Category: Post
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The Messiness of Male Friendship
I had maybe five close male friendships in my first fifty years. I wouldn’t call any of them intimate. Traditional American male friendships—unwritten rules about acceptable topics, no physical contact beyond the sterile back-slapping hug, careful avoidance of anything that might seem too close. I often wondered why we’re so terrified of physical and emotional…
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Protected: What Does My Arousal Mean? The Psychology Behind What Turns You On
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Carrying My History in My Mouth
From: A Life in Four Movements (An Unfinished Symphony) My father is dying at home in hospice care. I’ve been calling my mother more—once a week now instead of once a month—and every time she answers, her voice startles me. Not because it’s aged (though it has), but because it carries centuries of the Cumberland…
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Protected: What Epstein, Church Abusers, and Predatory Doctors All Knew
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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2025: THE YEAR I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS BUILDING
Gina asked me yesterday what I’d accomplished this year. I gave her some vague answer about the memoir and the novel. She looked at me with that expression she gets—the one that says I’m being obtuse on purpose. “Randy. You published your first novel at sixty-seven. You’re excavating your entire life with AI. You learned…
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When Gina Cried: The Forty Days That Changed Everything
From: A Life in Four Movements (An Unfinished Symphony) After three brutal years carving Kalien Retreat out of Tennessee wilderness, we were exhausted in ways that sleep couldn’t fix. We’d kept two horses that required daily care, and when it rained for forty straight days—setting an all-time February record—that care became an ordeal testing everything…
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A.I. or Real? Merry Christmas
Gina caught the virus for creating an AI Christmas photo. It turned out very sexy but I felt a real photo would be much more “Gina.” So I ordered her a sexy Santa outfit and we did a photo shoot at the beautifully decorated library of the hotel at which we are currently enjoying for…
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Protected: So You Have These Sexual Interests. Now What?
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Nail Gun Salvation
From A Life in Four Movements: An Unfinished Symphony Summer 2016 – When Power Tools Meet Inexperience Gina and I were adding a porch to the open basement of what would become our main house. I was installing 2×10 joists to support it, using metal hurricane straps to hold everything together. I’d been drilling them…
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Protected: Am I Perverted? What Science Actually Says About ‘Unusual’ Sexual Interests
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Aerosol Can Missile Crisis
Another Near-Death Experience at Kalien from A Life in Four Movements: An Unfinished Symphony Building Hawk’s Nest—my artist studio and the first thing in my entire life I had ever constructed from scratch—generated an impressive collection of wood scraps, sawdust, bent nails, and the kind of construction debris that accumulates around any project undertaken by…
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Protected: When Discovery Becomes Conversation: The Porn Talk Most Marriages Never Have
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Runaway Trailer: A Near-Death Comedy at Kalien
From A Life in Four Movements: An Unfinished Symphony When Physics Meets Ignorance There’s a foolishness that strikes certain middle-aged men who’ve suddenly decided they’re construction workers despite never having owned a drill. It’s the ignorance of someone who thinks good intentions can overcome the laws of physics, that enthusiasm can substitute for experience, and…
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Protected: The Ethical Struggle with Porn: Questions I’m Still Working Through at 67
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Naked Skunk Incident
From: A Life in Four Movements: An Unfinished Symphony Before Kalien, I had never owned a gun. This wasn’t a political statement or moral position—it was simply suburban reality. In my world of mega-churches and gated communities, firearms were abstract things that other people owned for reasons I didn’t need to understand. But Gina’s dad…
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Twenty Reasons for Gratitude on This Thanksgiving
I asked my AI tool Claude to thoroughly research my 20 years of blog posts, almost 1000 of my dreams, my books, social media posts, and fifty years of journal entries and give me the top 20 things I should be thankful for. And Wow!! It was fascinating to see how Claude chose and ranked…
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Why 67 Feels Like 50—One Word: Spain!
Letters from the Terrace I’m 67, active, healthy, and still having incredible sex (without medication). There. I said it. The thing Americans my age aren’t supposed to admit—because my birth country, America, is what researchers call “one of the most ageist societies on earth.” But here’s what I’ve discovered after two years in Barcelona: chronological…
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The Rise and Fall of Our Chicken Empire
A Life in Four Movements (Excerpt from Kalien Chapter) Gina loves animals with the kind of fierce devotion that makes her assume the best about every creature she encounters, which is both her greatest gift and, as we were about to learn, occasionally a tactical disadvantage when dealing with the realities of wilderness life. It…
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The Naked Truth
Letters From the Terrace An Atlantic article landed in my feed this week about the disappearance of communal nudity in America—how locker rooms now have private stalls, how generations are growing up never seeing an ordinary naked body that isn’t their own, their partner’s, or algorithmically perfected on a screen. Reading it from Barcelona felt…
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When Dreams Meet Reality and Reality Wins
First Year at Kalien: Welcome to Survival Mode 2015-2016 From my journal, August 12, 2002:“The Rivendell project—a vision born during a run through the Barn Trail woods. An artist retreat of 25-50 acres, a colony for artists. A place for people from all walks of life (but especially creatives) to find encouragement. Private spaces for…