Nine Foods You’re Eating Wrong.

Six Dog Breeds That Are Judging You.

Twelve Signs He’s Not Into You, And One Sign He’s Actually Dead.

Listicles.

List plus article. Somebody welded two words together in a marketing meeting in 2009 and now the entire internet runs on it.

So follow me here.

If you write one for practice... that’s a test list.

A testicle.

I did not invent this. I want that on the record. The word was just sitting there. Two syllables away. Since 2009.

An entire industry of professional writers has been staring directly at the word “listicle” every single day for seventeen years, and not one of them turned it over to see what was underneath.

That’s your media. That’s who’s covering the news.

Okay. Anyway.

I tried this on my daughter. Very proud. Nineteen minutes of my life went into that bit, and I delivered it like a guy presenting a ring.

She said “Dad.”

Just that.

“Dad.”

Then she did a better version in about four seconds, without looking up from her phone.

This is the situation over here. My kid is funnier than me. Cooler than me. She’s funny in the way that costs nothing, which is the worst kind, because I have to WORK. I’ve been doing this since 1993. I have index cards. I have a system. She has a shrug.

And I know where it didn’t come from. It didn’t come from her mother.

Her mother (my ex) is a wonderful woman. Truly. Kind, steady, would drive four hours to hand you a pan of pastitsio and then not mention it again for the rest of her life.

Though not cool. Not one day of it. She knows. We’ve discussed it.

So it isn’t her, and it sure as hell isn’t me, which means my daughter is some kind of spontaneous weather event. And I’m the guy standing next to her telling everybody she’s cool, which is the least cool available job at the party.

Case in point.

She met Grandmaster Flash.

Just... met him. Out in the world. The way you’d meet a guy at the DMV. And he gave her one of his books. To give to me. To ME. Which is the single coolest thing that has ever happened in my direction, and I wasn’t even in the ROOM.

Now understand, famous people have met ME. This happens. Dave Matthews and I once talked about bowling shoes for ten solid minutes, and he was kind enough not to point out to anybody standing there that I was somebody. Real class. Never made it weird for me.

But nobody hands ME a book.

It’s called Birth of a Culture. That’s the title. Birth. Of. A. Culture. You don’t give a man a book called Birth of a Culture and then expect him to be normal about where it goes.

Here’s my problem. I alphabetize my bookshelves by author.

Is he a G? Or is he an F?

Because “Grandmaster” is a title. You don’t file Dr. Seuss under D. You don’t file Sir Mix-a-Lot under S, and if you do, we’re not friends, and I mean that. So if Grandmaster is a rank, then Flash is the name, and he goes between Fitzgerald and Franzen.

But nobody says Flash. Nobody has EVER said Flash.

Maybe, as he is a Grandmaster, is he with the chess guys? Is he shelved up against some Kasparov hardcover? Do they talk? Is that a hallway conversation I want to start? Is Quick Mix Theory about when to move your Rook?

His real name is Joseph Saddler, which would put him under S, next to a Sedaris and a paperback about barn owls, where no living human would ever find him again.

So, for now, it lives in the fruit bowl. Eleven days now, under a coupon for a rotisserie chicken and one banana that’s clearly making bad decisions.

Which is where I’m standing at eleven in the morning, waiting on leftovers, with the little kitchen TV going.

And I cannot tell Drew Barrymore and Kelly Clarkson apart.

Two blonde women. Two talk shows. Both hugging a stranger inside the first eleven seconds. Both asking a chef about lemon zest. Both so warm I have to sit down. I don’t know which studio audience I am in.

Which brings me to the lisp. When did Drew Barrymore get a lisp?

I’m not being mean about it. It’s adorable. It’s the most disarming thing on daytime television, and I’d follow that woman into a burning building carrying a second woman. But I’ve seen E.T. maybe forty times, and Gertie didn’t have one. Don’t remember it in the nineties either. 50 First Dates and it didn’t go on any of them.

Somewhere in there it showed up and the entire country agreed not to bring it up.

So here’s my theory. Differentiation. Branding. Somebody at a network drew straws.

Kelly took the big voice. Drew took the lisp. Somebody signed off on that, and I would like to see the paperwork.

And speaking of faces I can’t file properly.

Walton Goggins.

(Not Walter Googins. I wrote Walter Googins in my notes, and Walter Googins sounds like a man who installs above-ground pools, takes a deposit, and never comes back.)

Where the hell did Walter Goggins come from?

Nowhere.

Everywhere.

He came from 1998. He’s been in every single thing you’ve watched since the Clinton administration, and you never once said his name out loud, and now he’s in a hit show, and everybody’s acting like a comet landed in the yard.

And he’s in those Walmart ads. Which proves my entire case. The man will readily rent himself out. He has RENTED. He just hasn’t rented the good part.

Because that is not a forehead. That’s a ballroom (He was born with it. Nobody tore anything down to build it.) That’s available square footage in a market with zero inventory, and he’s out there selling one-hour delivery with the top four acres of himself sitting dark.

I can say it because I have the same one. I have a head so large that cowboy hats sit on top of it like a marble on a stump. When I find a hat that fits, I buy it on the spot, in every color, in a panic, like a man buying bottled water before a storm (Ah shit, I forgot the bread. Maybe Walmart can deliver it?).

So here’s what I’d put up there on my noggin front (Note to Walter: Goggin’s Noggin. I am trademarking it, but you can rent that from me.).

1. IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. Just the standard apartment billboard. Nobody would question it. There’s parking.

2. Little Debbie. Not an ad. Just the face. Just her, up there, watching you eat.

3. The full Wendy’s drive-thru menu. Actual size. Including seasonal items.

4. All ten Commandments, with room underneath for a director’s commentary.

5. A live scroll of local school closings. In August. For no reason.

6. “In loving memory of my hairline. 1966 to 2004. It went first so the rest of us could live.”

7. A QR code that takes you to a photograph of the back of my head.

8. BABY ON BOARD, in the little yellow diamond, because nobody’s ever been able to prove otherwise about my belly.

9. This space intentionally left blank. Which is a lie. Everybody knows it’s a lie. I’d charge double.

That’s nine. Nine is a listicle. But I wrote it for practice, so…

And my daughter’s going to read this, take number six, cut it down to four words, post it, and beat me by Thursday.

Oy. I’m going to go dig a book out of the fruit bowl.

P.S. He’s definitely a G, I decided. He’s between Bill Geist and Spalding Gray now, which works alphabetically and does not work in any other way. I haven’t met either of them.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a beverage

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving TBD) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

Share

Subscribe now

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving soon!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

Share

Subscribe now

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving soon!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

Read more

So in the spring I planted a magnolia.

I am not a magnolia guy. But this is Virginia, which is ALMOST the South, and down here a magnolia is less of a tree and more of a membership card. You get one. You put it in the yard. Then you go inside and try out a “y’all” on the dogs to see how it sits.

So I bought one at a place with a sign, drove it home in the back seat with the seatbelt on it like a small hostage, and dug a hole. Dirt everywhere. Sweating like Gabriel Iglesias at a buffet.

A few days later, I go out to check on it, because that is a thing you do. You go stand there and look at your tree, and right at the base of it... there it was.

Big. Oval. White. Smooth as a cue ball and hard as a dead man’s opinion.

A rock.

I picked it up and did what any grown boy does with a special rock. I ran it into the house to show my wife.

“Look at this cool rock,” I said.

Karie looked at it for about a half second.

“That’s an egg.”

Nope.

“That’s a rock,” I said.

“It’s an egg. Goose. Or snake.”

Snake. She said SNAKE. Out loud. In the kitchen. Like that’s a thing you just say to a person who is holding it.

So I shook it.

Then I stopped. Because it occurred to me that if this WAS an egg, I might be scrambling the little guy’s brain in there.

Although... how would you tell? With a goose? What’s your control group? You’d need a regular goose standing right next to it for comparison, and even then. And a snake?Forget it. Nobody in the history of the world has ever met a snake and thought, boy, this one’s SHARP.

So I shook it some more.

Nothing. No slosh. No thunk. No little tenant in there doing his little tenant business. I have shaken a lot of things in my life to determine what they are, dear reader, and I have a nearly zero percent success rate, but I felt good about this one. I know rocks. I have a whole rock thing. (I do not have a rock thing.)

Still.

“Let’s keep it,” I said. Because if it WAS an egg, I wanted to… you know…SCIENCE!

I put it in a potted plant on the deck. Right on top of the dirt, like a little egg museum. Or a little rock museum. Whichever it was, I had a museum. I thought about putting up a little explainer plaque.

And then it sat there.

May. It sat there.

June. It sat there.

July, and it just sat there being smooth and white and mine.

We had a hot summer. Not “boy it’s warm” hot. Not “let’s grill” hot. Hot like the sun had a personal issue with Virginia and wanted to talk about it.

Yesterday morning, we noticed that the patio doors were covered in yellow.

Splatters. CHUNKY splatters. Sliding down the glass in a way that suggested velocity. And a smell that I would describe as “a dumpster behind a Denny’s, but the dumpster is angry.”

I stood there in my underwear (still new!) doing math.

Who did this? Was it a bird? A very large bird? Was it a person? Did some dude drive out to Keswick at 4am to fling weird alien poop at my house? And if so, WHY MY HOUSE?

