So I'm sitting in my underwear on a hotel bed eating Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt and watching Ultimate Fighting when it occurs to me: I could beat that guy. This is probably not true; all those fighters are in excellent condition, and they're younger and stronger. But I fight really dirty, plus even though I'm not as big as most of them, I am wiry. What's more, they all have a fighting stance like the pretty boy in the last fight scene of Karate Kid, and any technique that gets you beaten by Ralph Macchio definitely has some vulnerabilities.

As I sat there arguing with myself about whether I really could beat one of the Ultimate Fighting sissies, a second thought occurred to me, which is that I really ought to get back into the habit of writing to you people. But the task seemed overwhelming -- I mean, it's been a while, right? Where to start? Aren't I better off just starting a new website -- this one anonymous, so I can say what I really think about everyone -- and getting a new set of readers I can abandon the next time the going gets tough?

I'm a big fan of The Atlantic Monthly, as you well know, and every other issue they have a page in the back devoted to a contest wherein readers invent terms they believe will serve to describe common but unnamed phenomena. For example, the word snifferentiate was recently coined to describe how some people go through their dirty clothes hamper to find something to wear when the laundry runs short.

I need a word to describe the vicious cycle wherein we avoid getting in touch with someone we haven't spoken or written to in quite some time because of the burden of catching up -- a burden that only grows the longer we stay out of contact. I've let a number of relationships atrophy that way. I also need a word to describe the beautiful element of some relationships that allows two people who have been apart for months to simply begin talking, without feeling the pressure to update one another on every event that has transpired since they last spoke.

And isn't it wonderful, Dear Reader, that we have the latter kind of relationship, the kind where I can just write to you without detailing everything that has gone on in my life in the last three months?

Fine. You can't blame me for trying. I'll tell you what comes to mind, but this whole catching up thing is painful.

The most significant event is that we moved back to Kansas. I'm writing to you from the study of my lovely Wichita castle. You would be surprised, by the way, how much house you can get for your home-buying dollar when you aren't paying a premium to live near the massive kleptocratic apparatus known as the federal government of the United States of America.

The short version: A few months ago I went to the people I report to and told them I was done. I love the people who work for me, and I despair at the thought of ever having such a talented team under one roof again. But I counted it up, and I spend fifty hours a month commuting. Six hundred hours a year. I was gone from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on a good night, and I have three little boys to raise, and I'm scared enough about getting that right as it is.

So I told them I was done. I had an offer to teach at a university here, an offer that seemed to come out of nowhere, and I intended to take it. Then someone on my board made a counteroffer, and asked me to set up a new enterprise here in our adopted hometown. Eventually I agreed. So here we are.

My lovely wife hasn't stopped smiling in two months. Our friends think I'm taking Viagra.

Understand that I don't need Viagra.

The children are happy, and they now have ample space to ride their bicycles at alarming speeds. They have lots of little friends to play with (though they miss the ones they left behind in Virginia), and there is our old church, filled with the people who took care of us years ago, during that awful time. I have a fifteen-minute commute. I rarely encounter a teenager I want to smack for habitually dropping the f-bomb in a public space. Homeschool and private schools are the norm.

Was I clear about the Viagra thing? It was a joke. Seriously.

I'm in a stressful period right now because I'm commuting back and forth to Washington, wrapping things up, and simultaneously building something here from ground zero. But that will pass, and soon I will just have the one job again. Then I can write to you more.

And write more. I sent some poetry a while back to The Missouri Review. Something you have to understand about writing with the intent of publication is that it is much like Drew Carey's high school dating life. Your only hope, as the rejections pile up, is that people eventually decide that you are, well, Drew Carey, and not just some chubby geek in BC glasses.

On that last item, ask someone in the military to explain it, and while you're at it, thank them for preserving our freedoms. Unless they happen to work in the Pentagon, in which case you can thank them for inventing new processes for extended the decision-making structure necessary for a captain in Afghanistan to order more toilet paper.

Anyway, as a writer I'm Drew Carey in the early undiscovered years. Or maybe I'm just that guy at the Blockbuster, the one who always strikes you as too intelligent to be working there.

As you can see, I have some insecurity about my writing, reinforced by the fact that I come back to it from time to time and have thoughts like: my goodness, that bit certainly sucks; and do I have a crack habit and I just don't realize it? The point is, I got the expected form rejection slip from The Missouri Review's poetry editor, but with a bit of scribbling at the bottom of it.

This is always a thrilling moment. It's like the head of the cheerleader squad saying that while she still won't date you, the sight of you doesn't make her feel as nauseous as it once did. The editor's comment was that they prefer larger batches of poetry than I had provided, with a request that I send a larger batch and enter it in their upcoming contest.

Do you ever wonder if you are a glass-is-half-full or glass-is-half-empty person? It turns out I'm the latter. My first thought upon reading the note was: yeah, he just wants to get my $15 entry fee. But, with the ill-advised faith of Charlie Brown at the start of football season, I am assembling a larger collection and sending it in this week. Go ahead, poetry editor, yank the ball out from under me, then stand over me with the good writers and laugh in my face. Like I said, I'm not the biggest guy, but I'm tough.

And if the writing thing doesn't work out, and my day job falls apart, there's always the cage fighting. Because I really do think I could take some of those guys. But maybe that's just the Viagra talking.*

*Editor's note: the author wishes to stress that some parts of this essay are fictional and intended solely for the purposes of entertainment. Specifically, the Viagra references are entirely contrived. Thank you for reading Sand in the Gears, and God bless America.