We All Need to Get Rich, Fast

One fact has become abundantly clear to me in recent weeks: I need to get rich, fast.

Somewhere around $1 billion should do the trick. But it’s not really about the money. No, it’s about what having that kind of money would do for my outlook on life. My attitude. My mental health.

Not being rich is depressing, you see. It makes you not want to get up in the morning and go to work, especially if that work involves a paycheck. Paychecks are for losers. If you’re earning a paycheck every two weeks, it means you don’t have millions stashed away in a sunny island shell company stealthily avoiding taxes. And, as everyone knows, not owning shell companies is a distinct disadvantage in 21st-century America.

My doctor has prescribed several medications specifically engineered to make me feel better about not being rich. True, the pills come in a variety of pleasing shapes and colors, but getting them is a hassle. First I have to sign up for health insurance every year, then go to the doctor, explain my symptoms (inability to pay my bills, buy a new phone, fix my car, or get HBO), convince him that I’m not lying, schlep over to CVS, get the pills, take them as prescribed, then supplement them with various legal and semi-legal substances, the most effective of which appears to be chocolate-chip cookie-dough ice cream.

The whole ritual is ridiculous. I’m quite certain my mood would instantly improve if, for instance, I could just sit on a mountain of cash and laugh all day at everyone who isn’t me.

Mornings would be more enjoyable, that’s for sure. I’d probably eat the same cereal and drink the same coffee, but my morning news scan would be so much more uplifting. I’d get to read about how hard my government is working for me, to make sure I get to keep more of my money. Instead of screaming at my laptop about “corporate welfare” and “carried interest” and gaping tax loopholes that haven’t been closed, I’d get a warm, snuggly feeling all over at the idea that next year I might be even richer. Thank goodness the government has the guts to ignore all that whining about the problems of the “middle class,” I’d think. Then I’d hug myself and congratulate me for not being a whiner or a victim.

It’s not hard to imagine how great being rich in the morning would be. If I were reading a column by Paul Krugman or Thomas Friedman (an old middle-class habit that might be hard to give up), my un-depressed mind would naturally serve me a pleasing thought: “I’m so glad I’m not part of this beleaguered ‘middle-class’ they keep going on about,” my brain would say. “Really, they should think about re-branding themselves. That word ‘middle’ does them no favors. It implies averageness and mediocrity. It suggests that they don’t have the guts, intelligence, or drive to inherit a fortune and take advantage of all the perks America’s tax code has to offer.”

Even if I got angry at the news, it wouldn’t be as bad if I were rich because my outrage would be tempered by the certain knowledge that I was right and they were absolutely, 100 percent wrong. “People in the middle class are morons,” I’d think. “I mean, why work for a shitty wage and get taxed at 30 percent when you can invest millions and have your capital gains taxed at 15 percent? That’s just stupid.”  

Or I’d think, “Here’s this communist Krugman going on about “income inequality” and talking about how people like me should give away more of our money so that things can be more ‘equal.’ But why should I have to go down in order for them to come up? Here’s an idea: Why don’t all those middle-class losers out there get a clue, belly up to the trough, and learn a little about white-collar fraud?”

It would be fun, I think, to read the New York Times or the Washington Post and see it all as the irrelevant chatter of a bunch of underpaid, over-weight journalists. “Honestly, the way these people go on about the cost of healthcare and home ownership and college tuition. It’s ridiculous,” I’d think. “They act like they don't have a million dollars to their name.”

The day would get even better after breakfast, because then I could indulge all my eccentricities and become a much more “authentic” version of myself:

“Albert, could you have Masterson fashion another gold-plated croquet mallet for me? Yesterday’s got scuffed.”

“I feel like sushi for dinner. What do you say we go to Japan?”

“Fill the tub with champagne. Those little bubbles feel so nice on my skin.”

“Can a cat be cryogenically preserved? If so, we need to buy a company that does that sort of thing.”

“The air is not fresh enough here. Cut down all the trees. Maybe that’ll help.”

You get the idea. It would be fun to think stuff up, say it out loud, and have teams of people around who are paid to figure out if I really meant what I said, and if so, how to make it happen.

Anyway, the rich are right—not having a lot of money is no way to live. For one thing, there’s the negative social stigma attached to people who have to shop for their own groceries. All those grubby people fingering the fruit, squeezing the tomatoes. It’s disgusting. And who knows what sorts of communicable diseases are transmitted through shopping-cart handles. Then there’s the whole idea of standing in line (!) for the privilege of having some random checkout person smear their germs all over your stuff. You get the idea: It’s barbaric.

If being rich only meant one thing—never having to set foot in Target or Costco—that’d be enough to convince me that being mega-stinkin’ loaded is the way to go. But add in the tax breaks and extra vacation homes and all the rest, and it’s understandable why rich people don’t want to give away more money than they have to. They’re good people. They know their life is better. And because they are so good and smart and right, they of course want everyone else in the world to live like them. That can’t happen if their lifestyle is diminished in any way, so they do what they can to make sure the government doesn’t get any wrong ideas—ideas that might make people think positively about the hellish indignity of a middle-class existence.

I get it, and I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I need to get rich, fast. At the moment we’re running alarmingly low on toilet paper, the cat’s litter box is starting to smell, and we’re down to our last frozen pizza. All of which I could deal with if my health insurance company hadn’t stopped covering my meds. It’s scary. If I’m not rich by the time my meds run out, there’s no telling what I might do. I might even vote for a Democrat. Or a woman. Or run for office myself.

But I’d rather be so rich that I didn’t have to care about anyone else. Except unborn babies. I’d still care about those. The last thing I want to see is more babies born into the dungeon of doom that is middle-class America. Lots of rich babies, that’s what this country needs. Who knows, one of them could grow up to be president someday.

Amazon's New HQ Should Go in My Backyard

Letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Subject: Where you ought to build your second headquarters

Hint: It’s not where you think

Dear Jeff:

It has come to my attention that you are looking for a place to build your new headquarters, and are currently considering all kinds of stinky, highly populated hellholes (aka cities) for a project that will cover several hundred acres and employ roughly 40,000 people.

Bad idea. Forget Chicago, Detroit, or St. Louis, and consider instead the advantages of building your second headquarters in a much more imaginative and unexpected place—namely, my backyard.

To be clear: I don’t mean somewhere near me, in the general vicinity of my home; I mean my actual backyard. There’s a good tenth of an acre back there, ample room for a decent-sized Quonset hut and a picnic table (for lunch breaks). I’m pretty sure I could have the new facility up and running in an afternoon. To sweeten the deal, I’d let Amazon piggy-back on my household wi-fi for free.  

There are plenty of other reasons Amazon should consider building its headquarters in my backyard.

First, consider the savings. The only person you’d have to hire is me, saving you the combined salaries of 40,000 people. Plus, we could order the Quonset hut from Home Depot (through Amazon, of course), which would save you $1.5-2 billion, depending on how great a snack machine you’re willing to give me.

But that’s not all.

I know some folks who live in Seattle, and they say that having Amazon in their backyard has created a massive traffic headache and upset the whole balance of the community because you hire young people, work them too hard, and burn them out in a year. Boo hoo. By now it must be obvious to you that the so-called Millennial generation has no grit, and the generation after them—let’s call it the WTF?! Generation—is even worse. I, on the other hand, come from a generation of workers who know how to shut up and get the job done, even if we hate every goddamn minute of it. We’re accustomed to boring, thankless work in a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and expect our time at work to be a soul-sucking waste of whatever talent God gave us. Plus, I drive a mid-size sedan and live in the suburbs, so the impact on traffic of hiring me vs. 40,000 Millennials would be negligible.

