“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is sound advice, but it’s unrealistic. Judgments happen immediately, reflexively. The real meaning of the phrase is not to trust our first flawed, and maybe even cold and cruel, judgments.
 
Anyone so morally perfect to never judge another human being by appearance would never enjoy those delightful moments in movies when we find out the Dumb Person is a Smart Person. Matt Damon suddenly goes from janitor to math genius in “Good Will Hunting,” and we marvel at the unlikely occurrence. In “Five Easy Pieces” Jack Nicholson plays a manic oil rig roughneck who spies a piano on the back of the back of a pickup truck and hops aboard to belt out some Chopin. The reveal of talent in each case is dependent on an audience full of flawed people who judge books by covers constantly. The surprise is also validated by the fact we are usually right when we do so. Janitors do not tend to solve math problems no one else ever has, and roughnecks do not tend to be classically trained pianists.
 
This is not a defense of being judgmental, but an acknowledgement of judgment’s inevitability in daily life. It is also a preamble to say: show me a guy “running” a 15-minute mile in a mask with no one nearby, and I will tell you his politics.

Last month I compared late medieval depictions of hell with vague post-religious affirmations of beauty and found the latter inferior as a motivational force. Toward the end of my essay I wrote, “… while I don’t pine for the harsh, hell-focused Christianity of [the 13th century], I do wish there were more acknowledgement today of how we are often not beautiful, how we have the capacity for ugliness—like sin.”
 
This part of my argument needs further explication. America is still in the middle of the Great Awokening, and now we are anything but short on people pointing out our ugly sides. After the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the bitter and often toxic debates of college campuses and Twitter became common throughout America. Millions of Americans are demanding accountability from other Americans for our failings and crimes related to race, gender, and sexual orientation. It is impossible to read, watch, or listen to the news without the topic coming up within minutes. So why do I think that there should be more acknowledgement of our capacity for sin?

​One afternoon late last summer my wife and I were sitting on the porch working on our laptops when a man walking two large, white, and expensive dogs passed by. Without breaking stride he looked up at the Stars and Stripes hanging over our steps and said, “I love that flag,” in a passionate, breathy tone I now imitate whenever I see a giant flag flying over a car dealership.
 
This was a few months after the George Floyd riots, around the time of the Kenosha riots, and, as my wife and I working from home implies, several months after the coronavirus had sunk its protein spike into America. “I love that flag” is an odd greeting, and I have wondered, pretty much whenever I see a flag or a large dog, why he chose that salutation out of all possible options.

​Which one motivates you more? Which one do you think is truer to reality?
 
Are you, in fact, beautiful—currently, right now, no matter what? If so, how are you beautiful? Physically, spiritually, generally? Does your beauty come with any obligations? Does this statement/fence make you feel better?
 
Or are you, in fact, a loathsome sinner worthy of hell? Have your deeds made you a delicious snack for a demon? (I love his expression; you make it after your fifteenth Cheeto—dude is zoning out.) If you are not currently a stand-in for one of the munchable-damned in this painting, do you think you could be if you gave in to a few temptations? Do you see something like this and not laugh from the safe distance of the post-Enlightenment, but instead react like Rilke before the torso of Apollo and hear a voice saying, “You must change your life”?

I received the following email from Slack yesterday:

​April is National Humor Month and we’re celebrating by inviting you to a special virtual event.

Join us as we welcome the authors of the best‑seller Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, for a conversation on how leaders can use humor to empower employees to bring a broader and more authentic range of their humanity to their work and to their team.

We’ll talk about:

--The behavioral science of humor, and why it is an underleveraged superpower to fuel creativity, foster resilience and strengthen bonds at work.

--How to flex a new leadership muscle that will foster greater boldness, authenticity, presence, joy and love—in yourself, your teams and at your business.

Written the evening of February 21.


