🧩 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 had decided, en masse, that I was not good enough to hang out with. Suddenly, I was in a new school — our middle school combined four elementary schools from different communities — with absolutely no friends and more than just a few people who were engaged in what even then would have been called bullying.
“Just be yourself,” this trusted adult said, encouraging me to “get out there” and meet new friends.
I remember wanting to punch him in the face.
Didn’t he understand? That was at the core of the fucking problem! Who exactly was I? I’d never really known. I knew that I could adapt who I was to just about any different setting. I am extremely gifted in that area, I’ve come to realize as an adult.
I also knew that, when not with anyone else, I didn’t have a clue who I really was.
I knew who I was supposed to be. Those norms had been instilled in me by well-meaning parents and my suburban New York upbringing. But did I feel like being the person defined by those things? Absolutely not.
You know who I was back then? I was a scared-as-shit, lonely, angry, confused pre-teen who had absolutely no clue why he didn’t seem to fit into this world in any meaningful way. I’m quite sure that what this trusted adult was saying wasn’t that I should go be that person.
But if the me I was supposed to be being was someone different, well, no shit, yeah, I’d want to be that person. Would you happen to have the Dewey Decimal System number in the library to go find that book so I can study up and make it happen?
I tried so many different things to “be me.” I looked back to a time when “me” seemed “good enough,” and I pegged the change to third grade, when I got glasses. Apparently, seeing through external semi-artificial means was a grievous sin in my school, so after being made fun of one too many times for wearing glasses, I put my foot down and said I wasn’t going back to school if I didn’t get contacts.
I got contacts. It changed nothing.
I tried changing how I dressed. I tried smiling more. Smiling less. Talking more. Talking less. Approaching random groups. Being generous with surplus snacks. Selling Blow Pops for a quarter (word to the wise: Don’t ever start getting high on your own supply).
No matter what, “being me” always seemed to be a step behind or out of line with everyone else who seemed to have comparably less problem being them.
I fully recognize that all these changes weren’t me being authentically me, but again, at that time (and, to a large extent today), I had no clue who the hell the authentic me actually was.
Being told to be me led me down some pretty dark paths as I grew through my teen years. Being me sometimes meant I was a sullen, angry, argumentative, standoffish prick. Being me led to overwhelming, uncontrollable, often unseen sadness and pain that nearly drowned me.
That was me being me, but not the me I wanted me being … not the me that anyone wanted me being.
It has been more than three decades since that trusted adult told me to just be myself, and I think his advice no less stupid and unhelpful than I did back then.
I was thinking about that today, thinking that the person who gave me that advice is probably dead, wondering how many other people to whom he passed on that little pearl of wisdom. I know he meant well. I know he thought what he was saying was wise and helpful. I also know that he missed the point.
What would I say to sixth-grade me? Could I do any better job in counseling that kid, to help pave a less difficult, painful, scarring path for him to get to where I am today?
Yes. Yes I can.
“John, make yours a good self.”
I realized about a half decade ago that the cure for me when I’m feeling down or anxious or angry is to focus on doing for others, on being a light, on not just being me but being a better version of me.
This doesn’t mean I have any resentment to the me I am before I start focusing on being a better me. It just means that we all can do more. Every fucking day, we have opportunities to do something different to be a better self. That doesn’t mean we have to. It just means the option is open.
It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t not have to be big. It could be a random act of kindness for a stranger. It could be flowers for my wife. It could be leaving an anonymous gift for a co-worker on his desk. It could be sitting and talking with a homeless person and giving him a bag of supplies before a cold night. It could be buying myself a coffee and sitting outside in the cold and alternately sipping the hot drink and watching the fog from my breath in the cool air.
Whatever it is, if I go back to doing that thing that helps me be a good self, I seem to find peace. Do I fit in any better? Maybe. Maybe not. It just doesn’t seem to matter as much when I’m making me a good self.
So please … fuck all this talk about just being yourself. That is so often unhelpful. Just make yours a good self.