I started getting mad. I was building the whole speech. I was gonna find him. I was gonna go on the local news and hold up a yellow, stinky paper towel.

Karie sipped her coffee.

“Check your ‘rock.’”

Ta-da.

The egg had cooked. On the deck. In the pot. And then it had gone off like a little Fabergé grenade and redecorated our house with itself.

Crap. She was right.

Now, if you have been married for a while, you know there is a period after being wrong where you are supposed to say something gracious. I was still working on mine when she went ahead and delivered the closing argument.

“And it was DEFINITELY a goose egg,” said Dr. Karie. (She has a PhD. It is not in geese.) “Because there was no embryo of a snake.”

I stopped.

I said, “Say that again.”

“There was no embryo of a snake.”

Embryo of a Snake.

I wrote it down. On my hand, like a lunatic. Because that is a band name, that is a GREAT band name, that is a band that opens for Blue Öyster Cult in 1978, and everybody in the parking lot loses their minds. Embryo of a Snake, live at the Aud, two dollars at the door.

Anyway.

I went to get paper towels and the spray with the trigger that never works, the one where you have to hold your thumb at the angle. Took maybe ninety seconds.

By the time I got back, Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS had made his own arrangements.

He was on the patio. He was working. Ten pounds of chihuahua going at a solar-baked goose omelet like he’d been waiting all summer for it, which, honestly, he probably had.

I let him finish.

The magnolia’s fine, by the way. Except for the leaves. Deer got every last one of them.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me an omelet

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Share

Subscribe now

No twelve-part space stack, no gate-of-heaven synth, no guy screaming about a server farm. This one’s a one-drop. Bass so fat it needs its own chair. Verses toasted low and filthy, and then a full gospel choir kicks the door in on the chorus like the Lord Himself booked the Rib Fest.

Yes, it’s kind of an Eagles song. Kind of. Desperado does the Henley parts at the Knights of Columbus, Local Hall 123. Todd plays bass like an proctologist, because he is one. Kevin yells FREEBIRD. Kevin buys three shirts. One’s for his mother.

Nobody’s asking. Nobody’s mad.

Recorded in a Ford Windstar with a car seat in it. We got paid in wings.

Share

Subscribe now

Here is what happens at 4 a.m. in this house. Every single day. Like a Swiss watch, if the watch had a snout.

First, Vinny Van Meow knocks something off of something. Or Trouble grunts. It’s one or the other, and it doesn’t matter which, because they’re both just the starting gun.

Then Pickles whines.

Then Queso barks.

Then Remmi gets up and jumps straight up and down while facing a wall, because she’s blind and no wall has ever once corrected her.

Then Karie gets up. She lets them all out. She feeds them.

And I get the bed. The whole bed. Every inch of it.

That’s the show. 4 a.m., seven days a week, no dark days, no understudies.

(I awake at 3:50, by the way. My body likes to arrive early for things it hates.)

So I stretch out like a starfish that made good decisions, and I sleep like a...

Well…

Not last night

Nothing. Nobody. 4:00 and the house is in diorama-mode.

Karie didn’t stir. Not a twitch, not a sigh, breathing away like a woman who has never owned an animal in her entire life.

So suddenly this was MY issue.

I nudged the cat. Nothing. I nudged him again with intention, which in cat law is a felony, and he absorbed it like a bag of flour.

So I coughed. Loud. A big theatrical cough, the kind a guy does in a movie when he wants the room to look at him.

Which caused a real coughing fit. An actual one. Forty seconds of a man drowning eight inches from his wife.

Nothing. Not one critter. Not one PhD.

The lamp plan

Okay. So there’s a lamp by the dog beds that’s on the phone app timer switch thingy.

Simple. In my mind, at least. Light comes on, dogs wake up, dogs do the whole revue, Karie gets up, and I go back to being an innocent bystander in my own bed.

Except the light would be ON. And she would ask why the light was on. And there is no good answer to that question at 4 in the morning.

“It came on by itself” only works in this house six or seven times a month, and I had already spent all of those on the power surges that Central Virginia Electric Cooperative sends my way (They aren’t cooperating very well). Of course. THE one night I need the power to do something stupid, it just sits there... working normally.

Could I set it to come on and then go back off? Sure, dude. And then what? Clear the app history? Am I really going to lie under the covers (the phone is bright, smart ass) deleting evidence so I can get some sleep?

So I tried telepathy instead.

I’m not proud of it. I lay there and beamed a signal at four animals and one doctor of education. Wake up. Somebody. Anybody. Wake UP.

I got no reply at all.

Which is a Genesis song, my friends, and once it’s in there it does not leave. Phil Collins at 4:40 in the morning, real chipper about the whole thing. Over and over.

Eventually it started to morph into Bob Mould seeing a little light, which felt like spiritual progress until I figured out that was just the sun coming up.

And still nobody was stirring.

The theory… MY theory

So what if they were all dead?

I mean it. Five packages of heartbeats in this house, zero of them doing anything. That’s not sleep. That’s a scene.

So we all have it on the record, Karie falls asleep to murder podcasts. That’s her thing. Every night, a woman in Ohio gets into a van she should not get into, and by the second ad break Karie is out cold. I feel like I have slept next to an active crime scene for years.

So which podcast covers this? Because somebody has to.

Probably the two ladies. The one with the voice like a heating pad who says every town’s name like it’s a diagnosis. “Keswick. Virginia. Population not many. A quiet farm at the end of a quiet road...” and then the other one goes “oh no” and then they both laugh, and then... and then... they read an ad for a mattress. In the middle of it. MY very mattress situation. Use code BLUEDOG for fifteen percent off.

And then back into the podcast. No forced entry. No lights on. No signs of a struggle, except for the husband, who had nearly died coughing four feet from her earlier that same evening.

“And that... is when things took a turn.”

Then I realized that if Karie is dead too, she isn’t listening to any of it. She’d miss the whole episode. She’d miss HER episode.

And that’s when my brain gets me to the treats…

I hand out treats before bed. Everybody gets one. That’s the routine, that’s the deal, that’s the last thing I do every night.

Oh no.

Did I do this? Was I the guy? Am I the guy on the podcast, sitting in a folding chair in a bad shirt, saying I don’t know what happened? They were fine when I went to bed?

And a follow-up question I still cannot answer.

Why did I give Karie a dog treat?

The autopsy

Eventually, I got up to pee. That was not part of the investigation. It was just time.

On the way back, I picked up Vinny Van Meow and gently tossed him down the hall. Gently. This is important. He’s a half-eared cat with a documented history, and he understood the assignment, which he expressed by hissing at me out of the dark like a punctured tire.

Alive.

Which set off Queso, who barked.

They were ALIVE. Nobody was murdered. I was not the guy in the folding chair.

And then, from the bed, in the dark, an utterance a bit more than a mumble.

“Why are you trying to wake them up?”

I want you to picture a grown man in his own house, in his own hallway, ducking behind a chair.

“I am not. I was just helping Vinny with a hairball.”

The village

Then it was quiet again.

So I lay there with Bob Mould, Genesis, and two ladies laughing about a mattress, all going at once in my skull. Nobody asked for that supergroup.

And c’mon. This was MYYYY sleep time. This is MYYY window. This is when I get to have the dream about the magical village by the sea, and the nubile vixen who lures me down to the water for some shenanigans, and then has an “episode,” and then I go get an ice cream cone.

Every time. Same village. Same vixen. Same episode. Cone.

MY TIME.

6 a.m.

At 6, Pickles whined. As is normal. At 4. I guess we had all moved to Mountain Daylight Time.

Then the rest of the critters came in behind him, two hours late and not one of them apologizing. Remmi found her wall. The wall was right where she left it. So the telepathy did work... it just runs on the same schedule as our power.

Nobody was poisoned. Karie got out of bed.

And I sprawled. Boy, did I sprawl. All four corners of it. Overcome with joy.

And I farted.

It stunk so bad I couldn’t sleep.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a mask

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving TBD) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

The power went out again. Central Virginia Electric Cooperative.

Cooperative.

That’s the word they picked. For themselves. Out of all the words.

A cooperative is a group working together toward a shared goal. Our shared goal is electricity.

We are not hitting our numbers.

So we’re sitting in the dark at two in the afternoon like Amish people with a canceled Barn Raising, and Karie says she wants to clip the piggy’s nails.

Sure. Perfect time. No lights, no fans, no way to call anyone.

I said, “Do you want me to do the wrestling flip maneuver? The one we saw?”

Quick explainer, because the maneuver has a story shared with us, and I’m a little excited to try it.

I sit down on the floor behind her. Right up against her, close, like I’m about to teach her to row.

Then I flip her.

Back and over, both of us going down together, and I land flat with 162 pounds of pig on my chest and my arms around her. Firm. Calm. Nobody hurt. The way ICE could do it, if ICE had any interest in a version where nobody dies and nobody has to cover their face.

(I digress. But also, fuck those cowards in the Lucha libre masks. Rey Mysterio wore one and still managed to be a hero. It’s not the mask.)

Where was I?

Right. Pig on my chest. She goes quiet. Something about being tipped over on a guy just switches her off.

Then other people clip.

