Three men who fell to Earth.

My 100th story!!!

To my fellow outlaws, outcasts and misfits,

This is my 100th story!

Some of you have been here since the first sentence.
Some found me somewhere along the way.
Either way, you showed up and stayed.
You read. You reached out.

You subscribed. You shared.
You reminded me that this work matters.

Some invested in me by becoming paid subscribers.

These stories aren’t polished.
These stories are not dressed up for the dinner party.
They come with scraped knuckles, scar tissue, and soul.
But they always come honest.

This is a quiet pact between outlaws, outcasts and misfits.
Folks who’ve been through some shit
and are still standing.

Thank you for your trust, your open hearts and minds.

It would have been easy to pick a lane - true crime, memoir, comedy, or fiction -and build a brand around it.

But I didn’t come here to sell you something. I came here to write. To stretch. To risk. To get uncomfortable. Because that’s where the truth lives.

Over the last hundred stories, I’ve taken you from the streets of Chicago, where I begged for change as a kid, to the moment I put the bottle down for good. I’ve written about a mother who robbed banks, about dodging hitmen, and chasing dreams in Hollywood.

I’ve reimagined Gatsby’s origin, dabbled in sci-fi satire, wrote about heartbreaking romances and inspiring romantic revelations, told you the story about a lost gravedigger, and a newspaper kid who found an unlikely mentor.

Some stories made you laugh. Some may have made you cry. All of them were written to make you feel. And every Sunday, you show up not knowing what to expect, which I hope is half the fun.

That trust?

That time?

It means everything.

THANK YOU.

Here’s to 100 more.

Much Love,

Mick

So without further ado, away we go!

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THE FIRST MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

I was in my mid-20s, driving trucks for Home Depot (humble brag.) November in Chicago is a coin flip. A beautiful day in the high 70s can be followed by a day filled with howling winds getting you ready for the five-month assault of ice and snow ahead.

I was sitting in our 1994 Chevy Cavalier, waiting for my wife to come out of the Aldi. The wind rocked the car back and forth. I looked out the windshield and saw an old man pushing a shopping cart across the parking lot. He was thin, wearing a perfectly fitted windbreaker that was doing a poor job.

His eyes stared straight ahead as the wind roared over him, causing tears to streak back into his perfectly combed white hair. He wore pressed khaki slacks and brown polished dress shoes. A distinguished old man.

The wind died down, and the old man shifted his weight — from leaning into it to standing upright. When it picked back up, he lowered his head and shuffled forward in small, determined steps.

Get out and help this guy, I thought.

Nah, he doesn't need your help. He's a tough old man.

Stop it, don't be a bum, get out there and offer to help this guy.

Nah, I'll get out there and he'll swat my hand away, tell me to fuck off.

Nah, not this guy, he looks like a decent guy, look how put together he got just to go to the Aldi. This old man clearly gives a shit about himself. He's put together. He'll view the help as an insult.

Then total quiet. It felt like the wind and time had stopped. Then the wind came back twice as furious as before and hit the old man in the chest like he was an open sail.

His bony fingers reached out for the shopping cart bar and missed. He fell like a long lean spruce, straight on his back hitting his head on the pavement.

I jumped out of the car, ran over, and knelt beside him, knowing not to move him. His eyes still had the same ferocity as when he was pushing the cart, like his body knew he fell but his heart was still in the fight.

A middle-aged woman got out of her car, saw him on the ground and called 911. A small crowd formed and asked the old man if he was alright, but he didn't answer, he couldn't. There was a sense of confusion in the old man's eyes, that co-existed with grit, both demanding his attention, both fighting for his reality. There was a brave young man inside the scared old man determined to stand, dust himself off and get the fuck out of there. But the old man's body was controlling the young man's grit.

Out of nowhere, his son appeared.

"Fuck, I told him not to go to the store," the son shouted as he angrily paced, then called his wife to let her know that his dad fell. Again.

Apparently he lived close by. His father had called to say he was going to the store. He told him not to. Then his Life Alert went off when he fell and the son got notified.

The son noticed me on the ground next to his father and asked, "Is he okay?"

"I don't know. I watched him fall straight back."

"Why didn't you help him?" the son asked.

"I don't know. I should have. I'm sorry."

"Whatever," the son said, still pacing, "He's 85, for Chrissakes, and still thinks he's flying fighter planes in World War Two. He shouldn't even have a license. I told him not to drive! He just doesn't listen!"

As the young paramedics loaded him into the back of the ambulance, the old man’s eyes remained ablaze with fight.

THE SECOND MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

I was in my late 40s, had two kids, one who just graduated from high school and another about to graduate from grade school. There was money in the bank. They slept in a house that was clean with a fridge full of food. Every waking hour was consumed with work and money and school and clothes and sports and what they needed and what I needed to do to make it happen.

In the middle of this time, my wife and I were invited to the wedding of a dear friend who had moved from LA to Texas. We didn't know her new friends, so we sat at a table with wonderful strangers. Everybody seemed happy - except for one man sitting across from us. He was thin with long hair, with a southern biker or pirate hippie vibe. He stared at me with a contemptuous frown.

What's up with this guy, I thought? I don't even know this guy and he's mean mugging me. At a wedding no less.

