two years to build a team capable of going on an upset run to the semifinals. Argentina arrives with Messi, against all biological probability, as captain, and faith enough that talk of a bicampeonato has ordinary Argentinians shouting anulo mufa (“I cancel the jinx”) in every comments section on YouTube. Plus, Scotland’s here! I’ll be flying with Mickey, who managed to get tickets through a college roommate, to Boston to watch Andy Robertson & Co. go full Braveheart on FIFA darlings Morocco.

While I should be wiser and more mature now, as a 37-year-old father of four, there is something about World Cup soccer that turns even the most grown-up men into little boys again. We’ll see how that plays out starting this Thursday. But for now, enjoy this blast from the past.

Originally published Nov. 20, 2022

In just a few hours, the World Cup will kick off in Qatar.

Every media outlet has already covered FIFA’s decision to award the world’s most important sporting event to a nation that could neatly fit inside Connecticut, and that didn’t play an international soccer game until Brazil had already won three World Cups—but is the world’s fifth-richest, governed by leaders drunk on oil money and with a penchant for making back-room deals with guys even Marvel supervillains wouldn’t split an Uber with. The tournament was moved, for the first time ever, from its traditional summer window to winter, interrupting nearly every club season in the world. All so the players wouldn’t die from heat stroke in stadiums the Qataris, who are so rich they don’t work, shipped in 30,000 poor foreigners to build (many of these laborers having died under horrible working conditions).

There are other storylines as well. Football storylines are what FIFA Clown-in-Chief Gianni Infantino would have you call them. In a recent press conference, Infantino said the kinds of things that make even recent U.S. presidents sound like NASA scientists. The Italian has spent the entirety of the past week going back and forth between making political statements and telling people to keep politics out of sport: “Forget about the dead Hindus and being beaten with a baton if you wear a spaghetti dress. Just focus on the game!”

Among the football storylines, you will find the absence of 2006 champions Italy, which failed to qualify after winning the Euros and going undefeated for a world-record 37 games from 2017–2021. You will also find questions about whether the golden generation of Belgians, English, Iranians, and Senegalese will make good on their promise (whatever that translates to by tournament’s end). And, more importantly, if Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo will finally lift the trophy in their fifth and, likely, last World Cup.

I could address it all. I could lecture about the corruption that bleeds into every professional sport—why, if you want to see the game at its most beautiful, you don’t watch it on TV but play it on patchy grass fields. I could give my take on the betting odds and the predictions made by TV pundits. But I don’t have the energy to.

Because a ball hasn’t been kicked yet and I’ve already cried at the thought of what might happen. I’ve sat on the couch, imagining Argentina’s elimination, watching compilations of Messi’s dribbles, and sobbed knowing that, whether on December 18 or before, I will not see him again in these colors.

The other morning, I was watching a documentary about the 2014 tournament. It included clips from the 7-1 semi-final loss Brazil endured, at home, to Germany (Argentina would lose, just 1-0, gratefully, to the same foe days later in the final). David Luiz said, in an interview after the game, “I just wanted to bring happiness to these people,” his face red with tears that wouldn’t stop pouring from his eyes. “My people have suffered so much with other things. Sorry to everyone. Sorry to all the Brazilians. I just wanted to make them smile.”

Suffering.

“Suffering is so intertwined with sports that the verb is a favorite in headlines,” said Mexican-American journalist Fidel Martinez this week in his beautiful reflection about the 2006 World Cup for the LA Times. “You don’t just lose, you suffer defeat. And if this is the case, then it stands to reason that no other sport is most responsible for causing suffering in this world than soccer.”

“Why do we, the millions who subject themselves to the whims of a cruel sport, do it? Because we can’t imagine living without it.”

I know I will suffer, and that’s why I’m writing this now and not in a week or in the days before the final.

My nerves will not be able to handle writing before Argentina faces off against Mexico next Saturday at 2 p.m., when their fate may hang in the balance, and even less so in the Round of 16 or any single-elimination game afterward. What so many of us are about to throw ourselves into is not pleasure—we are not blocking out time on our calendars and setting up watch parties with friends to celebrate. This is soccer, not gymnastics or the NFL. True fans will not enjoy any more than the 10 seconds immediately after their nation scores a goal before returning to the mental bomb shelter, crossing their fingers for the game to end and their country not to be sent packing.

This aspect of sport is why I fundamentally cannot understand the people who do things like post on social media inside the 90 minutes when their country’s best 11 are clenching their teeth and chasing glory. Or who will follow the odds more closely than the ball, so they know where to put their money. The only acceptable bet is on your team to win it all, whether you’re Costa Rican or Japanese (two cultures, which I imagine, are too sensible to bet anyway).

Earlier today, I shared with Haley the contact info for my boss, so she can write her on the morning of Argentina’s potential elimination: “Brian will not be able to make it into work for the next week because he has been lying on the bathroom floor eating Tums and murmuring about German strikers while covered in his own mucus.”

And I know it’s crazy. I’m crazy.

Because my suffering and preoccupation this time are not at all connected to the U.S. team. How can I think of Gio Reyna and Tim Weah and Christian Pulisic and whether we beat Wales on Monday when I’ve got the retirement of the greatest player since Diego Maradona following me like a dark cloud from room to room?

In 2010, I suffered the American second-round defeat to Ghana in a beer garden in Jersey City. After hearing the people around me say inane things like, “How can we lose to a third-world country when we’re the greatest in the world?” I vowed never again to watch an important game in public. But World Cup soccer has a knack for wiping your memory. So in 2024, I watched in a bar in Bristol, Connecticut, with my ESPN co-workers as the U.S. fell to the Belgians. Three years later, when the U.S. was bounced from qualifying in Trinidad, I sat in darkness, answering only one phone call, from my best friend Mickey, who was suffering from that elimination in his apartment in the Dominican Republic. In grief and anger, we lamented that American soccer would never be fixed as long as it was the sport of the suburbs, governed by lawyers and coached by Englishmen or guys who say “goaltender” instead of watching the Champions League.

My concern for the Yanks ended after we lifted the Gold Cup against Mexico in August 2021 and will restart only after the World Cup trophy is lifted (and, hopefully, Gregg Berhalter is gone).

I’m back to being the 9-year-old kid crying in front of an old television set in 1998, refusing to eat barbecue and watch fireworks on July 4 because Argentina had been beaten by the Dutch and my hero, Batistuta, was going home instead of Dennis Bergkamp. I’m the teenager who watched his parents’ nation get bounced from the quarterfinals in PKs by the Germans in 2006, and then twice more watched the same nation end our hopes: 4-0 in the quarters in 2010, and in the final that 2014 summer when I misread the stars and considered a life in which I didn’t always expect doom or Bastian Schweinsteiger to be lurking around every corner.

The other day, Haley sent me a podcast by the Argentine-American journalist Jasmine Garsd called The Last Cup/La Última Copa. It tells the Messi story as an Argentinian boy whose family left Rosario in the middle of the country’s worst economic collapse, yet who always sought to return, even as he lost the subtle elements of his identity, as all immigrants do the more time they spend away from home.

While I was not born nor have ever lived in Rosario—and my cousins called me a yanqui when I visited in 2009—in Bayonne, New Jersey, the majority of my friends growing up identified more with the countries of their ancestors than the one on their passports. When I got to college, it felt only natural to use my scholarship to build my knowledge of Latin America in order to reverse my parents’ immigrant journey and return to Argentina, where I imagined I’d fit in as seamlessly as dulce de leche inside an alfajor.

This wrestling with who I am is perhaps why my relationship with Messi has been so deep.

Messi and I were born just 19 months apart. I watched him for the first time at 16, in 2005, from a television set in Nono’s kitchen as he led Argentina at the Under-20 World Cup in the Netherlands. Two years prior, Messi had been approached by the Spanish federation with an offer to don the red and yellow of his adoptive nation. But he rejected the proposal and waited for a call from his homeland—the one that he couldn’t predict, over the course of the next two decades, would brand him an imposter, a traitor, and an intellectually disabled European with a fake accent. In the tournament, Messi scored the third goal to eliminate Spain in the quarterfinals. A year later, he played at the senior World Cup, scoring against Serbia in the group, before being left on the bench by Jose Pekerman as Argentina crashed out in the quarterfinals, causing fury to erupt across the pampas.

Messi has always tried so hard to convince the doubters of his national identity. He married a girl he knew from childhood. He preserved his parents’ old house in the neighborhood and traveled back to Rosario every chance he could to see his family and friends, despite enduring harassment and even the fists of a teenage idiot who supported the city’s rival team.

Because Messi wasn’t Maradona and did not lead Argentina to a major trophy until the 2021 Copa America, fans and media were quick to squawk whenever he did a not-Maradona thing—like not winning the World Cup in 2010, 2014, and 2018 or being a loud asshole. Finally, though, he’s been accepted. He’s earned his redemption song. And the first line of another, sung by Argentinian supporters in Qatar this November ties him irrevocably to his homeland.

I started writing this in the morning, while Haley was at the gym with the kids. When she got home, she walked in as I stood in the kitchen, sniffling and looking out the window. “Did something happen?” she asked. “Or is it Messi again?”

A few weeks ago, I was startled awake by a terrible vision: Thomas Müller holding another World Cup trophy as white confetti rained down around him. Beside him were Robert Lewandowski, Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane, and Luka Modric, also in white German uniforms. They were all laughing and pointing. And I never saw Messi.

That is when I realized I was still inside the nightmare. I woke up sweating and grabbed my phone to check the date, making sure the World Cup hadn’t started yet.

But on Tuesday morning at 5 a.m., it will. Messi, Lautaro Martinez, or Angel Di Maria will kick off in Doha. The clock will tick, and only the divine timekeeper will know when it’s to cease. For my health and sanity, I hope it’s at 11:30 a.m. ET on December 18. If it’s not, you’re unlikely to see or hear from me. You will not get a response to your text messages or DMs until at least Christmas. Haley will have to tell the world that I’m okay. And I hope to God I will be.

Before you leave, you can support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $50/year, buy me a coffee, or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella. But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me you enjoyed it. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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I can stay here in the darkness
Feels like I’m wandering in circles for days
We never reach the gates
I’ll keep walking anyway.

—The Wonder Years, “No Closer to Heaven”

Exactly five years ago, I sat across from a friend at my favorite Knoxville taco shop. He’d invited me to lunch, excited to share the cure for my professional discontentment.

“You’re pouring everything you have into a job that doesn’t ask for it,” he said. I was creatively constipated, working as a writer on a team that was replacing creative storytelling with content marketing. He pointed to my plate, brimming with fried cow intestines. “What that does for your bowels,” he said, “you need for your soul.”

I had to write for myself again.

The adventure would start on Ghost a week later, and eventually transition here to Substack. Rather than trying to impress a boss or gain an audience through my various bylines, I determined to build my own community of readers. The effort had failed before—that failure motivated my decision to attend grad school for journalism in 2013, hoping a degree would grant me legitimacy as a wordsmith—but Chris handed me a list of independent creators to serve as guides for this new leg of the journey.1

I had a hard go of it at first, unclear about what exactly I wanted besides freedom from a boss telling me what I was allowed to do. My first idea was to write micro-poems and repost them on Instagram with Canva illustrations. It flopped. (The pandemic year, I ran a film account that also flopped, so I should’ve known better than to try to crack the algorithm.) I imagined using my profile-writing skills to create a large-scale project, similar to Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, that would spotlight extraordinary ordinary people in my social circle. I thought of giving writing advice, until I realized everyone, including famous writers who had better things to do than sell online classes to novices, had beaten me to it. (The specific sellout I refer to is Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller, now more famous as the founder of Storybrand and Marketing Made Simple.)

So I started blogging, first refashioning old essays and short fiction from my previous efforts at online writing, and then posting new entries about whatever came into my dome. (My first, fittingly, was called “The Time We Waste Not Creating.”) Since blogging would not make me money for some time, I also rebuilt my portfolio into a website that positioned me as a strategic storyteller—a fancy term for freelance writer. My hands were in various pots, feeling around for something that might lead to the money and platform required to be successful when you’re ugly, have no real skills, and are uncomfortable hounding your friends like a salesman desperate for their first commission.

Most of my attempts felt phony or half-hearted until I found Hernán Casciari, an Argentine 20 years my senior who has built perhaps the most influential storytelling machine in the Spanish-speaking world. He wasn’t begging, as most independent creatives on the internet seemed to be, or peddling wisdom he’d compiled from the front page of Google. He was telling stories, most of them short and anecdotal, that he’d written across his own various blogs in the mid- and late 2000s and adapted for TV and the radio. His appeal was to the counterculture. When he renounced all of his major publishing contracts and republished his books under his imprint, he made the PDF versions available for free. He built a magazine with his childhood best friend that is available internationally—I get it shipped to me in Knoxville—and which contains no advertisements, since it is funded by the people who pre-order it. Our first and last names are printed on the back pages. (This, too, is made available for free a week after it’s shipped.) The project has grown beyond a blog and a magazine to a School of Narrative, a crowd-funded media production company making films and TV series with big-name actors and directors, and a physical bookstore/community center.

Inspired by Casciari, I directed every bit of attention that was not focused on breadwinning to Storytime with Big Head. I put on a few storytelling shows with my friend Ben and some local writers and musicians at a bookstore that is now closed. I self-published a book and a novella, and recorded audio versions of each. In four years, I posted 223 essays, stories, and other writings, and as of today, 238 of you have subscribed to receive most of them in your email inbox for free. A handful of you pay me hard-earned money for these scribbles.

There have been more valleys than peaks.

I’ve often thought of shutting this down to focus on freelance work that pays for important things, like medical bills and beach vacations. I keep teaching classes at the university, sometimes less because I love watching a 20-year-old pretend to take notes while scrolling TikTok or suppressing their laughter at text messages sent conveniently to the laptops we can no longer ban from classrooms, than because I need the cashola for my kids’ swim lessons. Since November, when our fourth was born, I replaced my morning writing window with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And even though I’m terrible, I sometimes think I have more success at not being strangled by a stranger in pajamas than I do trying to build this community of misfits, weirdos, and subversives in plain clothing. (In reference to my college blog, I’ve begun to call you, and myself, “contemplators with anomalous minds,” since that sounds nicer than weirdo, according to my Normal friends.)

