Hey it’s me, your boy Mackey¹. I’m a mostly-blind dog with a possibly over-developed and wildly inaccurate sense of danger. I can’t see, can’t run, and am frequently convinced that that thing moving in the distance beyond my nose is a mortal threat worthy of a red alert, but I can write².
It’s only my second Christmas, but even I can tell that life moves extremely fast here.
- Téa Sloane is now a teen, and thus her response to any question is completely rational and proportional.
- Devon’s car hit Andy’s car in our driveway. Devon might have been driving and, perhaps because we were all there to witness it, it seemed to happen in slow motion. Teen driving is terrifying enough, but watching a new driver miss the shift from R to D and confidently accelerate broadside into another car that you own defines excruciating. If only this car-on-car action was an isolated incident; our Platinum Member Discount at Mike’s Auto Body suggests otherwise.
- Coop suddenly cares about nutrition. For breakfast he now downs a health shake that only Andy is permitted to prepare for him. He doesn’t even trust himself. Andy’s just so-so at preparing his scrambled eggs properly (cooked not burned, fluffy not watery), so Jennifer is allowed that honor. Those of us who don’t already, will be one day working for Cooper.
The family moved to NYC this summer, which means that they lived there for 4 weeks and 1 day. It was long enough for them to do quite a few things that I wouldn’t recommend.
For example: when you hear it’s Young Comedian Night at a bar in The Village, you immediately think ‘I should bring my 13-year-old girl,’ right? Neither did I, and need I remind you, I’m a dog. Ignoring both tingling Spidey-Sense and logic, Andy, Jennifer, Téa Sloane and our friend John³ arrived early to get a good table. Just before the opening act, Jennifer spots two friends solo on the far side of the club and impulsively dashes across the club so they wouldn’t be lonely. If this was on TV, this scene would feature arch music or strategic cutting to foreshadow the significance of this impulse and the impending cascade of doom that would soon follow. The first comedian takes the mic. “So, I’ve been told that there’s a child in the audience!” she says. Spotting Téa Sloane seated 15 feet in front of her, she waves, saying “Hello, child!” to Téa, who gamely waves back. The woman then launches into her routine about stress masturbating on the toilet with a hairbrush. Time passes. From across the room, Jennifer locks eyes with Téa, enacting a desperate yet encouraging pantomime which said both: “You can do it, it will get better!” (it didn’t), and also “Cover your ears! Close your eyes! Curl up into a ball!” By halfway through the third comedian’s lightly misogynistic bit about how thoroughly he disappoints the women he meets for sex on Tinder, and wonders aloud if gay dudes would be quite so judgmental, Jennifer issues the order to abandon ship. Wedged in among larger, appropriately-aged audience members, she used cocktail tables like stepping stones, cutting directly in front of the performer to reach Téa, then (figuratively) picked her up by the scruff of her neck and moved swiftly to the closest ice cream shop to ward-off permanent emotional scarring while furiously Googling ways to induce memory loss.
While Téa was riding the tides of parental negligence this summer, the boys were on deck to begin college applications. For the uninitiated, the college application process is like hell, but considerably worse. It is a forced march across a parched, featureless desert that you can’t even feel special about surviving, because literally everyone you know is marching alongside you. Any other experience this all-consuming and painful would be the subject of the college essay. Jennifer thought that being friendless and thus free of distractions, the boys time in NYC would be optimal for college essay inspiration. Also, it would be fun, kind of like writing a novel on the beach! They’d get done early and be ready to really savor their senior year. That Disney-esque idea was beautiful and 100% pure fiction. It’s December and the boys are still heads-down writing apps. People who study pain say it has two scalars: amplitude and duration. The ability to make painful things more painful by maximizing their duration is a family strength.
Andy remains focused on entrepreneurship including a satellite business, an autonomous drone security company and a friend’s pinball business. Long able to justify the outlandish under a façade of work relevance, he’s now eyeing rockets, more pinball machines and a prototype microturbine jet drone.
Jennifer’s book, Humor, Seriously: Why Humor is a Secret Weapon in Business (and Life), is progressing in ways that make college apps seem fun. Hitting Amazon right ahead of the 2020 election, you’ll also be able to find it wherever fine alcohol is sold. Because Jennifer teaches a class on AI for Human Well Being, and because Andy is Andy, they have both been serving as Technical Advisors on Artificial Intelligence and the applications of Quantum Computing for the upcoming Halo TV series featuring Cortana. And because truth is stranger than fiction, Jennifer will use some of the Halo material to inform her class.
Lots of love & Woofs, Mackey
¹ This is not Mackey. As you know, the kids traditionally take turns “writing” this holiday card, a cheap comic contrivance to say things that we believe, but originating from a deniable expendable source — like Rudy Giuliani. However, over time, the kids grew old enough to construct complete sentences and some of you began to believe that they actually wrote it. And you were amazed and a little star-struck by their talent which was flattering but also unwarranted because they didn’t write the letter. So, to be clear to the point of absurdity that our kids don’t write these letters, and to emphasize that they never did, we are going with a dog as an author.
² I cannot write.
³ John is an innocent here (you didn’t see him bring any of his daughters, did you?). He is mentioned solely for accuracy and to give him credit for his shared pain.