There’s a powerful episode of “Homicide: Life on the Streets” written by my onetime Washington Post colleague David Mills (RIP) called “Bop Gun” in which a tourist is murdered in Baltimore. The shooter turns out to be a relatively innocent kid who thinks that by holding the gun during a stick-up, he can prevent his harder, hair-trigger comrades from killing someone. It doesn’t turn out that way.

And my efforts to prevent my wife from confronting a rude theater-goer last week in London didn’t work, either.

We were at the King’s Head Theatre seeing “Here Comes J. Edgar!,” a comedy musical about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover co-written by Harry Shearer and “Seinfeld” alum Tom Leopold. It was a great production of a pretty good show.1

What wasn’t so great was the woman sitting in front of us. I suspected she might be trouble. Before the show started, she spent 10 minutes disagreeably demonstrating that no couple in history had ever loved each other as much as she and the man she was seated next to. (Boyfriend? Husband? Accountant?) She’d run her fingers through his hair, stroke his knee then lean in and say something. Then kiss him.

Lather, rinse, repeat. I don’t know what changed in the 60 seconds that would elapse between smooches, but whatever it was, another kiss was the only cure. Thank god they stopped when the show started.

The woman looked at her phone during intermission. Fine. I expected her to put it away when the second act began. In fact, we’d been asked to turn off our phones completely, since on Friday night the UK government decided to send everyone emergency texts about the wildfires. We’d been walking down the street in Islington before the show when every pedestrian, cyclist, pub and outdoor cafe rang with the screech of bad news.

But when the interval was over and the cast danced its way out and started singing about Hoover’s connection to the Mob, she was still tapping at her phone. A last text to a babysitter? No, she was doing Duolingo! She was typing in translations, watching illustrations wriggle, getting rewarded with stars and exclamation points. I realized she could conceivably do this for the rest of the show — or until she’d mastered Italian.

I had to say something. I leaned forward and in what I hoped was a voice free of rancor whispered, “Can you please wait till the show is over to use your phone?”

Man, did she give me a dirty look. How dare I! 2

I wish it had ended there. Alas, rather than turn off the phone, she moved it a bit, holding it in her lap so I couldn’t see it. But now Ruth could.

As much as this woman annoyed me, I’d been trying to save her from Ruth. Ruth comes from a long line of people who take no shit. This lady couldn’t have known that of course.

Ruth is not a whisperer. In her speaking voice — a rich contralto — she said, “Please turn off your phone.” And the woman did! 3

Even so, it put a damper on the performance for me, worrying she’d pull out the phone again or whip around and stab us. My suspension of disbelief was seriously compromised. When the show was over, I made sure we sat in our seats till she and her lover had left and the theater was almost empty. I didn’t want to run into them in the lobby.

Why is it that people who do the right thing feel bad? Could this woman have really believed it was okay to do Duolingo on her phone in the front row at a theater, a few feet from the actors? How rude to them, let alone the rest of the audience.

The compact we make at live theater is that no matter how bored we are, we’re not allowed to show it. If you really hate it, just leave, as illustrated so perfectly in this clip from “Peep Show”:

For the last week I’ve been walking around with a swollen, red welt above my right eye. It doesn’t itch, thankfully, and it isn’t warm to the touch, at least not yet. But it looks alarming and the swelling mildly obscures what I can see from the corner of that eye. It’s like I’ve adjusted the vignetting on a photograph, creating a fuzzy shadow in the upper right of the frame.

This is from a mosquito bite.

We’ve always had mosquitoes in our neighborhood, which is just a few blocks from a creek. They’re so bad in the summer that we built a screened-in porch a few years ago just so we could sit outside without being exsanguinated. I exude whatever pheromone it is that rings the mosquito dinner bell, and so every now and then I still get bitten. The occasional blood sucker gets past the porch’s perimeter. I’m set upon while ambling out to pick up the newspaper from the driveway. And though I douse myself in picaridin before I walk the dog every morning, I’ve gotten bitten then, too.

Last summer, I experienced the Kennedy assassination of mosquito bites: It was so painful that I remember exactly where I was when it happened.1 It caused my arm to swell, itch uncontrollably and become warm to the touch. Really warm.

After a few days, I took my big, hot blood sausage arm to an urgent care clinic where the doctor understatedly said it didn’t look good. Concerned about infection, sepsis, amputation, phantom limb syndrome and the end of my juggling career before it had even begun, he prescribed oral antibiotics. They worked.

I don’t have this reaction to every mosquito bite. And before last year I’d never had it at all. I looked up the symptoms online and was horrified to find that I probably have something called “skeeter syndrome.”

That’s the official name. Not “mosquito syndrome.” Skeeter. It’s like it was named by some toothless, overalls-wearing bumpkin: “Yup, Meemaw done got bit by a skeeter and her leg swelled up like a dead hog in the sun. She gots the skeeter syndrome.”

Is there any disease with a less distinguished name than “skeeter syndrome”?

I’m not often able to say, “The ladies love me,” but when it comes to mosquitos, I can. Every mosquito that bites me — and you — is a female, a female that’s just trying to be a good mother. She needs the iron in our blood to promote egg production. Just imagine if chickens had to do that. Now stop imagining it.

Where is our great research institution related to solving the heartbreak of this painful and embarrassing condition? Where is our NITSS: National Institute for the Treatment of Skeeter Syndrome? Where is our Distinguished Professor of Skeeter Syndrome Studies at the Harvard Medical School? Where is the Jonas Salk of skeeter syndrome?

You can find information online about skeeter syndrome — “caused by an inflammatory reaction to proteins in mosquito saliva,” offers the Cleveland Clinic — but none of it mentions the lasting psychological effects of the condition. For example, I have developed SSPTSD: skeeter syndrome post-traumatic stress disorder.

The main symptom of SSPTSD? It’s going fucking nuts whenever you think a mosquito is near you.

We’ll be sitting in the living room watching TV and the tiniest shadow will pass in front of the screen. That’s a mosquito, right? Right? I become hypervigilant. I rise from my chair, straining my eyes to see the intruder. I slap at dust motes in the air, freckles on my arm.

Or I’m in bed, about to fall asleep, when I hear that distinctive high-pitched drone. Eeeeeeee. That little fucker’s in here! I snap on the light, my pulse pounding. I’ve got to find it, or risk waking up covered in bites, my exposed skin a topographic map of angry pink volcanoes.

Climate change has increased the mosquito’s range and lengthened its season. Today it’s me with skeeter syndrome (ugh). Tomorrow it could be you. And don’t even get me started on ticks.2

I follow British politics the way some people follow Mexican telenovelas or pornographic fan fiction: as an entertaining and harmless pastime involving outlandish characters engaging in unbelievable gyrations. Last week, I was surprised to see that one of those characters — Nigel Farage — had a “hissy fit.”

I wasn’t surprised that Farage — a member of Parliament and the head of the right-wing Reform UK party — had a hissy fit, just that his actions had been described as such. And described as such not by some Fleet Street columnist but by the head of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch.

Some background: Farage has been embroiled in a scandal over dodgy gifts and questionable friends, including £5 million from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire and loads of free stuff from a convicted wire fraudster. Most of this largesse Farage did not declare. On July 7, he gave a speech in which he showed whatever the opposite of contrition is (protrition?). Farage played the victim, kvetching about how he could be earning more money doing something else. He announced he would resign his parliamentary seat in Clacton so he could then turn around and run for it again, thereby letting the voters decide his guilt or innocence in a “people versus the establishment” by-election.1

Badenoch was having none of it, saying: “He went on telly having a hissy fit because for the first time, he is finally having to face some scrutiny after a very long honeymoon and he cannot handle it.”

Having a hissy fit. Man, that took me back to junior high.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “hissy fit” as a “fit of temper, an angry outburst, a tantrum.” It also notes: “chiefly U.S.”

It’s such an infantilizing expression. Being angry and having a temper may be adult emotions, but tantrums are a child’s domain. “Hissy fit” evokes stomping feet, balled fists, held breath.

The OED suggests “hissy fit” comes from “hysteric.” Its earliest published reference is from 1967, in a dictionary of American regional English, though it found earlier references to “hissy” alone, as in “threw a hissy.”

Commenters on a web page called English Language & Usage offered other possible derivations: the hissing of a cat; the Norwegian word “hissig,” meaning angry and irascible; the agitated way Hessian mercenaries reacted to being captured by American soldiers during the Revolutionary War. (Get it? Hessian/hissing/hissy.)

I like this OED citation from Fannie Flagg’s 1981 novel “Coming Attractions”: “Momma always looks like she is on the verge of a hissy fit, but that’s mainly because when she was eighteen, she stuck her head in a gas oven looking at some biscuits and blew her eyebrows off.”

Online book and newspaper databases make it easier to find references now than whenever the OED plucked its examples. I found one from 1943 in Oklahoma City’s News-Review: “Rev. Mathes thinks some of the old shell-backs2 that have hissy fits every time the younger generation have a good time have the same complex as those old timers who stoned the prophets and burned the witches in Salem. They also forget that they used to kick their heels pretty high when they were young.”