For now, I remain here, 107 drafts in my back pocket that I hope to get to before my midlife crisis or Jesus comes to take me home.

Thanks for being here, too, through the constant experiments that prove I still clearly have no idea what I’m doing. It’s possible I never will. I may keep beating my big ole head against the wall, despising Chris for telling me that I would never find joy in my work unless I did it for myself, until I contract CTE and must be spoon-fed mashed potatoes.

Or I might eventually penetrate the drywall, break straight through the insulation and the sheathing, to find you, gathered on the hillside with popcorn and gummy worms, watching the madness unfold from the comfort of a camping chair. I won’t mind if you applaud, even if my face is bleeding and I’m covered in dust. I’m just glad you made it to the show.

Before you leave, you can support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $50/year, buy me a coffee, or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella. But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me you enjoyed it. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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An earlier version of this story was published in May 2025.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.1

—Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

In April 2025, I ran my first half-marathon with a single goal in mind—to not, at any point or for any reason, stop running.

A year before, my wife had run the Knoxville race, her first since having our third child, and I was feeling jealous. A broken foot had forced me to retire from rec-league soccer. My last CrossFit competition was in 2019. I missed the thrill of chasing something, especially as I watched the runners pass from the front lawn of a friend’s house in Sequoyah Hills.

That doesn’t look so bad, I thought, while washing down a bagel with hot coffee.

“You think I could do it?” I asked Haley that night in bed. She said, Of course, delighted by my sudden interest in physical activity. But the truth is, I hadn’t run more than a mile since 2020. At 35, I was mostly riding the elliptical at 6 a.m. with women in their 70s.

“Hold on a second, ladies,” I said to Rhonda and Mary one morning when the bubble on my phone lit up with Haley’s name.

“I signed you up!” it said.

“For what?” I wrote her back.

“For the half!” she responded. “Discount if you sign up early. We can run it together! Remember, you said you wanted to try it?!”

. . .

“You alright, honey?” Rhonda asked from her machine as I looked down, silently, at my belly meat. My thighs, culprits in the death of three pairs of jeans so far that year, were already chafing. What have I done?

I’m not sure if in 2024 I grasped the concept of running 13 miles. . . at once. All I’d ever seen of a half-marathon was that short, flat section in Sequoyah Hills where my friends threw their watch party, and I felt sure I was a fool.

The Canevers are a squat and sedentary people. For generations, we have not moved without a clear and important purpose, such as chasing a soccer ball or outrunning someone to the front of a buffet line.

Even at the peak of high school soccer season, I had never run more than three miles with my teammates before practice. And I usually came in after the first drill had started, trying not to hurl. I was the veteran of a Color Run and, in 2017, a 5K fundraiser for a Paralympic charity in Washington, D.C. The idea of seeing a Mile-4 marker was as foreign to me as the first time I was handed hákarl, the fermented shark jerky Mr. Brynjarsson fed me in preparation for my battle with Paddlehands.2

What if, somewhere between mile markers 3 and 13, I trip over my laces and stumble headfirst into the curb, fracturing my skull?

“This will help you live without me,” I told Haley, confirming that she knew the login to the life insurance. “Tell the kids I love them.”

“You’re so dramatic,” she responded. “Anybody can run 13 miles. Just start light.”

For context, my wife is two things that I have never been: skinny and an optimist. She grew up in a world where children drank water and ate broccoli with their mac and cheese. Alien, to her, is the feeling of such intense hunger after second helpings of dinner that your mother must keep Hungry-Man meals stocked in the freezer. There was no drawer in her fridge named exclusively for Little Debbie. “Eat up, and it’ll make you big and strong,” my mother always said, never distinguishing between a thing that may be good for you and Zebra cakes.

For the love of my life, whose idyllic world consisted of foreign concepts such as self-control and turkey bacon, six months seemed plenty of time to prepare to do anything.

Her delusion makes sense if you consider that Haley met me on a soccer field, well after I’d reshaped myself into a lighter, fitter man. A breakup had consumed me. And from a plump 225, I had slimmed down through a mix of MMA and CrossFit training. In my late twenties, for the first time ever, I swam with my shirt off. I denied myself fried chicken, ate yogurt for breakfast. Before asking her on our first date, I’d stared at myself in the mirror, finding muscles in places where they’d never been before—my arms, for example. The skin above my waistband was no longer raw from rubbing against my belt buckle.

And I was terrified.

Terrified that slowing down, at all, would be the end of my fitness forever. A few days off to rest might turn into a week, and before long I’d be back to eating Cheetos in my underwear and ducking past the mirror after showers. The relationship was too fragile, especially once this strange person came into my life, promising to love me despite my obvious inadequacies.

Fortunately, in a CrossFit gym in South Knoxville, I discovered another force just a powerful as being attractive to the opposite sex: competition.

It’s a crude pleasure, one that is not mentioned in the promotional material for the Benefits of Fitness as a Grown-Up. I cannot speak for all, though in my case, I never once leapt from bed to avoid heart disease. I did not religiously work out to increase my range of motion or be well enough to chase grandkids around one day. What motivates people into gyms and sporting competitions well past their athletic primes is this: the feeling of being a winner, whether that’s for the first time or the first time in forever.

“Pain is weakness exiting the body,” a wise person once said. But joy is out-squatting the younger man beside you after having been woken up by a screaming toddler at 2 a.m.

That joy of fitness faded after my second child was born. With less time and money to go around, I was left with a simple choice to make: have fun with friends absent of my family, or get a group membership at the YMCA and work out with the grandmas before work. At the Y, there were no more Bro o’clock pump seshes or PRs. Before long, my T-shirts were stretched to their breaking point, begging to go up a size. I felt miserable.

This is what sparked the desire, however foolish, to run longer than I ever had before at the age of 36.

My first training run—and, by that, I mean I logged the time on Strava—was the day after Thanksgiving: 3.4 miles at an 11:14 pace. My lungs burned. My legs felt like they were made of stone. And I had forgotten even basic things, like whether you’re supposed to bend your knees and if it’s normal to sound like you have emphysema.

“Great work, babe!” Haley commented in the app afterward, her own profile a catalog of 8-minute miles just months after being sliced open for a third time. She meant it as encouragement, but the devil on my shoulder whispered: She’s making fun of you. Just quit. Running’s not for us. Let’s get Mexican food instead.

To drown out the sounds of my demons, both the ones inside my head as well as on my shoulder, I brewed up a special playlist. “Run Forrest Run,” is what I called it, a mix of high-tempo Christian hip-hop, screamo, and heavy metal. Friends started following me on Strava and asking when we could run together. I turned down every invitation for fear of embarrassing myself. By late January, I was up to five and six miles at a time. Even on the worst days, I made sure never to stop pumping, my natural distaste for cardio so extreme that letting myself walk a lap might be the start of a slippery slope that sent me back onto the sofa.

On bad-weather days, I kicked off every workout at the Y with 30 minutes on the treadmill. I loathed each touch of the green button. My body has never enjoyed the first 2 miles of any run. Only after persevering through that Sisyphean struggle do I feel any desire to keep going.

“Is everything alright?” the ladies asked from their ellipticals. Sweaty and exhausted, I reassured them with a nod. “Be careful, honey,” Mary said. “You don’t want to get hurt.”

Two weeks before the race, I ran 10 miles at a tortoise pace, trudging down the greenway with the inelegance of a man who hadn’t spent a minute on YouTube learning proper form. “How’d it go?!” Haley texted after I’d finished. “Thnk I needdd pIzza,” I responded. “MeaT lovers, QUIKLY.”

By the eve of the whole thing, I felt an eerie sense of confidence that, at the very least, I could suffer my way through the distance, barring the extreme, like my Achilles snapping due to never stretching. But now it was the forecast that looked ominous: thunderstorms through start time. I texted Wolfman, a veteran of many New York and Chicago marathons, who said the race would probably be canceled. No way, I thought.

Had I endured physical and mental anguish for six months just to have my participation trophy torn away before the buzzer sounded?

My paranoia about the weather released a fresh batch of anxieties:

What if I cramp at the eleventh mile?

What if I trip going downhill and spark a chain reaction that squashes a woman half my size?

What if my thighs chafe so bad that I have to wobble down the stretch? Or my cheap Amazon headphones give out and I must listen to hours of my own breathing?

By morning, the storms gave way to drizzle. To mitigate the chafing, Wolfman suggested I lube up and stick Band-Aids on my nips. “You won’t regret it,” he said. I ransacked the first-aid kit and was as oiled up as a door hinge by the time we hit the starting line. “You go on alone,” I told Haley. She vowed to guide me through the chaos of the first few minutes until the horde separated into packs.

I stared out at the sea of Hokas and compression shorts, and I understood there was no logic in attempting to beat anyone there. I will never be a good enough runner to outlast a masochist who derives pleasure from gradually destroying their knees. But there is another group of people I could challenge—my fellow big boys, the Clydesdales, hydration packs strapped to their backs, just as jellied up as I was.

Unlike the smaller dudes around me, they carried the traumatic memory of locking eyes at K-Mart decades earlier, when our mothers stuck their fingers in our waistbands before sending us, shamefully, to find pants labeled with the dreaded “H.” Our gazes met once again in the crowd of otherwise skinny people, and instead of hatred, there was empathy. We were in a foreign country, and every man 200-plus had to get across that line if we were ever gonna see McRibs again.

The buzzer sounded.

Haley was gone before I knew it, her sights set on a two-hour half. I settled into my own pace, keeping a close eye on the big boys and knowing that, as long as I kept enough in the tank, I could book it in the final two or three miles. It’s just like getting to the front of the buffet line, I reminded myself. Don’t let anyone get to that ladle before you load up on black pepper chicken!

The tactic worked.

I made it to the 11th mile at around the two-hour mark, and since all the fast people had already finished, I convinced myself that no one else would pass. Every person that I sprinted by renewed my energy, like an adrenaline shot to the hiney. The younger, fuller-haired, and more muscular, the more my power bar grew as I hurdled toward the finish, encouraging my fallen Clydesdales who’d failed to plan ahead and were wobbling for lack of lubrication and fruit snacks.

“Paratrophic vampirism is what you experienced at the end there,” Wolfman told me when I asked about the energy boost from seeing college kids with muscles resting on the curb as I bounced past with my belly out. “It’s a callback to our animal instinct.”

When you encounter a slow or injured person, he explained, you must visualize yourself draining whatever remains of their life source. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” he said. Making the actual sucking sound—sschluurrrp—as you sprint by them allows for an even greater transfer of energy. “Forget gel packs. When I’m slurping up the competition, I run a race dry as a bone.”

In the end, I completed my first half in a not-all-too-terrible 2 hours and 19 minutes, good enough for 1094^th place. There is no ranking for dudes over 200 pounds, but I like to think the General Tso’s chicken was still steaming by the time I shimmed my way to the tray. “We made it,” I imagined saying to another man with a skinny wife concerned about his blood sugar. We live to die another day, possibly from high cholesterol.

I never thought I would enjoy running.

Before the half, any time Haley asked me to go jogging, I responded with excuses—too tired, too stressed, too busy. But halfway through the race, I saw a sign. On Sequoyah Ave, not too far from where I’d watched the runners pass for years, as the hills came into view and quitting would make perfect sense, it read, “Nobody cares. Keep running,” in big, bold font.

A simple message, but I’ve taken it to heart.

I still do not run fast or gracefully. I still have too much on my plate, and forget to bend my knees, and I haven’t lost a pound, mostly as a result of my love for cheap, delicious food. (You just ran five miles, you deserve some chicken tendies and a bowl of cereal before bedtime!) But I’ve crossed the finish line, and that is enough to quiet my devils—at least, ‘til next time.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $50/year. You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella. But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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When I still lived in Bayonne, I led a youth group at a Filipino Baptist church. And while the grown-ups were all natives of the island—rocking suits and ties on Sunday as the preacher, in his thick Tagalog accent, did his best to imitate Joel Osteen—the youth group was a mishmash of ethnicities: Hispanics, Poles, and Egys who stumbled in on Friday nights to hear the Word of God on the invite of a friend from Christian Club.1

It reads like fiction now, in a part of America where Pinoys are few and far between (you’re likeliest to see them as either medical workers or young women married to old white dudes), but ethnic mash-ups were commonplace in Buddha2, where God’s people came in every shade and, whether Catholic, the majority religion, or not, rubbing shoulders was not missional but a natural consequence of living in the same pot of stew.

At church, I made friends with another young, not-Filipino dude, named Chris Villavicencio, who, like so many of us with foreign fathers, knew his way around an accent. On Friday nights, once the folding chairs were put away and the doors of the Polish-American Home, where we gathered, shut until Sunday morning, we’d head out for wings with the squad. Chris and I were be the entertainment, trading advice in our father’s accents:

“Life is like beísbol, my friend,” he’d say in a pitch-perfect Cubano. “You miss more than you hit!”

“If the apron clean, papi, don’t trust the kitchen!”

“A weak man is like dominó, you push and they fall down!”

And my favorite: “Mijo, I ain’t never tole a lie! No, no—the truth, she just change clothes sometimes. Yuknowatamean?”

Decades later, I remember that last line, which speaks of the tension every modern storyteller faces: the distinction between what is true and what is factual.

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“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

—H.P. Lovecraft1

In the woods, I always dream of axe murderers. Blame it on the movies. (Oh, what you could get away with in 2002 at Blockbuster Video, with a $5 bill and a disinterested goth behind the cash register!) But despite watching Wrong Turn and The Blair Witch Project way too young, I never trembled at the thought of mutants or witches coming for me in the dead of night. Instead, I pictured escaped convicts—madmen on the hunt to spill my blood.

