Patrick McVay

When I was a kid, I’d heard that everyone knew exactly where they were when they learned that President Kennedy was shot. Though I haven’t taken a poll, I imagine that most people remember where they were when they heard that planes had flown into the twin towers and the country was under attack.

I was at work at the time, an administrator at Harvard, working at a research center that studied conflicts like the one we apparently were in. My erstwhile friend Mike Sleeper called me to tell me that a plane had run into the twin towers. At the time I didn’t get that it was a purposeful collision; it sounded like an accident. But soon the office was abuzz with the news, and by the time a TV was wheeled out to show the news, the second tower had been hit.

Shortly after this genuinely frightening news, I was reminded that I was supposed to be at an administrative meeting related to the usual BS that you have to deal with in office jobs, and – guess what – it was to go on as scheduled. Nothing I did was very important. I paid bills and reported on spending. The phrase that my colleague Mike Tiorano used regularly was “we’re not curing cancer here.” Meanwhile, the twin towers were about to collapse, the Pentagon had been attacked, a plane had gone down in Pennsylvania, and no one knew what the hell was going on.

At the time, Jeremy Knowles was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and at some point he offered us the option of going home. At the time I thought, “I don’t need your or anyone else’s permission to leave today.” However, my friend and co-worker Malcolm, who was the librarian at our Center and a master of tiny moving sculptures made of paper clips, had announced his departure from Harvard, and since I was to be the MC at his farewell party, I needed to plan for jocular speeches supported by an array of gag gifts and props.

Now released from work, I got on my bicycle and headed into Boston, which was not exactly on my route but was close enough. Jack’s Joke Shop still existed at the time, and I made my way there to get some tools of the farewell speech trade.

What I found, en route, was what everyone in the Northeast found that day and for days afterward: blue skies with nary a cloud or a plane in sight. The only people left in town, it seemed, were the ones working at Jack’s Joke Shop.

Imagine how much of a self-centered turd you have to be to take a medal that was awarded to someone else and accept it because you thought you should have won it yourself. Then, you threaten to drag your own country and several others into a military confrontation because you are insulted that you didn’t win the award. And, frankly, you never deserved it. I mean, who is that infantile?

In 2005, I had two cars – a two-seater Mazda Miata that had a pinhole in the gas tank, and a pickup truck. I also had a pregnant wife. The Truck had an extended cab with jumpseats in the back, but these were entirely unfit for an infant in a car seat. The Mazda, with its leaking gas tank and no rear seats, was worse.

So we bought a station wagon, a Saab 9-5 wagon in silver (hot color for that era). The salesman was a cranky old fella with a Boston accent, who talked about his wife and his ailing back. I’m doing this from memory and am not bothering to fact check, so don’t quote me. He spent about an hour with us upon delivery of the car, going over the facts and features. I would have been bored but the cranky salesman used colorful language spiced up with that stereotypical accent, which made the hour moderately amusing.

Sometime later – six months? a year? – I was back at the dealership, I think to purchase crossbars for the roof rails, or maybe to buy a roof box. As I waited for the parts guy to get my order, the cranky old salesman wandered past with a piece of paper in his hand and said, to himself I think, “Well, so fah this day sucks.”

That’s pretty much the way I feel about 2026. We just invaded Venezuela and arrested their president, putting him on a plane to the US, allegedly to face drug charges. This is hilarious given that just a month ago President Trump released the former president of Honduras from a US jail, where he was serving time for – you guessed it – flooding the US with drugs. I’m told by my sources that most of Venezuela’s drugs were bound for Europe and Asia, not the US. In an administration that is a leading purveyor of B.S., this is par for the course.   

I’m giving the start of 2026 a four out of ten, and that’s with the understanding that I grant a year five starter points just because I’m not dead yet. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.