Web-surfing and puzzles are taking up way too many hours, which isn't leaving enough time to write my memoirs. Too bad, because I saved all the really good stuff for the book...

• We’re the Cheapest! There was a guy who ran a bike store in the old neighborhood who always had the lowest prices on any item you asked for, but only when it was out of stock. Once the item was on his shelves, it was a different story. I’m reminded of him every time I hear some candidate making promises about what they’ll do once they’re in office.
• Sorry about the explosion. Why is it that people in power save the really useful information for a book they won’t publish for five years and never tell us what’s what when it could make a difference? “Here’s the code that would have prevented that nuclear blast. Yeah, I could have told you before the bomb went off, but I thought it would be a great detail to save for my memoirs.”
• Why aren’t you dead yet? Some guys on Twitter keep posting about “the obituary I didn’t want to read today” and I wonder if they have a most-wanted list. Do they have people who are on the list every day or do they have specific holidays or seasons for their favorite unfavorites?
• Worse and Worser. What’s it like to be on the International Space Station and have only two options for getting home: Boeing and SpaceX? NASA was probably smart to choose SpaceX, because Boeing’s doors can fall off at any time, but a SpaceX rocket that doesn’t explode on the way up will probably be okay on the return.
• One across. I’d like to think I’m well informed, but it turns out I spend most of my time doing puzzles. I’m zipping past the headlines in the NYT to get to Connections and the first thing I read in the WaPo is Keyword. On Sundays, I settle in for the crosswords and I never quite get to page 5 of the news section. Don’t ask me what’s going on in the world, but if you need a six-letter word for excessive pride, I’m your guy.
• TMMI. Along the same lines, reading the Sunday papers takes a lot less time now that I’m no longer opening the opinion section. To be frank, I’m totally overdosed on opinions long before the weekend arrives. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or, increasingly, Linkedin, online visits reveal the greatest leverage of all time; 0.0001% facts transformed into 99.9999% rants.
• Talk amongst yourselves. Why is it that conspiracy theorists are so busy fighting the mainstream that they never get into battles with each other? Why don’t the people who blame Jews for 9/11 argue with the people who say it was the Bush Administration? Why don’t the people who say 100 million illegal aliens voted in 2020 argue with the people who say it was the voting machines or the people who say it was China or a wireless link from Italy or…you get the idea. The world would be a calmer place if they just fought with each other over whose conspiracy is real and left the rest of us alone.
• Class Warfare. Am I the only one whose Facebook feed is non-stop stories about some poor person or poorly dressed person who is abused while sitting in first-class on the plane, only to reveal that they are just so super-duper deserving of their seats that everyone wants to kiss their filthy—but very worthy—feet?  I think they’ve finally run out of ideas at the click-bait factory.

I forgot to buy special glasses in the spring, so I missed the opportunity to look directly at the solar eclipse. I had a schedule conflict that kept me from checking out the peak peek at the northern lights in May, so that’s another moment that passed me by.
 
Even worse, I rescheduled for night two of the northern lights and drove out to a forested area where I spent three hours staring in vain at an uncooperative sky.

Even worser, there were a dozen people at the same spot, and all of them showed me pictures they had taken the night before. One after another, they displayed glorious images of the night sky, shot from exactly where we were now standing, and each person marveled that I really should have been there 24 hours earlier.
 
I was pretty miserable about the whole thing, but I had a great time that night. I was already there, so I figured I might as well get the most out of it.
 
The people I met that night were much better informed than I am, so they introduced me to a sky I had never really seen before. They pointed out a satellite or two and, maybe, the International Space Station. They showed me an app that predicted where the northern lights were going to be, which turned out to be just a bit beyond the horizon from where we stood. They were happy to tell me all the camera settings they used to capture great images of the heavens the night before I arrived.
 
As the moon flew over the lagoon, I marveled at the reflection of the trees across the water. As the sky darkened further, I spotted at least one shooting star. As more cars pulled up at the clearing, I remembered how events like this can bring us together for a purpose other than politics. I also learned that many people don’t seem to know how to turn off their headlights when they want to see something in the dark. Deer came out to graze on a nearby lawn and, undoubtedly, the rustling sounds nearby signaled creatures scavenging for food at night.
 
