The Democratic convention runs this week in Chicago, so we're going topical for a change. So much stuff in my mailbox and online that I cannot help but wonder...

• Mind melt. I’m beginning to think people might be right about that whole dementia thing with Donald Trump. I just received my fourth e-mail from him today, asking for the same money he asked for two hours ago. And he’s not the only one. I’m getting at least three notes per day from a half dozen senate candidates who seem to have forgotten I don’t live in their states. Must be a side effect of Covid, or the Covid vaccine, or possibly a brain worm.  Take your pick.
• Trump change. Speaking of which, could we get some rich patriot to send Trump $5 million? Almost every day, I get a note saying he needs $5 each from a million people, but it would probably be simpler to get $5 million from one rich guy. Frankly, I don’t think my five bucks is going to make a difference, but the guy who gives $5 million might get an ambassadorship, or at least a thumbs-up photo op at Mar a Lago.
• Rich guys only. Beyond the swift boating attacks on Tim Walz’s 24 years in the National Guard, the craziest complaint about Harris’s VP pick is that he isn’t rich. That’s because all the millionaires in Congress have done such a great job managing the federal budget and looking out for the middle class.   
• Driven to distraction. It’s hard to believe how easily we get distracted by arguments over verbal gaffes and the size of rally crowds and lose track of the real questions for our future. I guess the campaign committees realized it’s cheaper to come up with fake issues than to spend any money on bread and circuses.
• Deja vote. Every time I hear someone accuse their opponent of being an impossible combination of socialist, communist, anarchist, antichrist, fascist vegan, I am amazed that we aren’t over all of this by now. The same candidates have been making the same claims for so many years, how is it possible that anyone is still reacting to this crap?
• X marks the bots. It’s all politics all the time on Twitter, but I think my feed would be just two posts per day if it wasn’t for the bots retweeting the same exact posts all day long. Elon Musk has the power to cancel all those accounts, but that would be a First Amendment violation and bots are people just like you and me.
• No slackers allowed. There’s a million legit reasons to criticize any/all of the candidates on offer this year, but Americans will never be afraid of hard work. Instead of taking the easy way and carping about real stuff, our online warriors labor tirelessly to create false quotes, deep fake videos, and outlandish stories about things that never happened. I am so proud that the American Work Ethic is still the envy of the world.
  
• Second wind. Am I the only one who’s noticed that Joe Biden seems a lot more energized since he dropped out of the presidential race? If this rebound continues, maybe he’ll decide to get back in the scrum.

Next week, we'll be comparing guys in bunkers with gals on cell phones and you won't believe how much they have in common. Subscribe now. 

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.   

There’s this meme that really annoys me for some reason, and it’s probably one of the many reasons that I’m absolutely going to hell.

It pops up every month or so on my Facebook feed, an image of people being reunited with their loved ones during their first minute in heaven. Actually, I think the thing is called “your first minute in heaven,” or something similar, and it drives me nuts.

First, the drawing shows a bunch of individuals meeting with one person each, or maybe with a dog, which makes me wonder how all these people with only one friend made it into heaven. Of course, I could be missing the theology here. Maybe we’re each assigned one guide to bring us to wherever we’re supposed to be going or maybe the artist just got tired of drawing and skipped all the third cousins and work wives. Or, maybe, we ticked off more people than we knew on earth, so not a whole lot of people are rushing to welcome us until they’re sure we’ve changed.

We’d have to change, wouldn’t we? Even saints were human at one point, with all the frailties and failings that won’t cut it in the rarefied atmosphere beyond the pearly gates. So, once you get to heaven, will you be you? You won’t be able to maintain the personality quirks that counted against you in the heaven/hell rating, which means you won’t be you when you make the leap.

What? You thought everyone else would be different, cleansed of their irritating habits and dad jokes, but you’d be the same old irascible self? Dream on. On earth, we're imperfect, but our imperfections are cleansed in the afterlife, or so I'm told, and that means we'd arrive in paradise as changed specimens. Changed for the better, of course, but we'd be transformed nonetheless.

But, wait, someone is saying. It is our soul that is transported from this mortal coil, giving us life without the mundane challenges of life on earth. There will be no illness, no anger, no discomfort, none of the variations that make our lives lives in the first place. In a very real sense, we won’t be human at all.

That might be a good thing, since people are the absolute worst and we all know we’re part of the problem. Well, some people know they’re part of the problem and the rest run for political office. Still, if we aren’t people when we arrive in heaven, what difference does it make if we do or don’t run into some other soul that also isn’t the same person we knew on earth?

Different cultures and religions present varied images of a life beyond death, but they leave too many unanswered, and unanswerable, questions. For instance, exactly what do we do all day that makes us happy? You know those friends and relatives we’re meeting in our first minute in heaven? We missed them when they passed on, but we didn’t miss all their annoying habits. Maybe they’ve been cleansed of those habits in heaven, but what if they were very happy with the way they were and they haven’t changed at all. Now we’ve got to spend eternity with them and we probably aren’t allowed to complain up there.

