Junk Food is good. And it’s good for you.

When we say ‘Junk food is bad’ we’re not saying something true philosophically or even scientifically; we’re making a metaphor

Junk food isn’t bad because it’s not moral. You can do immoral things with it but in of itself, it just sits there, existing.

If anything, it’s good. Eating junk food, for a good many people, is a pleasurable experience: one that causes enjoyment. It can be just the thing for a celebration, or when you’re feeling down. It can be a comfort food, a treat, or just something you like, which is perfectly okay.

Good and Bad =/= Nutritious and Not Nutritious

But of course, nobody meant junk food is immoral, they meant it wasn’t nutritious.

Then that’s what they should say.

C.S. Lewis in his essay “The Death of Words” saw how a good many words went on to mean merely ‘good’ or ‘bad’ having lost their descriptive definitions entirely. He gives a few examples, like how we had to invent the word ‘pig’ to refer to an animal when the word ‘swine’ became almost entirely an insult. Most insults and compliments really had other descriptive definitions until we watered them down to colloquially mean good or bad.

It’s not nitpicking to say that the assignment of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to things that are neither can be a dangerous enterprise.

For starters, the world is far more complicated than being comprised solely of entirely good and entirely bad things. What’s more, the very act of labeling sections off that complicated reality into categories that may not exist except in our conception, or may exist erroneously, like calling some foods bad when really they just have sugar and calories.

Science isn’t catching a stray here, nor is Capital-T Truth under assault. Language is the operator under question here. When Hamlet said "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he may have been making a dubious statement on the nature reality, but he’s certainly on the money about on how our perceptions, our thinking, and by extension our verbalization of those thoughts, can shape our experience of those things as good or bad.

Metaphors and the World

As there are those who protest that ‘good’ or ‘bad’ didn’t mean good or bad, but really meant nutritious and we’re splitting hairs here… there are also those who may take issue at all with ever broaching the idea that touching concepts of good and evil with mere linguistic casualty is incredibly dangerous: if we start calling cookies good, or at least, not-bad, what’s next?

People make slippery-slope arguments because despite being fallacious they ask perfectly legitimate questions.

Recognizing that linguistic differences affect how we think about things doesn’t mean we are pretending to speak for all instances at all times everywhere: poetry is personal, philosophy is general.

It’s an important skill that involves a careful balancing act between recognizing the fluidity and transparent nature of some boundaries that words create, without dissolving all boundaries whatsoever. Generally there is little operation in this third space: people lean by temperament towards hard and fast boundaries or a loosey-goosey erasure of boundaries.

It’s useful to test rules universally but it can be remarkably foolish chalk someones personal experience, or your own personal experience, up to a universal constant, as it opens you up to being tricked by the exception that proves the rule. Real power comes from knowing when something is sometimes the case and sometimes not as well as when things are all the time the case. Those who are most easily duped are those who are most rigid in their worldviews.

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Sacrificed on the Altar of Poetry

We sometimes think that the only alternative to binaries is a kind of gray middle-ground: in reality we might escape into a different dimension altogether, which is realizing that good and bad may play a role in interacting with a thing, but that’s entirely dependent on how humans make, use, or employ said thing; usually most things (not all things, most- I’m not prepared to categorize all things together in all situations, lest we lose a tree for the forest) aren’t on the battlefield of good and evil, but rather in another domain entirely, like nutritious and non-nutritious.

The world as we understand it exists in a very linguistic, described manner. philosophy and science aims to figure out what everything is, but poetry is how we actually talk about, experience, and relate to that reality.

Much of our interaction with reality may entirely be wrapped up in metaphors: linguistic boxes that guide or cage our thinking merely by the way that we have described it. Perhaps this is part of where the idea of “True Names” comes from in folklore: knowing a thing’s true name gives you power over it. Perhaps the opposite is that when you don’t know a thing’s name it has a kind of power over you, whether that is the Cyclops’ deception by “Nobody” or it’s Junk Food literally being called “Junk.” When something has a different name, it’s hard to interact with it with maximum freedom because your perspective of it is limited, therefore it can hide things from you.

Metaphors are myriad and they can expose much about life: indeed, Life is like a highway in a manner you may not have regarded. Poetry is a remarkable art that allows one to see the world in a wonderful, strange, and new way, while bringing us closer to reality through it’s metaphorical representations. But metaphors can also hide things, or link things falsely together, and a discerning ear is required to see how the tongue tricks you: as it can be addicted to sugar or snacks, it is addicted to metaphor and malapropism.

Suddenly all sorts of words are describing- shaping, informing, feeding- other words that they have no right being associated with at all. If we’re willing to call tasty treats bad, what else would we be willing to sacrifice on the altar of poetry? I only make the slippery-slope argument because it’s legitimate: junk food is synecdoche: many more things in the world are going its way of death-by-poetry. It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles the person, but what comes out, and what comes out doesn’t stop with defiling just the speaker, but what he describes as well.

Beauty can save the world, Dostoevsky said; but, if we’re sloppy poets we can destroy the world too by describing it so, and never realize we sang the song of destruction. The world doesn’t end with a bang of a bomb, but with a whimper, which is a word.

The Opportunity

Grand Rapids, Michigan is facing an opportunity that few cities ever experience: it has the opportunity to decide what kind of city it will be.

The main obstacle that could cause it to fumble this opportunity is that it’s also a city in an identity crisis.

All cities have identity goals and work to be more X or less Y. But generally the big cities are trying to nudge an object that’s already in motion that has a lot of momentum. It’s not hard to consider the culture and identity of a Chicago, IL or even an Austin, TX because they already have an identity from a long, unbroken history: in those cities identity formation is a matter of cultivating what’s already there, like trait-selecting animals for specific breeds or fruits for certain qualities.

Grand Rapids has a different situation. It’s jump-starting it’s identity, more or less, from scratch.

It’s easy to hear this and think that I’m saying Grand Rapids doesn’t have culture, but that’s not what I’m saying. What Grand Rapids is unsure about is its identity.

Culture and Identity

Culture may be defined in this instance as ‘things happen in the city.’ Grand Rapids has plenty of culture; in fact, it’s for the abundance of culture that it faces this unique situation.

Identity may be defined as how the city understands itself and exists as a single unit in the mind of people. This happens in a kind of collective unconscious assent. It’s where some towns earn the moniker “College Town” or “Vacation Destination.” It’s how Portland, OR understands itself as weird, or Denver, CO understands itself as outdoorsy.

The culture in a city shapes the identity of the city.

While cities are obviously more than their identity, as its defined here, it is the main way people understand what their home is. Though plenty of life happens in college towns aside from college, everyone knows what their home is about. Though people in Las Vegas can live their whole lives there and never touch the strip; or people in Miami can live their whole lives there and never hit the beach, they know that the identity of the town is still predominantly occupied by a central concept.

Grand Rapids lacks this.

In the past it’s been called Furniture City and most recently it’s been called Beer City, U.S.A. The former is a remnant of a distant past but the latter begins to hint at an identity: Grand Rapids is a place for down-to-earth beer drinking folks, who are more sophisticated than can-crushers but not so uppity as to be snobs.

Then vs. Now vs. Soon

Then

The lack of identity comes from Grand Rapids’ history. While it has been around for 175 years, it also has only really been in its current form for about thirty years (more like ten years if we nitpick current form.)

While Grand Rapids went the way of growing cities from its inception to becomes the Furniture exporter of the United States, it goes dark for a number of years from the Great Depression up until the 1990s in the popular consciousness. That doesn’t mean nothing important happened or moves weren’t made of lasting significance, but a serious portion of history is missing in how people conceptualize the city. How people remember a city’s history is different than a city’s actual history, but in bigger cities they are one-and-the-same, or near enough, to give that city the aforementioned momentum.

Since the nineties Grand Rapids has been on the rise: often cited as a great place to live or a hidden gem of a city. Still, despite its major festivals, celebrations, attractions and quality of life, it has flown under the radar as an underdog city.

Now

But Grand Rapids has grown and is still growing.

Ten years ago some people lived downtown. Today many more do. Ten years from now, who knows what it’ll look like? That’s the exciting opportunity. The downfall is that everyone knows the city is going somewhere, but do we agree where it’s all going?

More and more apartments are going in downtown, but is the city building for a life downtown? Are more businesses coming in that are required for living, not excursions for a night on the town?

When passing through downtown Grand Rapids, exciting things are happening, but one thing that is missing is life on the streets. People on Grand Rapids’ streets have parked and are going somewhere. Little life happens on the streets as a location: streets are places for transient spaces for commuting.Even people who live downtown are doing this, leaving the downtown area to support their lives in work or shopping or luxury.

The people moving downtown may be young, but is the city being built for them? The people who already live downtown may be older, but is the city forgetting them?

It seems more and more that downtown is built to attract visitors for an evening on the town rather than people to live their lives in a cohesively life-supporting city.

Soon

Is Grand Rapids going to be a night on the town city, or a place where people live city?

The city is surrounded by populated suburbs, many of considerable wealth. Are we going to build into a gravity-well that seeks to be where all these suburban dollars funnel, or a place where downtown living is possible for those who are living downtown?

The more things built the more it seems we’re deciding with our actions where we are going.

A Case Study

The most recent addition to the town of the Acrisure Ampitheater. All Summer long huge artists have sold out the space, flooding the south west side of town with huge numbers.

Local businesses are packed and parking strategies have spread out in equal proportion to shuttle services aimed at getting people downtown. I’ve even seen bike-pulled rickshaws on the street for the first time ever in this town, capitalizing on the opportunity. Good for them.

The Soccer Stadium next year seems to be following in that tradition.

But with the Ampitheater’s creation came about a series of complaints on the noise. Across the river, less than a half a mile away, residents of the more neighborhood populated West Side dislike they can hear the music late into the night.

On one hand, of course you can: it’s an ampitheater. What did you expect? You live downtown. Go to New York: that city is nothing but noise! Go to Chicago and good luck hearing crickets in your yard at night. You actually probably wouldn’t even have a yard!

On the other hand… Grand Rapids isn’t New York or Chicago. It may seem obvious that Grand Rapids isn’t other places, but all we really have to envision where we’re going is where other places have been.

This is the identity crisis.

We make a terrible error when we think that the people, culture and identity of Grand Rapids is, or is going to resemble, other cities.

In many capacities we will come to resemble them as we go the way of the Ampitheater and Soccer Stadium. But we must be sure to build and grow in a way that actually reflects the people who are here.

The problem isn’t Attractions vs. Living, many other cities balance the two features of a city very well. But Grand Rapids isn’t other cities, and what is specific to Grand Rapids is that it’s not as historied, built up, or big as those places who balance them well. As a result, this tension of what a city can do, attract new people to have an evening out, or cater to people who live in its district, starts to feel like a zero sum game.

Another Case Study

This realization came primarily through my involvement in the Comedy scene of Grand Rapids.

The hubs of Stand-Up Comedy and Improv Comedy in America are unequivocally Los Angeles, New York, and most of all, Chicago (though at this point all majors cities and many minor cities have fantastic comedies communities.)

Grand Rapids, for how wonderful it’s comedy scene proves to be over and over, is still very much in its Wild West phase, meaning that time-honored institutions are still being built and the infrastructure that up and comers must follow in other cities still isn’t locked in place yet here.

That creates an instability that summons the obvious desire to implement said infrastructure. Where do we look for the model? Our near neighbor and comedy inspiration: Chicago.

The only problem is Grand Rapids isn’t Chicago. The city isn’t the same size but more importantly people don’t behave the same way. Different people live in the different cities, who are looking for different modes of living. While it is a vast overgeneralization, hardly anyone is moving to Grand Rapids to ‘make it’ in improv or stand-up like how they would in Chicago. The comedians here all have comedy as their second or third priority, not first.

Similarly Grand Rapids isn’t an artsy-city, meaning it doesn’t gather artists as other cities do: rather it is a city that highly values art and will dish out big dollars for it, but they come from mostly non-artistic people.

Unique opportunities and unique challenges for a unique city with a unique make-up.

Again, this is a vast overgeneralization, but the aim is to point out that to follow a Chicago model entirely would be fallacious. There are obviously things to learn and implement from how it’s been done elsewhere, but we’d be building for the wrong audience.

The Grand Tour

So too with Grand Rapids. Theaters and Stadiums are here, Aquariums are coming, and who knows what else will follow?

Parking and transportation solutions are flung around creating problems as they seek to solve problems.

What will the city become?

It’s an incredible opportunity and a very exciting time to be in such an amazing city. But we must build Grand Rapids up with a love for this city to be this city, just larger, rather than to love it so much it becomes something from somewhere else.

To help aid in this process of thinking about the city as it is, I will be releasing some articles on the great city of Grand Rapids on a Grand Tour. Keep an eye out for those in weeks to come.

I just saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, based on the ancient poem by Homer, at a 6:45 AM showing in IMAX. All the tickets for seeing it in IMAX at a normal times was purchased a year ago, so I’m pretty lucky. The theater I grew up with has a screen. I had always taken it for granted, or rather never fully acknowledged how rare and special a thing it was to have IMAX in my hometown: one of forty-one worldwide.

Walking out of the theater, if you go up the steps, there is a viewing window to look in on the mighty machine, the real star of the film, and people stood taking pictures and videos of the bluely lit room.

They handed out stickers saying “I saw it in IMAX 70 MM.”

I’m thinking about the movie I just saw. It was a tremendous work of art. One of the fundamental attitudes towards art that I practice can be found from another Greek, Aristotle. He said “That which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” In other words, what you perceive is shaped by what kind of person you are. I have found it so with movies: I cannot help but identify with characters, project myself onto them, envy them, learn from them, and feel the story to be wholly personal.

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The Song

I often experience movies and stories in a similar manner to how Matt Damon’s Odysseus describes the Sirens’ song, a tune of tremendous temptation sung by beautiful monsters to lure sailors to their deaths:

"What was the Siren’s song? All the things you want it to be. All the things you wish you never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch, only to find it’s under the skin and you can't reach... Told you what you most want is what you most can't have, and what you most can't have is what you already had. And lost"

One can see how fellow Greek, Socrates- who followed Homer’s Odyssey by several centuries- mistrusted art as being a lie, an illusion, a shadow that passes for reality when songs like this are the art he was handed from antiquity.

Still “…songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write” Odysseus opines at the end of the movie, and this is one of the oldest and most enduring of songs, one that has shaped and inspired stories for nearly three thousand years.

With any film of high adventure and daring bravery there are inspirations to desire things you never wished for. David Foster Wallace identified this pernicious paradox in his essay “E Unibus Pluram:”

In lots of ways, television purveys and enables dreams, and most of these dreams involve some sort of transcendence of average daily life…. Since television must seek to compel attention by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV's whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory ("Joe, Joe, there's a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture") while reinforcing television-watching in practice ("Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV").

And The Odyssey awoke such dreams of such a world for me after the fact, once the viewing (and what an awesome viewing) was complete. I had to exit the theater and go back to whatever my life was.

I left The Odyssey feeling such a gap between those men and me. I am not a King reclaiming his throne; I am not a prince seeking his Father. I am not even a man separated from his home. At the most basic sense, I am not a man whose life is about one, great legend.

The world of The Odyssey is sparsely populated across the islands and lands of Greece. Everyone knows of one another, reputations precede men, and news is readily met. There is a tremendous sense that legends are currently happening, whether it is in Menelaus’ return to Sparta; Telemachus’ treacherous navigation of the situation in his home; Penelope’s clever ruse to keep her suitors as bay; Agamemnon’s tragic death upon his return; or Odysseus’ terrible tricks: people are living stories. Legends are happening now.

This is the terrible chord in the Siren’s song, for me: that my life may not be an epic quest; that legends are not being written in word or deed in my daily life. That I am not, essentially, about one grand thing.

There is a great temptation that often arises within me, which Odysseus’ style itched under my skin. It is the temptation to believe that integrity of personality would be a sure path to happiness: if only I could be the same person, consistent across time, consistent in emotion and thought, consistent in action, then I would be happy, instead of being tossed about, abandoning enterprises that aren’t even worthy of song. Then I could avoid the empty, meaningless life of a nobody.

Odysseus is call polytropos, which is translated as the man of many turns, the ingenious, the complicated, the many-wayed, the man of twists. He is a liar, a trickster, deceitful and wise, beloved of Athena for his intelligence and cunning. Ironic that in being a many-turned man I reckon him as one thing, and find that oneness enviable.

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The Bookstore

I left the movie theater and crossed the street to a Barnes and Noble where I’m now writing. Before I sat down to write, I walked around the store and found many more men and women who are, ostensibly, one thing.

Entire books are about one subject: one subject that if I were to only read it, absorb it, act upon it, conform my life to it promise to make my life like Odysseus: legendary, worthy of telling, and perhaps great enough to be immortalized.

It’s a terrible thing to be a writer in the midst of a bookshop: every book is a promise that your goal can be accomplished, but is a threat about how insignificant your voice may be among the stacks and rows of other writers, all crowding you out as they invite you in, all showing that as much as you envy their accomplishment, you don’t really care to read what they wrote, so why would anyone care to read you?

This feeling alternates with that aforementioned desire to absorb everything they say and have your life be one thing, to have your self be one thing.

There’s a great world out there, but the only way to experience it is second-hand. Consumption is your only adventure: you cannot be legendary, you can only watch or read legends.

The Vice

Songs and stories, as Siren-like as they may be, also do contain wisdom: the very thing that draws me to them, wisdom that could improve my life, only draws me because oftentimes they do possess this wisdom and it can improve my life.

Wandering about these books I came across the calm and sure words of an old Mentor, C.S. Lewis. I turned through a collection of writings from letters organized by topic and found what I sought. It was what he wrote about ambition, the very thing that pained me, that my life might be great, epic, one, and worthwhile if only I, like Odysseus, were clever enough to trick my way into it. Lewis wrote how up until the very recently ambition was seen as a vice by moralists and was treated as such. Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame wrote similarly, “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” The desire for greatness, for integrity of personality and accomplishment were all distorted desires: understandable, but illusory paths to happiness.

Desiring to be like Odysseus is absurd, for not even Odysseus wants to be like Odysseus. The Odyssey tells a very different story than of an enviable man accomplishing mighty deeds. Robert Fagles translation says of the might Odysseus, the man I desired to imitate, “More than all other men, that man was born for pain.”

Nolan’s film does not fail to present this truth, for those who have eyes to see it and the mode to receive it.

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The Pain

In the presence of epic deeds and personalities of integrity, it can be hard to miss the internal life of pain that characters feel. Sailing across the sea defying gods, monsters and men with nothing more than wits is awesome, but it will cost two decades from home, the destruction of all of your loyal men, and more violence and pain than anyone could ever want.

Nolan’s film takes this farther by placing the impending crisis of raiders from Sea-People: those who plunder and take, abandoning the sacred law of hospitality that kept Greece in relative peace. It is revealed that Odysseus’ trick of the Trojan Horse, taking advantage of Trojan trust and hospitality, that destroyed, in an original sin, the devotion of hospitality. It turned the world upside down, and for all his cleverness it only amounted to the end of the bronze age.

It was a remarkable, wonderful and welcome reading of the Trojan War, wherein one saw not only Odysseus’ pain at his failure and circumstance, but also his moral failure as he becomes, in a sense, a kind of Pandora, who opened pain to the world and could not put it back. More than any other man, he was born for pain, to endure it and spread it.

And this was apparently the man I envied? This was the world I desired? Legends only exists in worlds that are dying: that’s why they are all from ancient times- the gap between creation and destruction is much shorter than we imagine. When Abraham left Uz the world lay in the ruins of ancient civilizations; when Troy fell it was one of the last ancient strongholds; when Rome fell the West was finished; when America revolted it was less the beginning of a new thing than the end of an old era. There are no legends now because the world is not ending, as much as it feels like it at times. When great men arise and mighty deeds are done, then make for the hills. My life is quiet and sometimes unremarkable, and that’s a blessing most great men pray for.

When my mode of being is slightly changed I see absolutely nothing desirable in the movie, tale, or life of Odysseus. I remarked to my friend Max halfway through the crews’ third or fourth retreat from imminent destruction “After the third time I’d volunteer to just stay on the boats than join the landing party.” Prior to the film we saw a three minute clip from Dune Part 3 coming out later this year. It was a Saving Private Ryan -esque clip of soldiers preparing to go into battle only to enter a slaughter of a fight. Max asked me “Do you ever see something in a movie that makes you say ‘I would be so scared in that situation?’” Reflecting on the events in The Odyssey I could say "Yes, every single moment of this film.”

It would be truly awful, not epic, to starve at se and fight monsters with death lurking one wrong move away (usually death comes even with the right moves.) What’s more, the cunning and trickery of Odysseus that I found admirable? Everyone absolutely hates it. What’s more, it’s born of necessity when he is in constant peril where trickery is the only thing that could save his life. It’s a really good thing I don’t have to do that. It’s a really weird thing to envy.

Glory is not something Homer or Nolan makes glorious. In the poem the dead hero Achilles says, “I’d rather slave on earth for another man- some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive- than rule down here under the breathless dead” (Fagles translation again.) My wisdom at staying on the boat points to this idea which the movie and poem very much enforce: being a nobody is very well preferable to having your name known by all. When Odysseus pretends to be Nobody he escapes without harm, but when he demands his name be known he calls down upon himself a decade of doom.

