The Dude
In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen finished writing a script that no studio fully understood how to sell.
The lead character was a shuffling, bowling-obsessed, White Russian-drinking Los Angeles slacker known simply as “The Dude.” He was not a traditional movie hero. He was not polished or ambitious or conventionally handsome. He barely cared about solving the mystery he had been pulled into. He just wanted his rug back because, as he put it with complete sincerity, it really tied the room together.
The Coens had based him on 2 real people. The 1st was Jeff Dowd — a film producer who actually went by the nickname “The Dude,” drove a Chrysler LeBaron, and had a particular fondness for White Russians. The 2nd was Peter Exline, a Vietnam veteran whose messy apartment and memorable real-life misadventures — including tracking down a car thief using homework left in the back seat — became the raw material for several of the film’s most memorable scenes.
Now they needed an actor who could make this unusual character feel true without making him seem like a joke.
For the role of the older, wealthy Jeffrey Lebowski — the so-called Big Lebowski — they tried everyone. Robert Duvall turned it down because he did not like the script. Gene Hackman was taking a break from acting. Anthony Hopkins did not want to play an American. The list expanded to include Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, George C. Scott, Andy Griffith, and Ernest Borgnine. Their dream choice was Marlon Brando, who was by then in poor health and unavailable. The role eventually went to David Huddleston, who was extraordinary in it.
For the Dude himself, there was really only 1 name that felt right from the beginning. Jeff Bridges.
When Bridges read the script, he laughed out loud. He later told The Hollywood Reporter that his first impression was of a great script unlike anything he had done before. He said he thought the Coen brothers must have spied on him during his high school years in California.
That was the first clue about what would make his performance so alive. Bridges did not have to act like a laid-back California dreamer. He already was one, in the best possible way. He was relaxed, philosophical, and deeply familiar with the rhythm of that kind of life from his own younger years. Much of what the Dude wears in the film came from Bridges’s own closet.
But here is the detail that still surprises most people.
Jeff Bridges was completely sober during the entire production.
Even though the Dude famously smokes marijuana throughout the film, Bridges did not. “While it seems very improvisational, it’s all scripted,” he told Yahoo Entertainment. “It was all done exactly as written. If you add an extra ’man’ in a spot, it didn’t quite feel right. So I really wanted to have all my wits about me. I didn’t burn at all during that movie.”
Instead, he developed a small ritual. Before every new scene, Bridges would walk over to Joel or Ethan Coen and ask 1 simple question: “Do you think the Dude burned one on the way over?” The directors would nod yes. Bridges would drift to the corner of the set, rub his knuckles into his eyes to make them bloodshot, and walk back ready to film.
That tiny, repeated moment was one of the only pieces of direction he ever asked for. Joel Coen later said it was essentially the full extent of what they needed to direct him. He showed up. He was, in every sense, already the Dude.
Bridges was also meticulous about the rhythm of the dialogue in a way that most audiences never notice. He has said he and John Goodman were deeply attentive to where every “man” and every pause landed — treating the script like a jazz piece where every note had to hit in exactly the right place. The word “man” appears an estimated 147 times in the finished film, nearly once and a half per minute. Every single one had to feel inevitable.
And then the movie came out.
And it flopped.
Released on March 6, 1998, The Big Lebowski opened to just over $5.5 million at the domestic box office. It was buried under U.S. Marshals, The Wedding Singer, and Titanic, which was still tearing up the charts 12 weeks into its release. Critics were dismissive, many comparing it unfavorably to Fargo, the Coens’ previous film. Julianne Moore, who played Maude, remembered reading the reviews the morning after the premiere in disbelief. “When I saw it, I was like, ’Oh my God, this is so funny.’ And then the next day all the reviews came out and they killed it,” she said. “And I was like, ’That seems weird. I loved it. I thought it was funny.’”
For a while, it looked like the Dude was going to drift quietly into forgotten cinema history.
Then, slowly, something extraordinary began to happen.
Midnight screenings filled. Home video rentals multiplied. The quotes started appearing in casual conversation — “The Dude abides,” “That rug really tied the room together,” “Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” People began dressing as the Dude at conventions. Annual celebrations called Lebowski Fest were founded across multiple cities. An entire unofficial philosophy — Dudeism — emerged, inspired by the character’s unhurried, calm, deeply unbothered approach to a chaotic world.
