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Otter Ranch, Minneapolis, MN (2026)

08/24/2026

Golden Hour, Late Summer— a Lyric Poem
By Wayne Stephen

Late summer.

The goldenrod has started shouting.
The cottonwoods are tired.
The grass has gone a little wild,
and evening arrives earlier
than it did yesterday.

Nothing remarkable is happening.

A deer might wander through.
The dog disappears into the w**ds.
The garden has mostly stopped
taking orders from anybody.

And then the sun gets low.

And the Back Bay
of the Middle Fork
of the Crow River
turns gold.

Every damn thing.

The trees.
The water.
The goldenrod.
The w**ds we decided not to kill.

Even me.

I've buried people I loved.
Watched people leave.
Been left.
Done some leaving of my own.

Children grow.
Friends scatter.
Rivers freeze.

Summer ends.

I've learned to stay for this.
To watch what is leaving
while it is still here.

Because tonight,
for a few ridiculous golden minutes,
nothing is asking to be saved.

The light falls where it falls.

And maybe that's been
my saving grace—

this little piece of river
asking absolutely nothing of me
except that I notice.

And I do.

Late summer.

And for now—

it is all still here.

08/23/2026

The F**k-You Economy— A Cultural Essay
By Wayne Stephen

Ya know what?...

F**k you.

And while we're at it, f**k “f**k you.”

We've ruined it. It used to mean something.

You had to earn a f**k you.

A proper f**k you was intimate and deliberate. It was almost ceremonial. It was reserved for betrayal, cruelty, extraordinary acts of as***lery. You didn't just toss one around because somebody parked crooked at Target or disagreed with you about mayonnaise.

Now? Pfff.... F**k this. F**k that. F**k him. F**k her. F**k everything.

Somebody cuts us off in traffic? F**k you. Takes too long at the self-checkout?... F**k you. Has a political sign we don't like?.. Oh, definitely F**K YOU.

We've flooded the market.

We've inflated the f**k-you economy until the currency is practically worthless.

And that's a goddamn shame, because contempt used to cost something. Now we spend it like pocket change.

We've become a culture of casual contempt. Not because anger or tribalism or cruelty are new. Human beings have been as****es to each other since one caveman got the better cave and the other guy started talking s**t about it.

What's new is the machinery.

We can express contempt constantly now. Instantly, publicly, and almost entirely without consequence. We don't even have to be angry anymore. We can just perform anger.

And, Kee'rist, does anger perform.

Nuance is lousy content. “I disagree with this person, although I can understand how they arrived at that conclusion” isn't exactly setting Facebook on fire.

But:

LOOK AT THIS F**KING IDIOT.

Now we're cookin.

Outrage gets attention. Contempt gets shared. Anger gets engagement. Which creates this wonderfully f**ked-up contradiction: Outrage has become economically valuable at precisely the same moment we've made it linguistically worthless.

So we manufacture more of it.

Everything becomes outrageous. Everybody becomes an as***le. Every disagreement becomes evidence that the other person isn't merely wrong...they're stupid, corrupt, evil, dangerous.

And somewhere along the way, we started treating anger as evidence of conviction. The angrier I sound, the more I must care. The more viciously I describe the other side, the more committed I must be to mine. The bigger my F**K YOU, the more righteous I become.

But outrage without discrimination isn't conviction. No!... It's noise.

And when everything is outrageous, nothing really is.

That's the part that actually bothers me, because there are things in this world deserving of genuine outrage. Cruelty. Exploitation. Corruption. Abuse of power. Watching somebody deliberately hurt another human being.

Anger ain't the problem. Sometimes anger is moral. Sometimes refusing to be angry would be obscene.

But anger ought to know the difference between inconvenience and injustice. Between disagreement and cruelty. Between somebody being an as***le and somebody being evil.

A culture incapable of distinguishing annoyance from injustice eventually becomes incapable of recognizing either one.

And maybe the thing being devalued isn't actually the phrase.

Maybe it's us.

Because every casual f**k you asks us, however briefly, to reduce another human being to an as***le. Not "that person did something s**tty", but "that person is s**t."

Maybe that's what contempt actually is: the decision that another human being is nothing more than the worst thing we know about them. Their worst opinion, their worst vote, their worst moment, the stupid thing they said, the s**tty thing they did.

