Along with identifying as “Swifties,” ignoring the reported Chinese threat of bad dancing posed by TikTok, and pretending that plant-based meat is actually edible, many young people in America are engaging in another fascinating trend – not driving.

In many of my writings, I’ve discussed my “three teenage daughters.”

On a recent family vacation to New York City over the holidays, I brought home exactly one souvenir (I ate the others).

I’ve never been a huge fan of hot chocolate. For some reason, I don’t enjoy cauterizing the inside of my mouth after being duped by the deceptively-tepid whipped cream or marshmallow topping.

In the 1980s, I repeatedly watched a recorded copy of the film “Escape from New York” on my family’s Panasonic VCR – complete with tuning knobs the size of hubcaps.

For years, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances take family trips during the holiday season to exciting locations like Disney World, Hawaii, Colorado and Cracker Barrel.

One of my fondest childhood memories of Christmas in the 1970’s was riding around in the family station wagon, “Bessie,” to look at Christmas lights while I whined to my parents about needing a snack – again.

Imagine, if you will, a tranquil late-autumn evening. It’s the first day of your Thanksgiving holiday, and you are reclining in your easy chair, enjoying the warmth and gently dancing flames of your fireplace insert – with semi-realistic gas logs – and sipping a cup of warm tea from your new Keurig machine that Bed Bath & Beyond put on sale for 50% off immediately after your purchase.

The whole concept of a bed and breakfast is pretty ingenious and fits almost perfectly with my lifestyle.

I’ve experienced a lifelong identity crisis, of sorts, because of my name (or names), and I’ve actually kind of enjoyed it – most of the time.

For those of you who don’t know, my more respectable gig for the past quarter century, or so, has been teaching college English. (Scary, I know.)

Now that my eldest and middle daughters are off at college dashing my prospects for retirement, and my youngest daughter has started navigating the pubescent challenges of high school, I can turn to more important matters – namely, pants.

In recent days, the hormonal distribution in my household has become slightly more balanced as two of my three teenage daughters and several lines of credit are now off attending college.

East Texas is hot, and not in the way you compliment your wife when she’s mad at you for performing an epic cannonball while she’s lounging by the pool with her laptop.

A few days ago, my wife and I joined some friends for a gathering during a few rare hours when we weren’t busy hauling a teenager to some kind of expensive activity or hosting an entire herd of them at our home to ransack our pantry and abuse the plumbing.

As I sit here in my uneasy chair, I can hear the screams and guffaws of what sound like about 500 teenagers in my backyard swimming pool for my middle daughter’s high school graduation party, and I wonder if a sufficient supply of chlorine shock treatments exists for that water ever to recover.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been engaged in a WWE cage match against allergies.

It all started with the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in the spring of 2020, and it’s one of the few lingering effects of the experience that hasn’t tempted me to seek intense electroshock therapy.

Depending on when you’re reading this, my 52nd birthday is/was on April 20th, which, as my dad still loves to remind me, is the same day as Adolf Hitler’s.

According to Livestrong.com, there are nearly 5 million young people participating in gymnastics in the United States, and although only a handful ever make it to Olympic competition, their parents fork over enough cash on lessons, leotards, custom-embroidered gym bags, hair bows, grips – and other equipment my wife didn’t tell me about – to fund the entire Russian sports doping program.

With the onset of Daylight Saving Time throughout the U.S. – except for a couple of states that still trust the science – we’ve now reached the time of year that is especially challenging for folks like me who don’t identify as “morning people.”

Warning! The following column is clogged with gratuitous potty humor.