That’s the whole job. I’m furniture. I’m a beanbag chair with a pulse and a heart rate the ER would want to look at.

So that’s what I offered.

She said, “No. I think you should get on HER back.”

Her back. My back. One leading word makes for a completely different afternoon.

I said we’d tried that before. I said I got tossed. I said the pig looked at me afterward the way a bouncer looks at a guy who says he knows the owner… and his mistresses.

She said that’s what she wants.

Dear reader, I want you to understand that I am a grown man with a a nice job and a LinkedIn profile.

I got on the pig.

The ride

Trouble McFussbucket is 162 pounds. (She was 159 last week. I blame the co-op. When the power goes out, she gets nervous, and when she gets nervous, I feed her, and when I feed her, she stops being nervous, which teaches her something I’d rather not think about.)

Here’s what nobody tells you about riding a pig indoors. Or outdoors.

There is no steering.

We made it around the kitchen counter. Good time. Clean line. Past the dining table, which is when the dining table became a suggestion rather than a location (Note to self: reposition it).

Then I came off.

Not thrown. Not bucked. I’d like the record to show it was more of a dismount. A tactical one.

I lay there on the floor for a second and did what you do. I looked for the crowd. I need applause.

Because here’s the part I had in my head the whole ride. Karie is standing there. Giant clippers up. Ready. The way a pit crew is ready. I bring the pig around, I pin her, Karie moves in, we get four nails before the animal knows what happened. A team. A cooperative, if you will.

The clippers were on the counter. Nobody was holding them.

Karie had gone to pee.

The one witness. The person who ASKED FOR THIS. Off having a tinkle while I set a family record.

I yelled, “Did you see it???”

She yelled back, “See what?”

Eight seconds. No judges. No time.

THIS WAS MY FIRST RODEO.

Going pro

My daughter Allie heard the whole story and said, “I think you should go pro.”

(There’s also a stepdaughter. Her name is Ali. Yep. Allie and Ali. George Foreman meets a banjo song from a county with one bridge. Calling the girls in for dinner sounds like a man having a small stroke. No worse than trying to get the weird dog in and screaming “Pickles!” The neighbors have opinions. Strong opinions.)

Two problems.

One. Clowns.

The rodeo clown is the guy who runs at the animal so you can crawl away. Which means my survival gets handed to a man in makeup. Nope. Clowns scare me. They always have. I don’t need a reason, and I’m not taking questions.

Two. The hat.

I have a giant melon. Not a Guinness World Records melon. Nobody’s flying anybody out to measure it. But big enough that when a hat actually fits, I buy it. Instantly. I don’t look at the price, I don’t look at the color, I walk it to the register as if I stole it.

Cowboy hats do not go on my head. They sit on it. They perch. I look like a thumb wearing a saucer.

Now, I do own a very wonderful Carmen Miranda-style hat, and I wear it out when I’m feeling sassy.

So it isn’t a hat problem.

It’s a brim problem.

About those nails

They’re big now. The pig’s nails.

The aforementioned Guinness big.

(Mmmm. I could go for a Guinness.)

Anyway, you’ve seen those people. The world record fingernail people. Yellow, spiraled, sort of ribboned, like a Christmas display at a mall that closed in 1994.

And I have one question. One.

How do they wipe their ass?

Do they have a guy? Is that a job? Does it have a title? Is there a LinkedIn profile that says “Personal Care Associate” and a headshot of a man who has made peace with things?

Do they use the tongs? They must use the tongs. Somebody at some point handed them the tongs and said, “Here.” And they took them. I am sorry if I just ruined tongs for you.

I think about this more than I think about my retirement.

The flour incident

Last time we brought in a professional for “The Clipping.”

The farrier came out to do Trouble’s nails, and I had a Zoom meeting scheduled, so I took it on the deck like a man with priorities.

Middle of the call, I look up. A pig goes by the sliders at speed.

Four seconds later, the farrier goes by the sliders. Holding a large needle.

Nobody on the call said anything. I don’t think they saw it. I have never been sure.

A few minutes after that, Karie is screaming my name in a register I associate with house fires. I apologize to the yawn-inducing group on the call, and I hit mute. I go inside.

They are both screaming the same thing.

“GET THE FLOUR.”

Not a doctor. Not a towel. Flour.

Turns out Trouble had tossed Karie too (so at least it’s not a me thing, at least there’s a lineage now), kicked her in the head on the way, and in the confusion the farrier had gone a little deep on a nail.

And the blood came out like Peckinpah. Like Tarantino watching Peckinpah and taking notes.

You dump flour on it. That’s the actual fix. That’s what the internet says, and that’s what worked. Our kitchen looked like a bakery got robbed.

I went back to the deck. Unmuted.

Somebody said, “Sorry, you were saying?”

I was not saying.

The power came back on around four. The nails did not get clipped.

Sigh.

Share

Subscribe now

Get me a farrier, now!

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving TBD) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

You paid for this newsletter, so I’m going to lead with the bad news and then bury you in other things to look at.

Deal? Deal.

Read more

Quick Pick and a Slim Jim. That’s the order. That’s been the order since 1993.

He wins four dollars. Then he puts the four dollars back in. Yep. Every time. That’s not a system and that’s not luck, that’s a man in a windbreaker at 10:40 on a Monday.

Some guy in Toledo got a whole new life. Some guys get a boat. Some guys get a wife.

Our guy got a paper slip and a Coke Zero.

The clerk stopped smiling around 2004. She hands him his singles. She does not comment. Honest, at this point it’s more of a ritual than a transaction... like communion, but with a roller grill.

Four dollars, dear listener. Look at your hero.

Bought another ticket. Won four dollars.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a lottery ticket

It’s the wee dark hours of the night, which are somehow also called early morning, and I’m negotiating with a blanket.

Not a metaphor. An actual negotiation. Terms are being discussed.

Here’s where we are. The air conditioning is running. Sixty-eight degrees. I paid for that air. I paid a man named Dale to come look at the unit in May, and Dale stood in my yard for forty minutes, said “yep” twice, kicked something, and charged me two hundred and forty dollars. So this is premium air.

Artisanal air.

The house is cold now. Cold on purpose. My purpose.

Which is why I need a comforter.

Escalation

Follow me here.

I made the room cold. So I got under a comforter to survive the room. But then the comforter works too well, because comforters have exactly one setting, and that setting is “sarcophagus.” So now I’m hot. In the cold room. That I paid for.

Enter the cooling sheets.

Cooling sheets, dear reader. Bamboo something. Moisture-wicking whatever. Forty-nine ninety-nine plus shipping, and the box says they’re “engineered.”

Engineered! Like a bridge. Somewhere there’s a guy with a degree and a hard hat measuring the exact temperature of my ass.

They work for about eleven minutes. Then they’re just sheets. Regular, warm, disappointed sheets.

Which is how I found out they also sell a cooling comforter.

Read that again. A cooling comforter. A blanket... engineered... to be less of a blanket. That’s a coat with air conditioning in it. That’s a sweater that apologizes.

And it’s made by the same outfit that sold me the hot one. Same company. Same catalog, twenty-four pages apart. They put the problem in the front of the book and the solution in the back, like an issue of Real Simple, a magazine that has never once made anything simple.

So I turn on the fan.

The fan makes the room cold again. Which is the thing the air conditioner was already doing. But now with a sound.

The sound is my fault. I was dusting the blades back in June, standing on the mattress, doing that slow drunk sway you do on a mattress. I started to go over. So I grabbed a blade. Put my entire body weight on a piece of faux wood the thickness of a Pop-Tart.

It held. Technically.

Now there’s a wobble. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s the ceiling version of a guy behind you at the movies eating an apple.

So I turn on the white noise machine.

Yep. A machine that makes noise... to cover the noise... made by the machine I turned on to fight the cold that I paid for.

You know where those live? Hallways outside therapist offices. That’s the entire product. It exists so the people in the waiting room can’t hear the guy on the other side of the door crying about his mother.

I have installed the crying-concealment device in my bedroom. Voluntarily. Eighteen inches from my head.

Nobody in here is crying. Yet. But the equipment is in place.

And my feet get cold.

So I put on socks.

I’m now wearing socks... under a blanket... under a wobbling fan... next to a box impersonating a rainstorm of static... in a refrigerated house... on sheets that were engineered.

Then, around 2:40, I do the “thing.” You know the “thing.” I stick one leg out from under the covers.

That’s it. That’s the technology. Eleven hundred dollars of climate management in this room, and the whole system runs on one exposed shin. I’m a thermostat made of meat. Half in, half out, hovering at a perfect equilibrium that lasts until I move, which is immediately.

Karie, asleep, thriving

Karie is flat on her back. One arm straight up over her head, like she’s hailing a cab in a dream.

She owns no cooling products. She has never in her life said the word “wicking.” She sleeps like somebody unplugged her.

At one point I say, out loud, to a woman with a doctorate, “I think the sheets are broken.”

She says, “Mmm.”

Nine years of marriage.

The bigger scam, which is all of them

Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. Whole concepts are built this way.

Decaf coffee. A beverage that removes the only reason for the beverage. My grandmother drank Sanka out of a jar. Sanka! Just brown water with a good attitude. Why not have soup? Have soup, Grandma. Soup wants to be there.

