• I’m thinking of joining the Masonite Church.  Its creed: we warp when we weep.

• Someday, in some alternate universe, I will be a restaurant reviewer for a city newspaper and I will be expected to use the word “redolent” as a fancy-pants way of saying “a lot.”

• High co-payments and high deductibles discourage people from seeking medical care, there can be no doubt about this.  People who have to pay their own way in the U.S. health system are induced to make trade-offs that the wealthy and well-insured do not concern themselves with.  Is my vision bad enough to justify the price of these procedures?  Can I live with my heart palpitations or should I keep ignoring them?  When a person knows that seeking care will have a major financial impact on his life, he or she is more likely to delay care until it is so obviously needed that it is too late to preserve or restore health.  But isn’t this what we want?  Our citizens deciding the market value of their own lives?

U.S. health care “reform” does not address this and, it can be argued, exacerbates this with its focus on the health marketplace rather than health outcomes.

So much is made by the conservative elite of the “moral hazard” of seeking unnecessary health care if it is “free” (which means the conservative elite think they are paying for it) but so little is made of the moral hazard of having frugal people deny themselves care only to be subject to more expensive procedures, lower quality of life, and shorter lifespans in the long term.  The answer is, and should have been, Medicare for All.

• Unwritten rule of the road: when two cars are approaching an unsigned intersection, the car with the right-of-way is the one going the fastest.

• I always tried to avoid telling my children I was “proud of them” for one or another of their accomplishments.  As I was growing up it seemed to me that my parents’ pride in what I did had mostly to do with my actions having conformed to their expectations.  So instead, I tell my son and daughter that I am happy for them, which I am.

• My college buddy Eric and I decided to create and exchange CDs of our favorite tunes, some 39 years after we graduated.  The one song that by chance appeared on both of our mixes was not by the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, Grand Funk Railroad (please!) or Led Zeppelin.  It was this one by The Beach Boys.  I must say, we had some good music.

• Speaking of old music, What’s for Lunch (click on link to play) is the last song I wrote and recorded on my four-track tape recorder in my college dorm room in 1974, with my friend Rob playing cymbal and the final guitar solo.  It was the best guitar work I ever did, which isn’t saying much.  The drum set consisted of my mattress, a padded chair with aluminum foil taped to the seat, and the aforementioned cymbal.  I produced the bass part by playing the low strings of my guitar with my tape recorder running at 2x the normal speed, so that the guitar part would be an octave lower upon playback.  As John and Yoko said, play loud.