What’s your home decoration style? Some people have “modern farmhouse.” Some have “minimalist.” Others have whatever the hell they saw on HGTV this week. My decorating style? Lived in and cluttered. Not the kind where you need a map and a tetanus shot to get through the living room. Just the kind that says actual people live here instead of a furniture showroom.

Do you think everything happens for a reason? I think the whole “everything happens for a reason” thing is one of those feel-good sayings people throw around because it sounds deep. Right up there with “live, laugh, love” hanging on someone’s kitchen wall. Sometimes life has a reason. Sometimes life just kicks you square in the ass because Tuesday felt like the right day.

Midwest Geobash 2026 is in the books, and my social battery somehow survived. Barely. We packed up camp in Wauseon, spent a few days surrounded by thousands of people who all willingly crawl through weeds, stare at guardrails, and celebrate finding Tupperware hidden in the woods. To normal people, that sounds like a cry for help. To geocachers, that’s vacation.

What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever? Some people have a deep, life-changing lyric that makes them reflect on the meaning of existence. Mine? “I wanna be sedated.” Forty-plus years later and the Ramones still nailed it in four words better than half the self-help industry ever could. Some days it isn’t about wanting to escape life. It’s about wanting thirty damn minutes where nobody needs anything, my phone stays quiet, work quits inventing new bullshit, and the world collectively agrees to leave me alone.

Daily writing prompt What’s your biggest dream? View all responses The first one already happened, and I damn sure didn’t see it coming. I met my wife right after I’d completely given up on love. Not “taking a break.” Not “working on myself.” I was done. Figured that ship had sailed and was probably at the bottom of the ocean next to common sense and affordable groceries.

What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept? A while back I made myself one promise: stop living for work and start living for me. Turns out that’s one of the few promises I’ve actually managed to keep. Work will chew you up, spit you out, and replace you before the coffee in the break room gets cold.

Daily writing prompt If you could have dinner with any fictional character, who would it be? View all responses If I could have dinner with any fictional character, it’d be Dr. Manhattan from the graphic novel Watchmen. Not because I think we’d become best friends. Hell, he’d probably spend half the dinner explaining how every moment in time already happened, is happening, and will happen while I’m just trying to figure out if the fries are getting cold.

If you want to see places you normally blow right past, go on a geocaching poker run. We hit eight different local businesses, and every stop had a cache waiting. It’s a pretty clever idea. The businesses get people through the door, geocachers get another smiley on the map, and everyone gets an excuse to spend the day wandering around instead of doomscrolling.

What is the best purchase you have ever made? Coffee. That’s it. That’s the answer. People spend thousands chasing happiness with new cars, fancy gadgets, and whatever overpriced junk an influencer convinced them they couldn’t live without. Me? Give me a hot cup of coffee and suddenly the world becomes just a little less irritating. It’s the closest thing to a factory reset for my attitude.

We made it. Camp is set up in Wauseon for Midwest Geobash 2026, and the town is about to be overrun by thousands of people wandering around staring at GPS screens and suspiciously poking sticks into the woods. To everyone else it probably looks insane. To us, it’s just another damn perfect weekend. Went over to the pavilion to catch up with some friends.

What’s the funniest misunderstanding you’ve ever been part of? I’ve been doing this a while, and this might be the soundest thing I’ve said yet. This prompt is FUCKING stupid. So today……… PASS!!!

What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it? If I check my screen time, the app sitting smugly at the top is NetNewsWire. Not Facebook. Not TikTok. Not some game designed to squeeze every last drop of dopamine out of my brain. An RSS reader. Welcome to being Gen X, where reading headlines from hundreds of websites somehow counts as entertainment.

What’s a movie or book that inspired you to travel? When people ask what movie made me want to travel, the answer is easy. It’s The Lord of the Rings. Not because I want to dodge Orcs, get stabbed by Ringwraiths, or spend six hours hiking with a guy who hasn’t had a decent meal since the First Age. It’s because New Zealand is absolutely stunning.

If you could erase one trend from history, what would it be? If I could erase one trend from history forever, it’d be this ridiculous obsession with wearing your pants halfway down your ass. Seriously. Pull up your fucking pants. I don’t want to see your underwear. Nobody does. It wasn’t cool twenty years ago, and somehow it’s still hanging around like that one broken shopping cart with the wobbly wheel.

Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why? The piece of outdated technology I miss the most isn’t a gadget. It’s the old Internet. Back before every website wanted your email address, your firstborn child, and permission to track what brand of toilet paper you buy. The Internet used to feel like wandering through a giant neighborhood full of weird hobby pages, personal websites, forums, and people who actually made things because they wanted to.

There are a lot of things you expect to see when you live in eastern Ohio. Rain. Snow. Humidity that feels like you’re wearing a wet blanket. Allergies trying to assassinate you every spring. What you don’t expect is to walk outside, look up, and realize the sky looks like somebody turned the world’s brightness down to about 40%. These photos weren’t taken during a foggy morning.