The film that had been dismissed in 1998 became, gradually and irresistibly, one of the most beloved cult films in cinema history.
Bridges himself has described what drew him to the character with the kind of simplicity the Dude himself would have appreciated. “There’s an aspect of the Dude I aspired to. He’s authentic, isn’t he? He’s who he is, and that’s about it. He’s a lovely cat.”
That might be the real reason this strange, quiet film has outlasted so many bigger, louder blockbusters from its era. In a world that constantly rewards ambition, hustle, and the performance of success, the Dude reminded audiences that there is another way. Slower. Kinder. A little weirder. A little more honest about what actually matters.
Sometimes the characters who seem to care the least turn out to be the ones we remember the most.
And sometimes, a film that bombs on its opening weekend quietly becomes the 1 that refuses to go away.
The Dude abides.
Quote of the Day
“The first and last thing required of genius is love of truth.” – Goethe, Writer (1749 – 1832)
Rock Bottom and How To Help Someone Bounce Off It!
He paid for $3.87 in gas with a sock full of quarters and I knew something was very wrong.
The coins hit the counter in a white athletic sock with a gray Nike swoosh.
It was 2:15 AM. I work the graveyard shift at the Shell station off Exit 47.
Most of my customers at this hour are truckers, third-shift nurses, or people making bad decisions they’ll regret in the morning.
But this guy didn’t fit any category.
He was maybe sixty. Wearing slacks and a button-down shirt that used to be nice but looked like he’d slept in it. His glasses were crooked.
“Pump four,” he said. His voice shook.
I looked at the sock on the counter.
“You paying with that?”
“Yes. Is that a problem?”
People pay weird ways sometimes. I’ve taken crumpled fives from sports bras. I’ve taken change counted out in pennies. I don’t judge.
“No problem,” I said. “Just gonna take me a minute to count it.”
I dumped the sock out. Quarters rolled everywhere. Some fell on the floor.
He dropped to his knees immediately, scrambling to pick them up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine, man. It’s just quarters.”
But he was nearly crying, grabbing coins off the dirty tile floor like they were diamonds.
I came around the counter and helped him.
We picked up the quarters together in silence.
When we stood back up, I counted what was on the counter.
$3.87 exactly.
“Pump four?” I confirmed.
“Yes, please.”
I activated the pump.
He walked out. I watched through the window.
He didn’t drive a beater. He drove a newer Lexus sedan.
That caught my attention.
Nice car. Sock full of quarters. Slept-in dress clothes at 2:00 AM.
Something was off.
He pumped exactly $3.87 worth of gas and drove away.
I went back to restocking the cigarette rack behind the counter.
Twenty minutes later, he came back.
Parked at the same pump. Walked in.
“Pump four again?” I asked.
“Yes. Please.” He put another sock on the counter. Different sock. Black dress sock this time.
More quarters.
“You okay, man?” I asked while counting.
“I’m fine.”
He wasn’t fine.
I counted the quarters. Another $3.87.
“You’re buying gas four dollars at a time?”
He nodded.
“Why not just fill the tank?“
“Because I don’t have enough for that.”
I looked at his car again through the window. Had to be worth forty grand.
“You could sell that car,” I said gently. “Get something cheaper. Use the difference for gas money.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound.
“I can’t sell it. It’s a lease. And I’m four payments behind. They’re coming to repo it on Monday.”
He leaned against the counter.
“I lost my job six weeks ago. Engineering firm. They eliminated my whole department. Thirty-two years. Gone.”
I didn’t say anything.
“My wife left me two weeks after that. Said she didn’t sign up to be married to a failure. She took her car. Took half the bank account. I’ve been living in the Lexus for the past nine days.”
“Where are you driving to?” I asked.
“Nowhere. I just drive around. If I keep moving, I don’t have to think.”
He looked at me.
“These quarters are from my coin collection. I’ve been rolling them and breaking them open for gas money. This was my last roll.”
I processed the payment. Activated pump four.
He walked back out.
Pumped his $3.87.
But he didn’t leave.
He sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, head in his hands.
I have a rule. I don’t get involved. People’s problems are their problems.
But I kept watching him through the window.
After five minutes, he was still sitting there.
I made a decision I probably shouldn’t have made.
I walked outside.
“Hey,” I called.
He looked up.
