While I was posting this, I noticed that half of it focuses on stuff we don't know and never care about, except that we should...
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The best dinner, stud fees, and the times I bring joy to the repairmen in my life, all from a deep dive into the shallowest of minds…
Not only is this America, but it’s also the internet, where you can get a free subscription to Dad Writes simply by clicking right here. In a few of my prior lives, I worked on a documentary about autism, headed up a large theater company in Chicago, and defrauded my home state. Too many details to describe in just one blog post, but all of these journeys into other people’s lives have changed my perspective about my own existence. In my tiny corner of the world, I’m pretty well informed, open to conversations with strangers, continually looking for new insights, and generally aware of my surroundings. Still, there are parallel universes just down the street, or down the hall, that I will never enter and will never really know. I live in a big city, for example, and I like to think it looks like America. We have rich and poor, multiple races and religions, and more sexual orientations than letters in the alphabet. Some days, I feel pretty smug about my great insight into the huge stew that is my kinda town. If you’ve always lived in the same small town, though, America can look much different, and it’s presumptuous to see the rural experience as less than my own. There’s an intimacy and comfort that small-town life offers, along with different challenges and fears to keep people up at night. It's almost instinctive to feel superior about our enlightened world view, whether it’s based on big-city congestion or small-town intimacy. We all end up proud of something and fearful about something else, and most of our perspectives are shaped by where we are, not who we are. Well, that’s probably not correct, because who we are is determined in large part by where we are, what we see, whom we meet, and all the other experiences of our lives. We’re all alike at birth, but nature and nurture divide immediately and, after a decade or two, it can be hard to discern that we all started with practically identical DNA. It’s easy to think we live in different worlds, not just different corners of the same universe, but that’s a mistake. The people you meet at the tattoo festival and the locals you run into at the train station have the same needs and drivers, the same humanity, as the people we meet in our echo chambers. After a few minutes of conversation, the common links emerge and their strangest traits shrink into a facet, but not an identity. After enough visits into different dimensions, I’ve changed my questions about other people. Instead of asking how it’s possible for someone to believe things that are so incredibly stupid, I wonder how their reality led them to their conclusions. Quite often, I end up with a better understanding of their place in the world and, even if I will never agree with their position, it’s easier to recognize their humanity. If the statute of limitations ever expires, I’ll be writing about that whole defrauding the state thing. Subscribe now and watch this space. Adapting to life’s challenges, mastering the club sandwich and the exciting world of fountain pens, because we only write about the most important stuff..
We’re absolutely sure you should be subscribing to Dad Writes and we’ve made it super easy to do so by just clicking here. I turned 70 yesterday and I recognized my actual birthday for the first time in a decade. It’s not that I’ve been pretending to be young for the last bunch of years, as if anyone would be fooled by my futile imitation of youth. Instead, I opted ten years ago to move my officially sanctioned birthday from May to June, forsaking the day that mom chose to toss me into the world. Mostly, it’s been a nice shift. I get to pay lots of attention to all the moms on my roster on Mother’s Day and I have my own little moment for celebration that I don’t have to share with anyone else. There have been complications, though, including the fact that I can’t always remember exactly which date I picked for my new birthday observance. So, when people ask me to remind them of my new date, I have to stop and look it up. As I get older, this situation is not likely to improve. Then there’s the issue of social media, with Facebook inviting people to send me greetings on my actual nativity date and declining my attempts to change their records to acknowledge my new benchmark. I suspect they’d allow me to change my gender at this point, but birthdays are absolutely non-fluid. So, on May 13, I get B-Day wishes from some people and questions about the “real” date from others and I get the feeling people think I am even weirder than they thought before. As if that was possible. And it has become just a bit uncomfortable when I exchange greetings with people who have the same birthday as me, including one of my cousins. They all know I’ve deserted them and, TBH, I’ve started to feel just a bit guilty about my betrayal. The final straw, though, is the aging process itself. I’m not quite at the point where George Burns announced, “At my age, I don’t buy green bananas,” but I’m getting closer all the time. The idea of delaying a birthday celebration, even if only for a few weeks, just keeps getting dumber and dumber. So it’s back