Sauerkraut

I’m making sauerkraut right now and I’m both a) amazed at how simple it is and b) intimidated by the process. Conceptually, I know it’s simple: shredded napa cabbage, 2% by weight kosher salt, massage, and put in a jar for two weeks to ferment. But emotionally, I’ve only ever fermented food once. What if it’s fermenting too warm? Or too cold? What if it’s exposed to oxygen? Will it taste good? Will I get diarrhea?

It’s easy to see boogeymen in the shadows of inexperience.

Breaker HotBoxing

The other day I smelled weed in my home. Besides the three times our dog, Bailey, ingested spent marijuana cigarettes on the sidwalk in front of our building and subsequently gorged on Beggin Strips and Taco Bell, our home has been weed free. So this was a rare intrusion. After Lauren and Bailey both passed lie detecter and drug tests, I set out to find the source. I sniffed everywhere in my apartment. As hard as I tried to isolate the point of entry I couldn't smell it anywhere except the electrical breaker box. It made no sense. As a last resort I opened it and smelled a rush of the good stuff.

We've had run-ins with smokers in our building before. A few years ago, a resident down the hall smoked weed every day. The smoke would waft all the way down the hall and right into our apartment. I reported it every time—every building needs a Karen—and every time, nothing happened. Our building couldn't do anything except build a case against the guy. That's how the law's setup in New York: it protects tenants even if they're being dickheads. After a year of smelling weed and getting second-hand high—not the worst way to spend a year, Bailey said—our building finally made us an offer: we could move to the same apartment 11 floors up and they'd lower our rent. What?! Not wanting to look a stoned gift horse in the mouth, we accepted the offer.

The morning of the day before our move, I took Bailey for her usual morning walk. As I rounded the corner of our hallway, I saw a uniformed police officer sitting in a chair down the hall, right in front of The Smoker's door.

"Morning!" I said. I'm that kind of neighbor.

"Morning."

Playing hard to get, I see. "Can I get you a coffee?" I pushed the elevator call button to keep up appearances, but I had no intention of getting into the car.

She smiled. "No thanks. I'm good."

I was getting stonewalled by New York's Finest. How was I supposed to get the scoop? I should have known she'd be trained to resist interrogation... I wasn't going to get much out of her without a fight. The elevator door opened and for a moment I stood there, staring at the cop, wondering whether to walk down the hall for a chat. But Bailey whined. So we hopped on and went about our walk. The next day, just as we were closing our door for the last time, a resident told me that The Smoker was arrested for domestic violence and evicted.

It's been three years since we tried to put some distance between us and him, but this whiff was a pungent reminder that no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from others, we're still connected. There’s always going to be someone doing something somewhere that’s going to annoy someone.

Pulling Out

In 1916, on the eve of America’s declaration of war in the WWI, Harry S. Truman put in $5000—around $147,000 in 2025 dollars—to the Morgan Oil & Refining Company and signed on as treasurer to help the growing business. The company began drilling beneath farmlands in Kansas in hopes that the country’s impending mobilization for war would lead to a gasoline boom.

But instead, business dried up. To add insult to injury, as McCullough writes in Truman, “only later it was it discovered that one of their leases in southeastern Kansas was part of the famous Teeter Pool, a supply of oil that would have made millions for the company and its officers had they just drilled deeper.”

Woof.

How do you know when to keep drilling and when to pull out? If there were signs of oil—and I have no idea what those signs would look like since the only oil I deal with is extra virgin olive—would you notice them? If you’re in a career and you think it’s going nowhere, would you know if you’re on the precipice of a breakthrough?

Asking for a friend.

I’m Sore Today

I'm just the teensiest bit sore after yesterday's trot with Wiff. And though I'm ashamed to admit it—since it was barely 3 miles— I’m also proud, because I won.

I Went For A Run Today

I’ve mentioned before how supportive of a husband / competitive I am, so you won’t be surprised when I tell you that when I walked in on Wiff changing into her workout clothes this afternoon, the first words out of my mouth were “I’m going too.”

And so, after not having run together since Thanksgiving, we went for a run/race. [I won.]

