A novel I drafted ten years ago about a broken man, a cross-country drive, and an eight-year-old girl who might be God is turning my essay collection into something I didn’t plan for, and I think I’ll roll with it. Some of my fictional snippets might appear among the essays. This is one of them.

Mrs. Malden stared into the beautiful blue sky and said, “Lovely day today. It’s hard to imagine we get such horrid summers.”

She was right. Mid-70s, slight breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. Perfect November afternoon.

She continued. “I wish I took the time to appreciate this more. Life goes by. Day by day. We work, we come home, we sit in front of the TV, and the next thing you know, the kids are gone, and you and your husband stare at each other from across the dining room table, not knowing what the hell to say to each other. In fact, it was at that very moment this afternoon that I got up in frustration and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. I don’t smoke all that often, but every once in a while, when I get stressed or upset at Mr. Malden, I grab my smokes and head out to the back porch. Today I noticed a little girl wandering the street in front of my house. I didn’t recognize her from the neighborhood, so I went out front. She was the nicest little girl. I can't remember her name. Not Mary, but something like it. I asked her if she was lost, and she said something I’ll never forget.

She said, ‘Oh no ma’am. I’m not lost. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.’

I asked where exactly that was, and she said ‘Right here, with you, enjoying this beautiful weather and taking in the wonderful aromas of your flower garden. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled Jasmine so sweet as yours.’

I see that garden every day and never notice the jasmine or anything else. That is, until today. I turned to look at the garden and smell the flowers. When I looked back, the girl was gone.”

Mrs. Malden seemed to snap out of a trance. She looked around as if just waking up and locked in on Jennifer. “Did you see her?”

Jennifer answered, “No, neither did Bosco; he would have barked and dragged me to meet a new friend.”

Mrs. Malden said, “Hmm. Well, whoever she was, I’m glad I met her. I need to get back inside. I think I’m going to make Mr. Malden his favorite dinner. I don’t remember what that is, but I’m going to find out. Then maybe we’ll take an evening stroll and look at the stars and sniff the jasmine.”

As I entered Jennifer’s front door, I took one last look toward Mrs. Malden’s house. I could see her through her kitchen window. I could hear her too. She was singing a song from Mary Poppins. Or maybe it was from The Sound of Music. Something that I recognized from Julie Andrews. I wondered what Mr. Malden was thinking. Was he pleased with his wife’s newfound love of life? Confused? Or maybe he, too, had met the girl whose name wasn’t Mary, but something like that.

Last night I asked Claude: “I have some old spreadsheets from 2001 and 2002 that I password-protected and now want to access them, but as you may guess, I have forgotten my password used over 24 years ago. Is there any way to access these sheets?”

Claude answered: “Good news — spreadsheets from that era (likely Excel 97-2003 .xls format) used extremely weak encryption by today's standards, so recovery is very feasible. Here's what you should know:”

Claude then listed a few things I should know, including an open-source (free) tool and a couple of commercial tools I could use for password recovery. Then it invited me to upload a file for analysis. Within seconds, Claude identified the file’s encryption: RC4, 40-bit key. State of the art in 2001. Not so much by today’s standards.

But rather than send me off to download tools, Claude might as well have said, “Forget downloading tools, let me take a swing at this!” So I did. And it did. What followed was a gritty, two-hour partnership between my Artificial Intelligence hacker friend and me. Claude wrote a brute-force password cracker in C, ran hundreds of dictionary attacks, extracted the cryptographic hash from the file, and walked me through running the open-source password-cracking tool on my iMac.

I did ALL the rest.

The rest wasn’t all that much. Claude provided me with instructions and the scripts to run the programs it created. It churned through 180 billion combinations, and at the 30-minute mark, a six-character password from 2001 popped out. It turned out to be a six-character tribute to a 1970s operating system. I typed it into Excel. The file opened. How ‘bout THAT for a tribute!

Cue the Jaws theme (still relevant after all these years).

That spreadsheet had "encryption" that a consumer desktop broke on a Thursday evening while I sipped a nice pinot and listened to Apple Music’s Jazz Currents playlist…and of course, checked in every so often to fill my obligation as an equal partner in this password-cracking caper.

There was no special hardware. No dark web tools. Just a free app, a pro subscription to Claude, a little patience, and wine and music of choice.

