“You should have seen the look on Mark’s face when he saw those bell peppers.”

It never ceases to amaze or discourage me to see grown men so threatened by something as harmless as someone else’s diet.

He was a huge Coke drinker. Obsessive.

“So why didn’t you and Elizabeth ever get together?” he asked about me and his wife.

I made up some crap about her and me not being a good fit, but she was an incredibly horrible person.

My brain now has me using the word “ronids” for the particles that cause covid-19.

Persistent, horrifying nightmares about spiders: it started with a fountain that mines glowing purple liquid from the ground. Then we were surrounded by huge spiders with long black legs and round white abdomens. They were all stealing cherries. Are there really cherry-stealing spiders, or has the Rona finally broken me?

When the current epidemic matures into a global catastrophe like the 1918-19 pandemic, do you really want your legacy to be, “I bought a lot of toilet paper”? Not me. I want everyone to remember my work, and mostly how well and much I loved my wife.

Wait. A covid is 10,000 covfefe, right?

There is some self-righteous inclination to not wear a Rona mask, citing personal liberty. I’ll bet those same people would wear the mask in seconds flat if the Rona turned you gay or black.

A drastic panic to buy toilet paper, but there are fresh fruits and vegetables as far as the eye can see. It never ceases to amaze me how silly and ignorant people can be. Why don’t you just curl up in a corner and suck your thumb?

What do I miss? With just seconds to go in overtime… one town on one side of the gym, another town on the other side of the gym. The ball hits nothing but net, and that team’s town goes wild. The gym traps the din, filling all our ears with wild screams and yells. The buzzer sounds, and the game is over. One team and their town loses, one team and their town wins.

Covering this was my job that night, and might have been the most fun thing I did all year.

You know what I love? …

“Barack Obama is not my president.”

Followed immediately by…

“How dare you say Donald Trump isn’t your president.”

Believe it or not, I had friends in high school pressure me… pressure me… to display a rebel flag front license plate on my car. I never did. Why did they care about the flags I displayed, anyway? I guess in their naive minds, it might have seemed like it made them look like “rebels,” and peer pressure is usually pretty stupid, but the meaning of the Confederate flag has remained consistently negative in my lifetime.

You don’t hate people of color because of who they are. You hate them because of who you are.

Hawken cornered a raccoon last night. Once I got Hawken pulled back, the raccoon shooed away without an argument.

“I can’t wait until Hawken corners me a cooter,” I told my wife. I meant cougar.

Me: I made a mess in the kitchen last night. The rice sort of got away from me.

Abby: Oh, honey, that’s because you bought wild rice.

Okay, maybe I need to decompress. I just had the phrase “white balance” pass my eyes as I web surfed and wondered if it was something racist. White balance is a camera setting, Richard. You’re a photographer.

Help me cultivate a new catchphrase: “That’s not my train to strafe.”

Okay, I can finally put all the conspiracy theories to rest. The coronavirus started with the eclipse in 2017, when the sun began emitting coronids. Sure, you say, light from the sun only takes eight minutes to reach Earth; why is it only reaching us now? Because it had to go around the moon. Duh.

If anyone is running low, I’ve got humidifier fluid I can let go of for $4 a gallon.

Nobody got that joke.