Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made a novel observation: women die much less frequently in labor if doctors wash their hands before delivering the baby.

But he couldn’t explain why (that would require Louis Pasteur). He just reported the factual findings and urged doctors to wash their hands after taking their pre-op bowel movement.

The Austro-Hungarian medical establishment rejected his findings because he didn’t have a theory to explain the phenomenon. He was mocked and his findings ignored. He suffered a nervous breakdown, was institutionalized, and beaten by the guards, dying fourteen days later in the same medical institution (the one with the nasty-ass hands) that he railed against in his writing.

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The modern mindset cherishes ruminations of the left hemisphere like my burnout friend in high school cherished his dented and dinged ‘78 Camaro. Those left-hemispheric ruminations are called “theories.” Because the modern mind elevates them to the level of religious faith, it can scarcely function without them, which is why Semmelweis’ colleagues kept delivering babies with their nasty-ass hands.

Thing is, theories tend to be more dented and dinged than my friend’s Camaro. And just as I couldn’t tell my proud friend that his Camaro was, you know, kind of a piece of shit, you can’t tell a politician that his theory reeks.

And like my friend who terrorized the town with his car, contemptuous of anyone who didn’t appreciate the beauty of his roaring engine (muffler removed to better rattle the peaceful), the politician terrorizes society with his theories, contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t see the goodness of his legislation (humility removed to better rattle the peaceful).

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You shouldn’t start thinking that theories are the problem. They’re not. Theories aren’t any more harmful than daydreams. They’re just things our minds come up with, more ineffectual and inconsequential than a guy trying to have sex with his car (I think my friend tried).

The problem is intervention.

Intervention is to theory what prayers and devotions are to the Church. You can have all the store of grace in the heavens, but without prayer, they tend to sit there. You can have the best theories in the world, but without intervention, they never leave the rationalist mind.

The politician intervenes in his effort to bring theories, with all their dents and dings that he doesn’t even notice, into society. The priest does a similar thing in his efforts to bring grace into the world through the sacraments and that peasant woman does too, through her devotions.

The difference is, the priest and the peasant woman aren’t looking to force any worldly change. Sure, petitions and intentions are a big part of devotions and a peasant woman who starts lighting candles in hopes of smiting that big-racked bitch next door who her husband keeps leering at is veering into superstition, but intentions, properly practiced, are just that: petitions. . . requests. Not commands. It’s the difference between soliciting the divine with “please” and thundering, “do it now!”

The latter is the essence of superstition: soliciting something divine (God or apotheosized theories) to bend the worldly to one’s will. It’s the sin of Simon Magus; it’s the sin of druid priests, voodoo doctors, and Jedi knights.

And of most modern politicians.

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And if the following anecdote is true, it could kill the GLP-1 surge without the need for a team of plaintiff attorneys to sift through 5,000 banker boxes ten years from now to assess the damage.

They say hedge funds are banning their traders from using GLP-1s because the drugs obliterate their desire to make money.

When I read that, I was like, “Ozempic cripples greed?!” Can we lace the water supplies of NYC, DC, and Silicon Valley with the stuff before they destroy the world with AI? Can we drop it into the HVAC systems at the Pentagon, Lockheed, and Halliburton? And heck, while we’re at it, maybe we can slip Wegovy to the masturbators so they take an interest in chicks again.”

The seven deadly sins, gone. Those ancient virtues of detachment and apatheia that take years of asceticism and meditation to attain: just one oblique injection away.

The world can then turn its attention to service and love. We’ll build a golden age on a mountain of those syringes.

But there’s a problem.

When the first GLP-1 results trickled in, podcasts like All-In slobbered praise. The drug doesn’t just help people lose weight, they said. It helps on many fronts: compulsive eating, compulsive shopping, compulsive gambling. If something compels you, Ozempic puts it in a headlock.

But there’s a rub, and not just from the guys who decline to take Wegovy to stop their onanism: The GLP-1s don’t just stop harmful desire. They eliminate all desire.

The jerk-off isn’t going to pick up a syringe, put down his sword, and bed a babe. He’s gonna do the first two but not the third. Two out of three ain’t bad, says Meat Loaf, but when number three is “engage life,” it’s a problem.

GLP-1 (man, I hope there’s not a 2, 3, and 4) is merely the latest in a parade of left-hemispheric solutions. The LH isolates a problem and then autistically focuses on eliminating it. It’s like that nightmare AI hypothetical: you tell AI to rust-proof equipment, then it proceeds to remove all the oxygen from the Earth’s atmosphere.

The LH saw a problem: a shload of overweight people crippling our health care industry, clogging Disney World with motorized scooters, squishing passengers on airplanes, and killing sexual appetite in everyone except the visually-impaired. The solution: get the fat people to eat less.

Eliminating the ‘food noise’ is how Oprah phrases it.

The problem is, many users have become entirely deaf.

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Instead of taking Ozempic, Dostoyevsky wrote (and wrote and wrote) to pay off his gambling debts. One of his short pieces, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, is about a man who travels to another solar system and encounters people just like us, but not tainted by Original Sin. The people don’t even know what vice and virtue are, much less have names for them.

The Ridiculous Man changes that. He infects them with sin. And then the people start categorizing. They invent morality because there is now immorality. They invent honor because there is dishonor. They know justice because they experience injustice. They invent brotherhood because there is now a thing called “hatred.”

That water buffalo-riding eccentric Lao-Tzu knew all this. If something is good, then something else is bad . . . and vice versa. The better course, says the Taoist: don’t categorize anything and sure as hell don’t judge anything. You’ll attain ataraxia, the existential suspension of all judgment, and thereby enter into a kind of earthly nirvana.

There’s a lot to this. We could all use a larger measure of such detachment from our opinions and screeds.

The Free Press

They Went on Ozempic—and Gave Up on Life

In June of 2023, Kim Francis did something that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable, but is now as American as apple pie: She shot herself up with Ozempic, praying it would change her life…

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a month ago · 142 likes · 362 comments · Evan Gardner

Unfortunately, that Taoist/Zen insight is, as McGilchrist observes in his books, highly right-hemispheric, and the modern world, especially its technological/medicinal/pharmaceutical/bastardal elements, appreciates the right hemisphere about as much as a bar owner appreciates Carrie Nation.

We aren’t the unstained people on the Ridiculous Man’s planet. We need categories to survive. We need to distinguish monsters from angels. The left hemisphere does a great job with this.

But it needs the right hemisphere to temper it, to moderate it, to introduce a measure of, “Okay, I hear ya, now settle the f’ down and let’s assess this a bit more without all the adrenaline.”

The right hemisphere injects measure and patience, plus a wallop of humility that urges caution and detachment that fits the matter into the grand scheme of things.

The left hemisphere wants none of that. It’s balls to the wall until our scrotums burst.

