One of the interesting truths about this whole “living” thing is that we make so many important decisions before we know what the hell we’re doing.
For example, I chose my career path the same year I got my driver’s license. I had absolutely no concept of a mortgage and office politics and exactly how much Uncle Sam would be taking from each and every paycheck. I just knew I liked to tell stories.
“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”
It sounds good. It’s also complete bullshit.
It didn’t take me long to realize that doing what I love wasn’t going to support the family I wanted to have and allow us to live the not-extravagant-but-not-extremely-frugal lifestyle we wanted to lead. I wanted to have a home of my own in a safe neighborhood, and we wanted to homeschool our kids and, yes, I really dug emerging technology like smart phones and home audio and the like. Telling stories for newspapers wasn’t going to allow that to happen, and had I known that when I was choosing a career, I would have taken a different road.
Today marks the 26th anniversary of the day I got down on one knee on a burgundy, silk handkerchief on the side of a dusty road in front of Roseman Covered Bridge in Winterset, Iowa, and asked Wifey Poo to marry me. We were 21-year-old seniors in college who loved each other deeply and had been together since the first month of freshman year, minus a few months during our sophomore year when I was kind of a butthole. (OK, more than “kind of.”)
I was thinking a lot about this as the day approached: What the hell does a 21-year-old know about 47? I would say that asking Wifey Poo to marry me was the biggest decision I’ve ever made and will ever make. Some might argue that the decision to create new life is the biggest, and that’s fair. Maybe they’re 1A and 1B. But I was thinking this week about how much I didn’t know when I took Wifey Poo’s trembling hand and slipped the engagement ring I’d worked the previous summer to pay for on her finger. I had no concept of what being married was like. I knew I wanted to get married, but “getting” and “being” are vastly different. Getting married is a moment in time, a wonderful party in which you’re surrounded by your friends and family and all the attention is on the happy couple and then you get to go away for a while and come home to a pile of presents.
Being married, on the other hand, is hearing a thud from the bathroom in the middle of the night and pushing open the door to find your fever-riddled spouse passed out on the floor with a pool of his vomit in the sink. Not a pretty picture, true, but it’s one Wifey Poo could have taken.
Being married is having your heretofore charmed life shattered with the words “Your baby most likely won’t live much past birth” and then standing by each other for four torturous months as the pregnancy continues until that eventuality happens.
Being married is saying things in the heat of the moment you never thought you’d say to that person into whose eyes you stared so lovingly at the moment you said “I will.”
Being married is about somehow retaining the individual freedom to grow and expand and evolve and change into the person God or destiny or the irresistible march of time would have you be while doing so in a way that keeps you walking side-by-side with another individual who is subject to the same forces.
I knew none of this 26 years ago today. None of this, and not only none of this but so much more.
So what does 21 know about 47? The reality is, not much. It’s why the statistics say that couples who get married young these days don’t make it more often than they do. Things happen and people change and there are so many more forces pulling people — not just couples — apart now than there were when Wifey Poo and I agreed we wanted to be married to each other.
Yet here we are.
I woke up this morning at 5:59 a.m. Next to me was this woman whom I met 29 Septembers ago in the basement of a dorm in the middle of Iowa. We make a cute couple lying in bed. I have a mask shooting air up my nose and she wears a mouth guard to keep her from snoring and recently has taken up wearing this foot contraption to help her plantar fasciitis. That’s not something you picture when you think about getting married.
I stood in the dim light of early morning and looked at her, how one foot was sticking out of the covers like I know she likes, even on the coldest mornings, how her hair was a tangle. I looked around the room. This is the 10th bedroom that has held our marital bed since we said our vows. Yes, we’ve moved around a bit.
I stumbled into the kitchen, made my coffee, sat down on the back deck in the cool morning air.
What does 21 know about 47? Not a whole helluva lot.
But here’s the thing: Knowing can be highly overrated. I spend a lot of time trying to figure things out, trying to decipher the whys and how-comes of topics most people don’t give a second thought. I want to know why we’re here and what’s the point of our existence and how I am supposed to find peace and joy and tranquility in a world that so often seams so not about those things. Some things truly are just unknowable.
And so had I known that the future Wifey Poo and I would have together would be pocked by such unimaginable grief as that caused by the sight of a tiny coffin holding the son you held in your arms so briefly being lowered into the ground, would I have asked her anyway? If I knew that our future involved me putting laborious burdens on her because of ailments of various organs and bones and muscles, would I have chosen to do that to someone whom I admired so greatly at the time I asked for her hand? Would it be cruel to say “yes” to those questions?