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The Hardest Lesson

It’s not for nothing that the man of many ways is doomed to suffer from travel. The ancients, Lewis Hyde tells us in Trickster Makes This World saw wandering as inherently problematic: “To travel from place to place in the ancient world was not only unusual, it was often taken as a sign of mental derangement (if a story began “So and so was wandering around aimlessly, listeners knew immediately that trouble was at hand.)”

For those of us that desire to walk many ways, and struggle to walk even one, anonymity and staying at home represent one of the least attractive routes to pick: what you want most in travel and movement is what you most ought not to have. Staying where you are seems like the worst option.

This is easier said than done. Desiring to be anonymous is remarkably difficult: humility is the hardest of virtues. It’s one that takes Odysseus ten years of suffering from his pride to learn.

Perhaps it’s not for nothing that a journey is necessary specifically to desire the destination; in the words of the Sirens, that you must realize what you can’t have is what you had, but lost. The main character in G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive circumnavigates the world to artificially create this very lesson for himself, lacking the fate to drive him far from home:

“I am a man who left his own house because he could no longer bear to be away from it… I heard my wife and children talking and saw them moving about the room… and all the time I knew they were walking and talking in another house thousands of miles away, under the light of different skies, and beyond the series of the seas. I loved them with a devouring love, because they seemed not only distant but unattainable. Never did human creatures seem so dear and so desirable: but I seemed like a cold ghost; therefore I cast off their dust from my feet for a testimony. Nay, I did more. I spurned the world under my feet so that it swung full circle like a treadmill.”

The Most Important Thing

So maybe no stories will be told of my actions.

The stories I write, if I am lucky, will be crowded cover to cover with thousands of other authors, and ignored by self-important would-be heroes.

When I post this article it will probably only be read by my close friends and family.

Only close friends and family? But who ought I prefer read it? Strangers?

My provincial and home-bound lack of success is a raging success specifically because it is bound to home.

A few likes on a post promoting this is only meaningful because it is liked by those who make any journey worth while.

And of those life-making-worthwhile people, today I am meeting my second niece for the first time, who was born two days ago.

That is something Odysseus would readily take, along with anonymity, over ten years of war; ten years of suffering; and ending the bronze age of civilization. It is something the poem, along with The Iliad remarkably emphasizes: that home and family are what is important and makes for the life most envied. That all mighty deeds of renown and glory are only remembered as warnings against ambition and pride, that all heroes of the past would only undertake such trials to “…win back what you most want (which) is what you most can’t have, and what you most can’t have is what you already had. And lost.”

The question is often posed, “What does it profit a man to gain the world but lose his soul?” We might ask as a thought experiment to help answer that question, what profit would you have to gain to be worth the terrible price of gaining the world?

It most likely means the loss of home, family, and time, while winning nothing but pain.

This is not an original reading of the song or an innovative revelation, but it’s oftentimes necessary to tell the same story again and again to ourselves, lest we forget what stories are really about: that the journey is grievously, reluctantly undertaken only to reach the most important of destinations, home.

Everyone is sick of the iPad tipping screen.

Customers hate being pressured to pay for little work and hospitality industry workers are sick of being shafted for doing a lot of work.

To solve this problem, I have devised a new tipping formula to be immediately implemented everywhere.

This would be calculated by Server and automatically included in all bills. It takes all guesswork out of the equation and ensures everyone’s interests are represented equitably.

Tip = (Bill Price Total/2) +1.5(1.T x 1.5(A + 2C)) + B + R

T= Number of Minutes at the Table

A= Number of Adults

C= Number of Children

B= Number of Bills at the Table

R = Rude Factor (R= (M x I) + -(P))

M= Scale of 1-5 how messy the table is left (Starts at 1)

I= Number of Interruptions

P= Scale of 1-10 how pleasant the table is (Starts at 5)

Isn’t it beautiful?

Understanding the Formula

Very little of the tip reflects the actual performance of the Server: instead, Customers are going to tip what they are going to tip, based on what kind of person that they are. Servers are seldom ever rewarded for good service, they are more often punished for bad service. Most commonly, however, they are neither rewarded or punished, but remain at the mercy of the personality to whomever Chance places at their table.

Overall this formula is very Server-centric: as it stands, the Servers don’t have a leg to stand on. The Customer orders the food and drives up the price, but then is completely free to not follow through and pay 20%.

The formula is structured around the three parts of a table:

1. The Food Order Price, or the Bill Total

2. The Nature of the Table

3. The Behavior of the Table.

The total tip a Customer must pay comes from the following considerations:

1. (Total Bill Price/2) The Bill Total divided by two. It is curious in the current system of tipping how the price of the food ordered is the main effective agent in considering how much the service is to be rewarded. It should be considered a little, but is divided in two to limit its impact. Instead, this ballparks a number with the rest of the algorithm moving the tip up or down based on the actual things about the table which most impact the Server.

2. 1.5(1.T x 1.5(A + 2C)) The second consideration is based on the nature of the table. The nature of a table is detached from the food price/bill total of the table and the behavior of the table: it is what is that table as a unit in the restaurant: who comprises the table as an entity and for how long? The make-up of the table and the length of the table is multiply by 1.5 to impact how much the nature influences the Server’s experience of the table: it has more impact than the bill, but is inherently a smaller number than the bill total; therefore the bill is halved, but the smaller number representing the tables nature is increased by fifty percent.

   1. 1.T How long is that table occupied is the first portion. Someone may only order a soft drink but sit in a table for three hours. Their bill is tiny, but their Server is thinking of them throughout that entire time. Simply being at a table both occupies mental space and takes that table away as a resource for other, more lucrative Customers. Time at table is then a billable widget, albeit a small one (comprising only a decimal percentage on a unit of 1) for the purpose that it weighs on the nature of the table but isn’t a massive influence on the Server’s experience, and people shouldn’t be incentived to rush through their meals.

   2. 1.5(A+2C) This number accounts for who is at the table: how many adults and how many children. Children count for a higher price because their meals are generally less but they make a bigger mess (Mess will be evened out later in the equation in consideration of kind adults who keep their children in line.) A bigger table is more work, plain and simple. Balancing a lot of people should be proportionately compensated, but can be screwed up by people sharing dishes, only getting water, moving around, splitting bills oddly, and more.

3. B This part translates the number of bills at the table into dollars payable to the Server. “All on one” is one of the most glorious things that can be spoken at a table. It simplifies a lot of things that are needed to be tracked and makes checkout a lot shorter. When you need to scan nine credit cards in the middle of a rush, it can severely set back all of your tables. This is why B is a single integer added to the total tip amount: if you want more bills, you pay one dollar per bill.

4. R = (M x I) + -(P) The Rude Factor is its own mini equation. It bills the behavior of the table. Right now tipping can largely be conceived as a reward or punishment that the table can impose upon the Server, but there is no recompense for the rights of the Server. The most demanding, pushy, messy tables always tip the worst. This is a way to ensure that the table is on their best behavior too. If they are on their best behavior, this algorithm is made to reward that, shaving off overall dollars.

   1. M refers to how messy the table is at the end of the meal. The scale starts at 1 and moves up depending on the mess. Most people stay at 1. This is limited to a scale so that Servers can’t charge arbitrarily whatever they like and act as thieves to Customers. But there are some people who make it look like a hurricane blew threw. Not only is their table messy but it’s also gross. This is a ton of extra work and can limit a Server’s ability to tend to other tables while simultaneously making the restaurant less inviting. Most people stay at 1 which then is multiplied by I. If they keep a normal table and don’t have a high I integer, they will be shaving dollars off how much they owe: a carrot to guide them to table manners.

   2. I is the number of interruptions. When I say interruptions, I mean waving Servers over; walking up to a Server station; and interrupting them in the middle of tasks; but it also refers to antisocial behaviors like being asked what they’d like to drink and remaining silent for thirty seconds without acknowledging the Server. It also refers to when a table refuses to look at their Server when they stand at their table but continue speaking for another minute. If a table is pleasant, they get a 0, nullifying the 1 that M starts at. If a table is reasonably rude, which is a thing: sometimes aggression and forwardness is needed, they get a 1 or 2 which multiplied by M=1 isn’t that high, especially when P starts on a sliding scale of 5.

   3. -(P) is how pleasant the table is on a scale of 1-10. It starts at 5. This means that if a table isn’t messy and doesn’t interrupt, they’ll subtract five dollars from their tipping requirement. If they’re actively pleasant and personable, they can subtract ten dollars from their total. That is the purpose making the P value negative. The more unpleasant a table is, the less they shave off.

Again, isn’t it beautiful?

Test Case

Suppose I have a table that has two adults and two children: they spent twenty dollars on a two-for-twenty deal, the kids get water and no food, but pick off their parent’s plate. They stay, however, for an hour, and leave a surprising mess. That being said, they are very apologetic and helpful to their Server for when their kids misbehave.

Current tipping culture would say they should, if they are so inclined, tip their Server:

$20 x .2

= $4

My glorious algorithm says they must tip, instead:

(20/2) + 1.5(1.6x1.5(2+2(2))+1-10

=$11.80

Isn’t. It. Beautiful.

Commentary

In all reality I don’t believe in this algorithm. Looking at the example, tipping almost twelve dollars on a twenty dollar bill is insane. This algorithm was satirical.

When serving a table, the Customer may pay whatever they like, which includes nothing. There is an unspoken handshake deal that the Customer will probably reward the Server with twenty percent of whatever they choose to buy: but the more they buy the less that they might be inclined to spend even more on service fees.

The point of this algorithm is to exhibit that the Server’s experience is affected by so much more than the price of the food and should be taken into account when a Customer thinks about how they are being experienced as a business partner.

That’s essentially what Customers are at a restaurant: those who have entered into not one but two different business relationships. The Server, Restaurant and Customer exist in a triad, wherein the payment of Customer→Restaurant is clear, as is Restaurant→Server; but the Customer→Server is vague and nebulous, up to mere generosity.

When complaining of poor pay, sympathizers often point to the Restaurant: “They should pay their Servers more!”

The problem isn’t the Restaurant.

Firstly, restaurants would just charge more for their food and drinks, so the Customer would be paying the same amount. In reality, getting a stable rate from the Restaurant would look like fewer shifts or fewer Servers, since they cost more to employ and restaurants ride a razor’s edge.

Secondly, when Customers tip twenty percent Servers make really good money that comes in well above a fixed rate.

The problem isn’t the Restaurant: I know where I stand with the Restaurant; the Restaurant has been very clear and consistent in its deal with me, which I agreed to of my own volition. They give me three dollars an hour and the opportunity to engage in contract-work with their Customers in order to make money as a third-party that facilitates the Restaurant-Customer transaction.

The problem has always been under-tipping Customers. Racking up eighty dollar bills and getting eight dollars is the kind of behavior where I don’t blame the Restaurant in the slightest, but entirely the table.

I’m open to other solutions: the Servers can stand at the front of the restaurant with their price for hire, reviews of past tables, skills available, and Customers can choose to hire one Server or another. You can get the less expensive Server, but its his first day, he’s slow, and doesn’t know the menu. Then the Customer and the Server know at the beginning of their business dealings who is getting what goods and services for what amount of currency.

Commentary on Commentary

The commentary previously mentioned was also satirical.

Really the ‘answer’ if there is one is that twenty-percent gratuity should just be included- in the bill: not more, not less.

Maybe.

Maybe generosity in gratuity really is what’s best: that people can do what they want with their money.

Maybe Servers are super entitled (we are) and spend all their time complaining that people are buying food at their restaurant.

Maybe, actually, everybody is super entitled.

That’s kind of the point: business deals are essentially two sides agreeing what each side is entitled to from the other side by virtue of free and willing exchange in the pursuit of mutual benefit. All this talk of algorithms and requirements; carrots and sticks; selfishness, greed, entitlement are all ways for people who are tight on money, Servers and Customers, to try and live their lives with some level of enjoyment, and make or retain as much money as they can in that endeavor. It’s understandable.

This isn’t satirical: people don’t tip well for a lot of really good reasons. It may be that they don’t have much money themselves: their tip doesn’t reflect selfishness or greed, but a small paycheck on their end. What, should those who don’t make a lot of money be denied the luxury of eating out once in a while? There may be cultural differences in tipping, or the Server may really have done a bad job, or any other reason. And it’s usually perfectly understandable.

Since I started serving tables I regret to look back and see what a bad tipper I had been and am still tempted to be. It’s not that I am malicious, it’s just hard to choose how much to pay for a service. People are bad at appraisals, especially when money is tight.

This formula and this essay are really trying to speak to the essential idea that the Server-Restaurant-Customer exist in a very strange business arrangement, and generosity, pleasantness, and mutual respect are required on all parties as well all try to understand one another and have a little bit more grace.

The Fish Hook Trick: Death hidden in Desire

The oldest trick invented, according to folklore, is the fish hook. The fish hook is a trick because it operates on a simple principle: allow the fish to go after what it wants, and let it trap itself. This is the model of all tricks: that they may be avoided if one can alter one’s desire, or one’s psychology.

Donna Tart said, “Psychology is fate.” It would be that what one sees, wants, even needs; what one values, pursues, flees from, and identifies with essentially determines the trajectory of one’s life.

This is the idea behind the fatal flaw, the hamartia, of the Greek tragedies. A character defect is really just character, and often the very things that are most praiseworthy and magnificent in a tragic figure are also what’s most central to who they are as a person, but this is what destroys them. The mix-up of fate and free will, in the dramatic sense, intersects in the mind of humankind, where they are free to choose but ultimately will choose always according to what it is. Fate is the fish hook, the thing you’ll be caught on, and the worm it hides within is the object of your psychological desire. It can be avoided entirely, but only by restraining one’s desires.

Trickster as the Mind

Lewis Hyde in Trickster Makes this World believes the Trickster, which is an archetype and mythological figure that demonstrates the free, quick, intelligent, cunning, and adaptable human mind is born from hunger, but is then able to restrain its appetite, and thereby develops the cunning needed to procure better food. Hyde actually posits that it is restraint of appetite that creates the mind. In the real world this looks like not immediately eating a cow, but keeping it alive so it can produce more cows. Animals may store food for later, but it is by instinct. Humans can choose to not eat, even when they need to. Humans can sacrifice food for higher goods than nourishing the body: this is the idea of fasting, wherein one denies the body to achieve something of the spirit or mind.1 This is why folklores often posit that Tricksters create religious sacrifice. In non-legendary terms, humans alone are religious creatures. No other animal offers up resources to a higher power, whether it is a god, a nation, or even some other good. Animals don’t diet, animals don’t fast, animals don’t worship. Humans with minds, represented archetypally by Trickster, are unique in this capacity. The fish cannot reflect on the worm as a possible means of destruction because it cannot restrain appetite, therefore it has no mind. Humans, on the other hand, can restrain appetite, and therefore can think about what they hunger for, and thereby detect if there is destruction in what one wants.

Tricksters are usually shapeshifters, like Loki; or imitators, like Coyote. In refusing to be stuck in their being as one thing they cannot be trapped by external things. In other words, the trickster represents the mindset of freedom, movement, and boundary crossing, wherein one isn’t locked into one state of mind. The mind that is free from the desire trap by changing can feel like its committing an act of transgression: the things we are asked to change from may be very good things. But very good things may have the hook burrowed deep within them in a trap. The hamartia of tragic heroes is probably what they benefited from in the past.2

As one examines the fish, driven to death by a natural and good desire; or tragic heroes driven to madness, death and ruin by their past virtues, it is haunting to turn one’s eye from art to one’s own psychology. The things I like, value, want, and even knows in my bones to be something good and necessary can, if not guarded against, become the very thing that destroys me. It can be a fate inexorable only by the trajectory of my inflexibility to deviate from what I value more than anything. It is chilling to consider I may be entirely blind to the dangerous hook buried deep in the good thing I am pursuing.

To avoid this hook I must be changeable. But when it is I who must change, I can feel like I am losing my very self. This is why psychology is fate: to change your destiny you yourself must, in a sense, die.

The Sane Self

It does feel like a throwing away of the self and the main mode by which one thinks to make the self secure, successful or sane. Integrity of personality and loyalty to one’s ideals is seen as a virtue, and changing those can be at best cowardice and at worse an evil betrayal of goodness. Kierkegaard said “To be a Saint is to will one thing.” It is a unity of self, directed in all situations to the same ideal that is seen as admirable. Society praises the Individual who stands against the world, digging in his heels to prove he’s right and everyone else is wrong. The one who sways and shifts is pragmatic, but lacking principles.

But it is not the sane and reasonable man that never changes. To the contrary, the sane man changes all the time, or at least is capable of acting in surprising ways. G.K. Chesterton had the observation that it is not poets and mystics who go insane, but logicians and rule-makers. Real sanity is in freedom, in mobility, in being surprising. Real insanity is in consistency and closed systems. Chesterton said that the maniac is always a mono-maniac: their mania is about one thing. The point is that insanity is only extravagant and unexpected to those who can conceive of something normal. The monomaniac is really quite dull: Chesterton says the man who thinks himself an egg is only just that, an egg. Sane men find that strange, but an egg doesn’t find being an egg remarkable.

That the one who is able to curb a desire and actually offer it up as a sacrifice to a higher ideal is then freed from the belly and develops a mind. But we may also think of this in reference to more than the food we desire, but also to our ideals. The sane man is able to go beyond his mind, beyond his current way of thinking, beyond his ideals, to experience metanoia, which is conversion or repentance, both of which are a turning from a current way of thinking, this they are able to change.3 In being able to change he can do such things as admit he is wrong, say he is sorry, or offer forgiveness of his own: all things that require going beyond a monomania. The sane man can essentially give up, or sacrifice, or restrain the desire of a dominant ideal, and in doing so ‘gain’ a new mind which is oriented towards sanity, freedom, and aversion of tragedy, that is hell itself, manifested metaphysically beyond, or more imminently, here and now within one’s mind and life.

Men may enslave themselves to any ideal because of the enormous power it can grant them, or the immense goodness it presents.4 But this is really the mind slipping into a myopic state. This is really the soul as it careens to hell: the souls of the damned in the Inferno fly to the thing that they love, to things that are good, but have gone wrong, and therefore are torturous.

This is why it can be particularly tricky to avoid the fish hook hidden inside the thing we ardently want; this is why it’s very difficult to stop, take stock, and walk away from what appears to be a central, unifying, guiding ideal in one’s life. It may be the very thing that is leading you, by hook or by crook, to your destruction.5 Perhaps this is something that is approximated by the saying that those who will save their life will lose it and those who lose their life will save it.

When we approach this time of year I always find myself thinking about the events leading up to the Fourth of July. Not the one in 1776, but the one in 1863, eighty-seven years after the rebellion against the British, during the rebellion of the South.

July 1-3, 1863

The Battle of Gettysburg.

It’s the one we all know the name of, but it quite literally is one of those few hinge-points of history, where everything could have changed.

Gettysburg

It’s the Second Day of battle and the South is farther north than they have ever been.

In fact, the Confederacy is attacking the Union Army from the North. Positioned just south of town, the army under General Meade (famous only for this particular battle, he is one of a long string of not-so-great Union Generals. His other claim to fame is letting General Lee get away after this fight instead of ending things right then and there) is positioned in a long hook-shaped formation along a similar shaped ridge south of town.

Lee matches his position, except for one plan that has the chance to decimate the Union.

Here’s the position of the troops on July 2.

As you can see, Meade and the Union Army have made a hook which Lee and the South are attacking from all sides.

He is going to flank the Union Army. That’s what’s going on down in the bottom left of the picture above.

General Longstreet is at the bottom of the Confederate line down the Peach Orchard, near the Wheat Field, Devil’s Den and Big Round Top. He’s aiming to get around the edge of the Union’s hook. If he does this the entire Union Army is flanked.

Flanked = Dead.

Not just that, but to the southeast? Washington D.C.

If Longstreet flanks the Union, not only is the army incapacitated, but there is literally no one standing between the Confederate army and the Union’s capitol.

This is a war-ending move if it works.1

Here’s the thing: The Union army doesn’t keep the straight line. Instead of maintaining the hook, it advances forward to higher ground causing a formation of what you see below.

This means that the fight for the flank and for the war itself is happening exactly at Little Round Top.

As a side note, this is one reason why the American Civil War is so interesting to me.

Take this for what it is: an uneducated perspective from someone who barely knows anything about war. I find that the Battle Maps and tactics more interesting than in other wars because of when the Civil War takes place.

It’s not all single shot muskets but it’s not machine guns in the hand of every man.
It’s not line-up-and-shoot-in-those-straight-lines (though that happens) but it’s also not stay-in-this-trench-for-six-months. Trench warfare is interesting, but for a different reason.
It’s not a three hour skirmish, but it’s also not a months-long grind.

The maps are clear and informative in a way I struggle to find, in my own limitations, in many other wars.

Looking at maps from the American Civil War, the tactics and use of land are the most easily readable for someone like me. When I look at a Revolutionary War map I' get kinda… disappointed? I just see less going on. That could be because it was a guerrilla war so you couldn’t have these big fights; but it also could be because I am unable to see on those maps what I see on these ones.

But for me? The sweet spot as far as military strategy at its peak importance? Civil War.

Little Round Top

Around 4:00 PM on July 2, 162 years ago, the battle that will determine the fate of the Union begins at Little Round Top.

From Wikipedia: “The summit is a total of 650 feet (200 m) above sea level. Historically, the western slope was generally free of vegetation, while the summit and eastern and southern slopes were lightly wooded. Directly to the south is Big Round Top, 130 feet (40 m) higher and densely wooded.”