I found myself back in urgent care this morning. It was a different urgent care from the one I visited Saturday morning, the one in which I was diagnosed with a double ear infection, given a steroid shot in the arm and handed two prescriptions — one for an antibiotic and one for steroid pills that have made me jumpy as a meth-head.
If anything, the stuffiness in my left ear is worse. The ringing in that ear is worse. My head overall is more stuffy. I’m tired, cranky and hate talking because it echoes in my brain.
If I wanted to see my primary care physician, I might be able to get in around January. Of 2088.
I worry about a nation that is pushing its ill to understaffed clinics with the most qualified person being a nurse practitioner. I have nothing against nurse practitioners. The have more medical training than I do. But they’re not doctors. Which isn’t to say I have tremendous faith in them either. Not after 2021 and my adventure with traditional medicine and Longhaul COVID.
This nurse practitioner today did the same thing the nurse practitioner did on Saturday She looked in me ears. She told me I have lots of fluid on my left ear and that my eardrum is really red. She told me my right ear has fluid but is less red. She peeked down my throat. She listened to my lungs, which seems to be the doctor-visit equivalent of being handed a tiny snack back on an airplane.
In the end, she called in a prescription for a different antibiotic and for ear drops. She said if I didn’t start feeling better by Monday, to call … and this is where I thought she was going to say “a real doctor” … my primary care physician or an ENT. I’m sure she’s well aware of the challenge of getting into either, even with ears stuffed for more than two weeks, before I either go insane from all this stuffiness or suffer permanent hearing loss.
Positive note: I’m getting really good at saying the word, “What?”
Inside the B.A.K.C. (Badass Alcatraz Knitting Circle)
Top 5 Things You’ll Learn If You Read This Whole Thing. If you keep lots of birds in a prison cell with you, you’re going to be covered in bird crap. Robert Stroud was not a kindly prisoner, even if Burt Lancaster was a sexy stud. My Grandma Fiorina had elective hand-amputation surgery. Before Amazon,…
Keep readingI got a text at work today from Boy The Elder. “Do you have time for a call in 15 minutes or so? I have a big internship decision to make and wanted to talk it through.”
This is how BTE operates. Nine times out of 10, he knows the right thing to do, knows what he wants to do, knows what he’s going to do … he just needs to talk to someone to get it out of his head and hear his own thoughts. I’m incredibly thankful that he sees me as a good person with which to do that.
I’m going to brag on BTE for a bit here, but keep in mind, this isn’t your typical dad-bragging-on-his-kid crap. I can take very, very little credit for anything that BTE is. He came out of the womb blessed with an old soul, curious brain and desire to learn. His work ethic is uncanny and certainly more than I ever had. He’s much more like his mother, but he surpasses even her intense concern over academics and achievement. Simply put, he’s driven.
Because of that, he has always impressed the adults he’s met. He’s always been ahead academically. He’s incredibly logical and a great thinker. He’s got amazing potential, and he’s not about to let any of it go unfulfilled. That’s a credit to him, not me.
BTE had a great internship over the summer. He had designs of going back there this coming summer. Then he interviewed with a different company, which he thought would just be a backup option. He absolutely loved the backup option. So what he needed to talk through was which internship would be the best one to take.
We talked it through. He knew already that it would be better to widen his net and take the one with the new company. The reasons are plentiful. Like I said, he just had to hear his own thoughts. That he considered my own is humbling.
The more important piece of advice I gave him is the same piece of advice I’ve been giving him for a year now: Slow down for a moment and take a look around. Breathe it in. Enjoy it.
He’s worked incredibly hard to get where he is. I know from experience the desire to achieve, achieve, achieve. He’s following a similar path by getting engaged while still in college. That means a post-graduation job is really important. So will earning more money once he gets into the working world.
I never stopped to enjoy my successes. I was a newspaper editor at age 22, albeit at a shitty weekly that couldn’t possibly get any worse. I was a hot-shot journalist with a bright future in an industry that, sadly, was in a death spiral. Not once did I ever pause to breathe it in and enjoy where I was. I was always looking to where I was going.
Then, suddenly, there was no place to go. The industry was dead. So I left it. I’ve never really had that same career trajectory since.