There’s no question my journey was a bust, at least for its intended purpose, but it was still a great night. Do I wish I’d seen the light show? Of course. Am I happy I went anyway? Absolutely.

That’s the way life works, isn’t it? Allen Saunders said life is what happens when you’re making other plans. Equally unheralded, Michael Rosenbaum recognized that, “I’m not getting today back.” And the most important question we can ask when things don’t go our way is, “Now what?” Life has more detours than roads, which means we're almost always asking ourselves what we're going to do next.

Stay. Go. Laugh. Cry. Rejoice. Complain. It makes no difference to the moving finger, but it makes all the difference for us.   

Freedom isn't free, but neither is a free press, and wouldn't you love to be a cicada? I thought so...

Free press. I’ve always insisted that everything should cost a dollar, except for an hour of my time, which should cost $200. That hasn’t always worked out for me, but it turns out I’m not alone. A new survey by Northwestern University reports that a majority of respondents think local news should be provided at no cost to readers, although it’s not clear exactly how all that free reporting would be produced.
 
Will work for stories. Speaking of which, pretty much every news outlet I know has become a panhandler, begging for a handout every time I visit. I’m trying to be supportive, but I can’t ever remember who I gave to when or whether I’m due for a renewal. Yes, I could set up a separate account and log in every time I read a post, but I only have so many more years on this earth and that’s not how I plan to spend them.
 
Running up the clock. I’ve always suspected that hospitals make more money on their parking lots than they do on medicine, and suddenly it all became clear to me. The doctors don’t keep you waiting forever because they’re busy. They do it so you get past the two-hour mark and have to pay $800 for parking.
 
Uber mentions. I understand that Uber is making more money delivering food via Uber Eats than they make by delivering people on their regular rideshare, so why haven’t they branched out even further? Definitely, we need an Uber Waits for people who don’t want to camp out overnight while waiting for Black Friday sales, and definitely an Uber Weights for people who really hate working out and need a stand-in every so often. We absolutely need an Uber Alerts to warn everyone to look out for us while we’re walking into traffic while staring at our cell phones. Then there’s the Uber Saloon, which will stay in the parking lot and offer a refuge for parents while their kids are at one more party at Superduperfunfunland. Then there’s Uber Alibi, Uber Assassin, Uber Protestors…come on, people, do I have to do all the work for you?
 
Yes, there is such a thing as bad sax. There was a guy playing the saxophone at the zoo and he was really bad, so I decided not to give him a buck because it might encourage him to continue playing. I felt a bit badly about it as I walked on, but then I heard a wife ask her husband if he heard someone playing a saxophone. “No,” he said, “If that was a sax, I’d recognize it.” And then I didn’t feel quite so bad about not encouraging the guy.
 
Big cicada energy. I spent a few hours hanging out with the cicadas in the forest preserve and, for just a minute or two, I was jealous. They don’t have calendars, just alarm clocks, so they don’t know how long they sleep between bouts of activity. But when they ARE awake, it’s nothing but summer days, food, and sex. Could be worse.
 
I am so seriously screwed. I finally started tossing all the spare parts from the last 200 years of home improvement projects, because I’m never gonna need any of this stuff, and then disaster struck. A repair guy lost a shelf bracket and I still had a spare in the original parts bag from four years ago. Problem solved, but now I can’t ever ever ever toss any of this crap ever again. Ever.
 
Even more depressing than MY job. Of all the jobs created by technology, there is nothing that sounds as soul-deadening as being a prompt writer for AI LLMs. It’s essentially the same job as oiling the rollers on the conveyor belt, except that the conveyor belt never threatened to rise up and destroy the Earth. Doesn’t matter, really, because the LLMs will be writing their own prompts in a week or two and then we can look forward to the next exciting opportunity created by the tech bros.

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The guy playing the bagpipes in the parking lot is from Bulgaria, not Scotland, and he doesn’t seem to think much of the more famous version of his chosen instrument. He tells me he met a man with Scottish bagpipes and he was unimpressed by the plastic pieces, unlike the genuine goat skin and wood that he’s playing today.

