On The Fly

In this episode, the Stubborn Choice to Rise There’s that tiny, breathless moment during a bicycle crash when you realize gravity has won, and it’s not going to budge. I recently found myself in that exact situation.  My front tire collided with another cyclist, and momentum took over,  and I flipped like a sack of uninspired potatoes flung into the back of a truck. As the dust settled and I lay there, thrown from the bike,  trembling  . . . I did that quick, quiet check we all do: Am I broken? Will I ever be able to swing a golf club again? And, most importantly, can I rise again? Thankfully, the answers were no, yes, and absolutely. I walked away bruised and battered, but okay. Once I realized that neither my golf clubs, hiking boots, nor my bicycle was going to retire early, I felt a rush of overwhelming gratitude. A physical crash is loud, embarrassing, and leaves a mark. But the truth is, most of us are crashing much more quietly every single day. We crash into ...

In this episode, the interactive obstacle course of the San Marcos bike path. (Sunday, April 12, 2026) It started out as a beautiful day for a ride—our usual 30-mile Sunday trek to Escondido. The weather was moody, with brooding dark clouds threatening rain, but the streets were mostly empty. The traffic was light, and the bike paths were eerily quiet. It gave off the distinct, yet entirely false, illusion of a peaceful sanctuary. We were headed home, and I had settled into a smooth, hypnotic cadence on the path across from Palomar College in San Marcos. I was listening to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, minding my own business, and dressed to be seen. Between my colorful jersey and my cherry-red vest, I was illuminated like a human traffic cone. You could spot me from low Earth orbit. Apparently, that wasn't visible enough. Up ahead, I spotted another cyclist. He was cruising along in a state of pure, unhelmeted zen—completely unburdened by the earthly concepts of peripheral vision ...

Picture this: an email lands in your inbox. A colleague—maybe even a friend—needs a favor, a second set of eyes, a moment of your time. You sigh, stare at the glow of your monitor, and type: “I’d love to help, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now.” Hit send. Problem solved. Conscience clear. Except it shouldn’t be. Most of us have said or sent that line at least once, hoping it would land gently. On the surface, it’s perfect—efficient, polite, even self-aware. And that’s exactly the problem. It lets you decline without ever quite telling the truth. You didn’t just say no; you softened the discomfort of being human until it barely felt like a feeling at all. Instead of admitting, I’m overwhelmed , or I don’t have the energy , you reach for the sterile vocabulary of a server room. You turn a feeling into a metric. A boundary into a system limitation. Apologies, my data transfer rate is capped. Please submit a ticket to my emotional help desk. It’s a clever little trick—and an un...

There is something different about pre-dawn this morning. Sitting in my reading chair, an almost eerie, luminous glow crept through the window, demanding to be acknowledged. Stepping outside into the quiet chill, a nearly Full Moon was sinking into the West beneath a crystal-clear sky, the Big Dipper hanging faithfully in the dark above. But looking at that Moon meant looking at a ghost. Because light takes time to travel, the Moon we see in the sky is not the Moon as it exists in this exact microsecond. It is the Moon as it looked about a second and a quarter ago. When we look up, we are forever staring into the depths of the past. And right now, somewhere in that million-mile abyss between our present and that past light, four human beings are hurtling through the vacuum of space at unbelievable speeds. Today is Good Friday. For centuries, it has stood as a profound marker of the universal human experience—a day that asks us to sit with suffering, injustice, and the "dark night ...

In this episode, A funny thing happens when you stop searching for your golf ball—you start enjoying the game. Welcome back to On the Fly . Let’s be honest: at 69, most people are focused on staying upright and not tripping over the cat. Not me. Fueled by a lifetime of Zig Ziglar wisdom—especially A View From the Top —I’ve been chasing a goal that sits somewhere between ambitious and “mildly delusional”: By my 70th birthday, I want to shoot my age in golf. And yes—before anyone calls the PGA Tour—this is happening on a par-3 executive course. This is The Amen Corner of Retirement, where the holes are short, the rounds are friendly, and the expectations are... negotiable. Still, a 70 is a 70. The Quiet Progress And lately, something interesting has happened. This week? I’m noticing the progress. I’ve been spending time on the parts of the game that don’t make headlines—chipping and putting. No drama. No hero shots. Just quiet, repetitive work around the greens. And now... the payoff is...

It’s back. Baseball—yes, baseball ! If you’re someone who finds themselves inexplicably drawn to this peculiar ritual, let’s be honest with each other: it’s a bit odd, right? I mean, 162 games. That’s a lot of hot dogs, a lot of standing around, and a lot of grown men in oddly tailored trousers spitting with remarkable precision. And yet, here we are, poised on the precipice of another season. Thursday, March 26, 2026, to be precise—Opening Day. It’s a curious thing, this Opening Day. You walk into a stadium, or turn on the TV, and suddenly, everyone is infected with a highly contagious strain of . . . Optimism . It’s a spectacular form of collective amnesia. All of last year’s fumbles, the endless losing streaks, the existential dread of watching your bullpen implode in the eighth inning—poof. Gone. It’s entirely replaced by a wide-eyed, childlike belief that this year, finally, the baseball gods will smile upon us. The Cycle of Hope and Despair As a Cubs fan, I know this cycle intim...

In this episode, terrified of smart toasters, yet demanding infinite electricity for potato personality tests. Pull up that chair again, and let’s hope your coffee is safe this time. In our last chat, we talked about our well-meaning but occasionally delusional AI friend, Chef Adamas, and his penchant for hallucinating blueberries into your Carbonara. We learned how to manage his quirks by keeping our “digital pantry” organized. But today, we need to look past the chef and take a hard look at the sheer size of the kitchen we are building for him. And folks, that kitchen has gotten completely out of hand. Down in Louisiana, tech companies are currently building an artificial intelligence data center the size of 70 football fields. It is a four-million-square-foot digital brain that requires so much electricity they are building three new natural gas power plants just to keep the servers from literally melting down into a puddle of expensive silicon. And what are we using this god-like, ...

In this episode, Why the 'Stupid' Choice Was the Only One That Mattered. It was the summer of 1982. I was on my knees in the humid Illinois heat, waxing the fender of a restored 1932 Plymouth Coupe. To the passerby on the Macomb Square, I looked like a failure. Here was a guy who had studied physics, computer programming, and calculus, now sweating through his shirt as a "gopher" for Bob Melton. And Bob? Bob was an event. Picture a man who dressed like one of Red Skelton’s characters—not the monologue version, but the sketch comedy version. We’re talking a sport coat, clashing slacks, a tie wide enough to land a plane on, and white shoes. His wife was the fashion queen of Macomb; Bob was, shall we say, not the fashion king. He was the wealthiest man in town, a lawyer, and a "lovable character" with a well-known thirst. At Christmas, while other shops played "Silent Night," Bob blasted Louis Armstrong’s raspy jazz trumpet through the toy store spea...