We will return to our irregularly scheduled essays eventually, but today I want to share another couple of poems from a collection whose working title is Meditations on Death.

First, though, an update: July has zipped by so fast that the two novels I intended to release in July will not be released in July but rather in a different month not named July. The manuscripts are formatted and the covers are close, so look for those in August and remember that any novel is a good beach novel if you’re reading it on the beach.

The poems in Meditations are mostly in first-person and cover a wide range of topics if you have a very narrow definition of wide, mainly politics, religion, and deep dives into memories of experiences that led me to where I am today. What is life if not one long meditation on death?

There’s a song called Once More Around the Sun that contains the lyric “I’d love to live forever but it’s kinda hard to do / So I guess I’ll use my time to say the things I think are true.”

And that’s what I’m doing with these poems. Make of them what you will.

Poem #22

There is a scene in Annie Hall

Where Christopher Walken’s character admits

That sometimes he thinks about swerving into the other lane of traffic

Just to see what would happen

And if there’s a better metaphor

For voting red in 2016

I can’t think of it

So congratulations on creating that initial crash

And 300-million-car pileup

The metaphor was different for 2024

That time you swerved into the other lane

And ran over the first responders

And survivors

And plausible deniability

Poem #30

Another thing I hate about social media

Is that you can explain something 18 million times

And someone will manage to miss

Every one of those 18 million explanations

It’s just a theory

No, we explained 18 million times what a theory is

Why are there still monkeys?

For the 18 millionth time, we shared a common ancestor

I’ve never seen a bird give birth to a dog

Pardon me while I smite you 18 million times

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A few months ago I was thinking about what might come next after Ripples in the Catfish Pond and Bob Smith were released into the wild. I mentioned on my website that I might start working on a long poem or series of poems called Meditations on Death, promising that it would be even funnier than the title but not really sure it was something I’d invest much time in.

As it happens, I have started investing some time in it.

I’ve never claimed to be a poet but that hasn’t stopped me from writing a poem now and then. This project is still taking shape but I see it as an old man (that would be me) reflecting on life and religion and politics and being an old man. In that sense it’s not much different than what I’m doing on Substack, except that it’s in poetic form and will probably reach an even smaller audience.

(After finishing Bob Smith and before starting Meditations, I wrote a stage play called House of Roughly a Million Demons. It’s a two-act comedy and I think there’s a chance someone will want to produce it. More on that by and by.)

Anyway, here’s a poem from a project that might or might not end up being called Meditations on Death.

* * * * * * *

The evolution of social media

(Lookin’ at you, Facebook)

The evolution of social media

Runs on a line parallel

With my disillusionment

About the basic decency of human beings

It was fun back when it was people you knew

Friends from high school

Friends from college

Friends from every different job

Friends from comedy and theater

And various family branches

When you could catch up and stay informed

As to the comings and goings of all these different circles

Vacation pictures and something called Farmville

Whatever that was

But whatever it was wasn’t enough

Because somewhere along the way

Everything had to be monetized

Let’s monetize this, let’s monetize that

Let’s grab all we can

And live by that tried and true marketing maxim

“Give the people what they don’t want”

Today I can scroll for a half-hour

Without seeing a post from someone I know

Here’s an ad for short-sleeved button-down shirts

Here’s an ad for an AI grammar checker

Here’s an ad for an AI romance story generator

Here’s an ad for a class action suit against AI

Here are 47 posts from a group I joined

But from whom I did not necessarily need 47 posts

Here’s a little video from Anson Williams

With the invitation to follow him

Wait—Anson Williams?

I like Potsie as much as the next guy

But I did not ask for a little video from Anson Williams

And would be willing to bet

That Anson Williams would like Facebook more

If he could just see posts from his family and friends

Like Richie and Fonzie

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Today’s essay will seem pretty elementary to regular readers of From the Desk of John M Donovan, who are by and large people of intelligence and discernment.

You might therefore wish to forward it to people lacking in those qualities.

People, for instance, who aren’t aware of the existence of search engines.

See, there are these things called search engines on this thing called the internet, and what these search engines do is help you increase your knowledge of pretty much any subject you can think of.

World History. Science. Literature. Movies. Potpourri. Odds and Ends. Potent Potables.

And countless others that aren’t old Jeopardy categories.

There’s never been a time when increasing your knowledge was a bad thing. Increasing your knowledge not only makes you more knowledgeable but can help prevent your current level of knowledge from embarrassing you.

For instance. Let’s say you’re a baseball fan, more specifically a fan of the St Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Stan Musial. And let’s say you go to social media and post enthusiastically about all the times Musial hit 40 home runs in a season.

And let’s say someone corrects you. Musial’s season-high for home runs, the someone says, was 39, in 1948. Had you taken advantage of a search engine, you would have known that and avoided embarrassment at your lack of knowledge.

But that’s kind of a weak example, now that I think of it. Perhaps there’s a better one that really illustrates how stupid you might sound if you didn’t avail yourself of the search engine that can be found on your phone or personal computer.

Hmmm. OK, I think I’ve got one.

Let’s say you’re a delusional dipshit who went to the University of Central Florida*, and you go to Facebook to post something, say, like this:

Yikes! While the first two paragraphs of that post are true, the third ignores how the parties’ ideologies became reversed over the years, so now your name is forever associated with something demonstrably untrue. How embarrassing for you and your family. Did you not have access to a search engine? (And if not, shouldn’t common sense have told you that in Civil War days, the Democratic Party was the more conservative of the two, just by virtue of the fact that, you know, they wanted to keep slavery legal?)

Fortunately there are helpful smart people nearby and ready to provide an opportunity to save face. But let’s say you still don’t use your search engine and instead double down on your misconception, posting something ridiculous like this:

Ouch! You’ve just made things worse by (a) not using a search engine and (b) contradicting someone who did!

Hard to recover from that one. Unless, of course, your peer group consists solely of other delusional dipshits.

If more people would take advantage of easy access to knowledge, social media might not be such a cesspool of misinformation or such a circle-jerk of dumb people**.

At the very least, it might have fewer people who think Vladimir Putin is a Communist.***

Remember, kids, while it’s your right to be stupid, a good search engine can prevent you from abusing that right.

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* Obviously I don’t mean to disparage UCF or its alumni, but only to note that this particular delusional dipshit successfully avoided being educated while there.

** Did you know the word dumb has a B at the end? Of course you did, because you’re not an absolute flaming idiot.

*** I corrected one person who made this claim, noting that Russia hadn’t been Communist since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Still waiting for that person to say thanks.

Preface

There’s a five-episode true crime documentary series called Outcry that’s running on a number of streaming services these days, and it’s exceptionally well done and worth watching. This essay, however, has spoilers for this fine series so if you have any interest in watching Outcry you should probably go do that now. If you have no intention of investing five hours in a true crime documentary series or if you like to live dangerously and plan to watch it later despite the warning about the spoilers, read on.

Post-Preface

There’s an old Russian proverb that goes “доверяй, но проверяй,” which is pronounced “doh-ver-yay no proh-ver-yay” and in English means “Trust, but verify.”

This proverb will not be found on any inspirational posters around the Cedar Park Police Department building in Cedar Park, Texas. Or if it is, no one took it to heart when they arrested a young man named Greg Kelley for sexual contact with a child and opened themselves up to scrutiny in the Outcry series.

Greg Kelley was a football star at Leander High School and had already been offered a scholarship to the University of Texas at San Antonio before going into his senior year. His parents had both had some health issues that led to Greg moving in with the family of his friend Johnathan McCarty, and gosh darn it I’d better find an alternate name for this guy because if I have to keep typing out “Johnathan” in that ridiculous spelling I’m eventually going to have to throw something across the room.

But that is neither here nor there. As noted, Kelley was headed to a Division I school while his friend J McCarty was a more garden-variety player. They were best friends, though, and not only that they could have been twins. The producers introduced the similarity in episode three, and when they put pictures of the two side by side I couldn’t have said with any certainty which one was Kelley, even after seeing countless pictures and videos of him in the previous episodes.