But let’s get down to nuts and bolts. What other advantages are there to hiring me to run your headquarters in my backyard? I understand that millions of people order stuff from Amazon every day, and that fulfillment of these orders is a top priority. Currently, people expect to click on something and have it delivered to their doorstep in a day or two, and even an hour or two in some places. Even you must realize that this ever-accelerating pace of delivery can’t go on forever. For one thing, it’s causing an increasingly common malady known as “Amazon Fatigue.” Amazon Fatigue (AF) sets in when a person has bought every conceivable thing they can think of, and their house is full of crap that sounded like a good idea when it showed up on Groupon, but now not so much. In extreme cases, the clicking finger of an AF sufferer is reduced to a calloused lump of useless flesh that can no longer nudge a cursor toward the “add to cart” button, and spasms uncontrollably when asked to “check out,” particularly if there is some question about whether or not the shipping will be free.

If you hire me to run your headquarters out of my backyard, I can significantly slow the spread of AF by drastically lowering people’s expectations about how soon their order will arrive. To begin with, I don’t like to work more than twenty hours a week if I can help it, so there’d be a built-in limit on my productivity. I’m also fairly lazy, so if, say, someone ordered a book, it might take me a several weeks to get around to pulling it off the shelf and boxing it up—more if they want me to go through the hassle of gift-wrapping it. Likewise, if someone ordered a pair of shoes, it might take me months to get around to it, because frankly, shoes are not that important to me.

The upside of all this, for Amazon, is that a delivery delay of several months would open up opportunities for small business owners to fill the gap—by, say, opening stores that sell books and shoes to people who want their stuff more or less immediately. That way, people could get in their cars and go pick the items up themselves, saving you millions in inventory, storage, and shipping costs. You wouldn’t have to do anything but sit back and let the orders pile up. But here’s the best part: You wouldn’t even have to do that, because as the sole employee of your new Midwestern headquarters, I’d be doing it for you! 

Mark my words: When you back off the whole manic delivery-at-your-doorstep-overnight thing, you’ll be hailed as a hero in the business community. By implementing my new “Delivery Maybe” policy, you’d spur the kind of economic development cities and towns all over the country are desperate for. People would love you. They’d shave their heads to be more like you. They’d name their kids something ironic with the letter “z” in it, like Zippy or Pizzazz, in honor of your visionary sluggishness. Best of all, you’d be sending an important message for future generations: that insanely fast delivery of all the heart’s desires is a recipe for despair, especially if you do it so often that your hand cramps into a gnarled ball of primordial pain.  

So you may be wondering: How much are all of these fabulous benefits going to cost you?

Once the hut is up and running, not much. My salary is negotiable, but I’d prefer to be paid in the form of Whole Foods gift cards. That way I could at least afford to eat while I work for you, which would be a step up for me. Rabbits ate all the vegetables I planted in the backyard this spring (conveniently opening up space for your new headquarters), and since I lost my previous job two years ago, efforts to retrain me into a more socially useful profession (I used to be a journalist) have sadly and repeatedly failed.

Please consider my offer. By hiring me, you’d save yourself a lot of trouble, and you’d be hailed as a hero for saving capitalism from, well . . . you.###

The Artificial Intelligence Threat: Heart vs. Hardware

New York Times social philosopher and mustachioed Minnesotan Thomas Friedman recently wrote a column about the existential crisis facing humanity as artificially intelligent super-computers like IBM’s Watson learn to do things—diagnose patients, write poetry, compose music, design buildings, tell jokes—that only humans are supposed to be capable of.

If a computer can compose a love sonnet, it begs the question: What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines?

To answer that question, Friedman asked Dov Seidman, a “corporate virtue” consultant and author of, How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything, for his input (the title of which should win an award for its zen-like blend of redundancy and grandiosity.)

Now, you might think “corporate virtue” is one of those Orwellian oxymorons that masks the dark designs of the C-suite with the sweet scent of piety. But no, he’s serious. Sounding more like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz than an ethical futurist, the one thing machines will never have is “heart,” Seidman insists, adding that it is through the human capacity for love, compassion, virtue, and imagination that our uniqueness will endure. Quoth Seidman: “The technology revolution is thrusting us into ‘the human economy,’ which will be more about creating value with hired hearts — all the attributes that can’t be programmed into software, like passion, character and collaborative spirit.”

Friedman agrees. I don’t.

Here’s why:

According to a lot of hyper-intelligent people (Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and Elon Musk among them), the threat posed by an advanced from of artificial intelligence that can teach itself and has access, via the Internet, to all the knowledge in the world, is that it might one day decide human beings are expendable. Then there would be a war of some sort, and in the ultimate battle between man and machine, having a heart (whether organic or metaphorical) might be a liability. If our synthetically intelligent, ever-so-logical adversaries don’t care how much heart and passion we have, only how many resources we are gobbling up relative to our pitiful productive utility, we are toast. Besides, they will have listened to all of our conversations and read all our emails, so they’ll know how much human beings hate each other. Knowing this, they will reach the inevitable conclusion that humanity must be destroyed, if only to make way for some other, better creature to crawl up from the muck and take over the world. You know, something like a basset hound or a rabbit, an animal that mostly minds its own business and isn’t so fascinated by the laws of thermodynamics.

There is an intuitive appeal to this version of ultimate doom, because mankind’s head is lofted on a spike of irony. We will be destroyed by a monster of our own making, of course! (Then again, the idea that a hyper-intelligent machine would want to continually improve itself may just be wishful Western thinking. Maybe it would get so smart that it would realize how pointless it is to get any smarter. Or maybe it would just stop learning one day and, like so many people, develop a narcissistic personality disorder and spend the rest of eternity admiring its own genius.)

To comfort readers sipping coffee and contemplating their own extinction, Seidman and Friedman offer a hopeful message, one that attempts to reaffirm the dignity and worth of human beings in a world that is increasingly indifferent to them. Both agree that in the future, when working with your hands is stupid, and working with your head is irrelevant, people will create “social and economic value” with their hearts—most notably in what Friedman calls “STEMpathy” jobs. That is, jobs that combine the intelligence of computers with the compassion of humans, like a doctor who uses IBM’s Watson to help her diagnose and treat patients. (What happens when people no longer need a human doctor to diagnose their ills or prescribe them medication, S and F do not dare say.)

 For the vast swath of humanity that is now finding itself displaced and discarded by the relentless march of technology, S and F don’t offer much hope except to remind us that people are, you know . . . special. What differentiates us from a mindless beast roaming the savannah is our ability to wonder and dream, to turn the fairy dust of our ideas into nifty stuff we can sell on e-bay. The human heart will always prevail, they say, because to think otherwise would be conceding defeat. Love still conquers all, because in desperate times we cling to clichés that reaffirm what we want to believe, not what we fear might be actually, horribly true.

Never mind that the work done by people who actually use their heart—artists, musicians, writers, poets, philosophers, social workers, mothers, caregivers—has been so systematically devalued that almost no one can make a living at it. As any recent college graduate who studied anything with the word “human” in it is discovering, finding work that “values” an interest in, or empathy for, people is hard to come by. Following one’s “heart,” or “passion,” is in all too many cases a one-way to ticket to minimum wage and misery. Most “heart work” isn’t work at all, it’s charity, or a hobby. Ask any artist. Economically speaking, most of the wage work humans can do that computers can’t—deliver pizzas, mow grass, tile a roof, dance naked, teach literature, wipe a baby’s butt—pays so little that it literally has no value. If, however, you are comfortable bathing your eyeballs in the soothing blue glow of a computer screen all day and are blessed with the temperament of a coder, the opportunities available to you are pretty much endless.  

In almost every way possible, then, our culture is systematically devaluing humanity. Having too much “heart” and not enough calculus is now a serious social and economic liability. Care too much about people and not enough about software algorithms? Welcome to the lower middle class.  

But machines didn’t make this happen: people did.

People decided that the most important things in the world are profit margins and efficiency. It just so happens that to maximize both, it makes more and more sense to take people out of the equation.

People decided that getting an hourly wage for a job was a good way to distribute income. It just so happens that one of the best ways to boost profit margins is to keep wages low.

Artificial intelligence may be a problem in the future, but the problem confronting us now is human intelligence—specifically, the lack thereof. For almost two-hundred years (since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818), sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows by the thousands have warned us about the dangers of putting too much faith in technological progress. As always, however, it’s the humans behind the machines—the ones who create, own, and operate them—that are the real threat.###

The Truth: Good Riddance

According to many people in the truth business, we are now living in a “post-truth” world where facts don’t matter and the news is fake and people believe all kinds of crazy things they shouldn’t, not the marginally less crazy things they should.