It’s his lunch hour, so he comes over to the lakefront to practice, which insulates him from the people who aren’t all that fond of bagpipe music, including his wife. We talk a bit about his hobby and then he plays a Bulgarian tune and asks me what I think. I flunked music appreciation in college, but I don’t mention that little detail. Instead, I tell him is very beautiful, and then I’m on my way.

It’s midweek on the lake shore and Chicago is waking up from our extended slumber. Women are sunbathing, a bunch of guys are jumping off the breakwater into the frigid waters, birders are wandering around the sanctuary at Montrose Harbor, and a small crowd is enjoying the sunshine at The Dock.

This is what we live for around here, the rebirth, the season that makes it all so very worthwhile. We put up with the weather and the traffic and the slings and arrows of cable newscasters, because we know our gift is on the way. It begins in May, with a handful of days that combine sunshine, temps in the 70s, and winds that barely register on the Beaufort Scale. Much like the transformation of barren branches into shade trees, the awakening begins slowly and accelerates into the summer.

The interval is shockingly brief, though, as the last of the slush melts into the sewer grates a few seconds before the solstice. The sun will cross the equator on Thursday and daylight hours will peak, marking both the start of summer and my annual day of depression. Just when the days are getting warmer, they’re also getting shorter, a gift snatched away before we get the chance to enjoy it fully.

It’s a metaphor for life. We spend a lot of time, too much time, waiting for something great and there’s always a catch. Or, maybe, we only think there’s a catch because we demand more than the world will provide. The days will be longer than nights for the next three months, but I want them to keep getting longer until, until, well, I don’t know exactly when. But I don’t want them getting shorter on Friday and life isn’t fair to me.

Of course, life isn’t fair to my new friend with the bagpipes, either. People will always be asking him why his instrument doesn’t look like a real one, nobody will recognize any of his favorite tunes, and he’ll be invited to practice pretty much anywhere…else. That isn’t stopping him, though. He’s out there in the parking lot, perfecting his craft while he enjoys his own moments in the sun.

That’s a metaphor for life, too. Add it all up and we get only a few moments in the sun. The smart people find a way to enjoy at least some of them, even if it’s a solo act.
 
 

The guy at the next table came from Amsterdam, by way of MIT, and he was staying at an Airbnb for a few days before giving a talk about black holes and dark matter—not the coffee—at the University of Chicago. He tells me it’s hard to get people in his field to accept new ideas about the nature of dark matter—again, not the coffee—and he is perplexed by their resistance to new data, or theories, or whatever they call scientific proof these days.

I tell him there’s no surprise here, because everyone is like that and there’s no reason to assume scientists will be any more immune to perception paralysis than every other human. We’ve got places to go and selfies to post, so who has time to revisit questions we’ve answered already? And you cannot see dark matter, anyway, so it’s not like we can really take a second look, can we?

So, we exchange a few comments about black holes and cosmology, and I’m sure I convinced him I’m really expert about the subject before he headed down to Hyde Park to harangue his colleagues until they see the light. Or the dark. Or agree it’s a different dark than the dark they thought they didn’t see before he shows them the new and improved dark they can’t see, either.

I found the whole thing depressing. New information, new insights, should yield new conclusions, but that’s just a dream. In reality, any suggestion that we’re wrong about something is just further proof that we’re 100% correct.

None of us knows whether Covid came from a lab or a wet market. Well, there is somebody who knows, but they’re not talking, and the rest of us are just guessing. If we found out the absolute truth tomorrow, how many people would change their beliefs?

Ditto for the school-closings divide when Covid hit. Students fell behind when schools were closed, but even children who were not old enough for school were affected in terms of their post-crisis learning.

Maybe the issue was school closings and maybe it was all the distractions and stresses of a pandemic. Maybe we’d have ended up with thousands of dead teachers if we’d kept schools open and, then, we’d have closed the schools when all the teachers were dead. We’ll never know, although we all know a ton of people who absolutely know they know. If we found out the absolute truth tomorrow, how many people would change their beliefs? (Yes, I know I asked the identical question two paragraphs ago.)

