Writing Boots

No need to order your chicken nuggets anymore. Just hit the "yeah" button and open wide.

On my microwave oven, there are buttons for cooking standard foods. A friend of mine is a cook, and he was making something in my kitchen. He pointed to the "Popcorn" button, the "Hot Dog" button and the "Mac & Cheese" button, which he thought were acceptable. But the "Chicken Nuggets" button—"that's discouraging," he said.

Well have you noticed the canned response buttons on LinkedIn?

 

I don't know what algorithms they're using to come up with these buttons, which do somehow change with the circumstances, but it's discouraging that "indeed" and "yeah" are now roughly analogous expressions (both meaning, roughly, "totes mcgotes).

I do know that the first time I bring myself to push the "yeah" button, it will be a death—a little writer's death. (As it also was a few years ago when a speechwriter correspondent was astonished and insulted when David Murray sent him a winky-face emoticon.)

Once I was the only person on a suburban Chicago bus. I struck up a conversation with the driver, who asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I was a writer, he moaned loudly. He'd hate to be a writer, he said. He said he looks at the newspaper and he sees all those words and wonders, Does the writer have to write every one of those words?! 

"Yep," I said, "every 'the' and every 'and.'"

Nowadays, even "indeeds" are done for you.

Can antidisestablishmentarianism be far behind? 

Well, my algorithms tell me we're coming to the end of the column.

So go ahead, dear reader. Push "Profound" or "Ha!"

Or "Chicken Nuggets."

You have more old friends than you think

We know why the years seem to go by faster as we get older: When you were nine, another year was a whole 10th of your life. When you're 40, a year is only a 40th of your life. So it seems like nothing—because it almost is nothing.

Except, it isn't nothing—it's a whole year.

This time warp affects the way we think of our friends, too. When you were 30, someone you'd known since college was a kind of brother or a sister to you, because you'd known them all your adult life. (And through some important years.) 

But now in midlife, you can be knowing a body for nine years, and when Facebook reminds you, you're surprised. It feels like you just met that person. That's the time warp again.

And it's dangerous.

Because if you treat that person like a recent acquaintance when they've been a faithful friend with whom you've shared life's roiling ocean for most of a decade, you might hurt that person's feelings.

Maybe it's hard to feel like family with someone you've met later in life.

But someone with whom you've kept in steady touch for decade in the mad middle of middle life—that person might be your family.

And you should take special care to extend your gratitude.

Which is the purpose of this post, my midlife friends and midlife family.

You know who you are, don't you?

The Quotable Murr

"They tell you not to punch down. But what else are you supposed to do when you're being nibbled to death by ants?"

Friday Happy Hour Video: Boy, I've been writing a lot of promotional copy these days ...

The problem with a political movement led by teenagers

CNN has a big town hall with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School kids tonight. I think I'll watch it, but I have to say I'm kind of dreading it.

Today's New York Times has a roundup of the various ways in which pro-gun goons are dismissing the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who have been speaking out for gun control.

... in certain right-wing corners of the web — and, increasingly, from more mainstream voices like Rush Limbaugh and a commentator on CNN ... the students are described as “crisis actors,” who travel to the sites of shootings to instigate fury against guns. Or they are called F.B.I. plants, defending the bureau for its failure to catch the shooter. They have been portrayed as puppets being coached and manipulated by the Democratic Party, gun control activists, the so-called antifa movement and the left-wing billionaire George Soros.

Which is bullshit, of course. 

But I have another worry. I think the main trouble with relying on these teenagers to shame the politicians into adopting sensible gun laws is not that they're going to be seen as professionals. It's that they're going to be seen as teenagers. And teenagers, as we know, can be pretty fuckin' dumb.

Now: So far, some of the teenagers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. have been inspiringly eloquent in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, none more so than Emma Gonzalez, whose speech last weekend employed so many rhetorical devices that I had professional speechwriters asking me if I thought she had speechwriting help from a teacher or someone. Based on Gonzalez' emotional ownership of her words and the lack of time she had to prepare, I believe any help she had was minimal. As I told the speechwriters, there are prodigies in our business too. 

But if Gonzalez and her classmates are going to last past this week on the public stage—past the crying and shouting stage—they're going to need some help.

Because the pathos they've been riding on will fade. Logos isn't their core competency (and doesn't seem too relevant in the American gun "debate"). And their ethos—their character, which will grant them credibility beyond that of the immediately grief-stricken—is literally adolescent.

The guttural rhetoric that was utterly appropriate and effective in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy will sound a week later like pots and pans.

A week's remove from the funerals will also see the rise of high school thespians and class clowns, like the carrot-topped student I saw on CNN last night who made some crack outside the Florida statehouse about how he has to worry even more because of his red hair, which allows him, especially considering Florida's flat topography, to be a shooter's target "as far as the eye can see." Hilair.