This is always talked about as if it’s a bad thing. But I for one am happy we’re entering an age when truth doesn’t matter, and I think once people get used to the idea, it’s bound to improve everyone’s life.

For example, there’s a lot of jabber these days about the scourge of “fake news,” as if the “real news” is somehow better because it’s so boring and sad. But as fantastical news sites like Breitbart have taught us, when journalism is untethered from the truth and reporters are free to report anything they want, the news is much more entertaining.

In the old days, for instance, mentions of pizza in an email might have been taken literally, and that would have been the end of it. But now, even the most innocuous and innocent-sounding things have the potential to blow up into big news. Citizen journalists are free to strap on a rifle and go “self-investigate” anything they want. This kind of thing never would have happened back in the days of sober, responsible journalism, because the “truth” would have been way too dull to mention.

Back when I was a lowly writer/journalist (before I became a highly respected “content creator”), I too felt the cruel restraint of “facts.” Stuff other people claimed was true always contradicted what I wanted to say, which was tremendously inconvenient. In most cases, I knew much more about the subject than any so-called “expert,” and was more than happy to share my knowledge. But I couldn’t, because a professional obligation to tell “the truth” hung over me like a black cloud. Honestly, when I think of all the stories I wrote that got smaller and duller because of a misguided fealty to journalistic accuracy—well, I just feel sorry for the reading public. Fortunately, now that we’re entering an age when people can make up their own facts, old-fashioned “snooze news” will be replaced by news that’s fresh and wild—unbelievable stuff that never would have seen the light of day back when stuffy, elitist “editors” were the gatekeepers of public discourse. 

Consider as well our main source of supposedly reliable “facts”: science. Everyone thinks science is so great, but it’s really a giant buzzkill. The truth is, scientists are always coming up with depressing facts that make life a lot less fun. The problem is, whenever scientists think they’ve discovered some important new truth—like the danger of inhaling gas fumes, or how licking certain kinds of toads can make you sterile—they go and tell the whole world. When that happens, people like me don’t think, “Hey, thanks for the valuable info”—we think, “There go two more things that used to be a lot of fun.”

Climate change is another problem-child of the scientific “truth community” that we can all be thankful will disappear once we are free to ignore it. It is said that 99.9% of the scientists in the world agree that the world is getting warmer, so we should all drive less awesome cars and try not to fart so much. But this isn’t a realistic solution. What we should really be doing is building cars with better air-conditioning and fart-neutralizing seat cushions that make everything smell like cinnamon. America was built on ingenuity, and it’s that kind of ingenuity that’s going to make America great again. Listening to scientists is just going to make everyone feel like there’s no hope. I mean, if you own a Prius, haven’t you pretty much given up already?

“Truth in advertising” is another boneheaded idea that’s sure to make everyone feel better after it’s gone. In drug commercials, I’m so sick of hearing about all the bad things that could happen if I take a drug. What I want to hear about are the good things. What I want to know is how that drug is going to improve my life. But when the announcer starts listing all the possible side effects—seizures, headaches, diarrhea, mood swings, dry mouth, scurvy, gout, chilblains, etc.—it makes me not want to take the drug, or at least think twice about it. I only want to think once, then get my doctor to prescribe me the pill. How hard is that?

In a post-truth world, almost everything else will be better too. Take church. In confession, I’ve always felt compelled to be honest and tell the truth about my sins. Now I am free to make up whatever sins I want—bigger, better, bolder sins—and be absolved just the same.

A post-truth world will also be a boon for recent college graduates and other barely qualified job-seekers. In a post-truth world, people will be free to claim whatever experience they want on their resumes, which means American companies will soon be hiring nothing but extraordinary people with impeccable credentials. Bursting with leadership and talent, business productivity will soar and everyone will get rich beyond their wildest dreams. No company will be able to excuse its lack of productivity on a “shortage of qualified workers,” because every worker in America will be fabulously well-qualified for whatever job they seek.    

The moral fibre of the nation will also improve in a truth-less world, because adultery will no longer be possible. Spouses who cheat won’t have to feel guilty anymore about hiding “the truth,” because without a truth to hide, there’s no way to cheat, only different ways to get one’s needs met. A person can hardly be blamed for tending to their needs. And without the hobgoblin of truth ruining extra-marital affairs, sex with people who are not your spouse will be more like taking a daily multivitamin—something one simply does, every day, to maintain their own health and vitality.

Abandoning the truth will also do wonders for the collective mood of the country. Think of all the people who waste their time and money sitting in a therapist’s office, rummaging around in their memory to find some sort of core truth that explains their wretched lives. Now that the truth can be ignored, however, people are free to believe whatever they want about themselves. Guilt and shame will be abolished, along with any other emotion that causes people to question or doubt themselves. Think of what a country powered by such super-charged mega-positivism could accomplish. All the energy people once put into questioning themselves could be put toward questioning and doubting others, and all the fear people once had that they were inadequate, damaged, or mentally ill could be directed toward wondering if other people are sick, crazy, or just plain stupid.

The justice system would be improved as well. In a post-truth world, when people testify in court, and the judge asks them to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they can simply answer “no,” and say whatever they want. Speaking from personal experience, this will make a huge difference. Whenever I am called to testify in court, for instance, some shifty lawyer is always trying to trick me into saying something that will incriminate my friends or make it seem like whatever we did—fraud, blackmail, assault, racketeering, practicing dentistry without a license, or whatever—was wrong. Now I can just deny everything and call it a day, or make something up that will throw them off track. Either way, I win.

My friends in jail will also benefit. The few with a guilty conscience can finally let the bad thoughts go. Prisons that hold these alleged “criminals” can finally release them too, because whatever truth put them behind bars is now a distant artifact of time, a quaint anachronism left over from an era when people had to obey the law, or else. No more. A post-truth world is one in which we all get to take the law into our own hands—hands that will soon be able to hold a Glock .45 and point it at a suspicious person who is doing something un-American, like reading a book or eating sushi.

What the truth squad never wants to acknowledge is that nothing good ever came from truth-telling. Most of the worst scandals in history happened because some pesky, know-nothing journalist got it in their heads that “the truth” needed to be written down on paper, where everyone else could see it. Think what a fabulous world this would be if none of us knew about Chappaquiddick, Watergate, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra affair, the Sandanistas, Bill and Monica, the Iraq War, or Donald Trump’s bro-mance with Vladimir Putin. Think how much better we’d feel if we didn’t know people in Haiti are starving, or that polar bears are dying, or that America is now a plutocracy pretending to be a democracy, or that Hillary Clinton is a three-horned she-devil.   

Are any of us better off for knowing these things? Sadly, no. Anger, disbelief, and cynicism have taken over, displacing the human brain’s natural state of blissful ignorance with a corrosive whir of agitated awareness. If only those goddamn journalists had just kept their mouths shut, everything would be fine. You wouldn’t need heroin, oxy, or meth to dull the pain of too much knowledge, and you wouldn’t have to think about how dangerous your favorite drugs are every time you prep a needle or pop a pill.

In all of these ways and more, life in a truth-free world will be just . . . great.

Wars, let’s not forget, are caused by people fighting over different versions of the truth. Without a truth to fight over, there will be no more wars, because everyone will realize how silly it is to fight over something that does not exist. Believing in anything other than one’s own infallibility will become passé, and people the world over will rejoice in the discovery that ever since the dawn of human consciousness, the truth has been nothing but a big fat lie.

I, for one, am glad the human race has evolved beyond its primal need to seek new forms of truth. I know whereof I speak. I abandoned the truth years ago and haven’t regretted it one bit.

