This is my journal entry from January 24, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.
Woke up this morning with a new look in my eye. Went straight to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I sat next to a woman who got sober a few months ago and got her phone number today in the context of talking with her about her friend who does life coaching and maybe could help me get some ideas in that aspect. It was a good reminder to, hey, yes, I believe in asking regular people for advice, but if there are people who are, quote, experts or experienced in their field, I'm happy to talk to them, too. Maybe it would do me good to talk to a business coach or two and a life coach or two in town to see if they have some ideas for me that nobody else has. Or they can give me feedback in my business system instead of just chat GPT talking with me. This woman is very attractive, but she has a husband she seems to be pretty happy with. So I am not trying to work on anything there. Did enjoy remembering, I'm like the first time I saw her at a meeting like months ago, I'm like, definitely want to get her number. And then it happened today. So I talked to a few other people after the meeting, went home.
Then I met a guy who is delivering my letters for me today. I've got at least 300 of them ready for him with most of them saying open on the outside, but he's going to deliver the old help letters as well. I'm interested to see what kind of responses come back in. He picks the letters up and heads off to begin delivering them while I go to work listening to the mob boss book and cranking out more letters for him to deliver. I've got another 300 letters ready for him the next day for tomorrow as he delivers all these. He stops by my house and I give him the $100 payment at the halfway point. He takes another stack of letters and gets off delivering those.
Then I go to do a workout at my gym right before the kids are due to come over. I go and just lift some leg weights. And I run into a guy there that shares an awesome conversation with me, something I've wondered about for a long time. I've wondered about how he met his now fiance. And I ask because I've wondered the details for a future template myself. So I ask him. He met his fiance in the grocery store. And I know both of them. She's very attractive. And, you know, he's a nice guy. He's got a good job, all that stuff. And I asked him, like, OK, so how'd this go down? I have a picture of how it went down, but it turns out it didn't happen how I thought it happened. So they were in the freezer section of the store. He's looking at some pancakes, frozen pancakes. And she just kind of walks up next to him looking at the same pancakes. So he starts talking to her first. He says, do you think these pancakes are any good? Then they get to talking a bit from there. Then he ends up checking out from the store ahead of her and heads out with his groceries to his car. And this is the part that really surprised me. She walks out and follows him to his car and gives him her phone number. I was like, holy shit, like that's the effect I need to be having on girls right there.
Now, before this, he had had years of dating online and he's been through a divorce and has kids similar to me. And he had given up on dating to the point where here's this beautiful girl that's talking to him in the store that he has a nice conversation with. He doesn't even ask her for her phone number because he's at this point where it's like, you know, whatever, I'm fine without a woman. Seems like he got tired of even trying, so he has this conversation and just goes out to his car and I was so surprised because I pictured in this scenario that he had asked her for the phone number but no, she literally chased him down to his car with it right after she got her groceries out. I'm like wow that sets something up in my head that I'm like that's what I want to be doing. I want to be going around so confident and relaxed and happy with my life that I'm not even worried about getting women's phone numbers or trying to make anything happen. In this day and age, it seems with the way things are, women need to just give men their phone numbers the way things are today. And that's fine with me. Now, am I open to different possibilities? Yes, but I already know all the possibilities where I push things forward and ask the girl for her phone number and all that stuff. But what I wasn't as aware of is girls pushing things forward with guys. And that sounds good to me because almost everything in my life, I've made it happen. I've pushed. I've texted. I've called. I've asked out on dates. I've got the phone number. I've made everything happen. And for my next wife, I would like her to make shit happen. Because I know I'm a very high-quality man, a great catch, and I deserve a high-quality woman. And yet, if a woman wants to be with me, I'm more scarce than she is. I'm very interesting, and I'm an anomaly, as my friends say. I am worth pursuing.