Non-alcoholic beer. Same aisle, more depressing. That’s a guy at a party holding a prop.

Weighted blankets. Two hundred bucks to recreate a hostage situation. “It simulates a hug.” Sure. So does a car accident.

Blackout curtains, which cost real money and turn your bedroom into a 1987 Wisconsin basement. Then, because you can no longer perceive morning, you buy a sunrise alarm clock. A lamp. A LAMP. That slowly gets brighter. To simulate the sun. That you paid to block. With curtains. That you bought.

Somewhere in America there’s a man who has spent four thousand dollars achieving a dark, quiet, cool room. He could have gotten this for free by being outside in October.

The animals have solved it

Trouble McFussbucket sleeps in mud. Full mud. She lies down in it, sighs like my father getting into a car, and she’s out.

She’s up to 163 pounds, by the way. She says it’s the barometric pressure. I say it’s the corn. We’ve agreed not to litigate it.

Remmi sleeps wherever she stops walking. Vinny Van Meow sleeps on the one warm laptop in the house, which is mine, which is open, which is how I’ve now got 900 pages of the letter B in a document. Professor Archibald Pickles sleeps under a lampshade like a small Scandinavian mistake.

Not one of them has a strategy. Not one of them is awake at 3 a.m. doing thermal math.

Señor Hector Queso Suarez DDS would shiver in a hoodie at all times, but that chihuahua shivers at brunch, so he’s not evidence of anything.

Anyway

It’s 3:20 now. Fan ticking. Radioactive Rainstorm box going. Comforter on. Cooling sheets, allegedly, cooling. Socks. One leg out. Karie hailing her dream cab.

I could just take the blanket off, raise the thermostat. I know that. I’ve known that the whole time.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a sandwich

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

7UP has changed.

More lime. Less lemon?

And here’s the part I need you to sit with, because I’ve been sitting with it since Monday and I’m not doing well.

They changed the ORDER OF THE WORDS.

It used to be a lemon-lime soda. It is now a lime-lemon soda. Same two fruits. Same hyphen. Somebody picked up the hyphenate, turned it around, and set it back down.

They’re calling the campaign “Flip the Sip.”

And then they stopped. That’s the part that keeps me up. They found the flip. They tested the flip.

Then they walked right past the name.

UP7.

It’s RIGHT THERE. Same three characters, and the dot doesn’t even have to move. Flip the whole name around it, and that dot just sits in the middle, unbothered, the one element in this entire operation that never got the memo.

UP7. Tagline: Same Soda, Other Way.

I’d have had it on a can by Thursday.

Is UP7 a word? No. Neither is Dasani. Dasani is tap water with a rumor attached to it, and not one person on this earth has ever asked what a Dasani is.

Somehow, and because you can’t have just one for an ad agency fee, they created ten packaging concepts, dear reader.

TEN.

A chief design officer in residence and an outside agency in Los Angeles, and somewhere in there a man stood up and presented concept number six.

Six didn’t win. And that guy has told every single person he’s met since that six was the one they should have gone with. It’s still in his portfolio. It’s on his phone. He’ll show you at a party.

A Grown Man Spent Three Months On A Dot

I won’t be sarcastic about the new can.

Honestly, the can rules.

Solid green, minimal, logo turned vertical, UP in caps now instead of lowercase.

And the red dot peeks out from behind the U.

Peeks. Out.

From behind.

The U.

There is a designer at that agency in Los Angeles who spent a season of his life on how far out that dot comes. That was the assignment. Slide it out. Slide it back. Too far and the dot’s needy. Not far enough and it’s hiding. A little coy. Just a little. Right there.

Three months. On a dot. I love this person. I want to buy them a drink. Not a 7UP. (But maybe a 7&7?)

And then they had to carry it into a room and get it approved.

I know that room. I’ve sat in that room a hundred times. There’s always a woman at the end of the table with a lanyard and a laptop and nothing else on her calendar today, and I’ve worked for her four or five times now. Different companies. Different names. Same woman.

So I’m going to say the part you’re not supposed to put in writing.

It isn’t the micro-management style I don’t like.

It’s her.

As a human being.

Here’s how it goes. She puts his file up on the big screen. Tilts the head. Lets the silence run a beat too long so the room knows something’s coming. Then... can we try it two pixels to the left?

Not because two pixels left is better. Because she needs everybody watching while she has a thought.

So they move it left. Then they move it back. Then she says, yeah, THERE it is, that’s what I was talking about.

And they nod. That’s the job. You nod at a dot that never moved. Somehow those people make more than you.

Fuckers.

Nobody Has Ever Asked For A 7UP

Let’s be honest about the brand equity here.

7UP is the soda you drink when you’re throwing up.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Your mom put a warm flat one on the nightstand next to a saltine and a bucket, and she felt like a doctor, and you felt like a Civil War casualty.

Nobody in the history of the world has walked into a party and said, “Hey, does anybody have a 7UP?”

You get handed a 7UP. Usually by a woman who has already touched your forehead with the back of her hand.

And for this change, they ran BLIND TESTS. People preferred the new one. Said it tasted crisper. More refreshing.

Crisper than WHAT, though? Than the last one you had, at three in the morning, in 1994, with that saltine and that bucket and your mother’s hand on your head?

Somebody wrote the screener for this study. Somebody sat down and typed the questions.

“Have you consumed 7UP in the past six months?”

Check. Yes.

“Please describe the circumstances in this little box.”

A stranger in a strip mall reads your answer back to you.

Little white cups. Windowless room. Seventy-five dollars and a parking validation. That’s a taste test, and depending on the cup, it’s also the worst afternoon of your life.

And not one person in that facility asked the only question that matters.

“Were you keeping it down?”

Your Uncle Goes Out To The Truck

Here’s the part that actually got me.

7UP was FIRST.

1929.

It INVENTED lemon-lime soda.

And it has spent the ninety-seven years since then losing to the people who copied it.

Now, they call the OG a challenger brand. “Challenger Brand” is what you write on the slide when you invented the whole thing and then stood there for a century watching other people do it better.

That’s not a challenger. That’s your uncle standing over the stuffing, telling the table the recipe is technically his. He’s got the index card. The card’s in the truck. He’s going out to the truck to get the index card.

Nobody asked him to. Everybody keeps eating.

Look at the bodies in this category.

Sierra Mist. Slice. Teem.

TEEM. There was a soda called Teem, and it died, and not one person filed a report.

And Sierra Mist didn’t die, exactly. Pepsi took Sierra Mist out back and came home with Starry, which is what you name the new dog when you don’t want to discuss the old dog.

Starry’s got Giannis. Starry’s got Ice Spice. Starry’s got the NBA and the WNBA.

7UP has your grandmother’s stomach flu.

So the marketing boss says the minute you stop being distinctive in lemon-lime, you stop growing.

Agreed.

Correct.

Airtight.

And the plan for being distinctive is to sell the identical two fruits in reverse order.

Now follow that out with me.

It was the “Uncola.” Today it’s the un-lemon-lime. Keep flipping, and eventually you get the un-7UP, and the un-7UP is a Sprite, and Sprite is the thing that beat it.

The strategy is to slowly become your enemy.

But, in caps.

That’s not a rebrand. That’s a man who flipped his mattress and came into work saying he’s a different person.

Same mattress, Gary.

Same mattress, Gary.

Same.

Four Points, And Teeth In A Cup

Seventy-two percent of Gen Alpha and Gen Z go for citrus-forward flavors.

Sixty-eight percent of millennials go for citrus-forward flavors.

Four points to make the point.

That’s the youth insight. That’s the whole thing. Read those two numbers again and tell me what you have learned about young people.

Nothing.

You have learned that human beings like citrus.

The Royal Navy had that data in 1747, and they weren’t even selling anything. They just wanted the teeth to stay in.

And here’s the part I’d have led the deck with, if I were them.

The Navy started on lemons. Lemons worked. Then somebody up the chain swapped the lemons out for limes, because limes were cheaper and easier to get from the colonies.

The limes had less Vitamin C in them. The scurvy came back.

So the lemon-to-lime flip has been run before. It’s been tested. The results are in, and the results are teeth in a cup.

Crisp, though.

Refreshing.

And they had to glue two generations together to even get to seventy-two.

Gen Alpha’s oldest kid has a driver’s license. Gen Alpha’s youngest is in a high chair. Average the license and the high chair, staple the result to Gen Z, and you get a clear view of… everyone?

But okay. Take the finding. Everyone likes citrus. Everyone has always liked citrus.

So the move is more citrus. Right?

No. There isn’t more citrus. There’s the same citrus, rearranged. They brought lime up, and they took lemon down. Two fruits, one can, brand new pecking order, printed on the front so you can see who won.

Ninety-seven years, lemon went first. Ninety-seven years at the top of the hyphen. And in a conference room in 2026, a man in a quarter-zip put up a slide and said the lemon has to come down.

Somebody had to tell lemon.

I want my feelings to move a corporation this hard. I’ve written to several. You know what your feelings get? Fifty-five cents off. Next purchase. Of the product you were complaining about.

Ten Concepts, One Legal Pad, No Talent

If a ninety-seven-year-old soda can flip its sip, so can I.

Same fruits. New man.

I got out the legal pad. I got to ten concepts. Here are four. The other six involved a mustache, and I don’t want to discuss it.