We take one piece of a person and declare it the whole person.

And once we've done that, empathy becomes unnecessary. You don't have to understand an as***le. You don't have to wonder what happened to an as***le. You don't have to consider the possibility that you might be wrong about an as***le. You certainly don't have to love an as***le.

You just say:

F**k you.

And move on.

That's an incredibly efficient way to live. It's also a pretty f**king miserable one.

Because do it occasionally and you're pi**ed off. Do it constantly and you've built yourself a worldview. Everybody's an as***le. Everybody's stupid. Everybody's the enemy.

Eventually you're walking through a world populated almost entirely by people you've already decided deserve your contempt.

And, before somebody says it: yes, I swear. A lot.

Some of you don't like it. You've told me.

I know.

But here's where I'm gonna push back a little:

Stop being so f**king afraid of swear words.
They're words.

Seriously. That's all they are.

At some point we decided that certain combinations of letters are somehow worse than the others. You can say hate. You can say war. You can say starvation. You can say abuse. You can say genocide. You can sit at the dinner table and talk about people doing absolutely horrific things to other human beings.

But God forbid somebody says f**k.

Come on.

I'm not saying words don't matter. Of course they matter. This entire essay is about two of them.

I'm saying we've got the morality of it backwards sometimes.

I've known people who swear like f**king sailors and would give you the shirt off their back. I've known perfectly polite people who wouldn't say s**t if they had a mouthful of it and were absolutely cruel to other human beings.

I know which one I'd rather have sitting at my table.

The ugliness isn't necessarily in the word.

It's in what you're doing with it.

F**k can mean I'm angry. It can mean something is hilarious. It can mean I'm amazed. It can mean I'm hurting. Among people who know each other well enough, it can practically be a term of endearment.

Sometimes f**k is just the right f**king word.

But f**k you?

Now we've pointed it at somebody.

That's different.

And that's what this whole thing is about.

Here's the uncomfortable part: we've all been the as***le. Every one of us. We've said the stupid thing, misunderstood, lost our temper, disappointed somebody, been selfish, failed people we love.

We've had moments that, if somebody isolated them from the rest of our lives, recorded them on a phone and uploaded them for a few million strangers to judge, could make perfectly reasonable people conclude:

F**k that guy.

But none of us wants to be reduced to our worst fifteen seconds.

We want context. We want somebody to know what happened before the camera started rolling. We want them to know what kind of day we'd had, what we'd been carrying, what we'd misunderstood, what we regret.

We want the enormous, complicated, contradictory rest of ourselves admitted into evidence.

In other words, we want grace.

Not absolution. Not permission to be cruel. Not some bulls**t insistence that everybody needs to agree or that genuinely terrible behavior shouldn't have consequences.

Just grace.

A little room for the possibility that a human being might be larger than the thing about them that currently pi**es us off.

We desperately want that consideration for ourselves. Maybe we ought to be a little less stingy about giving it to everybody else.

So no, I'm not suggesting we get rid of f**k you.
Kee'rist, no.

I'm suggesting we protect it. Preserve it. Treat it like the good bottle you don't open just because Tuesday was annoying.

Stop flooding the market.

Restore some goddamn purchasing power to the f**k-you economy.

Save our outrage for things worthy of outrage. Save our contempt for those rare occasions when contempt has truly been earned. And maybe, before spending it on another human being, leave ourselves just enough time to wonder whether we're looking at the whole person...

or merely the part of them we find easiest to hate.

Because someday, somewhere, somebody is still gonna do something so spectacularly s**tty that they deserve the full, undiluted, handcrafted, small-batch, artisanal:

F**K. YOU.

And when that glorious day arrives, I wanna reach deep into the linguistic vault, withdraw a pristine, fully backed, investment-grade F**K YOU...

and have the son of a bitch actually be worth somethin.

08/22/2026

The Year Of Goldenrod— a Personal Nature Essay, By Wayne Stephen

Last year was the year of mullein.

Those strange, prehistoric-looking stalks seemed to rise everywhere around the property, and for a summer they became part of the landscape.

This year belongs to the goldenrod.

