Meh Life Meh Journal, Mehmoir September 11, 2026

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Read More Only the essentials
Read More Don’t get me started on the Colgate pump.
Read More Ironically, I figured it out while reading “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury.”
Read More I assume they covered several techniques for becoming a better listener.
Read More Of all the things America had to offer, somehow we started with corn cob holders.
Read More Pregame has evolved
Read More Cultural exchange took an unexpected turn
Read More OUR comfort level, on the other hand, depended heavily on the relative replacement cost
Read More Hadn’t been alone with my own thoughts since before my BlackBerry
Read More Moses wandered for forty years. We’re in no rush.
Read More Birthdays lose some of their magic after fifty
Read More For about ten seconds I mentally rewrote the rest of my backpacking ttrip
Read More Doomscrolling > nature
Read More Apparently any uniform will do
Read More It seemed to be flexing that we were no longer bound by Athens’s “Do Not Flush the TP” rule

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It’s not left vs right — it’s wrong vs louder
Lambda Chi ‘til You Die — he did :(
Book Challenge

I was nominated to post seven books that I love or that have had an impact on my life. I don’t normally play along with these things, but I do love books, so here goes.

Book 1: Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures
More specifically, the story “The Patchwork Monkey” by Beverly Butler, which I first read in second grade after one of my brother’s friends brought the book to our house after school.
It was the first time a story genuinely terrified me.
What a wonderful feeling.

Book 2: Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov

Frankly, I could have chosen almost any of Asimov’s guides or essay collections. They’re all engaging, insightful, and remarkably accessible.

Asimov had a gift for taking dry or complicated subjects, distilling them into understandable ideas, and then adding enough examples, wit, and personality to make learning about them genuinely fun. His nonfiction books are basically How Do Things Work? books for adults—books that encourage curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge simply for the pleasure of knowing things.

They have also given my wife plenty of material with which to make fun of me.

Book 3: The Anarchist Cookbook

When I first learned about The Anarchist Cookbook, it was one of those quasi-forbidden books floating around the early online world, available to me only as a download from a dial-up BBS.

Naturally, the moment I discovered there was a “forbidden book” out there, I knew I had to read it.

The book itself was a disappointment—mostly amateurish pranks, homemade explosives, and spectacularly bad ideas involving household products. But it introduced me to something much more interesting: the realization that there are people who genuinely want to decide what other people should and shouldn’t be allowed to read.

It also reminded me of an incident in fourth grade, when our librarian, Ms. Raby, confiscated my Mack Bolan book—a violent, James Bond-type adventure novel. She circled some of the more objectionable passages and sent it home with a note warning my mom about the kind of garbage I was reading.

My mom sent back a note informing Ms. Raby that I could read anything I wanted.

Go Mom.

Ever since, whenever I encounter a list of banned or challenged books—usually courtesy of some crusty school board—I look it over to make sure I’ve read, or am at least familiar with, the books on it.

Such lists also make pretty good suggested-reading lists for my kids.

Book 4: It by Stephen King

It was the first hardcover book I ever bought with my own money, purchased from Little Professor in Omaha. It was also the first book I ever pre-ordered.

And I’ve now read it five times.

There probably isn’t much I can say about It that hasn’t already been written somewhere else. I’ll simply say that I consider it one of the best books I’ve ever read, and for reasons that go beyond the novel itself, it remains a very special book to me.

Book 5: The Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is the godfather of cosmic horror, and the idea at the heart of his fiction is neatly summarized in the opening of The Call of Cthulhu:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

I had already encountered elements of cosmic horror in Stephen King and Clive Barker, but Lovecraft had an unmatched ability to describe a universe that is not merely hostile to humanity, but utterly indifferent to us.

The idea that we occupy an unimaginably vast universe filled with things we cannot comprehend—and that our existence may be completely insignificant within it—is terrifying to contemplate and fascinating to read about.

Lovecraft himself was also an unapologetic racist and anti-Semite, something that can’t simply be ignored when discussing him. But his ability to put the incomprehensible on the page—to suggest things that by definition should be beyond human understanding—remains remarkable.

As an aside, it was only years later that I realized the Cthulhu mythos I had encountered as a kid in Dungeons & Dragons: Deities & Demigods came from H.P. Lovecraft.
Apparently he had been lurking in my imagination longer than I realized.

Book 6: Tell Me Why by Tim Riley

Tell Me Why was the first book I bought at the KU Bookstore when I went to college—other than, regrettably, textbooks—and it remains my favorite book about the music of the Beatles.

Riley examines Beatles songs as both music and cultural artifacts, analyzing the lyrics, arrangements, performances, and influences without falling into the common trap of retrospectively assigning profound meaning to everything the Beatles ever did.

He is clearly a fan, but not an uncritical one. He’s perfectly willing to point out when a song, lyric, or musical choice doesn’t work.

The result is part musical analysis, part criticism, part history, and part social study. What I love most is Riley’s ability to point out little musical details and nuances that a casual listener might never notice.

Reading Tell Me Why changed the way I listened to the Beatles—and made me appreciate even more just how extraordinary and enduring their music really is.

Book 7: The Complete Pun Book by Art Moger

Because you either believe puns are the highest form of comedy...

...or you’re just homophonic.
Of all the things America had to offer, somehow we started with corn cob holders.
The fact that he could even understand any of the lyrics on the album is remarkable

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