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 more Spanish this year than the previous two combined. You completed a Harvard course in philosophy. What do you mean ‘some writing’?”

She’s right, of course.

So here’s what 2025 actually looked like.

The Fiction

May first, The Purging Room was released. My first novel. Well, novella. At sixty-seven, I finally proved the redneck kid who taught his illiterate grandfather to write could write something that never happened. I can’t express how proud i am of this book.

Industry people are discussing screenplay adaptations. I have no illusions about Hollywood, but Christ, the fact that anyone thinks it’s worthy of film makes me feel like that seventeen-year-old who first imagined these stroies might have been onto something.

The Excavation

My AI tool Claude and I spent months digitizing everything—fifty years of journals, seven hundred dreams, twenty years of blog posts, nine books, decades of social media. What emerged is A Life in Four Movements, organized around my Four Essentials. Body, Mind, Soul, Spirit. Sensuality, Curiosity, Communion, Freedom.

Maybe the first time anyone’s used AI to excavate a complete life this way—to unearth the human voice more completely rather than replace it.

The Body Work

Forty-nine tantric massages. Systematic work to heal the body-spirit split, religion carved into me. Nearly weekly sessions learning that touch can be sacred, that pleasure and spiritual depth aren’t enemies, that my body deserves presence instead of performance.

Painted seven watercolors, including Dionysus—reclaiming masculine sensuality from evangelical shame. Cooked over two hundred meals, mostly Spanish and Basque cuisine. Learned 454 new Spanish words. And I started swimming seriously again, about 3,000 meters per week.

Barcelona became my classroom in embodied living. Burlesque shows and nude beaches. Retreats to Montserrat and Poblet monasteries. Three Kings parades and Carnaval in the streets. Disney at the Liceu Opera House. The magic fountains of Montjuïc reopening. 

Cathedral illuminations mapping light onto stone. Michelin-starred dinners and palace garden picnics. The Gothic Quarter’s back streets revealing themselves slowly. Museums—the Prado and Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museu de la Música here, an exhibition of nude art that felt like permission. The LONGINES Championship show jumping tour. The No Kings march. 

Day trips to Zaragoza. Longer journeys to Vienna, Salzburg, Dubrovnik—each city teaching me something about pleasure, history, beauty held in stone and flesh.

The Mind

Completed Michael Sandel’s Harvard philosophy course. Locke, Kant, Bentham, Aristotle. Read voraciously—Gauguin’s biography, Zafón’s Gothic Barcelona novels, Ian McEwan, erotic literature without shame.

Seven hundred thirty conversations with Gina—morning coffee, evening cocktails. The kind where we talk about affect theory and Barcelona politics and our dreams and whether consciousness survives death and what we want for dinner—all in the same breath.

The Communion

My daughter sent a few texts after fourteen years of silence. She told my grandson—whom I’ve never met—about running with me when she was his age. Then she disappeared again without explanation.

My father lies dying at home in North Georgia hospice care. I cannot go to him—speaking truth about Trump’s regime makes border crossing dangerous for this exile. The eldest son, who cannot attend his father’s deathbed. Heartbreaking.

And yet—730 daily conversations with Gina. My blog community grew. Readers engage with my uncensored voice. Tuesday memoir chapters, Friday provocations. A new YouTube channel. People keep showing up.

The Mortality

At sixty-seven, with your father dying, mortality stops being abstract. You’re next in line. The wild boy in the Tennessee closet has sixty-seven years behind him, unknown years ahead.

And the strange truth? I feel more satisfied, more fulfilled, more peaceful, more whole than any time in my life.

Maybe because of the grief, the exile, the estrangement—rather than despite them. Wholeness isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the capacity to hold your father’s approaching death and Barcelona’s Mediterranean light in the same hand without fragmenting.

That’s what 2025 taught me. You can publish novels and lose daughters. Complete memoir excavations while your father dies. Learn Spanish verbs while confronting your own mortality. Paint nudes while grieving. Feel integrated while everything breaks.

Most people spend their lives trying to have it all together. I spent 2025 learning that wholeness means holding it all—the breaks included.

Maybe that’s the real accomplishment.