On The Fly

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...

In this episode, A chat with Adamas the Chef on hidden recipes causing digital hallucinations. Pull up a chair and pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee—and please, for your own sake, taste it first. We need to have a quiet chat about why your computer sometimes decides to reinvent reality with the confidence of a five-star chef who has clearly lost his mind. In the world of technology, we call it a  hallucination . It sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it? As if the computer decided to ignore your instructions altogether in favor of a vivid, technicolor imagination that simply hasn’t met reality yet. But in truth, an AI hallucination isn’t a breakdown; it’s just a very confident, very polite mistake. Think of it like our friend Adamas , the Chef. Adamas is a master of the kitchen, but he is also a bit of a romantic who refuses to say “I don’t know.” When you ask him for a classic recipe he hasn’t made in years, he doesn’t stop to consult a cookbook—that’s far too pedestrian. Instead, ...

In this episode: The "Doctor" Who Never Was — A Return to the World of Seuss. Let’s take a trip back to March 2, 2022.  I was four years younger, significantly more naïve, and I made the mistake of asking an innocent question that—somehow—still echoes through the halls of pediatric offices everywhere:  Where exactly did the name Dr. Seuss come from? Because if we pause for even a moment, the whole thing is absurd. At some point, we collectively decided to accept moral guidance, life advice, and the occasional existential gut‑punch from a man whose résumé included oversized footwear, gravity‑defying cats, and an aggressive campaign to convince us that green ham was not only edible, but desirable. No white coat. No stethoscope. No medical board.  Just rhymes.  This wasn’t really a question about a title. It was a question about authority—and how easily we accept it when it comes wrapped in whimsy and ends with a couplet. Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, M...