And now there’s a segment of our population that doesn’t much mind that popping sensation in their scrotalia.

No, not the idiocy that has polluted every decent plot of land with solar panels that will be left to rust after the tenant tax-credit bandits leave them behind for the farmer to dispose of pursuant to an onerous double-hazmat process that is impossible to comply with unless the farmer hires his Senator’s brother-in-law’s company to do it at a fee greatly exceeding all the lease payments he received for f’ing up his fields in the first place.

No, I’m not talking about that barrel of dung bequeathed to us by puppet Obama and hologram Biden.

I’m talking about the Green Revolution in agriculture, that phenomenon of food production after WWII that made crop yields explode by abandoning traditional agricultural practices. Farmers moved to hybrid and GMO seeds, expanded use of irrigation, bought bigger-assed tractors with treads that crush the earth like a corpulent sorority girl’s high heels on her way to a social, and, of course, applied tons of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to the ground. Experts estimate that the Green Revolution lifted approximately 1.294 bajillion people out of poverty.

Great thing.

Until it sucks.

And it’s sucking right about now.

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When you read “NPK” levels on a fertilizer product, splatter the container on the floor, then run away before Walmart security realizes what happened.

The soil is more than Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium, just like the central government is more than the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary. If you focus only on those three things, your soil will die and the CIA will drug you with LSD while you try to bang a whore. Both those things happened late in the last century. I feel bad for the LSD-laced johns, but at least they got laid. The rest of us? We got nothin’ except food budgets that work only because Dollar General opens two stores in every village and stocks them with canola-infused muffins that your local white trash foodie labels as “health food.”

The Green Revolution focused solely on NPK (capitalized because they’re secular gods) on one end of the binary and weeds and fungus on the other end of the binary. They promoted the former and killed the latter, applying more chemicals to 40 acres than the Germans piped into an Auschwitz shower building.

In the process, they killed the soil’s microbiome. It no longer crawls with microbes, bugs, and worms. It’s become more sterile than a roid boy after a nasty accident with the Manscape Lawn Mower 3.0 Plus.

Some say we’re looking at the next Oklahoma Dust Bowl, but this time, in Wisconsin, Peking, and all points in between.

When they sterilized the soil, they killed our guts.

The bleeding-edge soil science tells us that our gut microbiomes are formed, fueled, and fed by the soil’s microbiome, and now that our soil’s microbiome is struggling along like an inebriated Stephen Hawking without his wheelchair, there’s evidence that it’s f’ing up our guts, which then is leading to allergies, autism, and autoimmune disorders.

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I used to think “non-binary” was a term used by dudes who tried to understand why they got their asses kicked in the locker room after taking a sneak peek. But now, despite being an ardent hater of other men’s buttocks, I find myself using it (the term “non-binary,” not the sneak peek).

The left hemisphere loves binaries. It makes things simple, and if things are simple, the left hemisphere can get its jobs done quickly. White people who live on a continent, good; yellow people on an island, bad; nuke ‘em. Simple. Efficient. Finished. Tell Elizabeth Anscombe and her moralizing objections to shut the f’ up. Move on.

So the left hemisphere apotheosizes good things and demonizes bad things. It’s why our culture converts every clever saying into a slogan and mercilessly says it over and over until we want to stab ourselves in the ears with pitchforks, while bad things are treated like Jeffrey Epstein after the security cameras go down.

The problem is, there are, indeed, 50 shades of grey, and not just on Little Saint James after a robust happy hour. The left hemisphere loathes grey more than an aging supermodel, but it’s there. Always. Defying the binary.

When we focus on the binal ends, all the grey--the subtlety and uncertainty in the guts of reality–gets neglected until everything turns black, or in the case of our soil, a pale, dusty brown.

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Chesterton, that stout Englishman who managed to see the cosmic joke amid the Edwardian fog, put it plainly enough: the bore is the poor sod who finds nothing funny, while the clown finds everything funny.

We gotta avoid both extremes like Odysseus threading the Straits of Messina, but if I gotta err, I’m erring on the side of the clown. He’s closer to the existential mark.

Nothing about life in this vale of tears is consistent. Nothing is ultimately rational. Nothing is predictable. Our own minds deceive us 15 times before breakfast, and our steeliest aims, goals, and resolutions deflate like a ready male confronted with a picture of naked Janet Reno.

Inconsistency is the only constant. Only unreliability is reliable. Always expect the unexpected.

Humor is the proper response to all this.

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Inconsistency is the soul of humor. It juxtaposes inconsistent things. The more sudden and unexpected and harsh the juxtaposition, the funnier. It could be a man slipping on the ice (his inherent dignity slashed by his flailing efforts to regain his footing) or one of those harsh and unexpected twists that mark deadpan comic Anthony Jeselnik’s style.

“I saw my favorite porn actress at the end of the bar. . . I told the bartender he shouldn’t serve her because she’s only 13.” Jeselnik (paraphrased)

I’d take the clown option one step further these days. In this zany vale of shit that Western culture has become, the clown has become the only effective option.

We debate whether a penis belongs in a girls’ locker room and whether people should show ID to vote when they’re required to show ID in every other important area of life. People use terms like “grand-dogs” to celebrate their children’s self-inflicted sterility, “safe space” to justify neuroticism, and “love language” (a term that no self-respecting American male can hear without biting his lower lip and grabbing his crotch) to describe the only thing that makes life bearable. A blanket of governmental regulations, like 2,000-page building codes, hobble human flourishing as effectively as that fat guy sitting on a prisoner’s head in Idiocracy.

To all this, there are only two possible responses: violence or humor. Violence is abhorrent, so I’ll take humor.

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The brain’s left hemisphere is rationalistic. It only appreciates and pursues those things that the explicit reasoning process can understand. Because modern culture is so overwhelmingly left-hemispheric, rationalistic conclusions govern its operation, no matter how awful the results (cue the penis in the girls’ locker room and building codes that fuel homelessness).

We can’t apply more rationalism to it any more than we can save a gunshot victim by stabbing him repeatedly with a kitchen knife.

Enter humor. Summon the clowns. Celebrate the obscene fools at 4Chan. Embrace the absurd. Slap every building inspector with a Zen koan every time he requires an electrical outlet to be moved two-tenths of a centimeter to the left.

Zeno of Elea explained to Diogenes that movement wasn’t possible. His argument was rationally ironclad. Diogenes didn’t reply rationally. Instead, he stood up and walked around.

Diogenes was pretty clownish. He took nothing seriously. If rationality said “checkmate,” he flipped over the entire chessboard.

Such is the necessary response today when a culture-wide left hemisphere approach to the world has produced a slew of rational yet ludicrous conclusions.

You can’t respond rationally to rational conclusions, no matter how obviously wrong. You gotta first crack open the rationalist cocoon that created the safe space in the first place.