The resemblance was rather important to the story. Unless you were a member of the Cedar Park Police Department.

McCarty’s mother operated a daycare facility in her home, and one day in July 2013 one of the parents called 911 to report that a man at the facility had molested his four-year-old son. Mr Greg did it, the child said. A report filed by the Texas Department of Child Protective Services said the incident took place on July 12, and the case was handed off to a Cedar Park detective named Chris Dailey for further investigation.

For some reason I was not aware of the legal term outcry, but it refers to the initial claim that a crime has been committed. In this case the outcry was made on July 13 and the young victim was brought to the local Children’s Advocacy Center for an interview. The little boy described what “Mr Greg” had done and in which rooms of the house. A second boy, also four, made a similar accusation (sort of, as we’ll see later), but during his live video testimony at the trial said that Kelley had in fact never touched him.

Greg Kelley was arrested, convicted a year later, and sentenced to 25 years without parole.

That was the end of the first episode, and I was left wondering why the documentarians hadn’t shown us the results of the whole investigation. Where were the interviews with the daycare owner and her son? Where was the search of the home? Where was the evidence?

Where was the verify part of trust, but verify?

As we learn in subsequent episodes, the documentarians didn’t include any of that because it didn’t exist.

Greg Kelley accepted the minimum sentence in return for waiving his right to appeal. Naturally, this brought out the Facebook and Twitter armchair legal experts: “Why would an innocent person waive his right to appeal?” According to the documentary, Kelley was given about five minutes to make this decision, and his attorney provided little or no counsel about its ramifications.

(By the way, the word is pronounced “sentenced,” despite the fact that 75 percent of people in true crime documentaries say “sennetsed.”)

The Williamson County prosecutors and CPPD spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back for getting this heinous character off the streets, so they were surprised to learn that there was a groundswell of public support for Kelley. Not because he was a football star in this Friday Night Lights community, but because of his character. No one could believe Greg Kelley was capable of such a crime.

That in itself isn’t proof of innocence, of course. A lot of criminals are able to fly under the radar and hide in plain sight, which is probably a good quality to have if you want to succeed in the old crime game. But a growing number of people were convinced that Greg Kelley was not one of those criminals or any other kind.

Not everyone joined the groundswell. A victims advocate named Jennifer insisted that you always have to believe the children. (I don’t know if they asked her if she knew any old Russian proverbs.) The police chief Sean Mannix never wavered from his insistence that they’d got the right guy. Detective Chris Dailey gave himself an A-plus for detective work.

Still, Kelley maintained his innocence and the support from his friends, family, and community members never wavered. In 2017, an Austin defense attorney named Keith Hampton decided to take a closer look at the case with the intent of filing a writ of habeas corpus if what he learned warranted it.

Here’s what Hampton learned:

1. At the press conference announcing Kelley’s arrest, Chief Mannix asked for other parents to come forward if their children had similar stories. Three days passed and nobody responded, so Detective Dailey cold-called a man who had a child at the McCarty daycare and scheduled an interview with this “second victim” at the Children’s Advocacy Center. Two interviews were conducted and the boy denied ever being touched, but Dailey needed a second victim to solidify the case so he himself conducted the third interview. This interview could be used for training purposes at the police academy on the day they discuss How Not to Conduct an Interview. It would be laughable if it weren’t such an example of corruption.

By the way, Dailey is kind of a large imposing figure, and he went into this interview with his gun visible in his holster.

Dailey: Did Mr Greg ever ask you to put lotion on his pee-pee?

Boy: No.

Dailey: When Mr Greg asked you to put lotion on his pee-pee, how did you feel?

Boy: I don’t know.

Dailey might as well asked the boy “When did you stop beating your wife?” You can see on the video that the boy is terrified. “I’m terrified,” the little boy might have been thinking. “Not only is this man very large and armed, but he seems to possess no professional integrity.”

(Well, I managed to go a little over 200 Substack essays without using the phrase “lotion on his pee-pee.” I suppose it was just a matter of time.)

2. As I noticed after episode one, Hampton and his team learned that the initial investigation was cursory at best and nonexistent at worst. The detectives did not visit the scene of the alleged crime. They did not interview any of the adults who worked there or any people who lived in the house. All they had was the outcry video from the first victim, and no one asked “Is this child mistaken? Did someone put him up to this? Did he confuse Greg with someone else?”

“Should we question the kid who lives here and looks almost identical to our only suspect?”

“Should we trust but verify?”

In the words of medieval barber Theodoric of York, “Naaaaah.”

It’s worth noting (to me anyway, not to the CPPD) that Greg Kelley had moved out of the McCarty house in June, a month before the crime occurred.

3. In the first victim’s outcry video, he said the touching occurred in two rooms, one called “the couch room.” Had the detectives actually visited the crime scene, they would have learned that the couch room was a room with a couch in it, and that this room was where J McCarty slept.

4. There might have been a wee conflict of interest on the part of Kelley’s original attorney, who had previously represented the McCarty family and who squelched any independent investigation of J.

5. In 2015, J McCarty was arrested and convicted of date rape. The victim was 15. McCarty’s phone had a considerable number of child pornography pictures on it. I’m not saying this makes him guilty of molesting a four-year-old, but it does make me go “Hmmmm” in a very loud voice.

All this and more was presented at a hearing in the summer of 2017. In such a hearing, the defense has the burden of proving that the new evidence is grounds for a new trial or perhaps even exoneration. Keith Hampton was backed by, of all people, the new Williamson County district attorneys, include department head Shawn Dick, whose commitment to justice was refreshing—even more so when compared to the team who had rushed to make a case on fumes.

Detective Dailey took the stand at the writ hearing and was asked such questions as “In a normal investigation, wouldn’t you want to view the crime scene?” and “In a normal investigation, wouldn’t you want to interview other potential suspects and witnesses.” He answered yes to these questions, so he knew what was supposed to happen in a normal investigation. He just didn’t want to do it.

Cut to police chief Mannix, who stood by Dailey’s investigation, insisted they had the right man, and eventually promoted Dailey to sergeant. I’ve got a hundred bucks that says I know who Mannix voted for in every presidential election since 2016.

In any event, Judge Donna King wasn’t having it. She ordered Kelley released on bond and sent the case on to the nine-judge Texas Court of Criminal Appeals with the recommendation that Kelley had proven actual innocence. Kelley was free but not. He had to check in regularly with his bondsman while waiting for the CCA’s decision.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals handed down decisions on their website every Wednesday morning at 9:00, and according to a judge who had once served on it, they were not known for their leniency.

Nevertheless, Kelley, Hampton, and other interested parties went to the CCA website every Wednesday to hope for the best. It took more than two years, but in November 2019 Kelley got his answer: Relief granted. Full exoneration.

Six years of having his life on hold. Six years of the actual guilty party running around free to commit more crimes.

Human beings can be lazy. I’m lazy at times. There were days in my freelance copywriting career when I’d say you know what, this project can wait till tomorrow.

But my laziness never put anyone behind bars.

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If you happened to check out the last essay you’ll know I had my cancerous prostate removed on May 26. I’m recovering at about the right rate, I believe. Still some tenderness around the incisions but no incontinence. My surgeon called me yesterday with the results of the pathology report and seems fairly confident there’s nothing left although we won’t know for sure until the follow-up bloodwork in three months.

I wasn’t taking notes during this conversation but I did want to be able to explain things to anyone who might ask. Then I remembered I’d once signed up for Follow My Health, an app/website that helpfully gives you access to your own medical records so you won’t be bothering people who are trying to work.