Now imagine what that means for every password-protected file sitting in old email attachments, dusty hard drives, and forgotten cloud storage accounts. That last one's where I found mine. They were tucked away in an old Dropbox account I haven’t used in more than a decade. Files that we assumed were locked forever. They’re not.

I fed Claude updates, and it provided me encouragement: “It’s running well — 65 million passwords/sec on your M4. It’s currently on 5-character passwords with about 2 minutes left on that length.

Here’s the rough timeline for each length:

• 1-5 characters: A few minutes total (almost done)

• 6 characters: ~3 hours

• 7 characters: ~12 days

• 8 characters: ~3 years

The good news is that most passwords from 2001 were 6 characters or shorter. Let it run — if it’s going to crack, you’ll likely know within a few hours. Press s periodically to check which length it’s on.”

It turns out Claude was right, but also sandbagging. I shared the last update from my computer’s Terminal session, and Claude responded, “Cracked! 30 minutes, 6-character password — right in the sweet spot for 2001.”

The good news is that modern encryption is exponentially stronger. As Claude mentioned, modern 8+ character encryption would take years to crack using my same setup.

The bad news is that many of us have a digital trail of old files, protected by security, that has aged like my movie references. If you’ve got old sensitive documents floating around with 2000s-era password protection, this is your dorsal fin. That lock isn’t a lock anymore. It’s more like a sticky note on the monitor.

One of the essays I wrote while on the Isle of Skye, and that I also read to a group of 50 or so at a recent Tipsy Talk event in Newport, Vermont. Sometimes the path to the good life is messy.

I‘ve never shot a gun. Other than a BB gun, that is, and I’ve done plenty of that, but not since I was 12, when my friends and I would play army in the woods near my house on Liberty Lake, WA.1 There were a few rules: no aiming at the face, a maximum of three pumps, and no pellets (only small, round BBs). We, at best, followed one of them. Once rules were established, we’d split into teams and go to war.

The hardening I would get from war would be useful later, when I took a pellet to the head. Not during one of the BB-gun wars of middle school. This was much later, when I was in high school and had moved 3000 miles from Liberty Lake. My bedroom was in the basement, sort of a split-level, with half the room below ground and half above. One night, my friend and I were listening to music in my room when smoke poured in through my open window. Before I could get up to close the window, my room was filled, and I could hardly see in front of me. My friend and I were coughing, so I opened my bedroom door to let the smoke out into the rest of the downstairs living area. Eventually, I opened my window again to let fresh air in. The cause of the smoke in my room was a smoke bomb strategically placed right next to my window for maximum airflow into my room. It was a good prank, and a good prank like that couldn’t go unpunished, especially when my younger brother pulled it off.

Later that night, I took the ladder from the garage and quietly leaned it against the house below my brother’s room. His room was on the house’s second floor. I climbed the ladder while my friend held it steady at the bottom. My plan was to scratch his window, and when he came to check out the noise, I would scream or pop my head into view to scare him. What I didn’t take into consideration was that he would be cleaning his pellet gun at the time, so when I scratched on the screen of his window, he loaded the gun and pointed it in my direction, so that when I peeked in for the scare, he instinctively pulled the trigger and caught me approximately an inch above my left eye. That was my brother’s story. The jury is still out, approximately 45 years later, whether he knew it was me outside his window all along. I fell back off the ladder and onto the grass. My friend laughed at first, then realized I was hurt. He sprang into action and helped me into the house, where I announced, “I’ve been shot!” Maybe that wasn’t the best entrance.

Chaos ensued at that point, and I don’t remember if my brother came out of his room first or if my stepfather went in after him upon hearing the news. I went into the bathroom and attempted to squeeze the pellet out of my head, like popping a zit. I was unsuccessful partially because the pellet was lodged into my skull pretty well and partially because a couple of my family members were frantically calling from the other side of the bathroom door to see if I was OK. I hadn’t locked the door, so my Mother was the first to enter and see the damage. Meanwhile, my stepfather smacked my little brother around a bit before taking his gun and, if I remember correctly, throwing it into a wooded area across the street from my house. Then he took me to the emergency room, where I had the pellet dislodged and the wound bandaged up.

I had survived those dark days of war in the woods near Liberty Lake, under the constant barrage of slow-moving BBs, with only my survival skills, multiple layers of clothing, and easy access to my house for snacks and drinks to get me through, but having a small pellet removed from your skull will change a man.