It only was recently that I realized that that was OK. My priorities shifted. I stopped being defined by my day job and started caring more about my passions. I should have realized long ago that those two things didn’t have to be the same thing. I started seeking good-enough jobs that paid well so I could support my family better and create the experiences for all of us that I want to create. I focused more on my physical and mental health.
Now, I truly work to live, as opposed to live to work. I am blessed with a good job that (finally) pays me what I’m worth. I can support my family with that, plus the work I do that is my true passion, Johnny Boy Marketing.
How do I know I’m getting it right? I’ve been in this job since late June. I don’t have my work email on my phone. There’s no need to. The workplace respects my home life. I take care of my shit here. Then I go home. I come back the next day. I do the best I can. Then I go home again.
It’s a simple formula. For me, right now? It’s working.
I just want to make sure BTE knows that this formula is a good option too.
Today’s Reasons to Keep Living
- I have new antibiotics to take!
- Metallica, 2023!
- Sushi
More From ‘A Puzzle Known As Life’
Netflix DVDs— Sept. 29, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩End of an Era 📀Tone Deaf 👂River Sharks🦈 Back in 1998, when Blockbuster was still the place to be on a Friday night, a small company shipped out a DVD of the 1988 comedy Beetlejuice, which brings us the second Michael Keaton reference in this space this week. Sometime today, that…
Keep readingHBP — Sept. 28, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Knee Bonk ⚾Attention Attention 📱Car-B-Que 🚗🔥 In the bottom of the first inning of my baseball team’s game last night, Boy The Younger stepped to the plate. On a 1-2 count, he took a fastball directly to the knee and went down as if shot by a sniper. This is a…
Keep readingToilet Diving — Sept. 27, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Porta Plunge 🚽Gung Ho, Part II 🍜Mood Movies 🎞️ We have now reached the stage in societal regression in which “Police remind public not to climb in toilets” is an actual thing police have to remind the public about. Yes, you can blame this on the Michigan woman who climbed into…
Keep readingNews Fairy Dust — Sept. 26, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Biscuit Snub 🥖Easier Cheating 😲Biden Walks 🚶 Buckle up, y’all. The News Fairies have sprinkled us with a heaping pile of funny dust today, so let’s get started. The international food site TasteAtlas published its list of the best breads in the world, and Muricah has only one spot on the…
Keep readingPenny For Your Thoughts — Sept. 22, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Cost of Money 💸Google Oopsie 🚓Broke Ape 😢 I remember as a child being dropped off at The Deli in my hometown with a pocket full of change and big dreams. I’m sure the place had a name besides The Deli, but I have no clue what it was beyond just…
Keep readingInfluencer Spending — Sept. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩I’m An Alien 👽Political Ads 💸Bumper Sticker😊 I have lied to my children from the day they were born. I’m not just talking about the typical Santa/Tooth Fairy bullshit. I’m talking about things like, well … for example … I had Boy The Elder convinced that I once was a QB…
Keep readingBear Invasion — Sept. 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Magic Bear Kingdom🐻Cash For Prisoners 💸Anti-Depression Tips 😊 A bear snuck into the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World yesterday, prompting the closure of numerous rides and attractions while Florida Fish & Wildlife officers looked for it. Seems to me that the first place to look would have been the Country…
Keep readingInnocent in Prison — Sept. 18, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Bail 💸Walk-off ⚾Under Pressure🧯 Most red-blooded Muricans who hear there’s a nation incarcerating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians for lengthy periods of time without a trial or means to be free would say said nation should get a good hard dose of Murican democracy landing on its shores. Thankfully, it’ll…
Keep readingBig Feelings — Sept. 15, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Reaching Out 🤙Go Big, Texas 📕🔥🔥🔥JFK Theory🔫 I’ve had big feelings all my life. I didn’t know until I was in my early 40s that this and a bunch of other “big” things I thought everyone experienced were actually only part of the lives of very few. Welcome to the empath…
Keep readingSwift and Stupid — Sept. 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dumb Newspapers 🗞️Dumb Politician 🗳️Dumb Soda Decision🥤 I was a newspaper man when it was stunningly common for leadership to do extremely stupid things. For example, I sat in meetings where our company’s higher-ups talked glowingly about the massive, multimillion dollar printing plant it was building at the exact same time…
Keep readingSad Songs — Sept. 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Minor Issue ♭Never Forget Bet 🤑Surge 🍺 Songs are sadder these days. At least, that’s according to an analysis of the Billboard Hot 100 list. Half are in a minor key — i.e. sad — up from roughly 30 percent at the turn of the 21st century and 15 percent from…
