Mistaking a gimmick for a concept is surest, shortest path to being ignored.

There’d be something deliciously ironic about political hacks who’d look like NASCAR drivers if they wore the names and logos of every company and billionaire they’re in hock to yammering on about paid protestors and such with an unconvincing veneer of imitation earnestness, if irony weren’t dead.

People have already stopped paying attention, assuming they ever started in the first place. Every day, this is true of something new.

Bicycle headlights have two settings: Anemic Firefly and Reignite the Sun

The English language has been begged and borrowed from virtually every other language in history, and typically works about as well as a car built from whatever parts you could steal from a junkyard. However, it also contains the word “discombobulated,” which washes away a multitude of sins.

I’m listening to Rick Rubin read his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, for at least the second time. I love it because it’s entirely nonlinear and meditative. And then I got to the part where he says “Impatience is an argument with reality,” and it floored me all over again.

In trying times like these, it heartens me to remember that “galumph” (verb) is an actual word in the English language, available for conversational employment at no extra charge.

Inhaling the smell of rain, mixed with notes of the first decaying leaves going from yellow to brown on the lawn, a different weight to the air.

Scared off a squirrel that’d been chowing down on something on the porch when I opened the door to go outside. Turned out it was a piece of roast chicken. And it’s a pity I don’t speak squirrel because I have so many questions.

Hockey season has begun, my team’s first game is underway, and here I am pretending to be ready to have my torn asunder and stomped unmercifully in dozens of bizarre and unspeakable ways between now and next spring

Anything worth thinking is worth overthinking. - Me, after wondering whether or not I should post this for actual minutes

I imagine it’s much easier to appear “calm” and “reasonable” when your own fundamental rights aren’t being debated, violated, curtailed or used as a politically expedient bargaining chip. Reality isn’t just a thought exercise.

I think the longest playlist I have is All The Cringiest, Most Embarrassing and Humiliating Things I’ve Ever Said or Done, which is playing nonstop in my head and takes up so much of my hippocampus that I can no longer make new memories.

Hi, I’m the radical left, I guess? Anyway, pleased to meet you. Guess we’ve got some work to do. Pour you a drink?

This week has had more red flags than Moscow on May Day.

So apparently I was listening to music when I was supposed to be learning how to make friends or something.

Spoiled children make the worst adults.

New Bike Day is always a good day. Good to get some miles in while the weather’s not sucky.

Writing teaches you many lessons in life, one of the most important being that whatever it is you’re trying to say, someone else has already said it better.

I was about to reply to a particularly inane and pointless comment with “You know you can just not say anything” and then for once I decided to actually follow my own advice. Except for saying this. Dammit.

For those who missed out on the nonstop knee-slapping hilarity of The Cold War, we’re now perpetrating exactly the sort of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that we used to unequivocally condemn, covertly invade and/or topple the governments of other nations for.

Baseball is not my favorite sport, but my enduring affection for it is rooted in both its connection to my beloved hometown of St. Louis and also its surprising usefulness as a rich source of metaphorical clarity in life and work.

There are far too many people who don’t know much of anything except that they’re always right.

I’m not an environmentalist because I love animals, insects, plants and trees more than I love humans. I’m an environmentalist because I understand that a planet without animals, insects, plants and trees cannot sustain human life.

One of the great tragedies of our time is that we never got to experience Anthony Bourdain and Werner Herzog doing a buddy comedy together.

Years ago, a friend who’s a career Air Force officer told me, “We’re in a world where the military is at war, but the country isn’t.” He felt that people, especially politicians, loved to pay lip service to honoring the armed services and those who serve the country.

I probably shouldn’t spend quite so much time preparing myself for arguments I’m never going to have.

I read because every so often I will come across a sentence or a paragraph that stops my eyes and my mind in their tracks and makes me wish that I’d written it. I write in the vain and somewhat selfish hope of someday making someone else do the same thing.

The problem with trying to outsmart the odds is that the odds don’t care how about how smart you are, or anything else.

“Promise me that if I ever find the courage to think like a hero, then you will act like a merely decent human being” is a line from the movie The Russia House that’s stuck with me for decades. And has been much on my mind lately because this feels like a time when I need to do more of both.

Everybody thinks they’ll be the exception to the rule.

A banger, still and always. youtu.be/VSv8FVJtbAk?...

When all else fails, say what you mean.

Maybe it’s just Gen-X nostalgia, but I do be believe that poor Walter Cronkite’s head would have exploded if he had been handed the President’s latest digital missive to read to the nation on the CBS Evening News.

I shoot an unremarkably mediocre game of pool with occasional, erratic flashes of luck and skill, like a fluorescent light that’s going bad. I peak after about one cocktail and drop off precipitously after that. Cue balls will occasionally leave the table, but it’s all in good fun.

Ever had an idea that won’t leave you alone? You know the one. You try to put it out of your mind, but it refuses to take the hint. Every time you turn around, there it is, tapping its imaginary little foot impatiently.

There’s inspiration in the restless search for a few threads of magic and wonder in something mundane and tiresome, the challenge to pull them together into a sentence, a story that’s a pleasure to write and to read. That and the white-knuckle thrill of a mercilessly looming deadline, of course.

Uncurious people perplex me. And vex me sorely, truth be told.

Your loved one may be entitled to compensation if you keep whistling the melody of that damn early ‘80s Depeche Mode song like that.

I still believe in impossible things. It’s just that the bar for “impossible” is currently hovering somewhere in the vicinity of “go an entire week without experiencing existential dread.”

I’m working on a project that feels like I’ve been given a cactus and tasked with making it huggable.

I guess the plus side of a chief executive who’s quite likely in Putin’s back pocket and almost certainly detached from reality is that Reagan would’ve had jets in the air and ICBMs armed 30 seconds after learning that Russian military aircraft had violated a European ally’s airspace.

Cold War kid me, reading the news tonight about Russian drones over Poland.

As you’re being stalked by an apex predator intent on devouring you, the most important thing to do is find common ground. Try to see things from its point of view, seek compromise, and look for ways to work together.

There’s a quote that gets attributed to John Steinbeck about socialism never taking root in America because the poor see themselves not as exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires and I’ve thought about it every day for the past 10 years because it’s not just the poor.

The best art in the world is the art that speaks to you, that sparks an emotional reaction, that makes you feel understood in unexpected ways. No one else’s opinion matters.

*Kansas voice* Dust and cat hair Everywhere there’s dust and cat hair

“Where or where has my partner gone?” cries the lonesome sock. “Check the corner of the fitted sheet, dummy.” replies a chorus of t-shirts. A wise old towel simply nods.

Who I wanted to be when I fell in love with hockey as a kid. What a legend, what a life.

I am not about to go gently into that good night, career-wise. But I might need to dial back the raging against the dying of the light a bit in the interest of continued employability.