“When’s the last time you ate?“
He thought about it. “Tuesday, maybe. I had a burger. Or was that Monday?”
Today was Thursday.
“Come inside,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I’m making you a sandwich.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I didn’t ask if you had money. I said come inside.”
He followed me in.
I went to the back. We sell sandwiches here. Pre-made ones in plastic wrap. They’re not great, but they’re food.
I grabbed a turkey club and a bag of chips. Poured him a large coffee.
Brought it all out front.
“Sit,“ I said, pointing to the plastic chairs by the window.
He sat.
He ate that sandwich like he was afraid someone would take it away. Didn’t even taste it. Just consumed it.
When he finished, he stared at the empty wrapper.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
“You can’t keep living in your car.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Yeah, you do. Where’s your family?”
“My parents are dead. My wife’s gone. I don’t have kids.”
“Friends?”
“I had work friends. But when you lose your job, you find out real quick who your actual friends are.”
I thought about that.
I’ve been working this shift for three years. I’m twenty-six. I dropped out of community college because I couldn’t afford it. This job pays $16.50 an hour.
I’m nobody’s hero. I’m barely keeping my own life together.
But I looked at this man, eating gas station food at 2:45 in the morning because a stranger showed him basic kindness, and I couldn’t walk away.
“There’s a day labor place on Route 9,” I said. “Opens at 5:00 AM. They pay cash at the end of each shift. Construction cleanup, moving jobs, warehouse stuff.”
“I’m sixty-one years old.”
“They don’t care. They need bodies. You show up, you work, you get paid.”
He looked at the floor. “I was a senior engineer. I had an office with a window.”
“And now you’re living in a leased car you can’t afford, breaking open coin rolls for gas money. So what’s your plan? Drive until the car gets repossessed and then sleep on the street?”
That came out harsher than I meant.
He flinched.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you need money. This is how you get it. It’s not forever. It’s just until you figure out the next thing.”
He was quiet for a long time.
“Where’s the address?“ he finally asked.
I wrote it down on a receipt. Added the phone number.
“Tell them Danny sent you. I know the guy who runs the dispatch. His name’s Carlos. He’s fair.”
He took the receipt. Folded it carefully. Put it in his shirt pocket.
“Why are you helping me?” he asked.
“Because nobody else is.”
He stood up. Shook my hand.
“Thank you, Danny.”
“Good luck.”
He walked out to his Lexus. Sat there for another minute.
Then he drove away.
I figured that was the last time I’d see him.
I was wrong.
Three weeks later, I was working the same shift.
A car pulled up to pump four at 2:30 AM.
Not the Lexus. A beat-up Toyota Corolla.
The driver got out. Walked inside.
It was him.
But he looked different. Clean-shaven. Haircut. Wearing work boots and jeans.
“Danny?”
“Hey,” I said. “You’re alive.”
“I am.“ He smiled. Actual smile. “I went to that day labor place. Carlos put me on a crew that same morning. Demo work. Tearing out old drywall.”
“How’d it go?”
“I made eighty-five dollars that first day. Cash. I bought food. I slept in the car that night feeling like maybe I could survive this.”
He leaned on the counter.
“I worked every day for two weeks. Saved up six hundred dollars. Carlos liked me. Said I showed up on time and didn’t complain. He offered me a permanent spot on his renovation crew.”
“That’s great.”
“I gave the Lexus back to the dealer last week. Bought this Corolla for twelve hundred cash. It’s ugly, but it’s mine. No payments.”
“Where are you living?”
“I rented a room in a house with four other guys. Three hundred a month. Shared bathroom. It’s not the suburb I used to live in, but it’s got a roof and a bed.”
He pulled out his wallet. Took out two twenties.
“This is for the sandwich. And the coffee. And the advice.”
“I can’t take that.”
“You can. You will.”
He put the money on the counter.
“I’m going to be okay, Danny. Because you saw me when I was invisible. You treated me like I mattered when I didn’t think I did anymore.”
I took the money. Not because I needed it. But because I could tell he needed to give it.
“Fill the tank?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fill it up.”
I activated pump four.
He walked outside and filled his Corolla all the way to the top.
$42.
No socks full of quarters.
Just a card that worked.
When he drove away, I put the two twenties in my pocket.
Later that night, when my shift ended, I used it to buy groceries for my neighbor. She’s seventy-three and lives alone. Her social security doesn’t stretch far.