To access your records, you have to connect individually with each of your healthcare providers. When you click on Add Organization, you get this window:

That all seemed easy enough. I typed the name of my provider—Urology Center of Iowa (good folks, by the way)—in the search box: . For the distance in miles my choices were 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100--although I didn't see what difference that made since I’d already typed in the name of the provider. It's 19 miles away so I clicked on 25, then hit Connect.

The first 11 entries were neurologists from Whittier, California. If you’re keeping score at home, Whittier is more than 25 miles away and not in Iowa.

The next six entries were indeed urologists, but, alas, also from Whittier, California.

Next came a neurology center in Springfield, Illinois, then a neurology clinic and a urology clinic in Johnson City, Tennessee. Then they took me back to Whittier for a urology practice (the people of Whitter should have no issues finding a neurologist or urologist either one), then suggested a neurology consultant in Manhasset, New York and a urology lab and two urology ultrasound clinics in Mobile, Alabama.

But then it was back to Springfield, Illinois for two urology entries, neither of which are called Urology Center of Iowa for obvious reasons. Next on the list were two urology practices in Buffalo, New York, but then they thought once again that maybe Johnson City, Tennessee was the place I ought to be. I was given a chance to connect to two Johnson City neurologists, both of whom I'm sure are tops at their craft should I ever find myself with a sprained nervous system while visiting this part of Tennessee.

I was only about halfway through the list at this point. Cumming, Georgia checked in and also La Plata, Maryland. From there it was a one-off back in Buffalo, then back to Johnson City for three different clinics specializing in neurology, urology, and pediatric neurology. “Maybe he only thinks he’s an adult who needs to connect with a urology clinic. It might be that he’s actually a child with some neurological issues. We’d better include it in the search.”

And sure enough, the next suggestion on the list was another pediatric neurology center, this one in Louisville, Kentucky.

The next five entries had nothing to do with urology: three repeat suggestions from Manhasset, Springfield, and Whittier, plus two new ones from Washington, DC.

But suddenly the suggestions started skewing heavily in favor of Springfield: twelve in a row, to be exact, interrupted by a urology clinic in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a quick dive back into Springfield, then another shot in the dark for Johnson City.

At this point I could see the slider getting very close to the bottom of the column and was beginning to despair of ever connecting with the Urology Center of Iowa. They suggested Springfield again, two more clinics in Whittier, and one in Washington DC.

But then a whole new one showed up: Urology Nurse Schedule at the Iowa Clinic Corporate Office. Not what I wanted, but at least they finally hit the right state. Even a blind chicken'll pick up some corn now and then.

That was as close as I got. The next entry was from the St Joseph Reg Medical Center. No city listed, no state. “Hey, if you happen to connect with these people, let us know where to find them.”

The list concluded with eight more suggestions from Springfield, Illinois and a brand new one from Midland, Michigan, giving me a grand total of 71 healthcare providers I had no need to connect to.

I remembered at that point that there was another app called My Chart that offered the same services as Follow My Health. I went to that site, typed in Urology Center of Iowa, and got no results.

That was kind of refreshing.

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Occasionally some imaginary person asks me a question I can use as the opener for an essay, and today that question is “Hey Dono, of all the advertising copy you wrote in your 37 years as an advertising copywriter, which piece is your favorite?”

Well, imaginary person, thanks for asking. And without going out to the pole barn to dig through the Rubbermaid tub that serves as the archives of my portfolio, I can point to two off the top of my head.

One had a lot of moving parts, the other was a single line of copy.

The former was a TV spot for the Iowa Lottery, which was introducing four new scratch games with the theme of “Make My Day.” You could buy a $1 Make My Day ticket and have a chance at a top prize of $1000, but there were also $5, $10, and $20 tickets with the top prize increasing commensurately, up to a hundred thousand smackers.

There were a number of good concepts presented but the Iowa Lottery liked my idea of having a barbershop quartet sing about the new games. I wrote the music and lyrics and then handed it off to a professional arranger, and we found an amazingly talented group called the Switchback Quartet in Cedar Rapids. These guys nailed the performance and were extremely nice to boot.

I was a little disappointed that this didn’t lead to an increase in requests for barbershop-style jingles.

Nevertheless. One of my other favorites was an outdoor board for Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines. They were one of the first hospitals in the metro to offer 3D digital mammography, and they were also bold enough to approve this copy:

Anyway, now that I’m on the subject of copywriting, let me rant for a bit about the worst trend in advertising since everything went meta and all the characters started acting like they knew they were in a commercial. I’m talking about AI-generated copy. I don’t know that it’s hit mainstream TV shows yet but it’s everywhere in the mobile ads.

(And yes, my awareness of it might indicate I play too much Scrabble and Boggle on my phone.)

For the purposes of this essay, I’m not going to cover AI-generated voiceovers and AI-generated people, both of which can be grouped with AI copy as a scourge in the industry and essentially a way for corporations to cheap out on ad production.

You can identify AI copy by its complete lack of the narrative logic a human copywriter would instill in the spot. There will be lines that make you say “Huh?” either immediately or on subsequent viewings.

Here are two of the most egregious examples.

This blonde woman might or might not be real, but if she’s a real person who understands English, she didn’t want to make waves and get fired from the spot for pointing out that her first two lines didn’t make sense.

Her first two lines are “Here’s why you should NEVER block spam callers! Because they’ll just call you from another number, over and over.”

You see why that doesn’t make sense? The first line, with its emphasis on “never,” implies there could be dire consequences if you block spam callers. What could it be? Is my phone going to melt? Will the spammers find out and send someone to my home for nefarious purposes?

The second line fails to explain the consequences. If I’m getting spam calls, what do I care what number they’re calling from? Block or don’t block, you’re getting the same number of calls.

A human copywriter would have caught that and changed the line to “Even if you block spam callers, they’ll still find ways to call you. Try Spam-B-Gone” or whatever the hell it is they’re selling.

A human creative director should have caught it. A human account manager should have caught it. The client should have caught it.

But somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that if AI came up with it, it must be correct.

Here’s an even dumber example. This one is trying to get you to download a game app where you have to see how many words you can find in a random collection of letters, and to show you how it works, they’ve got this AI-generated dillrod trying to find 20 words in the word TEACHER.

OF course, the AI-generated dillrod doesn’t know he’s speaking AI-generated copy, so he has no idea how stupid he sounds when he gets to this line:

“Cat, heat, reach—no, that’s only three.”

Let me give you a little tip on how to play this game, Mr Dillrod. The goal is to find 20 words, but you don’t have to find them and speak all 20 simultaneously.

Again, a human copywriter would have written “Cat, heat, teach—only 17 to go.”

Although I suppose it’s possible that both my examples were written the dumbest and most poorly trained copywriter in the industry and approved by the dumbest creative director, the dumbest account manager, and the dumbest client.

That’s the end of the rant, which was 100 percent generated by a real human being.

But speaking of Broadlawns Medical Center, this newsletter is scheduled to go out on Tuesday, May 26, which is the day my prostate is being removed at that very facility. They tell me my prostate has cancer and I believe them, so out it goes.

I only know this because I became eligible for Medicare when I turned 65 last summer. I spent a number of years without health insurance, so as soon as I could I went in for the long-delayed physical. The doctor said the bloodwork showed my prostate-specific antigen level was a little high, so he sent me to a urologist and the PSA level was even higher that day. The urologist scheduled me for an MRI, which showed some mysterious spots. The subsequent biopsy revealed cancer: “It’s not moving fast,” they said, “but there’s a lot of it.”

My dad was about the same age when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He aced the surgery and lived another 14 years.

Wish me luck. Or wish the doctor who’s supervising the robot who’s doing the cutting luck. Unless it’s late in the day in which case I’m already home. In fact, depending on when you’re reading this, I’m either on my way to Broadlawns or lying on a gurney or in the middle of surgery or in the recovery room or on my way home with a friggin catheter where such things are usually found. I don’t think I’ll die on the operating table but if I do this will be the last edition of From the Desk of John M Donovan.