This entire fight lasts for about ninety minutes. Every blue line is fighting every red line. But I want to focus on one specific red line at the bottom, the 15 Alabama, and a collection of little blue dots on the far right, the 20th of Maine.

These two regiments are going to fight on Little Round Top. 358 Unioners vs 499 Rebels.

These 358 Unioners are going to determine the future of America. And they are led by one man: Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a thirty-four year old college professor of rhetoric who took his sabbatical to serve in the Union Army.

Ever heard of him?

He had been absent for the first day of fighting. He and his division, the 20th Maine, were still walking to Pennsylvania through Maryland when the initial fighting broke out.

The Critical Moment

The Rebels are charging Little Round Top.

They have the numbers and they are terrifying. Hearing the infamous Rebel Yell, the Union Army knows that they hold the most important position.

Chamberlain is told by his commander, ‘hold the ground at all hazards.’

He knows what’s at stake.

The armies fight with Alabama attacking, falling back, attacking again.

The Southerners are exhausted, but the Northerners are out of ammo.

The extreme flank of the Union Army- who, if defeated, let in the Confederacy behind their army’s lines- have no more bullets to shoot.

It’s at that moment that Colonel Chamberlain makes a decision that shaped history.

“Let’s fix bayonets.”

To shoot a man from a distance in war is still no easy thing, but to charge him down, gun in hand and use not the combustion of gunfire and steel to take him down, but your own muscle and sinew is another. To see a line of men picking off the soldiers to your right and left, and leap headfirst into that grey storm cloud and parse it apart with nothing more than your determination is awe-inspiring…

It’s July and these men are head-to-heel in wool uniforms. Some of them are thirteen or fourteen years old.

And they charge.

You can watch the moment here from the 1993 movie.

The Door Hinge

Chamberlain is not only going to attack with bayonets, he’s doing it in a specific manner. His men is going to charge forward but also swing in on a pivot, so as to box the Rebels from the forward and the side. This drives them back while flanking them.

It’s a brilliant move known as the door hinge. And it’s not for nothing that this move should be the exact hinge of America’s future.

Like many people I often consider how my life might have turned out differently. If X had not happened; or if I had chosen to do Y instead of Z… But if I’m being honest, I find myself acknowledging that X would probably always have happened. That the dichotomy between Y and Z is false: they were two doors leading to the same room.

What I imagine as happenstance has often been the collision of my psychology, the people in my life, and events largely outside my control. The direction of my fate, if I’m being honest, is a lot less ‘endless possibility’than I like to imagine.

And yet, there are a few hingepoints where things skipped tracks. Where the concoction of my life suddenly had one key ingredient added and what follows can only be traced back to the introduction of that critical chemical. They are few but impactful.

July 2, 1863, Little Round Top, 4-5:30 PM is one of those moments for the American Experiment.

This moment should be immortalized in American History more than it is.

Our country has a lot to reckon with in a short and sordid history. The Fourth of July often becomes a focal point for such frustrations, recognition of injustices and protestations. As we reckon with the past, tearing down some men who should not be praised to raise up others who ought to be, I would submit we look to those 358 men on a tiny hill in rural Pennsylvania.

General Chamberlain’s decision to charge is America’s St. Crispin’s Day fight at Agincourt for the British, immortalized by Shakespeare. A moment where, for all the horror and hell of war, the nobility, courage, and honor of defending one’s nation, and its pure ideals when it has them, is at the forefront.

It’s a moment distinctly American: to be out of ammo, to be on the defensive, but then decide to charge headfirst and attack.

Incredible.

There is more fighting to do, both at Gettysburg and the war.

But this battle was the turning point: when the South was turned back; when the North started to win; and what led to victory.

But none of that could have been possible if there had been no army to win. No fighting could have continued if the Confederacy flanked the Union at Little Round Top on July 2, 1863.

It’s what I think about every year: the courage of fewer than 500 men and how they shaped the entire future of America, and by proxy, the world, by refusing to surrender or retreat.

For doing so would have meant the end.

It continues throughout the entirety of June until climaxing at last, resplendent with eagles, stars, and American iconography over all kinds of products just in time for the Fourth of July.

This year sees a particular increase of American-spirit marketing due to the Semiquincentennial Anniversary of the United States.

As a marketing ploy it is obvious to see through. It’s a shameless pandering to the holiday spirit in an attempt to hijack patriotic feeling to drive corporate earnings.

And it one hundred percent works on me every year.

Offer me a pack of cookies and I might turn you down. Put red and white stripes on the outside and it’s in my shopping cart. Every Fourth without fail I eagerly eat and drink the exact same products that I would any other time of the year, but feel they taste better because the plastic they were delivered in had some stars on it.

It may just be I am susceptible to marketing, or are naively loyal to a country that has many dark deeds in its past and present; but behind this marketing ploy I find a different cause for why Fourth of July packaging strikes me so powerfully as opposed to when the same products partner with curent movies for promotions. Holiday marketing always works better on me because it is specifically different.

Putting a superhero on my chip bag makes my bag an advertisement; putting the flag, or a pumpkin, or Santa Claus on my chip bag makes my bag a participation in an abstract idea. The former is trying to influence me to not only buy the snack but buy the media: the latter is trying to influence me to buy the snack, but there is no holiday to sell. I’ll be around for the Fourth whether I buy the product or not. No one can own a holiday, because no one can own days, keeping time from passing for those who fail to subscribe.

They aren’t ownable, that is they aren’t capital, but they can be capitalized on, which is what these companies are trying to do. I don’t hold it against a beer company to try to capitalize on the Fourth of July because I happen to like beer on the Fourth of July, so much the better when my beer is Fourth of July themed. As much as I’d like to hold onto the holiday, or drink it in, I cannot hold or drink the Fourth of July, but I can hold and drink the beer.

This is why the marketing works so well on me: just as no one can own a holiday, no one can also really touch a holiday. It’s a special time, but we touch space and only pass through time. That a place may be sacred makes sense: it’s very seclusion and atmosphere suggests and manifests what the place is. But touching a time is much more difficult, it only comes about in a feeling of the spirit of the holiday. But how does one feel the spirit? How does one interact with a spirit? What even is the spirit of the Fourth of July?

For all the things I don’t know about what I mean when I refer to American Spirit, I do know that I am referring to something that is incorporeal but nevertheless real. A spirit of a thing can very much exist, even if it doesn’t have some means of touching me or I it.

This isn’t surprising: all sorts of things exist without bodies, like Democracy, Mathematics, Laws, Ideas, Games, Cultures, and more. One even knows that these things, without having bodies or seemingly the ability to do anything in some way suggest feelings, thoughts, and action from us, in other words, they elicit responses. Responses answer something and we, the corporeally real, are somehow answering something incorporeal that has some proposed something to us.

It’s exactly how we may be prompted to act more charitably by the spirit of Christmas when we are not usually charitable, or tempted to jump out to scare a friend near Halloween when we are not usually frightening. And from these spirits of the holidays there is a response to the spirit where we create traditions. Traditions interestingly both answer the spirit of the season but also seemingly generate it, or generate feelings of it. The Fourth of July feels like the Fourth of July when you hear trumpets and fanfare; or a Firetruck blares its horn; or you smell the smoke of a grille and the scent of bugspray, as the hot sun sets over a lake or a river.

Traditions and foods, customs and drinks for holidays could really be anything. People all over America celebrate the Fourth of July differently. I may find a hot dog to be the most American dish possible, but find shrimp boils in Louisiana, or burgers right next door which suggest the very same thing.

But when talking about the visible… manifestations? avatars? bodies? signs, probably- of an idea the same things goes about with those that have both body and soul, that is physical component and invisible spirit: one can cut away or replace or customize a number of different parts of the body and still have a body. With holidays one can change the food or tradition as per the place and culture and still have the same body of the spirit.

And yet, to each person experiencing the spirit of the Fourth of July- to each person feeling the Fourth of July itself- the connection between the corporeal non-holiday item is intricately linked to the incorporeal holiday itself. I can’t eat the Fourth of July, but I can eat cookies that were packaged like the Fourth of July. I can’t hear, or be dazzled by, the Fourth of July, but I can hear and be dazzled by fireworks.

This is all really just how humans interact with things, places, people, and events: that they are stand-ins, signs, bodies, avatars, or sacramentals of real, in some capacity, albeit invisible realities. These invisible things (psychologies? pathologies? movements? ideologies? cultures? spirits? angels? demons?) weigh upon us and exert their presence in ways that we seek to resist or embrace, but we only ever approach them slantwise: I cannot rail against the city, but I can rail against the city’s parking. I can’t fight tyranny, but I can fistfight those who I perceive to promote tyranny in their person. We don’t interact with just items or just ideas: but rather the things, people, trappings, foods, marketing that means those ideas.

In all of the shameless marketing, it is a small way that says the holiday really is here, like a herald announcing the arrival of some important figure. But it is also more than that: these products are ways that it feels like I really touch the holiday itself. Without them it would be just any other day: no candy at parades, no hot dogs around a pool, no beers on a lake.

Those who are more cynical of businesses might be more than glad to have a day without products,1 but quickly after banishing candy one loses the parade; after banishing hot dogs the pool goes too; and banning beer bans the lake. People struggle to attack ideas; they can easier attack the manifestations of those ideas. Not from gluttony, but from removing the things of a holiday that we can touch, feel, eat, and drink begins the cascading effect of removing the rituals, traditions, and experiences of a thing, until it really is just any other day. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

This past weekend a friend remarked I haven’t been posting many articles on Substack recently. The reason for this is I have been working more on books than posts, mainly my upcoming book of essays, The Z-Axis.

After about a year of writing, the rough draft is finally finished.

I’m celebrating with a glass of whiskey appropriately named Writer’s Tears.

It is a book of religious cultural commentary essays, not focused on arguing, philosophy, theology, or apologetics, but on re-examining the lived experience of Christianity. With an emphasis on the joy that remains hidden, and removing unnecessary barriers and burdens, The Z-Axis seeks to help Christians navigate their world and their faith with renewed clarity, light, love, and joy

What started out a year ago as as a simple collection of unrelated essays I had posted on my Substack slowly morphed into a cohesive whole: new essays had to be added, existing ones changed, and some thrown out, all to fit into the new single vision. Just tonight I finished an essay I started a year ago.

This has definitely been the hardest book to write so far, but I’m so grateful to finally wrap it up.

Next up comes the editing section (as of right now it sits around 130,000 words (also my longest book yet.))

Nevertheless I’m thrilled to pass this trail marker. Stay tuned for the finished copy, coming soon!

-Corpus Christi, 2026

What’s Next

Posts

While my friend noticed my lack of posting, I try to keep in mind the pace at which I do post so that it’s not too much for my readers.

To accomplish this my plan is to focus next on writing a handful of essays to schedule out across every two weeks across ten weeks. That way consistent essays that don’t have a place in a book are still finding a home, you’re still having stuff to read, and I can work on my books without feeling like this Substack is being neglected.

Books

Books, plural.

While I finished up the rough draft of The Z-Axis tonight, I have many more books I am always kind of working on. I’m eager to wrap up this project to devote more time to these other projects. As of right now I’m projecting that I will be releasing about five books in 2026.

The Z-Axis

Q+A

Prayers (Name TBD)

Holidays (Name TBD)

Improv 365: a daily improv devotional

And in the midst of all of these, Via Dolorosa. More in the future about that one: of everything I’ve worked on so far, Via Dolorosa feels the most obituary-worthy.

This is in addition to all the other ideas I have.

Thank You

It’s an insane speed of work, for sure. But I’m sure grateful for your support and for your reading.

While it is a dream to one day have a book be acknowledged by some big publishing company and put on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, your support alone makes my dream of being a professional writer come true.

One thing I love about being an independent writer is the ability to write so many different things so incredibly fast: to speed around from idea to idea, unconstrained by market analytics, brand recognition, or fanbases.

So thank you! And keep reading!

A common claim is that the world is too hedonistic: everyone is addicted to pleasure. Everyone knows that everyone lolls around in a self-medicated state to avoid feeling any pain. Wild bodily indulgences abound every day to the degradation of society. This is something upon which both the seculars and the saints agree and equally condemn.

The only problem is that it isn’t true. The world isn’t drowning in pleasures. There isn’t an addiction to happiness, but rather an addiction pain. The pleasure the world is addicted to is the pleasure of pushing on a bruise, the pleasure of pain. The dance of the world is swapping back and forth between the partner of condemnation to the partner of self-improvement to the partner of self-reproach. The hedonism of this world is its ascetic devotions to diets and sobriety, in its proclivity to ever restrain itself with more rules for flourishing and incur more transgressions filled with guilt for breaking those rules.1

Our condemnation is a misdiagnosis in many, but not all, cases of actually just wanting fine things. Often the laziness we condemn ourselves and others for is not always sloth; the desire for money and resources we find repulsive are not always indications of greed; and the wish for things to go well and be well with people we love is not pride and power control. There’s such things as real, good human desires that we find detestable, delighting to heap coals on our own heads rather than find them out.

Life is difficult and the best way to get through difficulty, it sometime seems, is to take upon more suffering in the form of discipline, hoping to suffer your way to happiness. No pain, no gain.

To take a holiday to celebrate or relax in the midst of life can feel something along the lines of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned. But that was only evil madness because Nero was the ruler: when the Titanic sank it was deemed a great act of courage and heroism for the quartet to play their instruments. The temptation many people face is not forever avoiding a look towards injustice and suffering, but rather never looking away from it to something much happier. As Jack Gilbert wrote, “To make injustice the sole focus of our attention is to praise the devil.”2

Holidays break into our calendar and demand something from us. They are an interruption and a command to put down the tools, stop the grind, and actually enjoy something. This is profoundly difficult. We love pain, suffering, misery, and work. Haven’t you found it odd that God did not include among the Ten things he Commanded, “Thou shalt stop resting and get to work,” but rather the opposite, “Thou must observe the Sabbath and cease thy labor?” We had to receive a divine mandate to celebrate: and it remains the commandment still least observed.

Holidays are like Sabbaths: times when, whether you like it or not, you must celebrate. It is an interruption. Pleasure, delight, festivity do take a different, more difficult, kind of work than normal, everyday work. Holidays are easier forgotten and passed over because they are so difficult. Might it be that heaven is a place no eye has seen nor ear has heard because we cannot conceptualize a place of pure delight, being creatures so acclimated to seeking out difficulty and pain, passing over every opportunity given us to celebrate?

Though many holidays are under-appreciated, here we will look at three holy days in the Catholic year. These holy days have been cut off from holidays, despite being their progenitor. As one reckons up the year you’d be more apt to find a day celebrating whether or not a groundhog sees its shadow in the list of holidays than you would these days.

Top 3 Under-Celebrated Catholic Holy Days

3. The Annunciation

Christmas is the biggest holiday of the year. A great deal of that may be attributed to the secular celebration of it, but nevertheless in America we are still arguing whether it should take up 1/6th of the year by starting after Halloween or 1/12th of the year by starting after Thanksgiving. No other holiday takes up that amount of space on the calendar in the collective mind.

Christmas' place of privilege makes sense. It’s Jesus’ birthday. The people in darkness have seen a great light, the dawn of redeeming Grace. Joy to the world and a light of revelation to the Gentiles, the glory of the people, Israel. Lots to celebrate.

Why, then, is the Annunciation not even a holy day of obligation? Every Sunday is a mini-Easter, a huge feast that requires a pilgrimage to worship. There are other days of pilgrimage, much like the ancient Jewish feasts, throughout the year called Holy Days of Obligation. Just as the Jews had to traverse to the temple throughout the year, so too the Catholic must go on high Holy Days. Christmas is a Holy Day of Obligation, for example. Even when it’s on a Tuesday, you must go.

So why is the Annunciation not a holy day of obligation?

It’s the day we celebrate how the Word became flesh and dwell among us. That part where we bow our heads in the Apostles Creed- that sentence of privilege- is “I believe… in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary,”

If life begins at conception. as Catholics believe, why do we not celebrate with even a sliver of what we give his birth to his conception, the moment the Divine actually broke into our world; the day when humanity and divinity were wed together in the Hypostatic Union; when Mary as a representative of humanity, in obedience undoing Eve’s disobedience, said" “yes” to God, as a model to all disciples?

The Annunciation is huge day, arguably larger than Christmas. The Annunciation remembers the day of his incarnation, one of the few most singularly important days of history.

2. All Saints’ Day/All Souls’ Day

I’ve written at length about All Saints Day and All Souls Day in a previous article, “In Defense of Haunted Houses.”

The autumnal Triduum is lesser to the Paschal Triduum of Easter but nevertheless is an incredible holiday that aesthetically is incredibly appealing while highlighting an important and often assumed part of the faith: namely, our place in the story. Much of the individual’s soul and its destination looms throughout Christianity. We constantly think about it, talk about it, aim to save it. This holiday is about those souls specifically who have, by the grace of God, been saved: those who, God willing, we will one day join.

It is a day of solidarity with the Church, reflecting on Death in an entirely unique and unprecedented manner.

There is a strange, other-worldy, ethereal and morbid quality to this Holy Day. It is a holy day wrapped up is the macabre and the frightening. It reeks of November, greyness, and all the sorts of things that religion cannot do without but largely likes to avoid on Sunday mornings.

A fine summer morning with green grass and blooming flowers is nice, but a November dusk, with stormy weather, in a grey field surrounding a grave is incredibly religious, yet underemphasized.

But Catholicism is the religion that puts its Saints through the woodchipper: relics abound, check out this chapel of bones, Momento Mori, etc. It is dark and romantic, ghoulish and deadly, but it is still a holiday of hope and light, of celebration and joy. it is precisely where Catholicism really sets itself apart from Hobby Lobby Christianity, which can be good and have its place: but this holiday has its place too, and it’s been under-served (despite being, perhaps, the most serviced of the three holidays here listed.)

And all we do is make people go to Church the day after Halloween. You can also write your loved ones name in a book to be prayed for. The celebration of a mass in a graveyard on All Souls Day goes hard: that’s the stuff right there.

Let’s focus on the death and the grave, the promise of heaven, purgatory, and all the mystical, scary, but largely hopeful nature of this holiday. It’s underrated, wrapped up in panic about Halloween: I’d prefer less fear and more celebration.

Read more here:

1. Pentecost

In the number one slot: Pentecost. The treatment of Pentecost is nearly criminal.

What do you do for Pentecost to celebrate it?3

Answer: you wear red (if you remember.)

That’s it.

Birthday of the Church. Explosion of Grace. Descent of the Holy Spirit onto the Infant Church never to leave it. Supernatural power. Numbers increase by 3,000 in a day alone. God’s Spirit put in the hearts of men, giving them living hearts instead of hearts of stone.

No big deal. Wear red (if you remember.)

I started the Easter season wondering if Easter is the worst. Not really, but based on our celebration of the holiest day of the year, why would any non-believer be led to consider that we think it’s an important day?

You can read that essay here.

Did you know almost fifty days later that it’s still Easter?

Most Catholics don’t. It’s a season, not a day, and by this time it’s all but forgotten. Lent we can do: we love suffering for forty days. Feasting for forty days? Forget about it. Besides, what is worth celebrating for two months? Have you been around the world recently? Hell in a hand-basket.

Except that’s exactly what Easter says we should celebrate: that we are not going to Hell in a hand basket, but to Heaven in the hand of God.

At least we do Easter the honor of fasting before it. Just as Lent the season leads up to Easter, Easter as a season leads up to Pentecost. We do nothing for Pentecost (except wear Red (if you remember.))

It’s insane to me.

I wrote of Easter and why we should celebrate it:

First reason: Jesus is our main guy. We should be pretty pumped that he’s alive. If the people I have known and loved and lost were no longer dead, that would be a big occasion. Isn’t Jesus the number one guy?

Of Pentecost we might say:

Did everyone forget the Holy Spirit is also God? And God is kind of a big deal? And this is Holy Spirit day? Pretty important thing seeing as it kicked off the period of history we currently find yourself in until Judgment day.

There are two ways of discounting God when it comes to traditions of celebration: the first is valuing the celebration more than God, the second is not giving God anything that even attempts approximate the celebration that he deserves.

A few years ago, having recognized this inconsistency, I threw a Pentecost Party (everyone wore red.) As I planned it, I looked for old traditions and festivals that older people, who knew how to party (see: Twelfth Night), would throw for Pentecost.

Nothing. Absolutely insane to me.4

The Holy Spirit is mysterious: can you name and explain all the fruits (fruit platter didn’t work)? what about the gifts of the spirits? Charisms? Spiritual gifts? Confirmation is an absolute mystery to just about everyone, and not in a good way (our fault.) Pentecost is not given the desserts its due, nor does the Holy Spirit. Perhaps it’s because we’ve made the charismatic expression of life in the spirit a culture in the church rather than the daily experience of the faithful. Granted, the Holy Spirit is mysterious and the least directly revealed of the Trinity, but that makes me all the more eager to dive into Pentecost, deeper into the mystery.

How’s your personal relationship with the Holy Spirit?

You’re used to praying to God as Father and you see Jesus everywhere, what about the Third Person?

Do we ever approximate anything remotely close to a level festivity that mirrors the Apostles on that first Pentecost, namely that they were so alive with the spirit that everyone thought they were drunk at 9 AM?

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have crowned Neaera’s curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.

Easter is kind of the worst.