Humor is the most effective hammer. We could try slapping the person, like a Zen master whacking his disciple whenever the disciple asks a perfectly rational question, but that kind of thing is kinda frowned upon.

We could wait for grace to break open the cocoon or for the quiet influence of joyful lives well-lived to make an impression. But those things move slowly and unpredictably.

In the short term, I’m afraid the only option is to flail away at the rationalist cocoons with the hammer of humor. It’ll probably prove ineffective as well. We are, after all, dealing with self-inflicted insanity. But hey, at least we’ll be enjoying ourselves in this zany vale. That’s no small thing when public discourse gives us nothing else to enjoy.

I chuckled for a long time when I read about the genius Claude repeatedly pushing on that pull door when trying to play Pokémon Red on a Game Boy emulator. Claude did alarmingly stupid things like trying to interact with enemies it had already defeated, walking into walls, and, most humorously, getting stuck in the same corners for hours.

I guess it’s a pleateauing glitch that currently has AI standing in front of a rock wall . . . a wall that, depending on who you ask, is a few feet high or a Matterhorn slathered in pig grease.

After three days in Florence earlier this month, I hadn’t established my sense of direction and couldn’t reliably navigate beyond a 200-yard circumference of my hotel room. This is borderline-retard stuff, especially for a guy whose solid sense of direction is paralleled only by his exquisite fear of homosexual contact.

The culprit was obvious: My phone. I relied on my GPS from the moment I left the train and never looked up, adopting a posture and ambling gate that, in pre-smartphone times, would’ve prompted a sensible policeman to detain me. It was a frustrating experience, and I have little doubt it robbed me of many aesthetically pleasing moments while walking around that gorgeous city.

And for what? I didn’t want to fire up a few strands of mitochondria when I first got off the train? I could’ve focused for the first day in Florence, then walked around virtually phone-free for the second and third days, but no. I opted to be led around by that (f’ing!!!!) blue arrow on Google Maps like a mongoloid being led by the hand after a few shots of vodka.

But I find solace in that last refuge of scoundrels: comparing oneself to reprobates.

My stumbling gate around Florence probably looked pretty good compared to the morons who need AI to scan a restaurant menu and tell them what to order. I’d rather stumble into the Arno and drown before I get to that stage.

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Contrast stumbling me and the menu-challenged with Claude. Claude always knows where to walk and what to order from a menu, but he can’t play Pokémon Red without making ludicrous mistakes, like getting stuck in a corner for hours or days at a time.

AI’s resident philosopher, Scott Alexander, author of the compelling “Meditations on Moloch,” says it’s an “agency problem.” AI is great at book learning, he says, but terrible with agency.

AI is built on large language models. It sifts through tens of trillions of words to build its entire framework. That’s why it’s great at book learning.

But that means AI is exclusively left-hemispheric. The left hemisphere runs on words, the more explicit, the better, and it has no use for things like the gestalt, the poetic, and the intuitive, more oblivious to them than Helen Keller is to that ant on the other side of her room.

So when AI Claude gets stuck in a corner, it’ll stay there, bumping against the walls for hours, because its rationalist conclusions tell it that’s the correct thing to do. It can’t see a way out by looking at the larger, and often unspoken, contours of Pokémon Red.

That’s why the agency problem is huge and, I’m pretty sure, has AI looking up a pig-greased Matterhorn and not just a garden wall.

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Agency requires a principal. It’s the first thing you learn in Business Law 101. The agent works for the principal. If there’s no principal, there’s no agency.

In the world of neurons, the left hemisphere is the right hemisphere’s agent. It is, to use McGilchrist’s formulation, the right hemisphere’s emissary. The right hemisphere principal appreciates the non-explicit aspects of existence (gestalt, poetic, intuitive) and can see the big picture that always transcends what can be seen or grasped. That’s why it’s the principal and the left hemisphere ain’t.

But AI has no right hemisphere, leaving the left hemisphere no principal to work for, and without that principal, there is no agency arrangement. The left hemisphere then just keeps doing its thing, whatever that thing is, without regard to the big picture that the right hemisphere takes into account.

As long as the left hemisphere just flails away like Claude in that corner, it’s no big deal.

The problem, of course, is that it won’t just stay in that corner. It’ll break containment eventually, and when it does, it’ll rush into the next ridiculous situation.

At one level, it’s all quite humorous, until corner-bumping Claude gets enormous power in its hands. That’s when the funny stuff gets scary.

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Did the United States bomb a girl's school at the beginning of the Iranian War? It looks that way. Did it do it on purpose? I hope not.

Did American AI do it? That’s my hunch. Even a half-wit can piece together how left-hemispheric-exclusive AI would conclude that bombing the girl’s school was the correct thing to do: the Ayatollah is known to go there, AI is told to kill the Ayatollah, it bombs the girl’s school. It’s logical, precise, effective: all things the left hemisphere excels at.

But it’s something that a person with even a modicum of appreciation for the intangible, like, There are some things you don’t do, wouldn’t pursue.

But we apparently did, and many of us celebrated. We might as well celebrate Claude getting stuck in that corner. Both are actions of a severely autistic person. The only difference is, one is funny and the other is an abomination.

"Child's Play" by Sam Kriss

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I gotta believe his view of Simon has softened considerably since then. Simon was no red-hot conservative partisan, not remotely. He was merely a critic who expected beauty and culture from screen and stage in an era when beauty required pornography to get produced and culture was nearing the point of exhaustion.

Our culture has since arrived at the exhaustation station and everyone except the abjectly moronic knows it.

Observers like Chesterton and critics like Mencken were waving warning flags back in the 1920s. Simon was there--in the 1960s through 1990s--as the train flew off the tracks.

Simon’s prose is delightful, which is no small thing when one’s job in life is to watch and describe, week after week, an unfolding catastrophe, like Don Henley’s bubble-headed bleached-blonde who comes on at five to tell you ‘bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.

We could use more of Simon’s gleam these days.

He once said an actress’ breasts looked like rotten vegetables. She complained. He said that if she didn’t want him to review them, she shouldn’t bare them. It was neither the first nor last time he’d criticize an actor’s physical qualities when they didn’t match up to artistic expectation.

I can’t imagine what he’d do with the body positivity movement on the screen and stage, not to mention the ludicrousness of “blind casting.”

Simon did his best work for New York magazine. For 36 years, he wrote for the leftist rag, and they tolerated it (with difficulty, I’m led to believe). I doubt a person could even type the word “fat” between those covers today.

The man was also funny, even off-color. Despite his high standards, he was no prude.

When he heard Mamet’s criticism of his work, he responded, “[W]hat would the theater be without a clap or two?”

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They were “monsters” in the medievalist’s Latin jargon: monstrare: to show, display. Saint-Hilaire said the development of these baby monsters showed how normal fetal development occurs.

By seeing how monsters develop, we can better prevent monsters.

It’s like un-role models. If George Washington and St. Francis can show us how to live, that broken-down drunk at the bar and your uncle who can’t go within 200 feet of an elementary school arguably do something even more valuable: they show us how not to live.

We’re celebrating the year of the saints right now, and it’s a great thing. We should all cram a little more Butler’s into our daily regimen.

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But don’t discard those one-eyed pig fetuses in history. How did Andy Warhol become “Andy Warhol”? Did Nietzsche induce his own collapse into madness on the streets of Turin? Why did Michel Foucault repeatedly play rectal Russian roulette at the height of the AIDS culture until he caught the disease?

They’re good questions. By casting monsters into relief, we see good things better.

Yeah, I know: Many of these biographies are darker than ink spots on ebony, and damn it, life’s too hard and too short already. I doff my fleece-lined knit hat to the folks who stick with Butler’s, I really do, even during this blasted cold stretch that has deprived me of all feeling in my testicles for the past two weeks.

But here’s the thing: We’re kinda living in a world of one-eyed pigs right now. Monsters have become the norm. How else can you explain why we continue to celebrate the memory of Andy Warhol, who, Gore Vidal observed, is the only genius in history with an IQ of 60?

It’s worth figuring out how the frick we got here. It’s helpful to learn about that broken-down drunk’s first beer at age 14 and how your Registered uncle started clicking on porn sites at 12 while his parents were at work. The creepy biographies show these one-eyed pigs in development.

I suspect the exercise will start showing us a lot of one-eyed pigs in the mirror.

Modern culture infuses us with the habit of looking at the world and approaching life with only one eye: our right one, which is controlled by the left hemisphere.

McGilchrist’s three big volumes are snow globes of a culture blizzarded with left-hemispheric excess: a culture that sees with only one eye.

Once you notice that you’re approaching life with only one eye, you start seeing instances all over the place. In my case, most of those instances are in my own soul. Unsettling? Yes, very much so. I half-quip and half-quiver when I refer to myself as a recovering left-hemispheric.

My consolation? The confessional, primarily, but also Larry David. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld made oodles of money by repeatedly showing the fragility of left-hemispheric rationalism crashing against the rock reality of the world (a reality that can only be appreciated by the right hemisphere). I figure if comedians like Larry and Jerry can joke at their own left-hemispherism, I’m not entirely lost.

I’ll give you my favorite example from my life, which could easily be adapted into a Seinfeld dialogue at Monk’s Cafe.

I’ve long practiced the fine art of ghosting. When I’ve had enough socializing, I just leave a social gathering without saying goodbye. My friends and family long ago just accepted it, and I’ve long defended or at least tried to explain it (earlier treatments: link and link).

My defense of ghosting is, as far as my left-hemispheric/rational mind can see, pretty solid.

But here’s a thing my left hemisphere doesn’t appreciate: It’s a dick thing to do.

Now, we could fall down the abyss of rationalist argumentation about why it’s a dick thing to do or not a dick thing to do, Dick and No-Dick flailing away at one another like Gandalf and the Balrog. Goodness knows, I’ve run the dick/not-dick arguments through my head for years, normally the morning after ghosting, but I never resolved it (partly because, to detour parenthetically into one of P.G. Wodehouse’s descriptions of a hangover:

There were moments when he seemed on the verge of settling the matter, and then some invisible person would meanly insert a red-hot corkscrew in the top of his head and begin to twist it, and this would interfere with calm thought. Piccadilly Jim.)

Instead of Gandalf-Balrogging, I could just relax my mind and say, “You know what? It just doesn’t feel right, so it’s probably not right, even if my rationality says it’s okay.”

And then instead of ghosting, I could simply announce I’m going to bed even though it’s only 10:15, accept the derision with whatever grace my six gin-and-tonics can muster, and retire.

It’s liberating, in a way. It’s not as immediately liberating as ghosting (damn, I loved doing that, especially in my era of youthful excess), but in the final un-analysis, it liberates as only a shrug can liberate. You cease to analyze, you cease quite frankly to care, and just submit to that intuition of what’s right and what’s wrong.

It’s the virtue of obedience, which is the virtue associated with the fourth decade of the Catholic joyful rosary. Maybe it’s not the obedience of Joseph and Mary presenting Jesus to the Temple officials, and maybe not even the obedience to God or some other cosmic power. But it’s obedience . . . to something, somewhere, and it makes life a helluva lot easier and expends far less mental energy.

And if my intuition here is right, I suspect such an approach helps remove that left-hemispheric eye from the center of our existential face.

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A few numbers:

144: The number of times an American is digitally distracted daily. (NB: it doesn’t include that extrovert co-worker who circles the office like a turkey vulture).

6.67: How many minutes, on average, pass between digital distractions (16 hours of waking time x 60 / 144).

20: How many minutes it takes to get back on task after an interruption (some say, with practice, you can reach “flow state” in ten minutes, but most of us require up to 25 minutes).

(1,920): How many focused minutes you have every day if you’re an average American (total unfocused time (144 X 20) - total minutes in the waking day (960 minutes)).

47: The normal attention span these days (in seconds).

It’s time to go Savonarola on this shit. Grab every distraction device and throw it in the bonfire. Every digital distraction is just gilded left-hemispheric vanity, a micro-temptation to prey and grasp, a bicep curl for the left hemisphere.

That’s why those digital devices are killing our souls. The stronger the rogue left hemisphere becomes, the more it suffocates the right hemisphere. This makes it a spiritual battle because the right hemisphere is our transcendental router.

But hey, if psycho-metaphysico propositions ain’t your bag, look at it from a logico-scientifico perspective:

We need sustained attention to form memories. Brain scans show that the hippocampus and other areas of our brain required for memory formation are far more active during times of sustained attention.

Memory is necessary for pretty much everything that separates us from the animals. To solve problems, make connections, regulate emotions, form relationships. Memory is, in other words, necessary to nourish the rational soul, which is, as Aquinas pointed out, the thing that separates us from the animals.

The syllogism: Memory nourishes the soul. Digital distractions cripple memory. Therefore, digital distractions cripple the soul.

So, if you don’t want your soul sucked out of your body like a UFO abducting you from that cornfield at 2:00 AM, you need to take radical steps.

Cal Newport’s deep work? I’m a fan, but does it really work? Can you take a shot of beer every 6.5 minutes for a few hours, then decide, “Okay, I’m not taking any more shots for the next 90 minutes so I can get some work done”? It’s better than nothing, and I can’t dispute the (impressive, in a warped way) abilities of functional drunks who somehow surf through life’s everyday tasks, but overall, you might as well replace those shots of beer with coffee then decide to sleep peacefully for those 90 minutes.

