John Agliata – Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Crawl🎶
Finance🤑
Willing Hostages😑

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

1. Putting in earbuds and getting lost in music while tuning out the rest of the world.
2. The Diff’rnt Strokes episode with the creepy bike shop guy.
3. When the person with the loud, loud, loud annoying laugh at the next table in the restaurant finally leaves.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Three! BOOYAH.

Wordle 1,212 3/6

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Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: Six. The yellows … really?

Connections
Puzzle #490
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The song in my head when I woke up today: Crawl, by Breaking Benjamin

• Oct. 12: Failure, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 11: It Not Over, by Daughtry
• Oct. 10: Outside, by Staind
• Oct. 9: These Dreams, by Heart
• Oct. 8: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne
• Oct. 7: Complicated, by Avril Lavigne
• Oct. 5: Slide, by Goo Goo Dolls
• Oct 4: Evil Angel, by Breaking Benjamin
• Oct. 3: Right Here, by Staind
• Oct. 2: So Far Away, by Staind
• Oct. 1: I Will Follow You Into The Dark, by Death Cab For Cutie

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: Show me where it hurts, and I will make it worse.

Sleepy-Time Tunes: As I was falling asleep last night, I was listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcasts, because, sure, I need more evidence to showcase the waywardness of evangelical Christianity.

Something I’m looking forward to today: A day with nothing on the calendar.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: A charity trivia night next Friday.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: A fun couples date with Wifey Poo and the parents of one of my baseball players to Tony’s on Main Street in Saint Charles.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved some journaling.

What I’ve written: Molding Financial Minds: Lusine Baghdasaryan’s MEM course pushes engineers out of their comfort zone and gives them the foundational knowledge in accounting necessary for their future.

Vapid. It’s a word that keeps coming into my mind the more I participate in society. I wasn’t sure why, and, truthfully, I wasn’t sure of its precise definition. So I looked it up on the interwebs.

: lacking flavor, zest, interest, animation, or spirit : FLAT, DULL

a gossipy, vapid woman, obsessed by her own elegance — R.F. Delderfield

I look around at the world while I’m in it, and all I think sometimes is “vapid.”

People at concerts not experiencing the music but rather recording every second on their phones. Vapid.

Families in restaurants in which every single member is on a different device. Vapid.

Teenagers vamping for selfies while walking through a parking lot, oblivious to the cars trying to maneuver around them. Vapid.

All of this stuff that has become so important and integral to life in modern-day Muricah is disgusting and, yes, vapid. I feel like I’m on this never-ending carnival thrill ride with a crazy carney at the helm and there are screws flying out everywhere and everyone on the ride and watching the ride sees it and still doesn’t give a shit … not enough to say, “Um, something might be wrong here. Maybe we should find a way to stop the ride.”

Instead, we say things like, “Well, I know it’s bad for me, but I could never leave social media. I’d miss out on stuff,” and it’s true! It’s true that you would miss out on stuff and the only way you wouldn’t is if we all left social media en masse, together because it’s not only bad for our kids but it’s bad for us too. So we stay and we post stupid shit and we don’t think we’ve experienced an event or a vacation or a meal unless we post pictures of it and god help us if that picture doesn’t get liked or loved or commented upon by other vapid idiots who are doing the same damn thing, all the while knowing it’s a stupid waste of time and that algorithms have hijacked their brains and yet doing nothing to stop it.

I remember as a kid I watched this made-for-TV movie about the hijacking of an airplane that was then taken to the Middle East. Some passengers — those with connections to Muricah’s military industrial complex — were beaten and even killed. Everyone wanted to get off that goddamn airplane and get to safety, and the moment that opportunity presented itself, they did just that.

We’re so stupid that we’re hostages on a big-ass airplane and the hijackers are tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and whoever the hell is at the switches of Alphabet/Google/YouTube and we know the way off the plane and to safety but instead we’re saying, “Nah, I’m good.”

What. The. Actual. Fuck!?!?

Meanwhile, our own brains are being negatively rewired and, worse, we are allowing our children’s brains to be negatively rewired … and then we stupidly wonder why everything feels so goddamn off around here, why politics has gotten so divisive, why there’s so much hate, why it’s us-vs.-them and the thems is a group getting larger and larger by the day. We wonder why the public schools suck no matter how much money we pour into them and why teachers hate teaching and why behavior in classrooms is outrageous and why our test scores compared to the rest of the world (which ain’t all that much better when it comes to this stuff) are so much worse and why companies can’t find employees who aren’t so damaged by all this shit as to be actual useful employees.

Trust me. I know this makes me sound old and very get-off-my-lawn-ish. Fine. Whatever. I’m also right.

Think about stopping all social media. Think about putting your phone in a lockbox without the key or combination for 23 hours a day. Think about disconnecting the internet. Think about all that. Feel it. Does your heart race? Does your brain tell you, “I could never do that”?

That’s addiction, muthafucka! Addiction! And the thing is, most of us know that it’s addiction and that we are addicts, but instead of getting un-addicted, we throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s just how things are these days.” Beating addictions, changing behaviors at fundamental brain levels? That takes courage. We don’t have that in abundance these days.

So we get our “news” off TikTok and we have been led to believe in something called a Fake News conspiracy perpetrated by those with actual, ya know, news training. Why? Because so, so many of us worship a megalomaniacal despot who points to anything and everything that doesn’t serve his aims as being Fake News, and he’s one of the last two standing from our vaunted political process that we Muricans arrogantly think should be the model for the world’s “lost” nations. Really? Really?!?!? Is there any wonder why so many us believe immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, dine on their neighbors’ cats and dogs and that there’s a Democrat weather-controlling cabal causing hurricanes?

It’s all such vapid bullshit. I want off this tilt-a-whirl carnival ride. I want away from the crazy carneys at the helm. I want nothing more to do with those who participate in the vapidity, which I’m not sure is a word but which sounds fine to me so I’m going with it.

Maybe every generation feels something akin to this about the generations that have followed them. Maybe not. I don’t really care if what I’m feeling is odd, different or shared by one or a million others. I just don’t want to play this game anymore, don’t want to ride this ride anymore. I want it all to be done.

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?