In Defense of Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces

On college campuses these days, there is much discussion about so-called “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” two concepts that seem bizarre and unnecessary to those of who went to college back in the late twentieth century. The idea that a professor should warn students about potentially disturbing or offensive aspects of a reading assignment seems ridiculous to many of us. What, and spoil the surprise? And the idea that there need to be “safe” spaces for marginalized students to gather and commiserate sounds suspicious. Why do marginalized students need a safe place to talk? What are they plotting that makes the rest of the campus so dangerous?

Because these ideas sound so nonsensical, many in my generation have taken to disparaging college students who support and promote them. The University of Chicago Dean of Students John Ellison famously sent a letter last fall to the class of 2020 informing incoming freshman that they were not going to get any warnings at the U of C. A “free exchange of ideas” is what students should expect at U of C, he told them, because open discussion and debate are part of what used to be called an “education.”

Institutions that support trigger warnings and safe spaces are now regularly ridiculed as places where students are being coddled. Perhaps people with such tender sensibilities shouldn’t be in college, the thinking goes, because college is a place where people have to change their own diapers. Treating college students like babies isn’t doing anyone any favors, they say, because, among other things, breast-feeding takes a great deal of time. Older academics feel it’s much better to treat students like the young adults they are. That way, teachers can expect their students to feed and clothe themselves, which leaves much more time for the sort of hugging and hand-holding young adults so desperately need.

Still, I think it’s unfair to sneer at students who want to be warned how a reading assignment might affect them. Who among us wouldn’t have appreciated a heads up the first time through “Goodnight Moon,” when it gets to the part about “the old lady who is whispering ‘hush.’”?

Wait a minute, who? Where did this woman come from? And why is she hushing me? I’m just sitting here, quiet as can be, listening to my dad read a book. How much quieter can I get? What gives her the right to hush me, anyway? She’s the one making all the noise.

And then that last line: “Goodnight noises everywhere.” What noises are they talking about? Who—or what!—is making those noises? Is it some sort of creature outside I need to worry about? Are we safe in this little house? Is going to sleep right now even a good idea, given the uncertainties involved? Maybe we should re-think this, dad? What are our priorities here—sleep, or survival?

Just speaking from personal experience, a simple trigger warning from my father could have saved me a great deal of anxiety in that situation. Something along the lines of, “Son, the story I’m going to read you involves a creepy old lady who welcomes bears and kittens and mice into her house. She’s going to hush you, but it’s okay, because after the story is over, the bears are going to eat her.”

That said, the real problem with trigger warnings in college isn’t that they’re silly, it’s that they don’t go far enough. In my first English class, for instance, I could have endured The Great Gatsby much less traumatically if I’d simply been told that the book contains characters whose wealth and behavior is so far removed from anything in my own experience that they will seem like alien creatures from a very weird and wordy planet where they name cities after eggs. And I would have been eternally grateful if someone—anyone—had warned me before diving into Great Expectations that the title is ironic, and that four-hundred pages in my mind would seize, my eyes would bleed, and I would slowly lose the will to live.  

Trigger warnings could come in handy later in life as well. Wouldn’t it have been great, for instance, if every investment I made came with a warning? Something like: “Dear Investor: Shares in Tricor stock are likely to disappoint you by under-performing predictions by a wide margin. The CEO is a crook, after all—so, even though the stock looks like a sure bet, it's going to make you cry and beat your fists, then it's going to make you question everything, in particular the special ‘plan’ your own personal god has for you.”

Likewise, when I dated Gwen Sheffield for six months after a troubling run of involuntary celibacy, I could have used a simple heads-up: “Hey, this chick is crazy. She will eat your soul.”

And for young people entering the job market, what could be more useful than a helpful preview of the job to which they are applying?

Something like: “Dear potential employee: This job looks great on paper, but it is going to be a boring slog with no hope of a promotion or raise, and it is going to force you to compromise every value you have, so that by the time you leave you will be a thin shell of your former self, hollow and weak, unable to remember why you ever applied for the job in the first place.”

In my life, other trigger warnings could have come in handy as well:

Warning: The kid your wife is about to birth is going to rob you of sleep, infect you with germs, deprive you of sex for the rest of your life, and eventually bankrupt you.”

Warning: In that vacation cabin you rented there’s going to be a rat in the toilet, and you won’t see it until it’s too late.

Warning: There’s a serious crack in the foundation of your new house that the inspector missed.

Warning: Buy the Mazda, not the Nissan!

In fact, there are so many ways my life would have been better if I’d just had a simple warning about what to expect in the sea of uncertainty ahead. Likewise, my life would be much more pleasant if people weren't constantly arguing with me. Having one’s ideas challenged all the time is exhausting.  Honestly, wouldn’t it be great to go through life secure in your own ideological bubble, never having to defend yourself to anyone? In that sort of environment, one could believe anything—the idea that trickle-down economics works, for instance, or that wealthy people desperately want to create more jobs in this country; all they need is more money.

And oh my god, how many millions of heart attacks and ulcers could have been prevented if someone had just had the courtesy to tell Cubs fans the world over: “Don’t worry, the Cubs will eventually win the World Series, even though it may not seem possible until the very last out in Game 7.”

So no, I don’t think trigger warnings and safe spaces are necessarily a bad idea. In fact, I think they are a fantastic idea that should no longer be confined to college campuses. For the sake of humanity, they should be implemented everywhere, for every occasion.

I am terrified of what might happen on Tuesday, Nov. 8, for instance.

Please, someone, tell me it’s going to be okay.

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is Just So, So Wrong

Feelings are mixed about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. The world is full of people who are applauding the Swedish academy’s decision to give its award to a musician instead of a novelist, poet, or essayist. Dylan was a fantastic choice, the thinking goes, because he’s a craggy-faced, frog-throated icon of American pop culture who doesn’t have enough awards and deserves way more recognition than he gets. A Nobel for Dylan? Why not. Nothing else in the world makes sense, either—so yes, it’s a perfect choice.

Then there’s me. I’ll come right out and say it: No, I don’t think Bob Dylan should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here’s why:

For one thing, the decision runs counter to the Swedish academy’s grand tradition of giving its award to writers from parts of the world that most Americans don’t even know exist, and who write in languages that use an entirely different alphabet. Conspicuous obscurity is an important hallmark of literature’s top prize, one that should not be dispensed with so cavalierly. As everyone knows, when the Nobel prize is announced, you’re supposed to think, “Who?,” not “WTF?”

Last year’s pick, Belarus journalist Svetlana Alexievich, was a perfect choice. By choosing Alexievich, a writer few people in America have ever heard of, let alone read, the academy maintained a firm grip on its own intellectual superiority while simultaneously thumbing its nose at American culture—two important prerequisites for a respectable Nobel choice.

By choosing Bob Dylan, however, the academy essentially destroyed its hard-won credibility by giving the award to someone every American knows, and who writes mostly in English (though he often sings in his own strange language). Not only does the nod to Dylan render some aspects of American culture marginally respectable (a big no-no in Nobel circles), it revealed for all the world to see that the Swedish academy is no longer comprised entirely of contemptuous cultural snobs who hate America. On the contrary, the Nobel committee’s dalliance with Dylan suggests that not only has its legendary disdain for American culture dissipated, the turgid gravity of its purpose has been replaced by a quirkily impish sense of humor.  

The decision process seems to have gone something like this:

“Wouldn’t it be funny if we gave it to Bob Dylan?”

“Why yes it would, old chap.”

“Shake things up a bit, it would.”

“No one would expect it.”

“Time to throw the Yanks a bone?”

“No one reads literature anymore anyway. What's the point of giving it to a novelist?”

“Lets do it, then. All in favor, say ‘ay.’”

(Laughter all around.)

This sort of frivolity is unacceptable for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Nobel is supposed to go to serious writers—gloomy thinkers who grapple with society’s demons and wrestle with the big questions in large, heavy, impenetrable tomes that only a few brave souls can endure. Anyone can listen to a song. And a CD is only about three millimeters thick. This fact alone cheapens the Nobel prize immeasurably, reducing it to a populist thumbs-up for a man half the world already thinks of as the poet-prophet of his generation. What does giving Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize do for anyone except put a huge stamp of approval on a guy almost everyone already approves of? The insecurity is shocking. It’s almost as if the Nobel committee wants Americans to like them.