Twenty-one-year-old me had no clue what being married was like. Forty-seven-year-old me could write a book on the topic. The 26 years in between have have been so deliciously unexpected. And therein lies the beauty of being married vs. getting married. Everyone knows what a wedding looks like in our culture. No one knows what your marriage is going to look like. Many of us start out unknowingly trying to emulate our parents’ marriage — until we realize that the way they did things ain’t gonna work for us. That’s when the real fun begins. If I put you in a functional boat in the middle of an ocean, you might know how to get to shore. But if I put you in some contraption of which you have no familiarity? Good luck.
In some ways, Wifey Poo remains a mystery to me. In others, I know what she’s thinking before she even thinks it. Sometimes she surprises me. Sometimes she is completely predictable. Though we have both grown and changed over time — me far more so than her, I think we’d agree — there’s still that something that we saw in each other as she looked down at me on bended knee all those years ago that makes us know that — no matter the trial put in front of us, no matter the hurt, no matter the pain, no matter the stupid moments of the fellow human being we live with — the rest of this ride is one best and most beautifully taken together.
The Cost of a Kids’ Game
Boy The Younger’s baseball team got shellacked last night, 24-0. My little baby boy was on the mound for 14 of those runs in the first inning, a frame he did not complete. To be fair, about one of those runs was earned, but the number of errors only brought an early start to the time the other team took its foot off the gas pedal.
The team BTY was playing is called Premier Baseball Academy. As ball after ball after ball was finding their way into holes and gaps, I did some googling to learn a little bit about them. I also filled out a form to see exactly what it takes to earn a spot on their team.
By the time my boy was showering off the sweat and dirt, I had a response and a PowerPoint of unimaginable depth extolling the virtues of Premier Baseball Academy. Having seen their team play, they didn’t need to do much selling to prove the point that the kids who play for them are well trained and well coached. Nonetheless, I was shocked by three things.
- The Premier Baseball Academy is obsessed with data and metrics. The PowerPoint had charts and graphs on things like “scaption strength” and “IR/ER symmetry,” their kids improvements in the 60-yard run, throwing velocity, bat speed and attack angle.
- Premier Baseball Academy teams are filled with kids from parents who love them more than I love mine. Well, at least that’s the case if you measure this based on the size of the financial commitment a parent is willing to make to his child’s baseball career. I think I spent around a hundred bucks to sign BTY up for this fall season, and even that strikes me as a bit ridiculous. For the low, low price of TWO-THOUSAND-ONE-HUNDRED-AND-FIFTY-DOLLARS (!!?!?!?!?) for SIX FREAKING MONTHS you too can put your talented-enough kid the Premier Baseball Academy 12U team. And what does that absurd sum get you? They helpfully spell it out:
- A paid coach (Ours is the executive chef at a restaurant I’d like to try.)
- Fall and summer tournaments
- Fall and summer leagues
- Practice fields
- Hitting pass
- Agility training
- Blast Motion Bat Sensor, with subscription
- Weighted bat training program
- Mental training program. (Side note: WTF?!?)
- Winter training
- BTL lesson w/ current MLB affiliated athlete
The list goes on and on and on. Now, the good thing is that Premier Baseball Academy guarantees your kid will get to the Majors or at least a great Division 1 baseball program.
Or they don’t.
Which leads to No. 3.
3. For your investment, the best of the best end up going to obscure college baseball programs and have essentially the same shot at making the Majors as my kid. The PBA website has a section called “college committments,” which, besides being misspelled, shows which of its athletes are furthering their careers where.
Vanderbilt? Florida? Arkansas?
Or how about the mighty Greyhounds of Moberly Area Community College? The vaunted Lindenwood University squad? Or that pipeline-to-the-majors that is Champion Christian College.
In other words, for a $2,150 investment times about seven or eight years, you too can send your kid to a no-name college with no chance of him ever being able to pay you back from the earnings he doesn’t make in baseball.
Listen, I don’t want to get all “Back in my day,” on you, but back in my day, we signed up for the town’s Little League team and we played ball. We didn’t give a crap about attack angles and 60 time. Our coaches were our dads. Our teammates and opponents were our friends. And somehow, we put a pretty damn good product on the field game in, game out by the age we were expected to look like more than a bunch of doofuses out there. I’m sure The Parents spent something to have me play on those teams, but if you consider the fact that I played organized baseball from age 7 until my elbow exploded at age 16, they maybe shelled out $2,150 total on my baseball-related expenses. Go ahead and adjust for inflation. I’ll wait.
I understand that this is the way the game has gone and that it’s not just in youth baseball. But it’s sad. Sure, the kids who demolished our team last night played better than our kids. But they’re all still just kids, and the astronomical odds are that exactly zero members of either roster will be suiting up for any Major League affiliate, let alone an actual MLB ballclub.