Concept 1: Flip the hyphenate. The pure play. Change nothing, reverse the order. I’ve been a writer-comedian for twenty-some years, so going forward I’m a comedian-writer. Not a Buffalo guy living in Virginia. A Virginia guy from Buffalo. Not a husband who writes. A writer who’s owned. (Said that one out loud in the kitchen. Did not test well.)

Concept 2: Drop the Gerard. Brian Gerard Lewandowski is a name for a man who is the three-named tag for a serial killer. Trim it, and I’m cleaner, faster, one syllable lighter.

Except look at the trend line first. My father was Gerard Donald. His father was Bronislaus Henry. Bronislaus, Gerard, Brian. Every generation quietly filed a little more off. Went a little crisper. Tested a little better with the locals. My family has been running Flip the Sip since the boat.

So dropping the Gerard isn’t a rebrand. It’s round four of the same one.

Rejected. Karie noted that it’s on every book cover, and that Bronislaus never got a focus group.

Concept 3: Lowercase. Everybody did this. The airline, the bank, the cereal, all of them turning at once like a flock of birds that heard something.

brian.

Approachable.

Rejected after I signed an email that way to a client, and they called the house to ask if I was okay. (7UP went the other direction, by the way. Ninety-seven years of lowercase and they’ve finally started SHOUTING. In this economy.)

Concept 4: The dot. Every real brand has one identifier doing all the work. The swoosh. The arches. The little red guy behind the U. I don’t have one. I have a hat, and a hat isn’t an identifier. A hat’s a lid.

Karie says I do have one and I’m not going to like it. It’s the noise I make getting up from sitting down. She says I do it in every room. She says I do it at other people’s houses. She says people know it’s me before they turn around.

Instant recognition.

Zero media spend.

Fine. The Mustache.

I said I didn’t want to discuss it. Here’s the whole thing.

My daughter turns twenty-eight this year, and she has informed me that mustaches are back. That they look good now. That men are HOT with them. She said this at a table.

Out loud.

To her father.

Here’s what I see. I see a guy in a 1974 adult film. Not the lead. The pool guy. Shirt open, thumbs in the belt loops, one line of dialogue, the entire performance resting on the mustache… and a bit more.

Or, I see a man in 1877 on a penny-farthing. One wheel the size of a hay bale, one wheel the size of a coaster, waxed tips on the lip, pedaling eleven miles an hour directly into a hedge.

It’s the same guy. Same face, same posture, same absolute confidence that the equipment he selected is the correct size for the job.

Some nights I get both at once and the two of them collapse into one film. Period costume, 1974 production values, single location, and a plot nobody involved could describe under oath.

Which means it needs a title. I didn’t have to invent one, because 1877 and 1974 already agreed on it.

Boneshaker.

Real bicycle. 1860s. That’s what they called it. Out loud, in England, in mixed company. The Victorians looked at that machine, reached for that word, and not one person in the room said “Maybe not.”

Works fine in 1974 too. Same word, same guy, same mustache.

Because that’s all a mustache is. It’s an announcement made at the front of the head about business allegedly happening elsewhere.

That’s not a face. That’s packaging.

Pun intended. (I read that one back, then said “Well, that’s staying.” out loud, to the cat.)

So I grew one.

To prove her wrong.

My own blind test, except everybody could see it.

It came in grey. Just the mustache. Nothing else on the entire face. Fifteen days of that, and she looked up from her phone and said, “ Yeah. No.”

Also, note the strategy failure. A mustache is an ADDITION. That’s not a flip. I had a coherent brand position, and then I put a new ingredient on my face like some kind of amateur.

One of Them I Tested On A Dog Who Cannot See Me

I ran a blind test of my own. A real one. I want that on the record.

Concept 4 needed proving, because I was not prepared to accept Karie’s finding on the word of one woman. So I took it to the only panel in this house that has never once seen my packaging.

Not a pun that time. Regular packaging. The hat, the outside of the man, all of it.

I sat on the kitchen floor with one of our dogs, Remmi, who is blind.

And the hat.

Just a man, a dog, and whatever.

She sniffed my knee. Then she wandered off toward the fridge.

So I stood up. Then I sat back down.

And here she came. Head up, tail going, straight across the kitchen at a sound she has heard nine thousand times and can apparently pick out of a quiet room.

Independent confirmation.

Then she walked into the counter, which she does, because she’s blind, and the lime I’d bought for research rolled off the edge and went under the stove, and Queso (our Chihuahua) barked at the stove for eleven straight minutes. Trouble (the Famous Pig) heard the barking from outside and started oinking, because she assumed it was about food, because it usually is, because she’s 161 pounds now.

Up two. It’s August. Everybody’s up two in August.

A Focus Group Of One, Possibly Four

In fairness to my doubting her, Karie is my focus group, my brand council, and the only person in this house with a doctorate.

A focus group is supposed to be several people, though. She’s one. I’ve raised this. She says she’s plenty.

And she is, because there are at least four of her in there and they do not always agree.

There’s the one with the doctorate, who wants a source.

There’s the only child, who never had to negotiate for anything in her life and sees no reason to start now.

There’s the one who says “Brian Gerard!”, at which point I am some sort of concern for an action I assumed was benign, and everyone goes home.

Then there’s the fourth one, who has just been waiting on the other three to catch up.

I explained the flip.

I explained the concepts.

I pitched her UP7, free of charge, on behalf of a corporation that has never heard of me.

She asked if that was a vitamin. I explained that a refresh maintains distinctiveness within an existing category, which is a sentence I read on Monday and have been carrying around ever since like a smooth rock.

She listened to all of it.

“You already had a makeover,” she said. “It was called 2003.”

I asked what that meant.

She said I knew what it meant.

I do not know what it meant. I have thought about it for two days.

In 2003 I had a goatee. I had dark brown hair. I had sweater vests, and I TUCKED THEM IN.

Into my pants.

On purpose.

In front of other people.

And I drove a Saturn.

Now, look at that list and tell me which one of those got discontinued first.

All of them.

Every item. The hair, the vests, the goatee, and the car company itself. They took Saturn out back the same as Sierra Mist. They beat it harder.

I was writing promos for a cable network that isn’t there anymore while driving a car from a brand that isn’t there anymore, wearing a vest inside a waistband.

Karie was right.

Again.

Anyway, About That Lime

The Gerard stays. The order stays. Same two fruits, same sequence, no flip.

And the lime is under the stove.

It went under during the blind test, and it is staying under, because I am not moving an appliance for a piece of produce I bought to win an argument with a soft drink.

Queso’s been sitting in front of that stove for two days. Doesn’t bark at it anymore. Doesn’t leave either. Just sits, facing the gap, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, like a man with a job.

He got a whole new identity out of this.

I got a lime under the stove.

Share

Subscribe now

Coffee me.

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

So there’s a marmot named Dan’s Hat.

That’s the name. Dan’s Hat. She’s real, she lives in Colorado, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory calls her “the cool aunt who’s part of Stonehenge’s matriline.”

I read that sentence four times. I’m still not all the way through it.

Here’s the deal. It’s Fat Marmot Week. It’s Fat Bear Week’s little cousin, same bracket, less bear, and a bunch of scientists in Gothic, Colorado are posting pictures of enormous rodents twice a week and asking America to pick a winner. The marmots get named after the marks the researchers paint on their backs so they can tell them apart from far away. Non-toxic dye. Little earrings. (The critters have EARRINGS.) One of them ended up looking like a hat that belonged to a guy named Dan, and that was that. Forever.

The favorite is Open Kite. Open Kite is described, officially, by working scientists, as a “girl boss who runs the RMBL townsite.” She has no male to mate with. So per the lab, she has been able to allocate all of her energy toward self-maintenance.

I’ve never been happier for anybody.

USA Today ran the gallery. USA Today ALSO ran a companion piece with “onlyfans for marmots” sitting right there in the URL, which I’m choosing not to think about, because I have a job and a pig and a limited number of hours.

Okay. Now the other thing.

Same week, the Mascot Hall of Fame announces the class of 2026 on “Good Morning America.” Five inductees. Cocky from South Carolina. Cosmo from BYU, who debuted in 1953 by PARACHUTING into a football stadium and now holds three Guinness records, one of which is consecutive breakdance windmills. Miles the Denver Bronco, who wears Crocs. Mrs. Met, formerly Lady Met, who waited nineteen years to join her husband in there, which is its own essay and I’m not writing it.

And Goldy.

Goldy Gopher. Minnesota. Since 1952. Four national championships, famous head spin, the whole thing.

Except here’s the line in the ESPN piece that made me put my coffee down. Goldy is modeled after the thirteen-lined ground squirrel. Which is a rodent that, and I’m quoting, “bears a resemblance to gophers.”

He’s not a gopher.

He’s a guy who LOOKS like a gopher, and he’s been running that con since Truman, and now there’s a plaque.

So I went looking. Is there a marmot in there? Anywhere? Forty-three mascots have gone in since 2005, and I read all of them.

Nope.

And this is where I got mad enough to write it down, so stay with me. A groundhog is a marmot. Marmota monax. Same genus, same guy, different publicist. Which means Punxsutawney Phil is a marmot. THE marmot. Top hat, handler in a matching top hat, lifetime contract, national weather forecast, hundred and forty years of doing the same eleven seconds and never once phoning it in at a car dealership.

