By the end of the 1980s, my dad’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme was starting to show signs of aging. As a kid, I knew nothing of the mechanical problems plaguing The Great Silver Beast, but something must have been wrong if we were borrowing my grandmother’s car for a road trip. That was fine with me at the time, because it meant sweet relief from the black vinyl seats and metal seatbelt buckles of the Cutlass—both of which reached the temperature of a microwaved Hot Pocket when they sat out under the Texas sun.

I don’t remember much about Grandma’s car. My vague memories hold the image of a red sedan not unlike the Cutlass, some ’70s-era holdover from the age of big, blocky automobiles. The interior was also red—some kind of ultra-soft cloth that didn’t burn your legs when you sat on it in shorts. The ashtrays in the door handles were metal, opened and closed with satisfying clicks, and held remnants of recently smoked cigarettes.

What I do remember, as much as anyone can while looking forty years into the past, was the fact that Grandma’s car talked. Nobody prepared me for this, and I like to think Grandma encouraged me to open the door and sit inside, well aware of the surprise that awaited me.

The door is a jar.

Aside from Knight Rider’s KITT, I’d never encountered a vehicle that could talk, and yet here was this strangely robotic voice informing me that the door was “a jar.” Even at that age, I knew the difference between doors and jars, and so I’m now able to pinpoint the moment in my life where I learned a new word: ajar.

The door is ajar.

Grandma was born Cruz Trevino in Pearsall, Texas, in 1932. And yet, I don’t have any memories of her until after 1988, when my family returned from a tour in Italy. I know I met her before we left the States, but those interactions are lost to me. Coming home was like meeting her for the first time, and it’s from those years that my memories of her built like a fresco across a wall. She was loud, brash, endlessly warm, and loved my brothers and me like we were her own children. She spoiled us rotten, not as a way to win favor or torture my parents, but because that was her way: to give, to serve, and to care for.

It was strange to meet someone who already knew me—who knew my parents more than I could understand at the time. There was familiarity there, but it was one-sided. Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, we would visit her in her home on Staples Street in Corpus Christi, Texas. During one visit, I fell asleep early, and someone took me to an unfamiliar bed. When I woke up in the middle of the night, with the curtains blowing over the open window, and a shadowy figure lying next to me, I was understandably upset. But then a voice spoke.

“It’s alright, it’s me.”

And like a tactless child, I asked, “Me who?”

When her laughter filled the room, I knew I was safe. The moment amused her so much that she retold the story over breakfast, and it took a few years for me to live it down. But that was her style—nothing fazed her. My parents have plenty of stories of Grandma being mad or angry or not so nice, but I never saw that part of her. Not once. She was always so loving, and even when I was being ungrateful or aloof, she never wavered.

The keys are in the ignition.

I remember sitting in the passenger seat and playing with the ashtray while Grandma explained the car’s inner workings to my dad. She often spoke in a mixture of English and Spanish, which meant I only understood half of what she was saying. That’s where I learned the word maquina, which I thought she was using to refer to the car, but could have been a reference to the engine. I would sit in that passenger seat only one other time, when Grandma asked me if I wanted to go with her to get some corn.

Looking back, I might have keyed in on the fact that she didn’t say to the store, rather that we were just going somewhere to get corn. That somewhere turned out to be a random farm on the outskirts of Pearsall. When Grandma started pulling off to the side of the road, I thought maybe something was going wrong with the car. Except, there had been no voice telling us the engine is overheating or your tires fell off. Once stopped, Grandma got out, opened the trunk, then pointed to a nearby wire fence.

“Go get some corn,” she probably said. “Just climb in there.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Grandma and I committed a crime together.

After returning from Italy, we were stationed at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, which meant we only saw Grandma on holidays and in the summer when we’d all head out to Padre Island for fried chicken and painful sunburns. Her home on Staples Street always intrigued me because it was set back from the main road with what amounts to an alley between them. We’d pull off the road into this little asphalt strip, and before we could get parked, Grandma Cruz would be running out of her front door to greet us.

Unless she was working, which she often was.

For more than thirty years, she worked as a store manager at Maverick Markets, the Corpus Christi version of a 7-11 or Circle K. If we arrived in town during her shift, we’d usually stop by her store to say hello. As soon as we entered, she’d come running from behind the counter to scoop me or one of my brothers up. Her voice would fill the store, drowning out whatever Tejano or rock radio was playing in the background. Once she had hugged and kissed us all, we would continue on to her house where one of my uncles and some of my cousins would often be waiting. And when she got off work later and returned home, she was never too tired to sit with us, make us dinner, and spend the entire night visiting.

