•  Donald Trump: fake president, real prick.  Donald Trump: no leader of the free world, but the world’s cheerleader for vile remarks.  Donald Trump: vainglorious minus the glory.

•  I keep thinking I’ll get Donald Trump out of my system, but he lingers on like a bad case of pinworms.  Not that I’ve had pinworms, but you come up with a better analogy.

•  My wife is furiously typing on her laptop, and she turns to me and asks how one spells unaesthetic.  My reply was, can you just say ugly?

•  My 80/80 Facebook Rule: Even taking into account the 80% of things that one decides  it is better not to comment on, 80% of what remains is still better not to comment on.

•  And the remarks I decide not to post on Facebook?  80% of them wind up in this blog.

•  My spouse often asks me to “dust the tops of things” before company arrives.  I cannot recall a time when I was asked to dust the bottoms of things.  So when you visit our place, please don’t look there.

•  It is my firm belief — maybe even extra-firm — that pillowcases have been designed for planned obsolescence, and zippers are the weak link.   The only reasons I have ever thrown out a pillowcase are because the zipper tab falls off or the zipper gets stuck or breaks down somewhere along its short pillowy highway.  Are zippers made by Chrysler?

•  Speaking of planned obsolescence, what is it about supermarket raspberries?  Once you bring them home, you have (at most) 36 hours to eat them before they start getting moldy, even when refrigerated.  I suspect that someone at the berry packaging plant is responsible for spraying spores on them prior to shipment.

•  I went to the Southern States farm supply store last week to buy some bird seed.  (They have great prices on safflower seed, a cleaner and cheaper alternative to sunflower seed).  Waiting at the checkout, I saw these pork rinds.  Not just any old pork rinds but microwave pork rinds.  The feeling crept over me that I was out of my element here.

•  I was saddened by the senseless assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia.  Her yet-another wanton and random death was not a carefully-thought-out act of some evil, affluent, philosophical mastermind, but instead the pressure-cooked product of poverty, alienation, neglect, a cacaphony of messages, guns sloshing around like oxycodone, and a culture of untethered survival that most of us don’t even begin to understand.

•  Those of you who would prefer that thoughts expressed here would be happy thoughts: there are times for escape and times for engagement.  Thanks for reading.