Canada goldenrod is suddenly everywhere along our back bay. Along the meadow edges. Against the tall grasses. Leaning into the yard. Great sprays of yellow that seem to have appeared almost overnight.

Except they didn't.

They've been standing there all summer. Green. Quiet. Mostly unnoticed.

Then August arrives and the whole landscape turns gold.

Turns out, we've helped.

A few years ago, we started embracing permaculture in the backyard. Which, in practice, has meant we've increasingly stopped telling every square foot of this place what it's supposed to be.

Some of it gets mowed. A whole lot of it doesn't.

We let the grasses get tall. We let things volunteer. We let things flower and go to seed and fall over and rot and come back. We stopped treating every unfamiliar plant as a w**d that needed to be murdered.

Our w**d-control program consists primarily of not giving a s**t.

We don't spray diddly-squat on our property. Nothing ending in -cide, anyway.

Our neighbors?

Congratulations on the golf-course look.

Meanwhile, the critters stay away from that yard like it's got Critter STDs.

Ours is different.

Éowyn the deer wanders through. Turkey hens march around with their minions of chicks. Dragonflies patrol overhead. Butterflies bounce between flowers. Birds occupy every level of the place. Voles and moles work the basement.

And, of course, wabbits.

Lots of wabbits.

After all, Hanzō has to have something to chase.

The wabbits provide him with just enough confidence to believe he's still a mighty hunter.

Éowyn is another matter.

Every once in a while Hanzō gets feeling particularly brave and decides he's gonna chase her, too. Éowyn generally lets this nonsense go on for a few seconds before she turns around and steps toward him.

That's usually the end of that.

Suddenly he's Yellow Hanzō, hauling ass in the opposite direction.

And then there are the hummingbirds.

In fact, as I'm sitting here writing this, my hummingbird buddy just came ripping through the backyard with his morning zoomies. Hover. Dart. Gone. Back again.

Everybody gets a part in the free-form Critter Jazz.

And right now, goldenrod is having one hell of a solo.

There's a reason it's taken over the stage this year. Goldenrod loves sunny meadow edges, moisture and places that aren't constantly being mowed. It spreads underground through rhizomes, too, so what looks like fifty individual plants may actually be one big colony quietly expanding beneath your feet.

Then August comes and suddenly you notice what it's been up to.

That's when all those tiny yellow flowers become incredibly important. At a time when a lot of summer flowers are calling it quits, goldenrod is still serving dinner. Bees, butterflies and other pollinators descend on it for nectar and pollen. Later, its seeds become food for birds, and deer browse the plants as well.

Turns out humans have found uses for the stuff, too.

A little research reveals...

Goldenrod has a long history in traditional medicine, particularly for urinary ailments and inflammation. Modern researchers have found antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial activity in compounds within Solidago species.

That's interesting science; not permission to wander into the backyard and start treating kidney stones with w**ds, but apparently the beautiful yellow plant we've been admiring isn't just another pretty face.

But the best part is simpler.

Nobody planted this.

Nobody landscaped it.

Nobody fertilized it, watered it, arranged it into a tasteful little garden bed or put a goddamn Home Depot border around it.

We mostly just stopped interfering.

And the place got busy.

Last year, the mullein took its turn.

This year, the goldenrod stepped forward.

Éowyn is out there. The turkey hens and their minions are out there. The rabbits are out there, keeping Hanzō convinced he's a predator. The butterflies and dragonflies and birds are out there. Somewhere underneath all of it, the moles and voles are doing whatever the hell moles and voles do. Those tiny subterranean engineers, are digging tunnels, moving soil, and building an entire underground infrastructure we can only imagine. They remind me of the little Doozers on Fraggle Rock.

And every few minutes, my little hummingbird buddy comes screaming through with the zoomies.

The free-form Critter Jazz plays on.

And this year, the backyard answered in gold.

08/21/2026

Right Under My Nose— A Local Color Essay
By Wayne Stephen

A lady gave me some s**t recently. Fairly, as it turns out.

I'd written another love letter to the Willmar Library—one of my favorite places on Earth—and she called me out: “Why don't you ever write about the New London library??"

Oof. Touché.

Because this is my town now. This is home. And if I'm gonna run around preaching about libraries and community and all the little things that make a place worth giving a s**t about, I probably ought to spend some actual time in the little library sitting right here in New London.