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P.S. For-profit health insurance is immoral and shouldn’t exist.

No thinking person sincerely believes that teaching the truth about American history is actually “teaching children to hate or be ashamed of America.”

The qualifier there is “thinking,” of course. I know there are people who take comments like that on faith and at least one Republican candidate for Iowa governor who’s counting on it. Guy named Zach Lahn makes that exact claim in one of his TV spots.

Why?

There’s no way Mr Lahn believes kids are being tested and graded on how much they hate the country they live in. There’s no way he believes teachers are telling kids they should bear the shame of the early Americans who owned slaves and destroyed native civilizations.

But he’s certainly implying it in that commercial. And since he knows that Iowa went red in the last three presidential elections, and that a dumb person’s vote counts the same as a smart person’s, he probably figures a little disingenuousness makes good political strategy.

Disingenuousness. Intellectual dishonesty. Potato potAHto.

Mr Lahn’s website indicates that he’s aware of the disturbingly high rate of cancer among Iowans. He doesn’t specifically say what he plans to do about it, but he’s at least aware of it. He’s also against foreign ownership of Iowa farms, so good for him.

Lahn also laments that Iowa has dropped from its former number-one rank in education to “worse than Mississippi.” (Man, how bad are things in Mississippi that he didn’t even have to mention their rank?) But on the red flag side, he did not make the connection between that drop and the fact that we’ve had a Republican governor since 2011, or that Iowa school spending hasn’t kept pace with inflation*, or that the current empty suit on Terrace Hill, Kim Reynolds, made it one of her priorities to funnel tax dollars into private schools.

Lahn makes reference to Iowa’s brain drain, noting that our state ranks fourth in out-migration. People are leaving and not coming back, and I would imagine each one of them has a slightly different reason.

But I’ll bet at least one of them would say it’s because Iowa was the first state to remove gender identity from its civil rights law AND because the state subsequently passed a law preventing Iowa’s cities and towns from having broader civil rights protections than the state itself.

Those things happened within the last 15 months. The state went out of its way to make one particular group of Iowans feel unwelcome here. They could have done nothing. They could have expended that energy on the question of why the hell so many Iowans are getting cancer.

If you were a trans person, or the friend or family member of a trans person, or just someone who doesn’t like living in a state governed by a bunch of goddamn bullies, would you pass up an opportunity to leave?

Ah well. What were we talking about? Oh, right. Intellectual dishonesty. I don’t imagine there are too many Iowa Republicans reading my essays, but just in case there’s one: Please don’t consider my focus on Zach Lahn as an endorsement either for or against him. I don’t have the stomach to look into what the rest of the primary candidates believe in, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts their disingenuousness is as good as the rest.

Social Media: More Intellectual Dishonesty Than You Can Shake a Stick At

I don’t know why you’re shaking a stick at all, but if you wanted to shake one every time you found a tone-deaf brain-dead argument on social media you’d have a repetitive strain injury in a matter of minutes.

Case in point: Shortly after the freakshow at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Meghan “Hey Somebody Look at Me” McCain posted on ex-Twitter:

That’s disingenuous right off the bat. No one in history ever thought “You know what would prevent assassination attempts? A ballroom” until President Stach-Raper put that idea into their heads.**

Joe Walsh, not the Rocky Mountain Way guy but a former Illinois Representative and one of the few Republicans with the nards to stand up to Dementia Don, posted a response to McCain on X and then shared it on Facebook, to wit:

So, because this was Facebook, here’s where the fun began. A woman responded with this bizarre non sequitur:

Uh—ok, I guess. Walsh’s comment makes reference to his own right to free speech but certainly doesn’t claim McCain doesn’t have that same right. But because I was in one of those moods I thought I’d ask the following question:

Simple enough. Just show me who said Meghan McCain didn’t have the right to free speech and where it was said. Heck, maybe I missed it. Peggy didn’t respond but this guy did:

Wow, I thought—the answer was so obvious it rated a “Duh.” I double-checked Walsh’s post but again found nothing implying that Meghan McCain did not have the right to free speech. Fortunately, as if reading my mind, this political scientist offered an explanation:

It became clear at this point that I’m the only person in this discussion who knows the definition of free speech. Les here thinks that contradicting a point means you think the point-maker didn’t have the right to make that point. His comment was so silly I didn’t respond, but a whole day later, things took a turn for the goofier. Some other deep thinker came along and prompted this exchange:

Remember my original question was directed at Peggy, asking who said Meghan McCain didn’t have the right to free speech. So now this Bernie guy asks me directly, but still out of left field, who said Joe Walsh didn’t have that right—and, as you can see, when I expressed confusion about where the hell that question was coming from, I was the one who wasn’t keeping up.

I don’t know. I think we’d all be better off if social media hadn’t given everyone the impression their half-baked thoughts were blue-ribbon-winning pies.

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* KCRG.com, 2/6/26, “Fact Check: Iowa school funding falling well behind inflation”

** Similarly, two months ago not one person was walking around worrying about Iran having nuclear weapons. President Dickhead puts out one of his stream-of-consciousness rants and suddenly his fluffers are all going “Yeah, thank goodness we don’t have to live in fear of Iran having nuclear weapons anymore.”

Postscript

It occurred to me recently that our country wouldn’t be in such a mess if back in 2016 a few thousand more people would have had the critical thinking skills to ask themselves “What does Fox News have to gain by continually telling me that Hillary Clinton is (a) unqualified to be president, (b) an evil person, (c) a Marxist, (d) all of the above?”

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” –Dorothy Parker

Don’t get me wrong. From the first story I wrote back in grade school to the novel I just finished last week, I’ve never regretted a single moment of the time I used for writing.

I love it. I love the process. I love going back to read what I wrote the day before and finding it as good as I thought it was.

And when it isn’t as good as thought it was, I love fixing it.

Sometimes it comes easy and sometimes not, but there’s never been a time when I thought “Man, this is too hard—I should just stop doing it.”

Even back when I was approaching publishers and agents cap in hand and getting absolutely nowhere, I never thought I should stop writing. All it’s going to take, I kept telling myself, is getting the right query in front of the right agent on the right day. Other people do it, I reasoned. I knew that because the bookstores were full of books written by other people.

I didn’t dream of writing best-sellers. I dreamt of writing good books that readers would recommend to their friends.

Oh, I also dreamt of having them made into movies.

I was somewhere in my early 50s when something hit me. Something besides my early 50s. (By the way, this was a little over two decades since I’d started submitting queries.) I’d be searching online for literary agents and finding a whole lot of them who looked like they were just out of school. Recent grads, English majors, all “looking for great writers with fresh stories!” What hit me was that I too had once been a recent grad and an English major.* Fresh out of college, would I have known how to pick good books out of hundreds of query letters?

Maybe yes, maybe no.

But here’s a hypothetical: Let’s say that right after graduating from Wabash in 1982 I get a job with a literary agency. I start reading queries from writers and realize there are a lot of good books being written. I send all the good queries on to my boss, the agent whose name is on the door, and he or she says whoa, whoa, whoa, you’ve recommended more books than we have agents to handle. In fact, you’ve recommended more books than the entire industry publishes in a year. You’re going to have to start rejecting some of these. Like, a lot of these.

At some point after this, I reject a writer whose response is “What does some snot-nosed punk just out of Wabash College know about growing up in Oregon in the 1920s?”

Another says “What does this wet-behind-the-ears English major know about love triangles among upper-middle-class auto-industry executives?”

Another says “What does this entry-level agent know about anything?”

And that was the other thing that hit me in my early 50s. What first-year literary agent in New York City is going to be intrigued by a novel about fraternity brothers at an all-male college in the Midwest in the 1970s? Or a novel about a kid growing up in an Illinois small town in the 1970s? Or a novel about a guy who responds to the violence and evil in the world by moving into his abandoned grade school building?

