Back in the day, I had a strong belief that if you worked hard, paid your dues, and attended rock concerts in large venues, you’d experience the very best that life has to offer. I grew up in a small and declining city, where we braced for the icy grip of winter by drinking a lot of beer and urinating wherever the hell we wanted. That was the way it was back then: hard work, dues paid, large rock venues, and urinating regularly.

A bit of fiction, perhaps, although I did witness certain unnamed jerks peeing all over creation back then, into the pool, into the fire pit, and so forth. And the large venue rock concerts were a real thing, with people blowing huge plumes of pot smoke into the air, poisoning themselves and everyone around them.

It was awesome! I saw bands like The Who, Pink Floyd, and The Rolling Stones while packed in with drunk young people who threw up all over themselves. And then, I saw that some formerly hugely famous bands suddenly couldn’t fill those large rock venues and would instead play in bars. Bars! The very thought!

Now I can’t seem to bring myself to see the large rock show, unless it’s Radiohead. Instead, I prize the small venue.

Enter Billy Bragg, your favorite folk-punk love troubadour of yesteryear. Turns out Billy and his East London-esque accent were in town to play the tiny Sinclair in Cambridge, MA, easily the best small venue in the area, with great sight lines, reasonable crowd sizes, and actual urinals for us to use. Tickets went on sale in late 2018 for a late 2019 show, so the nation’s most acerbic high school principal had to clue me into tickets and encourage me to buy two pair, which I did while drinking beer and then going off to urinate.

I’ll admit I was a little worried about this show, as I was bringing my lovely bride of 16 years, who attends stand-up rock shows about as often as Jesus did, but seemed game enough if we could stand in the back. We did better, standing some 20 yards away on a secure balcony, with a clear view to Billy and his lefty anti-Trump, anti-Boris Johnson message.

I won’t go through all the songs, as you can always find those by going to setlist.fm, but I will tell you that for about half the show he was talking activitism, and in this bitterly divided world we currently live in, his message was enormously well-received in one of the most left-leaning cities in the US.

As the world inches ever closer to being ruled by women, I was thinking that I, as man, could take solace in the fact that we men still do certain things better than women.

For example, it’s clear to me that men are far more determined, laser-focused, and uncompromising when it comes to drinking beer. I’m not saying that we’re “better” beer drinkers; just that we put more time and effort into thinking about, making plans around, and ultimately executing on the consumption of beer.

Meanwhile, what are women focused on? Talking about reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, gun control – that sort of thing. Like that’s going to get you anywhere! Don’t these women understand that far more people drink beer than vote? If you want to get people to the polls to swing the vote in your favor, maybe you should be drinking more beer with the voters. That’s what we men are doing.

Of course, with a World Cup Final that pits the US v. The Netherlands, many women are going to be taking time off from their work trying to save humanity from doom to watch the event. We men aren’t going to slack off! Let me say unequivocally that as I and many of my male friends watch the game, we will continue to maintain our focus by watching with tankards of ale an arms-length away.

When are the Russians finally going to acknowledge that Venezuela is not in their hemisphere? Do we have to provide them with maps showing that it’s our hemisphere? The earth can be halved into infinite distinct hemispheres, but none of them are going to include both Russia and Venezuela without serious hemispherian Gerrymandering.

On the other hand, even my naked eye can easily see how all South America belongs in the US Hemisphere. So does Canada and our southern neighbor Mexico, where people are determined to pay for our border wall if it’s the last thing they do. So does all of Europe. Throw in Turkey and Africa and you’ve got the complete US hemisphere.

The Russian hemisphere is basically Asia and the Middle East, and we threw in Australia and New Zealand, kind of as afterthoughts. Antarctica is split 50-50, but don’t touch our penguins! US children have come to love penguins and it would really be a shame for the greatest children in the greatest hemisphere to lose even a single penguin to forces external to our hemisphere.

Next thing you know the Russians are going to try to interfere in our elections. At least we know that hasn’t happened yet. 

Everyone has his or her own opinion about what’s in the Mueller Report, but no one seems to think that it will be a mostly funny and wryly-observed discourse on American social behavior, with virtually no mention of the whole Russian Interference in US Elections matter.

Except me.

Having gotten to know “Bob” (as he lets me call him in postcards I send him, which he never responds to) over the past 24 months, I’ve come to expect funny and wryly-observed discourses from him, intended to distract attention away from the subject at hand and make you basically forget about it. The idea being that no one really cared that our elections were influenced by a foreign adversary in the first place, so why not go for the funny bone instead? It’s not like Attorney General William Barr doesn’t have a sense of humor. In a recent poll, huge portions of the population listed “didn’t know there was an election” as the reason they didn’t vote, which I’m told the attorney general thought was hugely funny.

Anyway, you go with your opinion – a report mildly suggesting that the president was egging on the Russians to help the election in his direction; and I’ll go with mine – where Mueller is cracking one-liners and making risqué jokes and saying, “Bah! I’m sick of talking about this collusion witch hunt!”

We’ll find out this weekend!