So today I did. And I mean I spent time there. I didn't just walk in, grab a book, nod politely and leave. I wandered around, looked at shelves, poked around corners, talked to people, sat down and paid attention.

And, lady who called me out...you were right.

This little library is f**king GREAT.

Melissa runs the place. Or, more accurately, Melissa is apparently some kind of hired library mercenary brought in from the Twin Cities and tasked with overseeing five little libraries in Kandiyohi County. Five. That's not a small undertaking, and she's fantastic. So is the staff.

The first thing you have to understand about the New London library is that it isn't big. The inventory isn't massive. There aren't endless floors or giant wings or miles of shelves. But this place packs a PUNCH. They've figured out how to make every damn corner count.

The woadies (kids) have this fantastic little room carved out for them. There are little tables, little chairs, books everywhere, places to sit and read and draw and generally begin the lifelong process of discovering that books can take you somewhere else entirely.

The young-adult section? Boom. Cool as hell....and growing.

Then I turned around and discovered an entire wall of puzzles. Not crappy puzzles nobody wants, either. A s**tload of legitimately great puzzles that you can just...borrow. Dude, get outta here.

I'm a chef, so naturally I went snooping through the cookbook section. Small, but well procured. Somebody has clearly paid attention to what's actually worth putting on those shelves. I even walked out with The Forever Dog Life, because apparently the library has now decided it will also help me cook better food for our dogs.

Fine. I'm in.

And sweet Jesus, if you love romance novels, they've pretty much created a small-town Midwestern museum dedicated to Danielle Steel.

There are comfortable chairs tucked into corners, little tables and natural light coming through the windows. It's cozy, quiet, comfortable and—this being August in Minnesota—air-conditioned.

And there's a goddamn plant sitting on the community table. A healthy, happy looking plant.

I don't know why that matters so much to me, but it does, because somebody put it there. Somebody thought, people are going to sit here; let's make this feel nice.

That's the whole place.

There's also a community room—a real room that people in town can reserve and use for free. Imagine that. A place in America where you're allowed to gather with other human beings without first being asked for a credit card.

That's what we sometimes forget about libraries. They're about books, obviously, but they're also one of the last places we have where nobody expects you to buy a goddamn thing. You can walk through the door broke, stay awhile, read something, use a computer, work on something, meet somebody, bring your kid, borrow a puzzle or just sit next to a plant.

Nobody hands you a bill.

And then there's the art.

Holy s**t.

This little library doubles as a gallery, and right now the walls are filled with work from local artists through the New London Arts & Culture Alliance.

Kari CL Weber (a local teaching artist who's spent more than twenty years teaching young people around here) has these incredible paintings of the rural landscapes we live in: fields and water and horizon rendered in these huge, strange blocks of color that somehow make familiar Minnesota look completely new.

And then I found Naomi Noeldner's work...Wow.

These gorgeous children's fantasy paintings—fairy-tale images of dark woods, strange creatures, a kid in a red coat disappearing into the brambles, another riding a giant white bird across a moonlit sky. Whimsical and beautiful and just a little dark, exactly the way fairy tales are supposed to be.

More of this, please!

More local artists on library walls. More teachers showing their work. More weird little paintings that make a kid stop walking. More community rooms and puzzles and plants on tables. More places where children can discover books, teenagers can find a corner that feels like theirs, old people can read the newspaper, and some idiot chef can spend an afternoon wandering around wondering how the hell he managed to overlook the place.

My second home has been the Willmar Library. I love that place.

But that's about to change.

Split-living from here on out.

And to the lady who called me out after my last essay about the Willmar Library—“Why don't you ever write about the New London library?”

Heard, Chef. You were right.

08/21/2026

DUUDE!.... it never gets old raving about these eggs from Feathered Acres.

There really is a difference. Great eggs are the result of the whole damn system:

What the hens eat, whether they actually get outside and forage for grasses, seeds, bugs and whatever else chickens spend their days hunting down. It matters how they're raised, and how quickly that egg gets from the hen to your kitchen.

The crazy blues, greens and browns come from different breeds— yo, the colors don't make them taste better, but they tell you somethin about the wonderfully diverse flock producing them.

