We’ve all either said it or heard it said by someone else.

“How’s it going for you?”

“I’m living the dream, man.”

We know that the “living the dream” quip is meant usually as a bit of self-deprecation. When I say it, though, I mean it. I am not making fun of myself. I truly am living the dream.

The dream includes coming and going (more or less) as I please; my wife of 46-plus years has a bit to say about that, but she’s not terribly demanding of my time.

Today I got a chance to speak to an Amarillo, Texas service organization. Someone from that group was familiar with this blog; he said he reads it “fairly regularly” and likes a lot of what I write. He admitted he’s not too keen on the political stuff that spews from High Plains Blogger. I get that. I live in the middle of Republican-Red Trump Country and this blog is decidedly not cast from that mold.

He likes to read the retirement posts, entries about my precious granddaughter, about Toby the Puppy and the other “life experience” matters that grab my attention from time to time.

So he asked me to speak to his service club. I did so. I got to boast — if you want to call it that — about the indisputable fact that there truly is life after journalism.

I pursued print journalism singularly for nearly 37 years, I told these good folks. I gave them the extremely short version of how that fruitful and moderately successful career came to an end at the Amarillo Globe-News on Aug. 31, 2012. I told them about how Mom and Dad suggested journalism to me at the dinner table one night in 1970 shortly after I returned home from the Army and was getting ready to go back to college.

I then told them a bit about my career and how I enjoyed it so greatly for almost its entire length of time.

But that was then. The here and now allows me to write this blog and to express myself beholden only to my own conscience. I no longer work for The Man.

Thus, I am living the dream. It’s no put-down, either.