I don’t know who Rev. Mathes was, but this is a good way of using “hissy fit,” since it ascribes childish behavior to a grown-up, just the sort of thing that bugs a certain kind of grown-up.

Nigel Farage strikes me as that kind of grown-up. He’s often mentioned as Britain’s next prime minister. This crypto cash scandal could derail that dream, but so, too, could the public perception that he is an unserious person,3 a person prone to hissy fits.

Frankly, as much as I love the phrase “hissy fit,” I don’t like Americanisms creeping into British speech. (See Lady Grantham: “What is a ‘weekend’?”) Badenoch could have chosen an English saying.4 In the U.K., a person who becomes unreasonably frustrated or angry is said to have “had a wobbly.” Someone who had a tantrum “threw his toys from the pram,” an expression that evokes immaturity perfectly.

But we’re all living in Donald Trump’s world now. Farage has taken so many pages from Trump’s playbook he should pay him royalties. His stance toward immigrants, his appeals to populism, his constant sense of grievance, his, uh, laxity towards people who may conceivably want to curry favor with their no-strings-attached gifts. Hey, it seems to be working for Trump.

Or maybe the scandal behind Farage’s hissy fit will actually force him to, well, take his ball and go home.

I’m not looking to get rich. I’m already rich, in the sense that my assets allow me to feed, clothe and house myself, with a little left over for the occasional drum set. I’m comfortable. I’m not wealthy enough to be perverted by money, though I confess I would like to be closer to that hypothetical perversion line, just close enough to peer over it.

So, eBay Monday is not my attempt to get rich. EBay Monday is my attempt to get rid of some of the shit that clogs my house.

You may be wondering: What is eBay Monday? So glad you asked. Every Monday I take at least one item that I’ve retrieved from the basement, the attic or the closet and stick it on eBay. Does this Washington Nationals Bryce Harper chia head — mint in box — no longer bring me joy? Onto the eBay Monday conveyor belt it goes.

So far, I’ve made (checks notes)…negative $24.06.

I am not good at business.

You can structure your eBay sales in different ways. You can have a “buy it now” price. Or you can sell it “auction style,” starting at whatever price you like, with or without a reserve (the minimum you’ll take), and of various lengths.

Drawing on its vast corpus of previous transactions — and applying generous dollops of AI — eBay can write the description itself. It can suggest a price, based on what similar items have sold for. It will estimate the cost of shipping, which you can pass on to the buyer. It will even print the shipping label.

On my first eBay Monday I posted a “British Air Junior Jet Club Vintage Log Book 1970s.” This was a little hard-cover ledger given to kids who flew on British Air, with a place to fill in details on each flight. It had one entry: July 16, 1976, when I flew from Dulles to London on a Boeing 747. I did that as “buy it now,” starting at around $15. When no one bit, I sold it for $8.95 to a gentleman in Connecticut. My take was $6.43. Next I sold a 1972 USAF Thunderbirds brochure, signed by three of the pilots. That went for $10 and I pocketed $7.38.

What these items had in common was they were small and flat. Shipping and handling was easy for eBay to estimate: $5.73 in both cases. Small and flat did not apply to the next items.

We have a lot of Washington Nationals memorabilia, gathered in our days as season ticket holders: bobbleheads, rally towels, programs, cups, lanyards. This stuff is not rare. Literally thousands of these tchotkes were given away to fans as they streamed into the ballpark on any particular day. My wife, Ruth, and I decided to bundle similar items and sell it in bulk.

And that’s where eBay Monday turned into Black Monday, or maybe Red Monday, ie, in the red.

Here’s a bunch of Bryce Harper stuff: three bobbleheads, two tiny action figures, a ceramic Bryce chia head, a Nats yearbook with Bryce on the cover. Here are a pair of political animals: a Democratic donkey and G.O.P. elephant in Nationals livery. I thought I’d experiment a bit with eBay Monday. Rather than doing “buy it now,” as with the previous items, I set these up as timed auctions. Critically, I neglected to set a reserve. I let eBay set the starting price.

The starting price wound up being the ending price. My Bryce bundle sold for $5.99. The animals sold for $1.

But at least the buyers would pay shipping, right? Well, I hadn’t paid any attention to what eBay set as the shipping rates. I’d blithely clicked through. It cost $57 to ship the Harperabilia. The buyer chipped in $20. It cost $14 to ship the donkey and elephant. The buyer paid half that.

I’ve literally been paying people to take crap off my hands.

I have no one to blame but myself. But now that I’ve realized the problem, I’ve instituted policies to address this issue. And on the plus side, I’ve made $64 on Poshmark. That’s a Web site where you can literally sell the clothes off your back. I’ve found that since I retired, a lot of my clothes have, um, shrunk.

I’m thinking I may need to explore Facebook Marketplace and CraigsList as eBay Monday alternatives. I’ve used them both in the past and found them to be flaky. People promise to take something then never show up. And there’s always the chance that the person who does show up is a serial killer.

Actually, “Serial Killer Monday” is a great title for a true-crime podcast.

My father was a better father than he should have been.

That sounds like faint praise — you were better than expected, Dad! — but I don’t mean it that way. John Patrick Kelly didn’t have a father growing up so he didn’t have anything on which to model fatherhood. My brother and I — and, later, our step siblings — must at times have seemed like a question he hadn’t studied for.

Dad, you passed.

That’s what I tried to tell him as he lay dying in April. He had Alzheimer’s disease and his dementia had made it easier for me to say sappy things to him, things like “You were a good father” and “I love you.”

Today is my first fatherless Father’s Day. My father died on April 15, 2026. He was 87. His dementia meant that I’d pre-mourned his death. It was a relief in a way. The last few years hadn’t been fun for any of us.

John blamed his dementia — what he preferred to call his “short-term memory loss” — on his father, who died of Alzheimer’s in 1992. John’s father, Francis Kelly, hadn’t given him much. Francis had abandoned my grandmother and their four children for his secretary when my dad was about 5. In my father’s eyes, all he’d left behind was that terrible curse.

For most of his life, my father was a great raconteur. The older he got, though, the fewer stories he told. It was as if Alzheimer’s had whittled his life down to a handful of anecdotes, a few mountaintops poking above the surface of a rising sea of dementia.

There was the time he accidentally hit his favorite cousin, Molly, with a baseball. There was that airman who would annoyingly read aloud from the Bible when my father flew a B-50 into typhoons off the coast of Japan. There was the reconnaissance mission John botched in Vietnam by flying too fast over the enemy’s positions in his RF-4.

Two stories about his father survived till almost the end. One was about the time in the 1980s when Francis had shown up unannounced with his wife at the front gate of Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, where my father was the deputy base commander.

“Well, I guess you finally outrank me,” said Francis, who had been a Navy officer during World War II.

Francis’s wife, Jean, was taking him to see each child, knowing that he probably wouldn’t be able to recognize them much longer. If she’d hoped for a rapprochement with John, it didn’t work.

The other story Dad told was about the previous time he had seen his father, nearly 30 years earlier. In 1957, John’s older brother, Francis — their father’s namesake — died when his U.S. Air Force bomber crashed during a training mission in Texas. Their father came to the funeral in Washington.

“My friends had to hold me back,” John would say. “I wanted to punch him.” My father, then 18, was enraged that the father who hadn’t been around for his oldest son’s life was there after his death.

But who knows what was really going on. It was a different time. To be divorced — to be a divorced Catholic — was shameful. In retrospect, it’s possible my grandmother wouldn’t let her ex-husband see the kids, that she thought it better for them to grow up with no father rather than with that father.

And so, paternally speaking, John had to make it up as he went along.

I didn’t know any of that growing up. I never asked why I had one grandfather, not two. And it must have pained my father when his marriage — to my mother, Peggy — ended when I was 12 and my brother 10. But he remained in our lives.

I sometimes think of John as a pretty standard 1960s dad. Pipe tobacco. Old Fashioneds. Bermuda shorts and barbecues. He was not overly demonstrative with his love, but I know he enjoyed his sons. I have a cache of letters my mother wrote to her family when we were stationed in Japan in 1963. She talks about John eagerly playing with me. And a remember a game called Tangly Bush: My father would envelop me in his arms and I could only escape by being perfectly still, when his embrace would slowly loosen, only to tighten if I stirred too soon.

I also remember long family drives and the dreadful deceleration of the car when he’d had enough of my brother and I fighting in the backseat, the threatened belt, the threat realized. Most fathers don’t do that today — they probably shouldn’t have then — but John was a military man and a bit of a hard-ass. But he wasn’t a huge hard-ass. When I saw “The Great Santini” I thought, “God, I’m glad my father isn’t that bad.”

John wasn’t bad at all. He was proud of me, even if he didn’t really understand me. I was a few things he wasn’t: A worrier. A procrastinator. A catastrophizer. A reader. When I became a man, I paid people to fix my car, fix my sink, paint my house. He did those things himself. (Things, I realize now, he must have taught himself to do, since he had no father to teach him.)

John was restless, always in motion, always wanting to be in the world. I wanted to be in my head. This may have bugged him at times, disappointed him, even.