(Actually, that last one should have caught the eye of even the most entry-level snot-nosed punk. Ignoring The Rocheville Devil is on them. Not that you’d know that from the number of copies I’ve sold.)

Point is, right about then is when I decided to stop beating my head against gatekeepers and start putting my books directly in the hands of readers. I had looked into independent publishing back in the late 1980s, but back then it seemed like more trouble than it was worth. By the 2010s, though, Amazon had made it easy with a program called CreateSpace (now known as Kindle Direct Publishing).**

That led to the publication of The Fraternity (2012), Trombone Answers (2016), The Rocheville Devil (2018), Love and Corn and Whatnot (2019), Fluffball! Or How Five Really Tall Guys and an Immortal Chinese Philosopher Opened the Door to a Parallel Universe and Saved Professional Foam Basketball, More or Less (2021), Kerouac’s Ghost (2023), The Snappy Cola Clock and Other Colby County Stories (2023), The Smalltown Way (2024), and Confessions of the Tenth-Smartest Person in the World and Other Delusions (2025).

I’m proud of this body of work.

However, I’m a long way from putting these books directly in the hands of readers.

So, with my 66th birthday not too far around the corner, I think it’s time to be honest with myself. What I’m doing isn’t working.

Songwriters can ask for five minutes of your time to play you their new tune. Artists can get your reaction to their new painting in a matter of seconds.

But a novel requires just a scosh more time. Hours. Days. And with the number of adult Americans who have read at least one book a year decreasing steadily (from 54.6% in 2012 to 48.5% ten years later***), this doesn’t bode well for those of us still looking for an audience.

The Essay Takes a Turn for the Happier Here

With all that in mind, I still intend to release my two latest novels on the same day, sometime in late spring or early summer. This isn’t some marketing gimmick designed to create buzz. It just happens that they’re both going to be ready to go around the same time.

See if either of these ring your bell or strike your fancy or both:

Ripples in the Catfish Pond was born years ago as my attempt at a potboiler called Godiva Nights but which eventually evolved into a more thoughtful and less explicit story. There is, however, still more sex and murder in this one than in all the rest of my work put together.

Ripples is told in two parts. Part 1 is a first-person manuscript in which a middle-aged English teacher named Mitchell Lazarus confesses to a series of foolish events, one of which costs him his marriage and all of which involve looking for love and lust in impossible places. This half of the book ends with Lazarus going off to meet a woman he’s fallen for online.

In Part 2 we learn that Lazarus has been missing for years and that his daughter Amy has uncovered this manuscript. She teams up with a popular mystery writer, Cooper Keye, to look for clues in the manuscript and see if there’s even a small chance her father is still alive. Their search takes them on a globe-trotting journey of international intrigue, and—check that, I’m thinking of the wrong book. Their search takes them from Illinois to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and even more states if you count driving and train-riding time. Still, though, lots of intrigue.

Now, if you’re in the mood for something a whole lot funnier on Two-Book Release Day, I’ll point you to Bob Smith. That’s the name of the book, not another author. You might remember from my memoir that Bob Smith was the novel I wrote during my two pointless months of grad school in the summer of 1983. A comic literary fantasy, I called it, which might be why no publishers wanted to read it. That and the return address of Hillsboro, Indiana. It was a good first novel with a number of flaws, and while I rewrote it a number of times over the next several years I could never quite get it the way I wanted it.

Something about the ending felt too contrived, which made sense because there was a huge chunk in the middle that felt contrived too. Sometime in 2025 I realized that if I ever wanted Bob Smith to see the light of day I was going to have to discard a good 75 percent of the plot.

That did the trick. Addition by subtraction.

Of course, I had to fill that space with something, so here’s where it stands now: Bob Smith is an unassuming young college student, an English major who daydreams of romance and adventure and who finds himself drawn into both when a mysterious girl shows up and invites him to an alternate world where the greatest writers in the English language have been granted immortality. He meets and befriends the likes of Poe, Melville, Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain, John Keats, et al—but he has arrived in Terrapocrypha at a critical point in its history. There’s a political faction demanding immortality for everyone, and they think they’ve found a way to make the Council of Governors accede to their demands.

It’s still a comic literary fantasy but it finally makes sense.

I’ve been describing it as even funnier than Fluffball! but more accessible to readers who aren’t sports fans. There’s a girl named Mushroom and a talking raven named Arthur Gordon Pym, and in a major departure for me, some of the shortest chapters I’ve ever written.

Ripples has only nine chapters and an average chapter length of 31.3 pages. Bob Smith has 105 chapters for an average chapter length of 3.3 pages. I mention this in case chapter length is something you consider before purchasing.

Have you noticed I sound happier talking about my books than about my struggles with marketing them?

I think that happiness comes through on the page.

Thanks for reading this far, and I’ll keep you posted.

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* I still think of myself as an English major. An old one.

** I didn’t anticipate the well-deserved anti-Amazon backlash.

*** US Census Bureau Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2022. The same survey showed that only 37.6% read at least one novel or short story in the previous year.

Want to be caught up before these new books come out? Here’s a link. If you’re in the Des Moines metro, ask for any of the titles mentioned above at Beaverdale Books. I’m working on getting them on the shelves at the new location of the Wabash College Bookstore, but I’ll have to keep you posted on that too.

The snack food police have been out in full force on social media in recent days, posting from their suburban home offices with a Twinkie in one hand and a Coke in the other about how people receiving SNAP benefits shouldn’t be allowed to purchase anything that isn’t broccoli.

One of the most egregious posts says “I think we can all agree that people on SNAP shouldn’t be buying junk food.” I’m not sure this person knows what “all” means, but I am sure that he or she was thinking that post in the voice of Thurston Howell III.

These posts always contain some variation of “They’re spending our money.” When I’m in the mood to respond, I ask for their Venmo and offer to send them 35 cents or so to cover their share. Heaven forbid they contribute to a poor person’s bag of Doritos and have that weighing on their conscience.

If you Google “what percentage of your tax dollars go to SNAP benefits,” you’ll get a number of answers, all of them higher than 35 cents but none of them high enough to invalidate my point but some of them high enough that someone would surely say hell yes, here’s my Venmo.

I don’t know if any of the snack food police have noticed, but President Felonious J. Stach-Raper is spending $1-2 billion of our money a day on trying to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

On the low end of that figure, it would take about three months’ worth of Operation Epstein Distraction to equal what the federal government spends on SNAP benefits in a year.

If it’s our money when it’s being spent for a SNAP recipient to indulge on a candy bar now and then, it’s our money when it’s being used to murder Iranian schoolgirls.

The snack food police seem to prove the point that nobody hates poor people more than slightly-less-poor people. Some of them hate Iranians just as much and some of them will just hate whomever they’re told to.

But in the words of Arlo Guthrie, that’s not what I came to talk to you about. I came to talk to you about “Christian” Nationalism. I try to remember to put Christian in quotes in that phrase because I don’t see anything Christian about it. I wish they’d come up with another name but Self-Righteous Bloodthirsty White Supremacist Nationalism probably doesn’t roll off the tongue the way they’d like.

As a disclaimer, or at least to give you a little background, I haven’t been a church person for about 40 years. But back in the 1960s and ’70s I grew up going to a little smalltown church in the Disciples of Christ denomination, and I still remember what they taught us about Jesus.

Robinson Reed remembers it too. He’s the character in The Smalltown Way who writes a book called Christosophy, in which he says the world would be better off if more people considered the teachings of Jesus as a philosophy as opposed to a religion.

Take the teachings of Jesus, subtract the concepts of divinity and salvation, and go around being kind to everyone. Christosophy.

In Christosophy, it doesn’t matter which way you believe. I like the idea that a real person did and said these things. Turning over tables at the temple. Cautioning people about throwing the first stone. Forgiving your enemies. Loving your neighbor. These might not have even been radical ideas at the time, but Jesus is the one who gets credit for them.

In Christosophy the end goal is living together peacefully.

