Getting Married vs. Being Married - Sept. 23, 2021

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 🧩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…

Santos Kills Puppy — Jan. 5, 2023

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Poor Puppy 🐶Romeo and Juliet 🤴👸Meta Mistake 🙊 Disturbing news out of Washington, D.C., today as Republican Congressman-elect George Santos (if that’s his real name) brought a 6-month-old puppy to the house floor and screamed “Hey, look at me!” before slitting its throat and lapping up its squirting blood like a…

Institutions — Jan. 4, 2023

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩A Pretty Good Rant 😠Tesla Plunge 🚗Missed Lasts 😥 Those of you who regularly read my drivel (I see you, DirtySciFiBuddah) might have become aware of the fact over the past year or so that I am not a huge fan of our world’s modern institutions. All of them might, in…

Finishing — Jan. 2, 2023

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Incomplete 🕮Frustration 😠Bowl Bust 🏈 To say that I know how to write is like saying I know how to breathe. No one considers that they know how to breathe. They just … breathe. No one is particularly good at breathing or bad at breathing. Again, they just … breathe. I’ve…

Fifty Intentions for 2023

Welcome to Issue No. 15 of Listicles, the feature that presents the Top 10, Top 5, Top 3, Top 100 or Top 1,000,000 of whatever it is you want to know about. Email your Listicle suggestions to johnagliata@gmail.com. So last year, I had a list of 100 intentions for 2022, and I did fairly well,…

Vision Board — Dec. 30, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩2023 📅Helping 🧠The Universe 🔭 I’m not much for long-term plans and goals. This isn’t to suggest I don’t think they’re important. I just think that spending a lot of time on them is futile. What’s the saying? Man plans, God laughs. Something like that. Anyway, I’ve learned through experience that…

The Point of Suffering — Dec. 27, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Chain Links 🔗”Work” 🧑‍💼Popular Toys 🧸 After my first son died in December 2000, I spent a lot of time wondering why. Why me? Why Wifey Poo? Why Jacob? Why this level of suffering in a world supposedly created and run by an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God? So I did what…

Freezing Fans — Dec. 26, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Chiefs! 🏈Indy Tickets 🏎️Bank Visit 💰 When I bought the tickets to the Christmas Eve contest between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Seattle Seahawks as a gift for Boys The Elder & Younger, it was sometime in September and temps hovered around 90 degrees. The thought that the game might…

Jacob at 22 — Dec. 20, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Timelines 👶Extinctions 🌋Sin City 👌 As I fall deeper down the rabbit hole learning more about theories on space and time, the concept of alternative timelines comes up again and again and again. Whether it’s the stuff of science fiction or one day will be proven to be the stuff of…

Joe(y) the Comedian — Dec. 18, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩’Cousin’ Laughs🎤Improv!?!? 🎭Drake Hoops 🏀 Back when I was a boy, I had a favorite Cousin-Who-Wasn’t-A-Cousin. His name was Joey DeVito, and he was in no way a blood relation to me, though I called his father Uncle Frankie and his mother Aunt Celia. I’m pretty sure this is an East…

Doughnut Guy — Dec. 17, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Glazed 🍩Bingo! 🖥️Disappearing Christians ⛪ I didn’t intend to bring doughnuts for my co-workers yesterday morning. It just sorta happened. How it happened and how it played out is a window into my weird mind. First, an explanation: I have a card purchased from Boy The Younger that entitles me to…

James and Stinky — Dec. 15, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩STL’s Homeless 😥Snake Hoo-Hoos 🐍That Was Epoch 👴 I found James huddled underneath a blanket as he sat, knees to his chest, head bowed, just outside the doorway of a CVS in the Delmar Loop section of St. Louis. If you’re not familiar with the area, it’s a fun place filled…

Paul Silas — Dec. 14, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Knicks Memory 🏀JBM LLC 🧑🏼‍💼Brain Drain 🧠 My most memorable interaction with Paul Silas occurred when I was a 17-year-old kid with big dreams of being a sports reporter. I’d talked with Paul before — his wife and Mother Dearest were active in the local Make A Wish Foundation chapter and…

Humbug — Dec. 13, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Piped-In Music 🎵Astronomy 🔭Fusion ☢️ Here’s the thing about Christmas: I want to love it, and in many ways, I do. I love giving gifts and, to be honest, I love getting gifts. There’s something so cool about the magical times when someone knows you well enough to get you that…