Because that’s what you do with kindness.
You pass it on.
We think rock bottom looks like addiction or crime or dramatic collapse.
But sometimes, rock bottom is a man in a Lexus paying for gas with coins from a sock.
It’s quiet. It’s hidden. It’s people drowning in plain sight.
And all it takes is one person to throw them a rope.
You don’t need money. You don’t need resources.
You just need to see them.
And maybe make them a sandwich.
Marcel LeBrun
In 2011, He Sold His Tech Company for $326 Million. Then He Went Home and Started Watching.
Fredericton, New Brunswick. Population 65,000.
Not exactly where you’d expect a revolution to start.
Marcel LeBrun grew up here. Went to university here. Built a social media software company called Radian6 here, starting with a small team and a specific idea and the particular stubbornness of someone who does not know yet what is supposed to be impossible.
In May 2011, Salesforce acquired Radian6 for $326 million in cash and $50 million in stock. It was the largest venture-backed technology exit in Canadian history. Marcel was forty years old. He stayed on at Salesforce as a senior vice president for a few years, then left in 2015, returned to New Brunswick, and stood in the middle of the life he had built.
He looked at what was around him.
And then he really looked.
Tents on grassy patches in the city center. Families sleeping in their cars in parking lots, moving from one side of a lot to another before anyone noticed. People huddled in doorways as the Canadian winter arrived without compromise. A waitlist for subsidized housing in New Brunswick stretching to six thousand names.
Most people with the kind of money Marcel had made would have felt sad about that. Maybe written a check. Attended a gala. Funded a study. Filed it under problems bigger than one person and let the guilt settle into the background of an otherwise comfortable life.
Marcel looked at it the way a software engineer looks at a broken system.
This is a problem. Problems have solutions. What are we actually trying to build here?
He told Maclean’s magazine: “I won the parent lottery, the education lottery, the country lottery. It would be arrogant to say every piece of my success was earned, when so much of it was received.”
Then he got to work figuring out how to spend it.
For years, he and his wife Sheila — a retired occupational therapist who understood, in the specific and practical language of her profession, what people actually need to rebuild a functioning life — traveled. They visited nonprofits and social enterprises across Canada, the United States, and as far as Ghana, looking for models that worked. Not models that provided emergency relief. Models that created permanent transformation.
What Marcel kept finding, again and again, was the same gap.
Emergency relief, he observed, gets done reasonably well. The safety net catches people. But the support disappears the moment someone starts improving — which is precisely the moment it is most needed. The system, as designed, was accidentally optimised to keep people stuck.
He thought about that for a long time.
Then he came back to Fredericton and started staking out a piece of land.
He did it literally. He walked a 65-acre plot on Fredericton’s north side — land previously used for harvesting trees — with wooden stakes and a measuring tape, laying out the shape of a community he hadn’t built yet. He adjusted distances until they felt right. He stood in the middle of it and tried to imagine what 99 homes could do for 99 people who had nowhere to go.
A local church group donated an 8,000-square-foot warehouse space. Marcel converted it into a manufacturing facility — not for software, not for algorithms, but for homes. He staffed it with workers paid a living wage, and the factory began producing fully designed, architecturally built tiny homes at a rate of one every four days, at a cost of $55,000 each. When conventional construction was failing to deliver affordable housing at $200,000 a unit, Marcel was doing it for less than a quarter of the price.
He applied to the federal government for funding in July 2021. By the time the approval came through seventeen months later, he had already built thirty-five homes with his own money.
He didn’t wait for permission. He showed them what the idea looked like when it was already running.
The community is called 12 Neighbours.
Walk in off the gravel driveway and what you find is not what the address prepares you for. Ninety-nine small homes — painted in warm, distinct colours — lining quiet paths. Each one roughly 250 square feet. Small, yes. But private. Lockable. Solar-panelled. With a full kitchen, a bathroom, a small deck out front, and a door that belongs entirely to the person on the other side of it.
A community center anchors the village — housing Neighbourly Coffee, a café and teaching kitchen run by residents themselves, a silk-screen printing workshop, community gardens. Goal-setting programs. Mental health counseling. Addiction support. Not beds. Jobs. Not charity. Purpose.
Rent is set at 30 percent of whatever the resident earns. The maximum — including all utilities and internet — is $200 a month.