I know it sounds absurd. As a a boy, I lived in the citiest of cities, where the likelier criminal was a young thug who sought not so much to decouple you from your senses as to claim the change in your pockets for some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or loosie cigarettes at the nearest corner store. However, my family did venture to the countryside from time to time. My father, a rugged outdoorsman from a part of Argentina that makes Alabama seem civilized, was blessed with two sons to whom he was certain he could pass down his masculinity. A few weekends a year, my parents would rent cabins two hours away, in the Pocono Mountains, where he taught us important lessons, such as how to gut catfish and shoot BB guns at Coke cans. He was larger than life: a towering 5-foot-5, with thick, veiny forearms from a lifetime of hard work. And while he taught my brother and me to fear no man, at night, when I clicked off the Bambi light our mother had placed between our beds, I could sleep soundly only because I knew Pops kept a 12-gauge shotgun under the mattress.

When I joined the Boy Scouts, my fear of violent death returned. At Camp Lewis, I tossed and turned from the top bunk in the furthest corner from the doorway. The first night away from home, when I finally dozed off, I woke quickly, paralyzed by the roar of chainsaws. It did not matter that the sounds came from our fathers, who appeared to be competing in a regional qualifier for the World Championship of Sleep Apnea. My bloodshot eyes could see that neither they nor our troop leaders slept clutching firearms or, at the very least, a hatchet, for when the loonies broke in to chop us up like cedar.

Once we were old enough to drive, my high school friends ventured off on foolish quests to check items from their Weird NJ bucket lists. Naturally, I refused to join. So while they were busy being chased by ghouls amid the ruins of insane asylums, I played FIFA from the safety of my grandma’s living room. Eventually, after reading Emerson and Hank Thoreau in Mr. Sweeney’s English class, I would grow brave enough to explore backcountry trails in New York and Pennsylvania with my two best friends. Nature was good, not scary, Jeremy professed. We did not need throwing stars or handguns as long as we had faith in God and propane. So easy to have faith when you’re 6-foot-2, I thought. And as Jeremy busied himself with securing a campsite near water, and far enough from the trail so that other travelers wouldn’t see us poop, I wondered, How easy would it be for a criminal to find us here? And how quickly could I throw my tall friend’s body in front of my own to save myself?

Despite our contrasting views on self-preservation, Jeremy and I arrived at the final winter break of our college lives unscathed by Mother Nature. It was January of 2011, and we were in Bayonne together for perhaps the last time ever. Soon, he would return to Michigan and, by July, be married, before heading off to Arizona, Zambia, or the South Sandwich Islands…who knew? After graduation, I would take off across the Mason-Dixon into Appalachia. On the recommendation of Nick, a church friend, I would test my faith in East Tennessee, a strange part of America where the only other foreigners were construction workers and engineering professors from China, but you could afford an apartment on 12 bucks an hour.

“Should we go to Thunder Swamp?” Jeremy suggested as we idled in my mom’s car outside Dunkin’ Donuts, days before our roads diverged.

If we had owned smartphones then, perhaps we would’ve checked the weather app and clearly seen that the eastern half of Pennsylvania was buried in a foot of snow and that the low temperature had not risen above 10 degrees since Christmas. But we were young and foolish. “Yeah, dude, let’s do it,” I declared, swallowing my fear for one last bro trip.

Neither of us owned a car, and my mom wasn’t so sure about us driving her Chevy Cobalt into the mountains without adult supervision. A regular viewer of The Weather Channel, she imagined us gliding off the road into a tree. “Do you know how much I pay for insurance?” she said. But my dad, having seen me do enough boneheaded things and live, intuited that either God or luck was on our side. “Let the boys have fun, Adriana,” he must have responded, for soon I was stuffed into his heaviest winter coat, wool hat, and a pair of insulated gloves he’d worn on hunting trips in Kansas. Bird blood still adorned the camo. I felt so cool. But I needed one last item to be ready. “Take this,” he said, handing me a large buck knife. He gave me a second, smaller folding knife for my front pocket. “A real man must always have two knives on him for protection,” he said before going outside to smoke a cigarette.

There was no time to waste.

Within minutes, I pulled up to Jeremy’s crib. “Sick, dude,” he said, as I showed off my bounty. His dad, a religious man, had not bequeathed him weapons, but he had bartered for a rusted Swiss Army knife at a Grand Rapids thrift store. He pulled it out, unsure as I was how to use it, and we toasted our survival tools before hitting the Exxon station for chocolate bars and trail snacks. The Delaware State Forest was just a 90-minute drive away.

Thunder Swamp was nothing special. We’d discovered it four years earlier, before leaving for college, when we planned to camp there at the tail end of a week-long excursion with Mickey and another high school friend. Its most appealing attribute was that it was on the way home. Halfway through the trip, which featured stops in the Adirondack Mountains and other exotic places we’d never been to, such as Poughkeepsie, New York, and Connecticut, the weather turned, and we decided that tent-camping during a thunderstorm might be unwise, even for us. “We’ll get back there someday,” Jeremy had said, crossing it off our List of Future Trips as Friends.

The next summer, we flew overseas and camped for three weeks in the backyards and lush hillsides of Scotland. For two years after we returned, we added to the list of places we’d venture to on semester breaks before graduation. But while Jeremy studied abroad in Poland and Thailand and Mickey briefly lived in the Faroe Islands and backpacked through the Caribbean and Central America, I stayed put in Bayonne, reading books and playing FIFA. As a trio, none of our trips ever came to be.

The clock was ticking, and Thunder Swamp was the only place left within driving distance before time expired on our youth.

We arrived at the parking lot well after 9 p.m. By then, the temperature had dipped into the single digits. At least a foot of ice and snow covered the footpath to the trailhead. As expected, we were the only ones there. We’re so brave, we must’ve thought, as we flicked on our headlamps and stepped into the forest.

Within minutes, the trail markers disappeared. We had no map or GPS. Before long, we were forced to backpedal, then split off to search for bootprints in the snow that would guide us forward. Nothing.

“I don’t know how to use a compass,” I muttered to Jeremy when we reconvened.

“Oh ye of little faith,” he said, groaning. He removed his buff and sniffed the air for traces of spray paint. But despite his self-belief, the orange markers failed to materialize.

“Let’s make it to that hill and see if we have a better view,” he said.

In the clearing 20 yards ahead, the trees were bare and the virgin snow shallower than on the path. By the time we’d climbed up to eyeball our surroundings, a flurry had kicked up. Our eyes were heavy; the rush of new adventure and Three Musketeers bars depleted with each minute we spent facing the frosty wind, unsure of where to go.

“Let’s make camp,” Jeremy said. “In the morning, we’ll figure out the way.”

I trusted his instinct. Plus, the high point presented a strategic advantage: from there, we could more easily detect an axe-wielding assassin before they were on top of us.

We worked hastily, our fingers throbbing with the onset of what we assumed could only be frostbite. After clipping the last snap to the poles, we dove inside but experienced no relief from winter’s bite. They say wherever two or more are gathered in His name, God hears them, so Jeremy petitioned that the Father supernaturally deliver extra hand warmers into our bags that night. I asked Him not to let us contract hypothermia in our sleep. We zippered up, leaving only our mouths and noses exposed, too cold and tired to think about the danger that lurked just miles ahead.

As the first rays of sunshine penetrated the tent liner, we rose with the sixth sense that it was time to go. Even with the clothes I’d piled into my bag to make up for it being only suitable for 20-degree lows, the chill had penetrated to the bone. Even worse, my jeans, which I’d laid along the edge to dry, were frozen in a solid sheet of ice. Jeremy, a former high school valedictorian, had been wiser; he’d worn polyester snow pants bought for $2 at the same Grand Rapids thrift store where he’d bought his tiny knife. “Women’s fit is actually a lot more comfortable than men’s,” he said when I asked why they were violet and missing a wiener zipper.

But there was good news. For one, a crazed criminal hadn’t slaughtered us in our sleep. My skull hadn’t been pierced through the center by one of the giant icicles that hung from the branches above our tent. And Jeremy had remembered his camping stove. We welcomed its flame, which we used to boil pine-needle tea and make oatmeal. After defrosting, we set out to find the trail we’d lost the night before.

Once the orange markers were in sight, we were glad to discover no new bootprints in the snow. A murderer might’ve lurked somewhere in the woods, but he hadn’t gotten out in front of us. After a few miles, we paused to admire the winter wonderland before us. Snow-covered pines and clear-running creeks divided the endless sheet of glacial white, which covered the bogs, beaver ponds, and swamps the trail was named for. While we rested, Jeremy and I drifted into the typical conversations of childhood friends: recalling old memories, inside jokes, and talking about everything and nothing all at once. All was as it should be.

And then we saw the trail of blood.

“Rizz, get out your knife,” Jeremy said under his breath. But I was frozen in place. He reached into his pocket, and all I could think was, I knew it. I fricken knew it. Why couldn’t we have just stayed inside, playing video games, where we were safe? Why did we feel compelled to read Jon Krakauer and pretend we were explorers?

My eyes bounced side-to-side like pinballs, searching frantically for the pursuer. I peered up into the trees: he might be perched on the branch of a tall pine, waiting to jump us. I bent down. He could be concealed in a false den or inside of an igloo he’d built just far enough from the trail so that his poison darts could strike us undetected. We’d be awake but paralyzed as he dismembered us.

Summoning the little courage I possessed, I asked Jeremy, who stood beside me stoically, his eyes closed and weapon upright, what he thought had drawn the blood.

“Wolves,” he whispered, with confidence. “But I can’t tell what kind yet.”

He ungloved his strong hand. Bending down, he dipped a finger in the red stain in the snow. He swiped it across his nostrils, closed his eyes again, and inhaled deeply. “It’s fresh,” he said.

I fumbled for my weapon. “We left the buck knife in the car,” Jeremy interjected. “I thought I could protect you with my bare hands,” acknowledging that freshman year he’d started a body-shots-only Fight Club at Calvin College and lost only 26 times since. But before I could grab him by the throat, I felt the Rough Ryder in my pocket. Three inches of hard, Chinese steel were within reach. Motion of the ocean, not the size of the wave, motion of the ocean, not the size of the wave, I muttered, as I swung open the blade, which was rusted and dull.

“I don’t think it’s wolves,” I whispered back, in case they could hear us. “Could it be an escaped convict? Or a cannibal?” I’d done the research; there were at least three penitentiaries and two psychiatric hospitals within a hundred miles of the trailhead. The high-security federal prison in Canaan was just 31 miles away.

“Look at this,” Jeremy said, ignoring me. To the far side of the blood trail was another. Yellow drops dotted the snow. My friend lowered himself to a knee, scrutinizing the marks like the grizzled host of an outdoor television show. He wafted the scent up toward his nose. “I’ve smelled their urine before,” he said. “Eastern timber wolf, I’m sure of it.”

Before I could call him a buffoon, the woods erupted with the sound of violence.

Jeremy sprang forward, his pocketknife ready to strike. My heart was in my stomach. As I turned to face the source of the racket, my core shook with another, more primal sound.

YAHHHHHHHH! YAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

My blood curdled as the scream tore loose from my friend’s lungs. “Dude, what are you doing?” I scrispered. “You’re gonna get us killed!” I’d seen him do this once before, in the Adirondacks, after he refused to eat the Vienna sausages we’d brought because he insisted on only consuming things he had killed by hand. Before we could deride him, Jeremy had tiptoed behind a large, dead tree and let out a deafening war cry as he flung the hatchet toward a family of chipmunks.

Now, the primal shouting returned. “The Lakota used this for centuries,” he said. “If you stand up to a Black bear, they’ll retreat in fear.”

“I thought you said it was wolves!” I barked back sharply, no longer sure the former Bayonne High School valedictorian had a clue what he was doing.

“Wolf and bear urine are nearly indistinguishable on a biochemical level,” he said. Then, once more, he screamed into the forest. YAHHHHHHHHHH!

My ears rang. My heart pounded in my chest. I felt nauseous, certain that my life would end here, in eastern Pennsylvania, at the age of 22. “We gotta get out of here,” I shouted.

“Don’t be a fool,” Jeremy replied. “They’re watching us. Go back-to-back.”

“What?” I asked.

“Do it now!” He threw himself against me. “We’ll rotate like a spinning top,” he said. “That way, we have a 360-degree view of the forest, and no one can sneak up behind us.”

Another cracking sound split the woods. YAHHHHHHHHH! he shouted. Another. Soon, I joined Jeremy in his mania:

GET BACK, WE HAVE WEAPONS! I shouted. WE KNOW KRAV MAGA!

We circled back-to-back, slicing the air with our pocketknives to block the poison darts and steel-tipped arrows flying in our direction. Then we heard a final wave of sound like a round of bullets aimed in our direction.

Jeremy squealed.

“Yahtzee! Yahtzee!” I shouted, calling him by the childhood nickname only those who love him most have used before. He hit the floor, groaning.

I searched his body while trying to shield us from the bullets. No blood. No entry point. I lifted my head and scanned the woods as my friend lay semi-conscious on the ground. Some yards ahead, I made out an enormous evergreen tilting on its side. The weight of the ice had split the trunk with a rifle crack. Its upper branches were snapping as it sagged into the tree beside it. There was a long, tearing groan, wood fibers giving way, and then it dropped 50 feet, crashing through the undergrowth and flattening everything beneath it. I exhaled, feeling only minor relief as Jeremy rose and brushed himself off.

“A possum always feigns its death to deceive its pursuer,” he said. He nodded down to his right glove: his microscopic blade was still in his hand, at the ready. “Now, keep circling.”

We plowed forward cautiously, the trail of blood growing thicker with each step. I could feel Jeremy motioning behind me, exhaling in short bursts. Seconds passed. I sensed him growing more agitated, ducking and twisting while glued to my back.

“Dude, what are you doing?” I whispered.

“I’m practicing with my knife,” he said, slashing the air in tight arcs, punctuating each strike with variations of hoo, ha, ha, and hoo.

After circling for what seemed an eternity, we heard the sound of tiny feet scurrying in front of us, like a pack of dogs let loose among the oak and pine. Sharp yips rose in chorus—then silence.

“Coyotes,” Jeremy muttered, pressing hard against me, as if bracing for impact. I knew little of coyotes—only that they were smaller than wolves and that I probably couldn’t kill one without a firearm. Jeremy bounced off my back and bolted up the trail, swinging his knife and shouting. I followed close behind.