Even though we’d visit late into the night, Grandma usually had to be back at the Maverick early the next morning. So we’d pack up, load the Cutlass, and make one last trip down the block to say goodbye. That’s when something wonderful would happen. With a little smirk and a rustle of thin paper, Grandma would hand us each a brown bag and say, “Pick out some candy.” The first time she did this, I was too excited by the idea of free sugar to question anything. But after a few repeat performances, it started to sink in: we weren’t paying for this stuff. My parents later claimed she was shutting off the security cameras during the heist, but that might’ve been for dramatic effect. I also never saw her pay for the candy herself, but honestly, I wasn’t exactly auditing her register. What I do remember is her smile—wide and mischievous—and how much joy she got from watching us lose our minds over Sixlets and candy cigarettes.

And it wasn’t just candy. Back then, cigarette and beer companies advertised directly to children, which meant Grandma had an endless supply of branded swag that needed to be sold or thrown away. Instead, she gave it to us. Hats, posters, foam koozies, and even mesh tank tops featuring the friendly cartoon face of Joe Camel. Which I wore. To school one time, if I’m not mistaken. The ’80s were wild.

All that to say, Grandma was always generous with everything—whether it technically belonged to her or not.

Those little shopping sprees kept on until we relocated to Japan in 1992. By the time we got back, Grandma had retired from Maverick and moved back to Pearsall. There, she continued her service to her family, mostly through food. On any given visit, you could expect a banquet of traditional Mexican food that made my parents’ mouths water. My brothers and I didn’t really have a taste for caldo or menudo, opting instead for meals from the Sonic on the other side of the train tracks.

There were some exceptions: carne guisada, Mexican rice, chorizo and egg breakfast tacos, etc., but my all-time favorite was her tamales. No one makes tamales the way Grandma did. By the time we arrived for our Christmas visit, most of the prep was already done, but there were a handful of times I was able to see Grandma hard at work spreading masa or filling pots. I didn’t (and still don’t) know a lot about how tamales are made; all I know is that they were always hot and ready to eat.

One year, we arrived to find her home in Pearsall saturated with the smell of tamales. I may have smelled them from the curb—that’s how much I anticipated tearing through a dozen now and maybe a dozen later. And though the stove was covered in pots, each containing dozens of steaming tamales, Grandma told us we couldn’t eat them.

Never before or since had the word why been spoken so meekly.

“Sorry, mijo. The head is bad.”

“The what?” I asked.

“The head. From the pig.”

And that’s when I learned where Grandma sourced the meat for her tamales. Did it make them any less delicious? No. But did it change my eagerness to eat them? Also no. I blocked out the image of my sweet little Grandma hacking at a pig’s face and buried it deep down with the time I peed my pants at Sunday School. She would eventually stop making tamales as she got older. They’re a ton of work to make (so I’ve heard), and I think she started forgetting her recipes.

I still like to eat tamales at Christmas, but every year is a desperate, fruitless search for something that even comes close to what Grandma made.

Cruz Verastiqui passed away on June 15, 2025, at the age of 92. Though the door to her tamales and pan de polvo had been long closed, now it is locked forever. It’s easy to focus on food as one of the things I will miss, but it’s more of the overall environment… what it felt like to be around my Grandma. Her home was your home. And while you were there, she took care of you. No matter how old she got. No matter how tired she was.

Her obituary, like many others, mentions service. This is not just a platitude for my Grandma. She served us our entire lives, and her love was unconditional.

Whether it was her food, home, time, or things that didn’t necessarily belong to her, she was always ready to give everything away.

Even her car.

I was only half-listening to Grandma talk to my dad, but my ears definitely perked up on the mention of the broken gas gauge. My little brain was laying the foundations for a lifetime of anxiety, so hearing we would be taking a trip in a car that could run out of gas at any time started up my little maquina de preocupación—my worry engine. My dad was equally confused.

“But Mom, how do I know if we’re low on gas?”

And my grandmother, this woman for whom nothing was ever a problem, said simply, as if my dad were ten years old again, “Pues, the little man will tell you.”

You are out of gas. Now.

I didn’t see her very often in her later years. A couple of birthdays. A few holidays. She eventually fell back to speaking only Spanish, which even after all this time, I’ve never learned. I still tried, though, because if nothing else, my horrible Spanish made her laugh.

