One key sign of advancing age is how you become your own Risk Manager. Without your parents physically nearby (although their voices are always in your head), there’s no one there to keep you from doing something exceedingly dangerous. Wanna jump off a too-high bridge into frigid water? Take the plunge. Wanna speed down a sparse highway with too much horsepower and not enough common sense? Hit the petal. Wanna jump off a plane, hoping that parachute does its job and expands your chances of a safe landing? Take flight. There’s nothing getting in your way. The Risk Manager’s job – a role you’re playing, remember – is to say, “Hey man, you got a kid coming on the way. Might wanna keep those legs healthy and moving,” or “The odds of you surviving this unscathed are pretty reasonable, but the odds of you getting hurt are just a little too high, my friend.” If you’re gonna have your life irreparably changed, the Risk Manager suggests, why not have it be something unavoidable rather than a clearly avoidable decision of your own?

I think about this role a lot when I drive through Austin and see someone on a bike. The explosion and steady slight decline of electric scooters, flimsy machines of injury that never come with a helmet, have emboldened the public past a dangerous point. Too often people are riding alongside cars in the bike lane, fully convinced of their ability to keep their balance in the face of turbulent winds. And it seems to have affected bike riders. There have always been too many bike riders rolling around without helmets. But the scooter scene has exacerbated the problem. Risk Managers everywhere are sitting down on the job.

When I was about twelve years old, I went to stay with a family friend of ours in a mobile home park. It felt a little bit like a homecoming since my parents’ first home, the first one I ever grew up and played with neighboring kids in, stood just a few blocks away. It was a park that felt enormous in my younger years. Now it felt like a curvy racetrack with too many hills and speedbumps. In other words: the perfect scene for a daredevil bikerider like our family friend. He’d pedal furiously down the hill before getting some serious (to me, at least) air off a the collision between his bike and the massive yellow bumps in the road. I’d keep reminding him he needed a helmet. He was partaking in some daredevilry! But he insisted he didn’t need it just as I insisted to myself I’d never be as cool as him. I kept my helmet on and eased my way through the same tracks, trying to strike a balance between street cred and safety.

I never really found that balance because as I rolled – slowly, mind you – down a particularly steep hill, I found myself airborne. To this day, I have no idea what instigated it or what I even hit, if anything. All I know is my body flipped over the handlebars, over the front of the bike, and scraped the asphalt with ferocity. Bleeding from each and every joint in my body, I ambled back to my family friends’ home, where I laid down in pain and embarrassment, waiting for the ziploc icepacks to come and ease my agony.

The best part about this incident is it got me out of a potentially more dangerous one: an invite to roller-blade with my friends. I could barely mange roller-skating, and only in perfect conditions: on flat, hardwood circles with nearby walls to cling onto. Falling on my ass allowed me to avoid embarrassment I’d never recover from. I knew my family friend didn’t think I was that cool. I didn’t do any of the cool shit he did. Nothing that would move the radar in any favorable way. But to fall in front of my peers, the ones who I’d have to face 6 days a week – 5 weekdays at school and soccer on Saturdays – was more dangerous than any joint I could have bent or scraped. You can heal a broken bone. You can’t always heal a broken heart.

So when I think about the helmet, I think about how wearing it emboldens you to do a little more than you’d usually do. Wearing a helmet, I’d be willing to try riding a dirt bike, even if my anxiousness with it causes me to fly up a short hill and into bushes (true story – advance apologies there’s no video footage of this hilarity). Wearing a helmet didn’t just save my head from getting scraped that day – it probably saved my life. If only it could have helped me get out of a ticket for the time I ran a red light on my bike.

Sometimes my favorite drawings come from a simple equation:

picture + surreal twist = a pretty rad thing to draw.

You can’t quite look at it and say it’s not realistic, because it’s not meant to be. That alone relaxes the expectations of my own illustration skills. But you also can’t deny the concept at hand. It’s right there, waiting for you to connect the dots. And when you do? You’re looking at the piece for what it makes you think of far more than what went into pulling it off. That, to me, is the dream. The drawings I love the most aren’t something to admire, but to make you feel something. To think. To leave you to digesting everything long after your eyes leave the page.

When you’re a new parent, working full-time, and trying to finish one of many writing projects, the tick can be shark-like, moving slowly, yet menacingly through the water. If you ever watch the seconds hand in a public school classroom, you know where this is going. The way the hand moves without any ticking – just one steady, ongoing wave around the clock. It’s a predator in motion, waiting for its prey to make a mistake.

