Not That Profound

Here is a basic truism that I’m guessing anyone who has ever been married to another human being already knows: Marriage is hard. 

We were somewhere in Oklahoma in a cheap motel off I-40 in the middle of nowhere, the type of nowhere place that most people from the East Coast don’t know about unless they’ve been to nowhere. 

In case you missed it, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the Comedy Central cartoon television show “South Park,” have opened up with both barrels parodying the Trump Administration and the MAGA movement in the first two episodes of Season 27. 

That’s it. The Blonde Woman left last Friday, and she is never coming back. I’ve been staring out the living room window looking for her as those damn Golden Retrievers walk past my domicile, back and forth and back and forth, with total insouciance—as if my barking doesn’t register any sound with them, as if I don’t even exist. 

I wrote about an accident that I had in February in this column when it happened. In short, I was moving a futon into my basement, skipped a step on the stairs and face-planted, breaking my nose and fracturing my two front teeth. As it turned out, my front teeth needed to be extracted and replaced with dental implants and new crowns.

I have a mental illness. As multiple MAGA supporters have pointed out to me, I suffer from a crippling case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), and I need help. 

I love beer. I love domestic beers and foreign beers and craft beers. I love beer from bottles and beer from cans and beer from taps. I love stouts and lagers and IPA’s and pilsners. I love regular beers and light beers. I love drinking beer and buying beer and thinking about buying and drinking beer. I love a beer in the shower and a beer after work and a beer before bed. 

In the piece, I included an excerpt from my 2012 book, “Hangover Breakfasts.” Afterward, I received a couple of emails from readers telling me that they enjoyed the excerpt and wanted to know where they could find the book. 

As we approach the Fourth of July this year, which commemorates the signing of the “Declaration of Independence” in 1776, it is hard to miss the irony.

While cargo shorts have gone in and out of style throughout my 30 years of loyal wear, the war against them escalated in 2016 with an article by Nicole Hong in The Wall Street Journal titled “Nice Cargo Shorts! You’re Sleeping on the Sofa,” which was about a guy who owned 15 pairs of cargo shorts, and his wife kept secretly disposing of them until he was down to a single pair. 

On Friday, we officially usher in the summer of 2025, and I’m finding myself doing the things that older guys tend to do, such as reflecting on the summers of my youth with both nostalgia and disgust.

According to some people on the internet, between now and the time I finish this column, I might vanish. I’ll start to write a sentence and…

Poof. I’m gone.

I’m particularly fond of using the term “douchebag” when referring to someone deserving of contempt. I’ve been drawn to the word since I first watched the iconic SNL skit set in the Victorian-era with Lord and Lady Douchebag.  

But what exactly is a douchebag? Where did the term originate? And, more importantly, how can we positively identify a douchebag?

For English teachers, the stack of essays that need to be graded at any given moment is notoriously referred to as “The Pile.” The Pile of student essays starts to grow early in the course and doesn’t relent until your final grades are submitted. The Pile is daunting. The Pile is a horrible, ubiquitous, nightmarish entity that always lurks in an English teacher’s periphery at all times. 

I woke up on Sunday morning and noticed a tick on the one anatomical place no male wants to find a tick. 

I should now probably mention—seeing this is essential to your understanding of the rest of the story that I’m about to unfold—that the basement is the one place in the world that has been designated as my own space. I write in the basement, and I watch sports on the flatscreen in the basement. All of my books are in bookcases in the basement, and all of my sports paraphernalia, movie posters and the motley art that hangs in my basement.

There is such a man, and he goes by the name of Herman McDerman. But I must also mention to you that Herman McDerman is not a man, rather an eraser and a character that I created when I was in the fifth grade. 

Almost nightly now, for months, I’ve been vicariously living through the characters in the show, arguably one of the most successful sitcoms of all-time. There is something about “Cheers,” more than three decades after the series concluded in 1992, that still speaks to our collective understanding of comradity, conviviality and community.