It was the least I could do.

A small gesture for a woman whose love and kindness I could never possibly repay.

---

You can learn more about my grandma’s life through her obituary, available here.

In retrospect, turning 45 was a mistake.

Ever since that fateful day in March, bad things have been happening to me—things even Cool Daniel or Even Steven Daniel can’t seem to reconcile. There was the you have angry old man shoulder just deal with it diagnosis from my orthopedist, the now that I have you trapped in this little room have you ever had a prostate exam before from my new doctor, and most recently, the kind Indian doctor who is supposed to be helping me control my stomach acid suggesting now that you’re 45 we should do a colonoscopy like it was some kind of prize for which I was now eligible.

Well, I can tell you this now with 100% certainty: it’s not a prize.

In fact, I’m pretty sure colonoscopies were invented by a bored, sadistic intern who one day saw butts and tiny cameras and thought we could charge a lot of money if we put these two things together.

These days, most colonoscopies end the same way: with the patient writing about their experience on the Internet so that strangers are forced to think about butts.

So go ahead.

Think about butts.

Good. Now we can get on with my story, tentatively titled, okay but there’s no cake in there if that’s what you’re after.

---

I wouldn’t claim we were poor growing up. My dad joining the military was probably the best financial decision our family ever made, and as he moved up the ranks in the United States Air Force, our meals improved dramatically. But in those early years, dinner was more about survival than culinary exploration.

Take, for example, my childhood favorite: carnitas with papitas. I didn’t realize until much later that this dish was just “meat and potatoes,” and you probably know it as picadillo. It was just ground beef, potatoes, a little tomato sauce, and maybe a tortilla or two if we were lucky. To me, it was the apex of haute cuisine. Our menu was simple and unpretentious: spaghetti, tacos, and chalupas (which, according to my wife, are actually tostadas, but whatever). We ate what we had, and what we had was usually delicious.

Except Shake ‘n Bake chicken. Fuck Shake ‘n Bake.

When we moved to San Vito, Italy, in 1986, we spent our first few weeks living in a hotel called the Dei Normanni. That’s where I first encountered the sacred duality of food: some nights we enjoyed authentic Italian cuisine, and other nights we cracked open cans of Chef Boyardee. Honestly? At age six, I couldn’t tell you which was better, but I knew which was cheaper.

I haven’t experienced the enticing aroma of Beefaroni warming on the stove in years, but I know it would take me right back to that cramped hotel room.

Living overseas has a way of shrinking your world. While my cousins were all growing up together in Corpus Christi and Austin, our family of five was tucked away in a little villa a few miles from the base. We were a self-contained unit, moving together, eating together, holding each other down through the transitions. And nowhere was that sense of comfort more apparent than at the dinner table. Food wasn’t just sustenance; it was stability, love, and a reminder that no matter where we were, we were home.

---

I don’t like anticipation. If something is happening on the weekend, I do my best not to think about it until Saturday morning. Unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work with a colonoscopy. You can’t just show up. You have to prep. Prep is most of it.

My first exposure to the butt-camera industrial complex came years ago while listening to Dale Dudley on The Dudley and Bob Show—now Mornings with Matt and Bob—describe his colonoscopy prep in excruciating detail. The kind of detail that makes you want to slam through the barriers on the 183 flyover and plummet to your fiery death just to make the mental images fade. He spoke at length about the prep drink GoLYTELY, which, despite sounding like a whimsical fairy’s incantation, is just a trademarked name for oh no juice.

Later, my friend Carl wrote a disturbingly informative blog post about his own experience, and even later still, my friend Cecilia started an awareness campaign for early screening, for which I had no follow-up questions at all.

When it was finally my turn, I read through the official prep instructions and laughed out loud at the line: “Plan to be near a bathroom.” Buddy, I live near a bathroom. My home office is practically inside one. Must be all the water I drink.

I did appreciate the way the instructions tried—valiantly, I think—to tiptoe around the sheer indignity of the whole process. Euphemisms like “clean bowel” and “you may experience increased urgency” made it sound like these things were somehow optional. It should have said this is going to happen, and there is nothing you can do about it.

So yeah, I had a lot of thoughts going into the colonoscopy. But most of all, I dreaded what was to come. Not the camera. Not the IV. No, the real nightmare was the fasting.