But anyone who’s ever seen a sundial knows it can be misread. If you’re looking at the shadows in the wrong way, from the wrong direction, you can easily be fooled. All of which is to say: the ticking of time is often an illusion that speeds up our heartrate, that compacts stress an extra few degrees beyond what we feel we can handle. It creates a sensation I can only describe as a crunch. Perhaps it’s the sundial shark’s jaws sinking into you, meeting the weariness of your bones. Perhaps it’s a shadow you’ve misread. Perhaps it’s both.

My dad showed me Jaws too early. I only knew it from the famous poster, the one with a giant shark’s mouth open wide, ready to consume a flailing, floating woman at the surface. I knew the theme song before I knew the movie, as my dad hummed it often, each time with a little twinkle of gentle menace in his eyes. I needed the repetition because the theme song notes were often too low for me to truly hear.

What I remembered about Jaws far more than anything in the movie itself is how it changed me. Specifically, how it made me terrified to be anywhere near water I could not clearly see all the way to the bottom. When we went to California a short time after seeing this terrifying film, my new fear presented itself in two key ways. The first came when we walked into a dimly-lit section of Seaworld with tanks of black water. I was so sure a shark would drag me to the depths if I ever put in an inch of my body near it. It didn’t matter if it was far too small a tank for such a shark to fit – let alone thrive – in. The imagination filled in the gaps. The second came shortly after at the beach when I dragged my feet into the ocean as the waves crashed and swirled around. At one point, something grabbed me and I screamed something, “It’s got me!” and sprinted out of the water as fast as my 4th-grade heart could pump. The laughter from my parents clued me in. It was no shark. It was fucking seaweed. That’s how badly Jaws had scarred me.

From then on, the fear become more subtle and more gripping all at once. Whenever we’d go out in the boat at Long Lake, we’d have a ritual of anchoring the boat somewhere not too far from the coastline and then hop out and swim around before eating our homemade lunches. It didn’t matter how many times I assured myself sharks were saltwater animals and we were at least 300 miles from anything approaching that kind of water. It didn’t matter if I knew alligators or piranhas or orcas were not native to Spokane. Whenever I’d swim out from the boat, I’d always, always swim back as if I was being chased. The feeling, even as I eased into my 30s, never left me. Something, somewhere was just waiting for me to relax. Just like the unsuspecting woman on the Jaws movie poster.

I think about that feeling a lot when I think about time. The way it feels you’re being chased by something that’s not quite tangible or easy to explain, that carries a heat of danger you cannot cool. Time can be like that. The way the seconds pivot in one continuous, unerring motion, around and around and around again. But like the fear of a saltwater shark chasing you in a freshwater lake, it’s not quite real. Time doesn’t have to be so compressed. The crunch doesn’t have to have any bite. The seconds can transform from an unrelenting shark to a natural, steady rhythm of life. It can be what we make it. We can find other things to make us tick.

This drawing started off as a pun. A literal roof over your head – cue the laughter! But it didn’t seem that interesting to me when it came time to ink it. So I added another wrinkle: making it a book that looks like a roof (and vice versa).

I know that books both feed and starve me unlike anything else. When I’m feeling in a rut – and not just in my writing – I often find a worthwhile remedy in a worthwhile book. Sometimes it’s a bit of nonfiction with enough truth to jolt. Often it’s fiction with sentences both luxurious and incisive, the kind of writing that makes the world feel a little bigger and a little wilder and aswim with possibility. At the same time, I have a To Be Read (TBR) pile surrounding my nightstand like a stacked-paper wall , forming a mental barrier of entry far more formidable than any army could dream up.

This year, I’ve been working with a new student who’s love of books is impossible to exaggerate. Their face is rarely seen in the halls; it’s too deep behind another book. As a team, we all discussed it like it was a real problem to be dealt with. They needed to walk faster! They needed to socialize more! They needed to realize there was more to life than books! All of these arguments are valid. But I was often surprised how many overlook the one that made the most sense to me: that this was a child who moved a lot in their short life, who went through COVID lockdowns and missed social time, and who just might find a book to be the most comfortable thing to take shelter under. It is safe. It is reliable. It is undemanding. It always provides, be it adventure or feelings or a kernel of thought to be stuck in their mind’s teeth. No matter where you go, there is always be a book to be discovered. There is always a book to cozy under and make your own little home.