Keep readingThirsty AI — Sept. 11, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Glug Glug Glug 🌊9/11 Farce 💣Men Behaving Badly🤦 I’m pretty sure artificial intelligence is going to spell the end of society as we know it. It just might not have been in the way I first thought. According to a study by researcher Shaolei Ren (not related to Kylo, to the…
Keep readingBitter Batteries — Sept. 10, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Swallow That 🔋Hamster Ball🐹Judging Google🧑⚖️ Modern-day Muricah is set up for the lowest common denominator. We are a dumb nation full of morons who do dumb things, and because of that, capitalism responds with dumb products. Don’t believe me? I give you this: I get that kids will put just about…
Keep readingWaschbärenproblem — Sept. 9, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Drunk, Horny Raccoons 🦝Influencer B.S.🎙️Fall 🍁 Germany has a raccoon problem, and it’s all Hitler’s fault. This, I learned after seeing an article about how beer-drunk raccoons were killing pets, breaking into homes and generally being bastards in the Motherland. Which got me wondering: Why does Germany have raccoons? Turns out…
Keep readingLazy — Sept. 8, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Montenegroans 🛏️Cave Conundrum 🩸Urinal reading 🚽 For more than 20 days now, people in Montenegro, which I hear is a country, have been lying down and doing nothing. This is news. As of this writing, seven contestants remain in a competition to crown Montenegro’s Laziest Citizen. The grand prize is the…
Keep readingShit Happens — Sept. 6, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Poop Problem 💩Airbnb Problem 🧑⚖️Oil Problem 🚙 I want to go to Spain. I want to eat tapas in Barcelona and talk with a lisp and have a grand vacation. But I don’t want it so bad that I would have wanted to be on a Delta flight that left Atlanta…
Keep readingOnlyMoney— Sept. 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Big Bank💰Second Glance 👀Life 🎲 The owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Radvinsky, earned more than $338 million in dividends last year, according to a financial statement obtained by People. That’s more than $1.3 million per working day based on the 20% the site keeps from women, who, among other things, let users…
Keep readingMcBullshit — Sept. 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Ice Cream Problem🍦GOP Clarence🧑🏿⚖️Corn 🌽 At one point yesterday, more than 12% of all the ice-cream machines in McDonald’s were reported broken. I know that because the interwebs are amazing. So infamous are these machines for not doing the only thing they are here to do that some brilliant soul made…
Keep readingBump, Set, Spike — Aug. 31, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Nebraska Volleyball 🏐Zombie Mitch 🧟Opening Day L ⚾ My first beat as a freshman college sports reporter for Drake University’s newspaper, The Times-Delphic, was the women’s volleyball team. The largest crowd I ever saw at one of their games was around 11. Last night, the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers set a…
Keep readingAI Sportswriters — Aug. 30, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Newspapers Suck 📰Tomato Chuckin’ 🍅Sad Anniversary 😔 Dignity was hard to come by in the newspaper industry back when I left it in 2009, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Sportswriters in the Evil Empire Gannett chain had to endure watching artificial intelligence attempt to cover an Ohio high school football…
Keep readingCoffee Concrete — Aug. 27, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Grounds for Strength ☕Improved Eyesight 🤓No Phones 📴 Based on my own actions, I am not an environmentalist. This isn’t to suggest I don’t care about the environment. I do. But that doesn’t mean I go out of my way to recycle or channel my inner Greta Thunberg when making daily…
Keep readingFunk, Bray, ‘Taker — Aug. 26, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩The Deadman Speaks 🪦NCAA Sucks 🏈Safe Cities 🏢 I became aware of professional wrestling shortly after Wrestlemania I, which took place in March 1985. My parentals smartened me up immediately, letting me know the spike Road Warrior Animal was driving into Dusty Rhodes’ eye was not, in fact, being done out…
Keep readingSick Day — Aug. 24, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Why You’re Off 😷Meat 🍖Bad Flight ✈️🔥 “Sorry, boss. Can’t make it in *coughcough* today. I’m *sneezebarfsound* sick.” Today is Aug. 24, the most popular day of the year for employees to call out sick, according to a survey by PTO management software company Flamingo. At first, I couldn’t figure out…
Keep readingCar Troubles — Aug. 22, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Auto Prices🚗Heat Ball ☀️⚾Country Music 🪕 We are stupid country inhabited by stupid people. This, I have believed for a long time, and data continues to prove me right. A year or so ago, I wrote about the Seven Steps to the Dawn of Dystopia. In that, I laid out a…