Aunt Pauline — Dec. 9, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Familial Reflections 👪Career Rebuild 🛠️Andrea 📱 It’s hard to think of my Aunt Pauline as old, hard to imagine how it is that she’s just about to leave her 80s and, thus, it’s hard to understand how she could be in such poor health right now. Aunt Pauline is Father Dearest’s…

Bye-Bye, Zombies — Dec. 8, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩The Walking Dead 🧟Nose B Gone 👃Turkey Trouble 🦃 I spent Tuesday night watching the final episodes of The Walking Dead. I have always been the type who can get so lost in a good story that I have really strong emotions (shocker, I know) when it ends. It happens with…

Redefining Family — Dec. 6, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Who’s Family? 👪Music Speaks 🎵Wedding Websites 👨‍❤️‍👨 I was raised as an East Coast Italian, despite being a mixed bag of ethnicities born in Denver, Colorado. That meant that there was this huge importance placed on family that’s not necessarily shared with the same ferocity by others. Yet as I grew…

Grief — Dec. 5, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Messy Grief 😔Hear Ye! 👂Die Trump Die 😡 I am acutely aware that I am hardly alone as a 48-year-old man when I say that I am well acquainted with grief. I’m not sure if it was always this way — though I imagine it was — but I don’t think…

Human Jewel Beetles — Dec. 3, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Beer Bottle Connections 🍺Ear Concerns 👂BTE vs. Deer 🦌 What exactly is reality? Is there a limit to the universe? How can something as heavy as the Earth be just sort of suspended … and what exactly is it suspended in? This is the rabbit hole I’ve fallen down, all while…

Be Yourself — Dec. 1, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩A Good Self 👋Urgent Care, Revisited 👩‍⚕️Slow Down 🐢 I remember this time back in sixth grade when a trusted adult was talking to me as I struggled through what turned out to be a pretty life-defining traumatic experience. The friends I’d grown up with since I was a small boy…

Metallica! — Nov. 29 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Gods of Music Deliver! 🎸Insta-Anger 😠Unpleasant 😓 I was in need of something good to happen yesterday. Desperate need. The gods of music delivered. Metallica is coming to St. Louis in concert in 2023 for a two-day show at the Dome at the America Center. I found out about this at…

Double Ear Infection — Nov. 27, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Urgent Care 👂👂Alone Update 😔Rest 🛏️ It’s never a good sign when, less than two seconds after sticking a light in your ear and gazing through the little viewfinder thingy (patent pending), the doctor says, “Oooooooooh.” That was followed by a diagnosis of a “nasty” left ear infection and the question,…

Fitting in — Nov. 25, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Alone 😔Christmas Changes🎄My Two Skillz 🔪 I would venture to guess that most of us like the feeling of fitting in somewhere. Even the most self-confident, secure person likes to have a tribe. We’re social creatures, and to have a place we just seem to slide into safely is a blessing.…

Spouse+ Subscription — Nov. 23, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Marriage Talk 💑Requesting Money 💰Murder-Free 🔪 If you’ve been married as long as I have (rounding the corner and heading toward 26 years), you understand that conversations between spouses can sometimes be awfully weird. I mean, Wifey Poo and I have known each other more than 30 years now. How much…

Coffee Hand — Nov. 22, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Man Cold? 🤒Balloon Analogy 🎈World Flop ⚽ If you want to know how my Monday started yesterday, I poured coffee all over my hand. It isn’t that I don’t know how to pour coffee. I’ve done it a billion times. It’s that, on this particular Monday, somewhere in between the start…

Zoo Signs — Nov. 20, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Gorilla Harassment 🦍Brother Love 👨‍👦‍👦True Crime 🔪 My love of wild animals was fostered early in my childhood. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was appointment viewing for my family. I grew up with scenes of hungry cheetahs chasing down baby gazelles that included what’s not included on nature shows today ……

No Slides Allowed — Nov. 17, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Presentation Skillz 📽️No Tribe 😔Fuck 45 🖕 There was a time not all that long ago, cosmically speaking, that the mere thought of standing up in front of a crowd and giving a talk would have made me want to throw up in my shoes. In fact, there has been a…