The best part? As we were having an evening Manhattan, I got a little peckish, and threw together a little snack. Here’s the recipe:

1 cup of oyster crackers
several tablespoons of EVOO
a bunch of smoked paprika
several turns of freshly cracked black pepper
a few pinches of cayenne
several large pinches of oregano
a decent amount of kosher salt

Toss everything together on a foil-lined baking sheet and bake at 350˚F for 8-10 minutes.

On a Diet

I'm a week and a half shy of starting my sixth month without checking the news, and no, it has nothing to do with our new president but everything to do with his wife.

It all started on Inauguration Day 2025.

*insert dream sequence harp glissando*

The morning started off like any other: two cups of Starbucks Caffe Verona coffee, French press, followed by a mild-to-moderate bathroom catastrophe. It continued like any other. I wiped the tears from my eyes and the sweat from my brow, and gingerly sat back in bed to play a few minutes of Disney Dreamlight Valley—because I identify as a 9 year old girl from Terra Haute who wants nothing more than to meet, or better yet, be, Belle. When I bored of Disney Dreamlight Valley—DDV for those in the know—I played the News+ Crossword and Sudoku. All three levels, thank you very much.

After the games ended, it was on to the real work: checking the news. I skimmed the headlines on NBC New York and then The Post, to ensure a balanced dose of daily spin. (I know, I know, I said I swore off the Post in a previous, ahem, post, but sometimes you just need a hit of the good stuff.)

On the morning of Inauguration Day, I went to NBC New York and saw the headline "What did Melania wear to Donald Trumps’ Inauguration?" Now, I have nothing against Mrs. Trump. One of our household even voted for her husband last year—Bailey started her own alt-right group, the Proud Good Girls. Mrs. Trump seems like a nice woman and/or a very well put together robot. But I have no idea what she wears and even less of an idea why it was front page news. Is this why I'm reading the news? To find out what people wear?

Whenever I tell someone I don’t read the news—and, when you don't read the news, you're required to work it into the conversation within the first five minutes of meeting someone—their response is always the same: "How do you stay informed?"

To which I ask, "Why do you stay informed?"

What are you doing with all the information? I'll tell you what most people do with the information. They complain. They complain about what one politician did and what another failed to do. They complain about how much other people complain. (At least that's what I did.) They tell you at the bar how the country's going to shit. They tell you that they read on X that illegals are stealing our jobs. Then the recession was stealing our jobs. Now AI is stealing our jobs. [NB: If your job is so easily stolen, maybe you're in the wrong job?] And when they see your eyes glaze over, they tell someone else, usually on X.

But as I started to interrogate my news intake, I found that it didn't sustain me like reading a novel. It wasn't improving my life like reading non fiction. It was just a quick hit of sugar. I'd get high, vibrate with rage, and then crash. The news was empty calories.

So I removed it from my diet. And I started to read more. I started reading history and philosophy. I read a biography on Truman. Did you know we've had presidents people didn't like before? With all that's going on in the news, you'd think we were living in unprecedented times. I hear all the time on comedy stages that "we're living in a very divisive time right now." Right now? Did you know that when Truman ran for reelection, a lot of people hated his political platform? He wasn't doing anything radical. He took FDR's New Deal platform, which sought to spend a ton of government money to improve the lives of Americans, and said, “What if we added black people?” Nuts, right?

But some people hated the idea so much they created a new political party. They called it the Dixiecrats, presumably because The Segregationists was a little too on the noose. That, or they couldn't spell it—they were Southerners, after all. Obviously the Dixiecrats, a party founded on racist ideology, couldn't put a man in the White House. That'd be preposterous. So they put one in the Senate, where he served for 48 years.

Time has a way of winnowing prejudices, bias, and falsehoods so that only the truth remains. Sure, each author introduces his own bias, but the good ones, I think, let data and facts speak for themselves. Plus, unlike news, which exists as an ephemeral flash, we can argue with authors. They take time to research, compile, and argue their point. They give us an opportunity to read, digest, and even refute what they write. You can't do that with news. It's just there, and then it's replaced with the next news story. Have you ever gone back through old news clippings to see what they got wrong or how little of the full picture they had?

