Fifteen Years Later
I finally met my mildly reviled neighbor . . .
Reflections on My Year as a Windy City Empire Duchess
So I became Empress Kate’s Duchess for Empire 15 of the Imperial City Court of the Prairie State Empire, or Windy City Empire for short.
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of November 24, 2019
We can’t predict the future. Therefore, we can’t predict how history will play out. We can, however, make informed estimates on how history will play out based on history itself. But that leaves a lot of room for a large margin of error. Squeeze that in among all of your certainty.
Hope Idiotic | Part 26
Chuck’s mother was sick again. A massive heart attack. She was in the I.C.U. for three days. Chuck arrived three days later. Neither his father, nor his brother thought to call him with the news that his mother was on the brink of death.
“She got home all right,” Darryl told Chuck over the phone.
“You people are unbelievable,” Chuck said. “I’m coming home.”
Thanksgiving: It’s All About Football and Farts, Bro
But Thanksgiving morning—oof. That’s the best. Since I was in third grade, every Thanksgiving morning, my childhood friends and I play seven-on-seven football. It’s the best. We freeze our nuts off at Willow Stream Park and all pretend we’re the next Tom Brady. You know, the Jewish one. Some of us don’t give a shit about the game and smoke doobies on the sideline, while others get overly competitive and call plays like the Annexation of Puerto Rico. We come home with chapped lips, bruised elbows, muddy clothes, and churning stomachs. Turkey Bowl is the most fun I have every November. Not because of the game itself, though, but because I get to see friends who’ve moved to San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Seattle, and even Beijing. Our annual game is my real Thanksgiving celebration—and I’m thankful for it.
The Minutes of Our Last Meeting | The War on Thanksgiving
I say we call it Thanksgetting.
You Know You Love White People Shit
You love Guy Fieri. You love Shark Tank. You love Nora Ephron. You love 5Ks. You love The Crown.
They’re Getting Rid of Time Out Rooms and Now There is No Legal Consequence for Dealing with Disruptive or Violent Students
I’m a bona fide Leftie with all my liberal merit badges but even I am aghast for teachers today. Without even the possibility of removing students from a room full of kids to calm them down or punish them with a bit of isolation from the very attention they so desperately crave, educators are fucked.
I Believe… [The Great Human Leveler]
…that without regard for political ideology, activist dogma, religious belief or sexual identity, we are all leveled human by the flu.
Hope Idiotic | Part 25
Lou shot straight up in bed. What did she just say? Am I drunk? Dreaming? Am I being punked? he thought. Lou could only recall one instance in their entire relationship—including their friendship before they dated—in which Michelle apologized outright like that. It was back in college, and it was for hardly anything worth apologizing. She got really drunk at a boyfriend’s frat house, fell in the pool, got into a fight with the boyfriend and called Lou for a rescue. They spent the night in his bed like a brother sharing space with his sister. The following morning she apologized with shame in her voice. This apology on the phone was something else entirely. And he needed to know more.
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah: How to Square the Circle of Disney’s Past With Today’s Need For Revisionist Cleansing
“It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”
Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of November 17, 2019
Political/social stridency is about as attractive a trait in a person as Jimmy Fallon fandom.
Muffled in German Luxury
It was noon and the streets were jammed with stylized fashionistas in hybrid SUVs driving their car-seated darlings who’d been born in our Taj Mahal Birthing Center to ballet, voice, or parent-toddler yoga.
Hope Idiotic | Part 24
When most people travel to Las Vegas, they spend a week drinking and gambling and trading venereal diseases with strangers. Maybe they take in a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon. Lou’s week in Vegas was spent interviewing for a job and repairing his house, which had been haphazardly battered and bruised by his best friend and tenant, a recovering alcoholic.
The Minutes of Our Last Meeting | Presidential Pardons
I have a lot of respect for soldiers who don’t say bad things about me.
Tips from the Universal Household Assistant | Lumber—facts about.—
It’s not that I haven’t entertained the notion of moving before. And it’s not that I think moving is some special thing you should only do if you’re twenty-something or retired or relocating for a job. But why am I so obsessed with the idea of moving that I spend hours in the middle of the night scrolling through Trulia, yet so paralyzed by the idea I can’t talk to a realtor?
Eat the Best Parts, Discard the Rest
I am not a Native American person.
I mean, I can’t say that I know any and I have to assume that modern Native Americans are no longer much like those from Dances with Wolves but my perception of those hunters and gatherers of the pre-colonized North America is that they were truly ecological in their approach. Kill the deer and eat or use all the parts as a sign of respect and a noncommerce-based frugality. Utilize the entire buffalo to be seen as a virtuous steward of nature because it’s okay to kill the animal as long as you use the shit out of the last sinew and bone.
I respect that concept and when it comes to ideas, I used to be that guy who found a new, shiny worldview or ideology and, if I discovered things I liked about it, took the whole load down my throat and proselytized it as all zealots do.
I Believe... [No New Pants]
…that I no longer care so much about my diet or exercise so much as I just don’t want to have to buy new pants.
Hope Idiotic | Part 23
He burst through the apartment door like a savage. It was just past one in the morning, and Michelle was in bed asleep. He started to kick his shoes off, but he noticed that she hadn’t closed the closet doors. He hated it when she left the closet doors open during the night. He pulled the folding doors to close but something was on the sliding track preventing him from closing the closet. Lou thrashed and thrashed them again. When he realized what was blocking the doors—some of Michelle’s shoes that had been pulled out—he kicked at them and a heel or two slammed against the wall of the closet as the door path became clear. “Fucking shoes!” he shouted. “To hell!”
What’s an Mp3 Again?
We had finished lunch at Arby’s.
Then took me to his place, which was his parents’.
A lovely home decorated in northeastern Americana
heavy on the light houses.
His bedroom looked like the bedroom of a twenty-year-old
who lived with his parents
and attended a university a fifteen-minute drive away.
Ten minutes longer than his commute to high school.
The first chapter of an in-progress novel.
“The voice began on a Tuesday morning while Monte Walsh was standing in his kitchen, holding an unopened package of bacon over the garbage can.”