Here’s an important lesson to internalize, my friends: people rarely change. While it’s possible for someone to maybe tweak his or her mindset and behavior and become, say, more patient, more reflective, or less quick to anger, an entire personality overhaul is never going to happen unless you’re dealing with someone who’s just spent a year surviving on bark and rain water in the wilderness – and even then it’s a slippery slope because you just know that person’s conventional behavior will slide right back in the second he swallows his first Hostess Sno-Ball. Change is hard. Change is inconvenient. And that inconvenience is why the committed liars will always lie, the horrifically selfish will never morph superhero-style into selfless crusaders, and a person who registers in the negative range on the emotional intelligence scale will very likely never fully understand (or care) that his actions lead to painful effects for which he is completely responsible. It’s a messy world out there and assh*les who have no problem being assh*les will rarely volunteer to remain … Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a great deal about divisiveness these days because, really, how can you not? We’ve probably never existed in a society in which people were fully tolerant of the views held by those who believed the emphatic opposite, but I think I managed for a while to convince myself that we did. Call it what you will – naiveté, stupidity, a New York mentality – but even the willfully blind have to eventually wake up and realize that the lines we’ve drawn are really deep now, the sentiments really complicated. It might be impossible at this point to convince people to believe in something they don’t already believe.

If you happen to be that one lone human being who has not recently engaged in a bit of existential terror due to the separations that now define us, I want to know where you are currently hiding so I can get you the money I’m raising on my brand new GoFundMe page. I imagine you must be residing in some sort of bunker and … Continue reading →