So I ask: Are the kids really any better off because they know their scaption strength? Do they care? Because if they do, perhaps we should be steering them away from a career in baseball and toward a career in medicine.
Oh, and if you’re interested: The 12U team currently has one opening and is in urgent need of a pitcher.
The ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Didn’t Say It’ of the Day
‘Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.’
Erma Bombeck
Today’s Reasons to Keep Living
- Tomorrow is date night with Wifey Poo!
- You get to see fun things through my office window, like a guy climbing a really tall tree with a chainsaw. He was way up there and cut off some really big limbs. The tree’s. Not his.
- I’m making dinner tonight. Don’t want to leave the family hungry.
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🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Relays Weekend 🏃♀️Janelle 🤗No Steve 😥 Want to experience something trippy without the benefit of hallucinogens? Return to the place you met your spouse more than 30 years ago with your 20-year-old and 13-year-old sons. The Core Four took a long weekend minus My Favorite African, who was wonderfully cared for…
Listening Right — April 25, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Drive to Work 🚗Drive to Home 🚗Broken System 💔 I was thinking a lot on the drive to work this morning, which isn’t necessarily anything new. I think a lot, well, a lot. Long drives are usually prime time for me to tap into my intuition and listen to what’s being…
Baseball Bookend — April 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sweet Single ⚾Car Delivery 🚗Back/Neck Fixers💆♂️ On the one-year anniversary of that time a jackass piece of crap Little League “coach” did the most un-adultlike thing I have ever seen, Boy The Younger took the field for his new team in the spring’s first tournament. He batted second and started at…
3:32 a.m. Thoughts — April 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Garbage Can 🗑️Food Insecurity 🍲Poop Smell 💩 The level of significance of a particular task varies based on the time of day. This is something I realized this morning when I hauled my ass out of bed at 5:09 a.m. because of a thought that popped into my brain at 3:32…
Living — April 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Alive vs. Living 😔Dental Thoughts 🦷Pronouns 🧑🤝🧑 I am 48 years old, and I realized something today: I have no idea how to live life. This isn’t to suggest I don’t know how to stay alive. I’m OK at that. But the finer points of relationships and communication and working my…
Team Thanos — April 18, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Awww, Snap 😏Office Flood 🌊Potty Mouth 🚽 Boy The Younger is like his old man in a lot of ways. One is that, if we experience something cool, we have a pathological need to have others experience its awesomeness as well. It wounds my soul when I share my music or…
Falling Down — April 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Fuck Carvana 🚗Stupid Tooth 🦷Cave Woman 😠 I am a huge fan of the 1993 movie Falling Down. The movie stars Michael Douglas. Interesting side note: I once umpired a Little League baseball game for his son and called him out on strikes, which led to a crying temper tantrum. His,…
Toxic Positivity — April 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Stop Being So (Fake) Happy 😊The Better Choice ✔️Checkmate, Motherfucker ♛ I’m not exactly what anyone would call an optimist. Perhaps it’s because I see the world too clearly these days to think that we’re headed anywhere close to the right direction. Some would call me a pessimist, and I’m OK…
Nickname Need — April 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Brown Stockings ⚾I’m A Dentist 🦷Quick Hitters 🐅🦎 If all had gone according to plan, I’d be well into retirement and diving into my money Scrooge McDuck-style after a success career pitching for the New York Yankees. Alas, I’m sitting at my desk in Maryland Heights, Missourah, munching on carrot sticks…
Dental Malpractice — April 5, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Crowned 👑MFA Moment 😥AI Danger 💻 I remember as a kid getting a filling and hearing that it was real silver being put in my mouth. I figured if times ever really got tough, I could just yank out my tooth, melt the filling and buy food. Yes, these were thoughts…
Not Snot — April 4, 2023
🧩 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…
Bad Boys— Jan. 11, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Bruising Basketball 🏀Poke ☝️Six?!? 🔫 I grew up in the NBA era of the Bad Boys Detroit Pistons while loving a New York Knicks team that was, to put it mildly, quite physical. Guys like Steph Curry and LeBron James can makes basketball seem like artistry these days, but give me…
Done — Jan. 10, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩What There is Like! ⛅’Modern Policing’ 🚨Xylophone Time! 🎵 When you decide to talk about a time in which you truly believe you more-or-less died and saw what comes after this life, you have to be comfortable with the fact that people might think you’re nuts. Hell, talking about it on…
Media Landscape — Jan. 6, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Grace Ashford! 📰Idaholy Shit! 🥔Story of the Year! 🍆 The three most influential people in my life as a journalist are, sadly, all part of the Great Newsroom in the Sky now. Professors Michael Perkins and Bob Woodward (AKA Bob Woodward-Not-That-Bob-Woodward) helped educate me at Drake University, and Lisa Warren was…