"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. 

My uncle Dick died on February 4, the Thursday before Ash Wednesday. Last week, on Good Friday morning, I rented a U-Haul and headed to his house in Beverly to claim some of his goods. 

The windfall of inheritance is odd. At times that day it felt cold and mercenary to sift through a dead man's things--especially someone I loved and admired. Or maybe it is more accurate to say-- I was periodically surprised that I was perfectly fine with it. I loved him, he was a great guy, I wish he did not die so suddenly, but hell yes I'll take that dining room set and anything else that is cool. 
​
Among the cool things I snagged were a bunch of books, including a partial set of Everyman classics--and I mean classics-- like Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Erasmus and Montaigne. I also picked up William H. Prescott's "The Conquest of Mexico" and "The Conquest of Peru," which are each giants and here bound in one volume. I landed a hard-bound "Origin of Species." If I ever decide to read my copy of "Finnegan's Wake," (helped a friend move-- he died and went to California), I now have Henry Morton Robinson and Joseph Campbell's "Skeleton Key" to assist me.

In a post I wrote only a few hours ago, I lamented the popularity of opinion pieces in America. It occurred to me while writing it that I am a big fan of artistic criticism and have no intention of reading less of it. I also intend to write more of it. Isn't criticism a type of opinion?

It is, but I am talking about punditry. Politically charged opinion. There are far more honest music, TV, poetry, and fiction critics than purely honest political pundits. It is far more likely that one critic will change another critic's opinion about a movie than that one pundit will change an opposing pundit's opinion on Planned Parenthood. Or Obama. Or guns. Or terrorism. This also goes for economic and religious commentators. An op-ed columnist and their kin at various online outlets are warriors for a cause--usually of a hundred causes, each addressed with the same pretense of expertise. A movie critic tends to focus on a limited area of expertise, and is thus more likely to thrive as a writer.

Criticism, aside from even being an opinion of whether a given piece of art is good or bad, makes you appreciate things on a deeper level. A film critic makes me a better viewer, and that is cool. A pundit can make me a better citizen, sure. Too often he just makes me an angrier one-- at him or at those dumbasses who have the temerity to disagree with us on what is so obviously the Truth.

So, my official stance: Read criticism as much as possible. Read opinion sparingly.

I’m 174 pages into Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers.” It’s been a breezy slog so far, and I have 50 pages left. At one minute and thirty-nine seconds per page (I timed myself on the el this morning), that is one hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds to go.
​
Is it worth it? My wife just got me a great book on how to make pizza and I need to bone up on the science of crusts. Plus there is writing like this here blog post that I want to do more of; it’s in my blood, man. Then there’s being a good father and husband and well-informed citizen and all the prayer and study that goes with semi-pro Catholicism. Plus there’s fitness and over-all self-improvement beyond just reading. All that takes time. Do I really have 1:22:30 to spend on this book that I am not exactly enjoying?

Last night I smoked six wings and four legs. The unnamed animal in that sentence was a chicken. If I had a photo I could have posted it beside this paragraph and you would have known it was a chicken (or, rather, chickens) that filled my belly and my wife’s and my friend Marty’s bellys. You also would have admired the uncommonly red skin and finely mottled dry rub. You may have said, “Where’d you get it?” as if I must have had to purchase what is clearly the work of an expert. I would have been able to respond, “I made it MYSELF, dog,” as a sort of culinary muscle-flex to the cheering crowd.

“Food porn” is too coarse a term for the photo that does not exist. It would have been food erotica. Humanists would have held up pictures of the wings and legs while making life-vows during their DIY marriage ceremonies. “This is what you are to me,” they would say over the Unity Bush. Grandmothers would cry tears out of their mouths. That’s called salivating, ma’am, and wait till you see the spread at the reception.

On Sunday, February 24, 2013, my friend Sonari and I sat in a bar outside Dallas, Texas, each staring at a phone and barely speaking to the other. The specificity sounds portentous but it was just a random Sunday, easy to look up because it was that year's Oscars night. A decent crowd had shown up to watch the ceremony. We neither paid attention to the TVs nor, as I said, to each other. We'd just driven 450 miles from Memphis with a long mid-day stop in Little Rock. Google Maps says the drive takes about six and a half hours, but I recall it taking three times that.  It was a fine time, not complaining, but it was 10:00 at night and we had not had dinner yet. I recall feeling completely exhausted. 

The line between cliché and colloquial expression is fine. Consider, for example, the idea that there is “a line” between two categories and that the thickness of it is“fine.” Cliché to thee, adage to me.

Or what if I say, “Friendo, this here toilet’s flushing mechanism just hit a home run.” Have I uttered a tired cliché or used an expression that, like my accent, tells the listener that I am an American? I choose the latter interpretation. It’s not that I am fond of stock phrases. I am just a generous soul who would prefer to think that the speakers and writers I encounter are displaying hallmarks of their culture, not foreign objects clogging their mental pipes. Lack of eloquence is not crime, and stock phrases “are there for the taking” so people who don’t know how to say something clever “can get through the day.” 

So the merely inelegant does not invite the sting of my mace, nor the heat of my blade. Nay, my wrath is reserved for the lazy cliché, the phrase too graceless to be colloquial, too devious to be polite, and too faddish to mean anything but that the person has not thought about what he is saying. Or worse, what he is writing.

I have compiled a brief list of internet-era clichés that we need to put onto a raft in the middle of the ocean, along with the collected works of Aerosmith and Starbuck’s Coffee’s roasting methods. After a small ceremony we will give the raft a shove, and then never look upon their like again: