In high school, I was friends with a girl named Denise. She and I were both free-spirited creative types who liked to write. For a time, we served as co-presidents of the formed-by-us creative writing club, and we even went on a date (that didn’t work out too well).
Denise was and is a no-bullshit person, and I valued her friendship as a high schooler because what you saw was what you got. Denise wasn’t going to tell you what you wanted to hear. She was going to tell you the truth. Perhaps not surprisingly, Denise wasn’t a big fan of people. I will always remember one lunch time when we were outside of The Commons on a warm just-before-school-let-out-for-the-summer day and she said, “I don’t like people. I like rocks.”
We made fun of her for that. Playfully, of course. I was a social butterfly back then, a guy who, in the middle of a nasty, cliquish high school, floated between groups, generally being on good terms with everyone except Joey Sementelli, my middle school bully, someone whom I still loathe on principle though I haven’t seen him in 30 years.
Anyway, as time has gone on, I’ve become less of the butterfly and more of the lone wolf — or maybe it’s the stinky skunk. Whatever animal analogy you want to make, I have few people who actually know me. I don’t like this. I didn’t intend to do this. It just sort of happened. The older I got, the more I couldn’t make sense of people, of their motivations for doing the things they do, of their propensity to be assholes. People tend to tire me out these days, outside of the few who remain in whatever constitutes my inner circle. I have times where the ugliness of the world just smacks me in the face, where I see people do shitty things to others and to me, where the driver of the car behind me flashes her lights and gives me the finger instead of using either the lane to the left or the lane to the right to pass a 10-mph-over-the-speed-limit me on I-70.
Today was one of those days. I am working really, really hard at the end of a sprint that came at the end of a marathon. Ever since November, life has been absolutely insane. COVID, Longhaul COVID, the death of my father-in-law, the presence of a tiny African for six months, fighting to get paid my value at my old job, getting my house ready to sell, selling my house, starting a new job and moving. I. Am. Tired. There’s no doubt about that. So when a new co-worker does something that I considered pretty shitty, well, I’m just sad tonight. I’m sad people don’t treat each other better. I’m sad people aren’t who they show themselves to be. I’m sad communication is so easily interrupted by misunderstandings. I’m sad that people don’t more often talk to each other instead of about each other. I’m sad that things are the way they actually are in this country instead of the way I wish they would be.
In the end, I’ll be fine. I’m sprinting toward the finish line of this crazy race. We close on Old House in 10 days. New House is feeling more like New Home every day. My co-worker and I are already fine and moving forward as if nothing happened, as far as I’m concerned. Wifey Poo booked a cabin at the Lake for me to go to in early October to have a writing weekend. My boys are awesome. Life is good.
But sometimes I think Denise had it right. My thing isn’t rocks. It might be cigars, a good glass of dry red wine, the comfort of the blanket Wifey Poo made for me or music that makes me feel. People, though? People have the tendency to make my life infinitely more painful and confusing.
Date Morning
On a much brighter note, I had a date with Wifey Poo before work this morning. We intended to grab coffee and tea at Bread Co., or, as everyone else not from St. Louis knows it, Panera. Alas, the lobby was closed, I’m sure for lack of workers. So we went to Starbucks, which proceeded to take 25 minutes to make a cappuccino and a tea. Again, I blame the worker shortage. Get on that, Biden, would ya?
It was nice sitting outside in the morning sun and talking with Wifey Poo about random little things. We’ve had so much not-random-not-little lately that it was a good change to talk about stuff that really doesn’t matter much at all.
The ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Didn’t Say It’ of the Day
‘No.’
Rep. Barbara Lee, Sept. 14, 2001
“Hindsight is always 20/20.”
“Monday morning quarterbacking.”
“With the benefit of hindsight…”
These phrases (and others) are used to dismiss people who look back at a situation to critique what was done. And yes, it’s fair to give less weight to people’s opinions when they are shaped by everything that eventually unfolded instead of what was known at the time.
But this shouldn’t be used as an excuse to not look at how things actually unfolded. History can be very instructive to the present to help us shape a better future.
Rep. Barbara Lee serves California’s 13th District. Twenty years ago this week, she cast the lone dissenting vote against authorizing the use of military force in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Rep. Lee was not an unwavering pacifist. She wasn’t, as some of the voluminous hate mail she received accused, a secret member of the Taliban. She wasn’t even being partisan. Rather, she had a problem with the 60 words that made up the resolution, fearing that they empowered the presidency — not the specific president — to wage an unending war against unspecified enemies using never-before-used tactics on a new-concept battlefield.