I'm listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams's orchestration of "Greensleeves" on one of my dad's old vinyl records. This is one of my favorite songs, and this record is more muted and dull than many of his others. I don't mean dull in a bad way, which I guess means I am fishing for a word and coming up with the wrong one. It's a fifty year-old album, give or take, and probably got some use. It's not scratchy or crackly, but a little flat— maybe from wear, maybe it was never a great recording to begin with. But this flat, faded, almost AM radio sound works for "Greensleeves," that mournful, elegaic tune about... what, lost love? Williams's version is instrumental and I don't know the lyrics of the folk song it's based on, but I think it is a man remembering a woman he loved. To me the melody is so sad and beautiful that it must be the longing of someone around ninety, and not just for a long lost love but for a whole world, for an era and way of life that is now gone. What had seemed so alive, what was so alive, some gorgeous young woman in her distinctive green sleeves-- not only does he miss her, he mourns her, and not only her but his youth and everyone and everything he knew. That's what the song feels like to me, and the aged, faded quality of my dad's old record makes it more apt to the emotional core of the song than any higher fidelity recording.

Today would have been my mom's 81st birthday.

​When I was a kid growing up on the South Side we called all the bugs that make noise at night in July and August “crickets.” I am not sure why or if any are actually crickets. I think they are cicadas, but we reserved that word for the 17-year variety. As a boy I was told how much noise the 17-year cicadas made back in 1973, the year before I was born, and looked forward to 1990 for their next arrival in Chicago. When that happened I was in Europe on vacation and only arrived home for the tail-end of their emergence. They liked oak trees, everyone said and it seemed true, and my neighborhood had many oak trees. The trees themselves seemed to sing when the cicadas got going. When they came back in 2007 I was up on the North Side, where the cicadas where more muted and widely dispersed. But once that year I went to a cousin’s house in my old neighborhood for an engagement party for my sister, and I deliberately got off the train two stops early to walk over a mile down oak-lined streets to listen to the cicadas. I remember, on the deck of my uncle Bob’s, my great aunt Rosemary had a cicada sitting on her shirt like a living broach. Her husband, my uncle Kevin, sat next to me and asked me why no one made comedies anymore. I was somewhat confused, thinking maybe he meant the quality had fallen off since Chris Farley died, which seemed an unlikely opinion given his age. My dad later whispered “He means musicals.” Kevin was a daily communicant. Fought at Saipan, and was part of the first group of Marines who arrived at Nagasaki after Japan surrendered, which we only learned through a eulogy someone gave after his death a few years later. Rosemary, seated in the front row of the church, saluted the young marine who handed her the folded flag. I never saw her again.

Implicit in complaints about political correctness is that it (the statement, term, belief) is logically incorrect or at best misleading. It then follows that a deliberate logical fallacy creates aesthetic problems in essays or speeches or works of art-- or whatever the PC thing touches. In short, PC feels stupid just like any bad logical leap, and is therefore ugly and distracting.

That thought came to me while listening to a decent podcast from the BBC called "Living with the Gods." It's a series of 15 minute episodes about some of the core aspects of religious belief throughout history and across culture. The first several episodes are great, and generally it's way above average for podcast/radio shows, but I score it a mere "decent" thanks to commentary in several episodes that is simply PC bullshit of the 2017 vintage.

Last week I wrote an essay about Tom Petty and his influence on me. Read it here.


​

There are a pair of comic-relief scenes in Manchester-by-the Sea that concisely encapsulate my problems with the movie. 16-year old Patrick, whose father recently died, practices with his band, Stentorian, in the garage or basement of one of Patrick’s two girlfriends’ houses. The band sucks, and that is supposed to be True and Funny. In the first scenelet Patrick and his mates reprimand the drummer for playing too slow. In the second, they reprimand him for—hold on, you’ll never guess—playing too fast. Nothing else happens in either scene.

These two paired bits add little to Patrick’s character beyond 1) reminding us he is just a teenager and 2) showing us one of the things that binds him to his titular town. The latter is important because his uncle Lee may move him out of it.
​
Unfortunately, the terribleness of the band makes Patrick less interesting, not more, and makes this particular bond to his hometown flimsy. I’m not asking for Jack Nicholson suddenly playing a busted piano like a virtuoso minutes after clocking out of the oil-rig in Five Easy Pieces, but some nuance or passion or depth of character would have been nice. If I am supposed to spend over two hours giving a shit about a guy, please make him interesting. Beyond the death of his father, the boy possesses little to excite our sympathies. I mean, he’s one of those dudes juggling two girlfriends once. Nuts to him.

"Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable," the New York Times ordered me this weekend. Facebook can do no such thing since I bravely deleted my account in 2013. Even still, I have a patrician disdain for social media, so was hoping to enjoy some schadenfreude over the world I left behind and its many mindless prisoners. Alas…
 
The premise of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's article is simple: we don't live lives that are quite as exciting as we portray them on social media. The problem is he turns every piece of data into evidence of this phenomenon. Here are three examples that serve, for him, as proof of our hypocrisy:
 
1. "In the real world, The National Enquirer, a weekly, sells nearly three times as many copies as The Atlantic, a monthly, every year. On Facebook, The Atlantic is 45 times more popular."
 
2. "Americans spend about six times as much of their time cleaning dishes as they do golfing. But there are roughly twice as many tweets reporting golfing as there are tweets reporting doing the dishes."
 
3. "Owners of luxury cars like BMWs and Mercedeses are about two and a half times as likely to announce their affiliation on Facebook as are owners of ordinary makes and models."
 
Try to find the flaws those stats. In the meantime, I will relate that Stephens-Davidowitz "actually spent the past five years" unearthing them. Now, let's bitch about the above and explore why they do not support his brief.

Below is the eulogy I gave on Thursday, March 23, 2017 for my dad, Paul O'Toole.
​

​​My dad disliked a lot of things. One of the things he disliked most were eulogies that turned a common sinner into the holiest of saints. In honor of his preference for a realistic portrait, I will now list all the annoying things he said and did throughout his life. I’ll try to keep it under an hour.

If you ever asked my dad "What does the clock say," he'd respond, "It doesn't say anything, it's a clock."

ERRGGH!  Just tell me the time!

Whenever the phone rang, he facetiously announced, “If it’s for me, I’m not here.” Every. Single. Time.

My dad loved sports. He knew football, baseball, and golf well, but he did not really get basketball. So rather than enjoy, say, any of the six Bulls Championships, he preferred to loudly announce to his sons that, “The fix is in,” whenever Jordan pulled off some fourth quarter heroics. 
​

Upon the anniversary of the 3/9/87 release of Joshua Tree...

Last week, while stuck in a Lyft on the way to the airport, I heard a U2 album that I had never heard before. By definition a U2 album that I have not heard is anything after 1993's Zooropa. For all I know it could have come out last week or 20 years ago. Though I would not say the music was in any way excellent--or even that I will look it up on Spotify--I was pleasantly surprised to find I liked it. It was probably like how a lapsed Catholic feels who attends a Christmas mass, enjoys it, and thinks, “Maybe… maybe I will come back to this familiar, comforting thing and… well, maybe.”

Everything Zooropa and before I know, or once knew, extremely well. (Everything, that is, except for October, which no one alive knows well.) Between 1987 and 1996, at least five U2 albums were in my regular rotation.* Then, at some point before Pop came out in 1997, I stopped listening.
​

1. Down To Earth Session IPA, 21st Amendment Brewery

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/735/154937/?ba=Denotoole#review

​This is a terrific beer. Just terrific. I could drink it all day, but if I did I would be a poor father and husband since it contains alcohol albeit not very much alcohol.

Down-to-Earth is aptly named since its glory is a mundane one. “Not Reinventing the Wheel” is a bad cliché and a worse name for a beer, but that’s what is going on here. It simply takes a good idea—a somewhat hoppy session ale—and nails it. It pours a sort of muted gold. Not sure what the hops are—Galaxy or Amarillo maybe, or maybe Citra since even my mom cooks with Citra lately. But it’s citrusy and good. ABV is 4.4% but feels even lighter than that going down. A few weeks ago I accidentally drank one in four sips while barbecuing.