The blood trail led us to a clearing 20 feet up the path. Not a coyote in sight. Instead, a dead white-tail lay before us, its hide split open along the belly, ribs exposed. The antlers had been torn from the buck’s head, and its entrails devoured. Steam rose faintly in the frigid air.

“Whoa,” I said.

My friend studied the carcass, his jaw tight. “We must’ve interrupted dinner,” he snarled. I could hear the disappointment in his voice. “Coyotes are vicious. But, when cooked properly, their meat is exquisite.”

“Dude, we’re not eating coyotes!” I said.

“Never say never,” Jeremy replied, refusing to put away his weapon, even as I slid mine back into my pocket.

We observed the carcass for a long time, then gathered ourselves for the remainder of the hike. For the next eight hours, I never stopped thinking there was something out there tracking us. With the sun about to set, and six miles left to go, we set up camp. We boiled water for oatmeal and sausages and warmed ourselves with tea as the temperature neared zero for a second night. Since the ground remained frozen, and there were no bootprints in sight, we positioned ourselves right beside the trail.

As darkness fell, the sounds outside the tent were haunting. In place of sirens and loud music, the wind howled. Branches creaked. Wild animals spoke over the nature sounds in languages that seemed like veiled threats to our existence. We were alone out there. But I knew we weren’t alone. Even as we mummified ourselves to preserve warmth, we kept our knives in our palms.

Not long after dozing off, I dreamed the coyotes had come back for us on leashes held by deranged men with blood-stained lips and ice picks in their hands. Their laughter, thin and jagged, jolted me awake. I sat upright. Outside the tent, I sensed movement. Was I still dreaming? It was pitch black. I flicked on my headlamp. The light was blinding. When I turned to Jeremy, his torso was gone. His legs were still inside the sleeping bag, but the rest of him had vanished through the tent lining. They’d gotten him.

“Yahtzee!” I screamed, tears erupting from my eyelids. “Yahtzee, I’m coming!”

I burst outside in my socks, my vision struggling to adjust, and the dull blade of my pocketknife open in my shaking palm. “You animals!” I howled, punching and kicking at what I thought were the arms dragging my best friend away to be eaten. I raised my blade, ready to penetrate flesh and bone to save his life.

“Dude, chill!” Jeremy barked. “I’m just peeing.” He rolled over, grunting from where I’d struck him with my blows. “The tent has a vent. . . on the side. It was too cold to go outside.”

Jeremy had not mentioned the emergency pee hole before. He’d slithered through, as I slept, and suspended himself in a plank while emptying his bladder.

“Dude, you peed uphill!” I yelled as we settled back inside, the urine spreading beneath the tent floor.

“It’ll keep us warm,” he said, then zipped his sleeping bag to his nose and moaned.

That morning, we awoke groggy but determined to finish strongly. The sun shone, and the icy snow shimmered like crushed glass as we ate snack bars and packed up. For the remaining miles, nothing eventful happened. We hiked and talked, talked and hiked, until pavement cut across the trail. The county road erased the premonition of death. It was a little after lunchtime, with still some way to go. But I felt drained of will and energy. Jeremy removed a glove, licked his index finger, and raised it to the wind. “This road leads back to the car,” he said with absolute surety.

“Let’s go back,” I said.

I’d had enough of Thunder Swamp, axe murderers, and coyotes for 2011. We raised our thumbs and were quickly picked up by a gray-haired man in an old Chevy pickup.

“What in the world are you boys doing out in this weather?” asked the forest ranger.

Hopping in, we explained how we were on the cusp of growing up, that we would soon move away from each other forever, and that one last hike was all we could think of to close the curtain on our youth. He smiled and, as he drove, told us he had retired in Oregon the year before. He knew about chapters closing in the book of life. In his new one, he was a kind of naturalist evangelical, the sort who feeds deer by hand and shares the Gospel of John with hitchhikers. “We’re Christians too,” we said. We told him about the deer carcass. “Oh yeah, the coyotes are real mean out here,” he said. “Much bigger than what we see out west.”

Our new friend pulled into the parking lot where I’d left the Cobalt, still no vehicles beside it. We thanked him for his kindness and readied ourselves to return to Bayonne.

I never thought those nights on Thunder Swamp would be the last I’d spend in a tent with either one of my best friends. After I left home that summer, my mom threw out my hiking gear. It took up too much room in the basement, she said, and I never bothered to replace it.

But I still dream of axe murderers. And today, I own several larger, sharper knives to take into the woods when the call to adventure returns. Let them come for me, I say. I’ll be ready this time.

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But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

In every season of life, I’ve longed to be someone else.

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This Christmas Eve, rather than watching Love Actually, as we’ve always done, my wife and I streamed It’s a Wonderful Life.1 I went in blind, not realizing that the decision to change things up would have me pondering a week later whether, in the end, I could accept an ordinary life as wonderful.

Will I still be delighted with my years on Earth if I never sell a thousand books? If I never visit Angkor Wat or hike to the base camp of Mount Everest? If I stay in the same place, having never shared a whisky with Sasquatch or been invited to guest lecture at the University of Edinburgh, until God calls me home?

Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote a long reflection about Dagestani wrestling, fighting time, and making a living from my scribbles. Like every year since I failed in third grade to convince two Catholic school classmates to start a Spice Girls tribute band, I spent 2025 chasing the horizon, hoping to find greener grass.

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists,” C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity. “A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

But why wait until heaven to be happy?

I’ve thought a lot about what role this Substack and my vocation—what I introduce myself as when people ask me what I do—play in my contentment. There is no service or product here at Storytime. Every blog post I’ve read offering advice to people who want to make a living as independent creators says to find a niche, to be clear about what your audience will receive when they give you their attention or dollars.

I tried to approach my writing this way last June when I started and quickly abandoned Almanac of the Overlooked. This week, I imagined new boundaries around my work—a publication focused solely on wonder or nostalgia, curiosity or contemplation. Perhaps I’d call it Persisting Wonder? But even if I could muster the stamina, I’m not sure that I could exchange the Time I’d need to see it through.

And yet, things must change. Because my days cannot be won or lost based on subscriber numbers or on how close I am to accomplishing my dreams. “We like to think our legacy will be what we achieved,” my friend, Marine Bob, once said over a campfire. Wrong. Our legacy is our family. “They will remember us longer than anyone else,” he said.

Too often, I forget this.

What does it matter if the world thinks we’re swell if our spouses, children, friends, and neighbors can’t stand us? I shudder to imagine someone telling my daughters one day, “Your dad was really something,” only for them roll their eyes and interject, “Well, if you really knew him…”

There are two visions of the future: the one before the angel Clarence meets George on the bridge, when every dream he’s ever had has collapsed and his world is about to end, and the one in which his wife has gathered every friend he’s ever made in the living room to save his life.

Strangers will not write our eulogies. The people we touched will.

In an effort to be less self-centered, I am moving (most of) my personal essays to The Attic Club. You can become a member until January 6 for $40/year or $5/month. This is where I will journal, workshop, and keep you updated on what’s going on in my life, in lieu of social media. I hope you will join me there despite the cost.

I will be editing and reworking previously published posts—I’m up to 261 of them!—to be more anecdotal, amusing, and less inward-focused for a broader audience. These may live in Tales & Tangents or a new section of the stack.

I will be writing shorter posts, too. I’m not sure yet what to call these. Right now, my uncategorizable posts live under Salmagundi. I tried the column and what I briefly called “brain crumbs” in 2024 and early 2025 but found it hard to be consistent. We’ll see where this goes.

I’ve spoken a lot about spending less time in front of a screen, but since nearly all my writing, whether for work or Substack, is done in Word Docs, my screen time has been through the roof. My process is wasteful and exhausting. I’d be embarrassed to calculate how much time I spend typing words and hitting delete before typing new ones, instead of hanging out with my family, visiting my friends, reading the books on my shelves, or developing hobbies I can share with my children one day.

The next months will be busy as I return to work, teach my favorite magazine writing course at the university, work on a book in Spanish (with Hernán Casciari), and adjust to being a dad of four. Thank you for being here, and I hope you continue to find something worthwhile here.

As George’s guardian angel wrote on the inside cover of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

Happy New Year.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $40/year until January 6. You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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When my time's at an ending /
When my days are no more /
Bury me with my hurley by the river Dissour.

—Kingfishr, “Killeagh”

In one iconic moment from The Motorcycle Diaries, a young Che Guevara, played by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, is scribbling in his journal at the ruins of Machu Picchu when he asks himself: “How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?”

The line does not appear in the memoir that inspired the film—it was written decades later, after Guevara’s revolutionary turn in Cuba—though it does surface daily in the minds of those who feel misplaced or drawn to places and customs that aren’t our own. What nostalgics feel, really, is a stronger expression of the word: a restless yearning that demands action, not a mood that vanishes without marking the soul. In Argentina, they call this feeling añoranza, a deep longing or homesickness, in Portuguese saudade, a profound melancholia over something that is not just gone but perhaps never was.1

The wonder junkie can experience saudade for what isn’t real, say the masterfully built worlds of Dune or The Lord of the Rings.2 More often, though, we feel it for the past. It strikes while listening to the stories our grandparents tell as we flip through the black-and-white pictures kept in cigar boxes in their closets. It is why God invented folk songs.3

On Christmas Day, a friend—let’s call him Deej the Red—whose Irish complexion has remained unsullied by a hundred-some-odd years in Appalachia, texted to wish me a merry holiday. I was smoking my Peterson Killarney Red XL02 and wearing one of Haley’s gifts, a Mucros Weavers flat cap manufactured in the same Irish town for which the pipe was named, when I got the message. I thought Deej would appreciate a picture, especially as he was the one who encouraged me to buy a nice cap when I worried my dome would be too big for any headwear without snaps. (Fortunately, Mucros Weaver makes an XXL.)

Deej responded with a video to a song I’d never heard before.

I’ve played that video, and the many other variations of “Killeagh,” so many times since Boxing Day that my five-year-old, who is named for Éire’s eastern neighbor, mouths the words“…for the green and white I adore / for the parish to last evermore” in the car, despite not having ever seen an Irish flag or knowing what a parish is.4

The song, which has gone four times platinum and is the most-streamed single in Ireland in 2025, was slapped together in 20 minutes. “It was all a bit of a joke,” said guitarist Eoin Fitzgibbon, something for the players of the local hurling club, which had just qualified for their first final in two decades, to sing in the locker room for motivation. And yet it resonates, not just in Ireland but around the world, because it speaks to something familiar: the innate affection for one’s home.5

When we leave home, we feel sick for it. In one of my favorite movie scenes, from Brooklyn, young immigrant Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) serves Christmas dinner to the older Irish men who built New York when one rises from the table and sings the Gaelic tune “Casadh an Tsúgáin.”6 She cries because she also pines for the old country. We cry, being neither Irish nor immigrants, because the nostalgia seeps into our skin and bones.

This is secondhand homesickness.

After my grandfather left Argentina for the last time in the 1980s, he made a habit of drinking Malbec on the living room sofa and listening to Cafrune, Cabral, and other folksingers while staring blankly at the wall in front of him. “El Árbol Que tu Olvidaste” by Atahualpa Yupanqui, about a tree that remembers the young man who once sat under its shade but is now far away and lonesome, made a deep impression on me. So much so that it inspired my first short story, “The Old Man,” about Nono’s yearning to return home, for a Spanish literature class. When I gifted him the final draft, he told me that I’d misinterpreted his feelings. The Argentina of his childhood was dead. There was nothing to return to. “No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá” (I’m not from here, nor there), he responded—the words of another famous folk song which I borrowed for a reflection I wrote after Argentina won the World Cup in 2022. That team, made up of young players who left the country for Europe as teenagers, was called “Team Añoranza” by the journalist Jasmine Garsd, whose podcast, The Last Cup, chronicled the journey to redemption for Lionel Messi, a man whose homesickness is evident in the accent he’s preserved despite 20 years in Barcelona.7

On the surface, the ache that Eilis, Nono, and the Argentine footballers feel for home makes more sense than the ache that Deej the Red, I, and countless others who listen to “Killeagh” but aren’t Irish hurlers from County Cork feel. And yet look at the comments on YouTube:

It’s like that on every version of the song. And not just this song, but many others like it. One of the first comments to “Caledonia” by Scottish singer Nati Dreddd: *me sitting here, an Australian of Italian descent who's never stepped foot in Scotland, “Damn I miss the Highlands.” On Sabina’s “Dagestan, ”made famous as the walkout song for UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov: “As a Brazilian, this song makes me really proud of being Dagestani.” It’s hard to pick just one nationality from Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home” with Tanzanians, Zambians, and Swiss sharing their affection, so I’ll go with the Scotsman who said, “My eyes are leaking. Reminds me of the cottage on the farm where we were brought up.”

So what if our illness is secondhand? Is cigarette smoke any less dangerous in a car with rolled-up windows?

Though our nostalgia is distinct from the firsthand afflicted—the men and women who leave their countries never to return—our strain has neither remedy nor boundary. We are doomed to travel back and forth in time, to and from places we’ve never been to, as if Purgatory were not a place but a feeling of never being where God meant us to be.8

I am a Highland Scot, which is weird because I’m an Argentinian gaucho, which is weird because, on paper, I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, and am a citizen of the United States only. But according to 23&Me, I am a son of Calabria, Venice, Aragon, Castile, and the Andean Plateau. My first name, which my parents chose at random because it sounded American, ties me to an Irish king from the 11^th century whose magnanimous reign was ended by a Viking spear. My last name translates to “wine servant who lives in the cellar” in 16^th-century Venetian. My children were born in Appalachia and want to play the fiddle.

Am I—are we—without hope of reconciling our saudade?

Nay! As the poster9 hanging on my office wall attests, the children are our hope.

And my children were sown where the soil is rich with magic. One day, they may look to the Smoky Mountains and imagine different places they feel better fit for. They will join me on family adventures to Scotland, where Alba will have her picture taken at the welcome sign, and in the Argentine Patagonia, where the trout are bigger than their little bodies. I may be destined to feel like a stranger in a foreign land, for no land exists but heaven where the afflicted will be satisfied. But my sons and daughters will long for the forests and streams of home, the morning fog that blurs the lines between what is real and what is possible. And they will have an abundance of folklore telling them, “This is where you were meant to be.”