A memory: We’re on a lake in a rented speedboat that he’s piloting across the water. I’m 7 or 8, trussed up in a life jacket that looks like a faded orange marshmallow. He slowly backs off the throttle. We stop dead in the water, the engine putt-putting in neutral. I know what he’s going to ask before he asks it. And I know what I’m going to say.

“Johnny, come up here,” my father says. “Why don’t you drive?”

“I don’t want to drive. I don’t think I’m allowed to drive.”

I don’t drive.

Did John ever think to himself — worry — that he was flying blind as a father? He never said. And maybe that’s something you can’t do as a father — or at least couldn’t do back then: Admit doubt. Confess that you’re making it up as you go along. Tell your son or daughter that this is new for both of you.

We never said “I love you” growing up. My mother, yes. My father, no. But surely the proof was there, is still there.

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one — except maybe to Marc A. Thiessen1 — that Donald Trump has botched his effort to beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. If this had happened to you — your pool full of soupy, green algae; the fancy new paint peeling from the bottom — you’d be on the phone with the Better Business Bureau. But then, you wouldn’t have tendered a no-bid contract.

The Roman emperor and fixer-upper Augustus supposedly said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” Future historians will say: “Trump found Washington a city of marble and left it a city of slime, holes and tarps.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Trump can pivot and say he wanted algae in the Reflecting Pool. Why? One word: aquaculture.

Think of all those Japanese restaurants serving seaweed salad with their miso soup. Or those sushi rolls wrapped in dried seaweed. Think of spirulina, a blue-green algae prized for its anti-oxidant properties and which NASA sent into space as astronaut chow. Or Calerpa lentillifera, aka “sea grapes,” a bead-like algae that, according to Wikipedia, “bursts with a salty, briny flavor.” Mmmm.

Trump could sign an executive order transforming the Reflecting Pool into a large, state-of-the-art algae-production facility.

Such aquaculture is not without precedent. In 1879, fish ponds were dug into the land between the Washington Monument and the Potomac. As I wrote in my Washington Post column in 2017, officials at the U.S. Fisheries Commission were concerned about declines in fish populations. They hoped that breeding fish in the ponds — carp at first, but eventually shad, bass and crappie — and sending little fingerlings around the country could reverse overfishing. Americans could order free baby fish from the Federal government, which would ship them in bottles by rail.2

I know that Trump has probably never eaten a fish, let alone a bit of algae. But he loves insisting that the mistakes he makes weren’t actually mistakes. He meant to do them. He favors the “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” style of governance. Rather than saying the “Dumocrats” are overstating the algal outbreak at the Reflecting Pool, he could say it’s all part of his plan to grow the green economy. 3

In other words, Trump can get by with a little kelp from his friends.

If you ask me, when the recording you hear every single time you call a toll-free customer service line is “We are experiencing longer than normal hold times,” then maybe those hold times — the longer hold times — have become the normal hold times. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder this over the last month as I’ve spent hours on the phone trying to straighten out a screw up made by my health insurance company, CareFirst.

I’ve long believed that, like other people’s genealogical discoveries, outpatient surgeries and grandchildren, other people’s insurance horror stories are boring. I make no promises about this one. Saying “My health-insurance company messed up,” is like saying “Water is wet” — and just about as interesting. Still, pray indulge me.

This all started on a March evening in 1961 at a hospital in Rome’s Parioli district called the Clinica Quisisana (literally “here you get healthy”). It was there that a wide-eyed, raven-haired baby named Ruth was born. Reader, I married that baby — after she grew up, of course.

Ruth has kept on growing, so much so that in March of this year, she turned 65. And that meant Ruth was eligible for Medicare and had to be dropped as a dependent from my health insurance.1 (I’ve always been younger than my wife.)

For most of our lives, Ruth and I had insurance through my employer, The Washington Post. The buyout package I took in 2024 included 18 months of Cobra. When that ran out I had to procure insurance through the Maryland Health Exchange. That was fine, if expensive (about $2,000 a month).

And then, as inexorably as a sunset, that relentless leviathan called Time caught up with poor Ruth and she had to transition to Medicare. (My god this is so boring. I almost fell asleep typing that sentence.) I notified CareFirst that Ruth was turning 65 and should be dropped from my policy. They sent us a form. We filled out the form. Suspecting that something might get screwed up, when I returned the form I included the entreaty “PLEASE DO NOT terminate my CareFirst insurance coverage.”

Two months later I’m checking in at the podiatrist and the receptionist utters the words that turn my guts to ice: “Has something changed with your insurance? It’s not taking your card.” I put that visit on my Visa card, got my feet fondled, then hurried home to Deal With It.

A month later, I’m still dealing with it. It turns out that rather than just dropping Ruth, CareFirst had terminated the entire policy as of March 1. I’d been unknowingly without insurance for nearly two months, blithely slicing avocados, mowing the lawn, and driving a nitroglycerin-filled truck on dirt roads over the mountains to extinguish an oil well fire.

CareFirst said I’d filled out the wrong form — the form they sent me! the form I sent back with a plea not to terminate my coverage! — and that I would have to go back to the Maryland Health Exchange and reapply. I did that. But the insurance wouldn’t start up again till the first of the month, meaning I’d be uncovered for three perilous days.

I wrapped myself in gauze and sat in an empty bathtub breathing through an N95 mask.

No I didn’t. I filed a formal complaint with the Maryland Insurance Administration, demanding that CareFirst explain how my policy was mistakenly terminated, how often that happens to other customers, and what specific steps it would take to address the problem.2 I sent out as many emails as I could to various CareFirst departments, knowing that the entire structure of corporate America is designed to withstand assault from mere consumers.

And I kept calling CareFirst, hearing “We are experiencing longer than normal hold times” countless times, jabbing buttons on my phone with my fingers and shouting “Representative! Representative!” until I was hoarse. After a week of this I finally found someone in customer service who actually said “This does look like a CareFirst error. May I put you on a brief hold to investigate further?”

Yes! Hold me! Hold me!

This representative said the termination request should never have been processed by CareFirst. She promised to “escalate” the issue. In fact, she said she was going to “escalate to reinstate.”

Escalate to reinstate! Escalate to reinstate!

Well, things didn’t really escalate. The escalation wasn’t like the advent of World War I after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand: quick and inevitable. It was more like the escalators in the Metro system: broken. My issue had to go before the Maryland Health Exchange again, CareFirst said. The exchange needed to retransmit some form to CareFirst.

There were other ups and downs — I had my insurance; I didn’t have my insurance — until I finally got a new card in the mail, with coverage retroactive to March. I even got money back from the podiatrist. Everything was looking good.

You know how every horror movie has a scene where the protagonist thinks the monster is finally dead only to be grabbed by a bony hand suddenly erupting out of the dirt? My bony hand was the chirpy letter I got last week from CareFirst announcing they had “completed your recent request to terminate your healthcare policy with us.”

My request?!?!? Escalate to reinstate to…terminate?

So, back on the phone. Back on hold. Back chanting “Representative.” Yesterday a CareFirst customer rep said it appeared the problem was due to a PDF sent from the health exchange that was corrupted. There was, she said, “some sort of cryptic in the fileage.”

Bustle in your hedgerow? Fine. Cryptic in your fileage? Not good. She said she would put me on hold, call the Maryland Health Connection herself, and then undertake a “warm transfer,” which I took to mean she would stay on the line with me, handing me like a flesh baton to the next runner in the marathon that is this month-long farce.

And she did. The Maryland Health Connection promised to resend the file and said I should check back in 10 days or so. CareFirst said not to worry, it sure looked to them as if I did have coverage.

I suspect at this point, what we have is computers sending messages back and forth, generating letters like the one I received, impervious to humans who say “Please do not terminate my insurance” and “Representative, representative.” We live in a “Terminator” world where long after the last human has died, Skynet will be talking to itself, apologizing for longer than normal hold times while the chromium sky burns.3

I spent a couple months earlier this year living in North London. I wasn’t in a particularly posh area, but when I walked along the Finchley Road — or looked down from atop the No. 13 bus — I saw an overabundance of posh furniture stores: Ligne Roset. BoConcept. Roche Bobois. At one point, there were two Roche Bobois showrooms a block from each other. One closed down, only to move just a few blocks up the street, surely the densest concentration of Roche Boboises (Roches Bobois?) on the planet.

What I decided when I looked in the windows was: Those couches look really uncomfortable.

The seats were deep. If you wanted to support your spine, you’d have to scootch back, leaving your feet dangling over the edge, like Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann in her gargantuan rocking chair. Even then, your back wouldn’t have much support, since the backrests were so shallow. The tops of the backrests ended somewhere around the T6 thoracic vertebra. Relax your core and you’d flop back as if felled by a sniper.

I saw the same design in last Sunday’s T, The New York Times Style Magazine. There were ads for Roche Bobois, but also for Sixpenny and Flexform and Edra. Every sofa was a vast horizontal fabric platform equipped with either a low wedge of vertical cushion or an explosion of pillows. The couches were low to the ground, too, hard to get up off of. These couches — selling for up to $22,000 — would be a nightmare to sit on.