---

Don’t tell anyone I love, but nothing in this world brings me as much pure, unfiltered happiness as food.

While it’s well established that I am a sugar-fiend of the highest order, I must also admit to being a savory fiend, a fried fiend, and, depending on the day, an I’ll-eat-something-I-dropped-on-the-floor fiend. Food isn’t just fuel. It’s the reward, the goal, the emotional support animal I keep in the form of a double Whataburger with cheese, jalapeños, and no onions.

Fast food is my happy place. I dream of Jack in the Box Ultimate Cheeseburgers. I would vote for a Domino’s thin crust beef and jollies if it ran for office. My taste buds know the topography of a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich better than they know the contours of my lover’s neck. Give me Popeyes spicy tenders, Sonic’s foot-long coney, and the fish product from Long John Silver’s, and I am whole again.

There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t smile—truly smile—when thinking about what I’m going to have for lunch. I want to die in the middle of a General Tso’s chicken meal, with the last thing I taste being a crunchy bit of caramelized chicken slathered in syrupy joy.

All that said, I draw the line at buffets. These gross, germ-infested troughs represent the lowest form of human experience, where evolved apes jockey for position in front of crab legs and wilted lettuce, rather than having food served to them at a table like a person who is part of a civilized society.

I live to eat and eat to live, and I have receipts in the form of this epic Dad Bod.

---

Honesty corner, I missed the part in the instructions about avoiding fruits, vegetables, and nuts the day before the day before, but in my defense, I rarely eat those kinds of empty calories anyway. So I was probably fine.

To prepare for my liquid diet day, I went to H-E-B and returned with a frozen pizza. Not exactly on the approved list. I ate it alone in my office, crouched over my keyboard like Gollum with his ring, whispering “my precious” between bites.

Later, I realized the word “liquid” in “liquid diet” had a very specific modifier: “clear.” Apparently, protein shakes and orange Jell-O don’t count if they look like someone wrung them out of a traffic cone. So back to H-E-B I went, this time reading labels like a detective on CSI: Pflugerville.

On the actual liquid diet day, I subsisted on clear protein drinks, pineapple Jell-O, and lemon-lime Gatorade. It was soul-crushing.

To top things off, Dom made chili for dinner that night. Her famous, aromatic, soul-nourishing chili. The entire house smelled like warmth and joy and Fritos, while I sipped a bottle of vaguely apple-flavored sadness.

To be clear, keeping my stomach full of liquids did help stave off actual hunger pangs. But my hunger has never lived in my stomach. It’s always lived in my heart. And my heart was empty.

I wasn’t hungry. I was miserable. This was terrible, I told myself. And the worst part? I hadn’t even gotten to the Dale Dudley “grip the seat with both hands” portion of the festivities yet.

I didn’t care about what was coming next. The procedure, the IV, the butt-camera—whatever. All I cared about was that I couldn’t eat. That someone, somewhere, had the authority to tell me I couldn’t eat.

That’s not the America I know and love.

---

Fasting is a champagne problem, I know. The fact that I can normally afford to eat whatever I want, whenever I want, is a privilege—and a curse. Because I don’t eat to “fuel my body,” as my more disciplined, kale-crunching friends do. I eat to beat back the darkness. I eat to silence the internal monologue that keeps reminding me of all the things I’ve failed to do by age 45. I eat to feel, if only for a moment, like I’ve won something.

Food is happiness. Not metaphorically. Literally. There are chemicals. Endorphins. Signals to the brain that say, “You’re doing great, sweetie.” And for whatever reason, those signals seem amplified in me. I can’t explain it, but a chorizo, egg, and cheese taco brings me more joy than a month of Wellbutrin ever could.

You know that old saying, “Feed a cold, starve a fever”? In my world, it’s “Feed a cold, feed a fever, feed a sprained ankle, feed a paper cut, feed a generational trauma that is threatening to upend the very foundations of your existence.”

I assume people think I talk about Long John Silver’s all the time because I’m trying to be funny. But I’m not. I’m crying out for help. I’m asking you to love me, so I don’t have to keep eating diamond-stamped fish to feel okay. I’m asking you to care about me before I order another combo with extra crunchies and tartar sauce.

Fasting didn’t just deny me food. It denied me access to the one thing I know makes me feel better. The one thing I trust. And what kind of monster asks you to give that up, even for a day?