Marcel’s quote about the difference between philanthropy and what he was actually doing stayed with him through the whole build: “The word philanthropy is often interpreted as someone who gives money. But the Greek roots of the word mean to love humans. What I have discovered is that spending money is the easy thing. Spending yourself is the hard thing.”
He spent himself.
Randy Burtch had been sleeping in his 2004 Chevy Impala for about a year.
He had work — construction jobs, here and there — but pandemic-era rents in Fredericton had climbed far beyond what those jobs could cover. No kitchen. No shower. No address. No place that was his.
When he moved into 12 Neighbours, someone asked him what it meant to have a working kitchen again.
He said: “If I want a shower, I can have one. If I want something to eat, I can cook it.”
That is what $55,000 buys. Not luxury. The specific, irreplaceable dignity of a door with a lock and a kitchen that is yours.
The first couple to move into the community had spent ten months living in a tent, taking sponge baths in the woods behind a lumber yard. They walked into their new home and closed the door behind them.
In early 2023, the provincial and federal governments added $13 million in funding. Not to launch an idea — to scale one that had already proven itself.
Marcel is not finished.
He has launched a second initiative — Neighbourly Homes — a rapidly deployable housing model designed to scale across the Maritimes. Other nonprofits are already ordering homes from his factory. A community for vulnerable youth is being planned in Ontario. A second 12 Neighbours community is taking shape in Miramichi, New Brunswick.
He still shows up on-site every day. He knows residents by name. He attends community events. He treats the whole thing the way he treated every startup he ever built: as a problem with barriers, none of them actually impossible, all of them worth solving if you are willing to stay long enough to solve them.
There are still thousands of people on the housing waitlist in New Brunswick.
There are 99 homes at 12 Neighbours, with more being built.
The math doesn’t balance yet.
But it is more balanced than it was three years ago. And Marcel LeBrun is still in the factory.
Because that is what happens when someone with resources, a specific idea, and the specific personality type that cannot live comfortably with an unsolved problem decides that homelessness is not too complicated.
It is just unsolved.
And he is not the kind of person who can leave it that way.
Anton Chekhov
Shortly after midnight on July 15, 1904, in a hotel room in the German spa town of Badenweiler, a doctor arrived at the bedside of a dying man.
The doctor understood there was nothing left to do medically.
So he did something else.
He telephoned the hotel kitchen and ordered a bottle of the finest champagne.
When it arrived, he poured three glasses.
The dying man took a glass, said it had been a long time since he had tasted champagne, and drank it.
Then he set the glass down, rolled onto his side, and stopped breathing.
His name was Anton Chekhov.
He was forty-four years old.
And his death — quiet, precise, tinged with both beauty and sadness — was so perfectly Chekhovian that writers have been retelling it ever since.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog — a commercial port city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia.
His grandfather had been a serf who bought his family’s freedom in 1841.
His father Pavel was a grocer and a religious fanatic with a violent temper who used his children as unpaid labour in the family shop.
Chekhov described his childhood in a single word: suffering.
He found his escape in language — in stories, in observations, in the details of ordinary life that most people walked past without noticing.
In 1876, his father’s business collapsed under debt.
To avoid arrest, Pavel fled to Moscow with most of the family.
Chekhov was sixteen.
He was left behind alone — to sell the remaining family possessions, finish his education, and find ways to survive.
He tutored younger students. He caught and sold goldfinches. He wrote humorous sketches for newspapers and sent every ruble he could spare to his family in Moscow, along with letters designed to make them laugh.
He was the head of the household at sixteen.
He would be for the rest of his life.
In 1879, he joined his family in Moscow and enrolled in medical school.
To pay tuition and support his parents and siblings, he wrote daily — short, comic sketches of contemporary Russian life, published under pen names like Antosha Chekhonte and Man Without Spleen, in the cheap humour magazines he read himself.
In 1886 alone, he published 112 stories.
One hundred and twelve stories in a single year, while practicing medicine, while supporting a family, while beginning to suspect what was growing in his lungs.
He said of those two vocations: medicine was his lawful wife and literature was his mistress.
He loved both.
By the late 1880s, something was shifting in his work.
The humorous sketches were giving way to something more searching — stories that did not resolve neatly, that ended in the middle of a feeling rather than the end of a plot.