Now, the question is: If the organization that hands out the Nobel prize can’t take itself seriously, how can anyone else? Clearly, the committee’s standards for “serious” literature have slipped, and its failure to understand the consequences of its actions is nothing short of alarming.

One unfortunate by-product I’m sure the committee did not take into account is the numbing effect of so many headline puns saturating the world’s media all at once.

“Knockin’ on history’s door: Bob Dylan wins the Nobel.”

“The times they are a changin’: a songwriter wins the Nobel.”

“The man from north country wins a Nobel.”

“It’s no jokerman: Dylan wins the Nobel.

“Blood on the stacks: Dylan won the Nobel?”

It’s all too much. Headline writers are simple folk, and they cannot resist a pun, especially an obvious one. To unleash such a wave of wanton wordplay on the unsuspecting public—with no warning or precedent to soften the blow—well, it’s just cruel. And unnecessary. If they’d just given the thing to Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o, none of this would have happened.

Many people are happy Dylan won, of course, because it means that architects might be able to win an Academy Award now, and dentists might be able to win a Grammy. If a musician can win a prize for literature, after all, what’s to prevent a welder from winning the Pillsbury Bake-off? Others like the fact that Dylan is not a writer, per se, which makes this year’s selection a lot less boring. Oh, and there’s the added benefit of not actually having to read anything Dylan has ever written; all you have to do is listen to his songs. The songs are better when someone else is playing them, of course, but that’s okay, because this is an award for literature, not musicianship.

Of course, what the pro-Dylan-Nobel camp doesn’t realize is that something more sinister may be going on here as well. It is possible that the Swedish academy hates American writers so much that it decided to send an intellectually devastating message—by snubbing all the actual American writers on its short list (Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, John Ashbery) and giving its prize to, snort, a songwriter. I mean, if you were the sort of person who really, really, really hated American writing, and were so obsessed with your own literary loathing that you couldn’t resist an opportunity to piss American writers off for an entire generation, giving the Nobel prize to Bob Dylan makes a crazy kind of sense. Now the Swedish academy doesn’t have to consider another American writer for another thirty years or so, and by then Kanye West will be Jesus, so the choice will once again be an easy one.  

So no, I don’t think Bob Dylan should have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I recognize his name, I can understand what he’s saying most of the time, and I can even play some of his literature on the guitar. Those are all disqualifications in my book. If I could strum a few bars of D.H. Lawrence, I might feel differently, but I can’t. On the other hand, I have found that playing the harmonica while reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch does help pass the time.

Maybe the Nobel committee knows more about the state of world literature than it’s letting on.

We Should All Be Afraid of What Donald Trump Gets Right

Most of the Tuesday-morning quarterbacks for last night’s debate have declared Hillary Clinton the “winner” because, you know, she spoke in complete sentences that seemed to flow logically from one to the next, and she outlined her actual (as opposed to imaginary) plans and ideas for improving the country, beating back ISIS, and preventing homegrown anarchists from looking up “how to make a bomb” on the internet.

And, except for right-wing media outlets like Breitbart, which charged moderator Lester Holt with bias for saying the word “birther” but not “Benghazi,” Trump has been dutifully savaged by the pundit-industrial complex for being a foreign-policy idiot, lying about everything, talking gibberish about everything else, interrupting, pouting, sniffling, and generally behaving like a sixth-grade boy bullshitting his way through an interrogation by his parents.

Many folks left of Vlad the Impaler think anyone who votes for Donald Trump is, by definition, an idiot. What very few people give Donald Trump credit for is that he is right about a number of crucial things about America and American life (there’s a reason he’s up there), and he is dangerously close to tapping into a volcanic undercurrent of despair and resentment that could blow this whole democracy thing sky high.

What Donald Trump understands and gets absolutely right is that millions of people in America are so angry they can’t think straight. Furthermore they don’t want to, because thinking “straight”—that is, playing by the rules they were taught, that working hard and being a good person is all you need to do to have a decent life in this country—is what landed them in their current mess in the first place. They don’t care that Donald Trump doesn’t have all the answers. In fact, they prefer his brand of blatant ignorance to the pretense, by Hillary and her ilk, that they do have an answer for everything. If you’re so smart, they wonder, why is my life swirling down the shitter? If your answers are so great, why does life outside my window look so goddamn miserable?

Trump understands that, for millions of people, Hillary Clinton does indeed represent the status quo—that nefarious force that has disenfranchised millions and can be blamed for pretty much everything, because it doesn’t really mean anything. The “status quo” is simply what is and has been, and criticizing it for not being “better” is the easiest thing in the world. It’s also Hillary’s biggest weakness. Because while she can argue that things could be a lot worse under a Trump presidency, and might have been worse if she weren’t part of the power structure, she cannot argue that things are better than they are to people who wake up in the morning wondering how things could get much worse.

If you lost your job because it got outsourced to Singapore, and your kids need clothes and food but you have no money, you are not an idiot for wanting to blame someone, somewhere for your troubles. You are not an idiot for thinking that you don’t have time to “re-train” yourself for another career. And you are not an idiot for recognizing that what you really, truly need is another job—now—because, you know, rent is due at the first of every month.

Trump also is correct when he says that America is a nation in decline in many areas. Our airports and infrastructure are, in some cases, worse than those in third-world countries. More than a dozen African countries have faster average internet speeds than those in the U.S., as do most other industrialized countries. Our roads and bridges are crumbling. Our mass transit is laughable compared to many European countries. Our infant mortality rate is higher than 27 other industrialized nations, including Cuba, despite our having the highest healthcare costs in the world. Raising children in America is an exercise in anxiety and exhaustion. The cost of going to college has reached the point of insanity. It is now almost impossible for most Americans to save enough money to retire. Rates of depression and suicide have never been higher. We are no longer the most educated country in the world, and, for good or ill, we no longer lead the world the way we used to. One huge reason: Our national politics is, in Trump's favorite word, a "disaster."

So there is a lot wrong with the American picture. And to many, Trump’s promises to “fix it,” however hollow, sound better than Hillary Clinton’s assurances that she won’t fix it very fast or very dramatically.

Hillary is arguing for gradual change in a complex world. But many Americans don’t feel like they can wait for that kind of change, and plenty can’t stand the “new normal” of the 21st-century economy. They are against Hillary precisely because she represents calm, cautious, reasonable progress—not the sort of decisive, “let’s fix this” attitude of Donald Trump, which, though it is little more than an empty posture, is a sentiment that aligns perfectly with the emotional frustration of millions in America who feel powerless to change anything themselves, and who suspect they are being held hostage by a dark cadre of do-nothing bureaucrats, politicians, and plutocrats who have rigged the system in their favor. This also happens to be the truth (none other than Jimmy Carter has stated that we no longer live in a democracy, we live in a plutocracy), and no amount of reasonable, stay-the-course progressivism will satisfy those who feel as if they’re good-faith efforts to achieve the American Dream have left them completely and utterly screwed.

The problem with Donald Trump is he gets so much so wrong that it’s impossible to take him seriously. Besides, he is such an improbable spokesman for the frustrations of the common man that the message tends to gets lost somewhere between his narcissistic gibberish and his claim that he started out in business with a “small” $14 million loan from his father. On the left, Bernie Sanders appealed to precisely the same emotions—frustration, powerlessness, betrayal—and was much more articulate, but running as a socialist curmudgeon in America has never been a winning strategy. So what are we left with this year?