And in this Me Too culture and shit, women need to feel safe, as a friend says. Fine, you feel safe. I'm not going to do shit. You can give me your goddamn phone number when you want to proceed, all right? That'll be just fine with me, and I'm just going to increase tension until then. I might ask for a phone number if there was a very high level of tension with somebody like a woman I had a crush on that I saw over and over again in that scenario when it seemed like it'd be rude not to ask. That's one thing. But here, I'm going to just go around talking to girls, and they can follow me out to the parking lot if they want. That said, this guy was single years beforehand, it's interesting because like everybody said oh if you just relax and surrender it'll come to you. Okay well fine, I'm gonna just sit in my motherfucking house and play video games and write books and just hope that money and women come my way. Like there's a balance, and I guess with women these days the balance is just to be so hands off like they know that if they want you they're gonna have to make a move. We'll see how that works out for me.
My ex-wife brings the kids and meets me at the dog park at Crescent Lake. And we have a nice time talking there. Then we walk around to my house and my ex-wife heads out. My daughter has some emotions come up in the context of letting my ex-wife go. And what's nice is since I've been present as a father for my daughter's whole life, I know that my daughter has emotions with my ex-wife in all kinds of contexts. Like there's nothing special about staying at dad's house that's triggering emotions. If it was not for us being divorced, we're still at home together, my daughter would probably have some emotions over something else. In some ways, it's even easier that my daughter does have emotions over something that has some reality to it, or some substance or some depth to it, I'd say. Instead of getting upset that my son did this or the toy she couldn't have, the toy she wanted online immediately.
After my ex-wife leaves, my daughter and my son, while they're outside, my daughter's getting her emotions together. Then they run into a kid, a girl who lives nearby and her mom. The kids come in and tell me about her, saying that her mom wanted to introduce us. So I come out and meet everybody, and then the kids want to go play over at her house. So I let the kids go over there, bring my son over there too, because at first it was just my daughter. I walk in the house to make sure everything looks fine. It looks nice. Then another little girl comes over with her mom. I say hello to this other neighbor. She has a boyfriend that lives far away. And the boyfriend has a stepdaughter, and this is the stepdaughter, apparently. And then her son's off doing something else. So all the kids start playing. And I noticed my I Was Famous on the Internet book is sitting on the coffee table in this house, which is awesome because it was like two weeks ago that we gave that book away. And it's really cool to see that the book's still sitting there on the coffee table. How cool is that?
Then I go back to my house and start boiling potatoes because I thought we were staying at my house. So I turned the stove on and set potatoes to boil, which apparently boiling potatoes is the best way to cook them. I like them better than roasting them or sauteing them in a pan. The kids play over with the people across the street for a while. Then my mother arrives a little bit after the kids have went. But right before my mother arrives, my ex-wife comes back with water because my daughter, one of her points of breakdown was that she didn't like how the water tasted at my house. So my ex-wife went home, grabbed both her water, the bottles for the kids and filled up this gallon jug of water with the reverse osmosis water that I put in their house, which reminds me of Pulp Fiction. So when I drink my water, I want to fucking taste it instead of coffee. I know how good my water is. That's why I'm going to get something set up like that at this house.
Then my ex-wife is happy that my daughter has to watch while the kids are off playing in another house. And my ex-wife and my daughter miss each other because she's playing. And I'm like, yes, please don't disturb them. And they just started playing and they just started feeling better. So my ex-wife heads out. I imagine it's a little bit of a loss of control feeling for her that, you know, my daughter's out playing at, you know, some other kid's house in my neighborhood now, but that's the package. When you get divorced, the control that you have over each parent slips a whole lot versus being married and in the same household. And I'm enjoying getting there, have some flexibility to be more what I want to do instead of my ex-wife having control of everything. I enjoy now that when I have the kids, it's like I'm the primary parent. So I get much more primary parent time with them than I used to when we were married because my ex-wife was always supervising and dictating everything. So this is good for her to practice a little bit of letting go as well.
