Notes from the Post-it Wall — Week of May 21, 2017
• Some of my Facebook friends are trolls. Some of my Facebook friends troll the trolls. It can be fun to watch the fight play out but it also reminds me that some of my friends are real pricks.
The Rabbit Hole of Sewage and Unrestrained Horror
In the dawn of the New Era of Emotional Primacy, the concept that our emotions are the most intelligent approach to decision making is just as shortsighted and just as completely chuckleheaded. As I've written before, in a world of Kirks, we need a few more Spock's. Spock generally walked the Good Captain through the consequences of his poorly thought-out actions.
Our Two Children
Yet, there’s a part of us that will rejoice in Donnie’s failure. It will cease further damage done to our nation, and in a way, it rights our wrong. But we still have Hillary to worry about. Hillary is the kind of daughter who loves her parent just enough to put us in an old folks home so we won’t get lonely in our dying days. But it’s the old folks home right off the highway with the orderlies who sweat in our soup.
Ce n'est pas votre vie (This is not your life)
Perhaps the desire to have an omnipotent god floating above and beyond us is the desire to have some being see and record the objective truth, untainted by human memory or the traps of ego or of believing that which you choose to believe rather than what is true. An idea that somewhere there is an accounting for our mistakes and misdeeds, or silent moments of suffering or failure, the betrayals and disloyalty, the hidden opinions expressed in odd looks or coded phrases by someone or something untouched by our daily grind.
If Trump Is Not Your President, Try Not Acting Like Him
The sudden scorched earth viciousness of doing everything instantly to destroy someone you disagree with is almost comical if it weren't so stunted and counterproductive. But it works for Trump, so why not, right? Or maybe it doesn't work in the long run as we can see four months into his reign.
I Believe... [Trump vs. Harrison]
...that the idea of a male romper is more distressing than the man-bun, the endless facial hair and the fake enthusiasm for kale. I may move to Wyoming and live in a cave to avoid modern fashion trends.
Recalibrating the Daily Grind (Like College but With Higher Stakes)
On more pragmatic levels, it's slightly terrifying. In practice, I still have to do things on task that generate income and no one I know is going to pay me to masturbate and eat bricks of cheese while watching Better Call Saul for eight hours at a stretch. The dawning realization is that there have to be rules that I commit to following just like when chained to a public radio cubicle inches from the little twat I trained and who finally found the backhanded courage to impale me in the spine with Sharpies.
This time, however, the rules are mine to create.
This New Job is Making Me so Emo, I Could Cry
In less than one week, I will show up to an office with lots of cubicles and paid time off for its employees, a Human Resources Department and company-wide team building events. This is a full-time gig. It’s a W2 kind of gig. I haven’t had a gig like this in almost seven years. And I’m looking forward to it in the way 16-year-old David looked forward to going on a date with that girl who finally showed some interest in him. And I’m an emotional goddamn wreck over the whole thing.
Bay Leaf Game Theory (and Other Lessons from My Mother)
When I was a kid, we weren't exactly flush for a lot of my growing up. Granted, I wouldn't have known it because my mother often worked several jobs to feed my sister and I. My mother would not let us wallow in the bucket of self pity that she saw in others. Whenever we started feeling "poor" she'd grab us up and spend the last of our money to take us out for a big night at Shakey's Pizza. "Poor people don't eat at Shakey's Pizza so we aren't poor," she'd demand.
It's a lesson I've kept with me all my life.
Notes from the Post-it Wall — Road Trip Edition
• The President George Bush Turnpike being a toll road is hilarious irony, and sort of a fuck you to the people of Texas.
Creation Does Not Guarantee Equality
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Jesus Christ, that's a high bar. I mean, first, the whole "endowed by their Creator" hits the religion thing pretty hard on the nose. For this post, let's just assume that in spite of their vast knowledge of the Magna Carta and the enormously well read nature of our Founding Fathers, they were still sort of a bizarre group of highly superstitious religious types, admit the flaw and move on, OK?
It's that almost comical statement that "all men are created equal." Ignore the fact that they only meant men and only white men and only rich white men. Let's take the phrase as we interpret it today. That WE ARE ALL CREATED EQUAL.
I hate to break it to you but that's complete horseshit.
Adults Put in the Work
Let's be amazingly reductionist for a moment.
There are 100 people.
25 of them voted for Trump and the existing Republican Party.
27 voted for Hillary (but only 18 of them wanted her as the candidate...)
2 voted for candidates outside of the two-party system.
10 couldn't vote (mostly through voter obstruction.)
36 simply didn't vote at all.
What are the potential strategies to moving in a direction perhaps less poised for complete and utter disaster under a continued regime of GOP controlled governance?
The Illinois-Missouri Derby
I could have made the drive inside of two days had I been alone. But I had the wife and the dog, and when you’re driving the 1,164 miles between Chicago and Austin, Texas with souls on board other than your own, it’s best to make pit stops along the way.
Springfield. Kate was unimpressed with Lincoln’s home. “It looks too nice for being that old,” she said.
“You would have been even more unimpressed if they’d just let nature take its course for these past 152 years,” I told her.
Making Space and Rejecting Ego
You are not your popularity or your lack of it.
You are not the number of “likes” on your Facebook feed.
You are not your credit score.
You are not the number of dates you went on.
You are not your ability to influence others to do the things you want them to do.
You are not your weight or your body image.
I Believe...
I believe...
Playing Dead in the Face of Responsibility
Human beings are among the most vulnerable creatures on the planet. No armor, no big claws, can't fucking run fast, not particularly strong. Even the strongest man on the planet (you know, the redneck fucker who can pull a tractor with his teeth or hang an anvil from his balls) is just a thin-skinned hot dog meal to a mountain lion.
So we compensate with misdirection.
Kindly Persuasion Works Better Than Outrage
When Abraham Lincoln was 33 years old, he gave a speech inside a Presbyterian church to a temperance society. His message: The assembled ought to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol, rather than shunning them, or denouncing them as moral pestilences. Indeed, they ought to use “kindly persuasion,” even if a man’s drunkenness had caused misery to his wife, or left his children hungry and naked with want.
The Enemy is Us
If you hire soldiers to become policemen, civilians become the enemy.
Obama Making that Paper the American Way
I don't wish heartbreak on anyone, but I can’t help to laugh at the outrage and sadness that former president Barack Obama is going to collect $400,000 to speak to a Wall Street investment bank. We don’t know what he’s going to do with the money. Build his library? Invest in Chicago Public Schools? Buy Michelle a shitload of sleeveless dresses? Donate it to the Carter Center?
Notes from the Post-It Wall — Week of April 30, 2017
... I picked apart a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup. The chocolate on its own, kinda sucks. The peanut butter on its own kinda sucks. Eating the chocolate and peanut butter separately is like Paul McCartney and John Lennon. They’re completely awful unless they’re together. ...
The second voice arrived on Thursday morning while Monte was attempting to make toast.