I don’t see the end goal of “Christian” Nationalism being living together peacefully. I never see “Christian” Nationalists talking about feeding the hungry and loving their neighbor. What I do see is a desire for control.

And a desire for control is generally rooted in money.

If these people take over what used to be a flawed-but-functioning democracy, who’s going to benefit financially?

It won’t be the average Christian on the street. It’ll be the architects of Project 2025. It’ll be the guys in suits and ties who have already put themselves in Diaper Don’s orbit because they know he’s not smart enough to know when he’s being played.

Put it this way: A “Christian” Nationalist country isn’t going to increase SNAP benefits. It isn’t going to offer universal healthcare (“Not with our money!”) It certainly won’t embrace diversity or welcome people of other faiths and cultures. It might outlaw the things it purports to rise above (abortion, pornography, drug use, etc) but don’t kid yourselves. Years ago there was a story about how these people were going to move to South Carolina in droves, elect only “Christian” Nationalists to the state government, then live happily and righteously in a vice-free state.

This clearly didn’t come to fruition. But if it had, I would have taken out a thousand mortgages and invested in a string of liquor-and-porn stores just across the borders in North Carolina and Georgia. I would have made many fortunes and donated them all to every progressive cause in the country.

There’s a widening chasm between Christianity and “Christian” Nationalism. I still have respect for the former but none, obviously, for the latter.

Do most people understand when powerful people are using Jesus as a prop?

I sure hope so.

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Back in August 1988 I saw my second Bob Dylan concert, this one at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. Seated beside my group was a chubby shirtless man whose hair was a hybrid of flat-top and mullet, and who enthused mid-concert that “The old man’s still rockin’!”

Dylan was 47 at the time. He was 84 when I caught him at the Orpheum Theater in Omaha on March 21, and I don’t know if I’d say he’s still rockin’, but he’s still delivering his songs in a style that’s right for his age. Most people either love his voice or hate it, but as someone who loves it I was glad not to hear any of the gargling-jagged-rocks-in-phlegm that turns up now and then on songs he should have just transposed down a key or three. What we heard in Omaha was a subtle rasp, well-suited to his newer material and nicely adaptable to the older stuff.

This was my tenth Dylan concert and my first since 2006, when he appeared at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see him again, mainly because I’d seen so many reviews from naysayers in the last 10-15 years suggesting, usually snidely, that it was time for Bob to hang it up. But last Christmas my younger daughter Delaney surprised me with tickets to the Omaha show and I’d been looking forward to it ever since. She was excited to give me the opportunity and, she said, to see Dylan for the first time herself.

(She had forgotten being dragged to an outdoor concert in Bonner Springs, Kansas back in 2000, when she was nine. This was certainly understandable. For me that concert was particularly memorable because Bob was doing dad jokes when he introduced the band, to wit: “And this is our drummer, Winston Watson. Winston went golfing today and took an extra pair of pants in case he got a hole in one.” Maybe Delaney repressed the memory of the concert when she heard that joke.*)

Neither of us knew when she got the tickets that the Omaha show was the first of Dylan’s 2026 US tour. He hadn’t performed since last November in Dublin, so I didn’t know what to expect from the setlist or the show itself. Would there be a radical departure from previous setlists? Were he and the band rehearsed enough? And why Omaha? (That last question was easy enough to answer: You’ve got to start the tour somewhere. As it happens, I’d also seen the first show of his 1994 tour at Sangamon State University and his 2001 tour at the Iowa State Fair.)

The Orpheum Theater in downtown Omaha is a beautiful old ornate venue, the kind, as Delaney pointed out, they don’t make anymore. We were there as soon as the doors opened, and learned immediately that cell phones would not be allowed in the auditorium but would be locked in a special tamper-proof bag that came with a long strap so you could wear it around your neck. Some warning would have been nice. Deeper inside the building, Delaney asked an Orpheum staffer to unlock her bag long enough to get the picture that accompanies this essay, and this very helpful woman obliged us.

Then the phone was locked back up and we were plunged into a world where time had no meaning. Until we found someone wearing an actual watch.

The show opened with the band jamming for two or three minutes, and then Bob made his way from backstage to the piano. I knew he played guitar only rarely on recent tours, and I was afraid maybe the piano was little more than a prop. The opposite was true. Dylan’s keyboard was essential to the band’s overall sound.

They got off to a rough start with “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” from John Wesley Harding (1967), one of only three numbers from before 1970. Bob was clearly not happy with the microphone placement, and this led to some missing lyrics. There were issues with the mic and its stand the rest of the night, but none that resulted in as many distractions as the opening song. They started rolling after that. Here’s the setlist:

1. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight

2. Man in the Long Black Coat (from Oh Mercy, hadn’t been played since 2013)

3. All Along the Watchtower

4. I Contain Multitudes

5. False Prophet

6. Black Rider (I believe this is the only Dylan song that contains the line “The size of your cock will get you nowhere”)

7. Love Sick

8. Key West

9. I Can Tell (cover of a Bo Diddley song)

10. I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You

11. Crossing the Rubicon

12. When I Paint My Masterpiece

13. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

14. Soon After Midnight (I think this is the first time in ten concerts I’ve failed to recognize one of Bob’s own songs. This one is from the Tempest album, which I clearly need to listen to more.)

15. Nervous Breakdown (cover of an Eddie Cochran song, played for the first time ever)

16. Every Grain of Sand

Six of those songs are from Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). Except for the two covers, only four are pre-1975. He hasn’t played “Like a Rolling Stone” since 2019,** but that’s fine. As Van Morrison recently said, it doesn’t really feel right to be singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” at age 79.

I thought the crowd would skew heavily boomer, and while there were a lot of people with canes in attendance, there was also a good number of people under 40. Delaney said she noticed some high school-aged kids on her way to the concession stand. Hey, they might not have been fortunate enough to see Dylan in his prime, but at least they saw him.

The stage was set without frills. No flashing lights, no props, and most of the musicians were shrouded in darkness. The drummer was essentially just a silhouette from where we sat, but I have to pat myself on the back for knowing it was Anton Fig by the shape of his beret.*** Dylan’s attire did not do him any favors. He wore a cream-colored zip-hoodie, unzipped with the hood up. The light-colored hood sometimes made him look like Dr Zaius and sometimes like a blond Kiki Dee.

For me the show’s highlights were “Man in the Long Black Coat,” “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” and the closing number “Every Grain of Sand,” on which he finally broke out the harmonica. There was no encore, but I didn’t expect one. If I were 84 and made it safely off the stage, I wouldn’t tempt fate by walking out there one more time either.

We both enjoyed the show and Delaney told me she’d be making a point of seeking out some of Bob’s later work.

All in all, it was a pretty nice Christmas present.

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*Except for his born-again period, Dylan has always tended to keep the between-song patter to a bare minimum—absolutely zero, in fact, at the Omaha show. I loved the dad jokes in 2000 but my all-time favorite line is from my all-time favorite concert at Illinois State University in 1999, when Bob was touring with Brian Setzer. That night Dylan told the crowd “They said I’d never make it to Normal. But here I am.”

**Sources for all setlist-related statistics: www.setlist.fm and www.bobdylan.com.

***You might remember David Letterman referring to him as Anton Zip when he was the drummer for Paul Shaffer’s band.

There once was a time when I sent this newsletter out three times a week, and then there was a time when I sent out two essays and a podcast, and then there was a time when I said the hell with it.

But not everyone has unsubscribed and in fact I’ve picked up a handful of new subscribers who are probably wondering when I might get around to making it worth their while to subscribe.

“Oh, look,” these new subscribers might be saying today, “I was wondering when I was going to get something from From the Desk of John M Donovan.”