The first time I almost killed a man, I was 16 years old. Except it wasn’t a man; it was a young child. Let’s call him Jimmie, who was six or seven at the time—old enough to brag to my friend and me that he could run around my house and never get tired, and too young to know that he was incapable of doing so. Challenge accepted, he ran laps around my house while we cheered him on and mocked him when he began to slow. “You’re not quitting, are you?” We would say, “Wait until we tell all your friends.”And so, skinny little Jimmie ran around my house until he collapsed in a tiny heap on my front lawn. He could not speak and could barely catch his breath, his chest heaving up and down as if controlled by a hydraulic pump. We watched Jimmie lying there, hoping his next breath would come, while I began to ponder where I was going to bury his body. Jimmie lived, and I don’t recall seeing him much after that. We moved cross-country not long afterward, and I heard much later that Jimmie wouldn’t make it to his 30th birthday.

It would be another 15 years before I’d almost kill another child. This time, my daughter. My wife and I were on vacation with another couple in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. My daughter was a month or so from her third birthday, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. As I had many times before, I carried my daughter on my shoulders as we walked around, taking in the sights. She liked to see over most of the crowd. My friend was doing the same with his daughter. At some point, we stopped to enter a store, and I attempted to dismount my daughter by reaching my arms up, grabbing her on each side of her rib cage, and flipping her head first in a somersault to land squarely on her feet in a perfect dismount. However, my daughter was laughing with her friend, so she was squirmier than usual, and I didn’t get a good grip. I dropped her a quarter of the way through the somersault, about six feet above the ground. Unlike a cat’s uncanny ability to land on its feet after a fall, Felicia fell face-first. Her chin hit the ground before the rest of her body. I immediately scooped her up. She was screaming. I saw blood gushing from her face, so I tucked her face into my chest and rushed to find her mother. Someone nearby who worked at the park witnessed the scene and escorted us to their on-site urgent care. Felicia, barely three years old, bravely took six stitches to the chin without moving or crying. She was courageous, sure, but how about some points for my creativity and degree of difficulty? Eventually, she would let me carry her in the same manner in a get-back-on-the-horse-again spirit, now with a tigther grip around the horse’s throat.

Years later, I would show Kalia that revenge for her headbutt to the bridge of my broken nose is best served when it involves her severe peanut allergy. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon while at a neighbor’s house for a barbecue. I was inside talking to my friend when my youngest approached me and asked, “Dad, can I have this?”

“Sure, honey,” I answered while only glancing at what she had in her hand. A few minutes later, I heard my wife’s voice from the backyard, “Who said you could have this Drumstick?” like a good attorney, already knowing the answer.

“Dad,” my daughter answered.

A Drumstick is an ice cream product made by Nestlé. Vanilla ice cream in a waffle cone, covered in chocolate and sprinkled with peanut chunks. I’ve enjoyed them since I was a kid. They are delicious, and apparently, the peanut chunks sprinkled on top of the Drumstick are part of the peanut family and therefore potentially deadly to my youngest. I remember the incident unfolding like this: My wife snatched the ice cream from my daughter’s hand mere moments before she took a bite. My wife remembers it a little differently: That our youngest took a bite and broke out in hives, which is what my wife noticed. We then force-fed our daughter Benadryl and waited to see if she would die, thus killing the buzz of the party. Her story is more believable.

The last time I almost killed a child, it wasn’t a child, and there was more than one. They were adults. My youngest was one of those adults, along with her boyfriend at the time and one other roommate. I was visiting and decided to cook dinner for their household. I cooked Gumbo, one of my specialties—I have two. I made a good batch that night, and everyone enjoyed it. After dinner, I was cleaning the stove and accidentally nudged one of its gas knobs hard enough to cause a leak, but not hard enough to hear or smell it at the time. We all went to bed, and one of the roommates woke up early that morning to the smell of gas and checked the stove to see if that was the culprit. He saw that the gas was on and immediately shut it off. It had been on for at least 10 hours, and most of us in the apartment, now awake, had a headache. We opened the windows and doors and let the fresh air dilute the gas, and eventually the air returned to a breathable level. No one died, but at least one person admitted to having wild and vivid dreams.