He stopped explaining what his characters meant.
He started showing, instead, what they did.
His short story The Steppe (1888), a child’s slow journey across the Russian countryside, announced him as a writer of a different order — one who was interested not in dramatic events but in the texture of consciousness, the weight of unexpressed emotion, the things people cannot say to each other.
He wrote later that it was not the duty of a writer to solve problems, but to correctly state them.
In 1890, he did something nobody expected.
Frustrated by intellectual critics demanding he hold firmer political opinions, he simply left Moscow — and traveled nearly six thousand miles east, across Siberia by carriage and riverboat, to Sakhalin Island: a remote penal colony in the Russian Far East, notorious for its brutal conditions.
He arrived alone, conducted a census of the entire island population by himself, and spent three months investigating how human beings survived — or failed to — in conditions of almost total deprivation.
The research he published became a respected work of penology.
It was also a statement. He would go and look for himself, at the things that mattered, in the places other people refused to go.
His plays told a different story.
The Seagull — his third major play — premiered at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1896.
The audience hated it.
The critical reception was so brutal that Chekhov publicly renounced theatre and vowed never to write for the stage again.
Two years later, the Moscow Art Theatre revived the play under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski.
This time, the response was rapturous.
The seagull became the Moscow Art Theatre’s official emblem — where it has remained ever since.
What followed was the most concentrated outpouring of theatrical genius in modern Russian history.
Uncle Vanya. Three Sisters. The Cherry Orchard.
Four plays, all produced by the Moscow Art Theatre, all exploring the same terrain: people trapped in lives they did not choose, longing for futures that will not arrive, speaking past each other in conversations that never quite reach what needs to be said.
He called them comedies.
His directors staged them as tragedies.
He was never entirely happy with the performances.
During all of this, he had been living with a secret.
As early as 1884, after graduating from medical school, he had begun coughing up blood.
He recognised what it meant.
He told no one in his family.
They were counting on him.
In 1897, a major lung haemorrhage in Moscow made concealment impossible. Doctors confirmed advanced tuberculosis and ordered him to change his way of life.
He moved to Yalta, where the warmer climate was supposed to help.
Tolstoy visited him there. Maxim Gorky visited.
He planted trees and kept tame cranes and wrote letters home assuring everyone he was getting better.
He was not getting better.
He married the actress Olga Knipper in 1901 — the lead actress of the Moscow Art Theatre who had starred in his plays.
By mutual agreement, they spent much of their marriage apart: she in Moscow for the theatre, he in Yalta for his health.
They wrote each other hundreds of letters.
The Cherry Orchard — his last play — was completed in 1903 under great difficulty, and premiered in January 1904.
Six months later, he and Olga traveled to Badenweiler, Germany, hoping the spa air might help.
He wrote cheerful letters home about the food and the weather.
His last letter complained about how German women dressed.
On the night of July 14th, Chekhov became delirious — apparently hallucinating about a journey to Japan.
His wife sent for the doctor.
When Dr. Schwöhrer arrived and understood the situation, he did not reach for another medical instrument.
He ordered champagne.
Chekhov took a glass.
Said it had been a long time.
Drank it. Set it down. Turned onto his side.
The doctor said: It’s over.
His wife later wrote of that moment that there were no human voices and no everyday sounds. There was only beauty, peace, and the grandeur of death.
Chekhov’s body needed to be transported back to Moscow.
In the summer heat, the coffin was loaded onto a freight car — one normally used for transporting oysters.
Mourners waiting at the Moscow station were startled and offended.
Maxim Gorky called it an outrage.
Others recognised it as something else entirely: a scene that Chekhov himself might have written, with its mix of the absurd and the sorrowful, its refusal to let death be simply solemn.
He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
He influenced nearly every major short story writer of the twentieth century — James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams.
He changed what the theatre believed it was allowed to do.
He showed that a story could end without resolution, that a play could proceed without a plot, that the most important things in human life were the things people almost said to each other.
He was a doctor who wrote.
Or a writer who doctored.
He never quite decided which.
Medicine was the lawful wife.
Literature was the mistress.
He died at forty-four, having just drunk champagne in a German hotel room, with a moth banging against the electric lamp and his wife beside him.
The perfect ending for a man who understood that life’s most important moments rarely announce themselves.