And then there's freshness. I mean....These Feathered Acres eggs were packed two days ago. Crack one into a pan and you see it immediately: Thick whites, yolks standing tall, gorgeous color...and that rich, buttery flavor that makes a plain egg suddenly taste incredible.

We get these beauties at the New London Co-op, by the way.

And no, I'm not an influencer. Nobody's paying me. I don't work for the Co-op. I just keep talking about the good stuff they carry because, frankly, it's low-hanging fruit.

When your neighbors are producing food this good and somebody down the road is putting it on a shelf for you, why the hell WOULDN’T you talk about?

Good farming tastes better. Sometimes it's really that friggin simple.

*Also, their logo is dope.

08/21/2026

"If you work with your hands you're a labourer. If you work with your head and your hands you're a craftsman. If you work with your heart, your head and your hands you're an artist." — Marco Pierre White,

08/21/2026

Our friend Éowyn showed up again this morning to hang out and watch the sunrise.

I've named her Éowyn after the badass, beautiful woman from The Lord of the Rings— She's a woman who endured grief and loss, but refused to disappear into it. She lives in the open prairie of Rohan.

This beautiful girl has endured, too. She's lost two yearlings over the last year, and yet she keeps coming back.

Still here. Still wild. Still carrying on.

Éowyn.... yeah, seemed right.

08/20/2026

For the cool Kids attending the New London Co-op Members gathering....

Beet cured salmon with shaved fennel, citrus segments, shaved radishes, fresh dill, parsley, and lemony vinaigrette.

08/20/2026

The Crap-Shoot — a Cultural Commentary
By Wayne Stephen

There is a particular kind of insanity baked into being an American adult, and I participate in it enthusiastically. I'll eat something knowing—KNOWING—exactly what is gonna happen. Not suspecting. Not wondering. Knowing.

I can stand in the kitchen at seven o'clock in the morning, after enough overnight diarrhea that dehydration has become a legitimate medical concern, briefly consider whether I should go to urgent care and have somebody hang a bag of saline from a pole, and instead eat another peanut-butter-chocolate-covered Rice Krispie bar.... 'cause it's there.

This isn't ignorance. This is informed consent.

We know the next pint of craft beer is gonna make us feel like s**t. We know the smoked weenies sitting in grease are NOT going to improve matters. We know the gas-station breakfast sandwich has been rotating beneath a heat lamp since the Obama administration. And still, "Yeah. Gimme that f**ker."

WHY do we do this?

We've somehow separated what happens in our mouths from what happens to the rest of our bodies twenty minutes later. Flavor gets diplomatic immunity. Consequences belong to Future Me, and screw that guy.

Long day? Beer. Bad day? Beer and wings. Great day? Beer and wings. Birthday? Cake. Funeral? Hotdish. Football game? Nachos. Camping?... S'mores.

The Fair? Let's find something that was perfectly edible to begin with, impale it on a stick, batter it, deep-fry it and cover it with enough sauce to require a pack of wet wipes and a change of clothes.

And here in the Midwest, somebody handing you food is practically an expression of love. Somebody hands you another brat because they like you. Somebody brings bars because that's what decent people do. Somebody's mom got up at six in the morning, loaded up a Crock-Pot with something involving cream cheese and at least one can of condensed soup, and now you're supposed to look that woman in the eyes and tell her you don't want seconds?

F**k you. Yer having seconds.

Then there's the brewery. It's 9:30. You've been there for three hours. Yer already bloated. Your pants are somehow smaller than they were when you arrived. There's a faint pressure developing somewhere below the waterline that you're actively choosing not to investigate.

You've had enough. Everybody's had enough.

Then somebody looks around the table: "Should we get another order of deep-fried mac-n-cheese balls?"

Yes. Every sum'bitch at the table. Immediately. No deliberation.

And then you get old.

At twenty-two you could drink six beers, eat a frozen pizza at 1:30 in the morning, sleep on somebody's couch using a Carhartt jacket as a pillow and wake up four hours later ready to play softball. Now three craft beers and some smoked weenies require a recovery protocol. Water. Electrolytes. Maybe a banana. And absolutely nowhere to be before noon.