To me, anyway. But maybe rich people are different. I mean, they are different and always have been.1 Conspicuous consumption sometimes means showing off your discomfort, like a high-born Chinese woman being forced to have her feet bound. I’m so rich my wife doesn’t have to, you know, walk!

I get that these ads are aspirational. And the rooms do reek of a certain kind of comfort, not the comfort that comes from sitting comfortably, but from living free from care. If I did my living in a living room like that, it would mean my life was pretty sweet.

The other thing I always think when I see a copy T Magazine or Architectural Digest is: Where do rich people put their shit?

I am typing this at my dining room table, which, in addition to my laptop, holds a stack of bills (VISA, Orkin), file folders related to our 2025 taxes, a stapler, a checkbook, a bottle of antifog lens cleaner, a (possibly broken) film camera2, Sunday’s Post Metro section, Sunday’s T Magazine, a CD sent to me3, my AirPods, and a plastic pill caddy waiting to be loaded with another week’s worth of medication.

I suppose rich people don’t need plastic pill caddies. They have actual pill caddies: tan young men in golf shirts who follow them around with an organized tray of Ritalin and stem cells.

I’ve been talking about sofas but rich people have weird taste in chairs, too:

At least, I think that’s a chair. It might be a caterpillar.

Unfriend me now if you post status updates that read, in their entirety, “I could really use your prayers now.”

You want my prayers? I want your story. Are you sick? With what? Is someone close to you sick? Who? Did your dog die? How? Did you lose your life savings in a Ponzi scheme? How much we talking about?

The default setting on sites such as Facebook is “overshare.” When someone undershares, I feel cheated. That fact that I hardly know you — I mean, it’s Facebook — in no way diminishes my hunger for details. You will not get a “like” from me, or a sad-face emoji, if you’re vague. Having said that, I don’t need a photo of your infected spider bite.

Surely there is a middle ground between spider bite photo and “And I thought today was going so well.” (God damnit, why isn’t it going so well?)

Similarly, I will not be shamed into copying and pasting your soliloquy on how awful cancer is — or mental illness, poverty, climate change, spider bites, etc.... If you post “Only one in a hundred will read this far. Post if you agree,” I will seek out a pro-spider bite charity and make a donation. And if I can’t find one, I will create one. Our slogan: “We speak for the spiders.”

My achin’ head!

That photo at the top of this post? It’s from the Library of Congress. I often turn to the LC’s image collection for copyright-free art with which to illustrate my words. I originally searched for “damsel tied to railroad tracks,” but nothing came up. Then I tried “sick woman” and that photo was among the hits. (It’s by Dorothea Lange and the caption reads “Sick woman awaits visit of the doctor. Merrill FSA [Farm Security Administration] camp, Klamath County, Oregon.”)

I was curious what else I might find, so I searched “headache.” And then I got lost in the world of 1890s trademark applications for anti-headache nostrums. I love the past. The more time I spend in the present, the more I love it. I’m especially enamored of the goofy ways companies named and marketed their products back then.1

There are applications for such scientific sounding products as Phenalgercine and Neuralgyline. There is both Antialgia and Antialgica — from two competing companies. Some products spell out what they’re meant to achieve: Headache Stop. Head-Ease. New Heads for Old. Go to Sleep. Good Night’s Rest. Brace-Me-Up. Headacura.

After the Ball must be a hangover remedy. Febrina sounded to me like a woman’s name.

There are two headache teas named, somewhat incongruously, after assassinated presidents: Garfield Tea (“medicine for relief of headache”) and Lincoln Tea (“for diseases of the blood, liver, kidneys, and bowels, dyspepsia, headache, biliousness, and neuralgia”).2

Best of all, though, are the illustrations accompanying some of the remedies, which mainly attempt to personify the headache, often in distressing ways. Herewith a gallery for your enjoyment.

Finally, if all else failed, there was always the carbolic smoke ball and the magnetic anti-headache cap:

And if you’re looking for a good book on this subject — migraine and cluster headaches, not 19th-century marketing 3— check out “The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction — and a Search for Relief” by Tom Zeller Jr.

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When I was 13 and 14, I went to a public high school outside of Cambridge, England, called Hinchingbrooke. Hinchingbrooke School was what the English used to call a “bog-standard comprehensive.” It was a state school, open to anyone who could breathe, even if they breathed through their mouth. Even so, Hinchingbrooke had some of the fancy trappings today’s Americans would recognize from Harry Potter, including school uniforms and “houses.”

My old alma mater is still going strong. In fact, I nearly spit out my coffee this week when I saw that Hinchingbrooke was the subject of an op-ed in, of all places, The Washington Post. The headline: “Another ludicrous canceling of a name from the past.”

The culture wars have come to l’il ol’ Hinchingbrooke!

The essay in The Post was by a writer named Andrew Doyle, whose books include “The New Puritans” and “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect From the Counter-Revolution.”

What insidious wokery has infected Hinchingbrooke? Well it seems the students and staff have voted to rename one of the houses.

When I was at Hinchingbrooke, pupils were divided into four houses, a system which aims to engender pride and friendly competition: Cromwell, Montagu, Pepys and Vesey.1

Today we know that at least one of the houses’ namesakes was — I don’t know how else to put this — a self-confessed pussy grabber.

Why was I at Hinchingbrooke in the first place? Well, my father was in the U.S. Air Force. He was “seconded” to RAF Brampton as an exchange officer with the Royal Air Force. We lived on the RAF base and my brother, Chris, and I donned the green blazers and striped ties of Hinchingbrooke, just down the road in Huntingdon.2

This was 1976, just after the U.S. bicentennial. Britain wasn’t as Americanized then as it is now. It truly was a foreign land. How foreign? Starbursts were called Opal Fruits. I took notes for each class in a different small, blank notebook. Each student also had a “rough book,” a book we were meant to use for drafts of projects, before committing them to the appropriate book.

I went native at Hinchingbrooke, developing an English accent, putting slashes through my 7s, and playing rugby for the school team. (We lost every game but one, which we tied. I’d been removed in the first minute of that game after breaking my nose.)

The level of instruction was high, even if some of the amenities at Hinchingbrooke paled in comparison to what I was used to. The junior high I’d left behind in America had a large “media center,” with shelf after shelf of books. The library at Hinchingbrooke was about the size of an American dining room.

But there was another part of Hinchingbrooke that was better endowed: the sixth form, which is roughly equivalent to junior and senior year in the U.S. system. It’s where students prepare to take their exams for college. At Hinchingbrooke, the sixth form is in a castle: Hinchingbrooke House.

As for those house names, the Cromwells were the first family to live in Hinchingbrooke House. (The regicide Oliver Cromwell didn’t live there but went to school in Huntingdon.) Later, the earls of Sandwich lived at Hinchingbrooke, all of whom had the last name Montagu.3 Vesey was an archdeacon in the church of England who worked in Huntingdon.

That leaves Pepys House, named for Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist who briefly attended Hinchingbrooke. Doyle, the Post op-ed writer, calls Pepys’s diaries “intensely personal,” and indeed they are. That’s what makes them so fascinating to read. Pepys wrote about the events of his day — the Great Fire of London! the plague! — but also about his own escapades and foibles. Some of his foibles included being a randy bugger, aka, a horn dog.

That, at least, is how many people think of Pepys: an old goat always looking for a little action. Doyle himself admits as much in his essay, recognizing that there is “frequent discomfort over Pepys’s diaries, because they are the work of someone with apparently little sexual restraint.”

That is why the Hinchingbrooke community voted to change the name of Pepys House, unforgivably in Doyle’s estimation: “The shaming of the dead is one of the most asinine pastimes of today’s culture warriors,” he wrote. “We have seen their shrill demands enacted in the renaming of streets and buildings, the removal of statues and the ‘decolonization’ of curriculums.”

Member of the anti-wokerati often argue that we shouldn’t apply today’s standards to yesterday’s figures. But Guy de la Bédoyère, author of the newly-published The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus), says that even by 17th century standards, Pepys was a serial and obsessive abuser of women.

Pepys apparently tried to obscure his depravity in his diaries, writing them in shorthand and using a melange of foreign words when recounting his sexual endeavors. When the diaries were published, these sections were often excised. Even the “unexpurgated” version published in 1970 leaves some incidents untranslated. Readers understood that Pepys got up to what were called “comical” interactions or “erotic” adventures without knowing the details.

And the details are grim. Pepys cheated on his wife, Elizabeth, continuously, including with her maid, Deb. After Elizabeth caught him trying to fondle Deb, the girl was fired. Pepys continued to pursue Deb, writing on April 15, 1669: “I led her into a little blind alehouse within the walls, and there she and I alone fell to talk and besar la and tocar su mamelles [‘kiss her and touch her breasts’] but she mighty coy and I hope modest but however, though with great force, did hazer ella con su hand para tocar mi thing, but ella was in great pain para be brought para it [‘did make her with her hand touch my thing, but she was in great pain to be brought to it’].”

Pepys had sex with the wives of tradesmen hoping to do business with him. Riding with Elizabeth in a coach with another couple, he took the other woman’s hand and put it on his penis. On their next coach ride, he slid his hand under the same woman’s skirt and groped her genitals. He noted in his diary that he had to use “some little violence” to make her “yield.”