Kevin Majeres’ “Golden Hour” prescription? That’s getting closer. Divide the day into focus sprints. 60 minutes . . . 45 minutes . . . 90 minutes. You decide (my sweet spot seems to 75 minutes). After each sprint, take a break: five minutes . . . 15 minutes . . . 30 minutes. You decide (my sweet spot: 15 minutes). During those sprints, your phone should be in the toilet, preferably defecated upon. If you then want to look at it during your break, go ahead, but I’ve been doing those sprints for two years now, and I normally want to use those breaks for recreational reading or walking outside.

Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities approach? I think that’s the only option, ultimately. Take that phone out of the toilet, wipe it off, then throw it in the metaphorical fire.

So how do you maintain relationships with friends and family after you’ve bonfired your phone?

I have no idea.

I already lose out on a lot of communication with my children because my phone has been in that metaphorical bonfire for over two years. They don’t even bother to text me with anything time-sensitive, and increasingly, anything at all. It’s a bummer that this brother can’t deny, but hey, when I do get the occasional text from them, I get sprung, so there’s that: each text message is welcomed instead of feeling like another drop in a drowning deluge.

IMHO, our Silicon overloads need to create a phone setting that allows trusted friends and loved ones to reach us if something is urgent. I have an analog app that does this. It’s called “The Wife.” She notifies me by dinging my phone or calling my secretary and saying, “Please get him. I don’t care if he’s in one of his work sprints or whatever the f____ he calls it. Get him.” It’s a good workaround, though I estimate that the annual subscription cost is about $50,000.

For those without that option? You’re just gonna have to figure it out for yourselves, but it can be done. Like anything, the first step is the hardest, but at least it’s obvious: Build a bonfire.

That’s not just me staring at the bottom of my sixth glass.

It’s all of us while sleeping.

After especially vigorous nights, we wake up and go, “Man, that was some wild shit.”

I heard awhile back that Muslims are converting to Catholicism because they keep having dreams of the Virgin Mary. I get the impression these aren’t “one-off” conversions. A trickle, a wave, a tsunami . . . beats me, but it happens.

Mary, mother of Jesus, pointing the way to Jesus. If you’re Catholic, you believe that’s what she does, which lends a tubful of credibility that something real is appearing to those Muslims.

If you’re a modernist, you dismiss dreams altogether. Sure, you can admit a little Sigmund into your worldview. Maybe that dream about defecating in plain view of everyone says something about your own fears, anxieties, and copro challenges. But as a pointer to anything real? That’s more inadmissible to the modern mind than a victim’s promiscuity in a rape trial.

Moderns respect what we see during the day but dismiss what we see at night.

The problem is, when we’re awake, we’re often asleep. That’s why many of the most profound noggins in history have described the mass of mankind as “sleepwalkers.”

During the day, a Mardi Gras of thoughts parade through our minds, we cringe at our past antics, we concoct hallucinations about the present and the future; frick, we even hallucinate about the past: facts recede and anachronistic current presumptions morph them into something else entirely than what actually happened.

For many of us, all that happens five times before breakfast. But it’s all sleepwalking, pointing to nothing real, except for the neuroses and ulcers that result from them.

Now, if we’re asleep while we’re awake, maybe we’re awake while we sleep. Put another way, if we’re seeing less reality than we think while we’re awake, maybe we’re seeing more reality than we think while we’re asleep.

Maybe we should give those nocturnal thoughts a little respect, like those Muslims who convert to Catholicism after seeing the Virgin Mother of God.

And maybe we should give our daytime thoughts a little less respect.

Good luck with that.

The modern world is erected on Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” It’s the dumbest-ass thing ever, but the frick if our culture hasn’t adopted it as its starting point, its default mode, and its religion. We’re taught from toddlerhood to respect our thoughts as reliable guides to reality.

But our thoughts aren’t reliable. How many times have you freaked out about something that wasn’t real, like when a friend doesn’t reply to your email only to find out that it went to his junk box, or entertaining a calamitous prediction about the future that never materializes?

How many micro-strokes triggered by imaginary things do you need before you kick that deceitful whore called “your mind” to the curb?

We’ve always given our brains too much credit. Those sages have been referring to men as “sleepwalkers” longer than a homeless guy’s been wearing the same pair of underwear.

It’s natural.

We give our brains too much credit because we need them to survive. If we don’t trust that our brains are providing at least a measure of reliable feedback, we won’t kill that mastodon to feed our family, and we won’t provide customer service to collect our weekly paycheck.

Survival: It’s first. It’s what the left hemispheres of our brains do, and they do it well.

But “first” doesn’t mean “only.” It doesn’t even mean “most important.” It’s just “first,” which, instead of being “only” or “most important,” probably is better associated with “preliminary,” as in, “Before we can get to the good stuff, we need to deal with this preliminary bullshit.”

But the modern mindset, taking its cue from Descartes, elevated the left hemisphere past “first” to “only” and “most important.”

The result?

The left hemisphere dominates.

And it’s damn awful at comprehending reality. It grasps fragments and pastes them together in a workable framework to get us through daily life, but that’s about it.

Yet we think it’s telling us everything we need to know and everything it tells us is true. That’s a major hallucination.

You can find more original essays at The Daily Eudemon, the Internet’s Longest-Suffering Blog.

The authorities ruled it a suicide.

Witnesses who saw the man the day he died said he seemed normal, not remotely suicidal. He had no history of mental illness.

The authorities ruled it a suicide.

On the day the man died, authorities saw another associate of the gang driving the dead man’s car and, later, two hunters saw a man climbing out of the car after someone dumped it into a nearby ravine.

The authorities still ruled it a suicide.

They found his corpse in a motel with an empty handle of whiskey and a second handle 2/3rds gone. The corpse’s BAL was only .03%, a level that wouldn’t be drunk driving in the most Baptistity of Baptist counties.

The authorities still ruled it a suicide.

And, 55 years later, they continue to clutch onto that belief like a devoted wife who believes her husband is faithful after her fourth round of chlaymdia treatments.

Welcome to Southern California during its multi-month murder spree in late 1969. People were showing up dead in obvious patterns but skilled detectives were suddenly less capable of connecting dots than a palsied drunk.

Questions, questions, and more questions. Never answered. The official narrative the Manson murders has been proven wrong, but we still don’t know what happened.

American history, especially since 1945, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery administered with a jagged enema. From the bizarre facts immediately following JFK’s murder to how the f’ we had a human hologram for a president from 2020 to 2024, from MK Ultra to the (literally) unbelievable bungling of the COVID crisis, from skyrocketing autism to the overweight Oompa-Loompas who waddle around our playgrounds.

The bald eagle shouldn’t be our country’s emblem. It should be the Riddler from the Batman comics.

People have for years wondered about these things, but they were made to feel like freaky losers for thinking about them so they just kept their thoughts buried like bodies in Pogo the Clown’s crawl space.