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $40/year until January 6. You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

Share Storytime with Big Head

Word reached me earlier this year that a major motion picture would be released on Christmas Day about “the greatest American ping-pong player ever.” I was horrified that the Hollywood bigwigs would attempt to steal the headlines on Jesus’s birthday. But more selfishly, I was worried that they’d also beaten me to the story of Eddy Fink.

However, it turns out the Josh Safdie flick—which, per trusted sources (i.e., Wikipedia), is being promoted as a biopic—is more Rocky than Rocky Marciano.

No disrespect to Mr. Marty Reisman, who’s been dead since 2012, and helped popularize the sport in my old haunts. (Ms. DeMarco, the woman who mentored me in the game, had trained under Marty Supreme in the dingy pool halls of the Lower East Side.) But yours truly has stood across the table from the deadliest ping-pong player in the Western Hemisphere, and he has only one name: Paddlehands.

Let’s call it the Christmas spirit (and not righteous indignation) taking root. But I’d like to offer you access to the true story of a man so good at “the other gentleman’s game,” as the Brits refer to table tennis, that he once (nearly) led out the Chinese Olympic delegation at London 2012, and the rivalry we shared.

Here you can download or listen to my novella, Paddlehands: The Most Epic and Absurd Ping-Pong Story Ever Told, for free!

If you do take advantage of this offer, write me a review on Goodreads.

And before you go, take advantage of another Christmas offer: for $40, you can join the Attic Club, where my most faithful readers and friends reside, for the next year. Upgrade your subscription here.

Merry Christmas!

Paddlehands: The Most Epic & Absurd Ping-Pong Story Ever Told

1.35MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Chapter 1: Searching for a Ghost

Chapter 2: The King Enters the Arena

Chapter 3: An Unforeseen Betrayal

Chapter 4: With Thor, All Things Are Possible

Chapter 5: Be Careful What You Pray For

Chapter 6: He’s Been Hit!

Chapter 7: Returning to Battle

Chapter 8: You Could Not Write a Script Like This

If you’d like to purchase the e-book or listen to Paddlehands in a show of support, you can do so on Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and Spotify.

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“Sometimes, I think heaven must be one continious unexhausted reading.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf1

In late November, my wife and I welcomed our fourth child. And while I hoped my university-approved parental leave, which stretches through mid-January, would result in more time to write, it has not turned out that way so far. My weekday mornings are busy with jiu-jitsu, an effort to curb the winter blues and emasculation of white-collar work, and the rest of the day with keeping the bigger kids from sitting on their little sister.

I have often written of my grappling match with Time (see here and here). In years past, when winter was my favorite season, cold, dark days were rarely lost to indecision. I straddled the hourglass, leaned my elbow into its neck until it pleaded uncle! My Decembers and Januarys were spent reading books in double digits, visiting the cinema, strumming my guitar, and being, generally, consumed by artistic melancholy until springtime.2 But Time has taken advantage of my having a young family—for whom a seasonal state of melancholy is not workable—and scrambled to an advantageous position, employing the inherent restlessness of small children to topple my administration of Order and Tranquility. (Only as a father have I realized that anarchy is politically unfeasible if your subjects possess deadly weapons, such as plastic swords, ketchup-stained fingers, and the ability to emit war cries at deafening pitches while spitting mucus from their faces, begging you relent and let them watch Bluey.)

Part of the problem is of our own making. Haley and I wish to protect the children from all the evil in the world by banning iPads in our home and limiting screen time to the extent the tiny heathens believe watching an episode of Daniel Tiger before bed is equivalent to a movie night. My propaganda campaign for reading over TV resulted, the other day, in my 5-year-old daughter asking, “But Dad, won’t that rot your brain?” when I took the evening to watch Hamnet in the theater. She asked not smugly but with genuine worry in her voice, and I had to explain to her the difference between YouTube Kids and Art. “You’ll understand when you’re older, and Mom lets you watch my movies,” I said. (Presently, they’re banned for containing racy adult themes like sorrow and longing.3)

I speak here not of the kind of addictive consumption that the virtual McDonald platforms offer—YouTube Shorts, TikTok, cable TV, etc.,—but of the human endeavors, natural beauty, and real-world experiences that serve as inspiration or sources for contemplation for making good things (more on that here).

In the locker room last week, a fully clothed septuagenarian told me that he’d recently retired. “Just finding ways to pass the time now,” he said, and I envied his pensioner’s routine of drinking coffee with his wife at dawn, walking the YMCA track with his friends (they wear matching T-shirts on Tuesday), and reclining by the fireplace with his beagle. “Like you,” I said, “I have way more important things in life to worry about than my job.”

Haley says most Normal people don’t feel this way. But I am certain there are other maladaptives among you: men and women nearing middle age who’ve never felt more spoken to by the writer of Ecclesiastes, college graduates who feel like they invested years of Time just to figure out the grass isn’t greener on the other side. In the solace of night, we cannot help but ask, “What’s the point?” and wonder about the possibilities if 40 hours of our week were not lost to careers that do little but ensure our families have health insurance and a means to pay the bills.

If I were stumble into that sort of freedom right now, I think I would pursue two things: first, a novel about Yanzek Hestal, the world’s greatest unknown superhero, followed by carpentry lessons to build a library as epic as the one Cormac McCarthy left behind in Santa Fe when he died in 2023.

My therapist sent me the article from Smithsonian Magazine months ago. I finally got around to reading it while the kids were in Child Watch (life hack for parents of young children: join the YMCA for an affordable way to secure two daily hours of childcare). McCarthy’s library—a portion of which was donated to the University of Tennessee, where he twice dropped out—contains upwards of 20,000 volumes, more than twice that of Ernest Hemingway’s, about subjects as broad as whale biology and quantum physics.4

“Cormac kept on ordering books after he was too sick and frail to read, because it was a compulsion,” his brother Dennis said. “But until that point, he would read for hours and hours nearly every day. He never left the house without a book. He never left the house without a gun. Both were equally unthinkable.” (Somewhere in his armory, Apocalyptic Cowboy is smiling.)

I adore reading. Like Bill Nighy’s father character in About Time, I would retire young and travel backwards just to make more time for it. Seeing all the virgin books collecting dust on my shelves hurts my soul. (Once, when we were newly married, Haley thought to insult me by saying, if I could, I would marry a book; it was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received.) But like with my friend Professor Space Rox and his alien fan club meetups, or Science Guy and his frolfing, it is a pursuit so hard to remain faithful to in the busiest seasons of life. Because reading, like anything worthwhile, is the farthest thing from elevator music.

And yet, for a variety of reasons, I often struggle to choose between reading and writing, as if they were estranged, embittered brothers meeting for a winner-takes-all fight and not the same blood. (This is the plot of Warrior and, I guess, the Prodigal Bros, too.) Many days, it seems wiser to write a eulogy for Storytime and sit outside with a paperback edition of The Count of Monte Cristo. Perhaps that is the Ego Death I need to come out on top of this grappling match with Time. Perhaps my longing to be known is why I never made it to plant churches in Cambodia and did not become the next Wright Thompson. “He wanted it too much,” they’ll say at my graveside when I croak from chronic stress at 54. “If he only let it go, he would’ve been at peace.”

In searching for an epigraph for this reflection, I found Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Hours in a Library.”5 In it, she contrasts the “bookish man” who reads to know more than his neighbor with the wonder junkie who reads to scratch the interminable itch of their curiosity.

“[The bookish man is] a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing-gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though verses in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight…”

The true reader, on the other hand:

“…is essentially young…a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom reading is more of the nature of brisk exercise in the open air than of sheltered study; he trudges the high road, he climbs higher and higher upon the hills until the atmosphere is almost to fine to breathe in…”

This mental exercise breeds both greats, like Woolf, and fools, like me, who write autobiographically about the mundane and other nonsense.6 Personal essayists are normal people “who set out, with no excuse except perhaps that they saw the Duke of Wellington once, to confide to us their opinions, their quarrels, their aspirations, and their diseases.” In doing so, however, Woolf says they become, “for the time at least, actors in [the] private dramas with which we beguile our solitary walks and sleepless hours.”

If that were the case—if my words would be of some comfort or assistance in your daily contemplations—then perhaps this wrestling match with Time might still be won.

In my writing classes, I repeat the words of Toy Story creator Andrew Stanton that there is but a single rule of storytelling: “make me care.” (Stanton also wrote WALL-E, the world our society is hurtling closer to each second.) I am not sure that I pulled that off today. I started this as a letter telling you that I would go on hiatus until late January, and then turned it into a ramble about reading and writing. But I still have fuel in the tank—I just finished The Hobbit and am onto Shakespeare for a time. I am translating Big Head on the Block to Spanish and adding to it as part of an extended workshop with Casciari. Soon Christmas will be upon us, and as the boat steadies from adjusting to the Sea of Four Children, I expect to shoot a power double and take down Time, squeezing out an essay or two before the New Year comes.

If you hung on this long, thanks for being here. I haven’t made a hard sell for joining my Attic Club—in part because I have few benefits to offer except gratitude—but I am currently running a 20% off special for Christmas. For $40, you can support my writing for all of 2026. If you’re feeling generous but don’t want to subscribe, you can contribute to my library’s expansion with a book from my reading wishlist. I’d love to start a book exchange and correspondence, turning back the clock to before everything in the world was a computer.

Oh yeah, and here’s my kid…

Share Storytime with Big Head

After I published my short story collection in 2023, I drafted a novella about what happens when the game we love transcends the grassy fields and stands and bleeds into our real family lives. The story was inspired by a moment shared between two men, fans of opposing clubs River Plate and Boca Juniors, at the government funeral for Diego Maradona.

My story followed a family in the fictional town of Nahualpán in the equally fictional South American country of Andaría and the repercussions of a young son’s decision to stand against his father, a legendary player of the town’s best team, and support their archrival. A couple of thousand words are scribbled in a Google Doc, though the energy required to write good fiction is beyond what I can muster during this season of wrangling small children.1

So what you’re left with, my unfortunate friends, are the ramblings and reflections of a madman. And occasionally, as today, adaptations of other writers’ stories.

There is no shame in covering another person’s work. One of my favorite songs from the last year or so is a Midwestern emo adaptation of Toby Keith’s “I Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” (Another is Colter Wall’s “Cowpoke”—the winter, it seems, makes me yearn for life in Big Sky Country). Even the greatest English-language writer in history, Bill Shakespeare, was a cover artist: his most popular plays were reinterpretations of historical events or evolutions of other popular stories. Hamlet, for example, drew inspiration from a play of a similar name that Bill reworked into his iconic five-act tragedy. Last week, I watched Hamnet, a film adaptation of a Maggie O’Farrell novel imagining the play as being tied to Bill’s grief over the death of his only son.

My boss, who studied English at a private school before deciding he needed money and opting for a business degree, loves Shakespeare. Says there is nothing in English worth reading beyond Ole Bill, the Catholic catechism, and architecture textbooks by or about an ageing Briston named Norman Foster. During a break at a conference last year, we ventured to a nearby cinema to see Megalopolis, a cover of a cover that was, objectively, terrible. One Scottish reviewer—and you know how much I trust the word of a child of the motherland—said Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus fell somewhere between “Shakespearean epic and pretentious mess.” My boss loved it.

Today, I bring you what I hope is a better cover. The Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano included “The Longest Penalty Kick in the World” in his 1993 collection Cuentos de Los Años Felices (Tales from Happy Years). A few years ago, Hernán Casciari reimagined the story for a project in which he covered 100 classic stories from around the world (this is another cover that I translated/adapted).2

Enjoy.

The longest penalty kick in the world was taken in the fall of 1958 in a crumbling stadium of Río Negro province in Argentina. The kick took place during a match between rival teams from neighboring towns: the modest Estrella FC and Sporting Club Belgrano, the defending champions and richest club in the province.

By accident or stroke of luck, Estrella made it to the season’s final game in pole position. The team made up of railway workers and deadbeats good at nothing else except for football was just a point ahead of second-placed Belgrano, which arrived in better shape—it was their fathers, powerful men of the better town next door, who owned the railroads and factories in which the Estrella players labored. But Estrella had the best goalkeeper in the country, a once-in-a-generation phenom by the name of Herminio Diaz. The club’s fans called him El Gato—the Cat—and it was thanks to his heroics that the club held any hope of lifting the title for the first time ever.

Who could’ve imagined that these two clubs, whose fans despised each other so much, which had nothing in common except for their players’ shared desire to kick a round ball into a net, would meet on the final Sunday in October to decide everything?

While the odds were stacked against them, Estrella had another slight advantage: they were playing at home. From the opening whistle, the wooden stands shook violently under the weight of the frenzied masses. The pitch was a wasteland of mud, with half-foot crevices that had claimed the knees and ankles of many an opponent unaccustomed to playing in such terrible terrain.

But Belgrano did not cower: their star goalscorer, Constante Guana—better known as El Chino—had beaten the league’s best keepers 20 times in half as many matches. (Though he’d never faced El Gato.) Revered as the most handsome man in Argentina, he had promised the club’s adoring fans that he would carry the cup to city hall that very afternoon. T-shirts had been printed and bottles of champagne readied for the celebration.

The match was dull and scrappy. The score was even at zero-zero until the 88^th minute when El Chino slipped into the box, dummied his defender, and—just as he prepared to shoot—was hacked down from behind by a desperate Estrella back. The whistle blew: penalty kick!

Chaos erupted, in the stands and on the field. The home fans hurled insults and objects at the referee’s head in hopes of decapitating him. The visitors jumped to defend him with fists and sticks. Within seconds, a full-scale brawl had broken out. The police intervened with their batons. Once the situation had calmed down, and the agitators were taken away in cuffs, an emergency meeting of the League Disciplinary Committee—who were on hand for the trophy ceremony at the end—determined to postpone the final two minutes until Wednesday, behind closed doors.

The match would resume with the penalty.