Now before you think me all high and mighty, taking about how much better I think I am than all of you news readers, let me be clear: I don't think that. [I know it.] And, I have to admit, I still get some news. In fact, I get my news by word of mouth. And I enjoy it. Some mornings Wiff will ask, "do you me to tell you about a thing that happened?" And that's how I learned about a few plane crashes, some freaky weather, and the recent flood that affected Texas. But instead of reading hyperbole on a computer screen, I get a just-the-facts-ma'am version from a human.

Look, I don't care if you read the news or not. I'm not even saying that reading the news is bad. Smart people have said societies need free press and those smart people have also written books so ergo I must agree with them. All I'm saying is that I've enjoyed not having to read poorly written local news articles about what the First Lady wore on Inauguration Day.

What did I do with all that time I saved by not reading the news? I figured out how to stop those mild-to-moderate daily bathroom catastrophes. Turns out the news wasn't the only thing I had to change in my diet.

An Ideal Day

Today I had lunch with Wiff, hosted a comedy show, and then had a few beers with a few of my favorite comic friends. I can’t think of a better way to spend a day.

I wish I could…

My Garden is Back

Why I got two 50 qt bags is beyond me.

I’m growing three kinds of lettuce to start, Romaine, Cimarron Red, and Simpson Leaf.

I keep a garden journal to keep track of what works and what doesn’t.

A lot of it doesn’t.

But that’s the point of keeping a log: so I don’t make the same mistakes again.

Hand Stuff

On the side of my bottle of Bombay Sapphire there's a little note that reads "hand-selected ingredients." I don't know why the body part is important to note, but they've got it on there. Does anyone care?

And does anyone actually believe these ingredients are all hand-selected? And what does that even mean, to be hand-selected. Does some buyer point to a picture of rose petals in a catalogue and say "those?" What do they think we think when we read "hand-selected?" That someone is selecting each and every juniper berry that goes into making 25 million liters of halfway decent gin every year?

And what does it say about the person who appreciates that? I don't know if I necessarily want to imagine someone rummaging through every ingredient that goes into my gin. At best it's a romanticization of the process, and at worst, a downright lie. Plus, this gin doesn't cost enough to pay for what I imagine it costs for humans to hand-select the ingredients. Or does it and I'm just that out of touch with the cost of human labor?

Let's take the neutral grain sprit. Are human hands selecting each of the thousands of acres of wheat it took to distill that? I could imagine someone pointing to one field over another and saying, "that one," and then watching the combine harvest all the wheat. But then what?

Does someone go around and hand-select all of the 10 botanicals?

"Let's get the berries from that juniper tree, no, NO! Not that one it's threadbare...that one! She's a beaut. Yes. Good. And that one. NO! The other one...Good..."

ChatGPT estimates that 12 million lemons are used each year to produce Bombay Sapphire. Are any of those hand-selected?

I've noticed this in restaurants too. Every steak is hand-selected. Every cocktail hand-crafted. Even the fries—something you'd think a machine could do handily—are hand-cut.

Just once I want the waiter to come out and say, "After the pandemic we realized no one knew how to wash their hands, so we decided to remove them from the equation altogether. Our kitchen is entirely hands-free. They’re all amputees."

To which I would say, "Amazing. Let's give them a hand."

The Freakin Weekend

Why is it that, even though I don’t have a regular office job or even a job that requires me to be somewhere on weekdays, a weekend still feels like a weekend?

It’s Saturday, July 5th, and I don’t feel like doing work. I have an audition due Monday that I could have done this morning, but I didn’t, because it’s a weekend. I need to write, but I don’t wanna because it’s a weekend.

I have nothing to clock off from. No desk to not go to. Any day could be a weekend if I wanted.

I can go to the movies on a Tuesday or the beach on Wednesday if I liked doing any either of those things.

I could work on a Saturday or even on Sunday, the lord’s day, if I wanted to do any work at all.

Who knows, maybe I’ll feel different tomorrow.

Hey, at least I wrote!

Amurica

In 1775, David McCullough writes, King George III “hoped his people in America would see the light, and recognize that to be a subject of Great Britain, with all its consequences, is to be the freest member of any civil society in the known world.”