Which is strange because it’s the holiest day of the year, celebrating the victory of Jesus over death. The party should be bigger.

First reason: Jesus is our main guy. We should be pretty pumped that he’s alive. If the people I have known and loved and lost were no longer dead, that would be a big occasion. Isn’t Jesus the number one guy?

Second reason: not only is this the holiday where our -reportedly- best friend is alive, but apparently also Death is no longer a problem for those who believe in him and we don’t have to be afraid of dying anymore?

“Death Lost” Day feels like it should be a lot crazier of a party.

Easter doesn’t have much to do aside from Church, Brunch, and maybe an Easter Egg hunt with the most controversial holiday candy.1 I happen to like Easter. My main problem with Easter Egg hunts is that I don’t get invited to do them much.

But Easter isn’t that great, over too quick, and just a blip of a celebration after forty long days of giving something up for Lent.

If it were truly Nobody Has to be Afraid of Death Day, I’d expect

• Parades with marching bands and floats

• Festivals

• Rides

• Fireworks

• Contests

• Gift-giving

• Songs

• Dressing up

• Plays

• Movies

And all the other ways we celebrate holidays.

Easter isn’t not fun because it evaded secularization like Christmas. And Christmas isn’t secularized because we insist on pageantry. Festivals, games, songs, movies, dressing up, feasts and more are how we celebrate holidays, whose very name comes from Holy Days.

Easter is lame it’s because we are not the best2 at celebrating it: Church and Brunch.3

We get closest to proper celebration with the All-Night Party that follows the Easter Vigil Mass, the most gigantic, packed mass of the year on Saturday night, celebrating Easter4 and welcoming in new Converts.

Mass ends at like 11:30 PM and then, you party.

Drinks, sweets, smoking, dancing.... It’s perfect: enjoying all the things you gave up for the past forty (forty-six) days.

But not everyone does it. And not all the parties are as partyish as something so awesome as Easter deserves.

Lent makes sense

Easter is boring, coming and going, and you can’t party because we all have work tomorrow.5

Easter faces the same problem that a lot of holidays have: they are “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,/ Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be/ Ere one can say “It lightens.””

The second I’m well and properly coming around to feel the spirit of a holiday it’s over! The second I get a really great idea on what to do to celebrate a holiday, I am looking down the long end of a 365 day stretch until I can implement it. It’s one reason Christmas rocks: Christmas Eve and Day- two days, one holiday.

Easter as one day? Too small, much too small to celebrate No Need for Existential Dread Day.

Lent makes sense: Lent is a season.

Lent is something that even non-Christians do. Why would that be? If I were to save some tradition from a religion I no longer believed, it might be the twelve-night party from Christmas to Epiphany (did you know they even did that?) that they used to do in the Middle Ages.6

Instead people save the suffering.

Lent makes sense- it feels spiritual: give something worldly up; remember your death; ashes; humility; penance. These are spiritual things.

But of course that makes sense: everyone does it.

Literally everyone knows or senses that giving things up is good for you and feels vaguely religious in nature.

We all do these even in the nonreligious spheres of our lives.7 No one has ever set down and told themselves “I am sad about my life and what’s going on in it. To remedy my sad state I will start eating ice cream every night after dinner- yes with hot fudge and bananas, and candy and all the works, just really doing it up. Yes, I believe an extra eight hundred calories a day is how I will turn my life around.”

Even if it’s in the name of a diet, thousands of people believe fasting will get them closer to happiness.

Everyone knows, or suspects, you suffer your way to happiness, you suffer your way to success.

Solemnities

But there are- did you know- certain days during Lent called Solemnities.8

We might like the sound of that. Solemnities: they are solemn occasions. Good religion ought to be solemn, serious even.

Except the most solemn and serious things, the most important things in our life are usually happy, like weddings. We’ve gotten it into our heads that solemn means the opposite of how the Church does: a Solemnity is the highest Feast. Christmas and Easter are Solemnities.

On Solemnities in Lent you are specifically supposed to not fast. You are supposed to feast.

It feels like you’re cheating. Like you’re breaking a rule. You might be scared to do it. It this alright? Is this okay? Maybe you won’t want to: you’re on a good streak anyway. How much you want it shows how addicted you are. You’ve done so well giving it up and now enjoying it throws that all away…

When you want to celebrate something, you just do. It’s spontaneous and sincere, like how people in love talk without thinking. When it’s an order, “Thou shalt feast,” it might make you inevitably ask “How?”9

There’s a natural and obvious answer: celebrate how you would normally celebrate anything. But notice the reaction to the Solemnity order to feast: it throws into terrible contrast the fact that God overcame the world, indeed came to redeem it, and in celebrating this fact we don’t seem too eager to engage with anything in the world. I don’t know if Jesus noticed, but we just spent almost fifty days avoiding that stuff: why on Earth would we engage with it again?

Underneath all of our apprehension of celebration is the sneaking suspicion that maybe God wasn’t serious when he said that the world is good and filled with good things.

To be fair to us, we’re incredibly suspicious because most of the time we don’t enjoy something because we have too much of it. As G.K. Chesterton said “…we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Temperance, like humility, leads to enjoyment, and most of our pleasures are ruined by overindulgence. But we can swing so far back that we sin by not enjoying things enough rather than enjoying them too much: this is just as much a perversion, though a less popular one.10

The Devil doesn’t just want to damn us, he wants us to be damn miserable while it happens. He doesn’t just want to kill our souls, he wants to be a buzzkill (which essentially have the same effect.)

Celebration is inconvenient

When life is dull, monotonous, and in a desperate want of a change, as we sit on a couch feeling bored and fat, we’d often like those changes to be catastrophically difficult: I will wake up early, and run vast distances. I will write my novel, and clean my room. I will do one hundred sit-ups and only eat celery.11

But suppose in sitting on that couch someone were to bust in and tell you to put on your best clothes, stretch, and wake up: a fantastic party has erupted and we need to start celebrating at that very minute. In theory we’d be on board, but when offered countless times throughout the year, we are too tired, too busy. Even minor things, just by virtue of being tired, or it being a Tuesday, will end in cancelling plans. There is nothing people love more than cancelling plans.

It’s not for nothing then, that I suspect God made required pilgrimages for the Israelites, You have to Feast, much like how he has Holy Days of Obligation, You have to remember this is a super special day, because our temptation is to dullness or fasting, seldom to feasting.

It’s not impossible to understand: celebrating is a huge and terrible inconvenience. It’s why the hardest commandment is to not work on the Lord’s Day. Of all the sins to commit, insisting on working is a pretty terrible one. There are much more fun sins to do than work on Sunday. Go do some coveting, or steal something.12

When the God who made the Universe says ‘Take one out of seven days to relax, come visit me, have breakfast with your family, have some fun, slow day, watch a movie, relax, etc. just refrain from work”

We cry aloud with shaking fist “What a cruel and terrible God we have who does not know that I have laundry I have to do. God places the heaviest burdens on the backs of his people, not caring that a big project is due this week and my PowerPoint presentation really needs fine tuning.”

How to Celebrate?

I once knew a man whose life motto was die before you die. It sounded all well and good, pretty Christian even, until I realized that was the end goal: just being dead. Christians might sometimes make that mistake as well. Only, God says give away so you can have more, die so you can live. Fast so you can feast.

So we have to celebrate.

But how?

How?

How?

What an insane question. How do you celebrate? By having a fun time! Celebrate with food, gifts; with material things, and kissing and singing and dancing and all the earthly, animal-like, bodily things.

But that all scares the Puritanical ghost in us. Instead of celebrating it might suit us well to first split hairs wondering if an activity is enjoyment or entertainment (there is, you know, a gulf between the two so vast that nobody can cross from one side or another) or enjoyment and distraction, as if enjoyable things wouldn’t take your attention.

By the time Christians have finished debating the virtue of their play, play time is over. No wonder we don’t do it too much: it’s exhausting.

Some people love the rules of a board game, but it gives me glassy eyes and a strong desire to something more fun.

We know how to celebrate, it’s by doing what we desire. We’re not only supposed to be drawn to God by our wills but by desire. A real enjoyment of him.

Like how Christians enjoy making a distinction between happiness and joy, we like to make a distinction between love as a feeling and love as willing the good of the other. The only problem is this overemphasizes the “willing the good” part so much so that God doesn’t feel like he really has any kind, affection, or enjoyable feelings by my estimation.

I certainly don’t enjoy anything when all talk of love is about what you’re willing. It’s good to emphasize specifically for when you don’t like someone. But this is a holiday from love. Primarily, one of the things I love a lot about people and things that I love is that I love them. I love spending time with them, and doing things together, and having fun together.

And on Easter, a day when Love is apparently so strong that it exists forever and we get to now exist in Love with Love for forever, we wrap things up by 3 PM and call it a day to get ready for work.

Celebration is too hard, too tempting, too wrong. The things of this world are bad, or distractions, or addictions. We’ve tried so hard to be good, to be spiritual, that we got Lent all over Easter.

Jesus came and chided the pharisees, and we got only half the message. We hear the dirge and know how to mourn, but we hear the pipe and still refuse to dance.

Easter actually is a season: do something for it

Easter - Death is Dead Day- should be more than one day and in fact it is.

Easter goes on for eight more days, from Sunday to Sunday. And then it actually goes on for forty more days. In fact, Easter runs as a season, just as much as a stretch of time as Lent, up until Pentecost (Pente- means Fifty, because it’s fifty days after Easter.)

But who is going to still be partying the next Saturday, let alone the next day?

And Easter is a season, even though we don’t act like it.

People will stick to their Lenten disciplines, even fear to break them for dread of sin (it isn’t) or dread of the thing itself. What if we had Easter celebrations until Pentecost- something we did everyday to celebrate?

What if the imposition to celebrate Jesus rising from the dead lasted for more than a morning? What if the Easter season felt different from the rest of the year in the same way the season of Lent feels different, but in feasting and not fasting.

Buy yourself an unprompted gift, put on some extra calories, deliberately don’t work (hardest commandment) play more, don’t work at home, watch more movies with friends, have a designated party night of the week, sleep in on weekend, etc.

You might find this a harder thing to do: you might face accusations from without and within yourself: lazy, greedy, materialistic, glutton. You’d be in good company: the same accusations were leveled against Jesus.

Joy

Joy is tricky- mostly because most of us don’t super know what it is. We know enough to say it’s different than happiness (but in making the distinction really try to make their joy superior to happiness, and ultimately less fun.)13

The most fun thing about joy is trying to prove to everyone else that you have it. The second most fun thing about joy is that you get it mostly by believing you are right and other people are wrong. Easter’s greatest tradition might just be grumbling about how much other people don’t know what an important and holy day it is.14 Super fun. So fun we might pause to notice we’re not really having any fun, none that would certainly make anyone think we have anything to celebrate.15

Like the knowledge that our, reportedly, favorite person in the world actually isn’t dead.

Or like having the knowledge that we won’t have to die.

I imagine onlookers that see the response to Easter, a celebration too little, a joy so small, that they must continue on and wonder, is Easter the worst?

Rather, it the the very best. We best act like it.

This poem imagines that Peter has exiled himself from the rest of the apostles on Holy Saturday out of shame for his sin. Despite being the Pope and their leader he feels he is cut off from them. He does not know that all of them abandoned Jesus, except for John.

Peter has found his way to the Garden of Gethsemane and finds the place where he fell asleep instead of keeping watch. It is a place of anger, guilt, and shame for him where he undergoes his own agony as he wrestles with his betrayal.

During his time there he undergoes multiple stages of grief, from wishing he could kill Judas for putting him in such a situation; for wishing he could do things over again; to even accepting responsibility for his actions.

One thing that is not entirely clear: does Peter believe in the Resurrection? Jesus has told his disciples several times that he’d rise from the dead. It seems to be up in the air for him, but both possibilities make him afraid. What’s worse. that Jesus is dead and Peter will never see him again, or that Jesus is alive and Peter will have to face him again?

Simon Peter returns to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Saturday following Jesus’ death. After his betrayal of Jesus he has exiled himself from the other apostles. Peter is ashamed and grieving. Mary Magdalene finds him and they mourn together.

Matthew 26:75

SIMON PETER
The water walk, the keys, the hope, the light
Atop the hill; the morning catch, the fish,
The loaves, the storm obeyed his voice.1 ‘Twas naught
To me, apparently, who blindly saw.

I’m not the man I thought I was; I’m not
The man he fated me to be. His voice
Which bade the light to be and e’er it shined
Could not conjure the best in me; I doubt
It ever there.

If I the traitor2 found,
I’d cut more than an ear!3 …And with his blood
Bring on more guilt, betraying him again.4
He’d have me, what, forgive him seven fold?
And seventy and sev’n again who made
The trap that I fell in? Without that man,
Who kissing-killed,5 I’d not be guilty now.6
I’d not my friend be now bereft, I’d not
My brother dread to see.7 In exile not
Would I, the leader, be!

But here’s the place,
My selfish, wanton bed.8 When he was here
I stayed not near; I slept and cut and fled.
Not to the tomb dare I approach, but hide
In olive groves. The sin is mine; as dark
As western sun.9 If oh it were that be
My sin, and I this garden in the East.10

What fear I more, the Christ’s dead corpse, or that
He prophesied in truth, awaiting me,
Who knew him not, and hear I’m known not e’er?11

‘Twas cowardice!

If he was here!

I’d choose
Anew if I but knew just then what now
I see!

Oh Babylon, I welcomed thee!
When I denied my God and friend, I lost
My company. The other tribes12 I’d dare
Not face and tell them of the crow.13 Oh which
Of them is still alive, or did what I’d
Dare not, though bragged I would, as dense as rock?14

Then sorrow, anger, hate and fear, yes shame
And wishful rue, in such full force commenced:
Would hat I’d drown or baptized by these tears.
They fell and joined a cut-off root, ‘twas dry
And wanting rain, but hopeless is this tree.15

Then Magdalene, the once-trapped one,16 approached
The salt-soaked stump and said softly, “Peter?”

“Please Peter call me not! No longer mine
That name, but Simon still am I.17 Or call
Me yet the other name he said, ‘Satan!’18
Behind him not I stood, but he I left
Behind.”

In platitudes she warmed me not,
Nor good-news bearing turn my course, but stood
And wept, compatrioting misery.

Have you ever gone to sleep knowing that when you wake up, everything will be different? Your next period of waking consciousness is going to include having to face whatever is waiting on the other side of sleep. Staying awake doesn’t really put it off, but you’ll gain a little more time awake before you have to before you experience it.Going to sleep knowing what awaits him in less than twenty-four hours is a kind of mini-death for Jesus.

What did he think about as he approached the unthinkable? Of all his friends, only his betrayer knew what was coming. What was Jesus feeling as the day of his death finally arrived? It was most definitely a lonely ordeal. This poem imagines two sources of inspiration and comfort for Jesus on the night before the Passion began. One source comes from Lazarus, who himself rose from the dead.

The other comfort, far away, is the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is so deeply united to Jesus that she also cannot sleep. She prays God’s will be done (“Fiat Mihi,”) a prayer similar to what Jesus himself will pray in twenty-four hours in the Garden of Gethsemane. He calls her Woman in reference to the Wedding at Cana, when he addresses her as such when he began the path that led him to this very hour (John 2:4.) In calling her Woman he establishes her as the new Eve to his new Adam. But the new Adam is about to die like the old one.

The night before his passion begins on Wednesday of holy week, Jesus takes a moment before going to sleep. He walks down the hall, stopping at the rooms of Judas, who will betray him; James and John, his close friends; and Lazarus, who himself has recently died and been raised. Jesus goes to sleep knowing that when he awakes, it’ll be the day he starts to die.

Mark 11:19

JESUS
To sleep: to die.1 Tomorrow I begin
My death, but dawn cannot come yet for me
Till eyes are closed in sleep. I wakeful walk
The hallways long, prolonging life with each
Of foot’s short length, since pillow’s softness whips
And burns those inner thoughts that wake me still.
The house is full. I visit first the one
Who curls my bounty’s bag;2 alike to me
He shifts and sweats. Insomnia is not
The son of sin, but oft is found where guilt’s
Incurred. His angel fights the thousand mares,3
His mouth bound willfully himself to stop
His tongue, in loving course, from pleading loud
Or threat’ning tones, and halt the Father’s will
That all should choose in freedom’s way and reap
Of what they sow.4 The angel weeps for sin
Of him, his charge since birth, o’er whom he cheered
When him I called amongst my twelve, and fights
Still now to save. Oh holy one of love
And light, who cries for love of thee, he guards
You still against the night that you might turn
To me. If you but knew the things that make
For peace…5 but of them all that call me Lord
Not all shall see my face.6 I wish to reach
And palm his pate,7 and say “Arise from sleep”
Then hold us two our conference and stay
His bloody kiss. But nothing more will change
His course, his fate’s been set, a chain well-forged-
For adamantium is softer still
Than what men bind their wills to do, and fate
Is but the bird’s eye view across the spans
Of time. I’ve done and said exactly what
Would woo his calloused heart, but still he loves
His silver more.8 I leave his tear-stained door;
I can not go where I’m not asked,9 he’ll wake
To find the floor aglow, where stones deep drank
My mercy’s pain, denied my heart’s desire.10

The night is fast as Dark’s domain begs quick
The hour of dark to come.11 My bed is soft,
The comfort last I’ll know; my head is sore,
My body tired. Three years have come and gone,
But moments more I cast off sleep, if but
To slow my fate.

A low and rumbling two
Doth whisper near: the lightning twins, who crack
Like thunder’s quake.12 Beneath the door a light
Flicks out; the lamp betwixt them lit; the way
Is closed but voices creep and twist on out,
And nothing in the darkness said from light
Is hid. They talk of nonsense and of all;
Between two hearts as close as these, what need
Have they for substant’ speech? I could but knock
And join them there, the two of three who hold
My heart most near.13 A laugh, surely, would ease
My strife. A step- but soft- I’m not a man
With laughter well to know:14 within my breast
The Godly Glad:15 ‘tis joy to see my face,
But glad by Glad is sorrowful,16 and that’s
My cup to drink, that I will weep so they
May gab and chitter laugh. My time’s been spent
For leisurely down-time and mirth. ‘Tis myrrh17
And gloom that’s set for me: with nostalgia
I think of laughter past, a flicker small
Like forward hope, to light this present dark.
And down the hall, in silent step, I tread
The Via Insomnis,18 the way of thoughts
Perturbed, and stop afore each of their doors
To hear a snore, or peaceful breath. These sounds,
These sounds, these human sounds, of those in deep
Sleep’s sacrament,19 entrusted all to me
And mine-20 I love them all for that. But I?
I am awake.

I walk disturbed, and cold.
Is there in here a place where comfort dwells?
Then come I to this house’s man, of him
The brother of those dearest girls, my friends,
Young Mary and her sister Martha too.
He sleeps in peace, a tranquil face on this,
A darkened portent night. But soft, he smiles
As I draw near his bed; but no, he stirs
Not so, and leaves me with my own type’s face.
What comfort’s there that comforts me? Just peace
Of sleep: that peace denied to me, it’s prince.
Arise, O one who slept and sleeps, and tell
Your king, your friend, of those dark paths you knew.
Recount my voice that bid you to return
And fan some hope to speed me through what’s next.
O Lazarus canst thou bring Sunday nigh
With haste?2122 Canst thou who hath sojourned near shores
Of Styx23 help see me through my hour? For you
Are of the few who drank the cup I drink,
The foamy dregs I gulp in obeisance,
O be thou now sacramental, a sign
Of what’s to come. But e’en in hope the bell
That knells my hour hath struck: I cannot have
Just you awake, but must the dawn announce,
The dawn rose-red24 with blood,25 my blood, so all
May wake like thou. Oh second-born thou hast
Convicted me: I’ll lay my head and thee
Follow in sleep tonight and deeper sleep
So all may know your joy.26

Back to my room,
To sleep: to die. Tomorrow I begin
My death, but dawn cannot come yet for me
Till eyes are closed in sleep. No comfort here,
But far away the Woman weeps and speaks
The words that drew me down, “Fiat Mihi.”
My soul’s delight27 doth know the hour begins.
Her heart’s like mine; inspired, then, I pray
My breath’s refrain of these next days: “Not mine,
Not mine, but Thine own will be done, Father.”
And troubled still, but resolute, to sleep
At last succumb. Tomorrow I begin
To die. Then let it come, and let it start.
I sleep and bid today, my life, goodbye.

Beer

A standard Folk: everyday doing nothing but going to his job to support his livelihood, then turning around and heading straight to the bar to drink with his friends and family. What a loser, what a not-man. What a person who shirks responsibility in addiction and pleasure. What a disgrace. Pick this for any vice: video games, sports watching, etc.

As I think about my life and its meaning, I cannot fathom a better life than one where I see my friends and family every day, sharing a meal or a pint. Maybe in a bar. or maybe playing video games with my family and friends, who can say?The Folks rebuttal to this alleged waste of a life might perhaps may best be demonstrated by the Bell Curve Meme.³

The secret of folks is that they are actually enlightened because they actually can enjoy the present: the serpent of knowledge doesn’t just want us damned, it also wants us miserable every step of the way, so we analyze everyday joys and communions into a Synecdoche of failure, lack of discipline, selfishness, hedonism and the like.⁴

In the ultimate twilight of my life, I’ll be judged for my love: and the places and times of most love, most communion, sharing struggles and heart and life, is around the hearth, the table, and the bar. And there is usually a drink there.