Your body changed the terms of service somewhere along the way. Your appetite didn't. There's still some twenty-two-year-old idiot living inside you who looks at jalapeño poppers at 10:45 at night and thinks: 'Hell yeah.'

Your colon is fifty-five. Your appetite is on spring break.

Maybe that's part of it. Adulthood is basically one long list of s**t we're supposed to be doing better. Drink more water. Eat more fiber. Get some exercise. Watch your cholesterol. Go to bed earlier. Schedule the colonoscopy. Floss. And then somebody slides a basket of hot fries across the table and, for about ninety seconds, none of that matters.

And we have the evidence. Kee'rist, do we have the evidence. This ain't our first rodeo. We've been conducting this experiment for decades.

Beer plus smoked weenies plus cheese curds plus whatever somebody convinced us to order at 11:15 equals gastrointestinal Chernobyl. The findings are conclusive. Peer reviewed. Replicated thousands of times.

And still tomorrow comes as some sort of surprise.

The reckoning.

You're sitting there staring at the bathroom wall like a defeated army general surveying the battlefield. Never again. Sweet baby Jesus, NEVER again.

Today I'm drinking water. Today I'm eating vegetables. Maybe some yogurt. I'm gonna take care of myself.

And you mean it, too....for about four hours.

Then there's coffee. Because apparently the first thing a compromised digestive system needs in the morning is a steaming hot cup of caffeine and acid. You know what that first cup does. You can practically set your watch by it.

And yet, twenty minutes later yer standing in the kitchen topping it off.

“Little more coffee?”

Oh, absolutely. Thank you.

Then somebody texts: "Pizza and Trivia at the brewery tonight??"

'Um...YES!'

At some point you have to ask: When does repeatedly doing something after knowing exactly what it does to you cease being a mistake and simply become a lifestyle?

Because we're not going to stop. That's the truth. We know precisely how this ends.

Hell, it's not even a crapshoot anymore. A crapshoot implies uncertainty.

Tomorrow's diarrhea is theoretical. Today's smoked weenies are real.

So yes, this sadomasochism has to stop. We have to grow up. We have to respect these aging bodies and finally break this ridiculous cycle of pleasure, punishment, regret and repetition.

Absolutely.

But first, I'm gonna finish this Peanut Butter Chocolate Covered Rice Krispie bar.

08/19/2026

The Sun Also Rises — literary memoir essay— as submitted to The Sun Magazine
By Wayne Stephen

I was fifteen years old, in the ninth grade, when Hemingway found me.

I was living in a foster home and going to Minnetonka High School. An English teacher gave me The Old Man and the Sea. I read it and loved it, so he promptly handed me another Hemingway.

The Sun Also Rises.

Funny thing about being a foster kid in high school: show an interest in something healthy and positive and the adults in your life will throw everything they've got at it. We found something! He likes art! He likes to read! Jesus Christ, get the kid some books. There's HOPE!

It makes me laugh now, but there was something beautiful about it too. They had found something. So had I.

I was probably the wrong age to understand The Sun Also Rises, but I was certainly the right age to be seduced by it. At fifteen, I didn't know what was underneath those sentences. I just knew I loved the way they sounded.

Paris and Spain. Wine bottles sweating on cafe tables. Trout in cold mountain streams. Men drinking too much and saying too little. Lady Brett Ashley moving through the whole goddamn thing like weather.

And the bulls.

Jesus, the bulls.

Hemingway romanticized bullfighting beautifully, and fifteen-year-old me bought every f**king word of it. The courage, the ritual, the blood, the matador standing still while a thousand pounds of animal passed inches from his body. Hemingway made it seem ancient and elemental and honest, man and death occupying the same small piece of dirt.

I was completely seduced by it.

Years later, in my early twenties, while living in San Diego, I went to the bullfights at the Monumental Plaza de Toros in Tijuana.

Trippin on L*D.

This particular bit of genius had less to do with Hemingway than my generation's greatest comedy— Caddyshack. In the movie, Lacey Underall mentions that one of the things she likes doing in her spare time is "Going to bullfights on acid." For whatever reason, I had carried that line around in my head and always wanted to do it.

So a few of us did.

We dropped acid and went to the bullfights.

It was one of the most horrific awakenings of my life.

