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The Midlife Remix

Hi there, I’m Kirby Ferguson! I’m best known for the series Everything is a Remix. I’m pivoting away from free content creation for financial and personal reasons. I’m seeking financial stability and personal fulfillment in the second act of life. I’m thinking aloud about all of this here. I might later revise, discard or ridicule anything said.

Welcome back, everybody!

The Everything is a Remix site has been redesigned! There are still issues, but I think it’s looking pretty good at this point. (It’s a SquareSpace site so I am limited.) Check it out and let me know what you think! Just reply to this email.

My Devastating, Disastrous, No Good Summer Vacation

Folks, I fucked up royally this summer. This was a new, different, and very much worse kind of failure than what I've experienced in the past. This was Father Failure.

Let me tell youall about it in an exhausting fashion!

I'm a bit cavalier with details and a bit forgetful with abstract information. These are just basic human brain flaws. Unless you've developed systems to compensate for these shortcomings, you're not great at any of this stuff either. And you might have these issues in one realm and not in another. For instance, in my work for clients, I run a pretty tight ship. But in my personal life, I'm fairly loosey-goosey.

I'm an optimist, I'm not very cautious, I'm not that into preparing, I just wanna go do the thing. And I assume everything will work out fine.

Mostly, it does. Except when it really really really doesn't.

We can’t click “continue”

I’ve lived in the US with Nora since 2007. This summer was the family’s first trip to Canada and my home province of Prince Edward Island. My parents still live there and we coordinated with my two sisters so the whole family (except for my niece and nephew) would be there at the same time. We hadn’t done this in—I don’t know how long. At least a decade.

We booked this vacation in early May for a July trip. We even bought travel insurance in case any of us got sick.

I thought small children do not need a passport to cross the Canadian border. I thought you just needed a birth certificate. If this were a movie, this is that moment where you think, "Oh, later on, this is gonna bite him in the ass hard."

I did a quick pass, a momentary Google, knowing I needed to do a serious pass later. Then I forgot all about that and thought the quick pass was the serious pass. I wasn’t worried about it because I assumed any issues with immigration could be sorted. After all, this is a baby and I'm Canadian and he's my son. The border should not be able to deny him entry.

And they didn’t. Instead, Air Canada did!

We’re all packed, we’re at the airport, we’re checking in, we give them Kirby Jr’s birth certificate and… bafflement. He needs a passport. If we don't put something in the passport field we can't click “continue.”

Attempts to negotiate through this were hopeless. The girls working the desk had no power. They just couldn't enter us into the system.

It quickly became clear there was no way out. I had to go take a knee while Nora took one last – and unsuccessful – swing.

No flight, no vacation. My family would not meet my son for the first time. We had to turn around and go home. 

In modern life, you sometimes get ground up in a system for no reason at all. In this scenario, my son was just an entity that couldn’t be entered into a computer system. That he’s a baby and doesn't yet have all the documentation the rest of us do never entered the conversation. Reality was irrelevant and ignored.

What difference would it have made if we boarded that plane? None. You just can't cuz, y'know, they can’t click “continue.” And if we can’t click “continue,” what can we do?

After getting home, I wrote this in my daily log: Devastating day. Couldn't board the plane this morning because KJ needs passport. Giant disaster. My fault.

And the money? Poof! Gone. Two grand. Down. The. Fucking. Drain.

And the traveler's insurance? Doesn’t cover that. To add insult to injury, if I'd simply canceled the trip beforehand, travel insurance would have covered that without question.

Walking the dog later that day, I ran into a friend, who was confused to see me. I was supposed to be gone. I told her what happened and she teared up, said "I am so sad for you guys" and hugged me twice.

The next day, we applied for a passport for little Kirby. His height: 2 feet, 10 inches.

Father Failure

Handing the Canadian border was my job. I’m the Canadian, I was supposed to do it, and I dropped the ball. Or I never thought to catch the ball.

Failing yourself is bad. I hate it, I’m sure you hate it too. When my casual ways backfired in the past, it was mostly me who paid the price – literally and figuratively. But when others pay the price for your fuck-up, that’s just worse. Guilt and shame get shoveled onto the mound of misery.

And failing yourself, your partner and your son, as well as your parents and your sisters is a special and exquisite type of failure. This was Father Failure. I stumbled into a new realm of suffering I didn’t know existed. 

Screwing up vacation was the first time I failed little Kirby. It was a catastrophe for the family, and Nora and I agreed that there was no silver lining.

But I now think there was a silver lining. It was a wake-up call. It cost a couple grand, but nobody got hurt. Nothing happened that couldn’t be undone. There’s an infinite array of far worse possibilities. Sometimes a smackdown is needed to wise up. I got it.

(I mean a figurative smackdown, people. Please don’t smack anyone.)

Mistakes now have a blast radius

In the bleak days that followed, I thought, “Well, no vacation. I screwed up, the money's gone. It’s done.”

But after a few days of licking my wounds, Nora and I decided it was better to just write off the money. We devised a new plan — and it didn’t even require a passport.

Weeks later, we flew to Maine, then crossed the Canadian border in a car. We used a birth certificate for little K. You see, my friends, that’s totally fine. Because... reasons.

This experience remains a bit raw, but it’s now overshadowed by how amazing that vacation was. It was perfect. Even though getting to Prince Edward Island and back was a comedy of errors worthy of National Lampoon’s Vacation. That’s a whole ‘nother story.

I’m sure all you parents out there know this, but vacationing with small children is next-level adulting. There is a shit-ton to keep track of. And just when everything is going great, you get a huge diaper blow-out. If your children are still in your future, be warned. It’s hard, be ready.

This kind of experience isn’t unique to parenting. When it’s your first time doing something complex, you can’t help but be dumb. You can’t know everything about that hotel you booked. You can’t know everything about that rental car. You can’t know that the worst possibility of choosing to rent “the mystery car” isn’t getting a tiny car, it’s getting a Ford F150! (Yes, that happened too.)

Beginners fuck up. When the score is kept in money, that hurts a lot. But you recover more quickly than you think.

I know what some of you are thinking: Dude, you're being too hard on yourself. This isn't “father failure,” it was just a mistake. Bit of a doozy, but still just a mistake.

Folks, what you don’t understand is that “father failure” is alliterative and also has a nice symmetry to it – similar syllables and rhythm to both words. Let me pen my little masterpiece here, will ya?

Yes, it was just a mistake. Another friend referred to it as a mistake with a “blast radius”. Past mistakes didn’t have a blast radius. Now they do.

If this was a video I would now hard cut to titles and cue this.

New stuff!

Once again, folks, I have new stuff!

First and foremost, I have a new guide to writing with ChatGPT. I spare you the hype, I show you how to write by doing real writing. It’s awesome, you should buy it. Buy one for a friend. And their friend.

I have a new Everything is a Remix newsletter! It’s weekly, it’s all about Remix and creativity with no vacation stories. I agree, that sounds awful! But actually, these emails are short, informative, and inspiring. Subscribe and you get my free guide to help you ship that languishing project, Finish It Now!

The Remix shop now supports Apple Pay! (You gotta use Safari.) We also now have Afterpay for merch purchases, so you can do installment payments.

The Tools page on the Remix site has long been one of the most popular, so I updated it!

That’s it from me, folks, I’ll see you in two weeks! As always, it is me, an actual human being, who sends these emails, reads replies, and whenever possible, has ChatGPT reply back to you.

Papa Kirby loves you Pookie,
Kirby

My new digital toolkit: Write Now With ChatGPT

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