It’s one thing to be robbed by a perfect stranger, and quite another to be robbed by someone you know — a friend, an acquaintance, a neighbor. A feline. One named “Pinky.” The back story: For the past week or so someone has been swiping my morning paper. At first we thought the paper carrier had just missed us. We called to complain and he showed up apologetically with a new paper, explaining that he really had delivered it. He said he took special care trying to get it over the construction trailer on the street — an Olympic task. I pictured the poor guy pulling a muscle as he tried to launch it at a trajectory so high only space shuttles usually attempt it. He told my wife someone was probably swiping it and that he would try his best to get it even closer to the porch. What a good guy, but I worried he might wrap his car around a tree in a vain attempt.

I say this without a pinch of cynicism or sarcasm: I’m pretty broken up about the death of Michael Jackson. Say what you want about him, whether you liked him or not, thought he did all the horrible things he was accused of, or was just downright stranger than a summer squash. Forget it all. The pure and simple fact of the matter is this: He may have been weird, but for my generation — the MTV generation — he was part of our childhood, not to mention our cultural identity. And you would be hard-pressed to find a single one of us who didn’t try to be a little like him. Especially to dance like him, which is why my generation will need an extraordinary number of hip replacements. (I alone dislocated my shoulder, a knee and even a kidney trying to imitate him.) We were all Michael Jackson in one way or another in the 80s. Music videos were new and groundbreaking, giving us these marvelously absurd glimpses of performers like him who followed two fashion rules of pop stardom: No. 1 – Raid your mother’s closet and jewelry box; and No. 2 – Only wear clothes that look like the fabric has melted onto your skin.

What do you do with yourself when it’s all over? I mean, completely over. Totally over. The whole enchilada with guacamole and all the fixins. Well, hold on, I don’t mean death. I’m talking about when you have had so much going on for so long and suddenly, soon, it will all wrap up. My master’s degree is done, and within a couple of weeks, the years of planning and the 6 months of building on our new house addition will quite suddenly come to an end. Poof! And then what? THEN WHAT? It’s like empty nest syndrome. What will we talk about at the dinner table? Right now conversations turn to wood floors, paint or how in the world we’re going to get the 13 tons worth of stuff we jammed into a storage unit back to the house. (I think we should just stop paying on it and let them throw it all away.)

It was at that moment — that very instant — that I realized I would never be able to travel into space. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t hack the confined spaces — the cramped quarters. I would go mad, get pushed over the edge by one too many floating piles of space mail. I would fry a circuit and undoubtedly start yanking on the air lock door until I was sucked out into the infinite darkness screaming the whole way, “finally free!” What got me thinking this way? Well, we’ve reached the mission critical part of our house addition. We’re just a couple of weeks away from completion, which is exciting, but we’ve also hit that rough patch when walls that used to separate living quarters from the construction have come down. Now our house has really shrunk and it all seems to be closing in. It was tight before, but we’re now experiencing life as canned sardines. After a couple of days of living on top of each other while the drywall went in, I began to crack. “I just don’t understand why there are so many piles of stuff everywhere,” I complained. “It looks like the Himalayas in here.” My wife gave me the kind of look that screamed, “If we had a shrimp deveiner you’d be in so much trouble right now.”

Crash went the conehead dog. Crash, scrape, bang, crunch, screech, scratch … scratch … scratch — those nails on plastic, sounding like a rat trying to claw through a plastic milk jug. Another crash, clunk, bam, slice … eeeyyyyooowww-OUCH! The “ouch” was the conehead dog’s lighting fast reaction to a morsel of food dropping beneath the table … lunging between chairs — and my legs — to get it … forgetting there was a plastic cone the size of a deep-space satellite dish rapped snuggly around her neck. Three layers of skin and a bushel of hair were instantly shaved from my leg. Stupid conehead dog! You know what a cone is? The kind you put on a dog when they have a wound that needs to heal? You can’t trust a dog with his or her wound. They don’t have the good sense to leave it alone and would just as soon lick their whole appendage off. In my dog’s case, she had stitches on the top of her noggin and along the elbow of her front leg. A couple things had to be removed and biopsied. Turns out she’s fine. Expensive, but fine.

There’s this wonderful line in the movie version of “Annie” when a flustered and frustrated Miss Hannigan (played by Carol Burnett) grumbles at the little ruffians, “Why any kid would want to be an orphan is beyond me.” I was thinking about that line this past weekend — tinkering and changing it a bit as I loaded box upon box, chair upon chair, tchotchke upon tchotchke into two trucks that were as long as a city block. “Why anyone would want to move is beyond me?” I mumbled to myself in the best Miss Hannigan voice I could muster. I now understand why people choose to stay in one place their entire lives. I used to think it kind of strange and lacked a sense of adventure — a taste for change. But then again, I’ve been in my house for more than a decade and wouldn’t leave if gangrene-ridden crickets tried to flush me out. Now I know why: I hate moving.

You can keep all your base-jumping, mountain-climbing, bear-wrestling, gasoline-gargling, whitewater-rapid-rafting, big-city-traffic-dodging, rocketship-flying, strange food-eating, death-defying thrills. You can have ’em. When I want to tempt fate and walk hand-in-hand with the grim reaper while singing, “Kumbaya,” I turn to the only rush that works for me: firing up the pole saw and trimming some trees. Not just any trees — the low-lying fruit-kind that hover close to the ground and beg to be snipped. I’m talking big trees. Tall trees. Trees who don’t want to be trimmed and stretch high on tippy-toes into the clouds when they see you coming. Trees that refuse to be trimmed, fighting you every step of the way as they claw and scratch your hands, your arms, your face. They’re tough trees who won’t go down without a fight — an eye for a limb is the motto here. Just thinking about it, I feel the adrenalin pumping and the blood bubbling. (Lucky for me the blood stopped bubbling after applying direct pressure with a handful of fallen leaves.)

There’s only one thing I hate about road trips. One thing — breakfast. Everything else I can handle. Even enjoy. Endless miles. Rest stops. Bad coffee. Seeing new parts of the country. Meeting new people. That guy at the rest stop who mumbles, “Wanna’ see what I got here in my pocket?” We went out to Missouri to collect my master’s diploma. Over to Louisville to visit with family. Down to the Smokies to plunk river stones the size of European cars into a stream. We covered more than 2,000 miles, burned through nine tanks of gas, and used a lifetime supply of wet wipes. My stomach is still trying to repair the damage from a cup of tar masquerading as coffee. But it was an amazing trip, and a thrill for my 3-year-old daughter who had never seen mountains before or spent so much time motoring from one place to the next. And I would do it again tomorrow — hop right back in the car and go … if not for those dang breakfasts.

I’ve never been hit in the head with a concrete block. Not before I answered the phone the other night. It was my mother and she cut to the chase: “Brian? I sold my house. I need to be out in June. I’m coming up this weekend to see about buying or renting a place. We’re going hunting Saturday. Be Ready!” Click. The block hit me flat side down, clean in the forehead. Ker-splatt! I sat on the floor watching stars orbit my head and considered calling 911. What would I say? “Yeah, hi, I just got a phone call from my mother about her moving up to St. Augustine. It laid me clean out on the floor and I think I have a concussion. Could you send someone over with a couple Harvey Walbangers … stat?” What had just happened?