Whatever Hemingway had planted in my fifteen-year-old imagination died in that arena. Maybe the acid trip stripped away whatever illusion I might otherwise have managed to maintain. I don't know. I just remember there wasn't anything romantic about what I was seeing. There wasn't anything noble about it either.

This wasn't courage. It wasn't some beautiful contest between man and beast. It wasn't grace under pressure or an ancient meditation on death.

It was people tormenting an animal and calling it culture.

And cousin, were the people were cheering.

The bull didn't read Hemingway. It hadn't volunteered to become a metaphor for masculinity or courage or death. We created the ritual, wrote the mythology, dressed everybody up, called it tradition and then congratulated ourselves for being brave while an animal suffered.

F**k bullfighting.

It took getting older to unf**k some of that Hemingway-inspired s**t in my own head. That's one of the strange things about loving a writer for most of your life. Eventually you have to stop worshipping him and start arguing with him.

Maybe that's part of growing up with an artist. Eventually you become old enough to tell him where he was wrong.

Hemingway was wrong about this.

But arguing with Hemingway hasn't made me love The Sun Also Rises less. If anything, it has made the relationship more honest. He gave me something extraordinary when I was fifteen. Life eventually corrected him on some of the details.

The book survived the argument.

This year is the centennial year of The Sun Also Rises. It was published in October 1926, and I've found myself thinking about it again—not exactly the book I read at fifteen, but the book I've been carrying around ever since.

That's the strange thing about great books. The words stay exactly where the writer left them while the person reading them keeps changing.

For years, The Sun Also Rises has been explained as the great novel of the Lost Generation: Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn and Mike Campbell drinking and traveling and f**king and fighting their way through postwar Europe because the First World War had shattered whatever faith their generation once possessed.

That's certainly part of it, but I don't think that's the heart of the book.

And Hemingway didn't really think so either.

He opens the novel with Gertrude Stein's famous judgment: “You are all a lost generation.” Then he answers her with Ecclesiastes. One generation passes away and another comes. The earth remains. The sun rises, goes down and returns again.

That's where Hemingway found his title.

The Sun Also Rises.

I've come to believe the whole go'damn book is sitting right there.

Hemingway resisted the idea that his generation was simply lost. He thought they'd been battered. That's a much more interesting word, because battered doesn't mean gone. It means something happened to you and you're still standing there afterward.

Jake Barnes is still there afterward.

The war has wounded him sexually. Hemingway barely explains the injury because the mechanics aren't really the point. What matters is what comes afterward. Jake survived the war, but survival didn't give him his old life back.

He loves Brett. Brett loves him. He desires her and she desires him, but because of his wound they cannot have the ordinary life they imagine together.

It's such a simple device. Hemingway takes something enormous—the physical and psychological destruction of a generation by industrial warfare—and puts it inside one man's body.

The war ended.

Jake's wound didn't.

Brett has her own version of the same problem. Jake cannot physically have the relationship he wants, while Brett seemingly can sleep with anyone she wants and still can't create the life she wants. One is denied desire. The other chases it everywhere and gets no closer to anything resembling peace.

So everybody keeps moving: Paris, cafés, restaurants, trains, Spain, hotels, Pamplona, bullfights, Madrid.

And everybody drinks.

Holy s**t, do they drink.

That looked romantic to me at fifteen too. Reading it now, it looks a helluva lot more like anesthesia. These people are almost never still, because being still means having to sit with themselves. So they order another bottle, find another cafe, catch another train, fall in love with somebody inappropriate, start another argument and go somewhere else.

Anything to keep moving.

Then, right in the middle of all that noise, Hemingway sends Jake fishing.

I've come to love that part of the book more as I've gotten older. Jake and Bill go to Burguete and suddenly most of the bulls**t disappears. There's a river and trout, food and wine, friendship, sleep and morning.

Nobody has to explain himself to the river. A trout doesn't give a s**t who your father was, how much money you have, whom Brett slept with, what happened in the war or whether you're sufficiently masculine.

The natural world just keeps doing what it does.

And there, again, is Ecclesiastes. Generations come and generations go. The river keeps moving. The earth remains. Morning comes.

This is where the Hemingway who seduced me at fifteen and the Hemingway I understand now finally meet.

