I’m apparently known as The Cool Dad. Maybe just A Cool Dad. It probably has a lot to do with a casual relationship with the word “fuck.” Tattoos don’t hurt. And I know my kids occasionally campaign for me.

For instance, I recently saw an Instagram post where my youngest daughter proclaimed: “omfg my dad rocks!!!”

Did I buy her a car? No. Did I spend a few grand on her birthday party? No. What did I do for such admiration from a typically disaffected teenage girl? I picked up a few boxes of Cheez-Its at the grocery store, because they were on sale.

Here’s the thing about Cool Dads, though: you can take advantage of them. Most Cool Dads overlook stupid teenage bullshit in order to remain cool. Unfortunately for my kids, I was the dumbest teenage boy I ever met. I know the tricks. I know the motives. Or — as is often the case — the singular motive.

After I picked up my oldest that night, I listened to her tell me all about the evening’s events — who was being nice to her, what girls were acting kind of “itchy” (she doesn’t use consonants on her curses out of “respect”).

I enjoy her recaps. They’re very enthusiastic and sometimes emotional. She feels everything. Her experiences — even when she’s just hanging out with twenty-ish people on a Saturday night in a suburban basement— are visceral. And I always know when she’s done relating the best stories, because she pauses, exhales and says: “So…yeah.”

That night, we were still several minutes away from home when she finished her summary of events. I let the silence and the calm and the space float through the car before I said: “Honey, I like those guys. But I also know those guys. They’re teenage boys. You know that if they do anything stupid, I’ll fuck them up.”

She laughed and said what she always says: “I know, Daddy.”

And I said what I always say: “Remind them every once in a while. Remind them that I like them. And then remind them that I will fuck them up.”

She said: “They know.” And she laughed.

And I didn’t laugh.

Parenting will teach you about fate.

You can control a child’s environment to a large degree. You can make sure they have the safest crib and car seat. You can make sure that their food is 100% natural, that they’re never exposed to genetically modified foods, that high fructose corn syrup never crosses their lips.

Until it does.

And it will.

It might be through a lapse of vigilance on your part. It might be that you forget to tell a play date host that your kid can’t have popsicles. And frankly, it might be that you do tell the play date host, and they think you’re overbearing and obnoxious, so they give your kid a popsicle the minute you pull out of their driveway.

Shit happens. You can’t control the world. And if you think a popsicle is horrifying, think about the reason for that car seat. A guy has a few beers after work to celebrate the arrival of a new client or drown the departure of an old client. He will never see the “Baby on Board” sticker in your rear window when he T-bones you at an intersection going ten miles over the speed limit.

That’s a horrible feeling you have right now, isn’t it? Just the thought? I physically winced typing it. But that shit happens.

Maybe you and your children remain unscathed from drunk drivers throughout their childhood, though. Maybe they never get a popsicle. Maybe they somehow miss out on skinned knees from bike crashes, broken arms from Supermanning off of a porch railing, black eyes from missed Little League pop-ups.

Then they grow to become a teenage boy or — worse for parents — a teenage girl. It’s an old joke. It’s also true. When you have a teenage boy, you have to worry about that teenage boy. When you have a teenage girl, you have to worry about all of the teenage boys.

My kids’ high school is number one in the state in two categories. They take top honors in standardized test scores, and they also have the highest concentration of STDs of any student population.

In the last two months of school, my oldest told me about three separate pregnancies. Those were just the girls whose names I knew. There were more.

That’s a lot. A lot of bad decision-making. A lot of babies on board. A lot of fate doled out too early in life.

From AutoZone to Omaha (Or: I Owe My Life to a Beer Bong)

I’m sure many of you are self-made successes. You rise each morning determined to carpe the hell out of the diem. You wheel. You deal. You pitch. Your schedules are booked solid from the day’s first coffee to the night’s final, reflective sazerac.

You spend 24 hours every day with your foot on the accelerator following a road map that has only one highway with no speed limit and a single destination: Awesomeville, population 1.

You’re grabbing one metaphor by the horns and another by the balls. You leave no room for chance. Zero. You’re in charge.

I applaud you and your gusto.

From a distance.

Because you sound exhausting.

For me, the best thing about real go-getters is they have to go to get. That leaves me alone to work. And that’s what I do. I work.

I don’t sell myself. I don’t intentionally network. I don’t go to get. I rarely even go. I’m never far from a laptop or a couch. That’s not true. I actually run quite a bit, but I even do that alone. When I’m not running, I’m writing. I write for a living. I write for fun. I write because I was a creative, underage drinker.

For more than two decades, my life has felt like one long series of reactions to a single action taken on a Friday night in the fall of 1985 when I was a sophomore in high school. On that night, a friend of mine and I went to our local AutoZone. We were in search of materials for the perfect beer bong — a large-mouth funnel, plastic tubing and duct tape.

We were standing in front of the funnels when two other guys walked up. One of them was in my English class. I didn’t like him, because it was obvious he didn’t like me. But here we were. One of us said something sarcastic. The other followed up with something snide. A mutual respect was born, and we were inseparable for the next three years.

In the autumn of our freshmen year at college, his uncle opened a bar. My buddy asked if I wanted a job. I did. I started work on a Saturday morning. After that day, I went to that bar every day for seven years. Five days a week, I worked. Two days I hung out and spent all of my tips on Guinness.

If it wasn’t for my friend, there was no bar. And if it wasn’t for me wanting to recklessly drink a 12-pack as a high school sophomore without using a Rube Goldberg-ian beer contraption, there was no friend.