Keep readingPig Kidney — Aug. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Oink🐖Jaws 2X 🦈🦈Practice Dinger ⚾ A pig kidney implanted into a human is still working after a month. In a big step toward using animals to help ease the shortage of donated organs, the surgical team at NYU Langone that transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a brain-dead man (with his…
Keep readingDoctor Day — Aug. 16, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dr. Spezia✋Hawk-Snake-Woman 🦅🐍👩Opening Lines 📣 Today I get to go to the Advanced Bone & Joint office in St. Peters to have my increasingly numb left hand examined. Side note before we continue: St. Peters is the most Missourah of Missourah town names. If it’s more than out Saint Peters, it…
Keep readingHello, COVID — Aug. 15, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩COVID 🖕Vroom 🏎️Gong 🤌 Wifey Poo awoke yesterday morning and had a stuffy nose and scratchy throat. We went about our days, me going to my job and her doing a variety of shuttling for children. When we met back up at our home, she still had a stuffy nose and…
Keep readingSpreadsheets — Aug. 10, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Fuck Excel 🖕Toilet Talk 🚽Baseball = Life ⚾ I was around 8-years-old when my father taught me the precursor to Microsoft Excel. It was a database program called Lotus 1-2-3 in which you could enter information into cells with formulas to speed results. Then, he was showing me how to create…
Keep readingJesus Christ, That Hurts! — Aug. 6, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩’I’m a Christian’⛪Numb Fingers ✌️Nuclear Propaganda 💣 Here’s something of a trend I’ve noticed: The more someone professes their adherence to Christianity in non-spiritual settings, the more likely you are to have to dig their knife out of your back. Currently wiggling one free from a “Christian” baseball coach whose actions…
Keep readingPool Poop — Aug. 4, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Wifey Poo Birthday🎂Indictment Punch Card 🦹🏼Trade Deadline ⚾ Not gonna lie to you folks: Coming back to this whole writing-personal-stuff thing feels a little bit like getting back in the pool on a hot summer day after it had been cleared because the weird kid shit in it and they needed…
Keep readingHello Again — Aug. 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Return to Writing ✍️Fuck Work 🖕Ghostly 👻 I’m back! “Wait. You were gone?” Yes, I was gone! Dumbass. Didn’t you read my awesome “Goodbye” post from mid-June? “Um, no.” Well that was part of the point! No one reads this shit. So why write it? “Quick question then?” Sure. Fire away.…
Keep readingGoodbye — June 15, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Farewell When I started this section of my website, where I’d write a whole bunch of creative and also personal things, I was a very different person than I am today. In so, so many ways, I was a shattered human being. I’d just gone through an extremely challenging time in…
Keep readingThe Moment — June 11, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Heavy Weight 🏋️Saving Seats 💔Five Stories 🖊️ There’s this one Moment every morning in which everything comes back. Maybe you have a Moment too. Sometimes, that distance between the return of consciousness and the Moment is minutes or, in extremely rare cases, hours. More often than not, the Moment comes within…
Keep readingNot Writing — June 9, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Drained Energy 🪫Saving Seats 💺Right Again ✅ Honestly, I don’t feel like writing. To anyone who reads my stuff regularly on here, and I really don’t think there’s more than one or two of you, you might be aware that I haven’t felt like writing for much of the past month.…
Keep readingSafe at First — May 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Leg Pain 😧Graduation 🎓Orca Attacks ⛵ There was a precise moment on Saturday as I was moving this broken down, underused, untended nearly 49-year-old body down the first base line of a baseball field at McNair Park in St. Charles, Missourah, that I realized I was in trouble. I was lookin’…
Keep readingWhiskey and Cigars — May 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Porch Talk 🥃Jacket and Tie 👔Strep 🤒 I find great comfort and relaxation in sipping a glass of good bourbon or whiskey while smoking an equally good cigar. Add a beautiful night, a screened-in porch and some good company who wants to be there, and I’m in heaven. Tuesday evening, that…
Keep readingReligious Exodus — May 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Jesus Wept 😥Good Mom, Bad Mom 👩Baseball Success ⚾ In 1990, just 7 percent of Muricans considered themselves non-religious. Today, that number has quadrupled. Depending on whom you ask, this is either a sign of our descent into earthly hell or a great awakening to the sins of the institution most…
Keep readingSlog — May 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Life Right Now 😥Classmate’s Death 😥TUP 😠 I long ago lost any semblance of the notion that life could be easy. To the best of my recollection, this shattering of innocence occurred for good somewhere in the third grade, when I was dealt my first really shitty teacher (I imagine Mrs.…