Not in the Hall.

The only other one I could find is Mukmuk. Mukmuk was a Vancouver Island marmot at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and they didn’t even make him a mascot.

They made him a SIDEKICK.

That’s an actual designation. Somebody sat in a conference room in Vancouver and said, “Listen, we love the marmot. We just don’t love him as a lead. Give him to the other three. Let him hold the coats.”

That’s the Ringo slot. That’s Chachi. That’s the little cousin they write in during season six after the original kid hits puberty and gets weird.

Now I know what you’re going to say, because I said it too. Marmots hibernate. Eight months, some of them nine, and you can’t run a mascot who’s unavailable from September through April. Misses the football season. Misses hockey. Misses Bark in the Park.

Great. Fine.

Thirteen-lined ground squirrels hibernate too.

They’re one of the most studied hibernators on the planet. Heart rate drops to almost nothing. Body temperature goes near freezing. NASA people study these things. And Goldy’s out there in February doing a head spin at half court like his relatives aren’t all facedown in a tunnel under a parking lot.

So it’s not the sleeping. The sleeping is not the issue.

And then Miles. Miles the horse, in Denver, in Crocs, climbing to the top of Empower Field. Beautiful. Love it. But Colorado has actual marmots, currently, up the road, being photographed for a national bracket by scientists who gave them earrings, and the Colorado slot went to a guy in foam shoes.

Open Kite is a girl boss. Miles wears Crocs.

I’m just putting the two résumés next to each other.

Anyway. My pitch is a Class-A club in a valley town with one hotel and a cannery, and the mascot is a whistlepig who does not do backflips. He eats. That’s the act. Fourth inning, dugout roof, one hoagie, crowd counts along. Merch is a foam belly shelf and a shirt that says HE’S BEEN AT IT SINCE MAY.

Somebody call the Hall. And I mean CALL it, because the Mascot Hall of Fame is a building. It’s in Whiting, Indiana. Five thousand people, refinery town on Lake Michigan, a BP plant that traces back to Standard Oil in 1889, skyline made of stacks and tanks.

A guy who wore the Phillie Phanatic suit for sixteen years started the Hall online in 2005. Then Whiting put up around eighteen million dollars to give it a real home downtown. Opened in 2018. Kids’ museum, lake view. The whole bet was that Chicago families would drive across the state line for foam.

This is also the town that throws Pierogi Fest. Which has a parade. Which has a lawn mower brigade. Which has men in babushkas.

So a pierogi town next to an oil refinery decided to become the Cooperstown of mascots. Eighteen million dollars. Forty-three inductees. Not one marmot.

I voted eleven times for Dan’s Hat and I’d do it again.

Share

Subscribe now

Buy me a café au lait

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share

I’m wearing new underwear.

I want that on the record. I want it in the minutes of the meeting. Somebody wake the stenographer, because this is the biggest thing to happen at this farm since the septic guy stood over the open tank, looked down in there a long time, said, “Ohhh boy,” let that sit in the air for eleven full seconds, and then said, “Nah. That’s just how they look.”

The old ones didn’t wear out. They flaked away. There’s a difference. Wearing out is a process with a beginning and an end, like a warranty. Flaking away is geologic. One morning you’re a functioning waistband, and a few thousand tumble cycles later you’re lint with a vague memory of purpose.

I found a leg hole in the dryer once. Only the leg hole. The rest had gone on ahead without it.

Nobody Tells You

Here’s what gets me. There’s no system.

The government will stamp an expiration date on a can of soup that could take a direct hit from a howitzer and come out of the crater still bubbling. Milk gets a date. Eggs get a date. Motor oil gets a whole schedule and a little sticker for your windshield.

Underwear gets nothing. No date, no light on the dash, no letter from anybody. You’re out there alone, ranking your own inventory, and the rankings are corrupt because you’re the one who made them.

So you keep the bad ones. You demote them. There’s the good pair, the fine pair, the ones for painting the shed, and then, way down in the sediment, the pair you’d want burned if you ever got hospitalized...

Which is how a grown man ends up in Wonder Woman Underoos on a Thursday.

I bought them ironically. That’s the excuse men use for the things they love sincerely. Fifteen years later the irony had rinsed out and left only the sincerity, plus Diana Prince, faded to the color of hospital pudding. The Lasso of Truth had lost the will to compel anyone to do anything. It just lay there across my hip. Retired. Thinking about the old days.

She deserved better. She fought a god. She did not sign up for this.

The Announcement

So I went to the store and bought a three-pack, $16.99, hanging off a peg like a fish somebody was proud of.

Then I fought the bag. They seal these things like they’re shipping a kidney. No perforation, no notch, no little arrow that says tear here. So eventually you use your teeth, and there you are, a full-grown adult, gnawing at a sack of his own underwear in the kitchen at eight in the morning. Karie walked in during that part. She didn’t ask. Good marriage.

(There’s also a sticker on the waistband. I found it at the feed store.)

And then I put them on. Elastic. Real elastic, with an opinion, doing a job. I’d forgotten a waistband is supposed to participate.

I felt so good I told people.

I told the mail carrier. “Hello! I’m wearing new underwear!” He said, “Nice.” Correct response. Correct dose.

I told the woman at the hardware store. She gave me the smile you give a man holding a hose clamp.

Then I told the guy at the gas station, and that’s where it went sideways, because the guy at the gas station was thrilled. Genuinely thrilled. He matched my energy and then he passed me. He wanted a brand. He wanted a cut. He wanted to know boxer, brief, or the negotiated settlement between the two. He had follow-up questions. He had a story of his own and it was starting.

That’s the risk in announcing joy in public. You don’t get to pick who joins you.

The Home Front

I told Karie last. She was reading and she didn’t look up.

“That’s not an accomplishment,” she said. “That’s the minimum. You’ve met the minimum.”

I told her people on the street were happy for me.

“People on the street are polite. There’s a difference, and you have never once located it.”

Trouble was no help. I leaned over the fence, made the announcement, and she regarded me the way she regards everything now, which is from a height, because she’s up to 159 pounds. I’m blaming the humidity. She’s blaming nothing. That pig has never in her life blamed anything.

Queso barked at the waistband. Remmi couldn’t see it and was therefore the only one who responded with any dignity. Professor Archibald Pickles got hold of the empty bag and now holds strong opinions about plastic.

So Anyway

Here’s the part I keep coming back to.

Almost nothing improves at this stage. Not the knees. Not the truck. The country’s been doing whatever it’s been doing. But underwear, for $16.99, gets provably, immediately, categorically better on a Thursday afternoon in about four minutes, and nobody asks you to fill out anything.

That’s the whole renewable resource. That’s the list.

Anyway. Hello. I’m wearing new underwear.

Share

I could use a coffee

Subscribe now

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Share

Subscribe now

So Substack built a lie detector for prose.

July 21. They partnered with an outfit called Pangram, which sounds like a diet cracker but is actually a machine that reads your writing and decides whether a person made it. You can scan a post. You can scan a comment. Anything over a hundred words gets the treatment.

And they gave the crime a name. The announcement is literally titled Against Claudefishing.

Claudefishing.

Claudefishing! Come on. That’s beautiful. That sounds like something you do off a dock in Ottawa with a cooler of Molson and a guy named Denny.

The Card

Substack also gives you a little disclosure card now. “How I make this.” Voluntary. A place to come clean before the machine does it for you.

Mine says AI.

It stands for Allen Iverson.

Karie asked me why I did that.

“Because it’s true,” I said.

“It is not true.”

“Ma’am, it is the truest thing on the whole website.”

She went back to her book. (She does this. It’s how I know a bit is working.)

Practice

Here’s the thing about Iverson. 2002. Press conference. Man wins an MVP and the room wants to discuss his ATTENDANCE. And he stands there and takes a perfectly reasonable question about showing up to a gym and turns it into a philosophy.

That’s my whole operation.

I don’t practice. I don’t outline. I don’t do the thing where you fill a notebook with observations and let them marinate. I sit down at 5:40 in the morning with a cup of coffee that’s mostly a threat and I WRITE.

Game day. Every day. Fifty-two footers a year and a couple of dunks.

So when Pangram scans me and the needle jumps, I don’t take it as an accusation. I take it as a compliment about my consistency. Nobody’s this reliable by accident. Nobody puts up these numbers on effort alone.

We talking about writing, man. Not practice. Writing.

The One in Ten Thousand

Pangram’s CEO says the false positive rate is about one in ten thousand. Other writers are less charmed. 404 Media went out and collected them, and the piece is called Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a ‘Witch Hunt’, which tells you where the temperature is.

One in ten thousand!

That sounds great until you remember how many posts go up on that platform every single day. Somewhere out there, right now, a retired dental hygienist in Sandusky is writing about her tomatoes and getting branded a machine. She’s got a trellis. She’s got a lifetime of opinions about blossom end rot. And a probability engine has decided she’s a Roomba with feelings.

Nobody’s coming to save her, either. You can’t prove a negative. What’s she supposed to do, mail them her hands?

Field Testing

I got curious. So I started scanning things.

