Every time I get on a plane I have thoughts about mortality and eternity. This post shares part of its title with a song by Joe Walsh, and the title sums up how I’m feeling about things as we all go hurtling toward 2026 together.

Except for a two-year happy hiatus in Rifle, Colorado, and summer escapes to Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, much of my childhood through sixth grade was a nightmare. Over the years, though, I’ve had more fun than pretty much any 3-to-5 people I know and some minor rock bands.

I’ve anticipated or survived four acquisition-to-downsizings and a chapter 11 filing by my employers to build what so far is an amazing, rewarding career, on track for a decent retirement if I ever do retire someday. All while having had the honor and good fortune to help our children and their loving spouses, in what may be the worst home ownership era for first-time buyers in modern history, buy their first homes.

I revel in the love of my beautiful family, now including a grandson and a grandpup…and our other pups who have left this world…whom collectively are the greatest people and creatures I have ever known. Only our kids post photos of their little loved ones online, so I’m not posting them here, but trust me, they’re beyond adorable.

I love what I do today at Cockroach Labs and have done at MongoDB, Gartner, Stratecast, and elsewhere; in our home and on our property; at the gym, in parks, and on walking trails; and at some great winetasting and craft beer venues.

I value dear friends and just met two of them, Doug and Ben, for a festive dinner at Carraba’s, Parkway Place, Huntsville. Shoutout to our son (-in-law, but to us he’s our son) Chris for getting me a killer deal at a really nice Marriott property for that trip.

We have some wonderful neighbors here in roughly the center of the US who have more than made up for the nightmare neighbors we endured in years past on one of the coasts.

I love the world-class sounds I hear in my Edifier headphones and Apple AirPods, from gorgeous, soaring movie soundtracks to high-speed, piledriving,  intense-but-for- the-most-part-not-openly-evil hard rock and metal. Many you’ve heard of and many more you probably haven’t.

As you may see in the image above, I never fall in line with ‘selected top lists’ of anything, starting with music. Can’t buy all the way into the issues and platform of any one political party, so I’m a Registered Independent.

I’ve never smoked, vaped, or used chewing tobacco in my life—with two glaring exceptions. Tried one cigarette on a Fish-and-Game Club overnight school trip in I think 5th grade, and hated it. One Saturday during high school, a bunch of us were playing a pickup game of baseball and one of the guys gave me a big chunk of chewing tobacco to try, “because big leaguers do the chew.” Five minutes later I made a diving circus catch of a long fly ball—and swallowed the whole chaw. Laid on the field for a half-hour before I felt like I could move again.

Hardest drug I’ve ever used is pot, which I never paid for but always seemed to happen upon for free from generous friends at parties in high school and my first year of college at Auburn University. That is, until 3x with different friends in far-flung locations, my respiratory system started shutting down after a few tokes. No more pot for me! Years earlier I had found myself sitting in a car in a darkened parking lot after closing time with some guys at my first job at a pizza place in Huntsville. Some of them were doing tabs of acid (yep, LSD), and one piped up: “It’s your first time, Jeff, so you should probably just do half a tab.” Did NO tabs 😊 and kept drinking my beer.

After decades of quiet-quitting meat by not eating lamb or veal because they’re baby animals, in 2016 Joanne and I, at Heather’s suggestion, went full Vegan. Yet, while Field Roast and Follow-Your-Heart produce delicious vegan cheeses, Violife makes a true-to-life Parmesan block for grating over pasta, and Hellman’s vegan mayo tastes better to us than the eggy original, no one has nailed the art of vegan cheese that works well on pizza. Good pizza is essential eating, and I love omelets and egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwiches. So a few years later we dialed it back to Vegetarian 🌱 and take B12 daily to supplement the meat we’re not eating.

Do I love making cocktails? SEE: image below.

So, back to mortality and eternity. While I guess I might like to live forever, my life has already been blessed-to-spectacular. My stock phrase about whenever my time on Earth comes to an end: “It’ll save me a lot of work next month.” And if the loving animals who have been a part of our lives somehow do not get into Heaven with my family, but are herded away to Pet Heaven, I plan to arrange a Park Hopper Pass with God. That way I can go from where I’m pretty sure I’ll be—a slice of cosmic real estate I call Permanent Purgatory—and travel between People Heaven and Pet Heaven, like on weekends, or on Mondays when park traffic is lighter, so I can visit those I love most for eternity.

You want more, discerning readers, on Permanent Purgatory? Good call. To me, New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry is the greatest humor writer who has ever lived. Dave’s in a band with other writers and authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, and he’s always calling out phrases that might be good band names. So I like to think Dave might say: “Permanent Purgatory would also be a good name for a band.”

I’ll now bring this post to a close with some shameless plugs for Dave (which, to be clear, he did not ask for and knows nothing about):

Dave Barry on Substack

DaveBarry.com, which offers many of Dave’s legendary columns and Holiday Gift Guides at The Miami Herald and beyond