I’m thankful those brave colonists did see the light and realized that, though they were subjects of Great Britain, with all its consequences, and were the freest member of any civil society in the known world, they weren’t free enough to leave.

Because now we can celebrate by blowing stuff up.

Smart Collector

The other day I was in a voiceover live directed session and the director asked me to send both the raw and edited versions of the audio files, each in two different formats. After the session I jumped into my Digital Audio Workstation and began chopping up the session recording. All in, I had 35 audio clips that needed to be exported four times.

Given software constraints this is not as easy as it sounds. I'd have to manually select each one of those 35 clips and add to an export queue, repeating for both versions and both filetypes for a total of 140 clips. That's a lot of clicking, and I wanted to turn this around quickly for the client.

I saved myself the clicking and decided to write a python script that would do everything for me.

When I was in the fifth grade, I started learning how to code. I read a book on the BASIC language, which sounds like it comes with a Pumpkin Spice Latte and contains words like "literally," "I can't even," and "obsessed," but is in fact a real programming language. I wrote a few simple programs, one of which would take the letter grades on my report card and calculate the average.

And thank god I learned how to program! Before this program [a note to readers under 40, programs are old school apps], my poor father would have to calculate the average for himself to award a dollar amount based on the result, but now, through the magic of automation, my program could do the work for him. Surely that was worth an extra few bucks. Due to a persnickety bug, no matter what grades you inputted, it always returned the same result. YOUR AVERAGE IS AN A.

I had no plans to use this knowledge beyond running this little scam. It wasn't exactly top of the list for impressing the babes in my class. "Hey, honey, wanna see some code?" But then, the other day, I thought about breaking it back out.

Not that I could use the exact knowledge, mind you. BASIC couldn't help me in my voiceover editing scenario, but having a minimal understanding of code could. So I wrote a python script—with the help of Chat—to do export. What would have taken me an hour only took me a few minutes. Well, technically it took me two hours to learn how to write the python code and two seconds to click "GO."

There's a story about an algebra teacher responding to a student asking whether he would ever use algebra. "No. Studying algebra is like lifting weights. Chances are, you're never going to need to deadlift a barbell-shaped object outside of the gym, but you might need to lift a couch to help a friend move or a dining room table to help your parents prepare for Christmas dinner." And just as lifting weights keeps your body healthy, studying algebra keeps your mind healthy.

This needs an ending. But that's what editing is for.

Tomorrow!

Stress Test

During our bookclub meeting tonight, one of the guys told a story about a stressful work situation. In the story, one of the leaders he works with, referring to the stressful situation, said, “I can’t wait to read the book on this in 10 years.”

Now, I don't know if this is what he meant, but I think that’s great advice for deciding whether or not to worry about something. If something isn’t worthy of having a book written about it, it’s not worth stressing about. Books take time to write. They have to be researched, edited, proofread. They have to be interesting enough that an agent will submit it to a publisher, and have a strong enough hook that a publisher buys it. No one’s gonna write a book about you losing your wallet or getting fired.

But the opioid epidemic? Or the COVID vaccine? (Both bookclub books, btw!)

Along the same line of thought…

Jaron Lanier talks about creating content that take 100 times longer to create than it does to consume. A blockbuster movie takes months or years to create and 110 minutes to consume. That passes the Jaron test. A novel, say about an ambitious NYC attorney who has to spend the holidays with her ex, for example, takes months to write, and several hours to consume. That passes too. But a tweet? Or a Reel?

The story about the stressful work situation was especially fitting given the club’s most recent read, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot. The author, a Vietnam Vet and former fighter pilot, was shot down over Vietnam and survived as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton for more than 8 years. His experience was worth writing a book about, and was probably worth stressing about. But, ironically, and because of his studies of Stoic philosophy, and in particular, Epictetus, he didn’t.

1903

Earlier today I took one of those touristy cruises to the Statue of Liberty and back. I had a blast. But my major complaint?

“When did the first subway line open in NYC?” There was a lull in the tour guide’s schtick and one of the passengers seized the silence to ask a question.

David, the guide, smiled. “1904. And do you know how I know that? It’s one year after 1903, which will become very important later in the cruise.”

We were just about to take off on a tour to the Statue of Liberty and I was excited. I made a mental note to listen for 1903.

