Once again, it’s time to save a much-beleaguered minority group from the public shame and private regret that reduce their lives to ceaseless misery. We’ve already rescued lazy people and the absent-minded elderly and liars from the ignominy of their existence, and now we’re going to resurrect the reputations of hoarders.

Yes, hoarders, the people we mock for saving every National Geographic (Kids, ask your grandparents about this.) since 1942 and stashing their Nehru jackets (Kids, ask your grandparents about this.) in the back of the closet and cataloging their old printer cables (Kids…never mind.) in case the wi-fi goes out.

Disdained by the elites, these packrats are saving us all from disaster and getting damned little credit for their sacrifice. Those days are gone, though, as we bring packrattiness into the light and celebrate the true heroes of the world.

Yeah, the zeitgeist says we’re supposed to jettison anything that doesn’t bring us joy and less is more and minimalism is ultra-cool, but that’s just hipster blather. We all know better, and we’ve all experienced the blowback from even the most petty downsizing.

No matter what it is, no matter how long an old, useless, broken-down item (insert husband joke here) has been lying around the house (insert another husband joke here), we end up needing it desperately…one day after we throw it out. (Not husbands, but other stuff.) It doesn’t even matter if we know what the item is. If we toss it out, it becomes essential retroactively.

Last month, I finally dumped a bunch of old jars and lids that I was keeping in reserve, just in case I needed some old jars and lids for reasons I couldn’t imagine. After keeping the jars in a kitchen cabinet for three years, I finally lightened my burden. The next day, I needed something thin and metallic, much like the lids I had dumped, to keep some shelving from putting a dent in the floor.

The timing of dump/need is so precise, so uncanny, that I now believe my possessions are sentient beings who like where they live. When I send them to new surroundings, they almost cackle and say, “I will get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” (Kids, you are clearly too young to be reading this.)

Just to be safe, I’m never throwing anything away in the future, and I hope everyone else avoids the deadly mistake of cleaning house. Millions of us still have a box or two of N95 masks from the height of Covid and we’ve thought about sending them to the landfill, but we absolutely cannot do that.

If we do, we’ll be hit with a pandemic the next day. Nobody knows if it will be Covid 47,  rampant Ebola, or maybe even New World Screwworm jumping from cattle to humans, but we do know the only thing stopping the next plague is hoarded N95 masks.

Clearly, hoarders understand the karma of preservation, the incredible balance between excess inventory and critical reserves, and we are somehow better off for their sacrifice. That recognition makes me much more enthusiastic about my own collection of important artifacts, spare parts, and chatchkes.

Suddenly, all of it is bringing me joy.

I'm having second thoughts about what qualifies as news and I know Italy will be very disappointing, but let's share some punchlines first. If you don't know all the jokes, just buy me lunch or dinner, or maybe a Porsche, and I'll catch you up on them.

• You can call me Ray. I wrote a few weeks ago about going to a friend’s funeral and learning that everyone called him David, while I called him Dave. Later on, I realized that at least half of my long-time friends call me Mike, not Michael. I should probably object, but I’m grateful anyone talks to me at all.
• Suffering for their art. The people who own the movie theaters started putting in reclining seats with giant cushions to compete with the comfort levels we all experience while streaming at home, but the live theater owners haven’t caught on yet. Tiny seats, tiny cushions, zero leg room and,  even worse, no popcorn.
• A timely question. We always think we sound smart when we say a stopped clock is right twice a day. Problem is, we can never know when those two moments are going to come along. It’s like saying we should only buy lottery tickets on the day our number is coming up. Almost a tautology, but stupid, nonetheless.
• Batteries not included. Actually, that thing about stopped clocks makes even less sense than I thought  before, since most clocks are digital and they're never right when they're stopped. Glad I could clear that up for you. Next week, we debunk the idea that a penny saved is a penny earned.
• Smells like teen dispirit. I took a picture of my granddaughter making funny faces and posted it online and she thought it was absolutely great. A few years from now, she’ll be a teen and think it’s 200% mortifying. Humor is a constant, but audience tastes evolve.
• Duke! Get away from that man. Every so often, I think I should share some humor on this blog, but most of my favorite jokes involve long stories that lead to TL:DR replies. I’m solving the problem today, though, by just sharing the punchlines. IYKYK.
  • Now that’s how you wave a towel.
  • I’ll take the soup.
  • Ours is prettier.
  • So, tell me, Johnny, did you do it?
  • He had a hat!
  • Some people just don’t know how to tell a joke.
  • Yes, sir, but your wife has been here for two weeks.
  • You idiot! I sent you a truck and a canoe and a helicopter…
  • You’re really not in this for the hunting, are you?
  • (Seven punch lines too scatological to include in a family blog), and, of course…
  • The Aristocrats!!
• Old Standard. I stopped in at an ethnic restaurant the other day and concluded that the food was not really authentic because it didn’t taste like the first place I’d gone for that cuisine. After Olive Garden, I know Italy could only be a disappointment.
• Let it go. Not every comment or joke requires a defense. It’s okay to laugh when someone points out how your side goofed up without an “oh yeah?” or a whatabout.
  

