black and red typewriter

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 were a part of the daily for which I served as a copy editor and page designer.

I admit, I’d joined in the fun. The paper was a joke. It looked ugly. It was poorly edited, poorly designed and poor written. Its primary color was this ugly shade of pink. A pink newspaper? Ugh.

So one day, I applied for the job. I figured the bar was so low, I couldn’t possibly screw it up any worse. (Incidentally, this is also how I became a basketball coach … after watching my son’s team lose 43-0.)

That’s how I found myself about a month later as a 22-year-old newspaper editor with a camera at a high school football game. I had no formal training as a photographer, and back in the late 1990s, cameras weren’t what they are today. First off, they were filled with film, which meant you had no idea what you’d shot until you got back to the newspaper office and found a photographer to actually develop the shots in the dark room.

The olden days, kiddos. Look it up.

My strategy to ensure I had a good shot to run in the paper with every story I had that lent itself to photos was simple — and extremely costly: Shoot the hell out of it. I routinely went through multiple rolls of film on every sports shoot, and I greatly annoyed the photographers who had to develop my shots. I’d like to think I’m partly responsible for the fiscal decline of the industry, though I doubt that’s true.

Here’s the thing: It worked. The paper became more visually appealing, which was part of its renaissance and enabled it to become a lot less of a joke and a lot more of a community resource.

I say that because it illustrates that I don’t always do things conventionally, and I never have.

I was thinking about that today when I was working on my side gig as the CEO/President/Grand Poobah of Johnny Boy Marketing. A fellow freelance marketer handed off an assignment to me to ghostwrite a letter for a person who recently has become head of an academic program at a prestigious university. I’ve written speeches and letters for people throughout my marketing career, and I enjoy taking on that person’s personality to showcase them, not me, in what they say or write.

That’s not easy when you’ve never met the person, which was the case with this assignment. I had an audio interview my colleague had done with her, her resume, her LinkedIn bio and some information about the program she’s now leading.

So I started writing.

Here’s the thing: I had absolutely no clue where I was going when I started writing. I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I don’t even sketch it out in my mind. I just … write.

No one would teach an up-and-comer to do this. I, myself, wasn’t taught to do this. I just sorta do it because I know it works and I don’t fight against myself anymore.

A colleague at my last job asked me how I go about designing the really pretty flyers and such that I can churn out digitally. (I can’t draw a straight line in real life). She asked me if I could teach people to do it. I told her I could try but that it wouldn’t be of any value. I literally have no idea what I want something to look like when I start designing. My way of designing is similar to my way of writing. I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I just … design. And it always seems to work out.

With today’s assignment, about two sentences in, the idea popped in my head of a relay race, that this person was being handed the baton to do something great with the program, but that she couldn’t be doing it if the person who’d run the previous leg hadn’t done his work. And who ran that previous leg? Why, the outgoing program leader, the faculty and the former students. Boom. Analogy.

By the time I finished, this theme carried through the entire letter. Did I mean for that to happen? No. It just sorta … did.

I say all that because it speaks to a larger thing about what I’ve learned about life, and maybe it’s something you — faithful reader — could learn, too. I worry about a lot of stuff. Less than I used to, because I’m learning, but still … a lot of stuff. What I’ve learned is that I don’t really need to worry about much if I’m feelin’ my shit and in my intuition.

I’m blessed to be an empath. I say that because so few empaths feel that way. I listened in on a weeklong empath conference online last week in the midst of all my daily work, and what I heard was seminar after seminar after seminar of how to cope with being an empath and how to get by and the struggles we all face.

And I get that. I was there. For more than 40 years, I didn’t even know about being an empath, didn’t know what an empath was, and I suffered mightily because of it. But finding out about it didn’t help. I was then in the middle of a community that largely saw itself as victimized by the world. And we are! The world sucks and we feel it all.

But I’m not a victim. I don’t let this world happen to me anymore. Those seminars are good if they teach you how to manage the shit. And at my best, I do exactly that. I manage my shit and happen to the world instead of allowing the world to happen to me.