Five Garden Myths
Some garden advice gets repeated so often it stops being questioned. Five pieces that sound right — and aren’t .
Gravel in the bottom of pots doesn’t improve drainage:
– A layer of gravel actually raises the wet zone into the root area instead of below it. A continuous column of potting mix with perlite mixed throughout drains better than a layered pot. Skip the gravel. Drill more holes.
Watering in midday sun doesn’t burn leaves:
– Water droplets on smooth leaves don’t focus enough light to scorch tissue. This has been tested. There ARE good reasons to water in the morning — less water lost to evaporation, and foliage dries before evening when fungal infections are most likely. Water early for those reasons, not because of sunburn.
Eggshells don’t add calcium quickly:
– Eggshells are one of the slowest-decomposing organic materials in soil. Crushed by hand and tossed in the garden, they take years to release anything a plant can use. If you want them to break down in one season, grind them to a fine powder first. Coarse pieces are still sitting in the soil when the next season starts.
Used coffee grounds don’t acidify soil:
– Brewing extracts most of the acid. Used grounds test nearly neutral. They’re a fine addition to compost as a nitrogen source, but they won’t lower pH for blueberries or azaleas the way most people assume. And don’t spread them thick as a surface mulch — they form a water-repellent crust. Mix them into compost instead.
Marigolds don’t repel most pests:
– French marigold roots release a compound that suppresses a specific type of soil-dwelling nematode. That’s real, but it’s underground and it’s specific. Marigolds planted among tomatoes don’t repel aphids, beetles, caterpillars, or anything above ground. The strongest effect comes from growing marigolds as a cover crop and turning them into the soil at the end of the season — not from tucking a few plants between your vegetables.
Five corrections. Same garden. Better decisions.
Go Do Some Main Character Deeds!
Spoiler, It is never too late!
Patch Adams
His name was Hunter Doherty Adams. The world came to know him as Patch.
He was born on May 28, 1945, in Washington, D.C. As a teenager, the darkness in his mind became so severe that he voluntarily committed himself for treatment. He was 18. He stayed for 2 weeks.
What happened in those 2 weeks changed the entire direction of his life.
He watches the other patients. He sees loneliness doing as much damage as any illness. He sees how 1 act of genuine human warmth can change the temperature of a room. He sees that nobody in the building is treating any of that.
He makes a decision. He will become a doctor – but not the kind who hides behind clinical distance. A different kind entirely.
He walks out and starts building the life that will prove his point.
1971. Northern Virginia.
Patch graduates from the Medical College of Virginia and moves immediately. He gathers 20 friends, including 3 fellow doctors, and opens a 6-bedroom house to anyone who needs medical care.
No receptionist. No billing department. No insurance forms. No payment of any kind.
The 6-bedroom home in Northern Virginia becomes a fully functioning communal hospital. Patch and his team live directly alongside their patients – cooking together, sharing meals, sharing space. The line between doctor and patient is deliberately and radically erased.
To keep it alive, Patch and another Gesundheit physician moonlight in hospital emergency rooms at night and donate their entire salaries back into the free clinic. Other friends take outside work and do the same.
Here’s what makes it worse, the medical establishment is not impressed.
Treating patients without billing violates every professional norm of the era. The idea that a doctor’s personality, humor, and emotional presence could be as therapeutic as a prescription is dismissed as unscientific and naive. Patch is written off. He is told that what he is doing is not real medicine and cannot last.
He tells them, “The most revolutionary act one can commit in our world is to be happy.”
Then he puts on a clown suit and keeps going.
1971–1983. 12 years. 15,000 patients. Zero bills.
More than 15,000 people receive care at the Gesundheit Institute, completely free. No payment. No malpractice insurance. No formal facilities at all.
Patch rides a unicycle. He juggles. He arrives at hospital bedsides in full clown regalia. He rolls down hills with disturbed patients. He deploys every instrument of human joy he can find – and then performs rigorous, genuine medicine alongside it.
He calls it his “pilot project.” A proof of concept, that a medical practice built on community, humor, and radical generosity can actually work.
In 1981, the Gesundheit Institute purchases 321 acres in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, using donated funds. The dream is a full-scale free hospital, open to anyone in the world.
The medical establishment is still skeptical. The 15,000 patients who received free care are not.
In 1998, Robin Williams portrays Patch Adams in a major Hollywood film that carries his story to audiences across the world.