Next up, we'll be comparing beggars and entrepreneurs, because the lines can blur quite a bit on the mean streets of Chicago. Subscribe now so you won't miss it.

If you’re lucky, you run out of things to teach your children. If you’re lucky, you wake up one day and recognize that there are at least a few areas where they have surpassed you, and that is quite all right.

It could be dealing with extended family or maintaining friendships, work-life balance or cooking, sales or Wordle…slowly the kids turn into adults and the relationships shift. If you’re lucky, you end up in a ton of peer-to-peer conversations, where you’re sharing ideas instead of imparting wisdom.

If you’re lucky.

The idea of my kids surpassing me isn’t new. I recall thinking about it one afternoon as I was clearing the set from a theater after one of their shows. I walked out on the stage, looked across at the empty seats, and realized that my kids would be more comfortable dealing with people, more competent in a crowd, and just a bit less fearful than I was, because they put themselves out on a stage to perform in front of strangers. I knew they already had a power I would never have, or never have in as great an abundance as my teen-aged daughters.

If you’re lucky, you can watch your kids—I shouldn’t call them kids anymore since they have kids of their own—as they build a life and create a home and plot their own journeys. You can hope they learned something from watching you, paying attention to your mistakes and your successes.

You can hope they’ll avoid your mistakes, but you cannot hope for them to replicate your successes, because their journey is all about their successes now. Consciously or not, they’ve sifted through their memories and all the dinner-table conversations and set their own priorities for their lives, so any resemblance to your journey is curated, not ordained.

I like spending time with people who are younger than I am, gaining new ideas and varied perspectives about the world. I enjoy the opportunity to update my thinking, master the slang, and generally be much cooler than all the other oldsters I deal with the rest of the day. My favorite companions are a couple of women who are very smart and likable adults, generous hosts, and very open to extended conversations. Yes, I fed them and clothed them and dealt with all their nonsense for 20 years, but that was then and this is now.

If you’re lucky, you can step back one day and take a fresh look at your children. You can see them as they are now, ignoring the path that brought them there, and recognize these are adults you would like to know today. These are adults who are interesting and smart and accomplished and level-headed and a joy to be with. These are adults you can debate ideas with and share experiences with and respect as they forge their own paths.

If you’re lucky.

Some days, we just feel really grateful over at Dad Writes and we always feel very, very grateful when someone clicks here to subscribe.

One of the things I really like about mentoring is the opportunity to redeem myself, at least partially, for some of my dumbest mistakes. I can’t go back and make better choices, of course, but maybe I can help someone else avoid the stupid choices that still make me cringe.

I wonder if we can do the same thing for ourselves as we look back at the last two years of pandemic mistakes, misperceptions and mischaracterizations. Maybe we need to mentor ourselves about all the ways we blew it and how we can avoid those mistakes in the future. For instance…

1. We’re too damned smug to admit it, even to ourselves, but we don’t know what would have happened if we did things differently.  No worries, though. We can always find a friend who will tell us exactly how things would have turned out if we had only done it their way. Just a thought here, but a little humility would be nice for a change.
   
