If you have a John or a Johnny in your life and if today happens to be their birthday, then this song is for them.
Happy Birthday, John!
Blog
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Taking Responsibility for My Choices
I stayed out and up too lat last night. I was having drinks with an old friend, and I had a great time. No regrets in that decision.
Now, I am moving rather slow today, and I have run out of time to accomplish all thing things I wanted to do. I take full responsibility for this outcome. And also, no regrets in this decision, either.
The older I get, the harder it is to see my old friends. And for that reason, I do my best never to pass up an opportunity to see my old friends.
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Tottenham: I Got My Hopes Up
(I know that today is May 4th, and I don’t celebrate.)
With everything going on in my life, and there is a lot, nothing awful is happening, I’m just very busy. As such, I don’t have a ton of time to sit around and watch football. This weekend especially, as me and my family were jammed packed with events. I am saying all of this because, I didn’t have time to watch Tottenham play on Sunday. Sort of…
With all of the running around I had to do on Sunday, I didn’t think I’d be home in time to watch the match, but as luck would have it, I got home which allowed me to watch the last fifteen minutes of the game. This means that I was first shocked to see Tottenham ahead by tow goals. Then I watched Aston Villa score a goal, and the affect was that I thought Spurs were about to lose, only to actually watch Tottenham win.
They won a match.
They aren’t in 18th place anymore.
I have a little hope.
I am also aware of how much of a huge mistake “hope” is.
I decide the best course of action was to start watching Ted Lasso again.
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ODDS and ENDS: Oxford Shirts, Sleep, and Walking in the City
(Right here where we need ya…)
AI generated this image, but I would NEVER wear loafers without socks, and I would NEVER wear loafers with shorts… But AI is gun’na do what AI is gun’na do… But I like how AI thinks I would have all that hair! I might have an addiction, or at least an unhealthy obsession with Oxford shirts. Like the very classic, button down collar, Oxford weave fabric, that once you have washed the shirts like a million times they end up becoming soft and a little thin. But I’m also really frugal, which means that I have several shopping carts on several different apparel sites waiting for their Oxford shirts to go on sale so I can scoop them up at a discount. And I do all of this because if I had my way, and could live the way I wanted in the climate and location I wanted, I just might be that dorky guy who wears an Oxford shirt with a sweater and shorts in Summer.
Me and the wife are working on our sleep schedules. The doctors have been hammering home to us that we need to, have to, start getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night. And yes, as we get older, our bodies will start waking up earlier, so that means that we have to also go to bed earlier. Personally, I hate this idea, as the night is when I do my best thinking, while sitting in front of the tv watching bad movies and tv shows, often eating ice cream or some other sugary snack. BUT… this also has to do with taking care of myself so I can extract a few extra years to spend with my wife and kid, as they do make me happy, and kind’a make life worth living. So, for this past week, we have been making an effort to go to bed earlier. Normally, I get about five hours of sleep, and the wife is close to six or seven, depending on what show we are catching up on. What our efforts have yeilded is 8 hours for the wife and seven hours for me. I can’t speak for her, but for me, I don’t feel rested or excited about getting at the day, but what I did notice is that as the week progressed, I wasn’t waking up in the middle of the night and having to fight tot get back to sleep. As such, I will take that as a small step forward.
I still love walking around this town. Might still be my favorite part about living here. I got to do it last week, and a little later today, I will have an excuse to do it again. This time I’ll be on the East Side of Manhattan, a place I very rarely get to. It’s a small joy, but a joy none the less that I am looking forward to.
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Short Story Review: “Process of Elimination” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
(The short story “Process of Elimination” by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh appeared in the May 4th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Jake Hollings
There was a moment when I was reading Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Process of Elimination” that I had to ask myself if it was possible to have a reliable narrator in a story who is completely unreliable because of the situation they find themselves in? On one hand, that doesn’t feel so much like a question, but more like an unsolvable literary riddle. But on the other hand, having this conundrum of a narrator kept me on my toes reading this story, happily figuring out which situations were and were not misinterpretations.
The story follows a guy who unfortunately has the same first name of one of the Boston Marathon bombers, and that terrorist attack plays in the background of the piece. This guy is a recent hire at coffee shop which is located on a university campus in a New England, two states away from Boston. As the story begins, our narrator is informed that he is about the be fired from this job. At first he assumes this termination is due to a missing tip jar, but it is also implied that his name might be part of the reason.
What I enjoyed about the protagonist is how normally flawed he is as a person. Maybe a little too eager to please, a little lazy, and perhaps prone to “get out over his skis” when it comes to events, but not a bad guy. He does his best in the situation he finds himself in, a minor crisis of employment and unemployment, trying to figure out what events, statements, actions are connected, and what actions he should take next. And when he receives a resolution that he desired months later; he is faced with the fact that he truly didn’t understand all the factors coming into play with his termination. There is a nice O. Henry touch of irony there with his guilt, and a wonderful last line to the story, that gave me a laugh as the narrator had failed up.
“Process of Elimination” is another solid story from Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in The New Yorker, and I do commend his skill of working in several different tangents to this piece, to build a layered theme, tone, and setting. This wasn’t a “big” dramatic story, and there is a nice mix of humor in this piece as well, but it touches on the dramas and crises that make up our day to day lives which unfold while larger events develop around us; perhaps even unintentionally influencing our actions? Seems like a rather timely story, if you ask me.