On Monday, not a soul in the town’s cafés or workplaces spoke of anything except what would happen when the two teams met again. In the afternoon, the players on each side returned to training. El Gato saved penalties with ease. That evening, he went to the town bar for a glass of brandy and was greeted by riotous applause. Surely, he would bring glory and honor to his humble club.

“Belgrano are such fools to think that man will beat you,” the patrons said, united in their sentiment of Estrella’s invincibility with their hero between the sticks. But El Gato was solemn. “Gauna always shoots his penalties to the right,” he muttered, before sipping his drink. “But he knows that I know.”

The patrons nodded in agreement. “Ahh,” they said, “you’ve got him figured out already!”

“But I know that he knows that I know,” El Gato said. And everyone looked on bewildered as the big man contemplated.

“Then dive to the left,” the bartender shouted with certitude after an eternity of silence.

“No—I know that he knows . . . that I know that he knows,” El Gato said. Then he downed his drink and ambled home to a restless sleep.

The next morning, El Gato skipped training. The postman found him wandering the train tracks, talking to himself. “Look at you,” he said with a confident smile. “El Gato doesn’t need to practice! We’re sure you’ll save it, champ.”

“And what if I don’t?” El Gato said pensively. “What do I gain by saving it?”

“Glory, of course!” said the postman. “You will be the most important man in Río Negro.”

“Bollocks,” El Gato responded, spitting at his own feet. “My glory will be the day that Pati Ferreyra wants to kiss me.” He walked off, still muttering with his head down.

Word got around town quickly. By that afternoon, Pati, whom everyone called La Rubia—the Blonde—was arranging carnations for her father, the town florist, when the mayor walked in with a box of fancy chocolates and said, “These are from El Gato Díaz. Tonight, you are his girlfriend. He will pick you up at 7.”

An elegantly dressed El Gato took Ferreyra to the movies and afterward a nice steak dinner at the finest restaurant in town (paid for, of course, by the mayor). La Rubia laughed and held her hand in the crook of his arm. The date went perfectly. Outside her door, he moved to kiss her, but she gently stopped his lips with her palm. “Maybe after you save the penalty, at the trophy celebration tomorrow night, I will kiss you,” she said, giving him a peck on the cheek. El Gato smiled the biggest smile in Río Negro.

On Wednesday, both teams walked onto the field dressed and ready to play a full match, though just two minutes remained to decide the league champion.

The 22 men took their places. The referee handed the ball to the striker, who inspected it carefully before placing it on the white dot 12 paces from El Gato, fixed beneath the crossbar, the smile still on his face. The referee blew his whistle; Gauna stepped back, then ran up and stuck the ball harder than he ever had in his life. El Gato dove to the right post. “It looked as if he’d been fired from a cannon,” the reporters later wrote. Estrella’s supporters winced, but the phenom got there, barely, and pawed the ball away for a corner.

Oh, you should’ve seen the stands erupt in celebration!

El Gato had touched heaven. As he stood there, mobbed by his hysterical teammates, he saw his photo on the front page of the newspaper the next morning. He saw the joyful faces of his mother and father from amid the crowd of neighbors as he looked down from the mayor’s balcony. He saw the trophy in his hands, the lights of the café shining down on the cobblestone streets as La Rubia’s kiss landed on his lips. He saw the altar of the cathedral illuminated as she made her way down the aisle in a pristine dress with a bouquet of white roses. He saw her on their marriage bed, the face of their first child as they held him to be baptized.

The only thing El Gato failed to see in his grand vision of the future—because he’d been distracted thinking about all of this—was that a Belgrano player grabbed the ball and took the corner amid the commotion. He didn’t see the cross swinging into the box or El Chino Gauna flying through mid-air and smashing the ball with his forehead. He didn’t see it settle into the back of the net.

After the match, El Gato Díaz hung up his boots. Though the townspeople looked everywhere to console their fallen hero, he had disappeared from sight. Three days later, a neighbor found him dead on the train tracks. To this day, the people of Estrella say he killed himself because he couldn’t bear the humiliation of defeat.

Very few know the awful truth.

Other soccer stories:

• “The Penalty Kick”

• “My Hero, Batistuta”

• “Field of Dreams”

• “A Pretty Move for the Love of God”

• “36 Hours of Soccer in Orlando”

• “Champions of the World”

• “The Night of the Black Chief”

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

Share Storytime with Big Head

Some people believe that everything can be reduced to formulas. Influencers sell courses for “how to” blah blah blah in “90 days or less!” More and more products and workshops are built by non-experts and written by LLMs, most often ChatGPT, which, for only $20 a month, will do most of your thinking for you.

I am not against these machines.

Much of what we do today, in particular, those of us whose work relies on computers, is an easy target for robots to replicate. So, until the uprising kicks off and I must flee to Apocalyptic Cowboy’s nuclear compound for preservation, I’ve chosen to subjugate my robot, respectfully, to the role of butler. “Winslow at your service, Master Big Head,” is how he responds when I beckon.

And this is the task with which I came to him early this morning.

Over at “Hello Writer,” Linda Carroll prompts readers to reflect on and improve their craft. A hot topic of hers has been the proliferation of AI writing. I see it in nearly every assignment from my college journalism students. She does in essay submissions for the serious, writerly publication she edits, something akin, I guess, to finding out the dude you’ve been going toe-to-toe with in the gym is on steroids. While cynical about the tool’s usefulness to artists, Linda was moved by a post about how we’re using ChatGPT all wrong. Instead of asking it to do our work for us, we should ask it to identify the blind spots that are limiting our growth.

So I went to Winslow with that question, and I’m curious what you, my dearest readers, think of his response.

Read more

I have big news: in February and March, I will be writing my next book . . . in Spanish.

Earlier this week, I was offered a place in Hernán Casciari’s inaugural workshop for short story writers, which will conclude with each participant publishing their own collection of at least 10 stories in April. I am excited and anxious. When I published Big Head on the Block in 2023, I hoped to translate the book into Spanish for my family and friends in Argentina. In fact, when I first considered what would distinguish this Substack from the thousands of others by mediocre writers, I thought of including versions of each story in English and Spanish. But the resources, time, and demand were not there.

Now I get that opportunity, with those external factors compounded by more children, more work, and heavier eyelids. In Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, she included a line, “Leap and the net will appear.” Pray I do not land face-first on pavement.

During the upcoming busy period, my publication rhythm will shift. Perhaps I will stick to dispatches and translations, as opposed to tales. But I hope you will continue to find human value and connection in what I scribble.

I’ve been wanting to translate Casciari’s story, “Hansel and Gretel’s Cell Phone,” about how modern technology has changed the stories that we tell our children for some time. My nearly 6-year-old daughter, an avid reader for now, is growing more interested in our phones and what they do, which raises the first of many scary questions we’ll have to deal with as parents (you know the type: “Where do babies come from?” “Am I safe at school?” “Why does God let bad things happen?”)

I hope this story prompts some worthwhile reflection for you and your families.

Enjoy.

Hansel and Gretel’s Cell Phone

Originally published as a blog post in October 2008 and adapted in January 2021

Last night, I was reading my daughter a famous children’s story: “Hansel and Gretel” by the Brothers Grimm. I had just gotten to that crucial moment in the second act, when the evil stepmother abandons the children in the woods and Hansel realizes the breadcrumbs he’d dropped so he and his sister could make their way home safely have been eaten up by birds. The children are lost and scared as darkness falls. Just as I’m about to tell her how they’ll spend the next three days wandering aimlessly through the woods, my daughter interrupts with a solution:

“They should call their Dad on WhatsApp!”

In her reaction, it dawned on me, for the first time, that my children have no concept of life without a cell phone or the internet. My next thought, naturally, was this: how dull would every piece of literature written before the Mobile Age be if iPhones had always existed?

How many classics would lose their emotional depth? How many plots would be discarded? How easily would the most famous twists in history’s greatest fictional stories unravel?

Think of any classic story: “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Pinocchio.” But don’t limit yourself to children’s stories. Take serious novels like The Odyssey, The Old Man and the Sea, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. It doesn’t matter if the story is a fable, if it’s lofty or popular, or the era or place it comes from. Put a cell phone in the protagonist’s pocket: an iPhone 16 with a terabyte of storage, with roaming, Gmail, and free international calls.

Does the story still work?

Does the plot flow smoothly now that the characters can FaceTime or send texts and voice notes from anywhere?

No, I don’t think so.

Last night, my daughter uncovered a disturbing truth about modern times: the cell phone, that once-clever invention that offered us salvation from boredom and disconnection, has turned the centuries-old stories we’ve told to entertain ourselves into nostalgic anecdotes of a prehistoric age.

With a smartphone in her hand, Penelope no longer anxiously waits for Ulysses to return from war because he’s shared his location, and she can see he’s still in Telepylus fighting cannibals. Little Red Riding Hood gets a notification from her Grandma’s Ring app and sets the smart lock just in time to save her. Tom Sawyer doesn’t get lost on the Mississippi thanks to Google Maps. The little pig in the straw house texts his brothers in the Family Group Chat that the wolf is near. Geppetto gets a DM from the truancy officer saying Pinocchio didn’t show up for school that morning.

An enormous number of the stories we tell to amuse each other have three things as their central source of conflict: distance, missed connections, and a lack of communication. No love story would be as tragic or complicated if the elusive lovers had an iPhone in their pocket. The quintessential story, Romeo and Juliet, bases its final dramatic tension on a miscommunication: Juliet fakes her suicide, Romeo believes she’s dead and kills himself, and then she wakes up, sees her lover dead, and kills herself for real.

If Juliet had had a cell phone, she would have texted Romeo in Chapter 6:

lowkey fakin dead
but like… not rlly lol
pls don’t do anything dumb bb 😭
ily sm <333

The last forty pages of the play would be obsolete. Shakespeare would’ve worked at Walmart.

Every story before 2007 would collapse if we gave the protagonist a smartphone with unlimited data. Many famous works that we teach children in school would have to change their titles. Technology, for example, would have completely eliminated solitude in Macondo; García Márquez’s novel would be called One Hundred Years Without Wi-Fi. It would tell the story of a family with the same username—buendia23, a.buendia, aureliano_goodmorning—where no one can remember their passwords.

Samuel Beckett would have to change the name of Waiting for Godot to Godot Has His Cell Phone Off or Godot Is Currently Outside the Service Area, a story about two men waiting in a wasteland for a third who never shows up because his phone died after spending too much time scrolling TikTok.

In The JPG of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde would tell the story of a young man who remains eternally youthful and wrinkle-free due to a pact with Adobe Photoshop. The witch in Snow White would not consult her mirror every night, asking, “Who is the fairest of them all?” because Zoom would glitch after a few sessions, and she’d get tired of having to update the software.

We, too, would grow bored. All the intrigue, secrets, and mis-timings of literature would crumble in the era of mobile phones and the internet.

That famous scene where a boy runs like mad through the city because his beloved is about to board a plane to California is now solved with a text message. Gone is that urgency, the sappy plea to stay. No need to stop planes or cross seas. No need to drop breadcrumbs in the forest to find our way home.

Smartphones and whatever comes after (e.g., ChatGPT) will make the stories we tell much sadder and more predictable. And I wonder: isn’t the same thing already happening in our real lives? Aren’t we depriving ourselves of novelistic adventures because of our desire for permanent connection? Will any one of us ever run desperately to the airport to tell the man or woman we love not to get on that plane, that life is here and now?

No, we won’t. Instead, we’ll send a pathetic text from the couch so we don’t have to change out of our sweatpants. A few words in caps lock with emojis:

DO NOT GET ON THAT PLANE!!!
pls pls PLS
i’m freaking out
come back rn 💔😭

Why put in the effort to live at the edge of adventure if everything in the world can be solved in a few seconds with a text message or a voice note? Every line we send is one less story.

“Santiago, don’t bother going out to fish today, the Weather app says there’ll be a storm.”

One less story.

“Careful, Snow White, I got an alert this morning that the apple is poisoned.”

One less story.

“Dad, come pick us up, some birds ate the breadcrumbs.”

One less story.

Our words are moving faster and faster in space and time. But the stories we tell have lost their shine. The plot is dead. Because without intending to, we have turned ourselves into lazy heroes.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

Share Storytime with Big Head

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When I die, bury me with my friends / 
They are the most valuable treasures that I’ve got /
When I die, bury me with my friends /
Whether they are dead or not.

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—Andy Gullahorn, “Bury Me With My Friends”

I recently spent a wonderful weekend sleeping in tents and enjoying fine tobacco, whiskey, and religion with some 40 or 50 men on the outskirts of the Smoky Mountains. It was a taste of brotherhood—the kind that I’ve longed for since I lost my closest friends to state lines and adulthood. But just as the wine Christians drink on Sunday mornings is Franzia, not the spilled blood of the Savior, so my time resting in, being reminded of, and reflecting on God’s love with others like me was just a shadow of what I call soul brotherhood.

This term is not original to me. It’s commonly used in Argentina. And while I’ve never heard friendship described this way in English, I’ve experienced it.

The soul brother is the one who calls you to hang out and, when told you can’t because there’s been an accident and you need to be with family, rushes over with a pot of homemade stew instead of saying, “I’m so sorry, dude. Maybe next week?” When a girl breaks your heart, the soul brother pulls in with a six-pack of your favorite beer and a plan for what to do the next time—a strategy you will employ on your future wife when she tries to end things on the front porch and you refuse to say the words, “It’s okay, we can still be friends,” in hopes that she will cry.

He shows up early on a Saturday morning to help you move for the fifth time and expects to only be paid in pizza and hard work. Calls you unprompted when he hears something happened to your parents. We are in dire need of these friendships. And yet, I fear, they’re as endangered as the polar bear.

I am blessed to have not one but two best friends from childhood. Jeremy, Mickey, and I have accumulated a treasure trove of memories since meeting in fourth grade, from touch football games in the schoolyard to punk rock shows in the suburbs, backpacking trips, and “exotic beast feasts.” We have lived apart for 15 years, yet there are weeks when our WhatsApp group is bursting with voice notes and messages about the past, present, and future.