Feeling my way through life? That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I am blessed with a really good brain that can think logically and plot and strategize and do just about anything except math with letters in it. But that brain isn’t at my core. It helps, but it’s also incredibly unreliable. I can overthink anything. But if I’m in touch with The Feels? Just like writing, just like designing, if I’m feelin’ it, it’s best for me to just start doing it.

Does it always work? No. Sometimes my writing or designs are spectacularly bad … at first. That’s usually because I’m tired or not hooked up with my feelings and intuition. If I do what needs to be done to get that shit together, I’m good 99.99% of the time.

I like that about me.


Technology is useful, right? I mean, this morning I saw this BBC news report from 1994 on this whole internet thing. Contrary to the newspaper execs my 22-year-old self shared meeting space with back in the day, it certainly wasn’t a fad, huh?

Tuesday, about 18 seconds before a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook those near San Jose, Calif., 95,000 people who’d downloaded and signed up with an app called MyShake knew it was coming. I hope they were, as most folks are these days, tethered to their phones.

The app was developed by scientists at UC Berkeley’s Seismology Lab, which sounds like a cool place to work. The hope in the future is that it will give you a tad more than 18 seconds to do whatever you’re supposed to do when an earthquake hits. I probably should review that elementary school lesson at some point.

The app uses the same technology that is pissing off cops and medics who are repeatedly having to make runs to amusement parks. The new iPhone has an emergency system in which rapid deceleration or twists or turns triggers a call to the authorities if not disabled within a certain timeframe. Turns out rollercoasters decelerate pretty rapidly and make unnatural twists and turns.

With MyShake, the sensors are used to detect movement, and the data is then filtered through an artificial intelligence neural network, which sounds nightmarishly frightening, to see if it matches what signals the beginning of an earthquake.

That’s freaking amazing, isn’t it?

I have a love-hate relationship with technology, but it’s not because of the technology. Any technological advancement is neutral. It’s how us stupid humans use it that makes it good or bad. We started off with that internet thing being largely good for humans. Now, it’s horribly divisive and allows for the rapid spread of misinformation and the proliferation of outright stupidity.

But detecting earthquakes early? That’s pretty cool. Just keep it away from the stupid people and maybe we can thin the herd a bit.


It warms my heart to see Facebook, err… Meta struggling. Ditto for Google, err… Alphabet. These two tech behemoths have been selling you and me as their product for too long now, and if there’s anything good about the pending recession and the current inflationary pressures, it’s that people are spending less money buying us from them.

Both companies’ Q3 profits disappointed, though they still are shockingly high. Meta is in worse shape, considering the fact that the place it relies on to learn enough about you to sell is being abandoned by huge swaths of people. There’s still not a popular Google alternative. That Chinese-owned TikTok is eating Alphabet/Google spawn YouTube’s lunch is great, but it really shouldn’t make you feel much better.

I was thinking about all of this and our current political climate in relation to the aims of the Revolutionary War. In that, we threw off the shackles of a repressive government that was taxing the hell out of us and not listening to what we were saying. The government was working at the behest of big business (The East India Trading Company) to the detriment of We The People.

All these years later, I’m wondering what exactly the Revolutionary War accomplished. Sure, it’s nice to not have to give a crap when the queen dies — though a disturbing number of you Muricahns appeared to have given a lot of craps about that — but it seems like we’ve just exchanged masters. Our government taxes the hell out of us and is horribly inefficient with that money, and while we say we are a representative democracy, no candidate for state or national election has appeared on the ballot in almost a decade who would accurately represent me. Worse, every one of them on both sides of the aisle is bought and paid for by some sort of industry, and most often, multiple industries.

It just seems like a pretty screwed-up system when the government has to take action to cool down an economy by implementing measures that are going to hurt the average citizen. I understand why it has to be done. It’s probably the right thing to do right now. But that doesn’t make it good.

That it hurts Meta and Alphabet is great, though there are real people who are going to lose their jobs because of it. What happens when those paychecks stop coming? Are they going to lose the homes they overpaid for when things were too hot? What happens to those who make the products they aren’t able to afford? And then what happens when those people lose their jobs and stop getting paychecks?

We like to think of our democracy and form of capitalism as some great success story. I’d like to suggest that there is a mountain of evidence to say it isn’t and never has been.