It’s been over 10 years since I last endangered one of my children, or anyone else, for that matter. I seemed to have finally lost the taste for carnage, discovered so many years ago after surviving a pellet gun shot at point-blank range to my skull. I no longer engage in BB gun wars in the woods or challenge six-year-olds to run around houses until they pass out. That said, I now have a granddaughter, who, as of this writing, is seven years old, has allergies, and lives only a mile away from me.

The opportunities are endless.

It’s been a little while.

If you’ve been following my journey over the last few years, you know my geography has shifted quite a bit. From the sun of Southern California to the soul and grit of New Orleans, through the relentless energy of Brooklyn,

Corina and I have finally found a quiet, mildly grounded rhythm up here in Newport, Vermont. I’ve spent the latest (probably not the last) chapter of my life settling into this new landscape, but more importantly, I’ve been writing, as I promised I would late last year (whew!)

Recently, I took off to the Isle of Skye for a month. It was just me, the wind-whipped Scottish coastline, a whole lot of words to process, and new words I hadn’t written yet. Ok, there was also The Stein Inn, a reason in itself to visit Skye, but it was only open for two of the four weeks I was there, so I was still somewhat isolated. I went there to center on a question that I’ve been mulling in my mind lately: What does it take to live a good life?

The answers are as numerous as there are people alive on this earth. I’m also pondering other questions, but for now, given that most experienced nonfiction authors strongly encourage me to have a central theme or unanswerable question to center the essays on, the good life query seems appropriate.

The result of that month of “isolation”, as well as the years of living leading up to it, is that the collection of essays is beginning to take shape. I’m reviving this newsletter (again) because I want this to be the space where I share that journey with you.

The core of this book revolves not only around living a good life but also around what it might take to get there. The mess, the endurance, the mistakes, the joys, victories, love, and lessons learned along the way. I’m beginning to realize that living a good life requires that exact same muscle as it did for me to complete the Chicago marathon—the willingness to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, bleeding along the way, and believing the finish line is worth it.

But the most surprising part of this project happened during week three, and it wasn’t the essays themselves; it was the structure.

As I was writing, I found myself reaching back to a novel I wrote a decade ago. My thought was to write an essay about writing that novel. A meta sort of thing. At the time I wrote it, my granddaughter, Lilo, hadn’t been born or even thought of. But looking back at those pages, I realized that the novel’s eight-year-old protagonist, Muriel, might have been a precursor—a strange, beautiful, connection to the granddaughter I would eventually meet. The past and the present started talking to each other. I know, right?

So, I’m weaving parts of that old novel into these new essays. It’s a tad unconventional, but not unheard of. I’ll be sharing pieces of it here as I go.

The day after I returned from Scotland, I participated in a biweekly, winter event called Tipsy Talks. Most of them take place a few-minute walk from my house, and I agreed to tell of my trip and maybe read from the collection, well before I knew either would be worth doing. The collective response I received from the 50-ish people there was overwhelming. Most laughed and were moved where I hoped they would, and surprisingly, I made it through the reading, only shedding a few tears. I will share one of those essays with you soon.

I’m thrilled to be writing to you again. Grab a beverage of choice, and let’s figure out this “good life” thing together.

Talk soon,

Kevin

Almost immediately after I revamped my Substack this past September, I changed my writing strategy and goals. Instead of posting edited, but not yet finished, drafts weekly, I posted edited, but not yet finished, drafts weakly; that is to say, three times since September.
”What happened?” you may have asked. “Did Kevin give up on writing…again?” could have been a valid follow-up.
Nothing happened, and no, I have not given up on writing. In fact, I’m writing more, the fast and shitty way. No edits, just words. My new goal is still to complete a rough draft of my collection of essays in 2026; however, instead of polishing various essays to post on my Substack, I am gathering unedited essays to work on during my four-week writing retreat in Scotland, on the Isle of Skye, from mid-February to mid-March. I plan to have a rough draft of the book sorted out and at least mildly edited by mid-March. I felt that polishing essays for weekly Substack posts would get in the way of the newly tweaked original goal.

Thanks for your patience as I change course a bit. I'm looking forward to sharing more on this site and will do so in the early part of 2026, maybe even while on Skye. Stay tuned…if you want.

Happy New Year!

The brink I thought I wanted to push myself toward when I registered for this race didn’t seem so desirable anymore. Instead of enjoying the cheering and the beauty of the October day, I might as well have been alone, lost in the desert, looking for water on my way to base camp, but most likely left to die in the scorching heat.