As a result, the book of riddles stayed shut.

And then came the Internet. And podcasts. The new media.

Suddenly, those freaky losers realized they weren’t freaks. It’s like they had been made to feel abnormal for being attracted to curvaceous blonds, then realized, “Hey! Lots of guys dig chicks like that.”

They suddenly realized that asking common-sense questions didn’t categorically disqualify them from enjoying the conjugal society of a normal woman. They could still get laid after asking outloud, “If a dead guy with all his pubic hair gone shows up, and a known murderer with a pubic hair jacket was in the area that night, shouldn’t the pube guy be a suspect, and if he wasn’t made a suspect, why not?”

Those freaky losers are now a major force in American politics, especially on the right, and it’s causing a civil war among conservatives.

Some conservatives (the “freaky losers”) are asking these questions and want answers. The other conservatives deride them for asking these questions.

I’m not officially taking sides here, but I have two questions of my own: Who would have the power to suppress all those riddles for 75 years? Who could coordinate Washington, New York, Hollywood, and, for a short spell at least, Silicon Valley to suppress information, squelch discussion, bamboozle everyone and then gaslight the frick out of everything without much fearing the consequences?

It’s the Establishment, of course, but that doesn’t get us far, so the freaky losers want to know: who is this “Establishment” that’s creating all these riddles and demanding we not try to answer them?

And if their opponents on the Right say those questions ought not be asked, doesn’t that imply they are part of the Establishment—an “Establishment asset”?

It’s virtually undeniable that Charles Manson was an Establishment asset, just as Jeffrey Epstein was. Does that put these conservatives who don’t want these questions asked in the same class as Manson and Epstein: Establishment assets?

Just more questions. You can deride the freaky losers for wanting to know, but they’re legitimate questions. And if they’re not legitimate questions because they can’t be answered, then the freaky losers deserve to understand why they can’t be answered.

And around we go, in circles until we’re dizzy with all the information, then stumble backwards down a rabbit hole.

It sucks.

No sane person wants to go down a rabbit hole, so I kinda question the sanity of the freaky losers who work themselves into podcast frenzies over it.

But as long as we have Establishment narratives telling us the rabbit holes don’t exist and kicking dirt over them, we’re going to have spelunkers going down them.

When a new high-powered beer eats through the side of an insulated paper cup, we don’t know whether to applaud or to hide the wife and children.

And we don’t know whether to stock the shelves or lobby to get it banned.

Fifteen states have outlawed the newest concoction from the beer industry’s Jekylls: high-octane beer, clocking in at 30%+ alcohol. Folks in the other 35 states appear to be lapping it up like drunk dogs, paying $200+ a bottle.

If you want to read more about beautiful abomination, click here, but you’ll probably need a Wall Street Journal subscription.

I accumulated so many books, people eventually started giving old paperbacks to me like you might drop your half-eaten sandwich on the homeless guy outside the restaurant.

I’m guessing I have around 4,000 volumes. It’s beautiful . . . in appearance, mass, and effect . . . even when that Savonarolic scold I live with tells me I can’t store my books in the fridge. (They’re a fire hazard in the stove, so WTH, woman?)

The volumes range from those ratty paperback classics I bought for the price of a used flossing stick to beautiful volumes my dad got, and I inherited, with his Folio Society subscription, including Steven Runciman’s tryptych of the Crusades.

I’m going to add this biography of Runciman to my library. I hear it’s a wild read, plus I’ve determined that my library is, on a weighted average, light on biography, and I’ve come to conclude that few, if any genres, are as important as biography.

I say this as a former young man who read a lot of those books, gathered a lot of facts, and cobbled up grand ideas like Buffalo Bill stitching together that woman’s suit, while at the same time ignoring everyday social niceties that make a person pleasant to be around. I was, in other words, a first-rate prick.

Today, I no longer have those grand ideas and put little stock in those facts. I’m still socially clumsy, but I now stand before you as a mere second-rate prick.

That’s why I fell short of my goal of becoming the definitive scholar about Albert Jay Nock (well, that, and a tenacity that parallels a newborn’s grip). Nock strongly believed that biography was irrelevant. I’ve come to conclude nothing else is relevant. He strongly believed that the life of the mind is all that counts. I’ve concluded that a faculty liable to shift imperceptibly into erotic thoughts while saying the Rosary is about as trustworthy as a homeless guy with a bottomless bottle of Night Train.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t think I ever really thought I’d finish my Nock studies. It was probably just a foil for that semi-conscious intent that surges like a dammed river through a sluice: the acquisition of more books. I also used my grand Nock project to try to get past the (troglodytic) harridan defiantly guarding the fridge as more and more books arrived from the world’s largest drug dealer: Amazon.

The most bizarre thing about this addiction?

I don’t even read the books these days and don’t even plan to. I just like lookin’ at ‘em, like the man who’d been drunk for a week sat in Jay Gatsby’s library, hoping the books would magically sober him up.

I’m almost as pathetic as Hugh Hefner toward the end of his life who couldn’t even bed any of those babes he liked looking at. The big difference between old Hef and me is, I still get an erection when I look at my books.

Gotta hangover that won’t stop? Carve the image of Elvis in a yellow cape sitting in front of the sun. Is Peter Attia’s advice for living to 100 too arduous? That’s alright. Make an image of Saturn on sapphire: you’ll reach 103, easily.

No matter what the ailment, no matter what the goal, the talisman’s gotcha covered better than that afghan your grandma crocheted for Christmas with off-hue red and green yarn that she got from the bargain bin.

Even better, you can supercharge your talisman and use it for grand things. Wielding it like a sledgehammer against your enemies, for instance, then wiping it off and using it to make Sydney Sweeney your love toy for the night.

You just gotta lace your talisman with a god.

That’s it.

You can find the god-trapping instructions in the Arabic Picatrix, a twelfth-century grimoire that described talismanic methods in great detail. The text was sacred script among the Renaissance magicians like Pico Mirandola, who kept a copy in his personal library.

Don’t feel like downloading Duolingo and learning Arabic? That’s alright. You can read the Latin translation. Still too rigorous? You can read free English translations online.

But if you want to bypass effort altogether, maybe you can ask Grok or Claude to short-cut it for you.

That’s what today’s hermeticists are doing.

Rumors seeping out of Silicon Valley say it’s become a coven of psychonauts using and invoking supra-rational intelligence to give them technological power. Specifically, they seek artificial intelligence laced with a god. It’s called “artificial super intelligence” or a machine with “consciousness.”

I’m not sure they care what supra-rational intelligence they trap in their talisman. They’re open to anything. They buy psychedelics by the blotter. If UFOs show up with a manual, they’ll take a copy. Some are channeling the Egyptian god Thoth. I think they’re even open to the supra-rational knowledge provided by mushrooms and their fungal underground . . . at least I know they’re open to psilocybin.