to Friday the 13th and conflicts with Mothers’ Day and weather that isn’t nearly as warm as it is in June and restaurants that haven’t opened their patios yet, because this is my day of infamy and I can rely on Facebook to remind me when it arrives. Of course, my reversal of my reversal is turning a lot of people into really bad friends. If you didn’t wish me a happy birthday yesterday, you are seriously late and there is no excuse for your failure to remember my very special day. Yeah, you’re going to whine that you didn’t know and I just told you today, but the truth is that you were never a good person to begin with and you’ve let me down yet again. Honestly, I don’t know what I ever saw in you. Of course, you can make it up to me with a belated birthday gift that reflects the level of your remorse at your transgression. Just as a reminder, I wear a size 42 Armani or a 911 Porsche. Avoid the embarrassment of missing the news if/when I change my birthday again by clicking here to subscribe to future posts. I paid $13 for a hot dog and fries the other day. That’s probably a record, and I was actually happy about it. There’s no such thing as cheap eats anymore, including the delicacies that the hip folks refer to as “street food” in Chicago. Some of it is due to food costs, which have already leveled off or started to decline, but mostly it’s a shortage of labor. Suddenly, even lower-level workers are getting a living wage for working 40 hours a week, instead relying on food stamps to compensate for their McJobs. We were paying that price before, of course, but now there are fewer bureaucrats in the middle. This is gonna take some getting used to, especially for people who are still trying to fill today’s job openings at yesterday’s wages and complaining that nobody wants to work anymore. We had a shortage of eggs over the past year and nobody got mad at the chickens, but everyone seems to be angry with the workers who are suddenly in short supply. I get it. I really do. For small business owners, every extra expense is truly coming out of their pockets. It’s not like a public company, where the shareholders lose some earnings per share when benefits go up for employees. In most small businesses, there’s only one shareholder, and that shareholder needs every dime to pay his own mortgage. Even if a guy has mortgages on two or three houses and his kids are going to Harvard on his dime, he still resents the clerk who’s demanding an extra buck an hour. You can’t complain to your buddies at the golf club that some chicken is picking your pocket, but you can absolutely complain about the fry cook and everyone will nod in agreement. And it’s not just the greedy capitalists who are upset at the idea of paying workers a living wage. One of the newer trends in the service economy is tip baiting, a practice of entering a substantial tip online when ordering something and then cutting the tip after the items are delivered. Convenience is worth the extra fees for Uber Eats and Grub Hub and all the other middlemen who add 35% to every food order, but the poor schmuck who delivers the pizza is 100% screwable. I’m rooting for the pizza guy, though, especially in comparison with the tech bros who developed all the apps that add 25-40% to every bill in a race to make your grocery order cost as much as Taylor Swift tickets. The American Dream has devolved from a house with a two-car garage to the needing only one job to put food on the table. We’ve seen this play out before, of course. After the Great Depression and World War II, millions of GIs came home and went back to work in one of the few countries that hadn’t seen its factories bombed. Family formations exploded and more than a decade of pent-up demand was suddenly unleashed. Inflation soared as factories shifted from war production to consumer products and workers benefited from higher wages as the economy boomed. It was a once-in-a-millennium event that truly built the Middle Class and made it possible for factory workers to buy homes while working just one, often unionized, job. Right now, it looks like we’re seeing a small replication of that economy. The pandemic caused major retooling of production, enormous shifts in demand patterns, and all types of shortages, leading to deflation and then inflation and a release of pent-up demand during the recovery period. Inflation rates soared and a labor shortage is driving wage growth for the first time in forever. The federal government added to inflation, absolutely, by throwing $trillions into the economy over the past three years, but it looks like there’s going to be a payoff as U.S. manufacturing starts to recover from more than a half century of neglect. The politicians will work their hardest to screw it up, of course, and the Fed has already announced its preference for recessions—and unemployment—over inflation, but the invisible hand just might be strong enough to swat away their meddling. One can only hope, because the fundamentals are actually looking better than they have in a long, long, long time. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, no doubt, but it’s actually possible that things are moving in the right direction. Will we still be this sanguine about inflation when the hot dog and fries hit $15? Find out by clicking here to subscribe. |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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