I somehow dragged myself to the water station. To my surprise, along with Gatorade and water, there were bananas, energy bars, Gu packets, and cherry-flavored gummies. A volunteer noticed my suffering and strongly suggested I consume everything. I remember downing gummies, swigging Gatorade, and taking a banana with me as I moved at snail’s pace through mile 24.

As the sugar made its way through my bloodstream, I was back to a slow jog by mile 25. Incredibly, I would finish this race after all. I had pushed my body to the brink of collapse only to find (be fed) the energy to finish at an almost-sprint the last 10 meters, taking in the shouts and applause from the onlookers. What a rush!

But let me back up.

The cheering was why I ran the marathon in the first place. My wife, Corina, and I had cheered with the crowd a year earlier while waiting for friends to finish. We got caught up in the rooting-for-everyone phenomenon as if everyone crossing the finish line was our soulmate. We heard rumors that the same support was provided throughout the race, and it all sounded fun and exciting. Plus, I craved the attention.

A few years ago, I took Dr. Gary Chapman’s 5 Love Language Quiz with my family, and my love language is, by a considerable amount, Words of Affirmation. Truth is, words of affirmation are the secret access to my soul. Knowing that spectators would cheer for me throughout the course? I might not even have to train. I’d receive admiration for completing or even attempting to run, sympathy for trying and coming up short, and even if I was seriously injured or didn’t survive the race, I would be a hero for my failure. My love language on steroids.

I had never run more than five miles at one time, and that was in high school. I was more of a sprinter. Completing the intense training would align nicely with my other life areas: as a business owner, father, and husband. The primary difference is that an almost universally accepted method of training to complete a marathon successfully exists. I was still mostly figuring out how to navigate those other areas, which came with guidelines so diverse that I could usually find material on how to run my business, raise my children, and enjoy a long marriage that matched my current style. No growth or change necessary.

The race started effortlessly enough. I eased out of the start, letting most people pass me during the first couple of miles (a strategy that would unintentionally last the remainder of the race). At mile one, I realized I had consumed too much water and Gatorade pre-race and already had to use a portable toilet. I would have laughed if I had seen those toilets before starting, thinking one mile in was too soon to use the facilities. I was wrong, as were the throngs joining me.

Corina stuck with me during that pit stop, but she was done with my race-running style when we reached the first water station. I wanted to walk through slowly, catching my breath. She didn’t want to stop. She asked if it was OK to run ahead, but I don’t think she waited for my answer before leaving me in her dust and empty water cup. She was a much better runner and more adequately trained. It would have been fun taking in the sights and talking along the 26.2-mile route, but I knew that wouldn’t be the case. I was prepared to struggle. I needed it. I wanted to push my body to the brink. As you already read, I would succeed.

I had lost most of my running group by the halfway point, but I felt good. At mile 14, I found my friend Renee and the four children who accompanied her—two of hers and two of mine. I stopped to greet them. I figured they made their way through traffic and blocked streets to cheer us on; the least I could do was hang with them for a few minutes. I’m confident it had nothing to do with needing rest. Corina had blown by them with a wave, wanting to continue her stop-for-no-one mentality. I was more of a runner of the people.

At mile 20—”The Wall,” as many marathon runners refer to it—I still felt good and ran through without much issue. “That was The Wall? Is that all you got?” I overconfidently thought.

Shortly after, I came across our 10-minute/mile group leader, still holding the 4:30 sign to indicate our estimated finish time. I ran up next to her with my new just-busted-down-The-Wall confidence and asked, “How are we doing on our pace?”

She glared at me like a mama bear who had just witnessed me taking one of her cubs and screamed, “I don’t fucking care!”

Whatever distance I ran to get out of the way of her glare and her ability to impale me with the 4:30 marker was, by far, my fastest portion of the race.

Then came mile 24.

When I crossed the finish line twenty minutes behind Corina and last in my training group, I was met with looks of surprise and astonishment. “I was certain you wouldn’t make it!” Corina confided shortly after I finished. Others in our group nodded in agreement, including me.

Had she realized what I had gone through at mile 24, she would have likely left the course searching for the nearest bookie to wager I wouldn’t be joining her at the post-race celebration. “If he’s not going to survive this thing, I might as well cash in.”

