On Turning 50.

What comes next.

Most of my life has been spent trying to do something — to be someone, to figure out the pieces of who I am and try to gather them up in order to make something bigger … something more. I had to always keep moving. When I was in high school, I wanted to leave my tiny town to go to college to meet people who had seen a lot more of the world than I had. When I was in college I wanted to move out of the Midwest to test myself among, and learn from, people with a lot more life experience and savviness than I had. When I was at a temp job answering phones at a doctor’s office for a year, I wrote like crazy for free online hoping it would somehow help me improve, hoping maybe someone out there might find it. When I broke through as a sportswriter, I pushed myself to do more, to write about movies and music and art and politics, just to see if I could. When I got married and became a father, I dedicated myself to being the best at both I could be, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but always with a desperate, searching need to find some way to get it right. In the week after the world shut down for Covid, I had pieces about What This Meant in The New York Times, The Washington Post and New York; I was not going to let some global pandemic slow me down one bit. I started Websites, I hosted TV shows, I covered Presidential campaigns, I took every job and gig I could find, I said yes to…