I worked and drank at that bar for three years as an underage minor and for four years after. I met many people there, including the guy who helped get me out of bartending and into writing.

When you go further out in my chronology, it’s easy to relate practically everything to that bar and my friend. One thing has led to another and another. But that’s how life works. It’s linear. Everything is connected. It’s easy to draw a line through the events of your life. In fact, you can only draw a line through the events of your life. Anything off of that line was a direction missed, ignored or forsaken. We all have many.

The thing about my particular linear timeline is that almost every milestone and event since the Night of the Beer Bong has happened to me, not because of me. I took one action. I went to an auto parts store. After that, most of my life has felt like a result of someone else’s suggestion, a series of reactions to external forces.

I was told I should try writing. I did. I was pursued by a woman. I married her. Then, I divorced her. The last thing I was trying to do when I had a kid was have a kid. My entire career is a result of someone giving someone else my name or someone chasing me down.

I’m not saying I don’t take action. I do. I spend ten minutes in the salad dressing aisle before I eventually decide. My Netflix queue has more than 300 films and TV shows waiting for me. I’ve chosen cars and TVs and couches and clothes. I chose to quit smoking after twenty years. I voluntarily picked up running. I’ve proactively written sometimes stupid, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant things on the internet.

All of those are actions, yes. None feel substantial, however. None feel like milestones. None feel like fate.

It’s very easy to think that a choice like quitting cigarettes and starting to run has added extra years onto my life and prevented me from enormous medical bills. But who knows? Had I gotten lung cancer or had a bypass or died by the age of 40, the causal relationship would have been obvious.

The choice of two packs a day manufactures fate. The choice of five to ten miles a day manufactures sore calves, a craving for ice cold water and a lot of your annual salary spent on running shoes. Those aren’t exactly epic events on life’s timeline that conjure a kind of destiny.

Newton Is Dead. Long Live Newton. (Or: Open Your Eyes and Collide)

For a very long time, I lived my life in fear of Newton’s Second and Third Laws of Motion. The Second Law defines force as mass times acceleration. The Third Law states that when a body exerts a force on another body, the second body exerts an equal force in an opposite direction.

Life is a series of these forces. It’s what happens when a drunk driver T-bones you at an intersection going ten miles over the speed limit. Or when an employer hires your replacement before they fire you. Or when a series of events across a decade leads to a hostile, gnashing divorce. Or a cancer grows inside of you. Or a million other forces collide, crash and throw you off course.

When you experience enough violent collisions — physical or emotional — it is easy to wince. It is easy to close your eyes, jump out of the way and pray that you don’t get hit. You begin to see the possibility of collision everywhere. It is very, very easy to sequester yourself behind a barrier that shields you from moving bodies. After all, when you take other objects out of your life, they can’t exert any force on it. There are no more collisions.

There are two problems with avoiding Newton’s Second and Third Laws of Motion.

First, it assumes all collisions are bad. Obviously, this is not true. Good collisions happen constantly. We have names for them. Happy accidents. Coincidence. Fate.

It is crazy to think all collisions are bad, but it is also easy. When you close your eyes to jump out of the way, you can no longer see. You can’t see the good, the bad or the indifferent. When you can’t see anything, your mind fills in the picture. And a mind that is scared — a mind that remembers trauma more vividly than triumph — fills that void with unkind imagery. But the horror movie that the mind plays is not reality.

The second problem with avoiding Newton’s Second and Third Laws is that the barrier you hide behind ensures Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force. While it is true that the barrier keeps out external forces, it also prevents internal forces from putting you into motion. With the barrier up, there is nowhere to go.

Several weeks ago I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday night. Door locked. Phone off. I was doing nothing, and everything was doing nothing to me. Newton’s First Law. It was bliss. And it sucked.

And then I accidentally ignored the self-built barrier. For the first time in memory, I acted outside of my Autozone-to-friend-to-bar-to-rest-of-my-life timeline. I sent a short, blind, impulsive message to a stranger.

It led to a four-day adventure with themed bookends — The National concert on Thursday night and the Nationals day game on Sunday.

In between, it led to cities that escaped me for four decades. It led to oysters and lobster rolls and bison carpaccio. It led to the world’s best Bloody Marys and to a craft beer tour like few have ever conquered in a mere 86 hours.

It led to an impromptu breakfast with a friend of five years who I’d never met in person.

It led to some of the most honest conversation I’ve ever had.

It led to cloud-watching at midnight while lying in the cold, damp dew of a neighborhood soccer field.

It led to someone who removed my fear of Newton’s Laws, someone who I willingly gave the only two things of value I have to offer — my gratitude and my spirit.

All from a note of only 82 words.

I know the go-getters are not still with us. By this point, they have already written their own 3,000-word screeds on the awful design of the icons for iOS 7, or on Bitcoin’s dominance/failure, or on the new trailer for the next Hobbit movie.

So this is just between you and me. It’s a simple reminder.

It is a reminder to act. To jump. To exert the force on the object that is your life. To do something — anything — and then walk into the impact. To collide.

With gumption and gusto. With confidence and composure. With the knowledge that you will occasionally fail, and with the understanding that failure is as often a starting point of success as success itself.

Manufacture fate. And know that the factory is never closed. As long as you’re willing to act, you will collide—with editors, with producers, with angel investors, with future employers, with potential business partners, with friends, with family.

With the occasional total stranger who provides enough hope for a lifetime.