Right after my ex-wife leaves, my mother arrives with her big dog, Scooby. And my mother and I get a chance to take a nice walk around the lake together with her dog. And she is having so much fun birdwatching. She said, I forgot how much I love birdwatching. She's got her binoculars. There's all kinds of different ducks and pelicans and birds all over throughout Crescent Lake. And my mother, it's nice to see that side of her that's having fun. And I don't get to see that as often. I am grateful like this is high quality time with my mother instead of just sitting on the couch with her. Even though I've been seeing her less, this feels like it's much more alive. We take a nice walk, catching up on everything, walking around the lake. And then when it ends up getting after seven, I find out we had walked right by my daughter and my son on the playground. I walked by them because it was dark, didn't even realize they were playing there. So I go back to the playground. My daughter and my son are playing with like six or eight other kids, all that live right nearby. When I show up the park my daughter waves me away and I go back and talk to my mother for like 10 minutes and I love it. Like they're getting to play with all these new kids and have adventures and make new friends and then they have their own social life in my ex-wife's neighborhood with her family and a couple of school friends there, but there's not as many kids right next to my ex-wife's house at least as there are right next to mine, which is great. I'm really grateful for this experience.
After we pick the kids up and walk back with my mother to the house, then I get the kids some food and we set up Harry Potter Monopoly. All four of us play, which is fun, although at one point my son starts getting crazy and whacking the cards on the table and aggravating us, so he eventually did stop. Then my daughter gets a three of a kind on the yellows and is taking everybody's money, but my mother ends up finishing my son off. She puts my son into bankruptcy. So my son gives her all his property. She unmortgages him. Meanwhile, she keeps getting cleaned out by my daughter too. Then my daughter cleans me out several times, but my mother actually puts me out of the game as well. My mother now has all kinds of three of a kinds. And then the game ends right after that. And my mother ends up winning because she got so many three of a kinds from putting my son and I out of the game that she ends up winning. The best part was everybody had so much fun. It was so nice to play a board game with my mother and the kids and all of us have fun and are invested. It clearly is something my mother really had a lot of fun too. And we gave her lots of hugs and she headed out.
Then the kids took showers while she was still here. And then she sang You Are My Sunshine to them, which warms my heart because I remember her singing that to me as a kid and even when I was 12 myself. It was wonderful to be able to see her get to have that level of participation with my kids. She hadn't been able, or she hadn't with me not having overnights. My mother had not been able to be there for bedtime since at least October, if not September. So my mother really enjoyed getting to be over here. And this is a good reminder. I was thinking about telling my mother we could go see her at her house one day a week, maybe eventually, but I'd rather put that off for now. I reflect that having four quality hours of time with my mother today is much better than having 30 minutes of sitting on her couch every day, feeling obligated to go over there. Plus it is maybe a five, 10 minute drive over to her house at this point, which is far enough that I don't want to be over there every single day. And I really appreciate her coming down here, getting out and getting active with us.
I shower and then get in bed at like 1030. The kids have already fallen asleep. And I've almost fallen asleep when this fear grips me that has always got me or that has been able to get me at various points over the last 20 years. The best I can describe the fear is this: the clear knowledge of my own immortality, the absolute horror that I cannot die, that I will always be doing something in some form or another. I mean, I actually moaned out loud a little bit in the room with the kids because when the fear hits just right, that knowledge that I can't die, that no matter what, I have eternal life, I will always live, that this reality is so big and always goes on. I remember like 15 years ago, when I lived by myself in an apartment and some nights when I wasn't drinking because I was going to work or something the next day, I remember some nights just like screaming and pounding the bed in my apartment when that fear would hit me at just the right angle. It's funny. Some of these religions go around selling eternal life, but to me, one of the most horrible things to process sometimes is that I am immortal. That really nothing has changed from the time I was born to where I'm at now. Who I really am just sits here. And everything and everyone and everything I do is done through me. There's almost this comfort of knowing the boundaries in the container you're in. Like that you were born and you die. I don't know. I hope I'm communicating it accurately. But there's nothing that kind of terrifies me more than the knowledge that there's no beginning. There's no end. There's this certain exact like feeling or point of reference of like, I'm immortal. I can't die. There's no way out. You are doing this forever. I mean, I just, there, I was trying to like get a hold of the feeling while I'm describing it. It made me want to throw up just talking about that. Sounds like a nice note to wrap this shit up on.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.