In one diary entry, Pepys laments the bruises left on his hand after a sexual encounter got physical. This sounds more like a rapist to me than a rogue.

And, de la Bédoyère insists, Pepys knew it was wrong: “If the extent of his behaviour had been exposed at the time he would have been denounced and his reputation destroyed. That was why he was so terrified of being caught,” he writes on his blog, “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” which provides an annotated diary entry every day.

Some anti-woke activists embrace what-aboutism. What about Cromwell House, Doyle writes, given that Oliver Cromwell was responsible for massacring thousands of Catholics? I think today’s students are more likely to encounter someone like Pepys than Cromwell. Pepys is not the sort of person you’d want driving your daughter to field hockey practice.

It’s no surprise to me that the Hinchingbrooke community decided to dis-honor him. In my opinion, the students should be commended. They gave the issue some thought, more thought than their critics have. I liked the video the students put online explaining their actions and introducing the nominees to replace Pepys in the school’s house system: Olivia Sparrow (1775-1863), who funded schools across the Huntingdon area; John Wakelin (1929-2018), a respected head teacher at Hinchingbrooke; and Mary Stuart, who taught English at the school, served on the board of governors and helped push back efforts to redevelop the school site into a block of apartments.

The kids probably knew they were going to get shit from people like Doyle — and from writers in the Telegraph, the Critic and elsewhere — but they stuck to their guns.

In his Post op-ed, Doyle wrote: “Putting the past on trial is a foolish exercise.”

No it isn’t. It is a useful exercise. It’s how you actually learn about the past.

There’s a lot of bullshit in the letter that Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray sent to his staff today as he was axing them. It’s full of the sort of corporate gobbledygook that journalists love making fun of when others do it. But the line that particularly frosts me is this one: “We have concluded that the company’s structure is too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product.”

I heard that for years at The Post, where I worked from 1989 to 2023. The Post had it good for a long time, digital seers would opine, but the print model is broken.

Okay, fine. Figure something else out then.

No one did. Meanwhile, “print” somehow became synonymous with “the stuff we don’t see value in.”

When I started at The Post there was still a Composing Room, where typeset stories on photo paper were affixed with wax to grid-lined sheets of cardboard and trucks filled with newspapers rolled out of the loading dock early every morning. When I left, you could read the paper on your phone, even if you lived in a foreign country. Progress!

Seriously, that’s great. I, too, love reading a “paper” on my phone. But along the way, the things that made The Post newsprint product strong — the Metro section, the Friday Weekend section, the coupons — were seen to be sad or contemptible or repugnant.

The minute you mentioned anything slightly positive about print — that even well into the internet era The Post still made most of its money from print advertising, say, or that print subscribers were our most loyal readers — you were given a pitiful look, as if you’d said, “Oh, you can keep your penicillin. Whenever I get an infection, I bury a garlic bulb in a graveyard.”

The same people who were telling us to break the paradigm, to think of “the newspaper” in a new way, were unable to look at these things in a new way. When then-executive editor Sally Buzbee met with me and some of my Metro colleagues in 2023 to explain why most of our particular team was slated for extinction,1 I said that local readers were important and probably would notice Metro being downsized, despite the “We’re cutting back to better serve you, the customer” tone that was already percolating.

Buzbee gave me that sad look and said there was no future in newsprint.2

I hadn’t said that there was! I’d just said that local readers were important. I guess what I should have said was, “I’ve come up with a brilliant plan to serve local readers online, a Web strategy that will allow us to keep those readers. And get more. And make money from them.”

Of course, that was her job. And Fred Ryan’s job. I wasn’t management so I didn’t know the specifics of the challenges we faced. But I would have respected them more if Buzbee and her underlings had just said, “Look, we’ve decided that local news and entertainment is a dead end, revenue-wise, and revenue is the name of the game. We don’t even want to stick it online.”

Instead, they seemed to instantly brand as a Luddite anyone who tried to explain why Metro was important: Our future is not in print!

It wasn’t just Sally Buzbee. It had started a decade before her arrival, when all manner of digital evangelists began popping up in the newsroom. Most of them stayed for a couple of years, spouted a lot of catchphrases, keynoted a lot of conferences, then scampered off to places like Vox.

What I learned then was: Never trust a man who wears a sport coat over a T-shirt. (Which, coincidentally, is what Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis3 was wearing the only time I met him.)

Critics will say I’m being overly nostalgic for a Bygone Era. (Just typing this I can hear Kara Swisher clucking.)4 I swear I’m not. I like reading The Post — and the Times and the Guardian and the (London) Times — on my phone. I never told those digital snake oil purveyors that we should stick with print.

But guess what? Their way didn’t work. And at some point they’re going to have to stop blaming newsprint for their inability to come up with something better.

Other voices, other newsrooms

Many of my former Post colleagues have written eloquently about today’s unfortunate events. Ruth Marcus has a lot of good stuff at the New Yorker: “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down The Washington Post.”

And Ashley Parker’s Atlantic essay — “The Murder of The Washington Post” — dares to be a bit…nostalgic.

The sun was not yet up when I left base camp, bundled like an Eskimaux with nothing but the moon to guide me. My plan was to hike west through the frozen waste, along the unplowed streets, then turn north and make my way to the subway and thence to the aerodrome, no vehicle being able to enter our snowbound street.

It was a distance of but a mile, but an unknown quantity of snow and ice lay between me and my goal.

I wore a balaclava, but the cold — 7 degrees Fahrenheit — hit the uncovered portion of my face like a slap: needles pricking the bridge of my nose, the orbits of my eyes, my delicate under-nostrils. The frozen air stung my lungs as I carefully descended my first obstacle, the stairs from my front door.

Providence — actually a guy with a snow shovel named Angel (the guy, not the snow shovel) — had cleared the steps, allowing relatively easy access to the street. I adjusted the pack on my back and turned left.

The storm had dropped 10 inches of snow then three inches of sleet, now frozen into an alabaster mattress that glinted in the moonlight like a faerie’s wonderland. No plow had deigned traverse the street, but an earlier truck had left twin ruts in the hardened surface, each no wider than — in fact, exactly as wide as — a tyre. I selected the southern track and put one foot in front of the other, being careful not to trip.

All around me were common objects rendered fantastical by the storm: Kias and Volvos and Hondas mantled by snow, each a leviathan sleeping under its gelid carapace.

I maintained that course until reaching the first plowed street, where I turned left, then right, ambulating along the vehicular lane, the sidewalks not being clear. The hour being early — not yet 5:30 a.m. — there was no traffic.

I was now confronted with my first challenge: How to cross a major thoroughfare? (Georgia Avenue, named for the American state, not for South Georgia Island, the whaling station in the South Atlantic.) Plows had formed great mountains of snow and ice at each corner. I chose one and made for it. Much of the hummock was cratered by earlier footfalls, but some was pristine and untouched. Would it hold my weight or would I plummet to an ice cave beneath?

I gingerly crept across the expanse of white, thanking the weather gods for the low temperature, which kept the crust intact. Then I pushed the button for a walk signal.

The next obstacle was Georgia Avenue itself. The blizzard, the wind and the rush of passing of vehicles had whipped the snow into a wild, impenetrable meringue that covered the sidewalk My route north was cut off.

But just as Everest climbers must go down to go up — traversing the Hillary Step on their push to the summit — so I had to deviate on my course. I left Georgia Avenue and turned west, following a gentle rise until I reached my salvation: the Aldi parking lot, swept clean of snow by the machines of commerce.

From there it was an easy transit to the station, marred only by a few icebound stretches of pavement that the crampons on my feet made easy work of. I successfully navigated the ice bridge that takes pedestrians under the Beltway then descended the steps into the Forest Glen Metro station, thanking Providence.

Then I got to the airport and saw that my flight was delayed six hours. Eff you, Providence.

Donald Trump wants a shrubbery. He doesn’t need a shrubbery. He doesn’t really understand what a shrubbery is. He doesn’t care that the shrubbery is already home to a vibrant ecosystem. Donald Trump just wants a shrubbery.

That shrubbery, of course, is Greenland.

Of all the wacky, unhinged things Trump has done in the last year — you’ll have your own Top 10 list — violating international norms and threatening to blow up decades of diplomacy to possess a large, frozen island is the wackiest.

But Trump wants his goddamn shrubbery.

The reference is from the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” As King Arthur and his knights search for the titular blessed goblet, they encounter various obstacles. At one point their way is blocked by a knight who demands appeasement in the form of a… shrubbery.

That’s nonsensical, of course, but that’s Monty Python. And that’s Trump. None of the reasons Trump gives for wanting to take control of Greenland — through tariffs or by force — make sense. There isn’t a parka-clad Sino-Soviet army ready to ski over the Arctic Circle and into Nuuk. The U.S. already has bases in Greenland. NATO is already dedicated to protecting Greenland. There’s plenty of room to hash out security details and mineral rights without threatening to invade.