That was October 11, 1998. Twenty-seven years doesn’t feel that long ago. My daughters were six and three back then. I can look at each of them to see what twenty-seven years will do, and if that doesn’t convince me, I can look in the mirror.

Overcoming the physical challenge of a marathon provided me a confidence boost in other facets of life. My business didn’t necessarily take off, but I impressed more than a few with my success-in-the-marathon-translates-to-success-in-business analogies. I’m sure I was the first to ever think of that. Not long after, I wrote my first book. I may not have cramped up or bled during that process, but my marathon training certainly helped in dealings with copy editors.

Of course, that boost of confidence did not carry over to my marriage, as not only did Corina run the marathon, she ran it faster than I did. Her confidence boost was at the “things are going to change around here” level.

I should have trained harder.

My family doesn't always understand this morning enthusiasm; rather, they get it, but they're not always willing to go along with it. They need coffee, or quiet, or preferably both first. "Not before coffee," my wife mumbles when I try to share my latest optimism-sparked idea. She understands, though. Deep inside, she gets it because I wake up on most days like she does on Christmas morning. I respect the coffee-first rule, knowing my wife is only a holiday away from her own bouncing-out-of-bed optimism. My daughters grew up rolling their eyes at my morning cheer, developing elaborate strategies to avoid my pre-school perkiness. But my granddaughter gets it. She bounces into consciousness like I do, ready to embrace whatever adventures the day might hold.

I wasn't always this reliable with morning optimism. Or rather, I was, then I wasn't, then I found my way back. Life has a way of grinding down your enthusiasm, replacing possibility with predictability. For a few years before the accident, morning optimism had given way to morning weight—that heavy-chested feeling when another identical day waits. I was living in a downtown loft with stunning views that should have meant something. Commuting to Santa Ana, making good money, and in a decent marriage. But somewhere between the morning coffee and the evening traffic, the optimism had gone gray. Which is probably why I didn't see the train coming.

It was September 8, 2014. I remember this not just because you tend to remember the day you collided with public transportation, but because I'm blessed —or cursed —with remembering dates: birthdays, anniversaries, and random Tuesdays when important things happened. My family finds it fascinating. This particular date stuck for obvious reasons.

That morning, I decided to take a different route to work. Waze was suggesting the 110 to the 405, but on impulse, I veered left toward the 10 East onramp instead. It was one of those last-second decisions that feel like freedom—a small rebellion against algorithmic certainty. The intersection was one of those complex downtown tangles where the left lane serves both the freeway entrance and the city street. I saw a car turning ahead, thought my light was still yellow, and followed.

The horn blast hit me before comprehension did. Not a car horn—something deeper, more institutional, more unforgiving. Metro train. There's this moment, I learned, when your brain refuses to process what's happening, even as your body starts reacting. I had enough time to think "that's not good" and nothing else. I may have let out a little yelp.

The collision was both definitive and merciful. Multiple airbags I didn't know existed deployed from hidden compartments. My right shoulder and neck took the impact, but I walked away. Just bruises and a stunned appreciation for Subaru engineering.

"Man, there are some unhappy people on that train," the paramedic said, more concerned about a birthmark on my neck than any collision damage. His relief was palpable when I confirmed it had always been there. "Not many walk away from a train wreck," he added, searching for silver linings in my having just shut down Monday morning transit in downtown LA.

When I got home, my wife was appropriately concerned. My brother was inappropriately delighted by the aerial news footage. But it was something Corina said later, after the insurance calls and the nervous jokes, that stayed with me: "You need to snap out of this funk. I can see it each morning when you leave."

She was right. Somewhere in the daily grind, I'd let my morning optimism fade to morning resignation.

We made changes after that. Moved back to Huntington Beach, where the commute wouldn't feel like a daily surrender. Bought a house in New Orleans because we needed to feed our souls with something more than mortgage payments and traffic reports. Started paying attention again, not just to routines but to possibilities. It took a train to remind me that different routes are always available, even if some turn out to be mistakes.

Now, years later, morning optimism again arrives with the dawn. It's different than before—less about what I'll be when I grow up, more about what remains possible. My wife still needs her coffee first. My daughters seem a bit more appreciative of my enthusiasm, or maybe apathetic is a better word. Somewhere in Los Angeles, trains still run their morning routes—now separated, at least at one crossing at Flower St and the 10 East onramp, by a gate.