An hour later, after we’d debarked, I was walking home. A thought occurred to me, and I texted my family, who’d been with me on the cruise. Did we ever get the story about 1903?!?

My niece responded first. I think it was the year Lincoln did his first open mic.

Then my step-mom. It was the year David was born.

We never did get the story about 1903 and I’m left feeling intellectually blue balled. David got me cerebrally hot and bothered and now I have no idea what to do with the empty promise.

I guess I’ll have to take care of it myself.

Death row Meal

Have you ever thought about what your last meal would be? Have you ever really sat down and thought what you’d want to eat, knowing you’d be dead soon?

I think about it often. I don’t fantasize about my death. Far from it. But I do often think about food, and inevitably it leads me to ask, “would I want this as my last meal?” Hyperbole aside, it’s a quick way to get to whether you like the meal or not. I don't necessarily mean would you want this for every meal, mind you. At some point sustenance comes into play, and no matter what you want your doctor to prescribe, bottomless carbonara probably isn’t the answer. But for a last meal?

I think I would choose really good bread with really good butter. My current favorite butter is French, and comes from Isigny, a town in Normandy. And my current favorite bread? Whatever’s freshest. And baguettiest. Despite my allegiance to Italy and all things pasta, they suck at bread. I mean, sure, focaccia. But c’mon, Italy, have you ever had baguette? Fresh from a Parisian bakery?

So…bread. And butter.

And Calvados.

Calvados also comes from Normandy. Which is something I just learned. My father-in-law introduced me to calvados twenty years ago, when I didn’t know anything about alcohol other than it would get me wasted if I had too much and boy oh boy was Midori good at getting me wasted. But the first time I tried calvados? It felt like the first time I put on a pair of suit pants. Something just fit. I felt like an adult. There’s a distillery in Oregon called Clear Creek that makes absolutely amazing eaux de vie, and if their apple brandy was the last thing I ever tasted I wouldn’t be unhappy.

Okay, so… so really good bread, and really good butter. And Calvados (or Oregonian apple brandy).

Oh…and also Champagne.

I had a glass of Champagne today at a high tea at Bergdorf Goodman because I was in a celebratory mood and god, do I just love Champagne. Wiff and I keep a bottle in our fridge at all times just in case we need to celebrate something. The past few months we’ve opened bottles of Pol to celebrate the commercials I’ve booked. And there’s another bottle in there now waiting to be opened once I finish recording a commercial voiceover on Tuesday. These celebrations don’t happen often enough, and they may not continue, but I love the feeling of opening a bottle of Pol Roger every time I have a reason to celebrate.

Okay.

So.

Good bread.

Good butter.

Calvados.

And Champagne.

Going once?

Going twice?

Dead.

When You Do Want to Write

My niece is visiting New York this weekend. As I gathered a list of options for activities—restaurants, museums, sights both touristy and not—I was reminded how cool this city is. This afternoon we walked to CVS to get sunscreen and a pizza place to pickup pizza. On the way, we passed a steakhouse, several theaters that had plays that starred household name celebrities, a new bar that used to be a nail salon, and an old bar that used to be a hangout for The Westies. Normally, I don’t notice much in my neighborhood, but tonight, with my niece in tow, I was seeing the city through her eyes, fresh eyes. Eyes that can read the DON’T WALK sign a little crisper.

What can I do to always see the world with those eyes?

Besides getting Lasik.

When You Don’t Want to Write

Updated Edited: June 29, 2025

When you don’t want to write, you still gotta write.
You still do the hard part: sit down and write.
It doesn’t have to be good.
It just has to be.
I mean, it eventually has to be good,
but that’s what editing is for.

Today Was a Good Day

Today was weird. I woke up at 5am at almost the exact instant Bailey emerged from her sleeping spot under the bed beneath me. You might want to say that it was because she emerged from her sleep spot directly beneath me that I woke up. But you'd be wrong. The stars had aligned and woke us up at the exact moment each of us was supposed to. Together. I believe.

As she pulled herself out from under the bed, I gave her a little scratch. Right on the spot she likes, right above her tail. She didn't even bother looking back as she curled her spine into the scratch. She knew it was me, knew we had both arisen at the same time. She believes too.