We're going to have more of that—and if I know teenagers, we could also see a parade of self-impressed sophomores, Eddie Haskells and Alex Keatons and all other combinations of earnest bores and preening posers that make up the average population of any high school (and the average split personality of most high schoolers, if a young David Murray was any indication).

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas did not cleanse these kids of their human nature, or render them immediately mature. (For many teenagers, World War II didn't do that.)

I hope a small handful of remarkable kids—rhetorical and political prodigies—emerge from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas senior class, to serve as the main voice of this movement.

(Delaney Tarr seems like an awfully good candidate.)

I hope those kids get permission from their civics teacher (and their English teacher and their history teacher and their math teacher and their soccer coach) to take the rest of the year as an educational sabbatical where they'll learn far more than they could ever learn in their high school curriculum.

And on that sabbatical, I hope those kids do receive the very best communication coaching, political mentoring and—yes, if they need it, even speechwriting help—so that they may, even in their vast inexperience, remain authentic and grounded as they also adapt their tone and message to different stages and moments of a movement.

I know a lot of really fine people who can help, and I'm happy to put them in touch.

Because these kids are kind of our last hope on this insane gun thing.

Or our first one for awhile, at least.

Wife discovers something she doesn't know about husband of 24 years: He's a dude

My wife and I have been married almost 24 years, and together almost 30. It's hard to keep a secret from a woman that long.

To do so, you probably have to keep the secret from yourself. That, or she has to wish real hard that you're something other than what you are.

I come from a long tradition of men who were incapable around the house. Whenever something would go wrong in my grandfather's house, he'd say two things consecutively: "I don't know anything about it!" And, "Call the man!" But that was OK, cause my grandfather was a big time steel executive. He didn't need to go grubbing around under his sink.

My dad's entire tool chest consisted of a pair of tin snips, a hammer and a few wrenches that he kept in a Pringles can. But he was an ad exec. Why should he know how to snake a drain?

Maybe it's because I've surrounded myself with handier friends than my male ancestors. Or maybe it's because I worked maintenance on a golf course during college and in the course of keeping mowers mowing and sprinklers watering, learned the difference between a socket wrench (shinier) and a pipe wrench (heavier). Whatever the reason, I've aimed just a little higher than my forbears as a fix-it man. For instance, I have a big black box full of tools: ratchets and screwdrivers.

Now, I don't try to fix the furnace or the water heater when they go down. After waving a lighter around to see if I can get the pilot light to miraculously catch, I call the man.

And whenever anything goes wrong that can wait a few weeks, I call the woman—my sister-in-law Jeni, will fix anything in my house if I fetch the materials she asks for and keep her supplied with Coors Light and wry commentary.

And I mow my little lawn like it's Augusta National. 

And somehow through all of the above I have apparently managed to conceal from my wife my big insecurity around my handiness as it relates to my manliness.

Monday evening was the big reveal.

On Monday evening something rare happened—something urgent broke, that I believed I could fix myself. Specifically, the goddamn spice cabinet door ripped off the bottom hinge again, right during dinner prep and cocktail hour, the piece of shit.

And this is when my wife—and my daughter, a budding young feminist trying to learn what lights the male pilot light—learned something about me.

Before I could even have a look at the damage, my wife said, "We need a handyman to fix that. I'm going to call Igor."

Igor is our Ukrainian neighbor.

Ukrainians are a very capable people, and Igor is very Ukrainian.

Igor has a garage so full of tools that he can barely walk through it. He is a hoarder of competence.

Igor can fix anything, and sometimes he fixes people's cars, in the alley.

Igor has been inside my broken dishwasher and has cut a lock off a gate after we lost the key. "Make a spare key," he instructed us.

Igor will not take money.

I do not want Igor to come and fix my spice cabinet door, and I say so.

"Why not?" my wife asks.

"For the same reason that I hid upstairs in the bedroom when Igor worked on our dishwasher," I say.

"Why was that?" she asks. I look into her eyes and, astonished, find that they are not just trying to goad me into admitting something embarrassing that she already knows.

She really wants to know why I don't want her to call Igor. Because she really doesn't know. So I guess I'll actually have to tell her.

"Because it makes me feel badly as a man," I hear myself telling her (and my daughter, who is listening with great interest). "I don't mind having a handyman, but I'd rather that handyman not be my neighbor."

I cannot believe that 24 years of seeing me get agitated every time I hired anyone besides my beloved sister-in-law to fix something around the house has not taught her that I have some issues around being a helpless fuckwit around the house. Based on my Everybody-Already-Knows-Everything Theory of Communication, my wife must have a lot invested in seeing me as being above such traditional male insecurities. Well, I guess my 1970s feminist mother also had a lot invested in the same thing. I have done my best.