   
2. There is a legitimate conversation to be had about the value of quarantines and shutdowns, along with the costs of pursuing “herd immunity.” We do know that we had more deaths per capita than almost every other country in the world, despite having more and better vaccines, faster, than almost anyone. Some things are obvious, including the reality that higher vaccination rates would have prevented more—but not all—deaths. Other things are not as certain, including the tradeoff between quarantines and economic activity in various states.
   
   
3. We demand perfection from everyone, or at least everyone else. If a vaccine isn’t 100% effective, it’s useless. If a gathering leads to a single infection, it needs to be outlawed. If an official makes a single mistake, they must die. There are a lot more than 50 shades of gray in the world, but we have a really annoying habit of seeing everything in black and white.
   
   
4. Speaking of which, we apparently think the President is God. We think he has the absolute power to stop inflation, fix the supply chain, reverse the trade deficit and repair that dripping faucet in the kitchen…if only he had the courage or the smarts or the right party identification.
   
   
5. Our worlds are smaller than two years ago, and they're going to get even smaller if we don’t reverse the trend. Most of us have spent more time with fewer people over the past two years, both online and IRL, and our echo chambers will keep getting smaller as we reconnect in person with our favored few. All of us need to expand our networks, and expose ourselves to new or contrary ideas. Think of it as building herd immunity against stupidity.
   
   
6. I know a guy who absolutely needs to be outraged. Okay, I don’t know him all that well, so maybe I am reading this wrong, but it seems from everything I see that he looks for things to make him angry. He’s not alone, of course, and I find it puzzling. What’s the benefit from all that anger? What hole is that filling in his life? And why do so many people these days appear to have the same addiction? It’s been really, really prevalent during Covid, but I don’t expect it to subside as the restrictions and cases retreat.
   
   
7. For a nation that lost an extra million people over the past two years, we aren’t seeing a whole lot of mourning going on. Some days, the death notices in my paper take up as much space as the sports section, but I don’t think I have ever seen anyone on social media mourning for these people. Yes, they post statistics about the carnage, but I’m not seeing a ton of real empathy.
   
   
8. Congress has decided to appoint a commission to review our response to the pandemic and learn lessons that we can apply in the next crisis. We hereby predict that we will find all kinds of missteps, that cable news shows will highlight the ones that cast the opposing tribe in the worst light, and we will apply none of these lessons the next time we have a crisis.

 
After two full years of this series, this is the last of the Covid Diary entries. What will we fixate on next? Click here to subscribe and you’ll be amazed at what happens.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Now that we’re starting our third year of this thing, it’s time to revisit our mass delusions…

1. On one level, it doesn't really matter if a state decides to close restaurants or require masks or institute other limitations in response to Omicron. People get sick, they stay home from work, and short-handed businesses or schools end up closing anyway. Everyone wants to argue as if it's a political question, but most of it has nothing to do with our tribes.
   
   
2. Despite the seeming contradiction, we are all in this together and also living in completely different worlds. I know people with hugely different perspectives on the risks of Covid, the right level of safety precautions, the balance point between government rescue plans and tyranny…and they sometimes think the people who disagree with them are on a different planet. But we’re all in this together as we deal with the same inability to find a good employee, supply shortages, gaps in medical care, inflation, etc. We’re all in this together, even if we aren’t all together on any of this.
   
   
3. Have you noticed that Covid is now the quick answer everyone gives for every problem that existed five years ago? The website is down because of Covid, the plumber didn’t show up because of Covid, the check is in the mail but it wasn’t delivered because of Covid. This is only a short-term aberration, though, because soon we’ll blame everything on the supply chain.
   
   
4. I’m always amused when people say they’ve lost a year due to Covid. We spent our time differently, even if we were merely adjusting to all the other people who were spending their time differently, but we all had lives that we dealt with for better or worse. The people who died can’t learn from the experience and lead better lives now, but the rest of us have the opportunity to learn from the year, or years, we’ve spent differently.
   
   
5. It’s true that we’re always living through history, but it’s rare that we get to see it unfold with such force and speed. This is the crisis our great-grandchildren will be reading about when they get hit with a pandemic 100 or 110 or 97 years from today. I know I won’t have to face their scorn, but I’m already embarrassed by how we will look to them.
   