A beer is many things. We tend towards a spirit of our Puritan ancestors with a deep suspicion for it. It reeks of hedonism, debauchery, and sin.

True, these things can all be byproducts of a drink, but they are perversions of the thing, which is a turning away from what it is meant to be. Like how anyone who thinks the summation of Science is Eugenics and the Nuclear Bomb is missing out on its full wonderful reality, or anyone who thinks Religion is mere power plays of morality and ancient superstition is missing the salvific purpose, so too does a beer get woefully undersold as merely a vehicle of sin. It is far from the full reality of a beer.

I wonder if it’s not for nothing that Our Lord chose an alcoholic beverage to make into his blood, as if to forever highlight something not just about himself, that his blood is something like wine, but also to teach us something about those elements of bread and wine he’d transubstantiate.

For a long time, beer was a drink of health, cleaner than water.

It is fundamentally a communal cup- or rather that’s wine- it’s a public cup: a gathering of community. It’s posited that civilizations might have come together simply to drink. It’s one of the six drinks of history.

And if you ever quit drinking (sometimes a very good thing to do permanently, often a great thing to do temporarily (fasting leads to enjoyment)) there is indeed a stark highlight of how beer is more than just a beverage, it is also the conversation, the atmosphere, the heightening, the emboldening, the conspiracy; it’s when lore is developed; lovers are encouraged to meet; and events happen. It’s a way to celebrate and unwind. It is many things to be sure: that’s why despite everyone’s best efforts, being the Pioneer⁵ at the Bar always makes people feel a little split from one another.

To consign it solely or merely to be an avatar of hedonism does it a great injustice. Just as consigning Folks to a lesser station or considering the terms Folks as an insult is the real insult.

There is an incredible healthiness to the sentiment that beer is a good. Ben Franklin was at his wisest when he said ‘Beer is how we know God loves us and wants us to be happy’ An entire theology could be written on the interpretation of beer and other pleasures like this and it would be a healthier one than the Puritan slant.

And to those who are still uneasy let us remember the great beer drinking saintly Chesterton who said the way to thank God for beer is to not drink too much of it. Temperance is a virtue and there is such thing as too much pickiness: both C.S. Lewis and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of it.⁶

The mark of a truly free-thinking individual is not whether she has a taste for that which few others like; but if she can like what is immensely popular.

We look at the world and see avatars of philosophies everywhere, liking what stands-in for what we support and hating for what stands-in for what we dislike.

The world is full of people pretending to enjoy what they really despise because it’s the kind of thing it’s right to like, and despising what is really enjoyable because it’s the kind of thing which must be despised.

Few other objects become as charged as an avatar of ideology, an object that is not interacted with on its own accord, but rather as a physical representation or ambassador of a much larger philosophy, than beer. Beer, and our relationship towards it, shows much more about us than it does about itself. If the word beer conjures suspicion, ideas of misuse, debauchery, and the like, it says what kind of person you are; if it conjures ideas of quiet reflection, community, and celebration, you are of another kind; still more it may be a temporary entrance into a bacchanalia of blacking out, which is considered fun, but expensive on the body. As Aristotle said, that which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver, and some items, like beer, say much more about the receiver than other items. The receiver in his judgments betrays himself and his constitution, he betrays his philosophy. It might be a very good philosophy, but beer especially, as a hot button product, may show exactly where that philosophy needs fine-tuning for sanity’s sake.

Even if you have everything figured out in your -ism (logically coherent;) and the end goal of that -ism is the betterment of society (morally upright…) can I have a beer with you?

Can you and I sit and talk?

Anyone that immediately starts along the path of “Yea, yea, it’s like - people can’t have a conversation anymore! Nobody can have a conversation without fighting.”⁴ I emphatically want to show them the door.

I’m not talking about the watery virtue of letting everyone share their opinion without getting upset. I mean are you so totally consumed by your -ism that you have lost an everyday sort of pleasantness and decency that comes from being a fully-integrated human being and not just an avatar of your philosophy?

You can be right and still be wrong if you are right in the wrong way.

And the way I think we can determine that? Are you able to care about other things, and chat and make little jokes and engage in the general experience of all of humanity? (I.e. how work is going, and have you met any new prospective dates, and what’s happening this weekend, and what shows are you watching, etc.?)

Has your -ism made you totally unrelated to any experience that doesn’t relate to your all encompassing worldview? If that’s the case, there’s probably something off in how your philosophy is manifesting itself in your personality.

This to be true even for the -isms you may hold to be true and good. I have met many people who hold the same beliefs as me, only for them to be so sunk into them that they struggle to present as normal, everyday people.⁵

In fact, a panacea I often revert to when I find myself being a little too logically consistent in how I must act based on a belief is to question myself, “is this how a normal person would act?” Usually the healthy, good, and true ends up with the affirmative, whereas the sick-but-still-true tends to have me answering “no.” Because let me be clear, I too often have beliefs would prevent me from having a beer with myself, if it were possible.

The Small Pleasures of the Everyday

That’s why you can only really catch them when you test to see if they are human in one of the oldest enterprises available to humans, having a beer and talking about nothing.

Evil and the diabolic, and all perversion stands opposed to the common little everyday pleasures of a mild decency with a friend. All evil is directed at the destruction of the most pure endeavors, two pleasant individuals doing nothing of importance but passing the time in a mutual haze of decency and every-dayness.

In The Man Who Was Thursday, a powerful story by G.K. Chesterton, Gabriel Syme infiltrates a council of men, all of whom represent different anarchical ideologies. At a pivotal moment when he is surrounded by the great and terrible men of greater and more terrible philosophies, he hears a barrel-organ on the street below the balcony on which he sits.

A barrel-organ in the street suddenly sprang with a jerk into a jovial tune. Syme stood up taut, as if it had been a bugle before the battle. He found himself filled with a supernatural courage that came from nowhere. That jingling music seemed full of the vivacity, the vulgarity, and the irrational valour of the poor, who in all those unclean streets were all clinging to the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not think of himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around him. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawling eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felt towards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that a brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors.

I have experienced this myself, in the throes of anxiety only to have the smell of a cheap cup of coffee passed in front of me remind me that there are such common, small, pleasant things like coffee, and that they exist, and the world is full of them, and I would lay down my life to ensure that the immense pleasure of something so small, like coffee, could continue in the world. That the world is built up on things like this; and the forces of evil are often held at bay, or actually fought against, by such things like the smell of a cup of coffee, or the clanking of beer pints, or a walk on a nice day, or sitting on the porch.

Do all of these common and kindly things hold nothing for you?

One of the most haunting chapters in literature to me is a short four paragraph soliloquy from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, where Captain Ahab looks out over a sunrise as he reflects on his obsession with killing Moby Dick, the whale that took his leg. With remarkable self-awareness Ahab reflects on how the sunrise is beautiful but he is incapable of enjoying it because of his “high perception” or rather he obsession that has robbed him of a simple delight like the sun over the water.

Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!⁶

The experience of being so totally consumed by an obsession, an idea, a certainty, that all of the pleasures of life could be offered to you, but they couldn’t register at all, or bring any light or happiness, is just about the most terrifying thing I can imagine.⁷

It happens with depression and that’s a tragedy because it happens unwillingly to you; but to willingly hand it over to a philosophy, and to go down swinging to the last that you may not be able to enjoy a beer with a friend, but dang it you’re right! just might be one of the arguments that best convinces me of demonic possession and in the existence of Hell as C.S. Lewis formatted it,

“Milton was right,” said my Teacher. “The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’ There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names — Achilles’ wrath… Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.”

On Cinco de Mayo, Everyone is Mexican.

Doesn’t have the same ring, or the same fun, or the same okay-ness (is it okay?) as St. Patrick’s day, does it?

What is up with this holiday? The more you pull at the thread of getting to the bottom of this holiday, the less sense it makes.

St. Patrick’s Day is the day where we celebrate a culture that doesn’t exist in a nation that doesn’t celebrate the holiday about a man that wasn’t Irish (he was Welsh.)

Why are we okay joking about the Irish being binge drinkers and drunks when we are hyper-vigilant about a lot of other discrimination- why do the Irish get left out, especially when they were historically discriminated against in America?

Raised Irish Catholic

I was raised Irish Catholic, emphasis on both. But that wasn’t just a brand of Catholicism, being Irish was an important part of growing up in my family. All my siblings and I Irish-danced for years and competed (Gold medal winners) at the Detroit International Feis (Festival,) where I would get a Tin Whistle as a souvenir and my Mom would win gold medal for her authentic Irish Soda Bread and Spice Cake. Our home was decorated with Irish decor, it was a constant topic of conversation/identity marker among extended family. My Grandpa was 100% Irish, and Grandma not too far behind; their parents were off the boat. Stories of ancestors and cousins and the immigration process (we had a picture of great-grandparents at Ellis Island) and cousins still in Ireland. My cousin learned to play the bag-pipes and I took a lesson myself. We were passionate Notre Dame fans where both my parents attended (Notre Dame and St. Mary’s.) My Mom studied abroad in West Ireland in college. W

When I got to college I decided to study abroad in Ireland myself. I had this notion that in Ireland I would find my people, reconnect with a primal part of myself amidst my roots, my bloodline, and my heritage. Upon arriving in Ireland I learned the startling information that I am incredibly American in just about everything I do, think, prefer, and enjoy. I was struck with how incredibly not Irish I am. While I may not be modernly culturally Irish, I definitely am a third generation Irish American.

American or What?

Europeans may be under the impression that Americans are obnoxious, entitled, loud and self-centered. America may be under that impression even more. Everyone may be right about some of those assumptions becuase we can definitely be guilty of a self-centeredness. Not necessarily selfishness, but certainly self-centeredness. And anyone who has a more cynical take on this sentence- that America is really selfish and it’s not a good thing- those people, if they are American, prove the point. Selfish people don’t walk around upset with how selfish they are. But self-centered people certainly do, and America, perhaps by geography, perhaps by popular culture, suffers from self-centeredness, the notion that our experience is fairly universal, not particular.

It was in going to Ireland to be with the Irish that I learned how American I was- not how average I was, how American. I learned our Doritos taste different, our types of television, our assumption for our sense of inborn potential and limitless ambition. It’s an obvious thing but it was shocking. We are all members of the human race, but culture, subtle as it can be at times because our world is more connected than ever, is still varied and myriad. There are still differences.

The feeling intensified when I moved to the Florida Panhandle. All the things I took as average American were really average Midwest (and really average Michigan, because the Great Lakes Midwest is different than the Farmland Midwest.) Even something like breakfast: Beans and Toast in Ireland, Eggs and Waffles in the South, and Pancakes and Bacon in the Midwest. All of them delicious in their own ways, and lovely to have anywhere, but concentrated in certain areas.

When people say America has no culture, we become trapped: what about very American things, like Hot Dogs and Hamburgers? Both German. What about our Capitol? Democracy and the like? Greek and Roman.

We borrowed everything.

Except we didn’t. There is a far cry between American hot dogs and German Frankfurters, and a McDonalds Cheeseburger and Hamburg, Germany.

And then consider Chinese Food; Italian Food; and Mexican food. If you’d like these, don’t go to Panda Express, Olive Garden, or Taco Bell, the most expansive and American Chinese, Italian and Mexican restaurants.

Are China, Italy or Mexico claiming that those are authentic food experiences? No, quite the opposite- we ourselves here in America are so quick to point out that these foods are not Chinese, Italian or Mexican… So what are they?

They’re American.

You can have a Pepperoni Pizza and find it quite different from authentic Italian Pizza where you’d have to order a Salami Caliente Pizza to get a comparable experience, which is a pizza the Italians invented for American Tourists to enjoy, but didn’t exist prior to their accommodation. They didn’t have it until Americans invented it and wanted to try the real thing from it’s place of origin.

And St. Patrick’s day is just this: not an Irish holiday, (or really a Catholic holiday) but rather it’s an American Holiday. And the subject of the holiday is not real Irish culture or people, but rather American’s idea of what the Irish represent.

There is nothing more American than creating an entire cultural touchstone then attributing entirely it to a different culture, which doesn’t recognize it as its own.

Folks

It’s easy to look at St. Patrick’s day in the worst possible light: all the old Irish stereotypes about temper and intemperance. But the real idea behind it is really that there is a deep yearning for many people for what St. Patrick’s day represents: Folksiness.

The most fundamental definition of Folks and Folksiness are those human individuals and groups who live within the Tao, which is the term C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man defines as “This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’ Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”

In less academic terms, Folks are everyday, common, decent people, who lack pretension and malice, who feel big and live a honest life, without delusions of grandeur, pompousness, inflation or ego; but rather in humility, decency, and straightforwardness. Folks are human at their most human.

But Folks are distinguished from all of us who live primarily not in the world but in our heads (Walker Percy might have called it Angelism: floating through the high, transcendental educated knowledge that makes us superior to our common man.) We are more educated, possibly, but certainly more neurotic, depressed, angry, and self-important. We are also more tepid, cowardly, and ghostly. The epic heroes of mythology and Shakespeare are closer to Folks than the professors who study them and their students who learned to critically think, then think wrongly in how critical they are of everything, except their own thinking.

Folks are not distracted by grand ideas or Philosophers, they are neither mouthfoamers nor do they make the mistake of treating everyone and everything as avatars of philosophy. There is a real earthiness and humanness to the enlightenment of Folks, because let’s be clear, being Folks is aspirational: Folks are the little ones who uphold the earth, who God chooses to humble the proud, who will inherit the world. No loftiness or pretension, inflation or delusion of power.

Reproaches:

Folks fill the rest of us with opinions (because nothing is more non-Folksy than educated appraisals tearing down a perfectly good thing.)

A common reproach: Folks are too hedonistic. Beer? Bar? What of virtue and beauty? Those who cannot see miss that a bar is one of the most beautiful things Man has made: fellowship, communion, love, friendship, comradely, passion, and more. If all you see is a suspicion of sin, debauchery and evil, there is a serious problem.1

We might find folks irresponsible (so they say:) they refuse to be educated (so the educated say,) they don’t help society (so the activists say,) they don’t topple regimes or walk around writhing their hands and pulling their hair in anger or fear at the things of the world: (they actually, if you think about it -and there’s nothing more than non-Folks love more than thinking a thing into a problem- are a main contributor to the problem.) If only we could mobilize them: show them the light, and make them see why we are right and why they should have our goals, and give us their manpower so we might, by force if necessary, do what is necessary for the good of the world, and coincidentally that might involve killing our enemies, not forgiving them. On the other, Folksy side, there’s something so much more noble, more human, and healthier about a good punch in the jaw rather than trying to take over the world.2

Hedonistic, irresponsible, uneducated: all of these rebuttals are stopped when we essentially ask: what does a good, quiet life look like for you? And we find the same few answers: community gathering together, a little leisure, a little hard work, lots of laughs, music, a beautiful view on land that matters, and that’s about it. And Folks are people who live that way.

St. Patrick’s Day is the day of celebrating Folks, not in the sense that these are the Irish, but what the Irish, as they occupy the American imagination, come to represent: a good life, well-lived, focused on the humanly important things like the heart, community and the everyday encounter with the intrinsically human experience throughout the ages. An experience where you raise a glass of beer, and perhaps it’s green, with friends.

Beer

A standard Folk: everyday doing nothing but going to his job to support his livelihood, then turning around and heading straight to the bar to drink with his friends and family. What a loser, what a not-man. What a person who shirks responsibility in addiction and pleasure. What a disgrace. Pick this for any vice: video games, sports watching, etc.

As I think about my life and its meaning, I cannot fathom a better life than one where I see my friends and family every day, sharing a meal or a pint. Maybe in a bar. or maybe playing video games with my family and friends, who can say?The Folks rebuttal to this alleged waste of a life might perhaps may best be demonstrated by the Bell Curve Meme.3

The secret of folks is that they are actually enlightened because they actually can enjoy the present: the serpent of knowledge doesn’t just want us damned, it also wants us miserable every step of the way, so we analyze everyday joys and communions into a Synecdoche of failure, lack of discipline, selfishness, hedonism and the like.4

In the ultimate twilight of my life, I’ll be judged for my love: and the places and times of most love, most communion, sharing struggles and heart and life, is around the hearth, the table, and the bar. And there is usually a drink there.

A beer is many things. We tend towards a spirit of our Puritan ancestors with a deep suspicion for it. It reeks of hedonism, debauchery, and sin.

True, these things can all be byproducts of a drink, but they are perversions of the thing, which is a turning away from what it is meant to be. Like how anyone who thinks the summation of Science is Eugenics and the Nuclear Bomb is missing out on its full wonderful reality, or anyone who thinks Religion is mere power plays of morality and ancient superstition is missing the salvific purpose, so too does a beer get woefully undersold as merely a vehicle of sin. It is far from the full reality of a beer.

I wonder if it’s not for nothing that Our Lord chose an alcoholic beverage to make into his blood, as if to forever highlight something not just about himself, that his blood is something like wine, but also to teach us something about those elements of bread and wine he’d transubstantiate.

For a long time, beer was a drink of health, cleaner than water.

It is fundamentally a communal cup- or rather that’s wine- it’s a public cup: a gathering of community. It’s posited that civilizations might have come together simply to drink. It’s one of the six drinks of history.

And if you ever quit drinking (sometimes a very good thing to do permanently, often a great thing to do temporarily (fasting leads to enjoyment)) there is indeed a stark highlight of how beer is more than just a beverage, it is also the conversation, the atmosphere, the heightening, the emboldening, the conspiracy; it’s when lore is developed; lovers are encouraged to meet; and events happen. It’s a way to celebrate and unwind. It is many things to be sure: that’s why despite everyone’s best efforts, being the Pioneer5 at the Bar always makes people feel a little split from one another.

To consign it solely or merely to be an avatar of hedonism does it a great injustice. Just as consigning Folks to a lesser station or considering the terms Folks as an insult is the real insult.

There is an incredible healthiness to the sentiment that beer is a good. Ben Franklin was at his wisest when he said ‘Beer is how we know God loves us and wants us to be happy’ An entire theology could be written on the interpretation of beer and other pleasures like this and it would be a healthier one than the Puritan slant.

And to those who are still uneasy let us remember the great beer drinking saintly Chesterton who said the way to thank God for beer is to not drink too much of it. Temperance is a virtue and there is such thing as too much pickiness: both C.S. Lewis and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of it.6

St. Patrick’s day is not a day to celebrate drunkenness but rather that one can and should celebrate beer and all its attendant virtues of the pub.

On Holidays and Romanticizing

Does this seem a romantic view of beer and folks? Then we know we are properly observing a holiday.

Holidays are the time of year you are supposed to romanticize, to highlight by hyperbole things true year round: one ought to be thankful, one ought to have good will towards men, new chances abound, love is real, before you barrel back into the humdrum of ‘real life’ and the everyday emphasis on what’s ‘normal.’ The way to straddle the middle mean of virtue is to swing in both directions, not ride a restrictive absolute the entire year. The normal attitude is too far leaning in one direction: we need certain days of extreme leaning in the other to mellow it out. If you take any holiday as an ordinary day it’s disproportional and dysfunctional- but that’s the point of holidays and the point of beer: to not be an every minute philosophy but a small spike that’s high to counteract a long valley of low, and thus overall create a virtuous middle.

If this whole thing sounds entirely too much in one direction, romanticizing beer or folks or even holidays in general, it is s only to balance out the unbalanced majority voice, a gross distortion that exists for the rest of the year. Their points still stand and must flavor this, but it must give a voice to the voiceless and presume the majority will be incorporated rather than the other way around.

Why the Irish?

Why not “Folks Day” or “Beer Day?” why not “It’s Drinking with your Friends Day?” Why the Irish?

Beer day? Who belongs to that? Who takes ownership in that? Who plays claim to that? The first thing we’d do is set about saying ‘who is this for?’ or ‘what is this for?” is it for IPA and local brewers? Domestics? German lager?

What’s the identity of this?

The Irish are a form of legitimacy (yes we should celebrate a people/culture/heritage) and keep the real party (folksiness) which is universal. People getting together to celebrate a beer? That will be met with suspicion, but to get together and remember the old country? That’s a holiday.

Hence, ‘On St Patrick’s day, everyone is Irish.’ And of course that can be true when American’s don’t actually mean the actual Irish, but some unspecified notion of what they represent in the American mind.

But that doesn’t quite answer why the Irish? Why not American? Perhaps because of the Spirit of the Irish- or at least the spirit everyone thinks of the Irish.

Each nation has a spirit to it: what it is and isn’t- and spirits aren’t easy to define. But in the ancient Greek world there was an idea that at boundaries existed Daemons (meaning ‘dividers.’) This eventually became Demons, and is a whole other thing, but behind the idea of a Daemon was the idea that things that are separate are different, so much so a Daemon, or a spirit, keeps them apart as unique identities, else everything is everything in a universal blob of non-identity. Wrapped up in all of this is a rather classical way of saying different Nations have different spirits: values, impressions, feels, ways of acting, culture, tradition, and things they find important.

Perhaps Ireland’s spirit, or rather the way Americans think of it’s spirit, is really at it’s best when it’s wrapped up in this: the notion that there might be a beautiful land where everyone lives rustic rural lives full of nothing but folksy drinking and good music. It’s a fantasy and a pretty arrogant condescending one, but it’s the desire for folksiness.