---

I never minded being grounded as a kid. I could survive losing my Game Boy or being told I couldn’t ride my bike for a week. But being sent to bed without dinner? That was true punishment. That was emotional warfare. If given the choice between a spanking with an old leather belt or skipping a meal, I would have dropped my pants and bent over the coffee table without hesitation.

One of my favorite dinners from that time was Penne with Butter Bread. Penne, in our house, meant pasta with tomato sauce—just sauce from a jar, nothing fancy. The butter bread was exactly what it sounded like: a loaf of white sandwich bread, each slice painted with a mix of melted butter and garlic powder, then toasted to perfection in the oven. I could eat four or five pieces without blinking. It was warm, and cheap, and perfect.

There was one night we were having penne, and I accidentally poured my iced tea into the bowl. I don’t remember how it happened—maybe I got distracted, maybe I thought I was topping off my drink—but the result was a bowl of sugary tomato soup. My parents were furious. They thought I was goofing off, ruining a perfectly good dinner on purpose. I tried to explain, but nothing came out right. I just sat there, staring at my drowned noodles, wishing I could take it all back.

That’s probably when it first clicked: food is love. And ruining a meal—even by accident—felt like breaking something sacred.

Dom and I try to keep that sacredness alive. We believe in family dinners at the table, even when we’re tired or annoyed or when one of the kids is pretending to die because we served green beans. And I wonder sometimes—do they feel it yet? Do they understand what the meal means, what it’s doing beneath the surface? Or are we laying the foundation for that feeling now, bite by bite?

The night before my colonoscopy, I didn’t have dinner with my family. I didn’t eat at all. At 5 p.m., I uncapped a bottle of Clenpiq and drank it alone, like a man who had been excommunicated from the church of dinner.

And it felt like a betrayal—not of my body, but of something deeper.

---

Anyway, the whole thing was fine. I drank the drink, I got through the night, and then I had the sleep of angels. Never mind about strangers seeing my bare ass because I don’t remember that happening, so it didn’t.

Ultimately, we like to believe we’re rational beings, evolved and enlightened. But all it takes is one day of skipped meals to turn us back into desperate little humans, clawing our way toward a shiny packet of Pop-Tarts. In that way, food reminds us that we’re alive.

And we’ll keep living, so long as we keep eating. Ping me sometime, and let’s go share a meal together.

Your brother in Krispy Kreme,

Daniel

The sky in Austin today couldn’t make up its mind. Half of it looked like a dingy bedsheet, bleached and stretched, and the other a bruised knuckle, blue to almost black. Rain was coming. The kind of rain that makes you reach for something hot and comforting or, in my case, cold and chemical: a Red Bull.

I’d been up in Georgetown for an MRI, which, for those unfamiliar, is a process where you’re inserted into a very expensive tube and told not to move, breathe, or think too hard. I suppose it’s what a torpedo must feel in its final moments—contemplative and deeply magnetic.

Georgetown, if you recall, is where I met Carl the other day for lunch after a sleep study consultation. This magical city, north of Round Rock and south of Dallas, is evidently the only place you can get healthcare in Austin.

The MRI process took fifteen minutes, though time lost all meaning inside the chamber. Darude played Variations on Sandstorm through headphones that pinched the top of my skull like I was a prize in a claw machine.

Honestly? It was the most relaxing fifteen minutes I’ve had all week.

Some people are scared of getting MRIs, of being trapped in that little metal tube. Myself, I’m more concerned about the XXL scrubs I was given to wear. I’d experimented with XLs in the privacy of my own home before—who hasn’t?—but out in the wild, I prefer to keep my silhouette reasonably discernible.

An interesting moment occurred when, after dressing like Missy Elliot in the music video for her song The Rain, I was asked to turn in a circle next to a metal detector. Of course, it went off, despite being dressed only in my undies, socks, and the aforementioned light blue trash bag.

“Are you sure you don’t have any metal on you? Or in you?”

There was a flicker of temptation to say, “Only my steel balls,” but I’ve lived long enough to know 2025 isn’t the year for offhand remarks about one’s genitals—especially not when the person you’re speaking to is wearing a multi-color bandana over a practical ponytail.

You learn these things growing up on a military base in Japan. One: keep your head down. Two: know when to joke. And three: always say dou itashimashite when the situation calls for it, even if the situation absolutely, under no linguistic circumstances, calls for it.

“Dou itashimashite,” I muttered today—reflexively, awkwardly—at the newish H-E-B in my neighborhood as an older man named Hector bagged my groceries and massaged the rim of my Red Bull with the kind of casual intimacy usually reserved for sommeliers or the newly in love.

