Notices by Human Ghostwriter (hg@beige.party)

My life would be so weird if I were as expressive and articulate in person as I am in print. On the page, I'm animated and energetic and exciting. In person, I'm dry and I stutter and I lose my train of thought.

Me: [explaining the cultural context behind "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" for like three minutes]

My wife: "I don't need to understand it to hate it."

Me: "It was an early viral YouTube phenomenon"

My wife: "I cannot imagine why that needs to be my problem now."

If something happens to me, I want my family to go through all my toots (and Lrrr's, too) to see who I really was. These are curated versions of me that are shamelessly batting at the dopamine button, but it's probably the most coherent (lol) corpus of my thoughts, impressions, values, and ideas that I'll ever produce.

My son is setting a tripwire with a jump rope at his preschool graduation. I have taught him well.

I'm gonna fight the next person I see blaring their music on a hiking trail.

It peaked hard in the second act, but my face is in actual pain after watching the new Naked Gun movie.

He's chanting "BORED BORED BORED! PHONE PHONE PHONE!" and I am trying not to laugh at him. He needs to get through this on his own.

He gets very little screen time and almost no phone time in normal life, but he got lots on our trip as a peace tax. The withdrawals are brutal.

Meanwhile, my daughter has been ritually drowning Peppa Pig in effigy since we got home. She will lead us in the age to come.

Trying to communicate to my shrieking, wailing five-year-old that I give less than zero fucks about his boredom.

We live in a house of toys that I constantly step on and books that we constantly read. The sun is shining and the back yard is enclosed. His boredom is an opportunity, if not a choice.

I bet AI is fucking things up for guys named Al.

If I see another article criticizing Gen Z for looking at people, I'm gonna forge a birth certificate and join them.

If your job is to shit on the young, your heart will be too heavy for the Ma'at and you will not be admitted to the afterlife.

My wife and I tossed our kids at a competent babysitter for 5.5 hours today and had the best time. We climbed a mountain. We ate a sushi boat. We [redacted]. We bought dessert at a specialty grocery store. We listen to a podcast about the opium war. We laughed. Not in that order. It's so good to get time outside of parenthood, and to actually use it? Forget about it.

Writing "The Counterinsurgent's Guide to Parenting." It'll be full of diagrams about setting up ambushes, tips on extraordinary rendition to grandma's house, and the tactical application of ice cream. I'm gonna sell it to couch warriors at a stupendous markup.

My daycare tells me that my son now has a blood brother, so that's a trip to the doctor.

He skinned his knee and another kid decided, "I know what to do with blood! I'm gonna lick it!"

So I guess it's their trip to the doctor, not ours.

I want to start doing standup but I don't think my online persona translates well. I can't look things up on Wikipedia to seem smart.