Shortly after my conversation with the scientist from Amsterdam, I ended up in a discussion about the pro-Hamas rallies and encampments on college campuses. My friend suggested that the students are largely uninformed, caught up in the moment, and that they see things somewhat differently in later years as they learn more about the world, the depravity of Hamas, and the complexity of history.

Hah.

Nobody’s changing their minds about Covid, about January 6, about the 2020 election, about 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, or whether that meme dress was black or gold. We take a stance and then we’re frozen, impervious to new information or the perspective that experience should provide. Once we stake our position, everything that follows is interpreted to support what we already believe. October 7 will be no different, unfortunately, because you’re never too young to stop learning new things.

I’d like to think my new friend from Amsterdam changed the course of science last month, shedding new light on a subject impervious to light itself. Maybe he found a way to reframe the conversation or restate the thesis in a way that moved his audience to reconsider their assumptions. Maybe he’ll come back to the restaurant and tell me his secret. We’d all benefit from escaping the black holes that we’ve jumped into willingly.

How do we see the light?

Next week, we’re taking a fresh look at funerals, so you’ll want to subscribe now to be sure you’re on the guest list.
 

There’s a defibrillator just outside the door to the funeral home chapel and I'm thinking, “If Dave was here, he’d point at it and say, ‘Too late.’” Dave’s the guest of honor, though, and our opportunity to sit in the back row and crack each other up is gone for good.

So, I had no one to share with after a mourner thanked me for coming and I said, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” like it was my kid’s wedding or something. I couldn’t nudge someone and tell them to make a note when there was a part of the eulogy they could also use for me. After overpaying to pre-plan my own going-away party, I couldn’t berate Dave for choosing the simplest of pine boxes and making me look like a show-off. I don’t know how this sounds online, but we’d have been laughing hard enough to get thrown out of the service if it had been Dave and I in the back row.

Actually, I should call him David, since that’s what everyone else was calling him in their eulogies. I don’t think I ever called him anything but Dave over the 30+ years we were friends, but I didn’t know him as well as I thought. That’s a constant, though. No matter how long you’ve known someone, you find out a million things about them at their funeral that make you wonder whether you’re in the wrong room.

He liked one of my favorite books, Confederacy of Dunces, apparently, but that never came up in a conversation. Apparently, we also skipped the details of his early years or some of his major challenges in life. Maybe that’s because they weren’t funny, and Dave was big on funny.

Or, maybe it’s because we all live in multiple worlds that only collide at our funerals and that wasn’t the part of Dave’s world that I inhabited. The two of us lived in the world of shtick, one-upping each other on old stories where he always had a crazier tale to tell. We even wrote and produced a play, which was such a smash hit that three people have heard of it. Yes, two are spouses, but that third guy is really influential.

Dave is the latest in a long line of people I knew well and didn’t. Alan and I were friends for 60 years, transitioning from grade school through high school and college, marriage, children and careers. After all that time, all those years, people I met after he died introduced me to a dozen facets I’d never seen. Jeff and I shared way too many drinks on the deck, traded old jokes, commiserated about life and took turns being the biggest loser at our monthly poker games, but I had to wait until his funeral to learn new details about my friend and neighbor. And on it goes.

Each of us inhabits separate worlds for family, for work, for hobbies, for people we knew in grade school or high school or college, and down the line until we’re all interplanetary travelers with multiple lives that we cannot share in total. Still, there is a world that we did share and, when a longtime friend passes on, a piece of that world disappears. Old friends are witnesses to our lives, testifying to the reality of our existence. Without their confirmation, we’re just a bunch of old guys in the park, rambling about stuff that might or might not be real.

I guess I could try to learn more about people I’ll meet in the future, but it’s already too late for me to start up any 30-year relationships. Maybe I should pay more attention to the ones I have already, before somebody is staring at the defibrillator outside the chapel and thinking, “Too late.” Again.

Next week, we'll focus on a different guest of honor as we share a few lessons from my dad's life on his 100th birthday. We'll all learn something, but only if we subscribe.