Scanned my grocery list. Scanned a text I sent Karie in 2019 that just said “ok but the raccoon is BACK.” Scanned the feed store receipt for Trouble McFussbucket, who is up to 161 pounds now and blames the clover, which is a lie, because I have seen what she does to the apples that blow down off our trees. All of them. In one afternoon.

Scanned my 1994 stand-up set. Boston. Catch a Rising Star, over in Cambridge, back when the drink minimum did most of the heavy lifting. The bit where I learn Japanese to win over a Japanese woman.

Which I did. Cassette tapes. In a car with no air conditioning, windows down on Storrow Drive in August, dead stopped, repeating a stranger’s voice back at the Charles River while a man in a Corolla watched me do it.

And the phrase I came away with, the one I had COLD, the one I could produce under pressure, was this.

私のアメリカ車の部品はありますか

Do you have parts for my American car?

That’s what I brought to the table. Weeks of tapes and a sunburned left arm, and what I could offer the woman I loved was a question about a fuel pump.

There was a woman in the front row that night. Short dress. Feet up on the edge of the stage. No underwear.

She wasn’t Japanese.

So I had nothing for her. Nothing! I had ONE phrase, dear reader, and it was about a fuel pump, and it did not apply. She could have been the great love of my life and I’d have stood up there like a language cassette with a haircut.

I did my seven minutes and looked at the door.

Wait. What if the scan comes back clean? What if a machine reads that and says yep, human, definitely a guy, and now I’m CERTIFIED for it? Notarized?

I think that might be worse.

The Part Where I’m Not Innocent

Okay. Honest.

I do use the other AI. The one with the polite little cursor. I use it the way a guy with a bad back uses a hand truck. It doesn’t decide what goes on the truck. It doesn’t know what the truck is FOR. But it will hold the far end of a couch at eleven at night without complaining, and that’s more than I can say for most of my friends.

Does that make me a Claudefisher? Probably. Dear reader, I have been fishing.

But here’s what nobody in this argument wants to say out loud. The scanner isn’t measuring whether a person wrote it. It’s measuring whether it SOUNDS like a person wrote it. Those are different jobs. One of them is detection. The other one is taste.

And taste has never once been improved by a percentage.

Verdict

I was going to end this by running the whole essay through the thing. Big finish. Show you the number.

Then I thought about it for a while and decided I don’t want to know.

So it’s staying up unscanned, with a card at the bottom that says AI, and if anybody asks I’ll tell them the truth. Allen Iverson wrote it. He was great. He’s still great.

He just doesn’t practice.

Anyway. The pig’s out again.

Buy me just a coffee bean.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

I could use a coffee

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”



He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Share

Subscribe now

So I’m in the aisle.

You know the aisle. Foot powder on one side. The stick that tells you your whole life is about to change on the other. Whoever built that planogram was either a genius or a monster.

And there it is. Eye level. Bold letters on a little box.

UNSCENTED.

Condoms.

I stood there a while. Long enough for a kid to ask his mom what I was doing. She said I was shopping. I was not shopping. I was recalibrating.

(And nobody’s asking the follow-up. Kid, buddy. Look around. Why is SHE here? What errand brings a woman to this particular six feet of shelving? The foot powder? Sure. Let’s all say it’s the foot powder. Mom has stinky flippers. Meanwhile I’m the exhibit. I’m the one getting narrated. Ask your mother a question sometime, that’s all I’m saying.)

Because unscented is a CLAIM, dear reader. Unscented is a selling point. Nobody brags about unscented unless the alternative is out there somewhere... wearing cologne... waiting.

Who complained? That’s my question. Somebody complained. Somebody filled out a card. Somebody called an 800 number and said the words out loud to a stranger named Deb.

And then somebody ELSE had to write it down.

I picture a conference room in Akron. Bad carpet. A guy named Duane Kettleman clicks to slide four. “Folks, we’ve got a nose problem.” And forty people nod, because they all know. They’ve known for years. They just never said it in a room with a projector.

Okay, but here’s where I got stuck.

Which nose?

Is this a you problem? A them problem? Is there a third party in the room I don’t know about? Because if the answer is “everybody,” then we have all been quietly complicit in something, and I’d like the CDC to say a few words.

The CDC does not want to say a few words. The CDC has a guy now.

And I know exactly how it goes if I call. Somebody puts me on hold, and forty minutes later RFK Jr. picks up, and he’s not going to answer the question; he’s going to tell me the question is downstream of the seed oils. He’s going to bring up the water. He’s going to get around to raw milk in a way I won’t see coming and won’t be able to argue with, because I’ve never once won an argument against a man who is that sure and that hoarse.

Then he’ll take his shirt off. Not for a reason. That’s just where these things end up.

And I’ll hang up, and I still won’t know whose nose it was.

I called Karie in. Held up my phone with the product page on it.

She looked. She looked longer. She handed the phone back.

“Sure,” she said.

That’s it. That’s the whole response. Fifteen years together, nine of them married, and the woman has a resting deadpan you could park a truck on.

Anyway. I did the research so you don’t have to, which is a sentence I use to justify roughly ninety minutes of every day.

The scents are real. They’re out there. Vanilla. Strawberry. Something called Cool Mint, which sounds less like romance and more like a dental procedure. There’s a chocolate one. There’s a banana one. There’s a bubblegum one, and I’d like to formally register that bubblegum is a CHILDHOOD flavor and we should all take a beat.

And yes. Before you write in. The bubblegum ones are in the Epstein files.

I did not go looking for that. Nobody goes looking for that. You type four words into a search bar on a Sunday afternoon in your own home, wearing pants you’ve had since GWB, and the machine hands you a page number, and now you know a thing you will carry to your grave and possibly past it.

Everything’s in there. Every product. Every guy. Every flight, every folder, every receipt from every gift shop in the Western Hemisphere. At this point I assume my library card is in there. I assume there’s a page that just says BRIAN, LOOKED UP CONDOMS, SUNDAY.

Because that’s the thing nobody’s saying. This is the 1980s coming back for us.

We were RAISED on this. Scratch-n-sniff stickers. Mr. Sketch markers, and don’t tell me you didn’t huff the black one, the licorice one, we all did, we were animals. Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in Dr Pepper. Strawberry Shortcake dolls that smelled like a jam factory fire. A whole generation trained from age six that if a thing does not smell like fruit, the thing is broken.

And then we grew up. And we got jobs. And apparently a few of us went into product development.

I’m not judging. I’m saying there’s a CAREER PATH.

Here’s what really gets me though. Unscented isn’t neutral. Unscented is a response. Unscented is the guy at the party going “no, I’m good, I’m driving.” It exists only because of the party.

So somewhere, in some warehouse in a state I’ve never driven through, there are pallets of bubblegum ones and pallets of nothing ones. Same building. Same forklift guy. Doug. Doug has seen things.

And Doug goes home at night, and his wife asks how work was, and Doug says fine.

Fine, honey.

Just fine.

I keep circling one more thing, and then I’ll let it go.

Unscented is not the same as odorless.

Those are two different words, and they picked the softer one on purpose. Odorless means there’s nothing there. Unscented means nobody ADDED anything. It’s still got a native situation. A house smell. A factory note. Whatever the raw material was doing before marketing showed up.

Which means the honest label, the one nobody’s going to print, is something like AS-IS.

Or NO NOTES OF ANYTHING.

Or, and I’d buy these immediately, WHATEVER.

I bought the unscented ones. Obviously. I’m a coward, and I was in public.

Got home, put the bag on the counter, went out to move the hose. Came back in twenty minutes later and Trouble was standing in the kitchen with a look on her face I would describe as legally ambiguous.

Bag was empty. Box was under the table. Box was open.

Now. A pig in the kitchen is already a policy failure, I understand that. We’ve had the conversation. The conversation went nowhere. But she’s 158 now, up two from the lollipop incident, and I can’t in good conscience pin those two pounds on my new box that weighs less than a slice of bread.

The vet said it’ll pass. Her exact word. Pass.

So now we wait. Me and Karie and a 158-pound pig with a full dozen latex novelties working their way through the system like a parade float.

Best case, she toots out a giraffe. Maybe a little poodle. A sword, if she’s showing off.

Somebody’s kid’s birthday party, but from a pig.

And hopefully... please... unscented.

Share

Subscribe now

I could use a coffee

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (arriving Spetember 1st!) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Share

Subscribe now

You already read it. Back when it showed up in your inbox one chapter at a time and was, let’s be honest, a little rougher around the edges.

It’s better now. I added things. I fixed things. There are …

Read more

The beetle on my rose bush has never been to Japan.

Neither has his dad. Neither has his dad’s dad. You’d have to go all the way back to 1916, to a nursery outside Riverton, New Jersey, and a crate of iris bulbs nobody bothered to look inside, before you find one single Japanese beetle in this entire bloodline who could find Japan on a map.

That’s a hundred and ten years. That’s longer than my whole family’s been white.

My people came over from Poland in the 1890s, and let me tell you, we were not white when we got here. We were Polacks. We were a punchline and a fire hazard. It took two generations, a name that fit on a form, and a hard swerve into “we’ve always loved this country” before anybody handed us the good paperwork. Now I’ve got a lawn and opinions about it. That’s the deal. That’s the whole scam and it works every time.

