The man next to me at the bar was wearing a visor, a tank top, and a bathing suit adorned with pink flamingos wearing sunglasses. “I tell ya, buddy, this is the best vacation I’ve ever had,” he said, while raising a large glass containing the same color liquid barbers use to sterilize combs. I did not know this man and had unintentionally sparked his monologue by simply nodding to him when I sat down. “Have you played that Jackpot Bingo?” he continued. “It’s a blast. I won this visor playin’ it yesterday.” The man was interrupted by a chipper voice that crackled over a PA system to announce the rules for the day’s scavenger hunt followed by enthusiastic pitches for the shuffleboard tournament, the talent show, the ice carving demonstration, and the fact that “DJ Dennis” would be holding his daily “Motion of the Ocean” dance party by the “Twist ’n’ Spout” pool at 4 p.m. I took a sip of my Mai Tai and chanted a silent mantra: “Only five more days. Only five more days.”

A few years ago I was sitting by the pool at a swanky resort in Palm Springs, California, when a man with a hairy back and tribal tattoos walked past me and slowly descended into the hotel’s hot tub. I was eating a club sandwich at the time, and it was all I could do not to gag. Not because of the man’s hirsute back or his questionable tattoo choices but because of a sign I noticed hanging nearby. The sign warned that anyone who had, and I quote, “currently active diarrhea, or had experienced active diarrhea within the past fourteen days” should not get into the hot tub. I myself have never experienced diarrhea that couldn’t be described as “active,” or at least “lively.”

Last October, my fiancé, Jess, and I left the southwestern city of Bergen in the morning and drove northeast through a foggy mist that floated over the mountains like a gray specter. Norwegians drive on the right, so Jess was finally comfortable letting me behind the wheel. During our time in Scotland, I had been relegated to the passenger seat.

A few years ago, I was having lunch at the rooftop restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. I was not a guest of the hotel and was staying at a much more moderately priced establishment a few miles away. The atmosphere was opulent—a sixteen-story-high oasis with a pool, cabanas, and an aroma that caused me to imagine a eucalyptus tree making love to a lavender field. I was trying to fit in by wearing sunglasses, a ball cap, and a black t-shirt—the standard Beverly Hills uniform. As I was waiting for my $25 appetizer, I noticed a man and woman at a nearby table whispering to one another while glancing in my direction. I began to wonder if I had been found out. Could this couple sense that I was out of my element? That someone should be notified to gently direct me back to the Comfort Suites in West Hollywood? Suddenly the woman threw her napkin down and walked over to me. I was dreading a confrontation when she said, “Are you Jim Belushi?”

When I was in my twenties and thirties, anyone over fifty seemed ancient to me. I pitied these dinosaurs from another era. They’d had their chance but it was now time for them to step aside and let my generation take over, especially since we knew everything anyway. In those days, fifty was a distant planet on the edge of my universe. I knew I’d eventually reach it, but it was light years away. There was plenty of time to spend my days dreaming. My whole life was ahead of me.

When the stay-at-home order was enacted, I became concerned about coming down with a serious case of cabin fever. Thoughts of Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining started running through my head. As the days dragged on, would I slowly descend into madness?

Being stuck at my mom’s house in Western North Carolina during the early days of the stay-at-home order was an experiment in patience and a test of the powers of anti-anxiety medication. But it did give me the opportunity to dig around her house in search of hidden treasure, the kind of stuff I might be able to sell on eBay without her missing it. While prowling around some rusty shelves in the basement, I came across a cardboard box full of matchbooks. I immediately thought of the tremendous fire hazard this posed and how careless it was to store such a tinderbox next to stacks of old magazines, rolls of gift wrap, and a dingy bottle of tiki-torch fuel that was probably purchased sometime during the Reagan administration.

According to psychologists, one of the secrets to achieving inner peace is learning to stop being triggered by the past. This involves identifying the situations that tear open our emotional baggage and rummage through it like an over-caffeinated TSA agent. But identifying triggers is only the first step—next comes acceptance, followed by resisting the urge to rehash the traumatic stories of our personal history (which is difficult when you make a living doing that exact thing), and finally reprogramming the subconscious through positive imagery.

The woman at the health store had the patience of a saint. I’d been rummaging around the place for almost an hour, perplexed by the array of homeopathic remedies that were as foreign to me as the lower half of the periodic table. She’d made the mistake of asking me if I needed assistance, and I’d responded by peppering her with questions. Can this stuff really detox my liver? Will this interact with my blood pressure medication? How can something give you more energy and help you sleep? What’s your return policy?

