Gold Mines

What's weird about my life these days is I spend a lot of my time profiling entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and self-published authors, on the other hand, who all stand a much better chance at becoming rich than I do.

It is a strange moment in history, and I am aware that I stand on the bleeding edge of it all.

Because I am becoming poorer and poorer as every day passes. It often feels as if we are on opposite sides of a train track. I am watching them ascend, and helping them do so with my stories, while they are watching me descend into a far less fortunate place.

Yet, it is my duty, as a father, to become rich and to do so fast. The colleges my younger kids will attend cost around $50,000 a year, some half that, but if you do the math, as their provider, it's my role to come up with this type of money.

How to do so? Is anything I write popular enough to attract this kind of reward? Here, I write for free, out of a love for writing.

But how could I write for profit?

Should I write "how-to" guides? Erotica? A guide to memoir-writing? My own memoir? A novel? A love story?

I do not have a clue and I could use some help. Some very big bills will need to be paid and the only way to make that happen is to answer these questions now.

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Spring Concert Once Again

My kids have been singing in their school's spring concert in the magnificent Herbst Theatre in downtown San Francisco every year since we moved back to this town in the year 2000.

Tonight, the boys and I landed at SFO in late afternoon, drove to Bernal and collected their little sister, and ended up at the Herbst to watch her and the other kids in her school sing and perform.

She looked radiant up there on stage, even though she has a sore throat and does not feel at all well. She and her cohort sang well, bringing tears to our eyes with a twist on the Beatles' "That Boy," changing it to "That Girl."

Afterwards, her brothers hammed it up with her outside the building, before they went off into the night to attend a premier of a movie, and I took her home to a warm cup of tea and honey to treat that sore throat of hers.

Such are families -- we show up for each other's big moments, happily, and would never be anywhere else.

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Scouting Colleges and Scrimmaging in a Light Rain

Late yesterday, as we visited Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, Aidan got to scrimmage with some members of that school's soccer team. As I was watching him play with guys a few years older than him, my mind wandered back to his first days learning soccer.

It was the fall of 1999. He was five. We were living in a big house on Maple Street in Takoma Park, MD.

I was his coach.

Here we are, a Baker's Dozen years and a continent later, and he's playing soccer with college-aged men on a college campus. It's not a game; it's a practice, but that's where it all starts -- at practice.

As the Evergreen coach watched beside me at the sideline, Aidan passed to a teammate and raced to the other side of the pitch, took a pass, and scored.

In this little friendly three-on-three, he did that multiple times, but on this particular play, the coach smiled at me and said, "Nice run."

It has been a nice run, being a soccer Dad these many years, privileged to watch this gifted young athlete and call him my son. Knowing how hard he has worked to get this far, it doesn't really matter whether he makes it as some sort of star in college or beyond -- to either of us.

It just matters that he loves the game, and will always be able to strap on some cleats, run out there on whatever field is at hand, and kick the ball around with others who love "the beautiful game."

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Science and Family

My younger boys got a rare treat by visiting their older brother's neuroscience lab at the University of Washington.

It was a rarity, my three sons and I hanging out three nights in a row, eating dinner, talking Giants, just being together.

Hope we can do this more often...

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Three Brothers

Together again, up here in the Pacific Northwest. Such an honor, to be their father.

We've been visiting colleges in the Seattle area. True to its reputation, the weather here has been rainy and cool.

It's the first time here (that they can remember) for the younger two boys. As much as the specific colleges we're touring, it's the region that is making an impression on them.

Going on campus tours present one of those quintessential human moments -- a bunch of high school juniors, feeling awkward but secretly excited, reluctantly accompanied by their parents, following along a college student walking backward and talking rapidly, pausing to ask if anyone has a question, which almost no one ever does.

The high schoolers are listening a lot more closely than their expressions reveal. They are listening for signs to their future, trying to imagine the unimaginable, being on their own, at last.