   
6. Speaking of embarrassment, how do we look to the billions of people, billions, who are desperate for our cast-off vaccines as they watch us squabble over the treasure they seek? A little self-awareness would do us some good, although it could be very, very painful.
   
   
7. Is it my imagination or are things getting a bit quieter out there? Maybe it’s the onset of cold weather or the fact that people only have so much energy, but I’m not seeing as many protests, fiery school board meetings and death threats over mask mandates. Maybe it’s a sign things are calming down, or maybe it’s just that everyone is regrouping for 2022 elections.
   
   
8. I wonder about the next time I encounter some relatives and friends who disowned me over my views on vaccination, or the existence of the pandemic. It will undoubtedly be at a funeral, since I can’t imagine being invited to a Thanksgiving dinner or a wedding.
   
   

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Shortsighted business strategies, really confusing political calculations, and the decisions we’ve already made are high on my list of unfavorite things this week.

1. Every day brings a new tale of a deathbed conversion—the too-late recantation of someone who rejected the vaccine and won’t live to tell their grandkids about it—but that’s a drop in the bucket. Other than intentionally doomed patients in Covid wards and a few of their survivors, nobody is going to change their minds at this point.
   
   
2. So I kinda understand people who are hesitant to take a vaccine that was developed very quickly and has unknown five-year effects, even if it prevents 95% of infections and roughly 100% of hospitalizations. But then people are excited about a new anti-viral pill that was developed very quickly and nobody knows the five-year effects, even though it only prevents 50% of hospitalizations...after you already have the disease.  I'm really trying to follow the logic here, but I must admit I'm lost. 
   
   
3. People talk about the vaccinated and the unvaccinated as if they are two separate groups, but that’s not true. The vaccinated pretty much fall into one group of people who believe the jab is safe, certainly safer than contracting Covid, and that it’s no big deal to take the same shot as another 200 million Americans. The unvaccinated include people who think the shot includes microchips to control our lives, people who oppose all vaccinations, people who view this as their personal run up Mount Suribachi, people who think they aren’t at risk and people who can’t finish anything on their to-do lists.  Did I mention that nobody is going to change their minds at this point?
   
   
4. We’re closing in on 700,000 Covid deaths in the United States and, at the current rate, we’ll hit the million mark this winter. That’s one person out of 340, though, so the odds of knowing someone who died of the disease are very low for most of us. I think that’s why I get a lot of comments from people who say the pandemic is over-hyped by the media because they don’t personally know anyone who died of Covid. Joe Stalin was right. One death is a tragedy, but one million deaths is a statistic.*
   
   
5. Am I the only person who is really, really, really tired of Covid Theater? The crazy school board meetings, the parents who write speeches for their six-year-olds to deliver, the protest marches…enough already. Did I mention that nobody is going to change their minds at this point?
   
   
6. I can’t figure out the strategy of politicians who encourage their voters to resist the vaccine, which leads to more of their supporters suffering and dying from Covid. I get the appeal of promoting freedom and resisting government overreach, but where is the political benefit from undermining the health of your followers?
   
   
7. As fall unfolds, we’re heading back into the shortages and delivery disruptions that marked the beginning of this pandemic. We probably won’t be hoarding toilet paper and Twinkies again, but we’re out of stock on everything with a computer chip and we’re already seeing delays of Christmas inventories. This is the real cost of all those “profit maximizing” decisions to source everything overseas and remove all the slack from our supply chains. I like free trade, but I also like sound business decisions, and all that “efficiency” is looking less brilliant every day.
   
   
8. I feel really bad for all the innocent bystanders getting caught up in this mess, especially those who need non-Covid health care. People can’t get into emergency rooms because the hospitals are on bypass due to Covid patients, while all kinds of important, but not lifesaving, procedures are getting delayed unnecessarily. School outbreaks lead to parents missing work and, sometimes, losing their jobs… while local businesses continue to fail without foot traffic. Fortunately, politicians and cable news anchors have job security. Phew.
   
   

By the way, in case I didn’t mention it, nobody is going to change their minds at this point.

*So it turns out that Stalin might not have made this observation, but we haven’t completed our research to identify the true author of the quote. Subscribers will learn the source as soon as we find it, which is a great reason to click here to subscribe.