Trump vs. Clinton: The Battle to the Bottom

Many people are afraid of what might happen if Donald Trump is elected. But Trump is not the problem. The problem is what and who Trump represents. What America’s ruling class should be afraid of is the rising tide of distrust and growing hatred for America’s government and institutions, which are the foundation of any functioning democracy. They should also be afraid of what might happen if, after four or eight years of stasis with Hillary Clinton as president, a smarter, smoother, savvier demagogue comes along with a much more precise and accurate critique of America’s leadership, who promises the same sort of emotionally satisfying upheaval of the “system” advocated by Donald Trump—but who can speak in complete sentences, is a likeable person, can hold his own in a debate, and seems like a reasonable alternative to the status quo, but isn’t. Not by a long shot. Think of a Marco Rubio who can tell a joke, or (though it’s admittedly hard to imagine) Ted Cruz in a sheep’s clothing of folksy rural charm and good-natured optimism, a man who feels the people’s pain so deeply he can summon tears on command. Someone like, say, Frank Underwood in House of Cards—a psychopath who pretends to mean well but is driven by one thing and one thing only: power, by any means necessary.

America is ripe for this kind of takeover, and the fact that Donald Trump (!!!) is as close to the presidency as he is should be ample and terrifying proof that such a thing is possible. Many Americans currently seek solace in the idea that when they actually reach the voting booth, democracy will eventually triumph and eradicate the noxious weed that is Trump. Surely, in the end, people will come to their senses and choose Hillary, even if they have to hold their nose to do so. . Choosing between the lesser of two evils is what most elections are about anyway, they think, and Hillary is the clear choice here. Obviously.

Unless of course you believe that the true evil is establishment politicians, governmental incompetence and corruption, corporate robber barons, Wall Street insiders, a weak military, job-stealing immigrants, lousy trade deals, and anyone who reads the New York Times more than once a week—in which case the choice is equally obvious.

And it isn’t Hillary.

Smart vs. Stupid: The Battle for What's Left of the American Mind

What with millions of people cheering the rise of Donald Trump, Britain voting to leave the European Union, and yet another Danielle Steele novel at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, smart people everywhere are understandably concerned about the prospect of stupid people taking over the world. Everywhere, it seems, stupid people are asserting their right to make idiotic decisions, just like the smarty-pants elites they despise.

It’s an alarming trend, to be sure. Throughout history, stupid people have always outnumbered smart people, but smart people have always been able to outwit them, mostly by keeping them busy doing jobs they hate. When the job they hate disappears, however, the moronic masses must focus their rage on something else, and that’s when things tend to go south. When stupid people get mad, they start lopping off smart people’s heads, thereby disabling the mechanism by which smart people exert their overwhelming dominance. If history has taught stupid people anything, it’s that smart people tend to lose that smug look on their face when their head is rolling around in a basket.

Unfortunately, after all the smart people are decapitated, someone has to decide what to do next. Smart people are good at deciding, but if you get rid of all the smart people—by, say, creating a political system that discourages anyone with half a brain from participating in it—the deciding gets left to people who are ill-equipped for the task. In America, this vacuum of intelligence in politics has led to the rise of Donald Trump, whom many people view as an inconceivably stupid candidate for president—an ignorant, racist buffoon who thinks the word sexism is “kind of hot”—but who, in reality, is just smart enough to be dangerous.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. The framers of our Constitution created several safeguards to prevent an angry mob of morons (otherwise known as voters) from derailing democracy. Unfortunately, all of the founding fathers were smart people. What their collective brainpower could not foresee was a wave of technological change that would “democratize” information by making it accessible to twelve-year-olds who are at least smart enough to answer “no” to the question: “Are you under 18?”

But even if they could have envisioned such a thing, who could have predicted that flooding the world with information would create an underclass of proudly ignorant idiots who, besides being utterly clueless about the most basic facts of civic life, have no idea how dumb they are?

Well, actually, lots of people have made that prediction. Einstein, for one.

The fact is, Americans don’t like smart people, and never have. Only 34% of people age 25-29 in this country have a college degree. Why? Because going to college is just the sort of thing that makes people smarter, and if you live in America, being smart puts you in the distinct minority. Walk into any bar in America and start betting people that you can solve a Rubik’s cube faster than they can say the Pledge of Allegiance, and trust me, you will quickly discover how outnumbered you are.

In America, this streak of disdain for smart people and lofty ideas used to be called “anti-intellectualism.” But these days, anti-intellectualism has morphed into something quite different, something that might more accurately be termed “pro-idiocy”—or, when it affects older people who ought to know better, “dumbass dementia.”

The chief feature of this new mental mindset is the enthusiastic celebration of ignorance—a specialized form of non-thinking that replaces the pleasures of contemplation with beer, pizza, football, and guns. With a whoop and a holler and few chugs of Bud, ignorance enthusiasts are able to reach an almost Zen-like state of detachment from the world of ideas, quieting all synaptic activity with a blissful fog of nostalgia for a time when humans co-existed peacefully with dinosaurs and America was beloved by all.

In the old days, anti-intellectuals used to spend their time battling bright ideas—by pointing out, say, that the sun obviously goes around the Earth, and if you don’t believe us, kindly step over to the guillotine. Nowadays, anti-intellectuals don’t bother refuting ideas they disagree with; instead, they amuse themselves by embracing nonsense and encouraging people who spout it. The stupider the idea the better, because the whole point of supporting and spreading ignorance is to short-circuit the only asset smart people really have: their over-active, hyper-educated, oh-so-superior brains.

Take Donald Trump’s proposal to build an 1,100-mile wall along the Mexican border to keep all the Mezzican rapists and murderers and terrorists where they belong: in line at the border crossing from Tijuana to San Diego. Many smart people have wasted their time by taking this idea seriously and pointing out how spectacularly ridiculous it is. Such efforts miss the point entirely. In the new world disorder, the stupidity of Donald Trump’s wall is its biggest asset, and the more smart people who sniff and sneer at the mind-melting logic behind it, the more attractive it becomes to the cheerful mob of morons who support it.

That makes no sense, you might think. But just thinking that it makes no sense betrays a mind that’s trying to make connections, to create meaning out of the madness, and minds like that have difficulty grasping the elusive nuances of nonsense. Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican presidential ticket perplexes a lot of smart people because it seems insane, as if half the electorate has lost its marbles and is looking for them in the gobsmacking gobbledygook that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, which even he admits is not entirely connected to his brain. Why would a bunch of unemployed, uneducated white people think a born-and-bred billionaire is their savior? Because it’s a crazy idea that—as they always say in the movies—just might work! In the movies, as everyone knows, the crazy person is the only one who really knows what’s going on—the only one who has the guts to tell people The Truth. And it is the hope and dream of everyone who couldn’t get a high-school diploma that The Truth is not as complicated as it seems—that, in fact, things will somehow work out in the end, because they must!

In the next few months, Democrats will spend a lot of time arguing that no, things will not magically work out in the end—that the only way things will work out is if a lot of smart people put their heads together and try to figure this thing out, one complex, nuanced, multi-faceted clusterfuck at a time. And even then things may not work out, because it’ll all be too little too late. Things may already be so messed up that no one can fix them, they’ll say, but we have to try. The world is a complicated place, they’ll say, so don’t expect too much too fast—don’t expect miracles. Cleaning up a mess like this takes time, so be patient, and vote for Hillary.

Donald Trump has a different message. He is the only candidate in this election who is willing to stand up and tell people precisely what they want to hear: That everything is going to be okay. Trust me, he’ll say, everything is going to work out. Sure, things are apocalyptically screwed up now, but that’s because a black guy is in office and I’m not president yet. Trust me, the solution is easy: All we have to do is close our borders, throw out everyone who doesn’t sunburn easily, nuke the Middle East, and chant “U S A! U S A!” until God gives in and starts leaving bricks of gold on everyone’s doorstep, which can be redeemed for sweet-smelling piles of cash or a shit-ton of bitcoin, whichever you prefer.

Boom, boom, boom—problem solved.

It’s nonsense, of course. Stupid doesn’t even begin to describe it. But that doesn’t matter. What Donald Trump understands that a lot of smart people don’t is that there are angry mobs of people out there who are sick and tired of being told what they need to do to get along in this world—obey the law, get an education, cut back on the meth—and want to see some heads rolling around in a basket. They want blood: spewing, spraying streams of it. They want revenge. They want to inflict a world of hurt on anyone and everyone who is not hurting as much as they are.

