You know you're really a winner when you get an offer for a free colonoscopy, but there's even more good news on the horizon this week...
 
Surge stiffing. Sometimes, I’ll take pity on a server in an empty restaurant and I’ll add a few bucks to their tip. That means I can stiff the servers when the restaurant is bustling, right? Hello?

Totally tasteless. Every so often, I’ll decide to try a new recipe and things will be going pretty well until I get to the last step. If I had any idea how to, “Season to taste,” I wouldn’t need to be following a recipe in the first place.

Bark once for yes. If a dog ages roughly (ruffly?) the equivalent of 12 human years in its first year of puppyhood, should we have a birthday party for them once each month? Dog-friendly restaurants are waiting anxiously for your opinion.

Wearing thin. My doctor say I can no longer consume red meat, alcohol, bacon, French fries or pizza. It’s called the Dyson Diet, because it sucks all the joy out of life.

Make me an offer. Speaking of healthcare, I just got invited to webinar about colon cancer screening and treatment and they highlighted that the webinar is FREE. Once, when I was much younger, my inbox overflowed with pleas from Nigerian princes and amorous Russian babes, but now my life has come to this. At least the colon cancer webinar is FREE, because those Russian babes turned out to be very, very expensive.

Call me, maybe. Remember when there was a big to-do about everyone asking for your Social Security number and it seemed businesses were prohibited from using it as your identifier? Good times. Now, it’s your cell phone number, which is the new key to entry everywhere. A couple of weeks ago, the host at a restaurant asked for my number, I gave it to her, and I was already on whatever database the restaurant uses for its reservations. Burner phones. They’re not just for drug dealers anymore.

The road taken, more or less. I made a choice that changed my life yesterday. When the light turned green, I opted to go straight instead of turning left and, now, everything else that happens in my future will be affected by that very major decision. We tend to think about the big turning points, the dramatic moments, when we look at our histories, but those might not be the most meaningful events. Those are the events we remember, but only because we were there, at that time, after a million other choices along the way.

Ciao buona. If exercising regularly makes you stronger and reading more makes you more well informed, shouldn’t eating more make you thinner? Asking for a friend.
 
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Being a true conservative, I decided to go to the No Kings Rally yesterday at Grant Park in Chicago. I thought it was only fitting, being as conservative as I am, because the Founding Fathers disagreed about all kinds of things, except one.

Nobody wanted another king.

Yes, kids, it’s true. As it turns out, the Founders disagreed about how powerful the federal government should be, how to tax the commoners, where to put the Capital, and they even disagreed about slavery. They were absolutely determined not to have a monarchy, though, and that’s a true fact. You’d think they’d teach people about this in law school or during their Supreme Court orientation weekend, but that’s a post for another day.

Anyway, it seemed like this whole anti-monarchist sentiment was being dismissed as liberal Argle-bargle on right-wing media, so I figured I’d balance the turnout by showing up. I decided not to wear my Make America Great Again hat (a gift, I swear) or my ICE hat (a gift, I swear again) so I would blend in better with the crowd. Good thing I did, though, because there were no other MAGA/ICE hats on display. Maybe my conservative compatriots were as bashful as I am about showing off our strict-constructionism cred.

By my rough count, there were between 20-30,000 people in Grant Park, and I was impressed by the demographics. I saw a few people from recognizable minorities and some people who appeared to be under 40, but this was about as old and white a bunch as you’d have seen at a Grateful Dead concert. In the 70s, they were marching out of concern for the world they’d be living in and now they were back because they’re handing a much crappier world to their grandkids…and some brought placards that made that point clearly.

The speakers on stage tried to drum up enthusiasm with group chants and cheers, with only moderate success. White liberals don’t work well with organization and cohesiveness, which is evident whenever there’s a rally. Or an election, but that’s also for a future post.

A woman walked by with a sign against the Iranian incursion/excursion and she said she buried her son this week, one of the first U.S. military casualties of this not-a-war. I checked after I got home and, yes, six reservists who were killed in a drone strike came from a unit in Iowa that draws soldiers from Iowa, Illinois, and Minnesota. Freedom isn’t free, the politicians love to say, but the politicians are never the ones who pay the ultimate price.

As the march was ending and people started heading home, I wondered what it all meant. It’s safe to assume nobody in D.C. was watching the march and deciding to change course. Still, it probably made a difference to the people who attended and that impact can have ripple effects.

Increasingly, I have conversations with normies who see nothing but extremism represented on their feeds and they tell me how much they feel alone in the political world. As the algorithms promote conflict, they say, they’ll wonder if there is anyone who sees things the way they do. On Saturday, they saw the reality. They saw other people who feel the same way they do, without any social media filters. Many/most/all returned home just a bit less isolated, more confident, possibly emboldened to share their views with others.  

Will they change the arc of history? You never know. Still, it’s reassuring every so often to watch democracy in action.

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While driving home the other night, I started talking to myself, as only the smartest and most intelligent and well-adjusted and absolutely-not-crazy people do. I don’t remember exactly what I was saying, but I am sure it was witty and charming and filled with gravitas.

