Yearly Archive: 2014

Thanks for sharing

I started Rapid Eye Reality in 2001 when my friend Susannah pulled me aside at a wedding and said there was this thing called a “blog” that I might find interesting. Since that time,...

Mistakes

This is a story of two mistakes with eternal consequences. They happened almost exactly three years ago, but I’ve never written about them publicly. There are a lot of things that happen when somebody...

Threadbare troubadour

Getting old is easy. It happens without your permission. It happens on its own. It’s literally effortless. The hard part is finding any good in it happening. Something happened last night, and it made...

My dog swallowed what?

I learned a new word this weekend: radiopaque. It’s not the kind of word you just throw out over coffee, or really, in most polite conversation, but it is the kind of word you’ll...

Remembering the first kill

This week in Arizona, a nine-year-old girl shot and killed her shooting instructor by accident. The instructor was teaching the little girl to shoot an automatic 9mm Uzi. Sit with those two sentences for...

A letter to an American kid

I will never forget the day you were born. I will never forget the day you turned ten years old. They were both days that scared me until I could feel the fear in...

The email my son won’t get

Hey, buddy. We dropped you off at camp yesterday. We watched you sit on your bunk in a cabin you’d never seen before. We met your counselor. You mimicked his Australian accent and called...

Mom’s pencil

One of my earliest memories—one’s that just gauzy enough to prove its age, but just clear enough to be truer than most—is a pencil in my mom’s hand. It’s jitting and jotting across a...

Dear Coach Pinkel

Updated below Tonight I sit here in South Carolina and look at my wife. She’s wearing a fleece with a tiger on the back. Today, I drove my car to the gym. It has...