My wife and I danced and ate wonderful food, but every time I sat down, the skinny long-haired man at the next table glared at me. I tried to shake it off but couldn't. Throughout the night, I stole glances at his table, where he remained rigid and stone faced.

Then a woman in her late 30s in a red dress and tattooed arms approached from behind, slipped her arms under his and helped lift him out of his chair, where he struggled to stand and finally got his legs under him. It was only then I realized he was not skinny but frail. He leaned into her and headed off to the bathroom in slow intentional steps.

It was all in my head. He, like the rest of the world, had nothing to do with me, nor I with it. He was not staring at me or thinking about me, he was just existing with what I came to know, without specifics, was the result of a rapid decline from a recent diagnosis.

The next day, the newlyweds and friends went to a massive Texas BBQ joint. In the center was a giant room filled with the smokers where the pitmasters worked their magic.

The long-haired man showed up and joined our group. He looked more comfortable in jeans and a t-shirt. The woman from the wedding was with him too. We got introduced and made some small talk, which quickly turned to checking out the restaurant’s storied meat smoking room. The long-haired man and I decided to go check it out.

He led the way, and I followed behind. After twenty feet he went down, just crumpled to the ground like his limbs liquefied. He couldn't even put his hands down to stop his fall. A woman passing by gasped. He stayed still. I froze. I didn't know what to do. Without saying a word, I hovered over him, picked him up and he started to walk again.

Twenty feet later, he fell again. Another passerby gasped. He didn't move. He couldn't. He didn't ask for help. Instead, he stared ahead and waited.

I helped him back up and he trudged forward, falling once more before we made it into the smoky, hot room filled with brisket, pork and sausages. He fell again on our way back to our table.

We talked and laughed and when it was time to go, I walked with him to the car, where he fell twice more. We never spoke of it. There was no need to. It was what it was. Once I got him into his car and started back to my rental, I started crying.

THE THIRD MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

My father-in-law worked two jobs for thirty-two years.

"I always worked hard," he told me, "But I wish I woulda' worked smart."

He had a bad arm but figured out a way to pass the Navy physical as well as the Chicago Police Department Physical and carried wedding equipment with a bum shoulder for three decades on the weekends.

Once he was coming out of the bathroom, and I was going in, and he pulled me in, turned to the mirror and said, "Who the fuck is this old guy staring back at me. I'm seventy but feel thirty-five inside. How is this possible?"

I didn't know what to say.

He turned from the mirror to me and said, "One day you're thirty-five, and the kids are little, and you think it's never going to end, you're at the games, and laughing and there's cakes and parties, then all of a sudden, an old man arrives."

He took a deep breath and left.

A few years later, his wife, a saint of a woman, got cancer. She beat it. Then it came back. For good. They gave her five years and nobody could believe it.

Then one day, while she was carrying the weight of impending death, his legs stopped working. Some days he could use them. Some days he couldn't. And nobody could tell him why.

He had heart attacks up to that point and had been shot in the chest as a young police officer. Maybe it was fluid on the brain that ruined his balance, his ability to walk? They wanted to drain the fluid but thought if they put him under, it would counteract with the heart medicine and kill him. So he never got an answer.

The only thing he did get was a walker. He would shuffle a few feet then get dizzy, rock back and forth, collect himself, shuffle a few more feet, until his only mobility was from the bed, to the bathroom, to his chair in the living room, all while his wife of fifty years withered away in front of him. He was scared for her and terrified for himself.

One afternoon I was at their condo, sitting in the living room and he was in his chair. Mom was at the dining room table opening mail. He stood and with no walker, shuffled toward the hutch to grab an old newspaper article about a big arrest when he was a younger man. When he reached up to grab it, without warning or a sound, he fell straight down, like the old man in the Aldi parking lot.

But he fell sideways instead of straight back and landed on his bad arm. Mom bolted up and screamed, furious that he had even tried to walk in the first place. He lay on the floor, silent, with the same war raging in his eyes — between confusion and grit, between who he once was, what he once was, and the stark reality of who he was now. Any and all negotiations had been made and confirmed. There was nothing left to say or do. The deal was done.

If you’ve lived your whole life to take care of someone — to provide, to collaborate, to love unconditionally — and you fall… and you can no longer help anyone, not even yourself… that’s a punishment worse than death. It devours and destroys and every natural instinct cries out in rebellion, to fight — and then, all of a sudden, a new voice calls out from a strange, undiscovered place — to surrender.

My father-in-law never walked again. For three years, the best he could do, and it happened rarely, was to stand long enough to heave himself in and out of bed, but he eventually became too weak to even do that. After the cancer stole another amazing woman, he stayed bedridden the last two years of his life.

Goddamn, this thing ain’t easy. Mother Nature and Father Time are undefeated — and I wonder what will happen when I fall? But I stay grateful — for the ones who showed me how to fall, and the ones who showed me how to get back up.

Much Love,

Mick

PS

As a special thank you to my paying subscribers, here is a link to 120 + episodes of my podcast (that were salvaged from the damaged drive.)

They are not on iTunes, Spotify or any podcast service. Just right here for you.

Click the link and download all or as many as you like. There are some incredible humans on these episodes. I hope you enjoy!