My car thought so, to, because SILEXA jumped out of the dashboard to ask how it could help. I ignored it (Her? Him? Does SILEXA have a gender?) and continued driving, but it reminded me to check my settings and stop the car, or maybe my phone, from eavesdropping on my most intimate conversations with myself.

It doesn’t really matter whether it was the car or the phone, though, because I never asked for this. Yes, there are times I cannot remember why I’m standing on a riverbank, wearing a tutu and holding a bloody knife, but I am sure I would remember asking my car to lend me an ear. Likewise, I know that, if someone had ever asked me if I wanted my car eavesdropping on me, just in case I needed something, I would have declined.

Add this to the list of incredible, time-saving, efficiency-building, supercharging-my-life improvements I cannot find a way to escape. I bought something from Walmart a couple of weeks ago and now I can’t get rid of a wallet app that I failed to reject. I get regular notices that I’m running out of storage in an iCloud folder I didn’t ask for. There are half a dozen sites I cannot access until I get past the pop-up that offers easy entry through my Google log-in. And my microwave won’t stop reminding me that I left the cat in there while I was taking my shower.

My doctor’s office sends me emails, but I need to log into MyChart to read them, including--really--"We are excited to let you know that we will be moving to a new office on March 31, 2026.” I needed to look up my password and wait for them to send a verification code to my phone for this? Couldn’t they just annoy me with regular emails like all my relatives do?

It's the death of 1,000 cuts, a labyrinth of obstacles and side roads that make every task just a bit slower, error-prone, and joyless. Exactly when is all this technology going to make life better?

I’m not kidding about that. I know I can get information more quickly than ever, but I’m also getting misinformation, disinformation, and scam links even faster. Every search leads to links and AI summaries that might, or might not, be accurate. I need to double check whatever I’m reading more than I did before AI started making my life easier. Net-net, am I really ahead of the game?

Not that many years ago, I could walk out the door and flag down a cab. Now, I need to have a ride-share account that’s costing me more and paying the drivers less than the system it replaced. Worse, the cab drivers actually had an idea where they were going, while all my gig-working friends are still staring at their screens after ten years as drivers. There was probably a time when I said the taxi industry couldn’t get worse. I was so very, very wrong.

I was going to write more about this subject, but my phone has been pinging like crazy while I've been typing and I'm sure it's something really, really important. I mean, nobody would be sending so many texts if it wasn't incredibly important. Right?
 
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Everyone’s panicked about the price of oil these days, but I really don’t see what the big deal is here. After Venezuela and Iran follow Greenland, Canada, Cuba and Mexico as our newest states, gas will be less than a buck a gallon and we’ll all be laughing about the whole thing.

That’s the problem with the mainstream media, politicians, economists and talk-show hosts. They’re always focused on the same thing and, almost always, it’s not even the thing that’s most important. They even come up with fake gimmicks like THE MISERY INDEX to measure the pain caused by higher prices for things like gas or rent or mortgages or dominatrices.*

Per usual, they’re missing the point. Prices go up and down all the time, but 99% of our economic misery is driven by just one metric: $50 pizzas.

It doesn’t matter who the president is or what mortgage rates are or how many Bitcoin you need to buy a dozen eggs. The battle is lost as soon as you need a portrait of U.S. Grant to pay for a decent pizza…and that means the battle has been lost.

I doomscrolled through the offerings on Door Hub a few days ago, just to see how much it would cost to have dinner with a couple of friends, if I ever made any friends. A medium pizza with sausage, mushroom, onion and green pepper—the minimum number of toppings for a Chicago pie—came in at $38.39, plus another $11.07 for delivery and fees, plus the 20% tip that’s a necessity if you don’t want the driver desecrating your dinner before you get it.

That totals up to roughly $59, basically a Grant and a Hamilton, if the delivery services sullied themselves with actual cash. And, did I mention, the pizza arrives ever-so-slightly colder than when it came out of the oven?

If misery loves company, $50 pizzas can create enough demand to fill a football stadium. Of course, the pizza in one of those facilities would be $50 per slice, but at least the fans would be too sloshed on $87 beers to feel the pain, at first.

In a way, I’m encouraged by the fact that nobody wants to be my friend, so I don’t have to invite anyone to dinner and I can avoid paying $59 (plus beer!!!) to stuff their fat, ungrateful faces. Yes, I could order a pizza from Little Caesars or Pizza Hut or someplace else that’s really cheap, but I tried that already and that’s why nobody wants to be my friend anymore.

This is where I’d usually digress into a hazy memory of kids on bikes delivering pizzas as a part-time gig and no middlemen to grab 30% of the total transaction as their technology toll. Don’t worry, though, because I’m not even going to mention those things.

Frankly, I’m just too miserable.

*Also, I looked up how to spell dominatrices while researching this post and I can't wait to write about all the ads I'm about to get every time I'm online. Seriously, folks, the sacrifices I make for my readers are immeasurable.

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We all know somebody like Jeffrey Epstein.

Not exactly like Jeffrey Epstein, I hope, but the reality is that he was of a type we all encounter in life.