Keep readingSad vs. Depressed — May 4, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Scratchy Sweater 😥Birthday Boy 🎂Fucking Facebook 😠 I think there’s a big difference between being depressed and being sad. And I think I’m qualified to talk about that difference because I’ve been both. Some say that depression is sadness that lasts, which I think discounts the true power of sadness. True…
Keep readingPorn — May 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩One in Two? ✌️Isolation 😥Really, HR? 😠 OK ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. If you’re flanked by two men, one of them likely has been on Pornhub today. I used math today to figure that out. (Proud of me, aren’t ya, Wifey Poo?) I read a…
Keep readingIowa Visit — May 2, 2023
🧩 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…
Keep readingListening 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…
Keep readingBaseball 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…
Keep reading3:32 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…
Keep readingLiving — 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…
Keep readingTeam 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…
Keep readingFalling 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,…
Keep readingToxic 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…
Keep readingNickname 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…
Keep readingDental 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…
Keep readingNot 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…
Keep readingWTF 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…
Keep readingThe 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…
Keep readingAfrican 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…
Keep readingAfrican 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…
Keep readingTech 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…
Keep readingExit 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 –…
Keep readingBlah — 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…
Keep readingFloss 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…
Keep readingThe 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…
Keep readingDeath 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…
Keep readingFinishing — 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…
Keep readingSorry, 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…
Keep readingPeaking — 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…
Keep readingThe 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…
Keep readingTribe — 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…
Keep readingMindful 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…
Keep readingAfter 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…
Keep readingAngry 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.…
Keep readingCorruption, 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…
Keep readingHome 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…
Keep readingWal-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…
Keep readingShit 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…
Keep readingBrain 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.…
Keep readingDrugs — 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…
Keep readingMissourah 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…
Keep readingPokey 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…
Keep readingStuck 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…
Keep reading‘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…
Keep readingSnow — 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.…
Keep readingSTUPID 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…
Keep readingWriting 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…
Keep readingCeilings — 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…
Keep readingMovie 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…
Keep readingAnimal 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…
Keep readingBad 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…
Keep readingDone — 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…
Keep readingMedia 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…
Keep readingSantos 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…
Keep readingInstitutions — 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…
Keep readingFinishing — 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…
Keep readingFifty 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,…
Keep readingVision 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…
Keep readingThe 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…
Keep readingFreezing 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…
Keep readingJacob 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…
Keep readingJoe(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…
Keep readingDoughnut 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…
Keep readingJames 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…
Keep reading