My granddaughter doesn't know about the train. Someday I'll tell her, when she's old enough to understand that life sometimes needs to knock you sideways to get you facing forward again. For now, we share simpler stories and morning enthusiasm. She bounces into consciousness expecting unicorns. I bounce into consciousness grateful to still be bouncing.

Every morning, we're both right. The day ahead holds something—if not unicorns, then at least the possibility of them. Even when you're old enough to know better. Even when you've been hit by a train.

Especially then.

New essays arrive weekly (or when the thoughts are too persistent to ignore)

I thought about the latter for a while and even attempted to convert my essays into a cohesive narrative. The unanswerable question that came to mind was, “Why am I doing this?”

I’ve also spent over a decade working on a novel, an 82,000-word exploratory draft with an ending I loved, a decent first few chapters, and a middle that I should set to proverbial, or actual, fire. I printed it and marked it up in red pen like a real writer, only to stick it in a drawer, where I would eventually dust it off, rewrite it, and shelve it again. Finally, at the end of 2023, I was done. Not finished—just done. My real life has presented me, and continues to present me, with richer material anyway: my daughters' carpool conversations, my wife's resilience, and my granddaughter's morning enthusiasm are just a few examples.

Oh, and here’s the thing: I buried the lede. This isn't my first book. I've written and published two technical books, which made me briefly famous within a small community of programmers. More than 15 minutes of fame. Maybe like 18.

So there you have it. I do qualify for the honor to write a collection of essays, and I have even considered an unanswerable question: a worthwhile yet challenging one, because the answer changes depending on the person, and more than that, depending on where the person is in their journey.

What does it take to live a good life?

This question follows me into each morning. Some mornings it arrives gently, carried on thoughts about my granddaughter's laugh. Other mornings, it crashes in like a metro train, reminding me of past mistakes, missed opportunities, and all the adventures in between. But it always arrives, as reliable as that damn train.

I'm Kevin. I'm a grandfather who still wakes up…that’s it, I thankfully still wake up. A career software developer, technologist, and leader, who discovered that debugging life is more complicated than debugging code, and a man who literally needed a train wreck to understand what matters. (Subscribe to read more on that)

What You'll Find Here

For the next better part of a year, I'll be sharing excerpts from the collection I'm writing. These aren't advice columns or how-to guides—they are, but I’ll disguise them the best I can. They're dispatches from someone still figuring it out, tracking my reluctant foray into fatherhood, my stumbles through marriage, my evolution as a parent, and now my unexpected joy as a grandfather. Plenty of things unrelated to any of that will make their way here, too.

You'll find:

Letters to Lilo (my granddaughter): Stories and words of wisdom about maintaining wonder in a complicated world…and what music to listen to.

Carpool Confessions: Ten years of driving my daughters to school taught me that the best conversations happen when no one's making eye contact. Those morning commutes became my backstage pass to their lives.

Marriage Stories: Including how my wife and I rebuilt our relationship one conversation at a time. Just kidding, we've had the perfect marriage, with not even the slightest disagreement in our nearly 40 years together.

General Reflections: On everything from chess lessons with a five-year-old, how to train for a marathon, to Marcus Aurelius quotes that hit different after 60.

The Real Story

My technical writing background taught me how to break down complex systems into understandable parts. These essays attempt something similar with life's big questions: How do we break inherited patterns while maintaining strong family bonds? How can we protect our children while allowing them to grow? How do we retain wonder in a world designed to diminish it?

The Publishing Journey

I'm working toward publishing this collection by early to mid-2026. You're not just reading rough drafts—you're witnessing the book taking shape. Your comments and shared stories become part of this conversation about what makes a good life. Some essays will appear only here, others will be expanded for the book, and all of them are real—sometimes uncomfortably so.

Let's Begin

Each essay stands alone, like me at one of my high school dances. But together, they form a larger story about growth and connection, about how we carry our pasts forward while creating new futures.

This morning, like most mornings, I woke up wondering what makes a good life. These essays are my attempt to share what I've discovered so far—not as a guide but as a fellow traveler, still figuring it out, still growing, still waking each day to new possibilities.

Welcome to the odyssey (I purposely didn’t use journey a second time, because that word triggers my daughters.)

—Kevin

New essays arrive weekly (or when the thoughts are too persistent to ignore)