Slowly, the image forms in their minds of why they have been told for so long now to work hard in school. It's for this -- this vision being held out to them by one just a few years older.

Freedom.

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The Winner!

I suppose the one good thing about a blog like this is it is the place I can tell my stories my own way, because most of the time the outside world will have other priorities.

Spring soccer season is under way. Some late winter storms have been raining out practices and games, but my two soccer players have been very active nonetheless.

Last night, Aidan gathered his U-14 girls team at Franklin Square for the second pre-season practice of this spring. The girls were distracted and excited because they had a dance afterwards.

That wild emotional energy is something their young (17-year-old) coach has a great deal of trouble understanding, but he patiently led them through the drills he'd prepared nonetheless.

It's hard to believe that one of the tallest girls (nearest in the photo above) is his younger sister and my youngest child. She's a stalwart defender on this squad.

And they did fairly well under his direction, despite their distractedness.

Afterwards, he joined his club team for a vigorous practice way across town, in a bitter cold (by San Francisco standards).

This morning, my cellphone rang early with news that the rainstorms sweeping over the city had forced the cancellation of my daughter's game, and therefore freed my coach-son to focus on his own game today.

That game was to be played far to the east and north of here, in Brentwood. A quarter century ago, this was a farming district where we took our older kids to pick fruit.

You can still do that in a few places there, but today it is essentially another sprawling suburb.

"What is this place, Dad?" is all my son could offer as we landed there.

Luckily the hard rain stayed to the west and south as his State Cup game got under way. His team has not played well lately and if they lost today they would be eliminated.

In sports that's called sudden death.

They fell behind 0-2 by the half.

But then the pace of the game changed. Aidan and his teammates stepped up their game and scored first one goal, then a second, to tie it and force the game into overtime.

After two overtime periods, as the skies were darkening and the few of us parents in attendance were shivering and fearing what appeared to be a ferocious oncoming storm, the contest proceeded to penalty kicks.

This is when one player from each team gets a shot all alone at the opposing keeper. After he shoots, an opponent shoots at his keeper. All shots are from point-blank range.

The teams deadlocked over the first seven rounds of PKs,6-6.

That's when Aidan stepped up for his chance. He positioned himself as if he would shoot right and looked straight at the right side of the goal as he approached the ball.

The goalie followed his eyes and his positioning and dove that way while Aidan sliced the ball into the left corner.

With that he won the game for his team.

As a defensive player, he has rarely ever had an opportunity to be the hero, but today he got that chance and he rose to the occasion.

Congratulations, son!

The Fight Is On

The largest ship to ever enter San Francisco Bay or any U.S. port, steamed through the Golden Gate late yesterday. It's almost a quarter-mile long and the containers it carries, if stacked end on end, would stretch for 50 miles across land. I tried to glimpse it as I drove around high points last night, but it was cloaked by our relentless fog.

Later, we got some very bad news. Long-time readers will remember the damaging IRS audit that so disrupted my life two years ago. Yesterday, my ex-wife got the news that the IRS is once again, inconceivably, auditing her 2009 tax return.

This, less than a week after she was hospitalized and while she continues to be under ongoing medical evaluation to make sure she will be okay, once her present problems are treated.

Our kids, to their credit, didn't panic at this latest bad turn of news, even though they all remember how much trauma the last audit caused.

For my part, I just tried to reassure everyone that we will come out of this fine. I will fight the IRS once again, and I will prevail.

I cannot express, however, how much these senseless audits have caused me to come to hate my own government. Why us? We've done nothing wrong. I thought that that was proved last time around.

Apparently, being honest, hard-working parents with professions that are not well-paid means you are easy prey for government bureaucrats looking to make an easy buck off helpless victims, as they meet their quotas.

My ex-wife is weakened by illness and stress, and meanwhile I am the one good with numbers. So they may be auditing her, but the IRS is confronting me.

Fuck you, IRS! We'll see who wins this round.

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