The resolution she voted against read:
“That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
Since our nation rightfully went after the organization from which the horrendous acts of 9/11 sprung forth, the president at the time and the men who followed him have used those words to justify deadly strikes against organizations and in countries that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on New York and D.C. Were they against people who perhaps shared some ideals with the 9/11 attackers? Certainly. Were they against people who oppose the “American way of life” (whatever that is) and our style of international diplomacy? Most definitely. Did these strikes prevent future acts of international terrorism against our country? Yeah, prolly.
Was Rep. Lee’s vote unAmerican?
Hardly.
Hindsight gives us the benefit of clarity. With a populace more interested in Kardashian fashion and eating Tide Pods, successive administrations from both parties took those 60 words and lit the fuse under our mighty military, using it as a bullwhip across the Middle East and Africa (and killing more innocent civilians than were killed here on 9/11 by multiples). Those words created the justification for torture and perpetual imprisonment of hundreds of human beings, some of whom were later proven to have absolutely no affiliation with any terrorist organization whatsoever. The list of organizations on the approved strike list grew and grew and grew but was kept secret even from Congress, giving the presidency free reign to annihilate those with differing religious and political persuasions and no connection to the events that unfolded on 9/11.
On the day of the vote that would make Rep. Lee a pariah, there was a memorial service in Washington, D.C., for the victims. A member of clergy urged the gathered, which included just about every senator and congressperson:
“As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
Guantanamo Bay. Torture. Drone strikes that killed innocent civilians.
We became that evil. Patriotism turns out to be not much better than many of the other “isms” out there.
But hey. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Today’s Reasons to Keep Living
- My new boss is pretty bad-ass and doesn’t let problems fester. She tackles them head-on, without politics, and I appreciate that.
- Coming home to the country after a day like this. I can literally leave the insanity behind and sit out in the darkness listening to the nighttime bugs sing their songs.
- A good cigar.
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🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Nose Woes 👃African in School 🚌Trumpster Fire 👮 The human body has a way of keeping us humble, especially as we get older. We lose hair where we want it and grow it in abundance where we don’t, we produce ear wax and eye boogers, and 99% of us should never…
WTF is a Tiguan? — April 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Tiger-Iguana 🐅🦎Cornhole Crushing 🌽Poison M&Ms ☠️ The first time I saw a commercial for the Volkswagen Tiguan, I thought it was a parody. As a marketing guy, I couldn’t fathom how an entire department of highly paid professionals could sit down at a table and decide the best name for a…
The Difficult Thing — April 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Closing the Door 🚪Car Shopping🚙Fake Kid-Hater 🧒 Over the course of my life, I’ve gotten used to doing the difficult thing. This often hasn’t been by choice, and it’s never been easy. It’s simply what I’ve had to do. Whether it was facing a pregnancy in which we knew our child…
African Arrival — March 31, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Changes and Similarities ✈️Family Drama Update 🎭Close Encounters 🤼♂️ My Favorite African (MFA) has arrived. His plane landed at Lambert International at around 1:15 yesterday, and about 15 minutes later, a kind TSA person allowed us and the woman who accompanied MFA on the flight to violate all sorts of Homeland…
African Eve — March 29, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Little D Nears ✈️Familiar Familial Drama 🎭Van O’ Canadians 🍁 My favorite African returns to us tomorrow afternoon. Dieudonne will board a plane from Philly with an escort (not THAT kind … I think, anyway), and land in the STL around 1:15. For the next three or four months, we’ll take…
Tech Hatred — March 24, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩TikTok Stupidity 😠Back Woes 😧Improv Friends 🎭 There are increasing number of hours each week in which I have a strong desire to throw every piece of connected technology into the nearest lake and move to wherever I have to go to be as far away from any modern gadget as…
Exit Ramp — March 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Anniversary Changes 💍Near Death Experience 💀Dreamcatcher Drama 😳 All relationships change over time. Friendships, parent-child, boss-employee, husband-wife … no matter the relationship, the only constant thing is change. My marriage has changed mightily since it began. When Wifey Poo and I said our vows on March 22, 1997, we were –…