And of course, even if Trump were to get Greenland, it wouldn’t satisfy his hunger. We only have to look again to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” for a metaphor. King Arthur does procure a shrubbery for the head knight of the Knights Who Say Ni. But that’s not enough:

HEAD KNIGHT:  Firstly, you must find... another shrubbery!
       [dramatic chord]
   ARTHUR:  Not another shrubbery!
   HEAD KNIGHT:  Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must place
       it here beside this shrubbery, only slightly higher so you get a
       two-level effect with a little path running down the middle.
   RANDOM:  A path!  A path!  Nee!
   HEAD KNIGHT:  Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut
       down the mightiest tree in the forest... with... a herring!

That’s Trump: Nothing is enough for him. He won’t be satisfied until every human, corporation, university, media outlet and nation on the planet has bent the knee in front of him. He won’t be satisfied until he’s burned down everything from the West Wing of the White House to the Kennedy Center, from NATO to the Constitution.

I mean, the guy is mentally ill, right? There’s no way to satisfy someone like that, no matter how many shrubberies you lay at his feet.

In the end, King Arthur just ignores the Knights Who Say Ni. Arthur and his fellow knights canter past while the head Ni knight sputters uselessly behind them. Perhaps that’s what the civilized world should do with Trump.

Trump’s rapacious greed reminded me of another Monty Python character. Could it be that Trump will wind up like Mr. Creosote, whose hunger for a waffer thin mint finally spelled his doom?

I ought to be able to keep track of major holidays. I don’t really do anything anymore — I’m, uh, retired — and yet here I am.

I should say, here I am again. I do this every year. In the past, I’ve not been bothered by this. I spent 20 years on deadline, after all. I got a charge out of filing at the last minute, of strolling the mall with desperate, flop-sweating shoppers. I didn’t always make good decisions — I regret the year everyone on my list received Isotoner gloves — but it’s the thought that counts, right?

It’s not as if I even need to get many/any presents this year. When you no longer have little kids at home, Christmas loses some of its urgency. Ours will be a quiet holiday.

It wasn’t always so. I want to share something that once occupied my brain every holiday season: my family’s Beatles album-inspired Christmas cards. It’s been years now since they were created, but I figure Substack is a new medium on which to post them. They were created over the course of 20 years, starting in 1993, when the birth of our second daughter made us a quartet, and ending in 2013, when our daughters were proper adults and could make their own decisions about holiday traditions. We took the occasional year off. And, sadly, I can’t find our version of the White Album: a blank front cover, of course, but with four black-and-white portraits inside. Maybe there’s one on Discogs.

The early cards were assembled by my friend and Post colleague JoEllen Murphy. The artistic ones were illustrated and collaged by my wife, Ruth.

Happy holidays to one and all. Thanks for reading my spotty Substack. I hope to be back with more in 2026.

I, for one, welcomed yesterday’s snow: about two inches that fell in our Silver Spring, Md., neighborhood. Oh, sure, it was picturesque, but more importantly, it made it easier to find my dog’s poop.

If you have a dog and you walk it and you’re civilized and you pick up its poop, late autumn/early winter is a perilous time. The ground looks like dog feces, carpeted as it is in brown, fallen leaves. When the poop emerges from your dog and enters the, uh, public doo-main, it’s in danger of camouflaging itself like a veritable crap chameleon.

This is all made worse if you have a dog like mine. Archie doesn’t deliver a nice, neat, discrete pile of business, prepackaged for easy pickupability. He has weak back legs. Unable to maintain his stationary arched-back posture, he creeps forward, dropping his “gifts” in a ragged line, like Army paratroopers tossed out the back of a C-17. And, just as with the Army, you must never leave a man behind. And by “man” I mean poop link.

Now, this is relatively simple on freshly-mown grass, where the poop stands out like so many 8 balls on a billiard table. And it’s not so hard in freshly-fallen snow, where the poop China Syndromes its way down, leaving tell-tale surface traces of its whereabouts. Why, sometimes when the weather’s cold enough, the poop even steams — the world’s worst geyser.

But in the autumn, finding the poop can be like staring at a Magic Eye poster and waiting for the turd to resolve itself. That’s why I use a method inspired by my father.

My father was a sailor. Whenever he took me or my kids out on a boat, he’d carefully go over the safety rules. One was: If someone falls off the boat, never take your eyes off of them. Shout “Man overboard!” and maintain eye contact while the captain stops the boat and maneuvers it to pick them up. If you lose sight of them in the sea, you may never find them again.

And so it is with Archie’s poop. The minute he assumes the position, I block out all distractions. I pause my podcast. I ignore my peripheral vision. The world contracts to a single point, a point no larger than a dog’s anus. As each turd emerges, I count it off audibly: “One! Two! Three! Four!…”

The instant Archie is done, he’s eager to flee the scene of his cloacal crime. He wheels on his leash, trying to get away. I maintain my grip on the leash, never taking my eyes from the skein of waste. I repeat the count as I retrieve each piece: “One! Two! Three! Four!”

Am I 100 percent successful? No. I usually get it all, but when Archie decides to divide his gift into nine or 10 pieces, even I lose track, especially if the ground is leaf-strewn.

Animal magnetism

Years ago in my Washington Post column, I wrote about a zoologist at a German university who studied dogs and how they poop. Basically, Hynek Burda found that dogs tend to poop with their spines aligned in a north-south orientation. I think Archie does, too, though my observations are only anecdotal.

Burda led a group of German and Czech researchers. In was in the Czech Republic — Prague — that I came across a most unusual poop bag. A lot of jurisdictions make plastic poop bags available for free in parks. The ones in Prague were paper. Paper poop bags. I took one:

As horrific as the notion of a paper poop bag is, I find this one rather fetching. Of course, I love that the dog is a reading a newspaper (and wearing glasses and slippers). This was in 2007, so maybe the dog reads a smartphone now. And I love the instructions, which translated read: “We thank all dog owners for using the offered paper kits, because with your responsible approach you help us keep the center of our metropolis cleaner and more beautiful.”

And on the flip side of the bag are instructions on how to use the “kit.” You see, each bag contains a cardboard insert, scored so it can be folded into a little scoop:

There is a helpful illustration and instructions that read: “After collecting the feces and placing them in a bag (including spatula) the entire thing is disposed of by throwing it into a designated trash can.”

If only all the world’s troubles could be solved by keeping our eyes on them, placing them in a bag, and throwing them into a designated trash can.

Oh, and here’s a photo of Archie:

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This is a tale that will take us around the world and end in human sacrifice. Why, it’s a veritable Dan Brown story, even if the sacrifice is “by” a human and not “of” a human. The sacrifice? An expensive pair of tennis shoes I bought in Australia in October.

Frankly, they are ridiculous shoes, from a Spanish company called Camper. The uppers are made of a soft, flexible knit material, perfect for accommodating wide, buniony feet.1 What is most notable about the shoes, however, is their color: yellow. Bright yellow. Big Bird yellow. Tweety Bird yellow.

Only after your retinas have adjusted to the chrome yellow do you notice that the chunky rubber soles are purple — imagine grape Kool-Aid — and studded with what look like octopus suckers. These shoes — technically “Camper X Sunnei Pelotissima” — make those bulbous Hokas look like ballet slippers.

I blanched at the price — 324 Australian dollars, or $240 U.S. — but don’t I deserve nice things? The world is going to hell. Can’t I at least go there wearing comfortable yellow clown shoes? So I bought them.

When I got back to the U.S. I noticed that one of the metal eyelets had popped out of the left shoe’s fabric upper and was dangling on the lace like a lone puka shell on a pimply teenager’s necklace.2 This was not acceptable on so expensive a shoe.

I emailed Camper HQ and included a photo of the offending grommet. After some back and forth, the company accepted my claim and said they would send me a return label. But a return to where?

Should the shoes go back to Mallorca, where the company is headquartered? Or to Australia, where I bought them? Or to New York City, 200 miles from me and the location of the closest actual Camper store?

London has two brick-and-mortar Camper stores, and that’s where my travels would be taking me a week after returning from Sydney. So I made room in my suitcase for my imperfect shoes, figuring I could exchange them there.

Well, it turns out you can’t just stroll into the Carnaby Street Camper shop, clutching an Australian receipt, a Spanish email and a defective pair of Camper X Sunnei Pelotissimas and expect to leave with replacements. That’s one inventory that’s never going to balance out. The sales clerk phoned his boss, who I’m guessing said, “That’s Australia’s problem. Why should we eat a pair of effed up yellow trainers?”

I wound up buying a second pair of yellow tennis shoes in London. So now I had four shoes, 25 percent of which were imperfect, and I was out close to 500 bucks. I had to hope Spain would come through with my refund.

They promised they would. There was just the little matter of the shoes I’d bought in Sydney…

You know how sometimes when you buy something cheap on Amazon and you don’t like it and you want a refund and you’re happy to return it but the sellers says, “Don’t bother. This thing is so shoddy that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to take it back. Here’s your money, do what you will with the crap we sent you”?

Well, I was sort of hoping Camper would say that. A loose eyelet is a big deal on an expensive pair of shoes, not so much on a free pair. But this is what they said: “Just to inform you that we need our inventories to balance due to legal compliance, if you cannot return a product you have to prove that you are not selling it elsewhere as this could encourage its sale on the black market (informal economy).”