There’s a sneaking suspicion to Americans that the hearth might be the warmest place; a quiet life is best; slow is fast; and a conversation can never last too long between friends. There’s a suspicion that pervades the American idealism, individualism, hustle, grind, work culture, and the like- in a country of moving fake numbers in a cubicle until you die from boredom after 25 years of a 9-5, (all part of the American spirit as much as the opposite may be a part of the Irish spirit)7 that an honest days work, followed by a quiet pint, with some good music in a picturesque landscape is really the most desirable thing. as they say, nobody on their deathbed wishes they worked more. and perhaps this suspicion leaks out in America on St Patrick’s day.

Everyone is Irish? Anyone can be American? Anyone can be Folks, really. Just because a country has a spirit does not mean its exclusive, merely highlighted as an atmosphere. America does not have the patent on Individualism, we (and others who think of us) just make it a part of our identity more. It’s how people think about a country, not how the country may actually be: and nowhere is that more evidences than in St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday that isn’t celebrated in the country it honors. All the joking/discrimination on the Irish drinking, fighting, and feeling guilty is a gross stereotype; but the American mind has formed with it the idea that the Irish pub is the symbol for fellowship.

Conclusion

Why does St. Patrick’s day endure? Why do people celebrate it? Perhaps it’s all this folksiness, national identity that people treasure because it’s really universal.

If you want my real, folksy guess. My no-nonsense, non-philosophic/analytic idea on why exactly St. Patrick’s Day is so popular, here it is.

Guinness.

People really do love it that much and it really is that good. And Guinness is the official sponsor of Ireland, pubs, and St. Patrick’s day. The official logo of Ireland, the harp, is actually the Guinness Harp flipped, so to avoid trademark infringement. Guinnes really cornered the market.

And Guinness might really actually be good enough to make an entire holiday to celebrate it.

Over the past couple months I have been keeping an eye out for entries on my Always Lovely List. It’s a list of things that are always lovely. They rock.

To be on this list, it must be something that when other people hear about it, they go “Oh my gosh I love that.”

It also has to be hyper-specific. “Music” is awesome, but it’s too generic for this list. You’ll see what qualifies as we go through the 51 contenders, all of which have been put into the bracket in the order that I noticed them.

The goal? To find the most lovely of them all.

The Entries:

Northwest Conference:

Crosswalk: When you’re at a crosswalk and there are no cars and you know the walk sign is about to come on but you start ahead of it and it changes midway through crossing the street (bonus points if there are sheep who foolishly stayed on the sidewalk behind you instead of following.)

Song End on Arrival: Arriving in the driveway or at location right as the song ends (especially at night.)

Eating Challenge: When a restaurant has an eating challenge.

Literary Food Descriptions: Descriptions of coffee, wine, and breakfast food in literature.

Easy Ice: When ice comes easily out of silicone ice trays.

Axlotl: Remembering the name Axlotl for those animals.

Perfect GIF: The perfect use of a GIF: niche but topical, expresses response exactly.

Clue Art Style: The Clue board game art style specifically from the early 2000’s run.

Monster Mash: The Halloween BOP, “The Monster Mash.”

Tongue Goosebumps: When you haven’t eaten food too recently and you take a bite of something tasty and you get the tongue equivalent of goosebumps.

Guinness Bubbles: The falling bubbles on a freshly poured Guinness.

Peeing from high up: Peeing off of high outlooks in nature.

The Wise Fool: The fictional character archetype that possesses immense power wisdom and knowledge but is engaged mostly with whimsical childish joy.

Southwest Conference:

Rainy Jazz Day: Listening to jazz on a rainy autumn Saturday morning at a coffee shop- or that vibe thereabout.

Moving Solo: When moving someone, carrying an object by yourself that others figured you’d need assistance to carry.

Work Phone: Being on your phone at work.

Fast Quit: Immediately quitting something you didn’t want to do but still tried but it didn’t work out the first time you tried.

Construction Drive: When a street is closed for construction but you know the vibe and drive through it when no one’s working.

TV to Movie: The quality of animation of a TV show when it’s made into a movie and has a higher budget.

3rd Words: using the words ‘Tertiary’ and ‘Thrice.’

Four Wheel Drive: Four wheel drive.

Eating Sounds: Grunting moaning and making noises because of how delicious a meal is while you’re eating.

New Adjectives: Turning specific words into adjectives that don’t exist to perfectly describe something.

Stomach Drop: When you’re driving up a steep hill and have a sharp descent and your stomach has that zero gravity feeling.

Ken Jennings: Ken Jennings, Jeopardy Host.

Northeastern Conference

Life Hack Recall: Having a niche problem as a group and then you recall a hyper-specific life hack you saw you online before and it works like magic and you look like a genius.

Technically True: When you are prescribed to do something beneficial (like practicing, doing an exercise, self-care) and you do it once right before a professional will ask you if you’ve done it so you can technically say yes.

Cozy Life: The cutesy things that small characters in movies engage in to do normal work (Sitting on a thimble at a threadspool dinner table; using a needle as a sword.)

Shenanigans Crew: The tomfoolery that a ragtag gang of misfits use in action adventure films which is highly whimsical, improvisational, and uber-effective (See: the crew from Pirates of the Carribean or the Dwarves from The Hobbit trilogy.)

Inside Pocket: Inside pocket in a suit coat: next level incredible.

Crumbs: Crushed up chips or popcorn at the bottom of a bag that are super salty and seasoned and just a handful of crumbs.

Abbreviation Origins: Learning the Latin phrases common abbreviations come from (What does I.e. mean?)

Dog Pillows: When dogs use pillows as pillows.

Life is a Movie: Using Movie and TV terms to describe your life.

Pantless Pee: Fully dropping your pants to pee.

Celebrity Friend: Suspecting that celebrities would think you’re super chill if you were their friend.

Circle = Square: When things that should be circular are square (Pizzas, for example.)

Earlier than Thought: When you thought it was late at night but it’s actually earlier.

Southeastern Conference

Casual Drifting: Drifting through the snow in your car casually while commuting somewhere.

Phone at Gym: That time between sets at a gym where you are on your phone not working out but no one else can use the equipment because you’re still sitting there.

Local Celebs: Meeting local celebrities: who’s that across the bar? The Weatherman? Stories are about to start.

Easy Blinds: Blinds opening/closing easily.

Milky Way Raw: Seeing the Milky Way with the naked eye.

Solid Sneeze: A solid sneeze that does it’s job.

Group Chat: When everyone is present in the group chat at the same time.

Really Long Icicles: Really long icicles.

Haircut Growth: That period shortly after getting a haircut where the haircut is still evident but you’ve grown into it a bit and everyone is like ‘Hey, looking good.’ Double points for when you time a the haircut correctly for an important event like a wedding.

Tortilla Chips: Hyper specific tortilla chips. I’m talking tortilla chips that require descriptors: Blue Corn, Long Strip, Restaurant Style Optimized for Maximum Dippage.

Time Naps: Time disorienting naps: what time is it? Same day? How long have I been out? Incredible.

Texting When Present: I have another list called the Never Not Funny List of things which are never not funny. Maybe this belongs on that list, but it’s when a friends texts you something like “Where are you?” and you don’t respond until you are with them and the need to reply is now redundant but you text them “Here” or “At your house” anyway as a bit. Hilarious. Always lovely? Maybe on the wrong list…

Brackets: shameless self-awareness, but isn’t ranking non-sports things, making them go head-to-head just awesome?

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Your turn:

Any entries that you think don’t belong on the Always Lovely List? Let me know in the comments below.

Any wins or upsets you disagree with? Fight me.

Know of anything lovely I should add? I love expanding the list. Leave your comments below!

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Round 1

The Northwestern Conference

Crosswalk: Gets a by-week for being the first entry. We’ll see how it fairs in the second round

Song End on Arrival vs Eating Challenge:

Winner: Song End on Arrival.

Eating Challenges just aren’t as common anymore, and few people even attempt them, let alone win. But almost everyone knows the sweet joy of a nighttime drive with a song ending exactly when you get home. It’s awesome.

Literary Food Descriptions vs. Easy Ice

Winner: Easy Ice.

It’s more common and I only like the first because I have an English degree. Overall, pretty weak contenders. I’d be surprised if Easy Ice makes it past the first round.

Axlotl vs Perfect GIF

Winner: Using the Perfect GIF.

You know Axlotls: they’re those aquatic reptiles found only in Mexico City. They’re super cute and I can never remember their name. It is the best when I can remember them… but the perfect GIF? Incomparable bliss. Everyone thinks you’re a genius, because you are. Perfect GIF will be a contender to keep an eye on.

Clue Art Style

By-week just by coincidence. Personally, I think this one is dead in the water: no way it wins a single round. It’s lucky it has a by.

Monster Mash vs Tongue Goosebumps:

Winner: Monster Mash.

First upset of the bracket. How can you compete against the pure physical pleasure of tongue goosebumps? This is one of those entries that people never notice until I point it out to them… but The Monster Mash slaps. It is iconic as one of the very few Halloween songs. It’s a throwback fifties jam that could so easily be universally hated as annoying, but it isn’t.

Guinness Bubbles vs. Peeing from high up:

Winner: Guinness Bubbles.

Look, peeing off of cliffs rocks, but it’s a pretty exclusionary experience. Not everyone can pee freely like that. Also, not everyone has the naturalist skills to get out to a remote enough location. The nitro-based bubbles of an Irish Pint, however? Universal. Another one to beat, I suspect.

The Wise Fool:

By-week. I think this one doesn’t stand a chance. As much as I personally love this archetype and its characters, this is my English Degree coming through.

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The Southwestern Conference

Rainy Jazz Day:

By-week.

This one will come out swinging next round, I can tell. The vibes are immaculate. Interested to see how far it goes.

Moving Solo vs. Work Phone:

Winner: Moving Solo.

Look, being on your phone at work is awesome. I’m writing this article right now at work (albeit on my laptop.) But it's not as always lovely as moving solo; sometimes phone at work is despair-filled and doomscrolling AKA not lovely. That moment when someone offers you help but you got it on your own? Sublime human experience.

Fast Quit vs. Construction Drive:

Winner: Construction Drive.

It’s brimming with self-confidence that comes from understanding the hidden mechanics behind the rules of the world. It shows that you are not like everyday fools who obey every little social suggestion like sheep. You are a god among humans when you drive through road construction zones that are unused.

TV to Movie and 3rd Words:

Both get a by-week and I cannot think of two entries that needed it more to survival at all. Neither will last long. I love them. They’re always lovely, but they cannot compete, I’m calling it now.

Four Wheel Drive vs. Eating Sounds:

Winner: Four Wheel Drive.

As much as I love verbal gustatory enjoyment, I think it’s 100% a me-thing that I would frankly find off-putting in other people. Four Wheel Drive however? That’s the gift that keeps on giving. Unparalleled security and confidence in all terrains: snow, mud, and ice pose no threats to the person who drives a car with four wheel drive.

New Adjectives vs. Stomach Drop:

Winner: New Adjectives.

It’s a tough one, but it’s just more present in daily life than a stomach drop when driving fast down a hill. Perhaps the mere ephemerality of a stomach drop should have gotten it points, but for me there are conversationally few things more enjoyable than grabbing some cinematic reference that perfectly fits the situation and transforming it from a proper noun into some poorly-used but perfectly articulating adjective. Maybe things are more precious because they do not last, but new adjectives are the seasoning that flavors daily conversation: truly the spice of life.

Ken Jennings:

By-week.

This guy just rocks. He had an impossible task to follow in Alex Trebek’s footsteps as the host of Jeopardy! and has done so with nerdy charm. Everything he says and does is the best. He could be a major dark horse candidate.

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The Northeastern Conference

Life Hack Recall

By-week.

I have the feeling this one has legs, though. Giving it the by may have made it’s path easier than needed. Recalling a Life Hack is awesome: it justifies your internet time; makes you seem like someone who sees through the Matrix of everyday life into the hidden operations of the world; saves the day in a minor but important way… it’s awesome. This isn’t the last we’ll see of Life Hack Recall, mark my words.

Technically True vs. Cozy Life

Winner: Cozy Life.

There are certain entries on this list, like flossing the morning of going to the dentist so when she asks if I flossed I can say yes (which is something everyone does don’t lie!) that I find lovely because it feels to me an integral part of the human experience. But when I highlight this or other similar experiences (for example: I love getting mad at people for doing something I myself frequently do (but it’s different circumstances for me, so it’s okay…)) despite feeling a deep kinship with humanity, people look at me like I’ve revealed a dark, horrifying secret worthy of shame, as if the most human humans weren’t also some of the messiest (see: Shakespeare.) Much more enjoyable? A diagram of a tree stump cut in half to show how a badger has made a 1940’s style comfy English countryside home out of its burrow, complete with a teapot on the stove and a sleeping cap next to a book of Dickens. Not many people know about this genre of fiction (Cozy) but it’s always lovely, and not something people find to be profoundly shameful.

Shenanigans Crew vs. Inside Pocket

Winner: Inside Pocket.

It’s hard to describe to those who have never partaken, but the best part of wearing a suit is that inside breast pocket. Phone, paper, wallet, anything. It immediately is hidden in the folds of the coat but feels so cool and fun to put things into and pull things out of. Secret agent status and it’s amazing.

Crumbs vs Abbreviation Origins

Winner: Crumbs.

Are you kidding? People fight for the crumbs. The perfectly seasoned, must-tilt-the-bag-to-access, flavor explosion for one bite only portion of a snack which are the final crumbs? Incomparable

Dog Pillows

By-week.

Life is a Movie vs. Pantless Pee

Winner: Life is a Movie.

When I shared how great it is to take some rare moments in a private restroom to full drop trow, people didn’t immediately agree and that made me self conscious. Plus many more people refer to their lives in seasons, with main character energy, or character arcs. It’s a really fun way to mythologize your life and also forget I said anything about pantless pee.

Celebrity Friend vs Circle = Square

Winner: Circle = Square.

No one is perfect and it’s hard to fantasize about famous people thinking you’re actually super chill when we know that a lot of celebrities themselves are not good people, or are famously bad hangs. I love thinking about how a famous person would tell me that I’m the only real person they’ve met and everyone else are just sycophants, but I’m a true friend: it is a type of irresistible qualified diagnosis that only someone surrounded by suck-ups could provide, but once you attach a real celebrity to the idea, it becomes much harder to enjoy the fantasy. Now the startling necessity of re-examining something taken for granted (circular objects that are now square?) Amazing. Much joy could be found by re-examining the mundane represented in new lights.

Earlier than Thought

By-Week.

The Northeastern Conference is letting some absolute best hits slide through the first round between thinking it’s late but then realizing it’s earlier than you had thought, dogs using pillows as pillows, and recalling life hacks that work.

I’m here for it. It’ll keep things interesting in upcoming match-ups.

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The Southeastern Conference

Casual Drifting

By-Week.

I would’ve been interested in how this played out against something in round one. Giving it a by may actually harm it: purposefully drifting in the snow on a commute rocks, it feels like you’re in Fast and Furious but is it going to win it all? Probably not- it requires living in a place where it snows and being a bit of a daredevil who would like to drift your car. It’s not ubiquitous. Waiting until the second round may have robbed it of any wins… We’ll see next round.

Phone at Gym vs. Local Celebs

Winner: Meeting Local Celebrities.

Like the earlier entry “Technically True,” being on your phone at the gym in between sets is a pretty common experience, but it’s not one that people love for its commonality. It’s more of a necessity and one people feel they need to apologize for engaging in, I’ve found. Meeting a local celebrity from the news, or a radio station; maybe a semi-pro athlete or a woman who lives at the top of the tallest building in town? That’s cool. That’s something that might possibly make a good night great, or an average story a little more legendary. It connects you to your local town and just rocks.

Easy Blinds vs. Milky Way Raw

Winner: Seeing the Milky Way with your naked eye.

Look, blinds are a pain in the neck and they seldom work. When you manage to open or close them with ease it is peak experience: it’s awesome. It’s a flow state inconceivable to mere mortals… but the vast beauty of the cosmos that lies in abundance above our heads, but is often obfuscated from our sight, laid bare so we may contemplate the heavens? Awe-inspiring. Nobody has ever wondered about their place in the universe after successfully opening a set of blinds. The last word in each poem of Dante’s Divine Comedy is ‘Stars,’ not ‘Curtains’ for a reason. Stars, specifically when you can see the Milky Way, are a source of wonder. Wonder trumps ease of use for cheap home goods.

Solid Sneeze vs. Group Chat

Winner: When everyone is present in the group chat at the same time.

The boys are back, baby. Sure, a solid sinus clearing sneeze that you feel from your diaphragm to your nostrils, getting the dust and muck out feels great. But bodily function isn’t ubiquitously enjoyed. The entire group chat all firing off jokes in rapid fire while you are present for it? S-tier experience. One potential drawback I can see: if you miss the ‘everyone talking in the group chat’ period, you are coming at your phone with 50 missed messages, and that is not always lovely. That’s a moment where you just have to accept you’re out of the loop. It may be the downfall of this entry, but for now Group Chat is on to Round 2.

Really Long Icicles

By-week. These are fun.

Haircut Growth vs. Tortilla Chips

Winner: Peak haircut growth, obviously.

Some may contend that specific tortilla chips aren’t always lovely. Maybe. Maybe it’s a stretch. But that is why we have this bracket. Just because you lose round one doesn’t mean you didn’t deserve to play. I will say, though, that an entry that requires explanation and examples (hyper-specific tortilla chips) never stood a chance against a universal experience of growing into the perfect period of time after a haircut when you look amazing. I think this match-up is a blow-out.

Time Naps vs. Texting When Present

Winner: time disorienting naps.

Texting someone when you’re with them as a joke is a lot of fun, but everybody is tired these days, and getting the chance to lose all sense of time, place, and identity is top tier. I remember taking a nap and waking up forgetting that I had fallen asleep: the time was 8:00 and it was light out… was it AM or PM? What day was it? It ultimately didn’t matter because I had never felt better. That is a generational talent of a lovely entry and a mere joke that probably belongs on my Never Not Funny List cannot compete.

Brackets

By-Week.

C’mon it just fits. Last but not least, the whole conceit of this article doesn’t work if there isn’t something inherently fun about a bracket for non-sport tournaments. This may be a dark horse contender: it is the battlefield that everything else has to prove itself on.

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Round 2- Sweet Sixteen

The Northwestern Conference

Crosswalk vs. Song end on arrival

Winner: Crosswalk.

Starting off Round 2 with a bit of an upset. There’s something cinematic about a song ending just as you arrive somewhere. And truth be told, revisiting this to write it a week or so after I made the bracket, I’m not sure it’s the right decision. But… the feeling I get from understanding crosswalks at a deeper level than everyone else? Incomparable. I see the lines in the Matrix. When a song ends as I arrive at a destination, I am a main character. When I understand the fundamental forces that weave together reality, like crosswalk light algorithms, I am a god.

Easy Ice vs Perfect GIF

Winner: Perfect GIF.

No explanation needed. In this David vs. Goliath matchup, Goliath decimated David and left no remains.

Clue Art Style vs. Monster Mash

Winner: Monster Mash.

Retro Art Deco never stood a chance against the Graveyard Smash. Honestly though, wild to me that “Monster Mash” has made it this far.

Guinness Bubbles vs. The Wise Fool

Winner: Guinness Bubbles.

Archetypes may be fundamental literary symbols and characters, but they can’t compete with that Creamy Irish Stout and it’s signature falling Nitrogen bubbles which are so famous that scientific studies have been published about how it works the way it does.

The Southwestern Conference

Rainy Day Jazz vs Moving Solo

Winner: Rainy Day Jazz.

Nobody likes moving: that’s why people pay others to do it the second they are financially capable of doing so. As fun as carrying something by yourself is, you’re still carrying something heavy. Sisyphus may be happy about not needing anyone else to help him roll the boulder, but the end result is he still needs to roll a boulder. Cozy jazz vibes on a rainy day? No brainer.

Construction Drive vs. TV to Movie

Winner: Construction Drive.

Better animation is nice. A favorite media property getting some breathing room is cool. I don’t know, it’s just not winning- not when it’s up against not having to take a detour.

3rd Words vs. Four Wheel Drive

Winner: Four Wheel Drive.

Duh.

New Adjectives vs. Ken Jennings

Winner: Ken Jennings.

The Southwestern conference really suffered from my love of various linguistic occurrences. Still,

The Northeastern Conference

Life Hack Recall vs Cozy Life

Winner: Life Hack Recall.

It’s a nice fantasy genre. But being helpful in a tough situation, usually by knowing some secret piece of knowledge based on common household objects? MacGyver with an smart phone.

Inside Pocket vs. Crumbs

Winner: Crumbs.

More common. The inside pocket makes you feel so handsome and strong, but do you know what’s better than feeling that way? Eating delicious food.

Dog Pillows vs. Life is a Movie

Winner: Life is a movie.

As cute as Dogs using pillows as pillows is, I think there could have been some stronger Dog-centric contenders. Applying a television-narrative to your life to understand and joke about your experience is so much more fun and ongoing. Maybe the Dogs could have had their day, but this one is a little too small fry to make it big. Important reminder: just because something loses doesn’t mean it’s not lovely: everything on this list is always lovely.

Circle=Square vs. Earlier than Thought

Winner: Earlier than thought.

Duh.

The Southeastern Conference

Casual Drifting vs Local Celebs

Winner: Local Celebs.

See, this is exactly what I thought would happen to drifting. Icarus flying too close to the sun. It would’ve rocked round one, I’m guessing. But it just can’t handle the momentum of a solid entry that has some battle experience under its belt.