62 Things Wives Can Do To Show Love To Their Husbands

Welcome to Issue No. 11 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. Most married couples enter marriage having heard at least once that marriage is work. Very, very few…

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  2. Dude. Fall. Period.
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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…

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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…

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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…

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Deer Drama — Nov. 30 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Shooting a Fake Deer 🦌Time Spent Poorly ⏰Child Support 💸 About midway up my left shin underneath my leg hair is a scar about three inches long and the width of a deer antler. Well, a fake deer antler, anyway. “Deer-antler width” is hardly a standard unit of measurement, I know,…

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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…

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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,…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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,…

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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.”…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Chocolateman— Oct. 19, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Passion 🍫Sarcasm 😜Poop 💩 I appreciate people who are passionate about something. Well, except politics. Then I’d prefer it if you’d just keep your mouth shut. But if you’re super-interested in photography, goats, cooking, geocaching, quilting, etching … whatever … your enthusiasm feeds my soul. Which is part of the reason…

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Top 5 Things From The Past Week: Oct. 10-16 edition

Welcome to Issue No. 9 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. No. 5: I pledged to finish something I am a writer. If I’m going to be a…

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Evolution — Oct. 17, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Monkey Crap 🐒BTY Day 👨‍👦Incomplete Stories 🖊️ If you’re of the belief that human beings evolved from apes, I’m not here to try to dissuade you. What I am here to say is that, if evolution is true, we sure have come a long way. I say this after a trip…

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Basement Water — Oct. 15, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Personal Growth 🌱Mad Mom 😠Oh, Jeffrey 🧠 About a year ago, Arti The Wonder Therapist waited patiently for me to finish yet another of my amazing monologues detailing just how I felt about the various situations I was attempting to address in my life at the time and then calmly asked…

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Death! Death! Death! — Oct. 14, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Cue the Outrage 🔫Animal Extinction 🐆Eye Update 👀 Even back in the day when I considered myself a Republican (before the dark times … before the Trumpire), I never quite understood the death penalty. Perhaps it was because I looked around at the other nations that still killed people as punishment…

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Corneal Complications — Oct. 13, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Hello Darkness, My Old Friend 👀COVID Costs 🦠Jackass Jones Verdict👩‍⚖️ I’ve spent much of this week so far in forced darkness. After I wrote on Monday morning, my right eye started to get blurry. Then it got real blurry. Then it became utterly useless. In this, I have reprised my role…

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Mattress Shopping — Oct. 10, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Awkward Shopping 🛏️Disingenuous Holiday 🗓️Help the Homeless 😔 If there’s a more awkward retail excursion than mattress shopping, I have yet to find it in my 48 years. Wifey Poo and I went to a high school gym to do exactly that on Sunday afternoon. The bed we’ve been sleeping in…

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So Long, Cards — Oct. 9, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Playoff Disappointment ⚾Oh, Britney 📲Friendship Failure 😔 In the span of just more than 24 hours, I went from the excited expectation of being in Busch Stadium to watch the hometown St. Louis Cardinals eliminate the Philadelphia Phillies and advance to the next round of the playoffs to watching those Phillies…

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Playoff Baseball — Oct. 6, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Baseball Gear-Grinders ⚾Sunrise Woes 🌄Heavy Pumpkins 🎃 There are a few baseball-related indignities in my home that, as the saying goes, grind my gears. The first is that there is a state championship trophy on the mantel above the fireplace in our Humble Country Home with a gold-plated baseball player, bat…

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There Will Be Blood — Oct. 5, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Weird Wound Treatment 🧂Phillies Bring Doom ⚾Meetings Suck 👎🏽 Apparently, I’ll take medical advice from waitresses and allow myself to receive medical treatment from busboys. This, I learned last night. I have a tendency to get hurt in really interesting ways. When I tell you that I once got a concussion…

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Top 5 Things From The Past Week: 9/26-10/2

Welcome to Issue No. 8 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. No. 5: I held an epic car concert If you were anywhere in the vicinity of my…

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Place Your Bets — Oct. 3, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Football Picking God 🏈Fish Story 🐟Free Floating ☁️ A few months before Boy The Elder was born, I had about $100 set aside to buy Wifey Poo a gift that I intended to give her after she ushered our child into the world. It was the least I could do for,…