Camper was worried I might hang out in some back alley accosting passersby: “Pssst. Buddy. Wanna buy a pair of pollen-yellow shoes with Smucker’s soles and a missing grommet?”

How could I prove I wouldn’t do that? Like this: “For this reason, we asked you to prove that the shoe had been rendered useless, therefore please cut off both tongues from the shoe.”

They added: “email a picture of the tongues separated from the shoe, then we will process the wire transfer.”

Fast fashion — cheap fashion — is in the news a lot these days, and not in a good way. It’s wasteful, bad for the environment. I was beginning to wonder about the environmental cost of my shoes, which would either need to fly back to Europe or Australia or be eviscerated then dumped in a landfill. But I did want my $240 back.

Our flat in London was in the basement of a townhouse near the Regents Canal. It already had an IRA safe house feel to it, a place suited to bomb assembly and torture. To these would be added “tennis shoe snuff film.”

I took a dull pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and kneeled on the floor. In front of me were the the Isaacs to my Abraham: Camper X Sunnei Pelotissimas. I unlaced the shoes to get better access to the tongues. I cradled one shoe and started sawing at it, cutting through the stitching and fabric glue that held the tongue in place. Finally it came loose, like the meat from an oyster. I repeated the process on the other shoe.

I took a photo.

At least I didn’t have to do a John Paul Getty III on these shoes and send a tongue back to Spain. The photo would be sufficient.

I still haven’t seen my money. Camper says they process refunds on the 25th of every month. I’ll be watching my bank account.

In other news, my wife ordered a couple things from Amazon:

Shoe business

This isn’t the first time I’ve written at length about tennis shoes. Here’s a link to an earlier essay, about my love for Pumas. My Pumas are a window to my soul.

What’s become of that love? Curdled, alas. My bunion means old-style sneakers are painful. I’m all about New Balance and On now, with stretchy uppers and thick soles. Oh, and Campers.

My wife and I went to see “One Battle After Another” the other night and as the closing credits rolled, a woman sitting in front of me turned around and said: “You are very rude!”

Me? Rude?

Or rather, “Moi? Impoli?” The lady and her two companions — a man and a woman, all in their 40s — were inexplicably speaking French during the coming attractions and right up until the film began. They’d talked through the gentle on-screen admonitions not to talk or text during the movie, but surely everyone knows that. Those reminders are like the how-to-fasten-your-seat-belt instructions before takeoff, like: Duh.

And yet there was something about this trio that had my Spidey sense tingling. I turned to my wife, Ruth, and whispered: “If they keep this up, we can move down there.” I nodded at empty seats down the row, where we wouldn’t be behind the group.

It’s usually Ruth who goes off at movie theater scofflaws. And so, as when going out in public with a dangerous dog, I try to avoid situations that might end badly. Which is why we were all surprised when it was I who eventually barked.

Both women had been taking out their cellphones during the film, the lady in front of me reading texts and sending emojis, the other women sneaking quick peeks that weren’t quick enough. The movie was already frazzling me — what with its [spoiler alert] immigration roundups, domestic terrorism and priapic Sean Penn — and the bursts of white light from their phones weren’t helping my mood. About 90 minutes into the movie, I leaned toward the woman in front of me and said: “Can you please wait till the movie is over to text?”

Well, I say “I said” but “I hissed” might be a better word. I put some energy behind my request, some force, so much oomph, in fact, that had the woman been holding a large tub of popcorn rather than a cellphone, popcorn would have exploded everywhere. Reader, the woman jumped.

I felt bad about that. Bad for her — I honestly didn’t want to scare anyone — but also bad for me. My adrenalin had spiked, triggering a fight response. What was going to happen when the movie was over and the lights came up?

What happened was this: I sat in my seat, eyes glued to the closing credits, avoiding contact with the trio in front of us. Then the woman stood. She turned around and said, “You are very rude. You could have just asked me to put the phone away.”

I said: “Lady, you were on your phone throughout the movie.”

Then the other woman began defending her friend.

“But you were on your phone, too!” I said to her in a voice thick with extra scoff.

“I had to check on my daughter,” she said indignantly.

I really would like to have heard more about that. Your daughter, you say? How is she? Did you leave her sick at home? Or in an airtight room with just enough oxygen for 161 minutes when “One Battle After Another” clocks in at 162 minutes? Were you texting her to tell her where the extra oxygen was?

I guess I should feel lucky they didn’t shoot me. That sometimes happens at U.S. movie theaters. And I have to hope that when they describe the interaction to others — “A rude American man yelled at Sylvie at the movie theater!” — someone will say, “Wait. Go back. You were texting on your phone? You do realize that you’re the asshole, right?”

Or maybe being impolite in pointing out her impolitesse robbed me of the moral high ground: You catch more flies with honey, etc. (Although, actually, wouldn’t you catch more flies with shit?)

I am feeling more and more like a cranky old man, well into get-off-my-lawn territory. Earlier this year, the Maryland county I live in banned gas-powered leaf blowers. They’re loud. They pollute. They’re unhealthy for the people who use them. You may disagree with all those things and prize a gas-powered leaf blower’s ability to blow the shit out of leaves, but them’s the facts. And the chief fact is, they’re banned. So when I heard one shrieking in the back yard of a nearby house in the summer, I drove over to investigate.

Now, where we live — in coddled, arboreal suburbia — a lot of people use lawn services. That’s who was using this leaf blower, not a homeowner but a poor schmo hired by the homeowner. Or, rather, a poor schmo hired by someone hired by the homeowner. I rolled up in my car, rolled down my window and said that the use of gas-powered leaf blowers was prohibited.

He looked up the street to his boss, who came down to see what was up.

Now, there’s no way this guy didn’t know his blower was banned. The new law had been all over the news. The county had even offered rebates for electric leaf blowers. But this guy played dumb, as if hearing about it for the first time.

“Who made this law?” he asked.

I wasn’t sure where he was going. “Well, the county council,” I said.

But he didn’t mean what specific legislative body made the law. He meant who in society stood to benefit from this law.

“Rich people made this law,” he said. He proceeded to go all Marxist dialectics on me, which wasn’t quite wrong (I endorse eating the rich, starting with people just a little richer than me) but did seem beside the point, which was: gas-powered leaf blowers are banned.

He lectured me for 10 minutes before I said, “I don’t need this working-class hero crap.”

Actually, I didn’t say that. Richard Dreyfuss said that in “Jaws.” But I was finally able to get away.

Gas-powered leaf blowers continue to be used in our neighborhood. Sometimes I remonstrate. Sometimes I don’t.

It’s one battle after another.

“You’re going to need a bigger memory hole.”

That, at least, is what I imagine President Trump’s history-averse supporters exclaiming to each other. From Smithsonian Institution exhibits to Department of Defense web sites to National Parks, inconvenient U.S. history — about slavery, about the achievements of minorities — is being marked for erasure.

We have a leak-in-the-dike situation — in reverse and on steroids. Americans who care about the past must scramble to plug countless holes lest our history — the “bad” parts, especially — leak out.

I have a suggestion for plugging one hole: As quickly as possible, some civic-minded, deep-pocketed, historically-aware, patriotic and, ideally, fearless person or institution should open a National January 6^th Museum within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol.

Remember Jan. 6, 2021? A lot of people wish you wouldn’t, or wish that you’d remember it their way, as either an antifa/FBI-led false-flag operation or a relatively peaceful citizen-led protest against Congressional overreach. Both things can’t be true and, in fact, aren’t true, which is why we need a brick-and-mortar museum that authoritatively sets out what led up to that day, happened on that day, and has happened since that day to those involved in storming and trashing the Capitol.

There was a time when the Smithsonian would have been on top of this, dutifully collecting artifacts and oral histories related to the riot. I’m sure there are plenty of staffers there who would like to be doing that now. Perhaps some have already gathered material and have hidden it deep in the bowels of the Nation’s Attic, attempting — as brave curators and librarians have done for centuries — to keep it safe from an advancing army.

Make no mistake: The army is advancing. President Trump may not know much about history, but he knows what he doesn’t like. And what he doesn’t like is anything that’s at odds with his personal view of the United States and his place in it. Since his return to the White House, Trump has moved to exert control not only over the Smithsonian — ordering that all exhibits (including at the National Zoo) be vetted to remove anything that “fosters a sense of national shame” — but over museums across the country. He has moved to gut the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that provides funding to U.S. institutions to use in their own exhibits.

Soon after returning to office, Trump fired the head of the National Archives, replacing her with acting archivist Marco Rubio. He fired the nation’s top librarian, too, Carla Hayden. Institutions designed to collect, collate and safeguard information — the Archives, the Smithsonian, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Library of Congress — may become suspect, as flexible with the truth as Trump has proved to be.

If Trump is successful in his efforts, it’s likely there will be an “official” line about every event involving him. January 6^th, Russian election interference, Operation Warp Speed, E. Jean Carroll, impeachment and more will all go down the memory hole.

Why a museum about January 6^th? Because it is so emblematic of where America finds itself today: a place of misinformation, ire and political violence. Because it has become a litmus test for Republican politicians, an opportunity to bend the knee to Trump’s version of history.

