Yesterday I went for a walk after work. I work from home on Fridays, and we live near Columbia University. I crossed Broadway near the gates at the entrance to the Columbia campus and was about to walk down Broadway when I saw, standing there in front of the university gates, one of my idols: biographer Robert Caro!

In fact, just two days earlier, I’d finished reading the first volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, The Path to Power, having been engrossed in it for the past month. The latest volume of his LBJ bio, The Passage of Power, comes out on May 1, after a ten-year wait, and I can’t wait to read it. I’d previously read volumes 2 and 3, so I wanted to read volume 1 before the new one comes out. I’ve also read Caro’s other masterpiece, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses.

And in fact, just before going for my walk — literally right before getting up from my desk to put on my shoes — I’d been reading this fascinating new Esquire profile of Mr. Caro.

And suddenly, a few minutes later, there he was a few feet away from me.

He was wearing a dark suit with a red tie, a red handkerchief in his pocket, and he was standing with a couple of other people. I had no idea what he was doing there, standing in front of the Columbia University gates, but I had to say hello.

So I went up to him and said, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m a huge fan of yours.” I told him I’d just finished volume 1 and that I’d previously read volumes 2 and 3, that I’d read them in reverse order.

He couldn’t have been nicer. He asked me what my name was. He shook my hand. He introduced me to his wife, Ina Caro, who was standing next to him, and I was just as thrilled to meet her; Ina Caro is an accomplished author in her own right, and she has been Robert Caro’s sole research assistant on all of his books. Then he introduced me to his editor, Katherine Hourigan, who was standing there as well. He asked me my name again, and then he made a point to ask my last name.

It was so surreal to meet him. I wish I’d been more prepared. I wish I’d had my picture taken with him. I wish I’d had a book for him to sign. I wish I’d sounded more intelligent. I wish I’d been able to talk with him longer.

I did a Twitter search when I came home, and it turned out that he was at Columbia last night to speak at a centennial event for the Columbia Journalism School.

Caro has been working on his biography of Lyndon Johnson since 1974 — almost my entire life. It was originally going to be three volumes, but three became four, and four became five. Caro is 76 years old; he has completed all the research for his fifth (and presumably last) volume, but according to Esquire, his will states that if he dies before he finishes writing the last volume, nobody else should finish it for him. I hope he makes it.

More recent profiles of Caro on the occasion of the new book’s release, including the Esquire piece:

• The Big Book (Esquire, May 2012)
• Robert Caro’s Big Dig (New York Times Magazine, last week)
• Should LBJ Be Ranked Alongside Lincoln? (Smithsonian, May 2012)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether or not to have kids. And by “lately” I mean the last several years.

I’m not sure when it started: probably around the time I turned 30, when I realized that most of my straight friends from college were starting to become parents, and I wasn’t. But back then it didn’t bother me too much, because I definitely didn’t want kids, or at least I figured I still had lots of time to decide whether I wanted them.

Then my brother, who is younger than me, became a dad. Now I have a two-and-half-year-old niece, with a nephew on the way. If my brother can be a dad, I feel like I should be able to be a dad.

And I’m 38 and haven’t accomplished anything in my life and I’m only getting older.

For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking more and more about what I’m missing by not having kids. I still don’t think I want them; certainly, having them comes at a cost.

But not having kids comes at a cost as well.

Having children allows you to grow as a person. You learn new things about the world and about human beings every day. You learn to be responsible for someone other than yourself. You become less self-centered. You gain more of a stake in what happens on our planet. And you’re contributing to society by raising members of the next generation who will live here.

And there are selfish good reasons, too. You have people to take care of you when you’re old and sick, to bury you when you die, to remember you after you’re gone. And then your genes will live on through your children, and through your children’s children. Or, if you adopted your kids, then the lessons you taught them, and the stories you told them, will be passed on.

And having kids gives your life some direction. Your adult life divides into stages: you’re childless, and then you raise a baby, and then a toddler, and then a kid, and then you’re a middle-aged parent of a teenager, and then your children are adults themselves, and then you get to be a grandparent, and so on.

Without kids, I have none of that.

My life has no direction. Right now I’m just in the long, vast middle of my existence, which started about 12 years ago and will continue on for the next 30 years or so. Nothing new happens. Nothing changes. I don’t take on new responsibilities. I don’t learn new things about life. I don’t grow as a person. I’m just stagnating.

A long time ago I read Dan Savage’s The Kid, about his experience adopting a baby with his partner. An early chapter of that book has always stuck with me, where he talks about why they decided to have kids. He says that if gay men don’t have kids, they have three choices. They can remain overgrown gay adolescents; travel the world and collect a bunch of crap; or renovate a house.

Of course, that’s bullshit. You can still try to make the world a better place through your career, or by volunteering, or by doing something else.

But what he wrote still stings. I don’t want to be some middle-aged gay adolescent.

Maybe this isn’t really about kids. But it feels like it is.

There’s also the nagging feeling that my own parents think less of me for not being a parent.

And yet… I don’t think I want kids. The day-to-day existence of it. The crying and the yelling and the tantrums. I fear I wouldn’t have the patience to be a good parent; I fear I’d lose my temper and raise them wrong and screw them up, like my dad screwed me up. And there are the extra mouths to feed. And the constant worry that they’ll get into an accident and die. Or thinking about what their lives would be like on our warming 21st-century planet, constantly staring at screens and ingesting toxic chemicals in this shitty country we live in.

Would I feel different if Matt wanted kids? Maybe. But he definitely doesn’t.

I just feel like there are these major life milestones that most people go through, milestones that I will never experience.

And I feel like not being a parent means that I will never fully be an adult.

I want to revitalize this blog somehow. Even though blogging the way I do it seems to be passé, and even though I haven’t been blogging as often as I used to, I still like having it available as an outlet. I think it needs a redesign — or at least a new theme template. The links to the previous and next posts at the top of each individual blog post have not worked in several years and seem to be unfixable. A new theme would probably fix that.

I’ve been seeing my new therapist for about three months. It’s been good so far. I have felt an increased urgency in my therapy sessions, although that’s not because I’m seeing a new therapist, but rather that’s why I decided to see a new therapist. I am tired of being an unhappy person, and I am tired of all the stagnation in my life. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my old therapist anymore; I was just talking about the same stuff over and over. So I wanted to start working with someone new.

My new therapist is more interactive, more willing to call me out on my circular thinking.

One thing he suggested is that instead of trying to fix everything at the same time, I try to focus on one thing at a time. So I’ve decided to start with my career. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start. I have never known what I wanted to do with my life. It would be one thing if I knew what I wanted to do, because then I could figure out how to get there. But I have no idea what I want to do.

Still, I seem to be out of the rut I was in with my previous therapist. It’s not necessarily translating into any life changes yet, but it’s only been three months. I saw my previous therapist for 11 years. I guess I need to be patient.

But I’m 38 years old and I’m not getting any younger.