Milky Way vs. Group Chat

Winner: Milky Way.

There are going to start to be more and more difficult match-ups like this one. We’re all going to have to decide between what is right and what is easy. When you’re texting the group chat and everyone is in on it, that’s the best. But does it beat staring at a galaxy? Recognizing constellations? Wishing on shooting stars? Having your breathe literally taken away at the grandeur of nature’s beauty which is, apparently, always there even when we have not eyes to see it? No poems are made about the group chat… I hate to say it, but Milky Way wins this one (but barely.)

Really Long Icicles vs. Haircut

Winner: Haircut.

Harder to decide than you think. If you think that the period of time after a haircut easily beats a really long icicle, you’re not thinking of a big enough icicle. Dream larger.

Time Naps vs. Brackets

Winner: Brackets

Another upset. But that’s part of what rocks about Brackets. You can whip out hot-takes like this and it’s part of the game. And it’s not just the whole “you can’t beat the map you’re fighting on” argument, there’s the whole style tied in of talking about non-sports things in sporty ways. Like, I’m talking about what advances in the Southeastern Conference in a match-up between naps and brackets. That’s just so much fun.

To further drive my point, and I hate to slander naps that disorient you in time and space… but sometimes a time disorienting nap is not a good thing. Sometimes it was on accident and it really causes problems. Brackets don’t cause problems. Brackets bring the world together with some goodhearted fun.

I stand by this one.

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Round 3

The Northwestern Conference

Crosswalk vs Perfect GIF

Winner: Perfect GIF

Sending the perfect GIF: it communicates that you are the funniest person in the chat; it shows how deeply cultured you are, but not so far removed that you don’t know what the people want. It’s just a sublime experience.

Monster Mash vs Guinness Bubbles

Winner: Guinness Bubbles, of course.

This is where I start to think Guinness might go all the way. Beating “The Monster Mash” isn’t necessarily anything to write home to Mom about, but here’s where I’m personally starting to see the what the endgame is going to look like, and Falling Guinness Bubbles has momentum.

This is also where I started to realize how difficult these last few showdowns were going to become.

The Southwestern Conference

Rainy Day Jazz vs. Construction Drive

Winner: Rainy Day Jazz

How many times do you think you know the move going through construction, only to make it halfway and have to turn around? Humiliating. Just pray nobody saw that insane faux pas.

But a cozy Saturday morning, coffee in hand; a book you’ve never picked up, and never probably will, next to you; and the rain softly falling outside all feeling like you’re in a PBS special? You never look the fool, you only feel cool.

Four Wheel Drive vs. Ken Jennings

Winner: Four Wheel Drive.

Look, he’s the All-Time Champion of Jeopardy turned Host for a reason: the dude is insanely smart, but also incredibly charismatic in a charming, nerdy way. But he’s personally never helped me get out of a snow bank. Is this all a numbers game? Four wheel drive everywhere vs. one man? But that one man is in every living room across the nation. No, this isn’t about ubiquity, it’s about salvation. Four Wheel Drive is a superhero, giving confidence in peril, arriving in an hour of need. Not a hero we deserve, but one we need every Winter.

The Northeastern Conference

Life Hack Recall vs Crumbs

Winner: Crumbs.

I go back and forth on this one. How has crumbs made it this far. And remembering a good life hack and pulling it off creates the perfect combination of saving the day, being a handyman, and having access to the secret workings of the world. It gives that aura which says Relax, I am competent in every situation given the most obscure of tools.

But people don’t fight each other for Life Hacks… People don’t get mad when you take the last Life Hack for yourself when they were eagerly looking forward to it. Remembering a Life Hack feels good, it’s awesome- that’s why it made it so far… but the handful of crumbs at the bottom of a chip bag invoke emotional passion. This was a close one, but crumbs take the cake.

Life is a Movie vs Earlier than Thought

Winner: Earlier than Thought

This was a great showdown. this is the kind of thing you expect to see fighting for Southeastern Conference champ and going into the Semifinals. This is the equivalent of remembering that the Miracle on Ice game at the 1984 Olympics wasn’t a championship game. Two titans squaring off in the elite eight.

In the end, talking about your life in movie terms feels to me like it’s such a youth-coded way of speaking. Whereas thinking it’s late but then finding out it’s early? That is a gift that means something different to you at every age of your life. It’s evergreen.

The Southeastern Conference

Local Celebs vs Milk Way

Winner: Milky Way

I’m a big fan of Localism and focusing on the things that make your surrounding community special and unique. The experience of meeting average people who, by virtue of some small things, elevates them to a local celebrity is great.

But what hope does one man have against the galaxy. The universal experience across time immemorial of staring up at the same night sky as everyone else is one of your utter smallness: maybe that makes you feel insignificant or it makes you feel special, but the experience of seeing the Milky Way sprawl across the night sky connects you at a fundamental level with the very experience of being human. It can’t be fought with.

Haircuts vs. Brackets

Winner: Haircuts

Brackets couldn’t last forever. They’re a blast, but there’s nothing like liking good and therefore feeling good. That perfect period approximately two weeks after your haircut where it looks manicured but natural and there are nothing but compliments coming your way is *chef’s kiss.*

Elite Eight

The Northwestern Conference Winner

The Perfect GIF vs. Falling Guinness Bubbles

Winner of the Northwestern Conference: Perfect GIF

All of these conference winners proved to be incredibly difficult, but this one in particular was a real Sophie’s choice: how could I choose against the bubbles on a perfect pint of Guinness?

But to be objective, not everyone likes Guinness. Not everyone is completely sane, either. But there are those who don’t like beer, or don’t like Guinness specifically (?) those who can’t drink, and more. At the end of the day, not everyone texts either, but being culturally literate for the sake of humor, which is the spirit behind sending the perfect GIF is far more universal and applicable to more people than the most perfect aesthetic of any beer. This one still breaks my heart.

The Southwestern Conference Winner

Rainy Day Jazz vs. Four Wheel Drive

Southwestern Conference Winner: Rainy Day Jazz

Here in the semi-finals, I had to start asking for other people’s opinion on winners. It just became to difficult to choose. Rainy Day Jazz vs. Four Wheel Drive is vibes vs. function; art vs. science; luxury vs. pragmatism. One is refined, the other rugged. In the end, not everyone has or needs Four Wheel Drive. It’s less ubiquitous. And whereas that’s a drawback for Four Wheel Drive, the ephemerality of a Rainy Day that’s got jazzy vibes makes it all the more rare and precious.

The Northeastern Conference Winner

Crumbs vs. Earlier than Thought

Winner: Earlier than Thought

Obviously this only could turn out one way. Thinking it’s late and learning how early it really is cannot be defeated by crumbs. I fear Icarus flew too close to the Sun. Crumbs, the oft-contested prime real estate of a chip bag could never win this whole thing, it’s crumbs. It put up one hell of a fight and went farther than I think anyone expected.

Breaking form a little bit and doing a retrospective, it becomes clear that it made it this far because it went up against “Learning the origin of Latin abbreviations” (hotly contested entry that I think I stand alone in thinking is lovely) and “The inside pocket of suit coats.” The latter is a harder win, but Crumbs, with the exception of beating “Life Hack Recall” had the way paved for it. Despite making it to the Northeastern Conference final, I don’t think it wins MVP of the tournament. It’s why “Brackets” didn’t make it past “That prime time after getting a haircut when you grew into it and it looks awesome” in the Southeastern Conference’s previous round because as fun as brackets are they can be fundamentally flawed with mismatched fights where some entries go farther.

The Southeastern Conference Winner

Milky Way vs. Haircut

Winner of the Southeastern Conference: Seeing the Milky Way with your naked eyes.

Humility is the mother of virtues, and there is a beauty of the night sky which draws one up and out of oneself, into a state of awe at the transcendent beauty resplendent across the tapestry of the stars, which puts to shame the self-pleased vanity of enjoying how good one looks with a haircut. Now there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your appearance and putting your best foot forward, but there’s something enlightening about staring up at the universe: something mystical, almost religious, that has kept scientists, prophets, farmers and laymen occupied for millennia that can’t be beaten by a haircut, no matter how excellent.

Final Four

Semifinals

Perfect GIF vs Rainy Day Jazz

Winner: Sending the perfect GIF

Earlier than thought vs. Milky Way

Winner: When you think it’s late, but then it’s actually earlier than you thought.

Championship

Earlier than Thought vs Perfect GIF

Pre-game commentary

Here it is. The final showdown. From fifty-one entries, all of which, by my estimation are always lovely, we have arrived at the final two.

Earlier than Thought

From the get-go, I think “When you think it’s late but then find out it’s earlier than you thought“ was a favored pick, destined to go the distance. It’s one that almost universally is agreed with when I’d read people entries on my list. It’s an entry that would be one of the two examples I’d give to people to help them understand what this list was all about.

Here’s “Earlier than thought”’s path getting to the final: By-week, Circle=Square, Life is a Movie, and Crumbs. Not the most impressive list of opponents, with “Life is a Movie” seeming to me to be the biggest competitor (though “Crumbs” was a big underdog in this tourney.) Perhaps it didn’t deserve the by-week, but it was by random chance. Nevertheless, this entry belongs in the championship.

Perfect GIF

“Sending the Perfect GIF” on the other hand represents exactly what I was hoping for from this tournament: something that is always lovely that goes the distance and by it’s rise to the top cements itself as more awesome than previously conceived.

Getting here, “Perfect GIF” beat out: Axlotls, Ice coming out of silicon trays perfectly, Knowing how to navigate a crosswalk better than the average person, and the falling bubbles on a pint of Guinness. This is a much more impressive rogues gallery than what “Earlier than Thought” has under its belt. “Perfect GIF” has had to claw its way to the final.

Let’s get to it.

Winner:

When you think it’s late but it turns out it’s earlier than you thought.

It’s ALWAYS LOVELY. It’s the best, the greatest of all time, the MVP. No drawbacks, no pitfalls. It’s evergreen and pertinent to all people of all ages and backgrounds of all time. That’s why “Earlier than thought” takes home the gold.

Your Turn

Thanks for joining me on this journey of what the most awesome thing could be. It was a fantastic showdown and I hope you enjoyed a trip through lovely things that you may have never given thought to before. The whole point of the list is to start seeing more of them around you and enjoying them a little bit more than maybe you did before.

Leave your comments below:

• Do you agree with my picks?

• Disagree with any wins?

• What should I add to the Always Lovely List?

I’m always on the lookout for new ones: while writing this list I thought of many more including

• Judging Olympic athletes/thinking I could compete

• Winning breath-holding competitions

• The absolute domination you display as an adult using 2% of your physical or mental power in a simple game against a child

• Making that deep pull from a freezer during a late night hangout where the food hits perfectly

• Grunting while sitting

• Flat brim hats with a rope across the brim base

• Needing the exact amount of some food for the recipe you’re cooking, and using exactly the amount you have so you can throw the container away after use without having to store the tiniest amount left which is utterly unusable in the future, but technically is a waste were you to throw it away

Repost from 2025

Repentance: ashes and sackcloths; fasting and… Fish Fry?

People of all backgrounds like to joke about a long-standing Catholic tradition, the Lenten Fish Fry: seems a little backwards, right? Shouldn’t we be suffering during Lent instead of enjoying a delicious meal?

The Fish Fry actually seems directly opposed to the spirit of Lent. Maybe one could go so far as to suggest it should be done away with? Except it shouldn’t be cancelled, and except it’s not opposed: it’s a symbol of one of the points about Lent.

It could be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but this year I’ve been hearing a bit about people adding something for Lent, instead of fasting from something. That’s cool: still counts! But the reasoning springs from a line of thinking that’s been growing over recent years: Gentle Lent.

Gentle Lent essentially comes from the idea that believers don’t have to cause themselves immense suffering to earn God’s approval. You don’t need to crush yourself, or metaphorically self-flagellate, just do something small. It’s very much in the tradition of St. Therese of Lisieux, one could argue.

When Gentle Lent is practiced because of a fundamental understanding of who God is and how much we’re capable of without him? Great. When it comes from a total misunderstanding of fasting? Not as great. I don’t always speak out when people talk about how difficult their religious upbringings have been: their experience is valid and true. But sometimes learning the truth behind something that has misrepresented and perverted can be healing: and I think fasting has been misrepresented.

Fasting gets a bad rep.

We can’t get around it: fasting seems spiritual. It’s not for nothing that almost every single religion practices it in some form or another.

Fasting goes awry when we think that suffering is the end-goal; or God’s love needs to be won; or the things that we’re fasting from are awful, and really God just hates everything except Christian culture.

Really, fasting is about emptying. Almost every real spiritual tradition intuits that you should be emptied to have a spiritual experience. It’s just Christians have learned that you’re emptied to be filled up with something.

We can be so focused on the cross that we forget about the resurrection.

Some might say “Woah woah woah, Easter is coming but right now it’s Lent. Suffer and repent.” and to those people I say, “You must be fun at parties.”

Fasting actually leads to enjoyment: that’s the whole purpose. Chesterton talks about it in his essay, The Advantages of Having One Leg. He writes, “All surrender of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed…The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost”
-G.K. Chesterton

I’ve given up alcohol for Lent, not because it’s bad, but because it’s good (Jesus turns wine into his blood everyday; and brought 180 gallons of it to a wedding: it’s his favorite drink.) When Easter rolls around I’ll appreciate it even more than I did on Fat Tuesday.

But that’s not just it: fasting also causes us to enjoy other things that we are currently missing. Fasting empties you of worldly stuff so you can be filled with Godly stuff. This is what the Fish Fry symbolizes. You give up meat, you get delicious food, community and a sense of belonging, invaluable memories and quality time with loved ones.

Everyone jokes about how much they think we miss the point of fasting. I get it: I once asked in a lesson about the Our Father why we ask God for our daily bread before asking for forgiveness of sins. I figured we better get all nice and clean before asking for favors: very Old Testament. But here’s the point: God’s priorities are the other way around. People who avoid fasting should know that it’s an invitation to something bigger and better, not needless suffering; not purification before we can enter God’s presence.

The Fish Fry is a great symbol of the Christian life. Give up living like everyone else and watch them all be puzzled yet envious: “I don’t get Lent, but man do I love a Fish Fry”

Give up something small, like meat, and in that empty space get filled up with fish.

Sacred Asides, available in paperback and electronically. I also offer a cheaper version of the book, which features only the introductions and poems, no annotations, in paperback and electronically.

Get your copy today and thanks for your support. Please share with friends and family who you know would get a lot from this book.

Here’s the trailer:

It premieres Wednesday, February 4th.

The only question:

Is it doomed to fail?

How We Think About The Muppets

The new The Muppets Show has a particular problem: they are competing not just for attention but against the very idea of The Muppets that exists in the minds of their fans. Fans have had decades to create an idea of what The Muppets should be: a Platonic form of Muppetry, perfect and immutable. If the new show is too aware of trying to evoke this ethos, it fails. But if it wanders too much, it’ll also fail.

All this may sound like an overindulgent way of saying the new show may just not live up to expectations.

But this is the specific problem The Muppets face of balancing authenticity with perceptions they are aware they must fulfill.

To succeed, The Muppets must be “The Muppets.” But what is “The Muppets?”2 There are the actual recorded episodes and movies, but those aren’t necessarily what we mean: just having Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzy Bear, and co. doesn’t make a Muppets movie according to the sense of Muppet-ness that exists in our minds.

Of course, that really is all that’s required to make a Muppets movie: have Muppets in it. But the Muppets are also an affectation, a style, a humor, a way of looking and joking. There’s tone, mood, and atmosphere that must be met for it to capture the spirit of what the Muppets represent.

So the problem comes about when we think about “The Muppets” in a way that the actual The Muppets3 pushes against: when what is the thing doesn’t feel like the thing.

In “The Price of Anonymity” the ‘Problem of Performing while Perceived’ is framed like this: when you are famous and meet fans…

…you must be the character of yourself; but, if you are too aware of your character, then the illusion pops (because it is an illusion) like a cute kid who knows they are cute. But you can’t decide to act against what is on-brand for you either since that obviously destroys the illusion. So you have to act with this quasi-awareness of the character you play, where you deliver on people’s expectations of who you are that only comes from an acute understanding of your brand, while also having to deliver all of the surprise and un-self-conscious consistency of character that only acting authentically can generate.

In order to succeed, The Muppets Show need to be authentic to the spirit of The Muppets, but it also cannot be aware of being authentic to that spirit. This is the peril of all reboots: how can you be the thing you once were when you are trying to be that thing? It ruins authenticity, like a cute kid who knows he or she is cute.

So we’ve put the Muppets in a bind: be like the thing we once had, but if you are too aware of being like that, it’s derivative. Conversely, you cannot stray away from this spirit too much, or it’s also not The Muppets. This is a major problem with the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy: “My favorite character would never act like that!” Even though their favorite character was written, acted, and filmed to act like that.

True authenticity requires an integrity of spirit, but also a certain amount of unexpected surprises. However, too much integrity and the spirit becomes self-aware and indulgent, but too much innovation and surprise and the thing wanders from what it is supposed to be.

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Just do “The Muppets” and it’ll work

But no, actually: is this really just ‘it’ll be hard to live up to expectations?”

After all, any Muppets fan can tell you how to make sure this new reboot is a success:

“Just make the actual Muppets Show and it’ll succeed!”

…But what is the actual Muppets? If all it takes is ‘doing the Muppets the right way…’ What is the right way?

I personally really like Kermit being wise, comforting, and sage-like, trying to do the right thing. I don’t really like the Electric Mayhem: I feel they are the only thing that dates the Muppets as something really Boomer-ish and not timeless. Personal opinion.

You probably disagree: Electric Mayhem is central to the Muppets. In fact, it’s not The Muppets without Electric Mayhem.

Exactly. We aren’t sitting around asking “How do I know your version of blue is the same color I see when I see blue?” People literally have different ideas of what is the central animating ethos that makes something The Muppets or not.

And if this show has a different idea, or is too aware of hitting the right idea… it’s doomed.

The Muppets have a harder job than most reboot attempts

All reboots struggle with this. I imagine all celebrities, to a certain extent, struggle with this too: how do I deliver an authentic experience, while still giving a curated experience? How do I give what they want, without seeming aware of giving the thing that is wanted, and in being aware, ruin it? How can you provide the experience someone wants, and even the persona you’re known for, once you’re aware of it? You’re trapped between the need to deliver a certain experience and the need to be authentic; between a need for unselfconsiousness and the fact that you are self aware; between the need to be unexpected and new to be authentic, but reliable, like a good twist: surprising but you should have always seen it coming. that’s good stuff.

This is the problem of performing while perceived.

The Muppets have a harder time accomplishing this than most, because the internet has had decades with very little Muppets content. In that vacuum, the perception of the Muppets has grown in a very specific way.

Problem 1: Muppets’ Fancasting

In the 90s’, the Muppets adapted two books into movies: Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol. This rewired the neurochemistry of Muppet Fan’s Brains permanently. Now it can become impossible to avoid Muppet fancasting, where fans cast books and movies with which Muppet would play them in an adaptation:

And here’s a whole Reddit post about casting Muppets in The Iliad.

CSMFHT Writes

Classical Muppets Fan-cast

Earlier today I tweeted about the difficulty in casting the Muppets in an adaptation of the Iliad, because it is my adamant belief as a student of Classical mythology and an even greater fan of the Muppets, that Hector would be the only possible role for Kermit the Frog, and no one wants to see him die. I know… the really important stuff…

Read more

2 years ago · 14 likes · CSMFHT

And it’s not even just classical literature and movies. In the wake of the Knives Out movies’ success, people called more and more for the detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, to star in a murder mystery movie populated by Muppets. This joke or idea (where does one begin and another end?) got so much traction that Muppet-cousin Sesame Street made a Knives Out parody, “Forks Out” starring “Beignet Blanc.”

Fancasting is a powerful force on the internet. Sometimes the fans get it right, or the studio will pander to their desires. Sometimes, the fan’s ideas are horrible, and to listen to them would destroy a movie or TV show.

Problem 2: The “Muppets are Real” Joke

The Muppets also has a specific problem that there is a real world conspiracy-joke that the Muppets are real. The Muppets’ fictional reality is that they are an acting troupe that puts on shows and performs in movies. It’s why Kermit can play Bob Cratchitt in A Christmas Carol, but we still know it’s Kermit. It’s part of what makes The Muppets unique and endearing, as well as enduring, but the joke can also make the problem of performing while perceived much more difficult for the new Muppets Show.

People treat The Muppets like real people. Here’s Emma Stone, a producer of an upcoming Miss Piggy movie, talking about if she will be playing Miss Piggy:

It’s a fun wink: “Me? Miss Piggy (the real person!) will be her.” It shows a real knowledge and love of the source material.

But fiction can shape fact.

I have written before of what I call The Nickelback Effect. It is essentially allowing a joke or opinion on the internet to become your real belief after using that joke for yourself. It comes about from an internet hatred for the band Nickelback.

If you’re not funny, just say you hate Nickelback and you appeal to a public-domain joke that exists in a shared consciousness. But then people start thinking they really do hate Nickelback because of the joke.

The same is true with The Muppets.