Because we know — most of us — that January 6^th happened, just as Winston Smith in “1984” knew that Oceania had once been in alliance with Eurasia.

“But where did that knowledge exist?” George Orwell wrote. “Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

What would the National January 6^th Museum include? Photographs and video would tell much of the story, as would ephemera: the dented helmets of police officers, the zip ties and bear spray of rioters, a makeshift gallows, Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

We tend to like big, sweeping museums and galleries in Washington, but narrowly-focused ones serve a purpose, too, even if they’re a bit ramshackle, as the National January 6^th Museum may be. When I visited Prague’s Museum of Communism 20 years ago, I found it a little kitschy — with its piles of decommissioned Stalin statues looking like so many felled parking meters — but I was moved by its founders’ insistence that this dark chapter of the Czech Republic’s history would not be forgotten.

The United States is undergoing a Great Forgetting. The “inconveniences” of our past are being disappeared. January 6^th may not yet be our Tiananmen Square — officially erased by the government, spoken of at your own peril — but there are those in this country (in the Capitol itself!) who wish that were so.

The National January 6^th Museum would be a small step towards remembering.

Late one night last fall I was sitting in an emergency room in Hampstead, N.C., waiting to see a doctor and wondering if one of my retinas really was floating around in my eyeball like a bed sheet torn from a clothesline. I was feeling sorry for myself — a state I’d increasingly found myself in — and even the conversation going on in the next cubicle failed to cheer me. A woman was pulling up her pant leg to reveal a poorly maintained wound she’d suffered in a recent car accident.

“Whoa,” said the friend who’d driven her to the ER.

“I know, right?” said the injured woman.

At least she knew what was wrong with her, I thought. What was wrong with me?

Just then a security guard on his rounds walked past me. “Those are some nice sneaks, man,” he said without breaking his stride.

They were Pumas, the antidepressant I’ve been applying to my feet for the last year or so.

“Thanks,” I said. “I have a bunch more colors at home.”

These were crimson — what Puma calls “Regal Red” but what I would call “cabernet” — with the shoemaker’s signature swooping line (the “Formstrip”) along the side in white. The model is called the Puma Suede and falls into that category of retro sneakers that were once used for actual sports — the Clyde (basketball), the Palermo (soccer) — but now adorn the feet of aging hipsters with bad knees, weak ankles and (possibly) detached retinas.

It had not been a good year for this particular aging hipster. My mother had died. My father wasn’t well. I’d accepted a buyout from The Washington Post1 and felt constantly antsy and rudderless. I needed something — I deserved something — that would make me feel better. So I went online and started buying Pumas.

It’s called “retail therapy.” The respected Cleveland Clinic has a whole web page devoted to it:

The term “retail therapy” describes the act of shopping with the goal of improving your mood or avoiding difficult emotions. Retail therapy usually involves buying things you want, not things you need.

Yep. That’s me. But is this me, too:

Shopping shifts from being therapeutic to a problematic compulsive behavior when it becomes a go-to way of dealing with anxiety, stress or loss.

Putting that aside for a moment, why Pumas? Why not, say, Adidas? Well, a few years ago I listened to a great BBC podcast about the history of athletic footwear called “Sneakernomics.” I learned that Adi and Rudolf Dassler were sneaker-inventing brothers from Germany who feuded bitterly and then split up. Adi struck me as more of a jerk than Rudolf, so when the time came to self-medicate with rubber-soled shoes, I went with the company Rudolf founded: Puma.

Puma sells hundreds of models of shoes. As is the case with modern sneakers, most of them strike me as ugly: bulbous and covered in excrescences. I guess when I fell into my middle-aged funk, I pined for a simpler time, a time when my parents were healthy, my life had purpose and my retina was attached. So that’s what I started ordering: classic, low, 1970s-era Pumas in bright colors.

I downloaded the Puma app onto my phone. My family started to worry about me.

I came of age in a time before kids shot each other for expensive and desirable limited-edition kicks. When I grew up, a particular tennis shoe didn’t show that you were rich, but it could show that you were poor. I did junior high in Texas, near San Antonio and a place called Boysville. Boys from that orphanage went to Kirby Junior High with me and every single one of them wore black fabric sneakers with a thin, white rubber sole and fat, white laces. They were shoes that weren’t sold in boxes but in big tubs at K-Mart, tied together to make pairs.

The Pumas I’ve bought aren’t very expensive. I don’t think there’s a great demand for these models, so most of them are around 50 bucks a pair, less when on sale. And currently I only have four pair. I’ve had more, but like a lot of things you order online, they don’t always work out. A cool pair that looked crocheted were basically unwearable. Another pair always seemed to pinch my toes. Off they went, back to Puma.

Puma continues to try to entice me. I hear from Puma more often than from most of my friends. After reading this, ads are probably going to start showing up in your feed, too.

My family has gotten tired of hearing me talk about Pumas. I don’t think they’re worried I’ll bankrupt us, but that my obsession masks a deeper disquiet best treated by something other than a sneaker. I can’t say that they’re wrong.

After I’d waited about three hours in the North Carolina emergency room, a doctor examined me. I did not have a detached retina, he said, but probably an ophthalmic aura, cousin to a migraine. It can be caused by stress, he said.

I didn’t say what I was thinking: You know what relieves stress, at least temporarily? Pumas.

The other shoe drops

To be honest, I’ve recently gone off my Pumas a bit. Retail therapy may be one thing, but aversion therapy is another. In December I walked 10 miles across London in my Puma Suedes. Wearing a tennis shoe designed in 1968 is like lashing a bed slat to your foot. There’s no arch support, no heel cup, no shock absorption. By the end of the day, I could barely walk at all. Each footfall was like stepping on broken glass.

I had to send my wife to the store to find something else I could wear. She came back with…Crocs.2

My feet got better. If I wear my vintage-style Pumas now, it’s only in situations where I won’t have to walk far. I’m like a woman deciding when to wear stilettos. Is this event Puma-worthy?3

My mother died on Aug. 25, at home in her bed in North Carolina, my stepfather holding one of her hands, me holding the other. It was something we both expected — had in a way welcomed after all that she (we) had been through.

Every living thing dies. Every human mourns. I’m still “processing” my mother’s death, as they say. Something else is processing it1 — and quite literally, too: the computer.

A few days after the death of Margaret Ann Kelly (Sept. 9, 1940-Aug. 25, 2024), I posted a photo of the two of us on Facebook. She’s younger in that photo than my youngest daughter is now. She’s holding a 10-month-old me. I was consoled by the hundreds of comments that friends posted on Facebook. Soon, something else was commenting.

Meta AI added a note to the top of the comments, headlined “What people are saying.” The AI tool had apparently combed through the comments, crunched them, then created a concise precis:

Commenters offer heartfelt condolences to John for the loss of his mother, Peggy Kelly. They express gratitude that he was able to be with her during her final moments and cherish the memories they share. One commenter notes that a mother’s hug is eternal, highlighting the lasting impact of Peggy’s love.

Every day, the AI would update the summary, refining it after reading newer comments:

Commenters offer heartfelt condolences to John for the loss of his mother, Peggy Kelly. They share moving sentiments, acknowledging the significance of his presence at her passing and cherishing memories. One comment poignantly notes, “A mother’s hug is eternal.”

And again:

Commenters offer heartfelt condolences to John for the loss of his mother, Peggy Kelly. They share moving sentiments about the eternal nature of a mother’s love and the comfort of cherished memories. One commenter poignantly notes that John’s mother will always be with him, even though he outgrew her arms.

A week later, I posted a link to the death notice I wrote that was printed in The Washington Post. Meta AI parsed those Facebook comments, too:

Commenters praised the heartfelt tribute to Peggy Kelly, sharing condolences and admiration for her vibrant spirit.

It was weird, this computer “thinking” about my mother’s life and death. There was nothing wrong with what it wrote. In fact, the sentences were pretty accurate, right down to the punctuation. But the words it used — love, cherished, heartfelt, eternal, spirit — were words no computer could ever comprehend.

The AI was all surface, all flat affect. It was numbers, not poetry. A summary like this might have more accurately reflected what I was feeling and feel still:

Sadness. Anguish. Grief. Commenters wish they could make John feel better. They know that death is forever, that life is a mystery. Why do we live? Why must we die?

Later, I pulled together old family photos for a slide show for a memorial gathering we had for Peggy. As I dragged each photograph into PowerPoint, the computer offered a helpful text description stripped across the bottom of the image. Again, there was nothing wrong with these descriptions, except that they were hardly adequate for the emotions I felt looking at them:

A person with long black hair

A person holding a baby

A person and two boys sitting on a bench

A person and person sitting at a table with wine glasses

A person in a kayak

A person. Her hair was long — long and black and lustrous. The baby was me. The boys on the bench were me and my brother, Chris. The “person and person” were my mother and her husband, Bob; they both loved wine. The person in the kayak was my mother.  

And yet, those simple descriptions reminded me of what a mother says as she flips the pages of a a picture book, her toddler on her lap. This is a baby. This is a person holding a baby. This is a bunny2, a dragon, a witch, a waterfall, a rainbow. This is the world.

That’s what my mother gave me: the world. The real one, not a simulation.