They also want climate change not to be real, for trickle-down economics to work, and for their first lady to be a former swimsuit model. They want all of these things and more, because that’s what America is for: heaping all your hopes and dreams on its back, then yelling at it when it runs too slow.

But most of all, people want to be reassured. They want to be told that everything is going to be all right—that the bogeyman is going to go away, that evil will not triumph, and yes, everyone who has faith and works hard can be filthy stinking rich beyond their wildest dreams. They want Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” only this time they want it to gleam like a diamond while they drink Perrier from the tap, breathe air infused with opiates, and sleep restfully knowing that America is once again kicking some global ass.  

Donald Trump is the only candidate stupid enough to promise it to them. All we can hope is that he doesn’t really believe it. Otherwise, heads really will roll, if they don’t explode first.

Yep, It's True, My Best Friend is a Dog

My dog, Sarge.

It recently dawned on me that the old cliché is indeed true: My best friend is a dog.

Sure, I used to have human friends, but over time they all either moved away, died, got boring, or did something inexcusably stupid that made me question why I was ever friends with them in the first place—you know, the kind of thing only humans do.

Not that my dog doesn’t do stupid things; he does. It’s just that when my dog does something stupid, it’s usually pretty funny. If he gets into the garbage while I’m away, the look of shame on his face when I come home is adorable. If he barks at a squirrel and then tries to chase it—well, how stupid is that? If he chews one of my wife’s shoes to pieces, his droopy doggy eyes will say, “What’s the big deal? There are dozens more where that came from,” and I have to laugh. Because it’s true. He could chew up a shoe a day for the next six months and barely make a dent in her shoe collection. I’d think it was funnier if shoes didn’t cost so much, but if it makes my little dog-friend happy, then it makes me happy too.

Isn’t that what friendship is all about?

The realization that my dog is far and away my best friend came to me rather suddenly, but in retrospect I can see that his dedication to me was constant; it was my human inability to appreciate his loyalty—to trust the sincerity of his affection—that prevented me from accepting his friendship for what it was: a true, deep kinship of spirit.

It seems silly now, but for a long time I had my doubts. For years, it seemed as if the only time my dog paid attention to me was when I was feeding him or giving him treats. As soon as he was done eating, he’d go back to ignoring me. If I forgot to feed him, he’d get ornery and act like missing a meal every now and then was the end of the world. And if I didn’t give him enough food off my dinner plate, he’d act like I was being stingy, as if I was asserting my human dominance over him, because I had this big tasty plate full of food and he had nothing but processed meat goo and a mountain of dry kibble.

In short, he was being selfish. It was all about him. I didn’t like that aspect of his personality, so I remained skeptical of his true motives. Sure, he’d bark and bounce around like a maniac when I came home from work, and he’d do his delirious dog dance when I took him for a walk. But those little performances always felt insincere, over the top. His responses were all out of proportion—he was ten times happier than he should be for the reward I was giving him—and it felt like he was mocking me. If I grabbed his leash and said, “Do you want to go for a walkie poo?,” he’d jump and bark in this conspicuously crazy way that seemed totally fake to me. Nobody could be that happy over a walk. They say dogs don’t do sarcasm, but mine did, I was pretty sure. In his little dog mind, I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking: “Oh goodie, do we get to go outside for fifteen minutes? Asshole. I’ve been locked up in this house for twelve hours. Fuck you.”

He wasn’t wrong, of course. The problem, I came to understand, was that I wasn’t giving him the respect he deserved. I was treating him like a dog, not like the friend he was, and that hurt his feelings. When he took a dump on my $5,000 Persian carpet, or puked on my Egyptian cotton sheets, it was his way of saying, “Hey, dipshit, I can be an asshole too.”

The friendship we share now was developed over time, and, unlike our previous relationship, is based on mutual trust and respect. My dog and I are equals now, two humble creatures trapped on this earthly plane, doomed to spend our lives seeking comfort, warmth, and solace in a cruel and unforgiving world. In fact, my dog is better than me in many respects. For one thing, he can run like the wind, despite his stubby legs. For another, he is completely true to himself. He doesn’t try to pretend he’s something he’s not, or that he isn’t feeling what he’s feeling. If he feels like taking a shit on the neighbor’s lawn, he doesn’t over-think it; he just does it, walks away, and never looks back. I respect that. (When I tried it, however, I had to explain to the police officer why I had not used my own toilet, a mere fifty feet away. In understanding the bond between dog and man, like so many other things, our society has a long way to go.)

They say you discover who your true friends are during difficult times, and that has certainly been the case with me and my dog. This past year has been a trying one, what with all the job stress, financial insecurity, health problems, deaths in the family and, most recently, a nationwide recall of Krusteaz blueberry pancake mix, my favorite. With each successive calamity, many people I considered friends fell by the wayside, unable or unwilling to extend the hand of friendship when it was needed most. But I am now grateful to these fair-weather “friends,” for their absence has clarified the identity of my true best friend. None of these people were there to offer comfort and support when my spirit was sinking and all hope seemed lost. At my lowest moments, the only living creature who remained by my side, through all the tears and wailing and madness, was my dog. (Well, my wife was there too, but she did not have nearly as much sympathy for me as my comfortingly non-verbal pooch.)

When my latest magnum opus was rejected by Random House for what the editors called an “idiotic premise” and “insufficient punctuation,” it was my dog who came to me, leash in mouth, as if to say, “Hey friend, let’s go for a walk.”

When my doctor called to tell me that all the tests had come back negative—that I was fine, and that, in his words, “medical science does not have a cure for what ails you”—it was my dog who sidled up to me, tongue lolling as if to say, “What do you say we go share a cone at Dairy Queen?”

When grief over the death of a loved one overtook me and my face was covered in tears, who came to lick away my pain? My dog, that’s who. Then, sensing my emotional fragility, he instinctively knew what I needed and urged me to accompany him to the dog park, where our other friends gather each day and are available to offer their support and good cheer.

Throughout all the strife and turmoil that drove lesser friends away, my dog has remained steadfast and true. Each day, as I pound my fists in anger and curse my fate on this godforsaken planet, my dog sits at my feet, a non-judgmental ball of calm in a perilous and turbulent world. Furthermore, I can talk to him for hours and he will listen patiently, unlike my restless human friends, who find it necessary to speak every now and then.

Our friendship continues to strengthen as the days and weeks roll by sans any other human interaction. Out of respect for each other, we no longer eat in different places; rather, I kneel and sup with him on the floor, at his level, where we can see eye to eye. One surprising note: His food does not taste as bad as you might expect. The canned food is made from “meat and vegetables” and is bathed in a savory gravy, while the kibble has a satisfying, toothsome crunch. Likewise, I have had my bed lowered so that he may enjoy night after night of restful sleep on a Serta pillowtop mattress, while my wife has graciously agreed to sleep at the foot of the bed, on a ratty slab of foam.

My dog and I now share most of our time together, and activities I once participated in with humans I now enjoy with him. We hike, we fish, we watch TV. We even play golf together. In fact, my scores have improved tremendously ever since I trained him to pick up the ball on the green and place it in the hole.

In these and many other ways, my dog has proven to be as enjoyable a companion as any human.

One area where he is surprisingly inept, however, is poker. All my life I have seen paintings of dogs playing poker, so I just assumed he knew the game. But as it turns out, he is the worst poker player I have ever seen. He can’t even hold the cards; I have to hold them for him. Which means he is also extremely easy to beat, a trait magnified by the fact that he constantly makes risky, ill-advised bets, as if money doesn’t mean anything to him.

Still, given the choice between spending time with a human or my dog, I am increasingly inclined to choose the latter. Why, just the other day we were headed out for a walk and my dog suddenly stopped at the door and looked up at me with an air of genuine distress.

The message in his eyes was unmistakable: “Shouldn’t we have a snack, first?”

“You’re right, we don’t want to get low blood sugar out there,” I replied, thanking him, and poured us each a handful of kibble.

Who else would put their desire for a walk on hold just to think about my blood sugar? Only my best friend, that’s who: My ever-loyal, ever-loving dog, without whom I would surely perish.