Patch Adams keeps going. Still traveling. Still wearing the clown suit. Still preaching the conviction he formed alone in a psychiatric ward at age 18 – that a doctor who withholds joy, warmth, and genuine human presence from their patients is practicing medicine with only half the tools available.
He has never sent a bill.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the most powerful medicine in the world is also the simplest, feeling like someone truly gives a damn about you.
On Making More Money
My elder daughter sent me a clip of Grant Cardone recalling how 16 years ago his wife got him to play the game of “What would we do if we won the lottery?” It is worth watching: http://instagram.com/reel/DYZiSN5xC-2/?igsh=dDI3NWkOdnpxeGto
Grant says, “There’s more money on this planet than there is creativity to spend it.”
I thought about that and had the realisation that what he said is an understated simplification.
“How so?” I hear you ask.
Well the amount of money is not fixed, it is variable. Each country is supposed to issue roughly enough currency and credit to facilitate the exchange of the goods and services produced within the economy without causing persistent inflation or deflation. (Given the persistent inflation, they obviously fail miserably at it.) Which means if you increase your delivery of valuable final products, the government increases the amount of money in circulation.
So, for argument’s sake, if every person in a country on January 1 doubled their personal and collective production and the government commensurately increased the money supply, the result would be that everyone would double their income, there would be double the goods and services to buy with their increased income and there would be no inflation. Prosperity for all! So there is really no limit to wealth, there is only limited imagination and creativity.
When producing physical goods there are various factors that limit this potential expansion – the availability of factory floor space and raw materials, immediate logistical capacity, who retains the profit from increased production, the individual or his employer etc. – but the core simplicity is that in theory there is no limit to money that can me made. Just because you start earning a million dollars does not mean someone else stops earning a million dollars.
So don’t hold back on your own expansion or growth for fear of depriving someone else! It does not work that way!
And if you are interested in the economic principles behind this, here is a conversation I had with ChatGPT on the subject, refreshing my HSC understanding from 50 years ago: https://chatgpt.com/c/6a0c062e-84a4-83ec-bf0d-fddf894d417a
Now, how do you go about increasing your income?
1. Discover your Basic Purpose, your passion. Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote to help you do that: https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=37862 Why? Because when you are working on your basic purpose, progress is closer to a hot knife through butter than it is to walking through molasses in the middle of winter! Motivation and self-discipline are higher, procrastination evaporates, you feel more like you are being paid to have fun rather than working.
2. Zig Ziglar famously said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Once you know your basic purpose, what your talents and personality characteristics are, ask yourself the questions,
“What do people want that is on my purpose line to deliver?”
“How can I best use my talents and personality to deliver that?”
“What skills or abilities will I need to acquire or boost in order to accomplish that?”
3. Delivering enough of what others want to get you what you want is most likely going to take some skills and abilities senior to those you currently exercise. So step three is to skill up! It may take some communication skills, some organising skills, learning some production techniques but for sure it is going to require you step outside your comfort zone to skill up. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to me for some direction.
4. Decide your future and plan out what is necessary to get you there. Here is a link to help you do that: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/targets/steps/administrative-scale.html
5. If you are working on your purpose line you will be doing something you love and you are good at. But there will still be tough days. So you need to have some ‘pick me ups’ that will help you over the troughs. A clear vision is great. A clean statement of what you are trying to do is motivating.
6. A list of wins and success you can look back on from time to time can be uplifting. I often encourage people to keep a little book called “My Wins and Successful Actions”. Every time you accomplish something worthwhile, document it. Every personal best, highest ever, career milestone, every time you helped someone do something great, write it in your book. Do that from the back of the book coming forward. From the front of the book, every time you have a good result, document the actions that contributed to it. Then, once a month, review it.
It is very easy to lose sight of or forget the little things that contribute to the big successes. You go away on holidays, come back and after a month you read through your successful actions and a couple of them jump off the page at you that you had inadvertently left out when you came back from holidays.
7. Realise that while 75-80% of us, or thereabouts, are constructive and trying to get along, that still leaves 20-25% who are destructively inclined. You are going to meet one of them from time to time. So don’t expect to win everyone to your cause. There is a course that gives you the basics on differentiating between those who would help from those who would harm you: https://www.scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/suppression/progress.html Using the data in this course can act like armour to protect you against destructive personalities.