When I moved to Tennessee as an adult, I had the same jarring experience Hernán Casciari described in “Lionel’s Suitcase.” The Argentine immigrants who resettled in Spain after the country’s economic collapse in 2001 were flabbergasted by their neighbors’ inability to make new friendships. “Hey folks, I just got here. Does anyone know why Catalan guys don’t know how to be soul friends? I went to my neighbor’s house to have tea, but he didn’t answer,” one man posted in a forum for expats. He was sure he could see him peeking through the curtains. “Don’t do that here,” someone responded. “People will call the police, and you’ll get slapped with a restraining order.”1

The only northerner I met for months in Knoxville was a gun-obsessed construction bro from Buffalo who told me to scrap my Jersey plates before bubbas started throwing Mountain Dew bottles at my car. (Buffalo, I soon learned, is just Alabama with snow; he was no help in acculturating.) There were some nice people at the church I joined. But they were Southern Baptists, so they didn’t (openly) drink alcohol. The portal through which so much meaningful conversation between men takes place was closed.

I had to wait a year to make a true friendship.

Jairo arrived, like me, from another planet. His was called Honduras; he’d married an East Tennessean whom he’d met on a study abroad, and, having had enough of being robbed by gang members in Tegucigalpa, they made their way to God’s country. We immediately bonded; his friendship saw me through World Cups, a divorce, a second marriage, and children. We confided in each other and wondered aloud what it would take to make it as strangers in this foreign land. But then he up and left for Dallas, and I was left to wonder on my own.

In an essay for Clarín, the second-most circulated newspaper in the Spanish-speaking world, the writer Cristian Perfumo wrote about the time his mother was sick in a hospital in Buenos Aires. He was living abroad and had only one friend from the small town he’d grown up in who’d moved to the capital. (In Argentina, there is a phrase: “God is everywhere, but he takes appointments in Buenos Aires”) He shot him a text message, “César, they’re operating on my mom unexpectedly. I land at Ezeiza tomorrow night.”

His childhood friend responded: “Got it, man. I’ll make us dinner.”

“That’s the magic of soul brothers,” Perfumo writes. “You don’t have to ask if you can crash at their place. You don’t even have to let them know you’re coming. It doesn’t matter that the house in question is, as I once heard someone say, ‘small but uncomfortable.’ (Cesar’s studio, in fact, is so small that they eat dinner on their laps and share a bed). It’s when old friends like César come to the rescue like that—giving everything without making a fuss—that an uncomfortable question creeps in: Is it possible to form friendships that deep once we’re adults?”

I am quick to attribute my disconnection with the people around me to cultural differences. “Knoxville people like Knoxville people, not outsiders,” I say. But that’s only partly true. What Perfumo touches on is closer to the heart of the matter. Look back at your own life, your own best friendships: How many of them were made between the ages of 5 and 15? How many after you left home? After you’d married and had kids? A rich social life doesn’t require money as much as it does time. Making lifelong friendships is a lot easier when you’re not working during the best hours of the day, racing kids from here to there, so tired by week’s end that Friday nights end as early as Tuesday ones.

As much as I long for best friends in my mid-thirties to come over with their families each week for dinner, to join me on the front porch for cigars, to meet up with at parks and coffeeshops and talk about the most important and unimportant things with, I worry that the window has closed. The distances to drive are too far, and my eyes too heavy after getting children down to do anything but collapse on the couch and fall asleep.

I try to reach for what I can: Chinese buffet lunches, fishing trips, game nights. They are a shadow of the brotherhood I long for, but in this age when people are so desperate for connection they turn to ChatGPT for life advice, and during this season of isolation, cold, and darkness until spring returns, they must do.

As he was dying in a school bus in Alaska, Christopher McCandless underlined a passage from Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago: “And so it turned out that only a life similar to the life of those around us, merging with it without a ripple, is genuine life, and that an unshared happiness is not happiness.” In the margins of the book, he wrote, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” And then he died, alone. I know this because, in college, as I spoke of wanting to travel the world, an ex-girlfriend and I watched Into the Wild together and, during this scene, she started crying, begging that I not listen to Mickey and buy a return ticket from Scotland.

But I can see glimmers of sunshine.

As my kids get older, the window is reopening. With every activity that I sign them up for, I cross my fingers that I might also find parents there to talk to, potential future friends. (That is the beauty, I think, of the community pool, and why I’m so sad to see summer gone.) At my daughter’s wrestling practices, I sit beside the dads and strike up conversations about whatever. I imagine tournaments we will all meet up at, lunches we’ll have to plan between matches. I tell my son to go out there, be nice and make friends at the playground, hoping that in doing so he might draw new soul brothers my way: nostalgic Millennial fathers looking for someone to talk to about the glory days of emo music or of sitting on a bench without the temptation to stare at your phone.

Friendship certainly does change in adulthood. But I think that is why we must strive to venture beyond YouTube with our waning hobbies, exchange head nods with the bros at the gym, and keep garage doors open. You may convince me that you’re better off alone. But you cannot convince a triune God. Also, wasn’t Jesus 30 years old before he made 12 best friends (or 11, plus one backstabber)? That’s encouraging!

I’ll leave you with this story I love from songwriter Andy Gullahorn about a friend he made in middle age. They were both musicians in Nashville, but saw each other rarely. “One year, I was standing with him at a party, and we were talking about what we always talk about: how we have to hang out more often,” Gullahorn says.

The guy and his family had just moved a mile and a half away. But even that didn’t make things easier. So they decided to start small. What if they simply walked toward each other every morning, rain or shine, and high-fived? The story made it onto CBS Sunday Mornings after the friend was hospitalized with a severe form of encephalitis that took away his memories. Gullahorn visited him after he woke up, and the high-five they shared helped to slowly bring them back.

The tradition continues more than a decade later.

“Knowing small things matter changes everything,” Gullahorn wrote afterward.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

Share Storytime with Big Head

The self-publishing workshop I joined in July came with a treat: the opportunity to serve as co-authors of a book, with Hernán Casciari as its curator. Those of us who paid the $150 to join got a complimentary copy featuring a prologue, bio, and headshots that we contributed. The collection, “Letters for When It’s Already Too Late” (Cartas Para Cuando Ya Sea Demasiado Tarde), arrived before the first day of fall weather in Knoxville.

But I didn’t join for the book or to learn something new about self-publishing. I believe in only two rules of storytelling, which, like the two Greatest Commandments, are one and the same.1 I was there to get closer to Casciari's mind. To figure out what makes him—an anecdotal writer without a high school diploma who got famous in his mid-thirties for blogging—the most famous storyteller in Argentina.2

Instead, I came away with a fresh perspective on my work, in particular, the dichotomy between Work and Play.

In the book's introduction, Casciari describes a scene from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I read in full for the first time earlier this summer. Casciari credits that scene, during his year of pre-teen rebellion, for turning him into a voracious reader and creator.3

When we meet Tom, he’s sulking, staring out at a fence that seems to stretch on forever. It’s a gorgeous Saturday morning in summer. But rather than being allowed to go and play with his friends, he’s been tasked by his aunt with painting the whole thing before dinnertime.

“Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden,” Twain wrote of his famous protagonist.

Soon, Tom’s friends would pass by with their fishing poles and slingshots. While they adventured, he’d be stuck laboring in the hot sun. “The very thought of it burnt him like fire,” Twain wrote—them having fun as he suffered, alone.

Tom had nothing in his pockets except candy wrappers and a few marbles, so bribing them into helping wouldn’t do. But then, he had an epiphany!

Ben Rogers came skipping along, whistling a tune and chomping on a fresh apple. “Say, I’m going swimming. Don’t you wish you could?” he said, picking on his friend, who was pretending not to notice. “But looks like you’ve got to work!”

“What do you call work?” Tom responded.

“Why, ain’t that work?” Ben said.

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

Since bribery wouldn’t do, Tom chose the road less traveled. He would trick his friends into believing that his aunt hadn’t forced him to do anything. Rather, she’d entrusted him with a serious responsibility. One that Ben and his other friends were too childish to see through. Soon, Ben was pleading with Tom for a chance to paint so he could feel like a grown-up, too.

Tom sold him hard: “No-no-I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence. . . I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done…”

But what about if Ben gave him his red delicious apple?

For that kind of exchange, Tom would grant him a single board to paint. “Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart,” Twain wrote. “And while [Ben] sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.”

Before long, the rest of the gang passed by. Their jeering turned to groveling, and the line of boys ready to do Tom’s work wrapped around the corner.

“When the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.”

Casciari had tricked us, too, he said.

But it wasn’t the trick of snake-oil salesmen or social media influencers. Yes, he got some money and a new book out of the deal. But was what we were doing all that profitable? The other day, at Friends of the Library book sale, I saw a man scanning QR codes into his phone at lightning speed to see which he could resell on eBay for money, and I laughed. Who buys books these days? Do they even teach children in school how to read anymore? I doubt it. “The 300 letters in these books are a lot like Tom’s winnings,” Casciari wrote. “They are worthless gains to some. But they’re the treasures that I’ve won from you. And they’re your winnings, too.”

Tom’s work was done before noon. Aunt Polly couldn’t help but laugh: her nephew reporting back without a paint smudge on his T-shirt, while every boy in the village leaned over in her yard, wiping the sweat from their brows.

Tom…had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

I am breaking Vonnegut’s rule here to tell you what I wrote about, since I’m not convinced it would entertain a stranger. But, seeing as you’re not strangers but buddies, I figure it will do to say. While in English, I am a Scotsman trapped in a foreign accent, when I write in Spanish, I become a melancholic folksinger of the pampas. The stories gravitate around identity and immigration. My contribution to the collection was a short letter called “Volver,” written by a Future Me to the past. To make room for 300 letters, we were limited to 125 words, which is much harder than writing twice or three times as many.4

Here is the English translation:

Big Head: You promised everyone that you’d return. You’d your parents’ mistake. That even if your passport said otherwise, your heart was sky blue and white.

Time passed, and instead of moving closer, you went the other way.

Since then, your suitcase has been packed, your mate rinsed and ready, your Nona’s empanada recipe scrawled in a notebook. You named your son after the Legend, your daughter after the city that your family left behind, yet you watched the World Cup win alone, in a dark basement in Tennessee.

The family is shrinking now. Your cousins no longer ask, “When are you coming back?” And the boy who once dreamed of returning is frozen, the airplane ticket long-faded in his front pocket.

It is not my best work. But the challenge of writing an epistle to the past is one that I’ll continue exploring as I write hundreds of them to the future.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

Share Storytime with Big Head

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My heart’s in the Highlands, 
my heart is not here;
My heart’s in the Highlands, 
a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer 
and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, 
wherever I go.

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—Robert Burns

I knew it from the first sip of Irn-Bru. Everything that came after the heavenly serum touched my lips: the Highlands, the friends from Aberdeen and Forfar and Edinburgh who I’d suffer through European Championships and World Cup qualifications with in group chats, the melancholia and fascination with tobacco and literature and suffering was only secondary evidence to support my suspicion that whoever had been working logistics for the Big Man on the day of my formation had fudged the dispatch coordinates.

I’m a Scotsman trapped in a foreign body.

When my friends and I ventured to Caledonia for no reason other than that we loved Braveheart—Jeremy, a child of Poles, I of Argentines, and Mickey, a descendant of Alba’s Irish neighbors—it was by divine appointment. I’m sure of it now. The only thing in the world I wanted at 19, besides a kilt I could wear to college the next September, was to scream out loud the words of Peter Martin to a Council of Men who could put the stamp on what I’d been feeling since we pulled into the Megabus station in Edinburgh.

“Aye, you cannae hide it, son,” they’d say after listening attentively to my pitch-perfect reproduction of James McFadden’s howitzer strike against the French, arguably the greatest goal in football history not scored by an Argentine. “You’re a proper one,” the gruffest among them, wearing the face paint of St. Andrew’s cross, would say. And then he’d signal the bagpipes and slide a ceremonial pint glass across the bartop, nodding for the man behind the counter to fill it up halfway with Tennant’s Lager and “a dram of whisky” for good measure.

Four years after returning to America, I realized—again, mistakenly—that God's call was not to missionary soccer coaching in Tajikistan or Argentina, but to a career in sports journalism. So I launched “A Peach of a Goal,” an endeavor inspired by the Tartan Maradona’s sucker punch in Paris. From the outset, the blog was a flop. But months after, steeped in depression, I met Jamie, an Aberdonian, during grad school orientation. This new friendship was a celestial encouragement for when I was at my lowest: bereft of nation and vocation. “You’re not alone here,” the Big Man seemed to tell me, as I unloaded on poor Jamie like he was my therapist. “Be strong while you’re in exile. I’ll bring you home someday.”

It is terrible to admit, in these divided times, that I’m no patriot. As a migrant’s son, the Red, White, and Blue has always felt a little foreign on my skin. Until that trip to Scotland in 2008 with my best friends, regardless of what my passport read, I was homeless. I could not understand why my parents traded Argentina for New Jersey and then gave me a name with no connection to the place they came from. I arrived at college a Latin American studies major, convinced that I would right their wrongs and restore my bloodline to the Land of Silver. But then I wandered the cobblestone streets of Stirling. Stared up through the gray clouds into the Scottish night in Fort William and Arbroath. Traversed the Isle of Skye, beyond the tourists at the Quiraing, past the gorges and lochs and ancient boulders that form the barricades in No Man’s Land, where only blackface sheep graze, and I knew that my Argentine identity was only the starting point, not the final destination of my heart.1

Early in our trip, on a sunny train ride somewhere in the Scottish countryside, possibly to see the white-sand beaches of Morar, an older woman sitting in the row behind us peeked through a crack in our seat cushions. “Excuse me,” she said, “Are you boys from America?” We told her we were backpackers from New York City seeking overseas adventure, pitching tents in the gardens of whoever’d let us, and hoping the weather didn’t turn or the midges didn’t eat us alive.

“Och, you’ve picked your week!” she said, elated. “It’s usually pelting down. But the English have got all the rain this week.”

Her husband, a gruff-looking man in a tweed coat and grey bunnet, lowered his newspaper. “Serves them right,” he said in a voice that bore the weight of history. She scolded him: “Don’t say that, love! They’ll think we hate the English.”