It wasn’t aggressive. He wasn’t licking it or anything. But his fingers were… present. Engaged. Turning the can slowly, tenderly, as if he were testing for imperfections. I didn’t mean to say anything at all, but the phrase slipped out like a startled hiccup: “Dou itashimashite.”

Now, if you didn’t grow up saying it, you might not know that dou itashimashite means “you’re welcome” in Japanese. And for my little brother and me, it sounded more like: “Don’t touch the mustache.”

I took Japanese Studies in eighth grade, or possibly ninth—it’s hard to remember, as I was emotionally unavailable both years. The class was led by Mr. Mikami, a warm and endlessly patient older Japanese man whom everyone adored. He had a smile that could disarm even the surliest teen and a genuine enthusiasm for language that made you feel bad for not caring more. He taught us dou itashimashite, and I didn’t commit it to memory because of its meaning, but because it sounded like something you might chant before casting a spell: Do. Itash. Imashte.

Like a threat whispered through a grin.

My brother and I would say it to each other whenever we didn’t want something touched. My Game Boy. His dinner. My Discman. His collection of meticulously sorted Legos. “Don’t touch the mustache,” we’d say, giggling like sociopaths. It didn’t matter what language it was in, only that it made us feel clever and vaguely superior.

So today, when Hector’s fingers lovingly rotated my can of Red Bull—a can I had very much intended to drink—it just popped out.

“Dou itashimashite,” I said.

He looked up at me. Smiled. Said, “You’re welcome.”

And I still don’t know if he was acknowledging what I said or just parroting me to avoid conflict. Either way, I didn’t mean you’re welcome. I didn’t mean thank you.

I meant: please stop fondling the rim of my beverage, Hector. Please.

Now, I bear no ill will toward Hector. He was older—sixties, if I had to guess—and his hands were no less hygienic than the next man’s. But I couldn’t help imagining the chain of commerce that led his skin to mine: bananas, dairy, a plastic sack of raw chicken, maybe a cashier’s tears hastily wiped on his apron.

And none of this would have happened at all if not for the manager.

Midway through the checkout process, this khaki-clad force of middle-management swagger appeared beside Hector and launched into a monologue that was as bizarre as it was candle-centric.

“I’m gonna bonus the shit out of you if you sell five more candles today,” he said.

Yes. Those words. In public.

“Just five, Hector. C’mon, boss. You got this.”

The candles in question sat like smelly sentries on a raised platform next to the credit card reader. I was tempted to buy one just to end the humiliation, but I feared what kind of “shit” might be “bonused” out of Hector if I did.

He didn’t say much. Just nodded, adjusted his apron, and resumed spinning my Red Bull with the same mechanical calm of a man who’s seen too many things to care anymore.

When the manager left—presumably to straighten a crooked box of Cheerios or yell the word “synergy” at a stock boy—Hector handed me the bag.

And that’s when I said it. Again. Out loud. Clear as day.
“Dou itashimashite.”

Maybe it was habit. Maybe it was protest. Maybe I just really, really didn’t want him touching my Red Bull.

Outside, the sky had given up pretending. The bruised side had won. Rain fell in earnest, and I stood under the awning, holding my bag like it contained the last hope for civilization. I considered wiping the can on my shirt, but even my shirt felt too delicate for the kind of decontamination I now required.

Back in the car, I stared at the Red Bull, contemplating whether to drink it or perform an impromptu exorcism. I was tired. Not from effort—let’s not get crazy—but from the idea of existing in the world.

What I wanted was something sweet. Something forgiving. A tiramisu for me and you.

What I had was a contaminated energy drink and cloudy weather.

If only I carried bleach.

If only Hector hadn’t touched the mustache.

On friendship, fate, and existential nihilism

Every time I drive somewhere in Austin, it feels a little like visiting a childhood home and finding it now serves poke bowls and bespoke dog treats. The city is growing, the roads are getting wider, and what used to be sleepy two-lane drags are now roaring 75-mile-per-hour thoroughfares with exit ramps that seem to launch you into the next decade. I had occasion this weekend to see just how much had changed as my wife and I headed south on the newly expanded 183 to meet friends for dinner. Our destination was Jacoby’s Restaurant and Mercantile, located on East East Cesar Chavez Street—a name so nice, they directionalized it twice.