He achieved success by leveraging people and cutting corners, using the appearance of success to draw the new connections that made him more successful. He was such a consistent manipulator that even his good friends knew not to trust him too much. They saw him cheat other people and they vowed they would not be so dumb as to allow the same fate for themselves, but that didn’t stop them from showing up at the party. It was fun and exciting and they wanted to be among the lucky few.

We all know somebody like that. They probably aren’t in the same circles as Epstein and Wexner and Trump, of course. Maybe they skated through high school on their looks or maybe they were hotshots on the playing field. Maybe their folks had a ton of money and they threw great parties or they had a job at a company where everyone wanted to work. Along the way, they got away with pretty much everything.

However, they got there, they were, are, and always will be the kind of people we swear (to God!!!!) we will never become. And yet, we all make the choice to stay in their orbit, despite our misgivings or revulsion at their character. Character is the key word here, because the same story repeats at all income levels, in all nations, among all faiths and ethnicities. Almost anyone, offered an invitation to hobnob with the rich and famous, would leap at the chance. It’s hypocritical to claim we aren’t like that, because we are.

Still, all the discussion about Epstein’s business dealings and who was on his jet and who his clients were is absolutely meaningless to me, a smoke-screen that distracts from the one thing that matters: sex trafficking. Hundreds or thousands of women and children have been shattered and I want to see their abusers tried, convicted and sentenced. If the statute of limitations precludes trial, I want them to be pariahs wherever they go. I want them to suffer for the rest of their lives the way they have created lifelong pain for the children and adults they scarred.

This is the big bright line in the Epstein saga, the line that cannot be erased. Stories about jets and parties and deals gone wrong are a diversion that protects the guilty. They connect to us as people, people who know and tolerate someone like Epstein. They allow us to forget the chronicles of lives destroyed.

On the political front—and what front isn’t political right now—this is a scandal to tarnish the enemy while protecting anyone on our side. It’s the Golden Age of Hypocrisy, brought to you by whoever is turning the levers of power. Right now, it’s the Republicans who own the Mark of Cain and they are accepting the diversionary challenge with relish.  In Washington, on social media, it’s a battle of memes and sound bites, both real and AImagined.

Lost in those sound bites is the bitter truth. This is about crime. Everything else is a shiny ball that distracts us from the singular focus that is the least we owe to the victims.

Every so often, there aren’t two sides to a story.
 
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I’m crossing the street with two of the grandkids when some jackass blows through the stop sign and head towards us. I pulled the kids back to the curb and, in a moment of pique, I chuck my water bottle at his car.

One of my better throws, too, because he’s about 100 feet down the street and the bottle hits his rear hatch with a resounding thud. Not accurate enough to reach home plate from center field, but absolutely good enough to grab his attention. And it does, too, because he suddenly remembers that his car came with brakes (standard equipment these days) and he screeches to a stop. He gets out of the car, leaves it in the middle of the street, and heads toward me—and the grandkids—while traffic backs up behind his SUV.

I’m right at my building, so I shuffle the kids in to a safe spot and turn to face the guy. He is furious, yelling, and extremely angry that I damaged his MERCEDES. Not his car. His MERCEDES. He reminds me many times that he is a MERCEDES owner and he will not tolerate some guy throwing a water bottle at his, did I mention, MERCEDES.

Eventually, he notices that a crowd has gathered to watch the MERCEDES OWNER screaming at an old guy wearing a U.S.S. Nimitz hat. He’s bigger than me and younger than me, and much angrier. I checked my surroundings and I already know how he’s going down, but I’ve got two frightened kids waiting for me and I don’t need the aggravation. Finally, he storms off and I go inside to restore some sense of safety for the children.

As I calm myself down, I’m thinking about guys who think their cars give them some sort of special license. Mercedes is a status car, like Beemers and, in ancient times, Cadillacs. They’re the cars that get vanity plates like, UNVME and BIGTIME and YESIATA. “Never in my life,” I said to myself, “will I ever be one of those guys.”

Full disclosure: I had a couple of Trans Am models that I referred to by brand name and I had license plates that said, “DADSV8.” That said, I was compensating for my lost youth, while my new friend was clearly compensating for, um, something else.

At the time of this incident, I was driving a 21-year-old Lexus sedan that I was determined to get past the 200,000-mile mark. I was close, too, until a fine young man drove his fine old car into mine and ended that quest. Back in the car market after well over a decade, I spent more than a month on the hunt and ended up with…you guessed it…a Mercedes.

It’s used, not new, although the price I paid at Autohaus on Edens got me much closer to new-car smell than I think was reasonable. Maybe the extra bucks were penance for all the times I’d mocked MERCEDES owners in the past. Who knows? As of now, I am a MERCEDES OWNER.

Now that I’m really, really special and a few levels above all the rest of you, I’m blowing through stop signs all day long. I wait for lights to turn red before I step on the gas. I take up at least two parking spaces in every parking lot I enter. It’s good to be the king.

JK. Nothing has changed inside the car, although I know people are making assumptions about me the same way I have done (almost 100% correctly) about status-car drivers in the past. Maybe I need to get a vanity plate that says, “NOTTA.”

That’ll work, right?
 
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