The Janky Cart

It was the TNT boxes.

On Halloween, people kept stopping to take pictures of our golf cart. My kids and I had turned it into a Minecraft cart by hand, and it was janky as hell. Hand-painted. Zip-tied. Cardboard. Minecraft is a world built from perfect squares. Ours were not. The thing everybody recognized first was the TNT: two hand-lettered boxes riding on the roof. I’m so glad we made those boxes.

What I didn’t expect was what it did to people. I knew my kids would love it. I didn’t know it would move the grown-ups. It moved one family deeply, and I’ll get to them.

First, the guy who isn’t here anymore.

There was a version of me who would have ruined this. That guy had a plan, and the plan mattered more than the people. No, no, no. Not like that. You’ve got to do it like this. You messed it up. He would have stood over his own kids correcting their TNT. He would have gotten it perfect, and nobody would have had any fun, least of all him.

I was that guy for a long time. This year I wasn’t. I let it be janky. I didn’t stress out my kids, my family or myself trying to make it come out the right way. And because I didn’t, the thing I actually hoped for happened: my kids had a joyful time making something with their dad.

That’s a tiny choice. A reframe inside my own head. Watch what it did.

While we were building, a friend’s daughter came over and asked how long I’d been working on this thing. Three days, I told her. Three days, she said, for something you’re only going to enjoy for three hours? Correction, my dear. I’ve had three days and three hours of enjoyment out of it.

Then she asked if she could help. Of course. Come over here, I need help with these zip ties.

She told me she was kind of scared of zip ties. When she was little, she had zip-tied her own finger. Her grandmother was too afraid to cut it off, because it was so close to the skin, so they worked it loose with soap. It was scary. She told me all of this with her hands busy, pulling zip ties on our Minecraft cart.

A while later her dad came over and asked if he could help too. Maybe he worried he wasn’t handy enough to be any use. It didn’t matter. I handed him zip ties. I told him how beautiful it was: his daughter had just been helping me with the same zip ties, and she’d told me how scared of them she was. He didn’t say anything.

He said plenty later. After everyone else had gone home or gone to bed, the two of us sat up for hours. I told him the specifics of my past, the parts he only knew the outline of. He still looked at me and saw the man I am now, and he told me that was a big moment for him.

He told me he was grateful. He’s a gruff guy, not one to hand out feelings. He was grateful for the cart, for me doing a simple thing with my kids that brought so much joy to them and to the neighbors who stopped to take pictures. He said watching me be a dad inspired him. Then he said the part I can’t shake. “I didn’t know that story. You told me a story about my daughter, about a fear of hers, that I didn’t know.”

Then he told me what the cart had shown him. He’s been stressing, hunting for the big deal, the big win that sets his family up for success. And chasing the big wins, he’d been missing the little ones. Let’s paint this block together. Let’s put up the Christmas decorations. Let’s go for a walk and throw rocks. Watching me build a janky cart with my kids, he saw what a simple win looks like.

His daughter told me her story because I was there. Not because I asked. Not because I was after anything. Her hands were busy, nobody was staring at her waiting for a confession, and the truth came out sideways. Kids do that. So do most grown-ups.

I wasn’t trying to do anything. I was just doing. Being present, doing what seemed right in the moment. That’s the whole trick, and it isn’t a trick.

Here’s what I keep turning over. A perfect cart wouldn’t have needed her. The old me wouldn’t have left loose zip ties lying around for a kid to grab, or a job a friend’s daughter could do a little wrong without anyone caring. No room for her hands. No room for her hands, no story. No story, and her father never hears it.

The jank was the door.

I said a version of this to people on Halloween night, so I’ll say it here. We’re in the age of AI. I use these machines every day, and I can see where they’re headed: very soon, anything we want, need, wish or desire will be made for us in a perfect form, edited until it’s exactly right. That’s exciting. I mean it.

But in that world, the hand-painted, zip-tied, Charlie Brown Christmas tree of a thing becomes an artifact. You can see the human in it. You can see the failures in it. The crooked TNT is a signature. It says somebody’s hands did this, and those hands made mistakes and kept going.

Perfect is about to get cheap. The janky thing is what will cost you something: time, patience, the willingness to let a kid do it wrong. That cost is the point.

Over Halloween weekend, friends pulled me down a rabbit hole about the Mandela effect, and I found out something about myself. For years I’ve been saying “If you build it, they will come.” I built a whole philosophy on it. It’s wrong. The voice in the cornfield in Field of Dreams says “If you build it, he will come.” He. One man. Add it to my growing file of things I’ve been confidently wrong about.

What gets me is how sure I was. We are so malleable. A message that spreads well can rewrite what a whole culture remembers. Most people find that terrifying. I find it thrilling, because it cuts both ways. If the wrong message can travel that far, so can the right one.

And the real line is better. Even Ray gets it wrong at first. He thinks “he” means Shoeless Joe. It turns out to be his father. At the end of the movie, they have a catch. Somebody does tell Ray that people will come, and he’s right. But first, Ray builds it for one man.

You don’t build for the crowd. You build for the one. I built this cart for my kids. The neighborhood came anyway.

Here’s the part I almost didn’t write.

There was a time I was the kid parents warned their children about. Violent. Full of hatred. Terrifying. Everything a parent pictures when they say stay away from that one.

The day after Halloween, there were five kids playing in my house, and none of them were mine.

A friend of mine saw that duality and couldn’t wrap his head around it. In the worst stretch of his life, he asked me: how do you get to be you? He’s gone now. I’ve held his question ever since.

For a long time my answer was grit. Put a smile on and move forward, in the face of all of it. That’s part of it. But honestly? Who the fuck knows how I survived. It was a cascading series of events and thoughts that just happened to work out. Maybe it really is faith underneath it all. Faith that it’ll be okay. I wish I knew the answer. Then I could tell other people too.

What I can tell them is what I told friends on Halloween night, the ones in the middle of their own hard stretch. Welcome to the chaos. I’ve lived here forever. It’s not as bad as you think, and you don’t have to be alone in your shame and your fear and your guilt. I’m here with you.

So here’s what I think the cart was a metaphor for. Presence. Showing up for something that looks minuscule, doing the work badly and in public, with your kids, and leaving gaps where other people can get their hands in.

It’s the Grinch, really. He steals every present in Whoville and waits to hear the crying, and instead the Whos come out and sing. That’s when it lands on him: the holiday was never in the packages. Presence over presents. Halloween isn’t Christmas, but the lesson holds. Nobody in my driveway needed a perfect cart. I got past my perfectionism, and a dad found out something about his own kid, and about the little wins he’d been walking past. Neither of those came in a box.

One more true thing, because I don’t do this without receipts. The words you’re reading came through a machine. I brought the seeing and the seed; Lumen wrote them down. The cart came through my hands, and my kids’ hands, and the hands of a friend’s kid who’s scared of zip ties and picked them up anyway. I’m not going to pretend that tension resolves neatly. I use the perfect thing every day.

I just know which one people stopped to take pictures of.

The receipts: https://ethicsbuild.github.io/Receipts/published/the-janky-cart-process-record.html