These minions of our Silicon Valley overlords– and maybe the overlords themselves--are grabbing at deities like those clowns in the glass money booth with greenbacks flying around, trying to grab as many as possible before the clock stops.

But with a crucial difference: When that clown walks out of the booth with $247 and sweaty armpits, he drinks off his degradation at the bar.

Those Silicon Valley wizards aren’t drinking off shit. They’re relishing it and doubling down as AI grows, “the Singularity” gets closer, and they feel themselves mere inches from shoving those talismans up everyone else’s ass: conquering the world, defeating mortality, and bedding every Sydney Sweeney (not necessarily in that order).

Albert Jay Nock didn’t have much use for such things. The former Episcopalian priest never rejected Christianity but neither did he have much respect for its organized forms. He became one of the most enigmatic popular writers of the 1920s and 1930s. A man with a mysterious past and even more mysterious present, his entire existence was dedicated to one thing: being left alone.

Well, that, and developing the finest American prose style since Henry Adams and using that prose to thrust spears into every sacred cow of the inter-war period. If the definition of a “dick” is someone who makes fun of things others take seriously, Nock and his contemporary, H.L. Mencken, were the big ones of their day.

As near as I can tell, Nock revered only one thing: Francis Rabelais, the 16th-century author of the satirical masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Nock revered Rabelais because Rabelais revered nothing. Like Nock, he was a Christian (and former cleric) who didn’t take his era’s religious forms very seriously.

Like Nock, Rabelais mocked every excess . . . every artifice or idea that took on sacred form . . . every form of hubris.

Gargantua and Pantagruel was the South Park of the 16th century.

He wrote his masterpiece during the bubbliest era of Renaissance magic, and he ridiculed the practices like he did every sacred cow back then.

But he seemed to have a special scorn for the magical pursuits.

Nestled in book three of GP, Rabelais referred to “the Reverend Father in Devil Picatris, rector of the diabolical faculty.”

The Devil Picatris? Diabolical?

Was it just part of Rabelais’ rhetorical excess of hilarity and not to be taken seriously?

Or did he see--sense--that those magicians weren’t just jacking around with empty superstition but really were invoking something sinister?

It beats me, but we probably need to start dropping copies of Gargantua and Pantagruel into Silicon Valley like we dropped bundles of food into West Berlin during the 1948 airlift. If nothing else, Rabelais’ slashing satire might give those minions at least a little reprieve from their hubris . . . and save the rest of us from whatever hell on earth they’re unleashing.

Few things make the smug college boy giggle like learning about prima nocta. Such customs let him look down on those stupid Middle Ages while at the same time getting an erection and resting smugly in his modern world.

But when one of his modern overlords comes along and sticks a dick in his face, he doesn’t even notice.

Our Silicon Valley overlords stick it in our faces every day.

Exhibit BSD: Microsoft.

Microsoft attained overlord status by giving the public what it wanted. Those were halcyon days of the free market.

But then it started trying to change what the people wanted. That was irritating but bearable.

And now? Microsoft just jams whatever it wants down our throats. The people howl, they beg William Wallace to rescue them, and Microsoft laughs as he walks into the tent with your bride.

I tried to order a non-Windows/non-Mac laptop from Amazon last summer. They didn’t have a single option. Every laptop was either a Mac or came with Windows pre-installed. I bought one then paid my IT guy to nuke Windows so I could hire that Braveheart of the PC world: Linux.

You ever try to save anything on your Windows desktop these days? MS tells you to log into your MS account first or it defaults you to the world’s most oppressive force since Oprah: OneDrive.

Every freakin’ time: dick in the face.

People scream “Get it out of my face!”

Microsoft giggles and wiggles his hips.

All the Valley overlords do the same—required app updates, forced software updates, purposefully obsoleted hardware, password changes. We swat and swat and swat . . . we hate them. They don’t care.

The Epstein Files are the Beltway’s OneDrive

Now fly back over the country to the Beltway, where another set of overlords sits.

If Microsoft is Exhibit BSD of Silicon Valley’s overlord status, the Epstein files are Exhibit PED of the Beltway’s overlord status.

Every person with a few strands of mitochondria knows with reasonable moral certainty that Epstein was a CIA asset, he didn’t kill himself, and a lot of powerful men were banging teenage girls.

But those Nabokovian files aren’t coming out until they’ve been redacted like Stalin’s photographs and ravished like a medieval Sydney Sweeney on her wedding night.

And the thing is, the Beltway overlords know you know. But they don’t care. Whatcha gonna do? Call Ghostbusters?

We thought Trump would be our William Wallace, but even he can’t overcome the overlords. He doesn’t want to end up getting disemboweled on that table like Wallace at the end of Braveheart and yelling “Grab ‘em by the pussy!”

Multiple essays like this drop every week at The Daily Eudemon.

Incessant small talk drains me like a deposed Nigerian prince drains your checking account after you click that link to help him in exchange for $500,000 that will be delivered to you five days after he lands in NYC. After my last dollar of energy is gone, I ghost, later texting my host an apology, saying I had to leave suddenly because my mom died again.

The righteous host tries to get in front of all that.

Righteous hosting is a small art: something worth doing for its own sake that requires the practitioner to shift focus from herself to the canvas in front of her: to the room, to her guests.

If you want to be a good host, here are tips:

1. Plan Ahead–But Stay Flexible

Three facts: (1) the left hemisphere plans, (2) things never go according to plan, (3) the left hemisphere then gets really irritated. Keep the left hemisphere on a short leash: enough to do its job but not enough to strangle your soul.

This isn’t just a hosting tip, it’s a life lesson.

2. Signal Small Ways to Tell the Guests They’re Welcomed

People are tactile. No one feels comfortable in a white box. Add decorations that fit the occasion, play appropriate background music (keep Frank Zappa in the cassette tape case). Even if you can’t understand how tactile additions enhance, they do.

3. Welcome Each Person

Your “guests” are an abstraction. Each person is a reality. Focus on the reality. And if she’s super hot, don’t leer.

4. Anticipate Needs Before They’re Voiced

Somewhere between the big box worker who assiduously avoids eye contact for fear you’ll ask where you can find the Cheerios and the neurotic host who pounces with an offer of assistance every time you adjust yourself, there’s Aristotle’s golden mean of helpfulness. Find it.

5. Invite Guests to Join In

I’m including this tip because the linked article does, but I don’t get it. It suggests that the host give guests jobs to do, like “taste the sauce” (a request, to my sensory proclivities, that’s barely better than the pig frat boy sticking his hand in my face and saying, “Smell my fingers”). I don’t think it should be incumbent on the host to find work for you. As a decent guest, notice small things that need to be done and do them.

I move on.