Blah — March 22, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Why The Blahs? 😷Anniversary Plans 💍Unpleasant Warnings 🐍 Feeling blah is complicated when you have my medical history. For many people, feeling blah as I’m feeling right now is a clear indication that some sort of illness or infection has invaded the body. But for me — and for many others…
Floss Shaming — March 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dentist Visit 🦷Basketball Sucks 🏀Found Husband 👨 No one truly likes going to the dentist. I’ve had people push back on me when I’ve said this before, but when I lay out the following scenario, well, it’s pretty much checkmate: “You just had the most well-respected doctor in the world tell…
The Lunchable Deal — March 18, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dumb Gubment 🦅Dawg Party 🐶Flying African ✈️ We as modern Muricans tend to just accept that it’s the gubment’s job to educate our children. Of course, when other countries that aren’t our friends do that, we call it “indoctrination,” but that’s a topic for another day. The topic for today is…
Death Cometh — March 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Costly Mortality ☠️Crazies, Unite 🤪Defining ‘Appointment’ 🦷 I’m getting ready to die. Sounds ominous, right? Dramatic? Scary? It’s not. Oh yes, in a certain light, it’s depressing as hell. But what it really involved was a meeting with an attorney that Wifey Poo and I had yesterday to figure out exactly…
Finishing — March 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Books and Stories 📚SVB Lessons 🏦Basketball Party 🏀 Holy crap, you guys! I actually finished something I wrote! In fact, I finished two somethings I wrote! As my regular readers (hey you three!) know, I’ve been stunk in a funk of starting to write books and short stories with gusto and…
Sorry, Please Continue — March 9, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Podcast Appearance 🎙️The Birth Control Pill Story 🐶Good Tired 🥱 If you would have asked me a few years ago whether I could ever envision myself on a stage in the back room of a dive bar sharing a story about how my dog ate six months of birth control pills…
Peaking — March 8, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Pee Mate 🚽Game Maker 🎲Dumb Muricans 🦅 I have been thinking about death a lot lately, not because I’m particularly eager for it to happen or because I’m particularly not eager for it to happen. I guess it’s because I’m a few months shy of my 49th birthday and please-for-the-love-of-God let…
The Return of the African— March 6, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dieudonne 🌍Hoops Win🏀Cornhole Roll ✔️ In 2021, during some of the darkest and most difficult times in our lives as individuals and couple, Wifey Poo and I did a thing. It was a big thing. It was a challenging thing. It was an amazing thing. But to say it was just…
Tribe — March 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩’Full Stop’ 🛑Needles 💉Business Lessons 🧑💼 Here’s something I learned about myself today: One way to ensure that I will debate you on a topic until I give my last breath or until you are huddled in a corner in a fetal position is to end the statement of your opinion…
Mindful Commute — March 2, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mindfulness 🧘Mullet Prez 👩🦳Murder Family 🔪 Our brains are amazing things. So adept are they at routines that they can essentially run on autopilot and let you do the everyday stuff like operating a multi-ton object advancing at 70+ mph among lots of other multi-top objects advancing at 70+ mph without…
After Life — March 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Bloody Hell 💂Circus Moments 🤡Silence 🤫 OK, people: I’ve got a bone to pick with you. But first, a little digression. What in the bloody hell does that phrase mean? “A bone to pick with you?” That sounds absolutely disgusting. And if you’re wondering why I said “bloody hell,” well, that…
Angry Marketing Guy— Feb. 28, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩24 Hour Video 😡Rubik’s Kid 🧊Dilbert Doofus 🤪 There are two things I cannot stand in the working world — and in life, in general. The first is people whose lack of preparedness turns ordinary stuff into emergencies. The second is when people criticize the result of something they previous approved.…
Corruption, Penis Sizes and Bird Drones — Feb. 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mormon Billionaires 💰Bigger Packages 🍌Birds Really Aren’t Real 🐦 Can we just get on with blowing the tits off the world with nuclear weapons or something and end this stupid thing we call the human race? Yeah, I know that’s a little dramatic, but when I take a look at the…
Home of the Hypocrite — Feb. 21, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Muricah The Evil 🦅You Buy You 💰Big-Ass Van 🚚 I find it rather humorous that Muricah warned China not to send arms to one side of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine … and that we issued this warning with a straight face. I’m quite sure most Muricahns believe their country…