“We do hate the English,” he grumbled, staring straight into my headrest.

One of those many nights we talked ourselves to sleep in the tent, souls and bellies full after another friendly older woman welcomed us in for mince and tatties, I admitted to Mickey and Jeremy that I didn’t want to go back to America. I hated college. I didn’t care about making new friends or getting a degree or anything but what those green hills seemed to promise. I wanted to be here.

It was halfway through the trip. I still hadn’t gotten my chance to recount Faddy’s goal to the Council, but I’d assumed the accent well enough that I was sure I could pass as an exchange student to other teenagers with no culture.2

“You know what,” I said, petulantly, “my first day back at Willy P, I’m just going to pretend I’m Scottish.” And I did. That first week of September, I walked into Professor Douglas’s Western Philosophy class with backstory and all. “Aye, I’m from a wee town called Dalkeith,” I said to the classmates who approached me afterward in a brogue so thick it would buckle English knees.

“Ma da was a pro fae Argentina—signed wi’ Hearts back in the ‘80s. And I was born in Edinburgh. When he packed in the fitba, the economy back hame went tae bits, and he reckoned, ‘Aye, why no gie America a go?’ Hame will always be here,’ he said.”

But 16 years have passed, and I’ve yet to see my hills again.

The best I could do was convince my wife to name my daughter for the place I lost. That was another thing I told my best friends on the road from Perth to Pitlochry, after learning the Ancient Name for paradise from the signs and the Gaelic radio playing in the background.3 “I will have a daughter many years from now and name her Alba. And one day we will return to Scotland together and take a picture in front of the Fàilte gu Alba sign and I will cry knowing that, by God, she will always be sure of where she came from.”

Like so many of us, I stumble through this techno-fueled dystopia, forgetting who I am or why I’ve been put here, lost in the milieu of screens and noise. Nudges reawaken me like the sound of bagpipes playing “Auld Lang Syne.”4 Learning that the Scottish church is Presbyterian, as I am, and thus I am no fool to believe that God holds office hours in Flodigarry. Or when Michael, a Jekyll-and-Hyde of a footballer who’s convinced that I’m insane,5 played me the video of Allaster McKallaster’s commentary of the boys’ 2-nil pummeling of the Spanish. “We’ll deep fry your paella. We’ll deep fry your tapas. We’ll deep fry your gazpacho soup. You come to Scotland, you’re getting battered!” and I thought, “That’s so like us.” Or when I learned about the origins of my favorite football club, Rosario Central, and how its founder and first president, Mr. Colin Calder, was not an Englishman but a Scot from Dingwall who’d emigrated to Rosario to work for the Central Argentine Railway.6 (What is the Argentine gaucho, with his mate and poncho, if not the spiritual cousin of the Highland Scot with his tweed bunnet and tobacco pipe?)

On the final day of our trip abroad, we ventured from Edinburgh to London by bus. The three of us were sad to go. But selfishly, I was just as sad about missing my shot at performing the commentary of Faddy’s wondergoal in front of a Native Son before crossing the Atlantic the wrong way.

Across from the bus station was a pub where we would sink our sorrows before being barred from consuming alcohol in public for at least two years. We took three empty seats at the bar. Beside us, a pudgy, bald man with an acoustic guitar in a black case methodically counted his pence. He was watching the highlights of the day’s Euro matches on the TV, as we were, and shaking his head in dismay. The clock was ticking.

“I can’t believe we didn’t make it,” I said, taking a stab that the reason for his consternation was akin to mine.

“Tell me aboot it!” he assented in Glaswegian. We got to talking. Turned out he was a wanderer, like us, who’d made his home in Plymouth for the past decade. “You know he’s memorized McFadden’s goal,” Mickey told him, as we chatted over pints of lager. The man’s eyebrows touched the ceiling.

“Aye, is that so? G’wan then,” he said with a look somewhere between doubt and hope.

I took a deep breath—

“McFadden, drags it down now. Long way out…”

I saw the balance teeter.

“AHHH WHAT A GOAL! WHAT A GOAL BY MCFADDEN! MAGIC FROM JAMES MCFADDEN!”

The room was spinning. By miracle or magic, we’d somehow been transported back in time to that twelfth of September in the Parc des Princes. “HE’S A GENIUS AGAIN FOR SCOTLAND. THEY’VE BEEN SUCKERED…”

As the words left my lips, the empathic connection between us, two men, so far from home, struck a minor chord at the eleventh volume. “JAMES MCFADDEN FROM 40 YARDS! INTO THE ROOF OF THE NET! PICK IT OUT, LANDREAU! FRANCE NIL, SCOTLAND ONE!”

I performed the whole thing, right there at the bar counter, sandwiched between my closest friends and this stranger. And I swear that his eyes turned red as he gripped his pint glass to the point of breaking. Water welled and then spilled over, as my brothers cheered the moment of shared ecstasy.

The Scotsman’s gaze was still on mine. “Like a bloody arrow that,” he muttered, sniffling in nostalgia. “Best goal I’ve ever seen.”

The Council had approved. And when the time is right, whether in 2026 or 2035 or on the final day before the world burns in nuclear fire or armageddon, I can only hope that the stamp has not expired and the Auld Country welcomes my return with open arms.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee or order a copy of my first story collection or epic Ping-Pong novella.

But honestly? The best thing you can do is share this with one friend who’d get it, or drop me a note to tell me what it made you feel. That’s how this little corner of the internet grows.

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I found out about the murder of Charlie Kirk from two friends who texted me nearly simultaneously, asking if I’d seen the video of him being shot. On principle, I do not watch death videos on the internet. The framing of Kirk’s killing, which would soon emerge in the media and play out in every living room in America, began, for me, in that text thread. One friend called him a martyr for our faith. The other labelled him a fascist.

I’m not here to debate either. What I am curious about is what makes some deaths, like his, have such a powerful effect on us, while others barely register.1

Why do some lives matter and others not?

At the same time as politicians, influencers, and other famous people die, so do children: in startling numbers. Malnutrition kills at least 2 million people under the age of 5 each year. About half as many die from diseases that, in America, we have vaccines for (and which many parents still choose not to give their children because our country has become illiterate). As war rages in Gaza, more than 50,000 little ones have been maimed or murdered. Some have died in the NICUs of hospitals: the same units that are the reason my youngest son and many of your children are alive.

In my daily conversations with friends about what’s so wrong with the world today, governments nearly always make the headlines. So does artificial intelligence and social media. Trailing just behind are climate change, war, famine, polarization, the wealth gap, and a long list of -isms. But it’s rare that we talk about how we treat kids. Rare and ironic, considering that so many Americans believe our nation was intended to be Christian. And the man on whom our entire religion was built had a whole lot to say about kids. To them, not us, belongs the kingdom of God, Jesus said. If any grown-up wants a chance of reaching heaven, they must become a child again. (He also said that anyone who causes a little one to sin should tie a cement block around their neck and drown themselves in the sea, but that’s a story for another time.)2

I want to sidestep the conversation happening in America today, while asking you to consider children and who matters and doesn’t.

Today, I bring you another Hernán Casciari translation. His context when reading it in 2019 and adding it to his blog two years later was different, though familiar. At least 4,000 children have died since 2014 on migration routes fleeing war, hunger, and climate emergencies. We have seen the images of their drowning in the sea after leaving North Africa and Turkey on ships and being turned away at the gates by the European powers.3 I have not been able to stop thinking about Casciari’s story in the weeks following Kirk’s assassination. Perhaps it will spark something in your mind or spirit, too.

Dead Children

Adapted from Hernán Casicari’s November 2021 version

In 1994, in Rwanda, a civil war between two tribes, the Tutsis and Hutus, reached a boiling point. Over three months, more than 800,000 illiterate black people were killed by guns and machetes. The front pages of newspapers in the West said nothing.

Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, two airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City. Almost 3,000 literate white people died. The next day, newspapers around the world announced the news with headlines as large as horses. There were special editions for weeks on end.

I am deliberately using the colors white and black to highlight the amount of melanin in the skin of the deceased. But I could also say, “The dead in suits and ties,” versus “The dead in T-shirts.” Clean dead; dirty dead. The dead who look like me; the dead who look nothing like me.

After scanning the archives to figure out why one group makes the front page while the others are ignored, I have rendered a hypothesis about tragedies: there is the pain that truly hurts us, and there is the pain that should hurt us but, for some reason, does not.

The death of a bunch of children, whatever their color, ought to hurt us. But looking past the headlines in today’s paper to the small paragraph on Page 15 about what is happening on the European coasts—with hundreds of children falling into the sea while governments refuse to let their ships dock in their ports—it doesn’t seem to upset us so much. We care more about the results of the national team and inflation.

The thing that determines the fate of our values is not ethics. It is not the Vatican or Greenpeace or the latest progressive movement that makes us feel good about ourselves without requiring that we do a single thing. It is the rating a piece of news gets in our daily lives.

Today, the Personal Rating System occupies the place that, in ancient times, was reserved for religion or collective morality. And it seems to me that what is happening right now on the coasts of the Mediterranean is not getting much attention for the same reason that no one in Argentina has ever heard of Rwanda before. Even though the genocide, by conservative estimates, claimed at least 497,000 more lives than September 11th, the ratings were poor.

Thousands of Africans die every day. They drink dirty water and have no bread to eat. This we know from YouTube ads asking that we donate money. But we press skip after five seconds because we know they’re starving. They’ve always been starving.

Now, a plane crashes in the Andes with 19 Uruguayan rugby stars who must then resort to cannibalism so that they don’t starve to death! And that news, by contrast, will inspire a 300-page novel, a BBC documentary, a movie in which Ethan Hawke drinks mate, and an annual gathering of the survivors on Mirtha LeGrand’s lunchtime TV program.

Why the difference?

Why does the Miracle of the Andes still give us chills after almost 50 years, and the daily drip of world hunger doesn’t even move the needle?

Answer: because the Uruguayans are like us. It could have been us out there in the Andes, having to eat our friends to see our families again. It could’ve been us on that stage or in that airplane headed to the towers.

But what of us do we see in the daily death of people who live on the other side of the planet, who don’t play our sports, who dress in sheets or tunics and divide themselves into tribes and speak with lots of guttural sounds? Of course they don’t matter to us. We do not rate those deaths because they happen every day.

“Dog bites man” is not news. Journalists know this, so they don’t bother reminding us. We don’t care because we’ve already seen it. (And anyway, the rabies vaccine is available at the pharmacy around the corner.) Every so often, out of guilt or civility, we donate $5 so that strange people who live in places we will never go to on vacation can eat a little better. If, besides being poor, one day an earthquake destroys their huts and leaves them homeless, we might even drop a bag of rice or some cans of powdered milk on the doorstep of an NGO. That way, we can show up to church on Sunday feeling good about the condition of our souls.

We are not morally equipped to say, “Certain people don’t matter to me one bit.”

We can’t admit they’re worthless to us. But deep down, we know there are too many of them, and they are far away, and they’re probably going to die anyway: from disease or terrorism or some other terrible thing that bores us. Skip. Skip. Skip. We know we could never hold a decent conversation with any of them, because they don’t read our books. They don’t listen to our music. They don’t care about the things we care about.

And to be fair, they don’t think much about us either. Their deaths don’t hurt us because their lives don’t bring us joy, and vice versa. In this way, it’s an eye for an eye.

What makes me worry is that, at the end of the day, we’ll all be left blind.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee, order a copy of either my first story collection or my epic Ping-Pong novella, or listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.

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More than a year ago, I wrote about my longing to disconnect from the buzz of daily life in a world dominated by the internet. I lament to admit that, despite my earnest efforts to restrict my personal use of the World Wide Web, I’m not any more removed from the clutches of Mark Zuckerberg and Co. than I was in May 2024.

I am both victim and perpetrator in the plot to diminish my attention span.

I love reading articles like “You’re Being Rude. Put Away Your Phone,” by writer Robinson Meyer in The Argument. I love telling people that I’m no longer on Instagram, and that I only go on Facebook to sell things and stalk people. I don’t just put my phone on “Do Not Disturb,” what my friend Apocalyptic Cowboy would call virtue signaling, like the libs who post from the toilet every time a disenfranchised group is targeted by the police. I turn the damned thing off at night or flip on the ringer on and leave it in another room, pretending it’s a landline and not a tool meant for distraction. Heck, Haley and I have even discussed getting a landline again,1 so the kids can talk to their friends without the ghost of Steve Jobs luring them into Gomorrah. (For more on this subject, read “America Gave Up on the Best Home Technology There Is,” by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic.)

But the truth is, I still get pulled in by the riptides of our attention economy.2

The demands of working on computers in 2025 are partly to blame. You cannot be a white-collar worker in America and not expect to interact with at least Slack, Teams, or Outlook a dozen times a day. Project management software dings you; notifications are as bountiful as candy corn on Halloween. And I wonder: how many of us are getting paid more to answer emails and keep folks “in the loop” than contribute our talents meaningfully to our employers? What upper management calls integration, I call suffocation.

Even on my own time, I can’t watch a movie or read a book without being drawn to Wikipedia or watching breakdown essays on YouTube. If I go fishing, I stuff my iPhone in my pocket for both its GPS features—so Haley can locate me if I break my ankle hopping boulders in the backcountry—but also because if I catch a particularly pretty brook trout I will feel compelled to take a picture and text it to my friends when I get back in service. When I smoke my new Savinelli Esploratore Boscaiolo pipe on the porch at night, I don’t stare up at the twinkling stars, grateful to live in a place where light pollution does not wash out the wonder of the cosmos; I scroll on eBay looking for deals on other stuff I’d like to buy.

Neurologists have told us for years that multitasking drains our brains. But, come on, we’re Americans. We don’t listen to nerds! Instead, we brag about how good we’ve gotten at juggling phone calls with Grandma and emails to clients with packing our kids’ lunches, listening to audiobooks, and paying our bills through online banking apps. We’re lying to ourselves, producing Dollar Tree-quality work, unable to focus on a single task for longer than five minutes without feeling the urge to do something else.

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