Top Secret Wall Design Revealed!

Did you guys know trump’s original immigration plan involved TWO walls? A source inside the White House just leaked the original blueprint to me. Insidious.

❤️

My 13 year old drew this picture of us hugging (because he didn’t get to give me a hug after school yesterday because I had to work late) and just texted it to me. My heart immediately melted.

Good, Good Membries!

For awhile now I’ve noticed that whenever my youngest son is really happy or having a good time, he gets this chill of joy that seems to lightly shake his body. When I mentioned it to him he told me that whenever that happens, he also says to himself ‘Good, good membries!’ It was so sweet to hear that, so I scheduled a reminder in my phone for every Monday morning that says ‘Good, good membries!’

Buy the Book

The Parachutist in Love, by Spencer Troxell

I Write Parodies in my Sleep

What does it say about me that my first thought this morning was ‘Weird Al should do a parody of Cardi B’s ‘Money’, call it ‘Honey’, and make it about Winnie the Pooh’?

All a bad bear needs is honey.

Demographic Anecdote

Fact: everyone I have ever met who was worried about ‘Social Justice Warriors’, ‘Leftist brainwashing’, ‘P.C. culture/censorship’ on college campuses never went to college.

Efficiency

All three of my sons are cleaning the house, and I just said ‘thank you!’ to one of them for their hard work, but two of them responded ‘You’re welcome!’. Two birds with one stone. Maximum gratitude-efficiency achieved. It’s like when you say hi to one person, and the person behind them also returns the greeting.

The Ideal Couple

Correct.

"Everything that's important goes on in the darkness, no doubt about it. We never know anyone's real inside story." - Louis Ferdinand Cèline

King

People will be trying to sanitize Martin Luther King on Monday by posting all of his Sesame Street quotes about light driving out darkness and choosing love over hate and stuff like that. Those are fine quotes, but Dr. King was a dangerous man underneath the sound bites. To truly embrace his vision we have to become dangerous too. Had MLK lived until today he would still be fighting for justice, and people would be as uncomfortable with it now as they were then. Don't let people make Dr. King safe. He was a lion.

550 WKRC

Conservative talk radio is for people who just couldn’t get enough of what their racist uncle had to say at Thanksgiving.

Pee As You Are

I want to open a restaurant just to have two bathroom door signs—with no gender indicators—that simply say ‘please do not shit in the sink’.

Cutlery

I was just using this knife to chop garlic and onions and Serrano peppers for chili when I remembered the significance of it. Around a decade ago I confiscated this knife from an individual who was high on crack and threatening another individual with it, who was also high on something, and had a pocket knife. I was able to de-escalate the conflict with the support of a few team members, even though the knife pictured was pointed at me at one point. I kept the knife based on a barely conscious principle I had at the time about weapons which went something like, ‘if I can take it from you, it’s mine’. This was a bit of silly bravado, but as I was chopping the garlic and onions and peppers, I remembered the story of how I got the knife, and realized I hadn’t thought about how I had obtained it in years. I guess the point of this post is that social work is a crazy field: if you can integrate a knife with this backstory into your daily cooking and completely forget how you got it, you work in an exciting business.

P.R.

It’s reassuring that if I ever get into any real trouble in my life, if I hold a press conference and proclaim ‘this is political correctness gone too far!’ I’ll have at least 50% odds of getting away with my crime, whatever that might be.

Ingredients

I have come to accept that all of us are full of shit to a certain extent. I guess the goal in life is to keep the percentage of shit on our ingredients label as low as possible, like, say, under 10%, and to cram in as many virtues as possible without completely ruining the flavor. We all need to meet our daily requirements of compassion, patience, and humility, with just the right mix of vice and neurosis to maintain our patented taste. Too much of the secret sauce causes diabeetus of course, and we never want to tip the full-of-shit balance so heavily that our label reads ‘Complete Shit, now with human flavoring’.

So Many Poisons to Choose From

I just had my first casino experience. Aside from having a vision of how easily and quickly I could blow up my own life flash before my eyes, the most interesting part of the experience was how easy it was to tell the difference between the folks who wanted to be there, and the folks who HAD to be there.

How We Learn

There are truths in life that I have come to believe we will learn one of two ways:

1. By having an open heart and mind, by being willing and able to look inside of yourself, and having the humility needed to honestly assess your own strengths, weaknesses, triggers, and history, so that when these inevitable truths come to you, you are ready to receive them.

2. By pain.

Unfortunately, I’ve had to learn many important lessons by the second means, due to personal pride, magical thinking, or ego. 

Because I am deeply invested in being the best father I can be to my children—and realizing that kids learn more from how we behave than what we say—I am trying my hardest to reorient myself to receiving my lessons from the first means. It’s challenging, because we are pattern seeking animals designed to feel discomfort whenever we are forced to step outside of our own personal rituals, delusions, and thought processes.

We will all be humbled. The question is, do we embrace it, or have it forced upon us?

The Theologian

I know there's no god because my chihuahua's tail sticks straight up in the air so he walks around and everyone can see his asshole. I don't know what kind of god would do something like that.

Take Your Own Advice

Man, if I didn’t have so much cognitive dissonance over my failure to apply all of the brilliant ‘this is how to be happy and have a meaningful life’ advice I so freely offer others to my own life, I would probably be happier and living a more meaningful life.

On the Death of American Presidents

There has not been a president yet who hasn’t ruthlessly ordered the murder of numerous human beings to benefit their own careers. Yet it is anathema to mention these war crimes upon their deaths. Posts about their passing are always loving eulogies without qualifiers from their tribe, or loving eulogies from the opposing popular tribe with the qualifier, ‘maybe I didn’t agree with all of their policies, but...they were a good man, etc.’ This is gross. All 45 of our presidents have blood on their hands, and the rival tribes are different variations of capitalist original and capitalist diet. The fact that all the leaders of the ruling class in this country have to do is live at least a few years past their years in power to become respected elder statesmen harkening back to a better time—however many lives they’ve destroyed and families they’ve disrupted—should make everyone vomit. But I’m the troll, right?