I had expected dusty lots and abandoned gas stations, but what we found instead was a lively nightspot, a wild tangle of bars, restaurants, and the skeletal remains of textile factories, all pulsing with the misplaced energy of people who should probably be heading home soon. It was 6:15 p.m. after all; time to get home and get the kids fed and into bed.

From the outside, Jacoby’s strikes the tone of a humble, down-home eatery—rustic wood, weathered signage, a porch fit for sweet tea and grudges. That illusion dissolves the moment you pull in and find valet-only parking, because if there’s one thing Austin does better than barbecue, it’s trying to be like Dallas.

We were meeting our friends, Jimmy and Cecilia, with whom we have a standing quarterly appointment to discover new-to-us restaurants like Jacoby’s, Hestia, and Fonda San Miguel. What brought us to Jacoby’s was the promise of a to-die-for burger, but what we ended up with was a bawdy waiter, gourmet food at gourmet prices, and a surprisingly deep plunge into existential nihilism—the sort of conversation you have when the cocktails are strong, the chairs are padded, and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.

The Man From Georgia

It’s always funny to walk up to a hostess stand, announce your name, and then immediately apologize for being ten minutes late—as if your dinner reservation were a court date and you were prepared to be held in contempt. Personally, I can’t stand being late to anything–even if I were on death row, I’d be standing at my cell door 45 minutes before I was to be taken to the gas chamber.

But lately, I’ve been working on being Cool Daniel, the kind of man who shrugs at the clock and lets the chips fall where they may, assuming they fall into a tidy, prearranged stack.

We were rewarded for our almost-punctuality with a prime table: a half booth tucked away in the back corner, safely removed from the chaos of the bar and the swinging doors of the kitchen. Dom and Cecilia claimed the cushioned bench along the wall, while Jimmy and I took the standard-issue wooden chairs that restaurants give to men, as if assuming we are harder to ruin.

Before we could even exchange pleasantries, The Man from Georgia descended upon us. From this point forward, I will refer to him simply as The Man—out of respect, fear, and his own plausible deniability.

The Man wasted no time launching into the drink menu, tapping the laminated page with a thick finger as he pointed out the cocktails he deemed “bomb as fuck.” He spoke with the urgency of a man who knew the longer we stayed sober, the more time we had to change our minds about being there at all.

He tried—successfully, I might add—to upsell Dom on adding a shot to her cocktail. She hesitated, weighing the options like a woman considering both the calories and the $8 surcharge, until I leaned in and goaded her into it. Check be damned. That was Future Daniel’s problem. And honestly, that guy’s kind of a drag.

Appetizers arrived almost as soon as the drinks did: deviled eggs so smooth they could have given a TED talk, filled yeast rolls that practically sighed when you bit into them, and Mexican ceviche so fresh it felt mildly rude to eat it. We always order a little of everything on a first visit, partly to maximize the experience, and partly because we are still pretending we might someday make adult decisions about our cholesterol.

Dinner was a parade of comfort foods executed at a frankly suspicious level of quality: steaks, burgers, chicken fried steaks, mac and cheese, Manchego tater tots. Every bite was a promise that I would not be sleeping well that night, nor buttoning any pants without the assistance of mechanical force.

By the midpoint of my main course, the buttons on my shirt were hanging on for dear life. Somewhere deep inside me, a structural engineer was running calculations and silently weeping. Spanx was going to get an angry letter from me—assuming I survived dessert.

Our conversation was exactly what you hope for when you see your friends: light, entertaining, hilarious, honest. We talked about kids, work, TV shows, and the unique joy of seeing your own pettiness reflected in your child’s behavior.

It was, by all accounts, a perfect dinner. And then, without warning and despite years of experience telling me not to, I made the fateful decision to “get dark as fuck.”

The Dark Place

It all started innocently enough, as these things often do, with stories about the accidental racism of our children. Cecilia’s son had asked a question at school that, while technically innocent, managed to mortify her to the core upon hearing about it. Our son, not to be outdone, had loudly asked in a Hobby Lobby why some people were “speaking non-English in an English-speaking store.” Parenting, it seems, is just one long exercise in managing public relations disasters you didn’t personally commit.

This bled naturally into a broader discussion about raising children—not just to avoid saying horrifying things in retail stores, but to grow into kind, compassionate adults. We wanted them to be intelligent, thoughtful, generous, not racist, not Republicans, definitely not Aggies, and if possible, to possess some kind of faith.

