This is my journal entry from February 22, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
My son and I woke up together this morning and I got some nice snuggles in his bed for almost an hour as he was waking up. These are precious since normally he has so much energy when he's awake. Then we got up and played the Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle board game. They got Bellatrix and Lucius Malfoy twice in a row. Destroyed us. We didn't even finish the game. We lost the first location in just a few minutes. Then we restarted again and I picked a thing where if the Death Eaters make you discard a card you get a lightning bolt to attack and you get to heal, plus I had Neville which gives you an extra heal. They got Tom Riddle out to start first, so I was discarding cards left and right. I was like, no, no, this worked good. And I'm so grateful my son woke up with this enthusiasm. Like, I can't wait, you know, let's play the deck builder, dad. I love that. I love that we're doing that instead of like on a screen or something together.
My daughter comes over a little after 10 and my son rides to go pick her up. And then they come back together and we have some time to play and relax at the house. And then I take them back to my ex-wife's house to drop them off. And I get ready for my call at 1 p.m. One of the guys that's been with me in AA for quite a while recommended me to a recovery coach. I talked to him and he coaches people, you know, in transformation, especially like exactly where I'm at. He talked to me for an hour on Zoom, which was really nice. He gave me three different books he thought I should read. And I immediately started reading this book called Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine, and then I added a couple of others to my wish list. I stopped my book diet, seeing that, okay, it is time to get back into reading. The Myth of Normal and the Spirituality of Imperfection are both on my wish list now as well. I'm really enjoying the Positive Intelligence book because it labels some of the thought patterns we have as saboteurs. And that makes it easier to deal with them instead of taking them so seriously and believing them all the time. I took a little positive intelligence test and noted that my score had slipped a little below where it was normally. I woke up feeling pretty down still this morning, which after that Friday yoga and then the Saturday, I'm still feeling down, but that's okay. We're going to keep moving forward. And it inspires my learning. When I'm down, I'm very willing to get in and learn and grow and ask for help.
After the call with the recovery coach, I meet a tennis partner for tennis at a local tennis center way down on the south side to finish the match we started last week that we didn't get to finish on Thursday night. Now, he normally plays on hard courts, and he was getting a bit worn down and frustrated at the end of the last set that I won. Now he's got a nice fresh start on his hard courts instead of playing on the clay courts like we did, and he kicks my ass. But I enjoyed it. I had a nice time. It was just a quick, you know, a little one set of tennis. He won 6-1. The wind was blowing like crazy, so it added a lot of variability, but it was fun. But I can see where the judge saboteur, as described in the Positive Intelligence book, really kicks in in things like tennis where it just starts, you know, oh you suck or criticizing me or the weather or the opponent or whatever it is. And I'm really excited to kick my sages more into duty, which I've been intentionally doing, like, hey, just you play, we're having fun, thank you for being out here, it's so healthy, isn't this a beautiful weather today. I play with my tennis partner and we're done in less than an hour from the time we warmed up to the time the set was over, and I figure okay that'll do, like that's enough tennis today. I'm going to go back home and continue to work on advancing the business plan.
So I get home, do the laundry and stuff, and I'm working on my envelope that I'm going to give out for getting people to write books. And the latest version that I come up with, I try a few different versions, but the one I'm really liking best says, imagine holding your life story in a book. I've written mine. I guide others in creating theirs. Begin telling your story at jerrybanfield.com. Jerry Banfield, author in St. Petersburg. A nice, like the outside of the letter, even if nobody opens the inside, it's told them Jerry Banfield's an author in St. Petersburg, tells them a website, gets them thinking about writing their book and tells them exactly where to do that. And like, man, that's, I really appreciate, you know, the branding. That's like the opposite of some of those letters I gave out before that said open on the outside or help, and more mysterious. These, just looking at them on the outside is very clear branding. And, you know, maybe I might even sell some books from people searching, you know, Jerry Banfield, author in St. Petersburg or whatever. That's awesome. Then on the inside, I'll write a long form sales letter, which I'll get to work on. After I work out some of the details on my letter and I print some test copies, I confirm that my printer can easily print on the outside of these six by nine envelopes, which is great.
I go to one AA meeting where I meet my sponsor there to say hi to him and talk to a few people, including the girl I started the meeting with. She's there and she comes over to say hi, which is great. My sponsor jokes that, hey, your girlfriend's coming over. And she has a boyfriend in the program that I like him. He's been sober a little bit longer than I have, which is cool. Good looking guy. And yet I have great affection for this girl as well. I feel like we really understand each other. I then wrap up talking with my sponsor and I go over to my home group. We have a couple of guys speaking. And it's funny that the one guy ended up marrying this girl in AA and I was there when they first met. And I remember she had talked about that she didn't think she could get pregnant. And I remember thinking, like, I wonder if she's pregnant. I had a bunch of thoughts about her being pregnant. And then at the end of the one guy's speech, he says that, you know, his now wife is pregnant. I'm like, that's awesome. Not only did she overcome the issues with not knowing if she could get pregnant and she had all these reproductive issues keeping her down for years, but now she's pregnant. And I must have been reading that somehow and thinking about it at the beginning of the meeting. I pulled that out of the air, even though I didn't consciously see anything to suggest she was pregnant. I was thinking about her being pregnant, and then they revealed it at the meeting. And it's like, wow, I love when stuff like that happens.
The other guy that speaks is close friends with another guy I talk with a lot, and him and his wife, we're all very friendly. After the meeting, I'm talking outside. The one guy I talk with gives me feedback on my business idea. And I really appreciate hearing his thoughts. And then we have a bunch of us talking outside, me and two other guys that we often spend late nights after a meeting talking for quite a while. Then the guy and his wife who have two kids, one's three and one's a baby, like a few months old. The guy and his wife invite us over to their house to keep talking and have pizza, which is awesome because these are the kind of things I rarely did back when I was married. And at this point, it's nine o'clock or a little after nine, like nine thirty. You know, I'm not doing anything the rest of the night. I'm so grateful for a chance to go over this guy's house again. We went over, I took the family a few years ago over to his house for the Christmas party. I think I brought them twice to the Christmas party at his house. They didn't have it this year because of the baby. And I'm so happy to go to his house with such an intimate crowd. We go back to his house and his wife's house and his kid's house. He has a friend staying there that looks familiar from like six years ago. And it turns out, you know, the guy that's staying with him, we must have ran into each other years ago at some of the, you know, ecstatic dances that I used to go to. We have a conversation that I'm surprised goes all the way till 12:30 in the morning before the wife goes to go to bed. And I'm like, all right, I got a 15 minute drive home. I'm like never up till this late. It's time for me to get to bed because I'm still going to get up at the same time.
And I notice as I'm heading home, I'm like, I feel full again. Like after a couple of days of feeling down, feeling empty, feeling like I'm not quite getting what I need, not quite in the right spot. Now I feel full again. I'm super grateful. As I get home, I go to bed. I'm like, that's what I needed. I just got five hours after a meeting of great time talking with people and the meeting itself was nice and I had time beforehand. Like that's six, seven hours of dedicated time being in, you know, a high quality connection environment with people. Plus I had the time on a tennis court. Plus I had hours with the kids this morning. Like this was a day of human connection that really left me feel back up. And I'm really excited to like get started the week with this kind of energy.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.