Kermit

...a dispatch from bewilderness

I started working at Time Magazine when dinosaurs were roaming Manhattan and I was one of them. Back then, nothing was Uber-shocking or genre bending or post-apocalyptic, and no one was trying to beat a bot.

I spent decades telling folks how to prevent everything bad, protect everything important, and procure everything good. All they wanted or needed to know, have, want, wear, buy, try, lose, use, taste, sip, skip, slip into or out of.

That was called freelance writing. My clients owned Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog.

I am older, way older than cellphones, texts, Google, email, Amazon, distressed denim, NFTs, and Artificial Intelligence. When I began, we weren't toggling between browser tabs, scrubbing metadata, or even unpacking the past.

Back then, nothing was frontloaded. Nothing was print-adjacent. People agreed on the name of the President, pages weren’t crashing, and humans did all the writing ourselves.

This somehow brings us to Michael Jordan, rather two Michael Jordans, both GOATS, as in The Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin.

In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. That Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was so big, it couldn’t find a parking space. Rather, it could barely fit in one and also couldn’t drive.

Speaking of driving, eighteen years ago, I was hit by a truck. That made talking hard, walking tough, and writing impossible. Then I got better, which meant what I did pre-truck with a ton of effort now required multiple tons of effort. But I did it anyway.

Here’s something I learned. Everyone should meditate 20 minutes a day unless you are too busy/stressed. Then you should meditate for an hour instead.