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Sliced Bread — Sept. 30, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩New Route Home 🏎️Confirmed Weirdness 🤪Here’s Your Sign 🤦 I took a new route home from the western part of Missourah yesterday after doing the whole open-house thing for work in St. Joseph. Rather than shoot down to I-70 and traverse the state on that familiar road, I went across Hwy.…

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Rental Tank — Sept. 29, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Woo-Woo vs. The Beast 🛻Dart Throwers 🎯My Job 📋 I am not used to driving a tank. My normal vehicle is Woo-Woo, AKA The Shitty Little Car, AKA a Nissan Versa. It’s practical. It gets great gas mileage. I hate it. Woo-Woo normally accelerates as quickly as a child asked to…

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LinkedIn — Sept. 26, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Unwitting Guinea Pigs 🐹False Bragging 🦹‍♂️Put Me In, Coach 🚀 My regular readers (hey, you three!) know that I have a hatred for social media’s influence on society with an intensity rivaled only by the heat of a thousand suns. The latest bit of “Are you fucking kidding me?” comes from…

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Top 5 Things From The Past Week: 9/9-9/25

Welcome to Issue No. 7 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. No. 5: I reached out to a friend I have not been shy about sharing that I’ve…

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iPhone Envy — Sept. 25, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩More Stupid Human Stuff 📱KC Trip ⚾Miserable Missourah 😠 Quick: Take a look around you. If you’re in a room with five other people, one of them thinks you’re financially struggling if you don’t have the latest iPhone. That’s according to a new survey following the release of the iPhone 14.…

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Human Babies — Sept. 23, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Loser Species 👶Email Win 📧Dad Pride 👨‍👦‍👦 I’m pretty sure I’m not normal. Normal people respond to that statement with, “Oh, John, nobody’s normal,” which is just a sign for us non-normies that the person we’re talking to is normal. Yesterday, I was waiting for Wifey Poo to pick me up…

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In It — Sept. 22, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Concert Thoughts 🧠Marriage 💍Drunk Idiots 🧉 There’s this scene in the 2004 movie Garden State in which Sam (Natalie Portman) looks at Andrew (Zach Braff) and notices … … And yeah, that resonated with me then and resonates with me now. Ever since then, being “in it” has become a thing…

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Remembering Sarah — Sept. 21, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sadness 😥Beautiful Skies ⛅Two Terms For 2022 ✌️ Back in our early days at Pound Ridge Elementary School, Sarah was the fastest girl runner in the class, which bought her some serious playground cred. There were only a few of us boys who could hang with Sarah in the 50-meter dash…

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Small Ear Canal — Sept. 19, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Ear Flushing👂Grunge God🎶Tech Guy📺 If you have to have a doctor tell you a body part or yours is small, I suppose one of the least offensive would be the ear canal. That’s what a doctor told me this morning, after I finally broke down and actually went to said doctor’s…

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Nominee Day! — Sept. 16, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Toys in the Hall🪅Idiot Governors🗳️Flopping FedEx✈️ Last night in my hotel in Springfield, Missourah, I set out a glass of milk and a plate of cookies before going to bed. It’s not that I don’t know how to read a calendar or have any particular belief in a fat man in…

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Springfields Aplenty — Sept. 15, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Which One?🗺️Leave Introverts Alone🤫Oxford Commas🤪 I’m on the road for work this week, in Springfield. Ahhh, but Springfield what? There currently are 35 populated places in the United States named Springfield, spread out over 25 states, including five in Wisconsin. In addition, there are 35 Springfield Townships, and Ohio owns 11…

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F’n COVID — Sept. 13, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Surrounded 😷Wood Splitter 🌲Morons 🤪 I’ve had COVID. Twice. The first time fucked up my life for a year. I’m still not back to the me I was before it came into my home, and I’m pretty sure that now, nearly two years later, that’s not going to change. The second…

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Change of Plans — Sept. 12, 2022

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sunday audible🤒Fantasy Failure 🏈Anal Chess♟️ Sunday was supposed to be a romantic day spent in a canoe with Wifey Poo, the two of us paddling leisurely down the Meramec River. Mother Nature was not in the mood to play wingman and decided to pick the one day in the midst of…

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