As with most concepts, I don’t think people have really thought this through. There might be a heaven and it might be absolutely terrific, but our new existence won’t be something we can imagine and it is very unlikely to be the homecoming image that annoys me every few weeks. Or, maybe it’s exactly as pictured and it’s seriously heavenly to spend eternity with one true friend from the moment you arrive.

I hope I get a dog.
 
Next week, back on earth, we take a look at one more detour on that road with good intentions. Subscribers will love it, or so we suppose.

Definitely a nerd alert in here, and a plea for munitions in the war on people...

Winning and losing in the war on people. As the tech bros hold each other’s beer and lead us over the next cliff, all of us are engaged in the ongoing war on people. Whether it’s self-checkout at Wal-mart or AI term papers or AI term-paper analyzers or AI chat bots that are even dumber than the bots they replaced, we’re making ourselves irrelevant, and then what? CEOs get bonuses, shareholders get a windfall, and the average Joan faces a narrowing path to survival. We were supposed to be using all this technology to find cures for cancer and prevent global warming, but mostly we’re using it to send Frieda to the unemployment line. It’s hard to see how this will end well.

Looking at you, Patrick Berry. Does it make me a real nerd that I have a favorite crossword puzzle writer? Would it really seal the deal if I admitted I have a favorite pen for writing in the answers? Nah, I didn’t think so, either.

Carnegie Hall, Driver! Whoever said 'practice makes perfect' has never ridden in a ride-share with a guy who has been driving for three years. Every street has a sign with its name on it, but there's no point reading those things when you can just stare at your GPS eight hours per day.

Nobody said it was profitable. All my life I’ve been buying things that are collectible, since I’m always reading about people who sell their chatchkes for huge bucks. But I just realized that they’re not called sell-ables, in-demand-ables, or get-really-rich-ables. Sadly, 'collectible' is truth in advertising.

No accounting for it. Why do I need to create an account for everything I want to buy? Some places let me just order something as a “guest,” but so many sellers insist that I create a new account with a password I will absolutely forget and need to retrieve if I ever come back…which will be as much trouble as creating the account in the first place.

Success stories. As I was putting together a list of lessons from my dad on his 100th birthday, it occurred to me that we need to come up with a new definition of success. We’re much too focused on success in terms of careers and fame, but not enough in terms of impact. If people are still quoting your wisdom 50 years after you’re gone, you’re a success. If your kids are raising competent, decent human beings because you raised them to be competent, decent human beings, you’re a success. If you provide for your family without impoverishing someone else, you’re a success. We can’t all be billionaires and we can’t all be Kardashians, but we can all achieve success in whatever lives we lead.

We’ll force you to sing. Why is everything a musical these days? From the Titanic to Sweeney Todd to Assassins, there doesn’t seem to be any topic that can’t be improved with everyone bursting into song. I was going to suggest some new and outlandish ideas like Impetigo!! and The Acne Chronicles, but I suspect those are already in the works.

Peen there, done that. I’d always thought I’d rather be a hammer than a nail, but now I’m rethinking my position. The hammer gets all the glory, but it’s the nail that produces under pressure and continues to hold things together long after the hammer has moved on. Truly, nails are the misunderstood heroes of this story.

Next week, we take a look at a really annoying meme and why it's leading me down the road to degradation. Subscribe now to get the news first.

Enough with the shaming and marginalization!! We’re vastly overdue for a celebration honoring all the lazy people who make the world a great place to live and play and, um, work, but only if it’s really, really necessary. For too long, the slackers of the world have labored, reluctantly, under the disdain of a go-to, take-charge, kick-butt society that values nothing more than giving 110% for your passion.

Frankly, I’m exhausted from writing that paragraph and I know you’re all exhausted from reading it. That’s a good thing, though, because our shared fatigue unites us in a common cause, a cause that is so noble as to be unassailable. We need a national holiday that honors lazy people, the true heroes of America.   

My LinkedIn feed is overflowing with rich people who encourage energetic young folks to get a side hustle, which is the way you make your second and third jobs sound really hip and edgy. You know who doesn’t have a side hustle? Rich people.

I know a few rich people who spend their free time playing golf or sailing or drinking wine in the tropics or skiing, but I don’t know any who are driving Uber on weekends as a side hustle. And that’s a good thing, because you wouldn’t want them competing for jobs with all the young up-and-comers who need to brag about how many hours they work in a week.

It also means all those rich people are valiantly sacrificing their opportunity to be un-lazy in the interest of the less fortunate in our society. They’re true philanthropists, not slackers, and we should all be grateful for their sacrifice.

The real problem with sloth shaming is the word ‘lazy’ itself. It’s a pejorative that’s applied to people who march (ever-so-slowly) to a different drummer. If a person works only the required amount of time at their jobs, they’re lazy. If they’d rather sit on the couch than go for a run, they’re lazy. If they don’t spend enough time living their absolutely super-best lives, they’re lazy.