In Washington Post article, “The Weird History of Treating the Muppets like real People” Alyssa Rosenberg writes,

But the transition to thinking of the Muppets as actual people started early, among civilians and journalists alike. Later in 1978, Kermit the Frog was invited to speak at the funeral of voice actor Edgar Bergen, along with Kermit creator Henson, who acknowledged the oddness of the situation. Students at Whitney Junior High School in Oklahoma enrolled Miss Piggy in their Parent-Teacher Association in 1980, along with human celebrities like Amy Carter, Erma Bombeck and Jane Fonda.

It goes further: Kermit has apparently written a book, spoken at commencements, and competed on The Masked Singer (hilarious.) You hear stories of people who were interviewing a puppeteer but found himself directing more question to Kermit than the man voicing him. Or how, on a Muppets set, the crew treats the Miss Piggy puppet different than the other puppets behind the scenes.

All of this is is a lot of fun, and a unique part of being a Muppet fan, but fans start forming perceptions of The Muppets as people, not fictional creations.

This makes people say all the more fierecely: this is the Muppets, or this isn’t the Muppets. Miss Piggy, as I have perceived her, as the internet has perceived her, shapes miss piggy into a thing that the show then has to meet or it feels like she isn’t miss Piggy. And then you fall back into the problem: having to meet a perception without seeming to know that you are doing it.

Fans know that they’re not real people, but how often will fans interrogate that fact directly and admit, at the end of the day, the character has no life of its own outside the mind of the authoritative writers and performers who record trademarked Muppet content?

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Problem #3: The Muppets meet Modernity

And here’s where things get really tricky: The Muppets have to try new things if they are actually going to entertain anyone and not just be a nostalgia grab (which it very well might be, and therefore is doomed to fail.)

If the Muppets Show is to endure, it has to capture and sustain attention from people who are going to love something so much they may hate it, but also attract new fans. It’s another reason why reboots are so hard to pull off.

They have to do this in a landscape where TikTok exists (and many Muppets-themed memes have gone viral outside of Muppets™ control.) They have to compete in sketch comedy when sketch comedy has changed a lot since they had their show.

Can :Puppet SNL: go viral when human SNL fights like hell to go viral?

And also, if The Muppets do classic Muppets jokes… will anyone like it? (Watch this clip of Christopher reeve on The Muppet Show. It’s insanely campy, filled to the brim with shtick (like Ralph mugging to the camera over and over.)

Would this work now? It’s fun as a relic, but doing this with new content? Does that endure? and if they try to do new comedy which is different than the old Muppet show then it’s not the new version of the old Muppet show.

The needs of the modern entertainment landscape demands innovation and growth, but The Muppets has built for itself (or the fans have built for it) the ultimate trap to ensure that, no matter what, it fails.

Take a look at the 2010s attempt at rebooting:

The Muppets (2011) worked because it was a meditation on how much The Muppets meant to people. It was about fans wanting to bring an old thing back in a world that still loved it, but didn’t really have a place for it anymore.

Everyone loved it.

“Great, Muppets are back!” Time for some classic Muppets movies.

Not as good as the 2011.

Not great. Maybe folks like this, but I couldn’t finish it.

Is history doomed to repeat itself now? Do we love the Muppets too much for them to ever succeed except in a super specific condition where the whole point is how they are no longer relevant, new, or capable of creating enduring franchises, but we love them anyway?

Why I hope the Muppets succeed and how it might do so:

To be fair: Muppets Most Wanted and Muppets Haunted Mansion are sitting at 80% and 73%. All things being equal, neither of those are flops just because The Muppets (2011) was 95% fresh.

Largely the problem of performing while perceived is that the expectations, perspective and idea of The Muppets are too powerful for the new thing to ever hope to take on a life of its own.

In a thesis, the fans will be the death of The Muppets.

Really, however, The Muppets are like the Theater: dying ever since it was invented and yet somehow still prevailing.

The formula is simple: let people who love The Muppets make Muppets movies.

People love The Muppets and the only way to get it wrong is for people who don’t love it to try to pretend that they do. As much as Emma Stone may be perpetuating the “Muppets are real people” joke/idea, it shows that she’s the right person for the job; just like how Jason Segel, who famously loves Muppets, was the right person for the 2011 reboot.

The very thing that can make it a problem is also how it can work: the question is will we love the Muppets to death? Or will we love them to life? Fans can make or break a franchise, and sometimes its not because they hate something too much, but because they love it in their own possessive way.

Today is Groundhog Day 2026. Perhaps you missed it.

It came and went with the usual lack of fanfare.

And I have a serious problem with it.

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I've always loved holidays. Ask my grandma and she'll tell you how I would get so excited in anticipation for a holiday that by the day itself I'd be sick. I remember how exciting every holiday felt when I was in elementary school. We never make so much of a big deal of minor holidays like in grade school. For many it was the last time they gave or received a Valentine’s card, which is tragic.

But temperamentally, I love me a good holiday, which is exactly why I have a real problem with Groundhog Day.

Interestingly enough, it is the love of a thing that causes one to dislike so much about it. You're most likely to be killed by your spouse rather than anyone else. When you love a sports team, you hate far more teams than the person who really just doesn’t care about the game. You probably also hate your team more often than not for their mistakes, blunders, failures, etc. You love them so much they drive you crazy.

It seems when one loves something one wants the best of it rather than enjoying it in any possible form. One would think if one loved, say, pizza, it wouldn't matter if it's from Italy or the freezer, one would like it just the same, but the one who loves pizza probably disdains the frozen pizza far more than your average pizza enjoy-er.

So it's with this critical eye that I approach one thing that I love greatly: holidays, but more specifically, a tragically under-celebrated day.

My main gripe with Groundhogs day? There's not more of it. More what? Good question. More... of it. Of celebration. Of holiday-ness. Why isn't it a bigger deal?

Easy: it's a day about a large rodent inaccurately predicting weather.

But anything can be reduced to meaninglessness if we define it in the least interesting, most deconstructive way: this essay is just squiggles on a light screen; love is just chemicals in brain-meat; and pizza is just a mangled up, sliced up mash of things we pulled from the ground.

This is a fundamentally wrong way of defining any experience in the world as it reduces something to simply the parts that its made of without giving any credit to what it means, why it exists, how much it’s enjoyed, etc. You know, all of the things that make being alive and experiencing things worthwhile.

Groundhogs day is a holiday which is a day that is supposed to be different from others. It may not be huge like Christmas, but it's got its own quirks. My problem is that it doesn't have more quirks.

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My top three problems with Groundhog’s Day

1. It's constructed wrong

Groundhog’s Day doesn't lend itself well to celebration. The entire way it's set-up flies in the face of having a special day.

At most it's a topic of water-cooler discussion because you heard it on the radio when driving into work. Everything unique about it is over and done before most of us go to work.

There's no anticipation, no celebration.

What can you do to celebrate? You can't have a party that begins at four in the morning where everyone predicts what the groundhog will say; Live-stream the event and cheer or groan when the prognosticator of prognosticators gives his prophecy.

2. It's a fixed day on the calendar

It doesn't take a day off of work, so you can't celebrate anything if it's on a weekday, since it doesn't have a changing date, like Thanksgiving. The first Saturday of February would be a fine Groundhog’s day.

And completely forget about moving the celebration to the closest weekend. If Halloween or the Fourth of July falls on a Monday or Thursday, you can bet celebrations will be held the weekend prior or after.

Celebrating Groundhog’s day the weekend prior is insane: you won't resolve the big winter question until February 2 rolls around. Likewise, celebrating after the fact is also nuts, because where's the anticipation? There’s a New Year's Eve quality to the day, where one must wait for something to definitively happen at a specific time, only it's more like the new year began at 7:15 AM on January 1 and you were informed of it as the second story on your daily email newsletter.

3. How would you even celebrate it in the first place?

Admittedly, this is my weakest problem with Groundhog’s day because necessity is the mother of invention. If we start celebrating it, we'll start making celebrations. It’s redundantly obvious.

Off the top of my head, we move the day to a first-Saturday situation and we ask the Groundhog for his weather-report in the afternoon, so anticipation can rise throughout the day.

Secondly, we institute a whole legion of local Oracles: there’s a groundhog in Pennsylvania, but in my hometown we could all go to the downtown for the mayor to consult a beaver, or the zoo to ask a bear. Different cities around the world drop different things for New Year’s Eve, why can't Groundhogs day feature a local gathering, followed by a communal festival with food, performances, games, 5k runs, a parade, and more?

Another gripe with holidays: you’re usually stuck with your family. Nothing wrong with that, but I like a 5k on Thanksgiving because you can celebrate with the broader community for a little bit. Groundhog’s Day could really capitalize on filling this niche.

A local festival, a brunch/lunch, games and prizes. It's easy. The University of Dallas has the right idea with their week-long celebration.

Lastly, have a normal party to celebrate the occasion. Everyone dress in light or dark colors: are you team shadow or not? We’ll find out at 4:30 PM.

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Maybe you don’t really care about holidays (or actively dislike them. You might be thinking, John isn't this a stupid thing to want to celebrate?

Yes.

But also, do we really need more reasons not to celebrate? Should our time really be spent in looking down on occasions for gathering with loved ones, enjoying traditions and celebrations, and turning up our noses in superiority at most opportunities for whimsy?

It's pride that stops us from enjoyment: perhaps it's not such a bad thing to simply be grateful for our Groundhog without looking it in the mouth, to decimate a metaphor.

But who knows? Maybe you just love fun more than I do, and therefore only demand the very best from it.

Have you ever taken a first aid class? It’s painful, but not from an actual injury. All inflictions come from the mental pain of facing the horribly obvious lessons the class hammers into your brain.

Revelatory insights include:

• If someone sustains a neck injury, don’t move them.

• If someone is overheating, get them into shade and put a wet towel on their neck.

• If someone is bleeding, stop the bleeding.

The entire time you cannot help but think, “Obviously: that’s just common sense.”

Another Class

In college I took a class on Communication (the thing I do everyday all the time.)

The textbook held marvelous kernels of wisdom including:

• Did you know that when you form opinions on people, those opinions shape how you think of what they do in the future?

• Did you know that if you say something nice before and after a constructive critique it is received better? It’s called a compliment sandwich!

• Did you know that asking people questions makes them like you more than talking a lot about your ideas?

Yes I did know all that: it’s insanely obvious

One more example

I do not have a business degree, but I do have business books. Tidbits of information I apparently needed a book to learn.

• To sell your product, people need to know it exists.

• People will buy your product if they think it meets a need they have.

• Your goal is to make a profit.

Reading business books can be like slamming your forehead into a wall. I don’t know how MBAs make it through a single class if this is what they’re hearing.

Two Categories; Three Kinds

In fact, all of these classes which are taught in colleges seem like poor excuses for a degree. This is really being taught in the same institutions as where doctors are learning to heal people and lawyers are learning to sue?

However, all of these classes lack the one question some other degrees have an overabundance of: as much as these classes possess the refrain “No shit, Sherlock” other classes contend with “When are we going to use this in real life?”

First Aid might be obvious (“If someone can’t breathe, check to see if their windpipe is blocked!”) but at least you can envision using it. When on Earth will identifying the rhythm of a sonnet ever be handy?1

So there are two categories of classes: useful and useless. And in the former category there is obscure knowledge (that which you need education to know) and obvious knowledge (that which is obvious and teaching it seems redundant.)

1. Useful obscure: Engineer.

2. Useful obvious: Business

3. Useless: English.

Prove me wrong.

Wait, you’d have to use English class… to do that…

The real purpose

The way into thinking about education can come about with these painfully obvious classes: as a professor highlights ‘Maximize your profits, minimize your costs’ on a whiteboard and you’re tempted to think how easy the upcoming test will be because of course you want to maximize profits and minimize costs, it would do well to ask why this is a class at all? if it’s so obvious.

The answer is less obvious: obvious classes are taught not to teach skills, but rather to form minds into naturally thinking that way.

Not So Obvious

If you’ve ever had to actually administer first aid, you immediately forget how obvious everything was in the textbook. Someone just broke their back? We should move them over here… for… reasons?

The same thing with communication: why are we fighting? Why are we no longer friends? What do I say to strangers? How do I deliver feedback? ChatGPT please write a more professional, kinder email for me! I forgot that I communicate all the time!

The same thing with business: I’d like to make money! How exactly does my business idea do that? Where do I get money from? How do I exchange goods or services for money?

I thought it was all obvious? What is obvious isn’t necessarily what’s habitual. Education, then, is not necessarily about teaching skills, but about providing a way of looking at the world, or a habitual method to solve problems.

When I was a lifeguard I was more prone to think about injuries and safety- more than the average person. You can hear of doctors who passively diagnose people they meet, both physically and mentally for psychologists.

My brother in law is in business and he looks at the world in a manner different than me, a fledgling entrepreneur. I look at the world in a different manner too: this whole essay came about as we were discussing business. I saw a phenomenon and decided to interrogate it by linking my experience of business with my experience of first aid and communication, saw a pattern, dug deeper, and decided to analyze it. Thanks English degree.

Most of my useless degree really just shaped this: that I look at things syntopically, where you encounter a topic, then compare what various sources say about that topic, put those sources in conversation together to reach something approximating a truth about that topic that was heretofore unknown to you. Mortimer Adler considers it the highest form of reading, but you can do it with anything. And that’s why, to a certain degree, I am the way that I am: because I was given this lens as a primary way of looking at the world and solving problems in it.

Very different than an eye doctor, or an engineer, or a chiropractor, or a garbageman, or a CEO, or any other job.

But so long as we question class’ utility we are going to miss the point.

Almost any job can teach you what you need to do: they want to hire people who look at things the way they need you to. (Which is more demonstrable when you have a piece of paper testifying to your being formed to be that kind of person, a bachelor of science, a master of divinity, an associate of the arts, for example.)

Our complaints of education are always boiling down to utility, which is flawed; and procedure, which is pragmatic (yes it would be nice for grades to go away, but how else do you track the progress of 100+ students you seeing everyday for one hour when 75 of them don’t even want to be there?)

At least this might change our perspective: that the next time we are taught something that seems painfully obvious, we must ask ourselves if it will be just as obvious when it’s needed, not in front of us. The answer is that it may not be, but not for lack of skill-instilling, but for lack of personal formation.

Watching screens is better

Reason 1: Being anti-screen and pro-book is just an easy way to gain status through performed erudition and media-snobbery

Hating technology, complaining of screen time, and quitting social media gains status. If you like books, then you’re not lazy: you’re analog. You don’t waste your time or drain your mental health: you do things that take longer and are harder just because.

It’s easy to forget that most people who are on social media, doom scrolling, or AI-lovers are probably just there because they’re not getting the real thing in their lives, so they settle for any source of dopamine that they can. Compassion would require us to sympathize with people we judge instead of promoting ourselves as better than them just because they are trying to ease their suffering through attempts to connect and laugh rather than make themselves better than other people.1

I’ve always found it strange when people say that they like books. A book is just a way to bind together words in a portable, easily repeatable manner. It’s the content that makes them distinctive. Take liking music as an analogy: would you like any combination of beats and sounds, since you like music so much? Or do you just enjoy the process of hearing patterns?

It’s the same as liking books: how about the phone book? Can any words be put together and have it something you enjoy? No: because ultimately books, in the public consciousness, are more than just modes of information: they are avatars of everything that makes a person better than someone else, specifically someone who watches screens.

Through this lens, books and screens essentially just become Avatars of Ideology, books for smart, humble, hardworking people who care about the right things; and screens for influencers who are desperate for fame and followers (please subscribe to my Substack) as well as those who are addicted, lazy, and uneducated young people who are devoid of traditional morality (forgetting older populations can be super guilty of phone addiction as well.)

When all a screen can mean to you are these things, its easy to forget that people go to books and screens for the same reason: they want to suffer less and be happier.

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Reason 2: screens are super fun, make me happy, and has a lot of incredible advantages that make life better

When I scroll through Instagram Reels (my drug of choice,) I:

• Learn new things about news, culture, historical events, life hacks, movies, etc.

• Learn new practical tips that I have implemented to make my life better (which can include fun recipes, cocktail ideas, fitness programs and more.)

• Stay in touch with friends I otherwise don’t speak to in my daily life

• Develop inside jokes with my close friends who I do see often

• Have fun

When people are chastised for being on their phones, maybe the chastiser should ask themselves why people prefer the digital world over their company.

Furthermore, online trends have done incredible things to accomplish good in the world: whether it’s spreading awareness of injustice, bringing people down who deserve to be stopped for atrociously evil things they have done, organizing the people and spreading education. At a macro-level, screens can and have accomplished remarkable things when used for good. This is often forgotten and wiped away. Victor Hugo said, “An invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come” and it doesn’t have to be Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Common Sense anymore: a few quick videos gets the job done much faster.

Reason 3: people have always looked down on ways that people fill the time

It’s also easy to forget that people always needed to fill the time and people have always looked down on it.2

If it wasn’t event television in the Nineties, it was comics in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. If it wasn’t that, it was pulp fiction. If it wasn’t reading, it was theater, which was considered low class in Shakespeare’s age. Every age has its form of media that it thinks is symptomatic of the world degenerating into the worst version of itself.

And yet Shakespeare and Comic books stand as some of our highest literature and most popular movies ever. When you watch some TikToks, sure they are faster and shorter, but some may be collected and kept for posterity, and considered works of art.

It’s already happened to a degree with Vine, an early precursor to TikTok that has since been taken down. There’s a finite number of videos with most of the best ones circulated over and over again in compilations you can watch on YouTube.

Reason 4: screens are chastised unfairly for things that books do too.

Book lovers and screen haters may argue: it’s the product (screens) itself: the internet, videos, social media: it’s all designed to suck you in, cut you off from reality, fill you with negativity, and radicalize you and make you buy crap you don’t need from already rich people.

…Right, because reading has never attracted people to dark and awful transformations by seduction to power.

Books are better

Reason 1: Screens have all of those problems we usually accuse them of having, and they’re really bad problems.

Yea okay, social media and TikTok and Instagram and stuff are terrible for mental health. It does radicalize people. AI has actively contributed to paranoia and mental instability. Internet bullying is very real and has had fatal consequences.

Everything I said about the internet and screens can’t simply just forget all of this. It’s not good what these screens can do to people, especially younger people.

Books do increase attention spans. They do educate you, but in a much different, ‘cleaner’ (metaphorically) manner. They connect you to the past and to the present. There is a reason why being well-read is synonymous with a level of intelligence and being well-watched isn’t, even for famously good and intelligent movies: books are obviously better for people and therefore better than screens.

Reason 2: Books are sacramentals. they are long-standing reminders change you more/stay longer because of repeated exposure over time

A sacrament is something that is visible and tangible that makes present an invisible reality. In the Catholic Church there are seven of them. Sacramentals are things that do things like this and are often referred to to describe items that help one get ready to interact with those invisible realities.

Books, in a certain sense, are sacramentals: consistent reminders of an invisible reality. It doesn’t have to be strictly religious, but books hold powerful meaning, lessons, stories and more. They show us through exposing us to ideas, empathy, new perspectives and more. To be exposed once can be powerful, but to be exposed many times makes it more likely the change will stick.

And one thing books have over screentime: they take a lot longer to consume. As a result, one can be exposed to the lessons, ideas, perspectives, and stories within longer. And that can seriously change a person.

Even if you forget most of what you read, while you are reading it (actually looking at the words, but also the entire period (days, weeks, months, years) of reading it can and is impacted by reading that book over time. And that’s not nothing, during that time or afterwards.

This idea of prolonged exposure is two-fold. Not only is it repeated exposure, but it also is in prolonged exposure that one is less easily duped.

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 said of books:

You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.

As TikToks and Reels stream endlessly over you, they mold your perception of reality. It becomes impossible to recognize when the model of life they present to you is fake, curated, or made to manipulate you, partially because you can’t do to it exactly what you can do to a book. you can turn your phone off, but generally you just scroll to the next thing with the algorithm having learned a little more about how to get you next time.

Reason 3: More Ray Bradbury

Bradbury said it best in another spot in Fahrenheit 451:

It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the parlour families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Ironic that the best argument for books is that you don’t need books per se. But for the sake of argument, the image Bradbury uses of information receptacles is that of a sieve through which sand is flowing. All sieves leak sand, and all receptacles leak meaning and information. But books hold it better and longer than other modes.

And it is this reason why it’s not books, but all that books represent we do have to defend and seek, while simultaneously realizing it doesn’t have to be books. It can be audiobooks (just as real reading as real books;) or maybe it is movies, or music or some other things.

It’s ironic: I often rail against looking at things as Avatars of Ideology, like I did earlier (see: ‘screens are better’ reason one.)3 But they are better when looked at as meaning something greater, not just larger or more abstract, or even hierarchically better, but better as a part of a greater whole. But books really are better when they are not avatars of arrogant Luddite intellectualism, but rather of all the deeply true, important, and life-sustaining things in life. If books don’t mean that, and we don’t realize that other things can be that too, then we have a real problem.

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Conclusion

The idea for this essay came from a conversation with a friend of mine recently wherein he asked me “I just feel better after I’ve read a book than after I’ve watched a lot of videos on the internet. Why is that?”

This friend is incredibly smart, but in that remarkably humble way where, despite the fact that he is reading at all, he feels books are somewhat beyond him. It’s arguable the best combination you can find in a person: he aspires to intellectualism while maintaining intellectual and actual humility. He remains a standard to be imitated: the man who feels he hasn’t read or learned enough who simultaneously is able to actually enjoy and learn from books because he feels himself not quite up to the task, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He stands as a better answer in his own person to his question than anything I could offer.45

But I’m a writer and I can’t resist the sound of my own voice.