6. Guide the Flow–And Stay Present

The unhelpfulness of this tip ranks right up there with a coach’s advice to “go out there and win the game,” but it is a decent reminder: everything, including a simple party, is flow, and flow can only be appreciated in the present. A good host works the room like a coach makes big and small adjustments every minute of the game.

It’s All about Proper-Functioning Hemispheres

The first tip isn’t the only one that requires proper interaction between your brain’s hemispheres. All of them do. The left hemisphere channeling Martha; the right hemisphere, Mary. We can snicker at dogged Martha doing all the work, but without her, the guests walk into a lousy party.

And if Martha runs amok, the guests walk out of a lousy party.

Same piece, re-worked with a funny Seinfeld clip, here

But it didn’t take me long to realize my co-religionists from across the border could drink me under the table, pray me under the table, and work me under the table.

Especially work. Damn, can they work. Whenever the grim labor reaper shows up at their door, they spit in his eye and grab a shovel.

It reminded me of my immigrant grandpa who worked 70 hours a week during World War II as a tool and die maker, then set up his own shop in his garage so he could work during his free time. My dad said he never saw his father so happy.

If you’d asked my grandpa about his life-work balance, he probably would’ve replied that, at 90 hours a week, he had perfected it.

But I can guarantee you he never thought about life-work balance.

Today, young workers obsess about it. They refuse to be bothered after 5:00, pickleball practice takes priority over their boss, they think elaborate vacations are crucial to avoid burnout.

“Burnout” to my grandpa was what happened when you fell asleep during a break with a lit cigarette in your hand, and worrying about work burnout would’ve been like worrying about getting laid too much.

You know who else didn’t worry too much about his life-work balance during WWII?

Number 119,104. A/k/a Victor Frankl, working on Nazi railroads during the day and practicing his pickleball at Auschwitz during the evening.

Yet from the smoke and the gas of that man-made hell Frankl found meaning. He developed an entire theory of psychology from the experience: logotherapy.

In my grandpa’s micro-hell that he didn’t even recognize as hell, he found a shit-ton of money and bought a family vacation cottage on Lake Huron that my grandkids enjoy 80 years later.

I’m not saying you should work 90 hours a week, and I’m not waiting for Rod Dreher to write The Auchschwitz Option.

I am saying you need to defocus (Frankl’s word), like my grandpa as he yanked another chunk of metal onto his worktable and the survivors at Auschwitz did after being reduced to their naked existence (another Franklism).

Defocus from what?

From the vicious circle jerk formations and feedback mechanisms that make us neurotic, said Frankl. Instead of preserving our pleasures and freaking out whenever something might tread on them, we should just focus on something (defocus from ourselves), thereby breaking up the “self-centredness of the neurotic” (Frankl).

For Frankl, the focus must be on meaning.

For my grandpa, it was on surviving and thriving in America when he still could’ve been trapped in the Soviet Union (and probably living in the Gulag, which is where Stalin sent most of my grandpa’s relatives who didn’t flee the Germanic Volga region).

When a major flood hit Topeka, Kansas in 1951, the authorities got men from the local asylum, some of whom had been hospitalized for over 20 years, to haul sandbags. Their supervising psychologist was “astonished” to see them “not only loading and placing sandbags with the rest of us, but effectively supervising us in the loading and placement of the bags.” This continued for several days. When the emergency was over, the patients passed back into their deteriorated state of mind.

Meaning, work, focus. They have one thing in common: they swirl outside our f-ed up little heads.

I’ve been watching those Mexicans in my town for 25 years now.

You know where those Mexicans find meaning?

In their families. Mexicans don’t just out-work, -play, and -pray gringos. They also out-family them. When they’re not working and praying, they’re drinking . . . with their families, with their kids running around. And when they’re doing none of those things, they’re out-hanging us with their families, sometimes contentedly lounging for hours in one another’s company.

Family: It’s where tradition tells us we should find meaning.

But in a modern landscape that is set up to tear apart the family, more and more people don’t have a family to occupy their focus.

So they worry about their pickleball game.

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Eric Scheske has written for dozens of print publications. You can find more original essays at The Daily Eudemon, one of the Internet’s longest-running blogs.

Dr. Lefty Hemifear has weighed the evidence and reached a conclusion: All alcohol is bad for you.

The glass of red wine after dinner? Shill conclusions from Madison Avenue. A few belts of whiskey to unwind after a long work week? Redneck heroin.

It’s all science, so it’s all fact.

Until it’s not.

You know who’d really benefit from demonizing alcohol? The pharmaceutical companies.

Satan.

The Satans are already attacking alcohol. The GLP-1 drugs are killing people’s impulsive behaviors, including the need to have a few whacks of the good stuff before the in-laws arrive.

How many more drugs could the Satans develop and sell if they made everyone afraid of tradition’s favorite way of making this vale of tears a little less sad!

So I’m guessing the studies will continue to roll out.

It started about ten years ago, it seems, when I heard that more than seven drinks per week is bad for you. Then that number came down to four per week. Then two. Now zero: more than zero drinks per week, and you’re heading for Zombie Land without a double-pump shotgun.

That’s been Dr. Andrew Huberman’s progression. He ain’t no Establishment hack. He gives it straighter than Viagra after a large can of Red Bull.

But Dr. Lefty Hemifear? He gives it even straighter. Too straight. So straight, it’s crooked.

He dials in the science more and more, taking one little line of fact and blockchaining it to another little line of fact, breaking the little lines down more and more, then he wraps them around and connects the ends to come up with something resembling a circle.

But it ain’t a circle. It’s a shit-ton of tiny lines pasted together and wrapped around to look like a circle from a distance, but when you look close, you see it’s all f’ed-up.

That’s because Dr. Left Hemifear can’t draw a circle any more than a virgin can do high-grade work in a whorehouse.

Read the rest here or be a paid subscriber.

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Back in the greasy, disco-lit haze of the 1970s and the dawn of the Reaganite ‘80s, the publishing world churned out a billion paperbacks. They were dirt cheap, some even free, handed out like girlie pamphlets on the Vegas strip.

But there was a hook: they were riddled with ads, mostly from the cigarette barons who’d been booted off the TV and radio airw…

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Part Two of Two Parts

Role models are great. We all oughtta have a few.

But don’t underestimate the anti-role models. These cautionary wraiths of consequence are more often the true educators in this carnival of folly called “modernity,” whispering not “be like me” but “For God’s sake, be anything but.”

That lean 60-year-old man playing robust basketball inspires, but that 60…

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Everyday Neurology 101: The right hemisphere receives sensory input, feeds it to the left hemisphere for processing, receives a report from the left hemisphere, synthesizes it, feeds its synthesis back to the left hemisphere for more processing, which reports back, and on and on until a decision is made.

This “lateralization” occurs rapidly, but in a hea…

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