It was the faith part that struck me as discordant, like when someone says reticent when they mean reluctant.

I am always the odd man out when it comes to questions of faith. Normally, when someone asks me what I believe, I pivot like a tech CEO being questioned by Congress: evasion, redirection, maybe a sudden-onset bladder emergency if things get too intense. Anything to avoid saying aloud that I think most people are—how shall I put this—a little bit silly in the head.

But somehow the conversation meandered from faith into fate and destiny, which is where I really thrive, if by thrive you mean “alienate everyone at the table.”

Dom and I had met relatively late in life, despite having lived just a few floors apart at the University of Texas at Austin. Same dorm, same timeframe, same stairwells, and yet we didn’t meet until well after our twenties had soured into thirties. Some would call it fate. I, riding high on two Old Fashioneds and a deep reserve of misplaced confidence, decided it was the perfect moment to drop an existential bomb.

“There’s no destiny,” I said, reaching for a Manchego tater tot. “There’s no fate. Everything is random. It’s all meaningless.”

The silence was not immediate—it sort of unfurled itself across the table like a heavy velvet curtain. Jimmy and Cecilia did their best to nod along, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps calculating how long they had to stay before they could fake an early bedtime. Dom, to her credit, simply looked at me with what I call the loving daggers: a gaze that simultaneously says I love you and you’re sleeping on the couch.

Sensing the need for further clarification, I pressed on.

I gave the example of John Williams, the legendary composer. “He has accomplished more in one lifetime than most civilizations,” I said. “He wrote Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones. He will die anyway. All of it—gone. You, me, Beethoven, the guy who invented pizza rolls. Death comes for us all, and nothing we do can stop it.”

At this point, Dom tentatively asked, “If everything is meaningless, why do anything at all?”

Ah. My moment.

“Because,” I said, spearing a final tater tot, “nihilism is freeing.”

I explained, perhaps too eagerly, that the absence of cosmic meaning doesn’t condemn you to hedonism or despair—it offers the possibility of choice. As Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” And Viktor Frankl, who suffered the dehumanization of concentration camps, still asserted that “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

Meaning, I argued, isn’t handed down from on high by a bearded sky deity—it’s created. You choose to be a good father. You choose to stop at red lights. You choose to be a decent human being because, in a senseless universe, choice is the only true authorship you have.

Wonderful things happen in life. But they just happen—not because you earned them or deserved them or because some grand puppeteer was scripting your life from a cloud.

They happen because sometimes, improbably, the tumblers fall into place: a boy from the thirteenth floor meets a girl from the ninth, and somehow, years later, that girl shares an office with the woman who never lets a group text go unanswered.

No destiny.
Just good luck.

What We Took Home

The Man from Georgia returned to deliver the dessert menu, peppering the air with a fresh round of spicy language that felt less like profanity and more like verbal atmosphere.

Everyone wanted to share a dessert. I, being the helpless sugar addict I am, informed The Man that I don’t share. He fist-bumped me in solidarity, the brotherhood of selfish dessert lovers cemented without another word.

When we finally thought to check our watches, we realized we had been sitting there for four hours. Four hours—gone without notice, carried off in a haze of cocktails, laughter, and conversation that moved seamlessly from light to heavy and back again.

Cecilia said it best, later in a text: “Thank you for being the friends that four hours go by at the dinner table and it still STILL feels like we need more time.”

Reluctantly, we boxed up what food we couldn’t physically fit into our bodies, settled the check (screw you, Future Daniel’s credit card bill), and made our way outside.

There, under the East Austin stars and the soft buzz of a half-dozen nearby bars, we lingered for warm hugs and the comforting promises to do this again soon.

On the drive home, Dom leaned her head back, eyes closed, smiling to herself in the darkness. I felt the same—a heart full, a cup refilled to the brim, and no need for words. Some nights just imprint themselves on you, quietly and permanently.

I would never call nights like these meaningless.

These nights strengthen bonds. They create the memories that stack up, haphazardly but lovingly, into the thing we call a life. They remind us why these four lives, through random chance or divine intervention, were ever intertwined in the first place.

I said it at the table, and I’ll say it again: tomorrow, the memory of this night will still be fresh. A year from now, maybe only the outline will remain. A hundred years from now, a thousand—nothing we said or did will matter. We, and all our memories, will be gone.

And yet.

At this moment, in this booth, with these people…

This night mattered more than anything.