Hemingway spent his life fascinated by courage, masculinity and death. Sometimes that fascination produced great writing. Sometimes it produced bulls**t. Sometimes it produced cruelty. And sometimes it produced a mythology of manhood that generations of young men, including me, had to spend some time unlearning.

But underneath all that macho scaffolding was something much more interesting.

Hemingway was obsessed with how a person should behave when the outcome can't be changed.

You can't undo the war or restore Jake's body. You can't make Brett into somebody she isn't. You can't make another person love you the way you need them to. And sooner or later most of us discover that you CANNOT bargain your way backward into the life you thought you were going to have.

So what remains is how you live the one you actually have: whether you do your work, tell yourself the truth, recognize beauty while it's in front of you, and maybe learn to sit beside a river without demanding that the universe solve your problems before you're allowed to enjoy being alive.

Jake isn't particularly good at all of this.

That's important.

He's jealous and bitter. He's complicit in the cruelty around him. He helps Brett get to Romero even though he knows exactly what he's doing. He watches people behave terribly and occasionally joins them.

Jake isn't some Hemingway saint. He's a wounded guy trying to figure out how to live.

He's an early modern anti-hero. Or, as Hemingway scholars describe as, "A wounded Hemingway hero."

I trust that guy more.

And then Hemingway brings the whole f**kin thing down to six words.

The fiesta is over. Romero is gone. The noise has stopped. Brett and Jake are together in Madrid, and Brett allows herself one last beautiful fantasy. She tells Jake they could've had such a damned good time together.

A lesser writer could’ve e given us a speech here. Tears, declarations, promises, maybe someday.

Hemingway gives Jake six words.

“Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Got'damn....

I didn't understand that sentence when I was fifteen.

How could I?

Maybe you need some mileage before you really understand the difference between the life you imagined and the life you actually got. There're people we thought would remain, bodies we assumed would keep working, relationships we thought would last, places we thought we'd return to and versions of ourselves we were absolutely certain we would become.

Sometimes they don't happen.

And you can spend an enormous portion of your life negotiating with that fact. "If only", "What if." "We could have."..."I should have."

Isn't it pretty to think so?

What destroys me about Jake's answer now is that he doesn't say the imagined life wasn't beautiful.

It was.

It just wasn't the life they got.

Well s**t, maybe maturity is learning to hold those two things at the same time. You can love the life that might've been.

You just can't live there.

I think about that fifteen-year-old foster kid at Minnetonka High School holding this book for the first time. There was no possible way he could understand that sentence yet. He hadn't lived enough.

He just knew he liked Hemingway.

And the adults around him saw that little spark and started throwing books at it.

He reads! There's hope!

Maybe they were right.

Not because Hemingway saved me. Books don't work that way. But a teacher put one book into the hands of a kid who needed somewhere for his mind to go. The kid loved it, so the teacher gave him another.

And that kid carried it around for more than forty years.

Which brings me, after all this time, back to the title.

Always the title.

The Sun Also Rises.

There's no promise in those words that justice arrives tomorrow, that wounds heal, that the people we lose come back or that the universe secretly arranged our suffering because it has some larger plan for us.

It's much simpler than that.

Morning comes.

The thing happened. You lost something. You were wounded. You probably f**ked a few things up yourself. Somebody left. Somebody died. The life you imagined didn't happen.

And still the river moves, the earth remains, the sun goes down.

And the sun also rises.

When I was fifteen, I thought Hemingway was teaching me how to be tough. A hundred years after The Sun Also Rises was published, I understand the book differently.

It's not really about being tough.

It's about being battered and continuing anyway. Not pretending the wound isn't there, not turning suffering into nobility, not convincing yourself everything happens for a reason. Just refusing to confuse being wounded with being finished.

That's prolly ehy I've carried this book for so long.

The fifteen-year-old in me loved Paris and Spain and Brett Ashley and the dangerous romance of the bulls. The young man went to Tijuana and learned something about those bulls Hemingway never taught him.

The older man loves the river.

He understands those six terrible, perfect words now.

And above all, he finally understands the title.

Eventually most of us discover there are things we cannot get back. Then comes the harder question:

What are you going to do with the morning?

The sun, after all, also rises.

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