What’s Funny? — Nov. 15, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Boss Kudos 🙌Chill Time 😌One In 8 Billion🧍 It always feels good when the Big Bossman comes up to you and shakes your hand for a job well done. That happened last night when El Presidente of our company congratulated me on the video I wrote, shot and produced for our…

Engaged — Nov. 14, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩BTE and Div 💍Brother Greetings 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦Travel Day ✈️ The morning after Boy The Elder was born, I awoke in the hospital to his sweet cooing and his momma’s deep-sleep breathing. Scooping him up carefully and holding him nervously, I sat in a rocking chair in the pre-dawn darkness and talked to…

Dying Democracy — Nov. 11, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Election Message 🗳️School Priorities 🏫Tickets Aplenty 🎫 It would seem to me that if a common sentiment from wise people following an election is that it’s a good thing the results were so muddled because it means not much will get done in the next two years, you’ve got yourself a…

Fairy Tale — Nov. 9, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Stephen King 🕮Legal Weed🌿Public Schools🏫 I read my first Stephen King book when I was in high school. It was summer, if I remember correctly, and everywhere I went, I carried a worn library copy of Pet Sematary. Since that time, King’s words have been a regular companion through every stage…

Year In Music — Nov. 5, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Concert Craze 🎵Back Crackin’👩‍⚕️To-Dos Done🚗 My year of music is over. And, my God, has it been good. It started on a sweltering mid-July afternoon at Hollywood Casino Amphitheater in which Wifey Poo and I watched my Backup Wife Jewel do her thing. It ended last night on an evening that…

Update: My Favorite African — Nov. 3, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Little D’s Return 🏥Irony 🔨Planet Killer 🌎 Being a host parent to a little boy from Africa (Burkina Faso, to be precise) was one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life. And now, that little boy is returning to the United States. For those not…

Mega Billions — Nov. 2, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Stupid IT Rules 🖥️The Bend 🚑Is The War Over? ✌️ Tonight, there will be a lottery drawing in which someone could win $1.2 billion. That someone won’t be me, as I didn’t buy a ticket, but it didn’t stop me from thinking about what I would and wouldn’t do with that…

Fun Family — Nov. 1, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Family Dynamics 👪New Mattress 🛏️To Share Or Not To Share? ❓ Let’s say the only cracker you’ve ever eaten is a Saltine. You have no experience with any other crackers. In fact, you don’t even know that there is such a thing as other crackers. You might not love the Saltine,…

Halloween Haters— Oct. 31, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Ghosts of Halloween 👻Wrinkles 👴Words Spawn Action ✍️ Wifey Poo made a bold declaration about her opinion of Halloween on our drive back from Springfield, Missourah, Saturday afternoon: “Halloween is a great time for kids to dress up …” If you think there’s more to that statement, nope. She added: “Period.”…

How I Do Me — Oct. 27, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Empath Life 🤗Earthquake 🌎Revolutionary Failure 😶 About six months after I started my career as a professional journalist, I started walking past this job opening in our company every time I walked in and out of the building. It was for editor of a weekly paper routinely ridiculed by those who…

School Shooter Match Game — Oct. 24, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Game Time 🎮Family Picture📸Marriage Tips 🪢 I remember when it was simple. Horrible, yes … but simple. There was Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and they matched up with Columbine — which, side note, would have been my high school had my parents not moved to NY when I was 2.…

Helping the Homeless — Oct. 23, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Helper Bags 🆘What’s In The Bag?🎒Mini Golf ⛳ I was raised to avoid the homeless. Avoid eye contact. Avoid conversation. And most definitely avoid giving them anything they asked for. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, which doesn’t make me feel any better. What was instilled in me as…

Marcus F’n King — Oct. 21, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Books & Covers 🕮Seeking Balance ⚖️Weirdo🤪 We’re taught at an early age to not judge a book by its cover. If I remember correctly, that was impressed upon me sometime around the first grade. Yet to be honest, I don’t think it’s a lesson that ever really sunk in. I imagine…

Political Ads — Oct. 20, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Illegals or Guns? 🤦Scrolling Through Stupidity 🖱️Worst Nurse Ever 👩‍⚕️ If there’s anything I hate more than politics and politicians, it’s political advertising. Cutting the cable cord has lessened its intrusiveness in my life, yet it still manages to seep in. Case in point: I was watching the Padres-Phillies game last…