Florian Schmid in Cyberspace

There is a specific kind of delusion that sets in when you are exactly forty-eight hours away from turning 41. You start looking at your life—the steadily declining 2013 Dodge Dart, the 6-year-old son who vibrates at a frequency that shatters glass, the depressing keto diet where you try to pretend that a slice of turkey wrapped around a stick of butter is a "wrap"—and you think: I need to be on the water. I needed a boat. A boat is a universal symbol of middle-aged relaxation. A boat implies you are sitting in a comfortable chair, moving at a brisk pace, and doing absolutely no physical labor. So, I went to a website called Boat Trader. My financial strategy was flawless. I am well aware of the MEDICAL FACT regarding boat ownership: the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy the boat, and the day they desperately try to get rid of it. I expected to find a digital wasteland of defeated men. I expected to find guys named Captain Ron, weeping openly i...

  So, it turns out Susan reads my blog. This is a terrifying development. If you recall, I recently wrote a column detailing the romantic and financial exploits of Caleb's grandmother. In that column, I stated that Susan was 67 years old. I have since been informed—loudly, and with a level of hostility usually reserved for territorial wolverines—that she is, in fact, 47. (So apparently she had Ashley at age 8-- according to her) She of course lied straight to my face. What she doesn't know is that her mother Caleb's great-grandma gave me her birth certificate. So, lets continue-- at age 73, Susan possesses a terrifying, aggressive vitality that makes me, a man four days away from turning 41, want to lie down on the kitchen floor and wait for the sweet release of a nap. But Susan was not just mad about the age. She was mad about the implication that she doesn't know what she's doing with her money. Let me clarify Susan's financial situation. She currently has rou...

 Turning 41 is not a milestone. Turning 40 is a milestone. At 40, society throws you a party, people buy you black balloons, and everyone pretends that "life begins at 40," which is a blatant lie invented by the greeting card industry. But 41? Forty-one is the morning after the warranty expires. At 41, you finally realize that your body is no longer a high-performance machine. It is, in fact, a 2013 Dodge Dart. It still runs, mostly, but there is a suspicious, unidentifiable rattling noise every time you bend over to tie your shoes, and the Check Engine light of your lower back has permanently blinked on. You start making "Dad Noises." You know the ones. You sit down on the couch: “Oof.” You stand up from the couch: “Nrrgh.” You drop a pen on the floor, look at it, and seriously calculate whether you really need that pen anymore. I am not making this up. MEDICAL SCIENCE has proven that at age 41, your metabolism officially packs its bags, leaves a note saying it’s...

Grocery stores used to be simple. You walked in, you bought your discount meat, and you left. Now they want you to invest in the future of global finance while you're standing next to the claw machine. At 40.9 years old, my personal financial strategy consists of hoping the check engine light on my 2013 Dodge Dart is just a suggestion, keeping my fingers crossed that Caleb doesn't outgrow his shoes this week, and occasionally finding a crumpled five-dollar bill in my laundry. I am not what you would call a HIGH FINANCE EXPERT. But the other day, Caleb and I are at Winn-Dixie. I am there to buy heavy cream and an offensive amount of bacon because I am still punishing myself with the keto diet. MEDICAL FACT: If you eat enough bacon, your body eventually stops realizing it's starving for carbohydrates and just accepts its greasy, miserable fate. While I am comparing the prices of pork products, Caleb has wandered over to the front of the store. He is currently vibrating at a f...

In exactly 3 days—February 22nd, to be exact—I will turn 41. Because of this impending doom, I am currently experiencing a level of DREAD usually reserved for people who are about to be audited by the IRS or forced to assemble a bunk bed using only an Allen wrench and a diagram drawn by a hostile alien race. People try to tell you that age is just a number. These people are liars. Age is a highly aggressive biological repo man coming to collect your cartilage. The dread really sets in when I look at my daily life. I have a six-year-old son, Caleb. MEDICAL FACT: Six-year-old boys do not have a standard human circulatory system; they are powered by a small, internalized nuclear fusion reactor that requires them to be moving at 400 miles per hour, bouncing off the walls, and asking 8,000 questions a minute about where bugs go when it rains. Meanwhile, at almost-41, I possess the overall structural integrity and get-up-and-go of my 2013 Dodge Dart. When Caleb wants me to sprint across the ...

There is a universal law of nature that dictates what a grandmother is supposed to be. A grandmother is supposed to bake cookies, smell faintly of peppermint, and sneak twenty-dollar bills into your pocket while whispering that your parents are too strict. Caleb’s grandmother, Susan, missed this memo. Susan is 67 years old, but she operates under the firm delusion that she is a 24-year-old cast member on a Bravo reality show. Let us start with the makeup. Susan will not leave the house without a full, theatrical face of cosmetics. I am not talking about a quick swipe of lipstick. I mean a layer of foundation so structurally dense that it requires a trowel, a curing period, and a municipal zoning permit. If a meteor strikes the earth tomorrow, the only things to survive will be cockroaches and Susan’s contouring. But the real comedy comes from Susan's deeply held, unwavering conviction that Caleb’s mother, Ashley, and I are raging drug addicts. Just to set the record straight: we ar...