I took her outside for her usual morning walk. I said hello to Wilson, the sometimes overnight doorman, as Bailey and I jogged from the elevator to the front door. It was cooler today than it's been the last few days. The thermometer said 79 degrees, feels like 77, so I wore a t-shirt and shorts. But with the breeze, the one that took the temp all the way from 79 to 77, I almost felt chilly. I didn't, of course, but almost. I believed I could. Like I could remember what chilly felt like, like I had forgotten the past two record setting hot days. And almost chilly was a far cry from how I felt not 6 hours ago when I'd walked home from a comedy show at Comic Strip Live.

I was first on the lineup in front of a receptive crowd. After watching a few comics and hanging out with a few more, I headed home. It was sweltering. My walk to the train station was only three blocks but that was three too many. I entered the station, paid at the turnstile, and walked to the escalators only to find them inoperable.

I thought it was an energy conservation mandate the city had issued to prevent blackouts. Our apartment building had to comply with the same mandate and had raised the temperature in the common areas to alleviate the strain on the system. The building sent an email earlier in the day suggesting residents do the same and consider “keeping air conditioning usage to a minimum,” but I secretly hoped Wiff had set ours to 60.

I walked down the frozen escalator steps and, as I descended, I felt the air get warmer. Each step felt like I was getting one step closer to Hades. I passed a few stray souls on my way down, people who were either too hot and tired or too old to step faster. I wanted to stop and talk to them, to complain about how hot it was and isn't it annoying we have to pay the price for the power company's shitty infrastructure, in the Upper East Side of all places, when I looked over to the up escalator and noticed it too was stopped. People had to walk, without mechanical help, up 238 steps in sweltering heat, in the Upper East Side of all places! I couldn't complain. At least not aloud.

I made it to the mezzanine level, one floor above the subway platform, and overheard an elderly woman talking to someone who looked like he worked in the station.

"Can I take that elevator to the street?" she asked.

"No, ma'am,” he said. “That one only goes down to the subway platform. The other one won't work until the power comes back on."

Aha! So it wasn't a mandatory energy curtailment thing. It was an accidental energy loss thing. Maybe the power company’s infrastructure was shittier than I thought.

She continued. "Well I can't walk up all those stairs."

"I'm sorry. You can wait here, or take a subway to another station and get to the street that way, and then take a bus back here."

I wanted to help, but I didn't know what I could do, other than offer her a piggy back ride. And I'm a nice guy and all, but I draw the line at piggy back rides for strangers. Especially in this heat. Especially in the Upper East Side.

What Do I Know?

Isn't it always the case where you know the right answer, but don't want to tell someone because you'll hurt their feelings, no matter how incorrect they might be? I was getting my haircut yesterday, and while my stylist was buzzing away the untidy mess on the sides of my head, the stylist on the other side of the mirror was prattling on about the weather to the woman in his chair, adding his own untidy mess to the world.

"Well, it's tough in this heat.” He sighed. “All this AC. It's not good for us."

"Oh, yeah," the woman said, the way one does when they're held captive. You could tell that her heart wasn't in it.

He continued. "It's not good for our skin or our lungs, the way it removes all the moisture from the air." He spoke with the confidence of someone who's rarely ever challenged, who rarely ever has to defend the inane things they say. He spoke like a small time mob boss. Or a hairdresser.

The woman in the chair had been through this before. Maybe not with him, but with someone else, and she knew the game. She knew what to say when, and when to look up from her phone with a shocked look on her face. This was not one of those moments yet. She knew he had a soapbox to step up to, and paced her responses appropriately. "Mmm hmm."

"That's why when I'm not at home, I let mine go up to 78 degrees. If you let the air conditioner rest during the day it'll work better at night. All these people who leave theirs running during the day...it just makes it harder for the AC to work at night."

Her legs shifted under the table. "I know, right?"

Neither of those things were true, but what was I to do? I couldn't just barge in and explain how physics works. Mostly because I don't know. But also because it would have been rude.

Yesterday I took Bailey for a walk. A woman passed me and sighed. "102 degrees out. Can you believe it?" she asked. "It's a record!"