Today the topic is Iran, but since I don’t really have anything new to add about the fact that American servicepeople are being put in harm’s way by a senile old man who thought it would help his poll numbers*, I’m going to add something old: Chapter 24 of my novel The Smalltown Way**. In this chapter, set on the day after Election Day 2004, we visit the Sweetpea Cafe and listen in on the conversation of four characters: Chuck Kelso, who has lost his oldest son in Iraq; Jerry Allison, who believes everything he hears from the right-wing noise machine (and who makes a reference to radio show host Mads McRight, the poor man’s Rush Limbaugh); Betty Nolan, the cafe owner and peacemaker; and Bud Sykes, who just wants to eat his lunch.

Enjoy.

Chapter 24

The Day After Election Day

“You don’t change horses in midstream,” said Jerry Allison. “And you don’t change presidents in the middle of a war.”

Betty Nolan said here we go. Chuck said “War? What war? We invaded a sovereign nation. Who are we at war with?”

“Iraq. Duh.”

“We are Iraq, genius. We took over the government. This isn’t like one of those wars where you’re fighting for territory and advancing ten yards at a time. We done advanced, man, all the way to the capital. Baghdad is in our hands. Saddam isn’t the leader anymore.”

“But they’re still fighting.”

“Wouldn’t you be? What if a bunch of damn Martians came down and took over Washington?”

Bud Sykes’ eyes went wide behind his thick lenses. “We’d need ray guns.”

“Hell yes we would,” said Chuck.

“We’d have to send ’em back to Mars,” said Jerry. “What’s your point?”

“What’s my point. Jesus. We’re the Martians.”

“And they’re a bunch of America-hating terrorists.”

“They? They who?”

“Those fuckin’ towelheads. Sorry, Betty.”

Betty held out a jar and demanded a dollar. Only two f-bombs had been dropped since she instituted the bomb jar. Jerry dug in his pocket for four quarters. “You can argue but keep it clean,” said Betty. Chuck said he understood that Bush 43 used the word terrorist as if it were an ethnicity, but wanted to know if Jerry sincerely believed that everyone in Iraq was a terrorist.

“I do. It’s part of their religion.”

“It isn’t. But you think Achmed the shoe salesman is more concerned about destroying America than he is with making a living and providing for his family?”

Jerry laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure they have shoe stores over there.”

“Where do you think people buy their shoes?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. They make them out of animal skins, maybe. Point is, like Mads McRight was saying the other day, we have a duty to show these primitive dickheads the way things are supposed to be.”

Bud pointed at Jerry. “Another dollar.” Betty said no, the jar was only for f-bombs because her mother in the kitchen still had her hearing and didn’t like that word. Chuck said it sounded like Mads McRight was all about Manifest Destiny.

“I don’t know what that means,” said Jerry, “but if it means primitive dickheads need to get the hell out of our way, then yeah she’s for that. We need the oil more than they do.”

“Because?”

“Because we drive cars.”

“They have cars, Jerry. They have cars and shoe stores. Running water. Office buildings. And just ordinary people. There’s probably 500 Iraqi Chuck Kelsos.”

“Maybe that’s why we invaded.”

Chuck raised his coffee cup. “Good one.” Betty warmed him up while his cup was in the air. “Point I started making before was that I think the Democrats threw this election.”

“Wouldn’t that be illegal?” asked Bud. “Like in boxing?”

“Only if they bet on the Republicans. But I’m serious. Jerry’s right about not changing horses in midstream. John Kerry looked too much like the same horse. Howard Dean would have given people an actual choice.”

“That was the guy who screamed?” asked Betty.

“The guy who yelled enthusiastically, yes. It was deliberately mischaracterized as a scream to put doubt in people’s minds and make people think they’d better get behind the safe choice. And the party wholeheartedly agreed because they knew the safe choice wouldn’t win and Bush would be stuck with the mess he created.”

“Seems like a smart move,” ventured Bud.

“It’s pretty damn short-sighted,” said Chuck. “You run for president to win, to put your ideas into action. People vote for you because they think you’re going to make their lives better. And then you find out the party behind your candidate is going nah, let’s let the other guy deal with this. Everyone sit tight for four years—we’ll get to your concerns next time around. Maybe.”

Jerry Allison muttered “Jesus.” This was what he hated about Chuck. Goddamn Kelso couldn’t accept that his guy lost, that his guy lost because more patriotic Americans voted to support the president and help him win the war—and yes, it was a war, a war on terrorism and a war on radical primitive religious nuts and a war on freedom. But no, Chuck couldn’t accept that that’s what real Americans want. Instead it was the Democrats throwing the election. Bullshit. What a crock. Jerry checked his watch; his 3:15 appointment was just on the edge of Colby City so he had time to poke the bear a little more. “Chuck, your wisdom is wasted in the lumber business. If only we were all as brilliant as you.”

Chuck shook his head. Jerry clearly hadn’t graduated beyond seventh-grade sarcasm. “I’m not trying to be wise or brilliant. I’m just saying give people a better choice.”

“Yeah, but people like you are hurting the cause—”

“And people like you just take it on faith that there actually is a cause—”

“Yeah, the cause is that they hate us—”

“So we go in and take over their government and put guys with guns on every street corner. To make people love us even more. People actually tend to hate you when you invade the wrong country—”

“That’s just your opinion. Did it ever occur to you that George Bush might be a little smarter than you?”

“The guy who said that more of our imports are coming from overseas? I can assure you that no, that never occurred to me.”

“Well, maybe we should have elected you president then. That way you could just let these assholes take over the world and execute all the Christians and Jews.”

“Is that something you think could actually happen?”

“That’s what they want. And they’ll start with our troops.”

Bud Sykes actually dropped his fork. (Later when Chuck was telling Janette about the situation he said it was just like in a movie. Complete silence and then the clang and clatter of that fork hitting the plate and the counter.) Betty Nolan took a deep breath and said oh my. Jerry knew exactly what he’d said wrong and hoped Chuck wouldn’t call him out on it. Then he hoped Chuck would call him out on it because otherwise Chuck would be taking the high road and that would give him the upper hand in this and all future political discussions. Arguments. Fights. Whatever.

Chuck drained his coffee and looked away. Jerry said “I didn’t mean—I mean, I forgot.”

“I know,” said Chuck. “But I gotta get back to work.”

Goddamn Kelso and his high road.

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*Don’t take my word for it:

**Why, yes you can buy this novel, which takes place in the small rural town of Colby City, Illinois and covers the time between the invasion of Iraq and the Great Septic Tank Explosion of 2016. Just follow this link.

A very condensed version of a recent attempt to pair my iPhone with the Bluetooth in a used Toyota Highlander.

Dono: I would like to listen to some music in my new car, which, while not new in the just-off-the-lot sense, is new to me.

Bluetooth: I can help with that.

Dono: Good. Let’s get this paired up.

Bluetooth: Go for it.

Dono: Looks like there are already five iPhones paired up. I believe that’s the limit.

Bluetooth: Yes, you’ll have to delete one.

Dono: I can do that. How about the bottom one?

Bluetooth: Good choice.

Dono: All righty—well, darn. When I press the bottom iPhone, the Delete button doesn’t come up.

Bluetooth: What? Weird.

Dono: You seem, in fact, to be looking for that fifth iPhone.

Bluetooth: I am. And that connection is unavailable.

Dono: I could have told you that. I’m trying to pair the iPhone I’m holding in my hand.

Bluetooth: You’ll have to delete one first.

Dono: You’ll have to show me a Delete button so I can do that.

Bluetooth: I don’t *have* to do anything.

Dono: How can I listen to music then?

Bluetooth: You’ll have to pair up your iPhone with me.

Dono: That’s what I’m trying to do.

Bluetooth: You’ll have to delete one of the five already paired up.

Dono: I’m—you know what, screw it. I can’t argue with you and try to drive. (drives for five minutes) Hey, the Delete button just popped up on the screen.

Bluetooth: Now you can delete one iPhone and add yours.

Dono: Yes, but why did it take five minutes of doing nothing for that to—never mind. Click, delete, add. There we go, I’m adding my iPhone.