And speaking of theories—and back to the kitchen Monday night—I then advanced a grand one: That no matter how evolved he may be, every man in our lives, if he was honest, would at least admit to not wanting his handyman, who naturally sees him as a nebbish, to be the same person as his neighbor, whom he wants to know him as a helpful mensch.

As I used the paring knife my wife was cooking with to shave chunks off a pencil to wedge into the ragged holes to make the wood screws bite again, these two women sat there scoffing and shaking their heads at my ridiculous male pride. As I turned the screws into the holes and successfully re-secured the cabinet door for another three months until it falls off again, I declared that a man reaches a certain age when he stops trying to pretend he's as liberated and enlightened as he wants to be. Quoting another man—namely Popeye the Sailor Man—he admits without pride or protest, "I yam what I yam."

And at this stage in life, it seems to this middle-aged man, the truth is more constructive to everyone involved than more aspirational pretending.

"Do me a favor, Babe," I said as I closed my big black tool box. "Next time you see Igor, tell him if he ever has any trouble with his cabinets, I'm happy to have a look."

I was playing it off with humor, but I was bursting with pride.

Male pride.

Facebook posters: Nothing is "everything"

A couple years ago the big thing was to write Facebook posts with the one-word headline, "THIS," and I worried publicly that such self-indulgent headlines would take over my newspaper.

So far the newspaper headlines are as persuasive as they ever were. (Maybe to a fault.)

But the self-referential Facebook posts are getting worse. Now people are saying, "___ is everything."

As in, "Adam Rippon is everything."

And you have to look up Adam Rippon, who up until now, hasn't, to you, been anything at all.

And you learn that Adam Rippon is a supremely talented, brash, funny American figure skater—sort of a modern day Cassius Clay, who got into a media kerfuffle because of some back-and-forth he had with Vice President Mike Pence. But Rippon said in a press conference that he wants the Winter Olympics to be "about my amazing skating and being America's sweetheart."

Which is amusing.

But is not and shouldn't even be referred to jokingly by any non-teenybopper, as "everything."

Things I hear myself say ...

"He's a peach," I said about a watch repair guy I'm dealing with—"which is 'cheap,' backwards."

Friday Happy Hour Video: Winter Wheat

The older I get, the more the winter affects me—because I let it, on purpose. Over the first two weeks in February, our furnace went out on a frigid Friday night. I ran many miles in black slush. Work was especially hard. And there were other tests. And all the while we tried to teach our exchange student (aside from her two-week course, Dysfunctional American Family 101), that life in Chicago isn't bad, even in February.

Or that it is bad, but it's good enough, as this song goes ...

... because it has to be.

(Thanks to Paul Engleman, deejay of my life.)

The Morning Jamoke: Who's as insufferable as Mika & Joe? The average American citizen.

My ad man dad used to say that every person's motto was, "There will never be another me." 

After the election last year, I switched my morning TV masochism from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to C-SPAN's "Washington Journal."

Why? Because "Morning Joe" is a bunch of utterly smug know-it-alls demonstrating their magnificent grasp of the obvious.

Whereas, "Washington Journal" is an egalitarian call-in show open to any American with access to a telephone. The comically neutral C-SPAN host introduces a topical subject and invites citizens to discuss it. It took me more than a year of willful self-delusion to realize that "Washington Journal" is also a bunch of utterly smug know-it-alls demonstrating a magnificent grasp of the obvious.

These unpaid pundits hail from towns you've never heard of—hell, sometimes states you've never heard of—and they aren't usually very good with their words, especially as nervous as they are to be on TV. And some of their ideas are Wack-a-Doodle-Doo.

But when it comes to supreme self-assurance that they possess a unique, incisive, world-shattering point of view, Joe Scarborough has nothing on Joe Six Pack.

There's no point in listing the sorts of opinions you hear on the Washington Journal, because you've heard most of them thousand times before. But the way they're expressed—it's like a child showing holding up her first lost tooth. And even the C3PO-like C-SPAN hosts seethe underneath when the callers refuse to answer the question posed, instead insisting on delivering their muddle-headed manifesto, cockeyed conspiracy theory, or political pet peeve delivered with an air of Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker—Dottie Parker or Oscar the Grouch, more like it.

No wonder Americans don't vote. We all think of ourselves as philosophers, not rank-and-file citizens. We sit around our dinner tables and tell our families how to think, sit around our greasy spoons and tell our neighbors how to think, sit it in bars and tell our drinking buddies how to think, sit on Facebook and tell our Facebook friends how to think. And we're so fucking wise that we don't have to personally get involved. We must only speak our precious truths and set a million others marching.

And then the C-SPAN host pushes a button to end the call. And introduces a new me, another one there will never be.