And yet. Every June this beetle hatches out of MY grass, climbs MY rose, and some seasonal kid at the garden center calls him a foreign national.

He was born here, dude. In the dirt. Eleven feet from a Weber grill.

So the courts went and said the thing the courts said about birthright citizenship, and I’ve been chewing on it out in the yard, which is where I do most of my chewing, and where most of my chewing goes sideways.

The standard’s right there in the text. Born here. That’s it. That’s the whole quiz. Nobody wrote an asterisk about legs.

Okay. Fine. The amendment says persons. A beetle is not a person.

But a corporation is a person. We settled that one years ago and everybody just nodded and went to lunch. So the beetle files paperwork. Popillia Holdings LLC, Delaware, sole member a bug.

Now he’s a person AND a small business.

Good luck deporting a small business. (Good luck getting one to return an email.)

He’ll do it right, too. He’ll underpay six guys, stiff a contractor, write off the rose as a company vehicle. That’s not me being cynical about immigrants. That’s me being accurate about Delaware.

Once you start down this road you can’t stop, and I did not stop, and I want you to know I lost a whole Saturday.

The Norway rat has never been to Norway. He’s not from Norway. He’s from northern China, somebody got it wrong in 1769, and nobody’s had the guts to correct it since. The rat in my barn was born under a pallet of chicken feed in Albemarle County, Virginia. He’s got a Southern accent. He votes. He hates Norway and he’s never met a Norwegian and those two facts are related in a way he will not examine.

The German cockroach is not German. The American cockroach is African. Those two need to swap folders at the DMV and then never speak of it again.

The house sparrow got dumped in Brooklyn in 1851 by a guy with a plan. English sparrow, we call him. He is a Brooklyn bird. He has ALWAYS been a Brooklyn bird. He’ll knife you over a waffle fry in a Wendy’s parking lot and I ask you... is that England?

The starling showed up in Central Park in 1890 because one man decided America needed more birds. Genuinely. A guy named Schieffelin let a hundred of them go on purpose. Two hundred million descendants later, every one of them born in a strip mall sign, and they’re all his fault and we still file them under European. One rich guy’s hobby became a permanent national infestation and nobody made him pay for it. THAT is the most American thing in this entire essay and I include the turkey.

Speaking of.

I want to talk about the turkey.

The turkey is from HERE. Most American thing in the woods. He was here before the flag, before the highway, before the deep fryer that has ended so many of his people. And we named him after a country he has never visited, because in the 1500s some merchant in London saw a weird bird and guessed.

That’s the reverse case. Native-born citizen walking around with somebody else’s passport stapled to his face. Ben Franklin wanted him on the seal, which tells you the vetting was already a mess back then.

Same energy as the french fry. Belgian. Always was. We just liked the other name better and nobody sued. And here’s the thing that keeps me up... it was a waffle fry the sparrow was fighting over back there. In the Wendy’s lot. A BELGIAN fry. So that Brooklyn bird from England was ready to die over Belgian food we call French. Nobody in that parking lot was from where they said they were. Not even the potato.

But the one I really want naturalized is the Canada goose.

Because the Canada goose doesn’t go to Canada anymore. Did you know that? Whole resident population now. They quit. They found a retention pond behind a Panera and said, yep, this’ll do.

They live in office parks. They stand in the road and stare down your Subaru. They hiss at toddlers with total confidence and zero follow-through. They ruined a soccer field and felt nothing.

Tell me that’s not an American.

Give that goose a Social Security number, a small unpaid tax obligation, and a strong wrong opinion about a war, and let him get on with it.

Here’s how I’d run the ceremony.

Folding table. Court officer who’d rather be dead. One of those little flags on a stick, the forty-cent kind, straight in the trash by Tuesday.

The clerk reads the oath. The beetle can’t hear it, doesn’t have ears in the way you’d want, and honestly isn’t listening.

Everyone claps anyway. There’s a sheet cake. It’s from Kroger. Says CONGRATULATIONS in blue gel and somebody already ate the corner.

Now, I’m not letting EVERYBODY in. Come on. I have standards. They’re terrible, but I have them.

The spotted lanternfly showed up in 2014. Fourteen. That’s yesterday. That’s a guy who moved to Brooklyn last spring and already corrects your pronunciation of the neighborhood. He can wait in line like the rest of us. The state of Pennsylvania has literally asked me to stomp him on sight, which is the first time a government ever gave me a job I actually wanted.

Emerald ash borer, 2002, still processing. Sorry, pal. Backlog. Everybody’s furious about it and none of it moves the line.

Kudzu gets in immediately. No questions, no interview. Kudzu has covered nine million acres of the South, eaten four barns, a Pontiac, and part of a Baptist church, and at this point kudzu isn’t a plant. Kudzu is a county.

You don’t naturalize a county. A county naturalizes YOU.

Anyway I went out to tell the beetle.

Got down on the grass, got real close, and explained the whole thing. The ruling, the Fourteenth Amendment, the LLC, the sheet cake. Top to bottom. Calm voice.

He listened. Or he sat there. Same posture, honestly, hard to call it.

Then he ate the rose.

Receipts, for the one guy in the comments who’s already typing:

The beetle really did show up in a Riverton, New Jersey nursery in 1916, grubbing along in a crate of iris bulbs. The starlings really are one rich guy’s fault — sixty birds in 1890, two hundred million now, no invoice. And Pennsylvania really will deputize you to stomp a lanternfly on sight, which remains the finest thing my government has ever offered me.

Share

Subscribe now

I's like a coffee.

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (available to paid Substack subscribers right now) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Share

Subscribe now

Everyone has a picture of what happens after you die. Pearly gates, a tunnel of light, a man with a ledger, fire if you were the kind of person who left the shopping cart in the middle of the lot. I’ve come to believe it’s none of that. I think the afterlife is a limited-liability corporation, I think it has a quarterly review, and I think you would not survive the onboarding.

That’s more or less the premise of my new novel, The Returnables, though I didn’t set out to write it. I set out to write about a man on a porch who has stopped expecting anything from the day. His name is Gary Plotz. He’s unemployed, he lives in Buffalo, his lawn is dying in patches, and there’s a thing that happened that he does not think about, which sits behind everything else like a radio playing in another room. I liked Gary immediately, the way you like anyone who has clearly given up but is still, technically, standing on the porch.

Then a man showed up at his door in a suit the color of a bruise, shot through with sequins, holding a manila folder thick as a phone book, and everything I’d planned went out the window.

The man is Terrence Midge. He represents Providence Freight and Salvage, a limited-liability corporation operating in what he calls the recall sector. Their business is the recalled dead, specifically the high-value ones, the celebrities, who apparently don’t so much die as get reassigned, the way a defective product gets pulled from shelves and sent back up the supply chain. Gary, through no fault or ambition of his own, has been selected as a handler. Nobody applies. Providence selects. The selection criteria are, and I’m quoting Terrence here, frankly none of your business, but the actuarial tables are very robust.

I fell in love with writing the corporate parts. There’s a document in the book called the CONFIDENTIAL HANDLER AGREEMENT, REVISED Q3. There’s a chapter I named “Quarterly Review of Dread” and did not have to strain to earn. It turns out the funniest thing you can do to death is give it an HR department. Make the infinite fill out a form. Have the beyond issue a compliance update. Every terrifying thing gets funnier the second somebody bureaucratizes it, and every bureaucratic thing gets sadder the second you remember it’s standing in for something you loved and lost.

Because that’s the other half. Under all the paperwork, Gary is carrying something. There’s a carpetbag by his door that stays empty and somehow keeps getting heavier. There’s the incident he won’t name. There’s the whole architecture of a man who has spent years getting very good at not hearing the radio in the other room. The recall sector, the handler agreement, the King of Rock and Roll turning up where a King has no business being, it’s all machinery I built so that Gary would eventually have to open the bag and look at what’s inside. I’m not going to tell you what’s inside. That’s the book.

I’ll tell you it’s a comedy. I stand behind the jokes, there are a lot of them, and Stan Krupka (garage archaeologist, discoverer of the Rat Balls of Eden) is personally responsible for a fair share. But I wrote it because of the bag. Everything else is the delivery mechanism: the sequined man at the door with the folder, the return you never asked to process.

The Returnables is out now in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. Come for the corporate afterlife. Stay because you, too, have a bag by the door.

Buy it here

Subscribe now

Share

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski) writes books critics call “aggressively adequate” — better than “aggressively terrible” but somehow more concerning, like a smoke detector that only goes off on Tuesdays.

He once traded a MetroCard for a pitchfork on a subway platform and now uses it exclusively for dramatic pointing. He lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, with a partner who smiles politely at his life choices, a pig named Trouble McFussbucket who has opinions about the sofa, and a five-pound dog named Professor Archibald Pickles who appears to be held together entirely by anxiety and unearned confidence.

See his Amazon author page and buy his books before he spends the royalties on the pig.

Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen stumbling through supernatural chaos. He has published “The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse,” “Not Bukowski,” and “Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind,” “Gesundheit Gary,” “The Returnables,” and has two new novels seeking a publisher: “Truth Tastes Like Pennies” (available to paid Substack subscribers right now) and “Elliot Nessie.”

He remains unconvinced that birds aren’t surveillance drones.

Subscribe now

Share