Bluetooth: There is no device connected.

Dono: Yes, there is. It’s my iPhone.

Bluetooth: No device is detected. Would you like to try to connect from the audio player?

Dono: I don’t care if I have to connect from the carburetor if it means I can listen to music.

Bluetooth: There is no device connected.

Dono: This seems to be a you problem.

Bluetooth: Is it, though?

Dono: Hang on—let me open up my settings. OK, Bluetooth is definitely on. It says the Toyota Highlander is not connected, so I’ll click on that—

Bluetooth: There is no device connected. Make sure your Bluetooth is on and within range.

Dono: Within range? I’m holding my phone right next to the screen. Is your range measured with a micrometer?

Bluetooth: There is no device connected.

Dono: Oh, no kidding? I hadn’t noticed, you piece of—

Creedence Clearwater Revival: I see a bad moon rising—

Dono: Oh, wait, there it is. I don’t know what I did, but I’ve got music after forty-five freakin minutes. Thanks, I guess.

(The next day)

Bluetooth: I’ve never seen this phone before in my life.

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Hey there, friends, it occurred to me recently that we have some new subscribers who might be wondering if it’s really sustainable for a newsletter to publish zero times a year.

Probably not. But neither was it all that sustainable when I was putting out three new newsletters a week. Right now the political situation in this country is so stupid I can’t even bring myself to write about it without raising my blood pressure to stroke level.

But I might again someday. In the meantime, I’d like to welcome new subscribers with an episode of my Radio Dono podcast. Enjoy!

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If you’ve read my memoir you know I have a somewhat ridiculous connection with the poem Ozymandias. It was my junior year at Wabash: I was in English 97, Studies in Literary Criticism, and one of the class sections was taught by a professor I found intimidating. One day he opened up the class by asking if anyone knew who had written Ozymandias; I raised my hand and said “Shelley,” which was correct.

That one word made up a rather large percentage of my class participation that semester.

Anyway, it’s a great poem, a sonnet to be exact, probably pretty easy to memorize if you had a mind to. The theme is hubris, which makes it timeless but also particularly relevant here in 2025. In fact, someone in one of the literature groups I belong to on Facebook posted the poem recently and a commenter noted that “Someone should show this to Trump.”

This commenter was obviously joking, as we all know that if President Felon could read he’d have one of his sycophants crank out some Lolita fanfic for him. Seriously, any day now I expect the criminal-in-chief to ramble on about how Humbert Humbert is a great hero. Terrific guy. The best. But I digress. Someone responded to the Trump post and said “You had to make it political.”

Uh, no—Percy Bysshe Shelley made it political.

But sometimes I give in and break my rule about not engaging with dickwits, so I replied “What do you think is the purpose of literature and art and in particular this poem?”

I also wanted to know what that person was doing in a group focused on literature.

He never replied.

However, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. I came here to talk to you about Ozymandias as a source of comedy. First, here’s the actual poem, direct from the public domain:

Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Gets you right here, doesn’t it?

I posted a little joke on Facebook about Ozymandias complaining that no one was looking on his works and despairing, but then I thought it might be even better if I did it in the format of one of Bob Newhart’s one-sided phone calls, the most famous of which is probably Newhart as a press agent talking to Abe Lincoln, trying to persuade him not to shave the beard.

So here’s “Phone Call with Ozymandias,” and you might as well read it in Newhart’s voice.

Newhart: (answering phone) Hello? Hey, Ozymandias, good to hear from you. How’s the old King of Kings? (PAUSE) Lots of in-fighting among the kings. In-fighting and back-stabbing. Not literally, I hope. (PAUSE) Just the one? Well, that comes with the territory, I guess, and—what’s that? Someone suggested everyone take turns being the King of Kings? Well, I hope you shot that down. Good, good. Cause that would get confusing. Just tell them there’s nothing wrong with being a king who’s subject to the King of Kings. That still looks good on a resume. (PAUSE) Exactly—everybody wants to rule the world. Say, Ozzie, how’s the statue coming? Oh good, glad to hear it. Are they getting your visage right? (PAUSE) Oz, no, I’m going to have to disagree on that choice. Hear me out—you don’t want a big smile on the statue. Well, it just doesn’t go with the image. No, I think you want to go tough-guy. Have ’em put a big wrinkle on your lip. A sneer. (PAUSE) An example? Well, like if Elvis was a tyrannical emperor. What’s that? Cold command, yes, that’s a good note. Let the sculptor know. How about the legs, Ozzie? What do I mean? I mean don’t let them cut corners on the legs. The legs are the key to the whole thing. The legs hold the trunk and the trunk holds your visage. If you go cheap on the legs, the whole thing falls down and it makes you look weak, like your empire is a flash in the pan. Trust me, Oz, you want this thing to last. Absolutely. When travelers come by in the future, they’re going to see this statue in the middle of your empire and they’re going to think “Now here’s a guy the world will never forget.” (PAUSE) Yes. It’s all in the legs. But Oz, you sound a little down. What’s the problem? The mighty aren’t looking on your works and despairing. Are you sure? (PAUSE) Every time you see the mighty, they’re not looking on your works. Well, let’s face it, Ozzie, the mighty are busy people. They probably already looked on your works and despaired. I’m not sure you need them to look on your works 24/7. (PAUSE) You don’t think some of them have looked on your works at all, let alone despaired. Yes, I know you put a lot of work into those works, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to tell people how to feel about them. It’s like saying, uh, “Be sure to leave a five-star review.” You can’t really dictate the reactions to your works. (PAUSE) You’re going for despair. Well, that’s one approach, but consider this: Maybe some of the mighty are looking on your works and being happy or inspired. (PAUSE) It’s despair or nothing. Oz, I’m not sure that’s—what? You’re going to have them put that on the statue? Like an inscription? Oz, I don’t know. In these times people have enough to despair about. What’s that? You want to take the mighty down a peg or two? Well, that’s your right, being the King of Kings and all, but I think if you put that cold sneer on the visage it’ll cover a lot of ground. Just think about it. Sleep on it and we can talk about it tomorrow. Tomorrow’s not good? You’re conquering another kingdom tomorrow. That’s fine. Next week works too. There’s no rush. We know your empire’s going to be here for a long long time. Catch you later, Oz. Good luck on the conquering.

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Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

The Number One Reason

One of the following is true:

a. This is a fast-moving and funny book that will provide an entertaining respite from the worries of the world.

b. The first letters of the words closest to the gutter on a particular odd-numbered page spell out the location of a secret treasure.

Which one could it be?

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Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

Number Two

If you like action*, this book’s got it!

*Action words, i.e. verbs.

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Tomorrow: The Last Reason (besides the usual “You would have my undying gratitude” and “I could use a royalty or two now and then”).

Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

Number Three

Mark Twain had lots of cats and wrote great books.

Ernest Hemingway had lots of cats and wrote great books.

I have a lot of cats.

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Unless my math is off, tomorrow should be reason number two. I hope you like it.

Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

Number Four

Compared to every single novel of the Victorian Era—Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and so on—this book comes a lot closer to answering the question “How the hell did Dono get to be the way he is?”

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Tune in tomorrow for number three. It’s probably the third-best reason.

Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

Number Five

It’s not the kind of memoir where somebody gets lost at sea, or somebody recovers from a severe brain injury to quarterback his team to the Super Bowl, or somebody nurses an abandoned baby wolf back to health so the wolf can quarterback his team to the Super Bowl.

It’s one of the other kind.

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Tune in tomorrow for number four—and if you’ve already purchased the book based on a mere six reasons, thanks!

Top Ten Reasons to Purchase and Read My Memoir

Number Six

Unlike Season 3 of Severance, it’s available right now.

Your outie loves funny memoirs with brightly-colored covers. Your outie also has lots of friends to whom you should recommend this book.

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Tune in tomorrow for number five, por favor!