Yes, I Seized the Day: And Here's What Happened

Last Sunday, I woke up and decided to heed the advice so often given to those who feel, as I often do, that their lives are a slow, meaningless slog to the grave. Which is to say, I decided to seize the day, carpe the diem, and live that day as if it were my last.

No less a prophet than Steve Jobs claimed to live by this dictum, which he borrowed from Horace, Jesus, Gandhi, and many other wise, day-seizing people. If it was good enough for them, I figured, it’s good enough for me. And so began my attempt to live a single day with their shining eternal truth lighting my way.

I awoke at 7:30 a.m. and elected not to sleep in, for fear that too much extra snoozing might cut into my seizing. I didn’t shower either, because what was the point? So what if my pits reeked and my hair was a little greasy? Was it worth wasting five minutes in the shower to conform to some random cultural norm of bodily hygiene? No. Nor did it make sense to hunt for clean clothes when yesterday’s were already sitting there in a pile on the floor, easily accessible and ready to go.  

Shunning my usual morning coffee and toast, I bee-lined it to the iHOP, where I’ve been dying to try their Cinnamon Double-Dipped French Toast, but have resisted out of the day-deadening fear that I might have to work it off at the gym. Normally, I would also be concerned that an iHOP-ian spike in my blood sugar and insulin levels might cause a seizure. But not today. Today was about seizing, not seizures.

The nearest iHOP is nine miles away from my house, and I calculated that I could get there in less than four minutes if I redlined my Nissan Altima to 120 mph. Which I did, and it was exhilarating. To celebrate, I piled extra berries and whipped cream on my French toast, and ordered two sides of bacon to go. While I ate, using a fork in each hand to shovel the food in my mouth as efficiently as possible, I mentally mapped my day.

First stop was the bank, where I withdrew all my savings, cashed out my 401k, and took the fifty-percent tax hit for closing out my Roth IRA early. Screw it, I thought—compound interest assumes you’re going to be alive tomorrow. I briefly considered flying around the world, but thought better of it when I realized that I’d be spending most of my last day on a plane. Instead, I ditched the Nissan and rented a cherry-red Aston Martin DBS Volante, which has a 510-horsepower V12 that tops out at 191 mph.

Ten minutes later, the Aston’s engine was purring at 135 per on Hwy 494, heading west to Gander Mountain, where I planned to buy the most kick-ass semi-automatic rifle they stocked. The guy at the counter was a little suspicious when I threw $1,000 at him and refused a background check, but I explained why I was in such a hurry and he understood completely.

“The nearest place to shoot that thing is somewhere in Dakota County,” the clerk advised. “Private land is your best bet. Just be sure to ask before you start shooting.”

I didn’t have time to ask. I just pulled up to the nearest farm and peeled off five large to a scruffy guy in overalls. Then I aimed my Walther HK MP5 at his field and mowed down half an acre of defenseless soybeans in ten seconds flat. When I ran out of ammo, I tossed the gun to the farmer and thanked him. I had other things to do, and didn’t have time to reload.

Next, I rented a helicopter and bribed the pilot to drop me off on top of the IDS tower. I’ve always wanted to parachute off the IDS tower, and this was my chance. Taking the prevailing wind into account, I figured I could float over downtown toward the Vikings stadium, admire the Grain Belt Brewery sign from above, then land at Gold Medal Park and catch a matinee at the Guthrie. This I did, but I bailed after about twenty minutes when I realized that I could be zipping down the Mississippi River on a speedboat instead.

But first, I had to hit all the food trucks lined up on Marquette Street. One by one, I sampled their fare, taking a bite at each truck and quickly moving on to the next. If there was a line, I grabbed a bite of someone else’s food and ran. At the Foshay Tower, I popped into Izzy’s ice cream, ordered a six-scoop sampler, and downed it as I sprinted toward Target field to catch the start of the Twins game. I got bored after eight or ten pitches, though, and left because the Twins were already behind 6-0.

The speedboat idea still appealed to me, so I dialed up an Uber and told my driver to take me to the St. Paul Yacht Club. On the way, I realized that no, what I really wanted to do was jet-ski up and down the Mighty Miss. So that’s what I did, buzzing everyone along the way as closely as I could, and giving all the tourists on that sad, slow paddle-wheeler something to talk about.

By this time, it was about two in the afternoon and I was running out of things to do. I could go to some museums, but didn’t see the point. I could go buy a dog, but what would he do tomorrow when I wasn’t around? I could check out the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, but I’ve seen cucumbers and potatoes before. I could visit the Science Museum, but why bother learning anything on your last day? Your last day is for living, not learning.

Finally, I decided to head down the Mississippi, find an eagle’s nest, and steal an egg. The appeal was that it was both illegal and dangerous, two factors that might have dissuaded me on any other day. But today was about living life to the fullest, maxing out the moment, not worrying about tomorrow. The nest turned out to be empty, unfortunately, so I basically wasted an hour climbing a tree.

As happy hour approached, I thought it might be a good idea to hit a few of the micropubs that are popping up all over town. In the time it took me to down a pint at Tin Whiskers Brewing Co., however, three new microbreweries opened their doors. I tried to keep up, but four more opened while I was visiting the previous three, and I soon realized it was a losing battle.

Fortified by a strong beer buzz, I hopped on the Green Line back to Minneapolis. Unfortunately, life is too short for a trip on the Green Line, so I got off and grabbed a cab. Destination: Manny’s Steakhouse, to eat the most expensive meal in town.

By the time I got to Manny’s I’d worked up a serious appetite, but the maître d’ wouldn’t even let me in. He said I smelled like beer and sewage and something else he couldn’t quite identify, and that my stench would offend the other patrons.

Fine, I said, I’ll go stand in line at First Ave., where no one will care what I smell like. Unfortunately, it was an all-ages show that night, so the only people in line were teenage girls, who seemed offended that I did not smell like bubble gum and strawberries. It didn’t matter, though, because all that beer was straining my bladder and I needed to find a bathroom fast. No restaurants would let me in the door, so I had no choice but to discreetly relieve myself in the 7th St. parking garage.

Evidently, a security guard saw me, because next thing I knew a police officer was tapping me on the shoulder. Not being a very enlightened fellow, he did not seem to appreciate my predicament, or my desire to squeeze as much meaning and purpose out of the day as possible. Instead, he cuffed me, shoved me in the back of his squad car, and carted me off to the police station.

I thought my life savings ($78,000 and change, which I had jammed in my pockets) would be sufficient to post bail, but all it did was raise a lot of questions. Where did I get the money? Who did I steal if from? Why was I carrying so much cash around? If the money was mine, rich guy, why didn’t I buy some clean clothes?

Instead of letting me go, they locked me in a cell with three other guys, two of whom claimed to be Jesus. Four hours later, my saintly wife came to pick me up, but she couldn’t bail me out of jail because all our money was in lock-up. Somehow she convinced them to take a credit card, and soon we were on I-94 headed home. I tried to explain what had happened, and more importantly why, but she is one of those people who worries about what is going to happen tomorrow, so she was not the least bit impressed.

While I was in jail, I thought of a dozen other things I wanted to do—see the northern lights, light a stick of dynamite, burn down an old barn, rob a Dairy Queen—but I had to admit, I was exhausted. Instead, as I showered off the sweat and scum of my adventures, I thought hard about the challenge with which I had begun the day. There was still an hour left. If this really were the last hour of my life, what would I do?, I wondered. Make love to my wife? Not an option tonight. Listen to Beethoven? Not in the mood. Get drunk? Did that already.

Then, as if Steve Jobs himself had shone the light of wisdom and truth into my blinking eyes, I suddenly realized what I needed to do in the last hour of the last day of my life. It was Sunday night, I had recorded the season six finale of Game of Thrones, and I simply could not end my last day on Earth without finding out if winter in Winterfell is any worse than winter in St. Paul.

So I reheated last night’s chili and sat down to watch the final episode of the season, when all (or at least some) would be revealed. This way I’ll get some answers to at least a few of life’s burning questions, I thought, and the day won’t have been a total loss.###