It was 102 degrees out, and it did beat a record. But one from the 1800s. Don't you always kind of look at records like that with suspicion?  Did we even have thermometers back then? Or did we divine the temperature through prayer?

I looked back at where I'd just stepped and saw a fresh shoe print in the melted tar. "Oh, is it that hot?" I said. "With this breeze I was getting a bit chilly."

She ignored the joke and continued, barely audible from behind her mask. "She's gotta be so hot! With all that fur it's like wearing a mink coat!" She pointed at Bailey as if I wasn't sure exactly whom she meant by "with all that fur."

I didn't know why she was wearing a mask but I've stopped wondering or minding. It's 2025, and thankfully you don't see them too often, but every now and then I'll see someone wearing one. I used to grumble to myself, thinking the wearer to a total moron. Like that Japanese soldier who was on the island for 30 years and didn't know The War had ended. I used to want to shake them. "You fool! Haven't you heard? It's over? We won!"

But a few of the 600 people in my building still wear masks, not for COVID reasons, but medical. They have or have had cancer and are undergoing chemotherapy. They're immunocompromised and the occasional wince or subtle mockery is a small price to pay for not dying from catching a common cold. After talking to them, I've stopped judging. It's easy to judge when you think they're stupid. But when it's for survival, it's harder to be an asshole.

"I brush her every day," I lied. "It's a lot of work." She didn't notice that Bailey's fur was a matted mess, having not been brushed in months.

"Does she have water?" She asked.

And right then, I wished I could sneeze into her mask. Does she have water? I wanted to say. She did, but she dropped her canteen a few miles back when we were running from the sandstorm. It was the darnest thing. The harness I force her to wear, the heavy one with three water bottle holsters—one for her and two for me—just slid right off, what with her losing so much weight in this heat. Oh, look at that. It's almost time for her midday sprints. What did she think this was, a company march?

I know she told herself she was trying to be nice. I'm sure she thought it was better to err on the side of caution and check whether this man on the street with a fluffy Pomeranian in the 102 degree heat had water than to walk by minding her own business.

But I didn't want to get into it. I didn't want to say "no, I don't have water because, do you see that door not 20 feet away? That's our front door. Beyond that is air conditioning and bottomless ice water." I didn't want the conversation to go further. Because I knew where it would go. So I just gave her a nice smile and said, "It's a five minute walk."

"Oh thank goodness," she said. "My dog just died and I couldn't bear to have that happen to anyone else."

Shame on Me

It’s been a while since I’ve really screwed up.

Once, when I was in the seventh grade, my class built a clothes trunk to donate to our school’s annual auction. I say “built” but I mean “asked one of our parents to build.” It wasn’t much of a choice, really. One of the kid’s dads was a carpenter.

After it was built, our teacher had the chest brought in to class so we could admire our handiwork. Then she asked us to sign it. Just like real artists. One by one, we went to the front of the class, and signed it with a thick black sharpie. Before we’d signed it, a friend of mine leaned over and said, “I dare you to sign it ‘Da Pimp.’” So, when I approached the chest, after taking a moment to admire my creation, I signed Da Pimp.

Once we’d finished, a few teachers took the chest away to be prepared for the auction. I thought I was in the clear. There’s no way they’d see it among the 30 names in in the chest. Especially with only minutes remaining in the school day. Moments later, Mr. McCoy came in. “Nobody’s leaving until we figure out who signed Da Pimp.”

For a minute, I thought if I keep my mouth shut, they’ll never know. And that might have been true. The only one who knew I’d done it was the friend who suggested I do it. He was a security risk. A few minutes alone with him and a baseball bat might clear that up. But then I experienced shame. The shame of failing my teachers. The shame of being the sole reason all my friends—including the one who gave me the idea—were being held after the closing bell was me.

Some people sit with shame for too long. They dwell in it because they don’t want or are too afraid to atone for whatever they’ve done. That day in seventh grade, I learned that shame can be a powerful impetus for change. It can push us to make amends with whomever we hurt and to be welcomed back into our communities. I could only take a few minutes before I fessed up.

“If it’s a pimp you’re looking for, look no further.”

“Everyone can go,” McCoy said, “except you, LeDonne.”