Wal-Mart — Feb. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Salve 🩹Car Wash 🚗💧Light Removal 🎄 I try not to venture too often into a Wal-Mart, especially on the weekend. I cling to slim hope for this nation as it is, and I find Wal-Mart trips do not help my grip. Alas, this weekend, Boy The Younger was under the weather…
Shit People — Feb. 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩CC, BCC, FU 📧Basketball Poll 🏀Andy Rooney 🎙️ This week has largely been a Shit Week marred by Shit People. What are Shit People? They aren’t exactly easy to define, but one hallmark of a Shit Person is his rampant use of the CC function at work to passive-aggressively play power…
Brain Rest — Feb. 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Chill Day 🛋️Busy Weekend ⚾Halftime 🏈 I’m not working today. Not only am I not working at my day job, I’m not doing any work for my side gig today. I’m not planning on doing much of anything, actually. And I don’t feel guilty about that. This weekend was insanely busy.…
Drugs — Feb. 10, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Big Pharma Sucks 💊Work Rules 🧑💼Big Weekend 🏈 Spend any time in front of the television and you’ll see ads touting the latest drugs that you shouldn’t take if you’re allergic to and that you most definitely need to ask your doctor about. Now comes a study showing that the people…
Missourah and the Spy Balloon — Feb. 7, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Top 5 🎈Symphony 🎻Living Eulogies 💗 Top 5 things overheard in Missourah last week as a purported Chinese spy balloon made its way over the state en route to its rendezvous with an F22’s missile: Despite my high-brow upbringing in Suburbia, New York, I’m not what anyone would call A Symphony…
Pokey Joe — Feb. 2, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Space Walk 🧑🚀Bye-Bye Brady 🏈Failure Rate 🐿️ When Boy The Elder was just Boy and devoid of a younger brother, we had a nickname for him: Pokey Joe. BTE didn’t do anything fast, but more than anything, what he did incredibly slow was get out of a car. That would suck…
Stuck Balls — Feb. 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Raccoons 🦝February 💘Man Nips 🕺 Today I bring you the story of a raccoon who got his balls stuck to railroad tracks. But the reason you think I’m bringing you this story is not the reason I’m bringing you this story. You think I’m bringing the story of the raccoon Neil…
‘Fuck Tha Police’ — Jan. 28, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Tyre Nichols 😔Tattoo Day ✒️Nephew Hoops🏀 I was a white kid in suburbia, New York, in 1988 when the gangsta rap group N.W.A. came out with its album Straight Outta Compton, featuring the song Fuck Tha Police. It was scandalous, at the time, to suggest that the police would be anything…
Snow — Jan. 25, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Car Concert 🎵Sick Wife🤒People Suck 🖕 Within the 24 hours in the run-up to Snowpocalypse 2023, the estimates on the Weather Channel app for our snowfall total ranged from 1 to 10 inches. That’s like going to the doctor and being told you have anything from a splinter to terminal cancer.…
STUPID Goals — Jan. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mission: Failed 👎Ho 🤣Handy Family 👍 It has to suck to work at the Missouri Department of Transportation. Why? It took exactly 75 minutes for all of 2023 to be a failure. Let me explain. Those of you unfortunate enough to have been involved in any sort of corporate planning process…
Writing Retreat — Jan. 15, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Houston 🖊️Sad clown 🤡Taco Seasoning 🌮 Houston, Missourah, is not unlike a lot of other rural Missourah towns through which I’ve driven and bears a resemblance to the Small Town USA in which Boy The Elder did a lot of his early growing up and to which Boy The Younger came…
Ceilings — Jan. 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Definitions 📖Missing Bourbon 🥃Mysterious Knocks 😵 I generally abhor any writing that starts with, “Webster’s dictionary defines …” Webster’s dictionary defines “ceiling” as a noun meaning “the overhead inside lining of a room.” The implication is that it’s a limitation, a max, a point of demarcation between what’s out there and…
Movie Ambush — Jan. 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sadness 😥Annoyance 😠Disappointment 😞 When Boy The Elder was Boy The Only in our home, he watched one of the Air Bud movies featuring a basketball-playing dog. Or maybe it was football. Or soccer. By the time that series was over, that dog had played them all. Anyway, whichever Air Bud…
Animal Updates — Jan. 12, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Thor’s Blurry Hammer 🍆Pigeon Delivery 🕊️Idiot List 🤪 Thor is really, really good with his hammer. And by that, I mean that Thor the walrus in Scarborough, England, is really good at masturbating and ruining New Years Eve. If you haven’t heard about this story, stop reading stupid news like politics…