I prefer a kinder, gentler thesaurus, one that recognizes the nobility of this non-conforming lifestyle.

When a person arrives no earlier than nine and leaves no later than five, they are punctual.

When someone sits on the couch and watches Simpsons reruns, they are perpetuating our culture.  

When they wear the same sweatshirt nine days in a row, they’re absolutely clean-water conservationists.

When we decline the opportunity to run for an hour—which adds heat into the environment and requires more food to sustain our caloric needs—we’re reducing the strain on our ecosystems. Heroes of ecology? Damned straight.

Staying at home and eating whatever is already in the refrigerator? The ultimate locavore, just like a pride of lions.

Speaking of which, do you know who’s really lazy? Lions, that’s who. Lions spend about 37 hours a day sleeping, or at least lion around (funny, right?) in the grass. They only get up when they have to eat and, like modern urbanites, they’re strictly locavores. They don’t go far and, often, simply wait for their food to come near enough so they can catch it without running too much and working up a sweat.

And that’s just the females. The males sleep even more, wander over after the kill to ask, “What’s for dinner” and then demand the savory hind quarters of whatever eland or giraffe is on the menu. After dinner, they don’t even offer to clean the dishes before they wander back to their dens to sleep until their next meal. Or mating season.

But nobody calls lions lazy, do they? Nope. We honor them as powerful hunters, apex predators, and the emblems of all kinds of successful companies. If they were people, we’d mock them as slackers and keep mocking them mercilessly until they ate us.

At long last, isn’t it time we gave our own neighbors the same respect we give to a bunch of African malingerers? Shouldn’t we remove the shadow of shame from the people who represent the best of America? Aren’t we finally ready to recognize the civic contributions of our comatose comrades?

Yes, yes and yes. This is the moment, this is our destiny, this is the initiative that defines our meaning as human beings. We cannot, we must not fail, and I promise to do my part.

Right now, I’m off to LinkedIn to demand that some young go-getter adopt this project as a side hustle. After that, it’s nap time.
 
Next week, we count the casualties in the war on people and pick a winner in that whole hammer-versus-nail thing. Subscribe here and you'll be the first to know. 
 
 

I owe Al Capone a big apology, and I should stop mocking that woman at the slot machine, too, as I consider all my misguided actions this week...

Man, over Bourdain. It’s time to retire the Anthony Bourdain memes where he’s telling us how we should live more fully. There’s just something about life advice from a guy who took his own life that is more than misguided. It’s cruel, almost like the people posting his quotes are mocking him for not taking his own counsel.

Invest in hubris! The problem with humanity is that we are smart enough to know we’re smart, but we’re not smart enough to know how stupid we still are. Archimedes figured out pi roughly 2,000 years ago, without a calculator, and the people who built the observatory at Stonehenge started work 5,000 years ago without a backhoe. If anything, we’ve just gotten dumber over time, while our hubris has exploded.

Never saw it coming. Speaking of which, I spotted a dead turtle on the road during a recent bike ride and I realized it had began its day like pretty much every human. It woke up and started its daily activities with no idea that it would no longer be among the survivors that night. And homo sapiens are smarter, how?

Pushing the buttons. The woman at the slot machine next to me is explaining that I’m losing money because I’m pushing the buttons wrong. Then she demonstrates how she massages them and where she pushes on each button before taking her next dollar for a spin. I’d mock her for her superstitious delusions, but she’s winning too much to listen.

Big props to Al Capone. Chicago hosted a big NASCAR event over Independence Day and I read a report about how much the 2023 races added to the city’s fortunes. Surprisingly, the promoters claimed $24 million of “media value,” based on all the mentions and awareness of the city generated by news reports and such. I guess we should give more thanks to all the other people creating “media value,” including gangbangers, Al Capone, and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Honey trap. Do waitresses get a special license to call everyone ‘honey’??? I’m not complaining about it, because I crave the kindness, but this one seems to be unique to this very special group. Nurses, plumbers, cab drivers, cops…nobody else in the world ever calls me ‘honey,’ but waitresses seem to think it’s my first name.

Just one more tweak. Every time someone comes up with a good idea, the next guy in line decides to ruin it. We need more STEM in schools—science, tech, engineering, and math—but then they made it STEAM by adding arts into the mix. And too much “arts” is the reason we needed more STEM in the first place.

Acts shunned. I’m a big fan of the First Amendment—in fact, I am using it right now!!—so I don’t think anyone should lose an employment opportunity because they spoke out against the treatment of civilians in Gaza. I do think, though, that people who demonstrate bad judgment make poor employees and that many, many protestors showed abysmal judgment over this spring. Whether it was the public intimidation of Jewish students, disrupting the education of others, illegal entry, or simply demonstrating a profound lack of common sense…I’m fine with consequences for that.