Tuesday, November 8, 3:00 PM. Amy.

It’s going to be Christmas soon. Thanksgiving is not so bad. We can pull a meal together, give thanks, relax on a Thursday. But Christmas…I wish we could skip it this year.

It’s going to be depressing with no one around.

What do we get for the kids? Everyone found a way to give me something on my birthday. It was quite special, actually. But kids expect something exciting on Christmas morning, something worthy of Santa Claus. Our kids don’t really believe in Santa anymore but they still want the magic. They have access to every possible physical thing you could ever need and a complete dearth of the most precious things: grandparents, cousins, friends, any kind of world outside our own little farm, any kind of future beyond today.

In a way, we must be among the wealthiest people to have ever lived on the face of the earth. Four months ago, Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or somebody like that owned $60 billion or whatever it was. Those guys were mosquitoes next to us. They owned a tiny fraction of the world’s total wealth. We, on the other hand, now own the cities of Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston, including all their outlying areas and all the contents and assets thereof, and possibly all of North America, if not the planet. We own all the gold, all the diamonds, all the banks, all the stores, all the buildings, all the cars, all the gas, all the clothes, all the toys, and all the food—such as it is.

What do you get a kid who already has everything?

The only things they need, how can we possibly give them?