I think a lot about hamster wheels these days. For some who loves to research and research and research some more (did I say ‘research’?), it’s easy to misunderstand action for wheel-spinning. When I look back fifteen years of learning about screenwriting, for example, from the early days of writing shitty short films on Movie Magic to reading through transcripts from the Scriptnotes podcasts to reading another book about screenwriting structure, I realize I’ve spent nearly half of my life preparing for doing the actual thing. That’s a lot of wheel-spinning. A lot of assuming and guessing and constructing knowledge that hasn’t had a chance to fail yet. Because that’s probably the point: you can’t fail when you’re always preparing. You don’t think you can feel too guilty about the lack of work if you’re still working on the skills to even begin the lack of work.

But it’s all a facade.

Yes, it’s good to invest in learning. But so much more learning comes from actually doing the thing. From studying those who have done the thing. From learning from the mistakes of applying what you learned and just how well it did or did not turn out. I’ve written first drafts of four feature-length screenplays in the past four years, but two of them came in a 2-month span at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, when we had plenty of time at home to finally put some things in action. I learned more writing those last two scripts than I did in any of the transcripts or books I read, or any of the thousands of screenshots I took from various screenwriters and screenwriting wannabes. And there is still so much more to learn! But it’s easier for the car of new learning to merge onto something worthwhile if you actually got your own traffic going. And traffic only exists where movement lives. No one wants to drive into a never-ending loop.

The best way to deeply understand a concept is to apply it to a different domain. Let’s shift from screenwriting to basketball. If I spent fifteen years of reading about how to finally set up some basketball plays or how to finesse my shooting stroke or how to negotiate a professional contract, all of which without actually playing on the court: would you sign me to your team? If I spent years and years in school learning about teaching and universal design and curriculum and lesson planning and all that fun stuff without ever actually stepping foot in the classroom: would you hire me?

That’s the thing about lifelong learning that, to me, separates fun facts from fulfillment. When it’s just things you’re vacuuming up but not applying in any physical, intentional way, you’re inevitably going to run into an emotional wall where you wonder what the point of all of it is. But if you’re applying and failing and trying again? It’s easier to enjoy the work for what it is.

Being stuck is being in an infinity loop where the surface changes – from stairs to streets to slides to ladders and back again to stairs – give you the short-term sense of accomplishment without actually getting you very far. You know more, yes. But knowledge without some kind of application is an unbalanced, wobbly head bumping through the hallways of life.

The thing about sour grapes is that you have to be vulnerable to create them. You have to really reach for them. I imagine it like you’re reaching for something you really want and it’s up really high, so high you’re on your tippy toes, your stomach stretching to where your shirt can no longer cover it, leaving your belly, the belly you’re so often self-conscious of, exposed for a good old poking. Inevitably, someone pokes that soft spot. You recoil immediately. They make a comment about your weight or your size or even give you a smile. But it doesn’t matter what they do or say; they’ve made what was once invisible very, very present. And it’s not a fun feeling. At all. You slink away and, either consciously or unconsciously, decide you’re not going to reach for that thing again anytime soon. You made all that effort and you walked away with nothing but perhaps embarrassment. It wasn’t that important after all, you convince yourself.

That’s what sour grapes is: really wanting something and then diminishing it when you don’t get it.

I think about the coworkers of mine who were famously opaque. You tried to reel them into a conversation and they’d keep it all at the surface. There was no way to truly get into the inner workings of their mind, not when you couldn’t find the key, the keyhole, or even the door. But then a conversation about a recently-filled job opening would come up. They’d remain quiet the whole time until you’d find out, almost like a whisper tucked inside a corner, that they actually applied for that same job and they were admittedly a little bummed they didn’t get it. It’s then you realize it was probably scary for them to stretch themselves, to possibly expose their soft side, the side that actually wants things it does not always name, and, of course, this is why they never said anything in the first place. They didn’t want to hear from an entire room how qualified they were or weren’t for a job; they wanted a quick email alerting them one way or another, hopefully after an interview.

I think about this a lot because this has often been me. A little scared to stretch out because Imposter Syndrome is real – a true double whammy when you’re a writer and a teacher – and because you just never really know how people feel about what you’re doing. We are all bound up in our own insecurities and hopes and fears. We inevitably project them on others. We are human.

So if you find a winery that’s made a successful side business out of sour grapes, know this: they exposed their soft spot many times and in many ways and found a way to make the best of it. That’s something to celebrate.