There's not a lot I know for certain.

Beyond the tying of shoelaces, there isn't much you can teach a person. But I believe every child should be given this little speech: “Whether they know it or not, everybody you meet is trying to make you more like themselves. Strong people tend to make you stronger. Weak people do things to weaken you. Drunks offer you drinks; whiners want you to whine back. Cruel people will be gratified if you respond to their cruelty with your own. Look for the kind, sad, funny people. They are the best. Try to learn for yourself how to be like them.”

Monsanto are still jerks, though.

Maybe it was shortsighted to pump up our agricultural outputs to where we can feed so many of us. Probably we should reduce our dependence on commodity-crop monoculture. And certainly we'll be restructuring the entire food chain over the next few decades. But look: When a living cell gets its DNA tweaked so it grows in some new way, that's called mutation. If a mutation enhances an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, then that mutation is replicated many times over. Like zebra stripes. Or opposable thumbs. So stop worrying about Frankenfood. You're a GMO and so am I.

Road Rant

East Cleveland is east of Cleveland. East St. Louis is east of St. Louis. So it’s peculiar that East Troy, Wisconsin is actually to the west of the ancient city of Troy. A long way, too. It hardly qualifies as a suburb at all. Down the road, there’s a chain of burger joints in Rockford, Illinois, called Beefaroo. The only other thing I know about Rockford is that’s where Cheap Trick is from. I fail to see any connection. Also, wouldn’t you think that entering a building called Piggly Wiggly would be an occasion for uproarious hilarity? It’s not, though.

Kelly and Scott, too

As I slouch through my 60^th year on this planet I find myself contemplating important people from my formative years. Occasionally from the lofty perspective which the intervening decades have provided I will suddenly have astonishing (to me) insights into relationships that I had taken for granted at the time. Like, that charming uncle who showed up periodically was a lonely drunk. Like, my parents were amateurs, young people with problems of their own who on balance did a great job. And, really, when you think about it, Kirk and Spock were just Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin in space.

Shut up in there.

Back in 1978, Sony prototyped the first Walkman, a little cassette player with headphones for private listening on the go. Then smaller, better, cheaper: today there's no reason whatsoever when jogging or biking or riding a public conveyance to listen to the actual world around you. They even have these noise-cancelling headsets that wrap you in a spooky silence that feels like your skull is turning inside out. But really, the entire world you live in fits nicely into a baseball cap. And for me at least, that's where all the racket is coming from. I need a noise-cancelling mindset.

We're all of Ethiopian descent.

People can establish a sense of ownership in an incredibly short time. Like, you get on the bus and walk past everybody to an empty seat and get settled in, then at the very next stop you look up at a boarding passenger and think to yourself, “Who's this new guy on my bus?” That's your inner two year old, the one who just learned the word “mine.” The same part of the brain creates ideas like, “This was always a Jewish neighborhood, now it's all Colored,” or “How come there's so many Mexicans in Texas?”

Romero never used the z-word.

Science fiction is whatever we're worried about now, spray painted silver. Our monsters are metaphors for what scares us most. RUR was about industrial class struggle, Flash Gordon fought World War II in advance, 1984 was about 1948, and we knew all those crappy '50s flying saucers were piloted by godless commies. So what are we afraid of now? Zombies. They stay scary, year after year, because, what if somehow you yourself became a mindless shambling thing, just a blind hunger groping around wanting more more more for no good reason? What if the brains you ate were your own?