It was Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that almost caused me to crack. A friend had given it to me as a gift, muttering something about my home resembling a pop-up flea market. For months it sat on one of the many teetering stacks of books that form part of the obstacle course I call a living room. But at the beginning of this year, in yet another attempt to get organized, I poured a drink, opened the book, and prepared, as the author writes, “to change my life forever.”

A couple of years ago, I spent an afternoon with a man ready for the end of the world. I was doing research for a book and wanted to talk to someone involved in the “prepper” movement, those people who stockpile food and other supplies in order to survive an apocalypse they believe to be as inevitable as it is imminent.

When I was sixteen years old, I bought a fedora. I was inspired by Humphrey Bogart in the movie The Big Sleep. In the film, Bogart plays Philip Marlowe, a cocky, private detective who solves a complex case involving blackmail and murder. But on the first day wearing my fedora, I discovered the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles were child’s play compared to the cinderblock halls of a rural high school in 1986. Walking to first period, my fedora was yanked off my head and thrown in a garbage can by a group of burly seniors who looked like lumberjacks on their way to a sawmill. At lunch, members of the football team threw tater-tots at my hat and questioned my sexuality, the latter being standard procedure since I usually spent lunch period cowered over my tray while reading the latest edition of Metropolitan Home.

In the fall of my seventh grade year, I joined my school’s football team. I didn’t have any interest in sports, but I did have an interest in girls, especially the ones who had miraculously “filled out” over the summer break. These girls seemed more interested in athletes than shy, quiet guys who wrote poetry, watched Masterpiece Theatre, and read the New Yorker during lunch period. When I told my mom I had signed up for the team, she looked at me as if I had just announced a plan to trade my piano lessons for a taxidermy course. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked when I handed her a list of the gear I needed. “You’re going to get dirty.”

It’s almost midnight in upstate New York at a small inn where a winter storm has blanketed the roads with three feet of impenetrable snow. The oil lamp on the nightstand casts a comforting glow over the pages of my Agatha Christie novel, while the smoke from my pipe fills the room with the sweet smell of Turkish tobacco. I’m about to turn in when I hear the creak of a floorboard coming from somewhere down the hall. A moment later a scream rings out followed by a series of sickening thuds. I pull my velvet dressing gown off the settee and step out into the hall.

Last spring, I was at the Dallas airport waiting for a flight to Greenville. Bad weather across Arkansas and Mississippi had delayed many of the eastern-bound flights, and I found myself with two hours to kill. At the gate, my fellow travelers passed the time flipping through magazines or staring blankly at their phones or tablets, but I busied myself with one of my favorite hobbies: judging people.

A couple of months ago, a stray cat I’d never seen before strolled onto my porch, hopped up in a chair, and glared at me sternly. The cat was white with a scattering of black spots. It was clean and seemed healthy but had no tag or collar. After a few minutes the cat jumped down, descended the stairs, and wandered across the driveway where it disappeared under a tangle of bushes. The next day the cat reappeared and took its position on the chair across from me. We looked at one another for a while and then the cat left as abruptly as it had appeared. This phenomenon occurred daily for the next week. I didn’t feed the cat or pet it, but every day it would show up, climb in the chair, and then stare at me as if I owed it money.

When I was a kid, my parents and I lived in an old farmhouse in the mountains of western North Carolina. The house was built in 1888, and every night as the sun set and the temperature dropped, the old building would come to life. The floorboards creaked and the joists groaned as if the house was preparing to devour the small child who lie wide awake in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Occasionally a squirrel or other small animal would become trapped between the home’s walls and scratch at the plaster like a furious zombie trying to claw its way to my young, delicious brain. Sometimes one of these vicious animals would scamper down the chimney and run across my bedroom floor. This would send me into such a panic, I’d grab my blanket and sprint into my parents’ room as if I were being chased by a pack of rabid wolves. The fact I was 15 at the time is irrelevant.

I first became a father not long after I turned twenty-four. At that age I wasn’t much more than a child myself. I was spoiled and immature and still looked to my parents to solve most of my problems, especially those involving grown-up things like money and responsibility. When my wife at the time told me she was pregnant, I thought she must be joking. We were the same age, and it seemed ridiculous to me that two narcissistic, only children who weren’t old enough to rent a car could be parents. But it was no joke. Several months later she gave birth to a baby girl, a tiny stranger I brought home to mooch off of me for the next twenty-five years.

A few years ago, I traveled with Jack Bacot to the annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Florida. As we walked through the convention center, Jack was wearing a smartly cut gray suit with a white shirt and silver tie. His wavy salt-and-pepper hair was in full, buoyant glory, and his black cap-toe shoes were shined to an onyx-like gleam. He looked decidedly out of place among the golf pros and industry executives in their no-iron khaki pants and billowing golf shirts.