For a long time, I thought I was a decent writer. But I learned more about writing today from Amanda Gorman than I have in 20 years of practice. I’ll find a full transcript at some point, but the San Diego Union Tribune has some of the prose. What a writer.

I don’t really have anything poignant or eloquent to say about the events of Jan 6, 2020. To be honest, I just feel like I need to write something that I can refer back to in 5, 10 or 20 years.

Just recapping the day in my head seems like I am writing a fictional story.

1. Congress is meeting for the straight-forward task of counting the electoral votes that were cast by states, validated by Secretaries of State, and signed off on by each Governor.
2. A sitting President encourages members of his party to invalidate the count.
3. The same sitting President asks his Vice-President, to invalidate the count.
4. A rally of supporters from across the country, listen to speeches from among others, the CEO of MyPillow and the disgraced lawyer who got caught in a hotel room with a minor in a Borat movie.
5. Said President encourages the crowd to march to Capitol Hill and fight for what was right (paraphrasing here).
6. The crowd goes to the Capitol, stomps around a while, and then attack it.
7. Said President goes back to the White House.
8. The crowd breeches the Capitol, and while some people are just caught up in the enthusiasm, others are clearly looking for specific targets.
9. Capitol Police are forced to shoot someone attempting to climb through a window to get to members of Congress.
10. Despite a mob attacking the place where the current VP, future VP, and all of Congress is located, the President is not moved to a secure location.
11. The crowd eventually just turns into a group of idiot spring breakers raiding a hotel, stealing what they can grab and taking selfies.
12. The crowd eventually leaves, but an officer is dead and 3 other people besides the woman who tried to jump through the window.

This has to be the low point. In a few weeks, we will have real adults running the country again. They won’t be perfect, and some people will hate them, but they will at least be adults.

In some way, my biggest takeaway from these last four years, is that this is how the country would be run if we had no President. It’s like if you were 12 and your parents went away for four years, and yet you survived. When a new relative came to take care of you, think of how much better off you’d end up.

I don’t know what to say. Storming the Capitol is something I never imagined could happen. Now I wonder what unbreakable barrier comes down next.

What a year. Like 1929, 1941, and 2000, this was one that will take up extra space in the history books of the future.

So what did we learn? I polled a few people and here were some responses.

1. I used to proclaim, “If there was just one more hour in every day, I’d finally be able to write a book.” Well, we all cut an hour of commuting out of our lives every day, along with about 3 hours of meetings. And I did not finish that book.
2. There is such a thing as “too much screen time.”
3. Some people we work with have WAY nicer houses than we could have imagined. And some people don’t.
4. There are a lot more incredibly gullible, stupid, and obstinate Americans than I would have thought.
5. The shift schedules for John, Alice, Margarite, Jane, and the other checkout clerks at my neighborhood grocery store.
6. For the last four years, we may not have actually had anyone running the country on a daily basis.
7. Many, many, many jokes and gags from movies made in the 1980’s and 1990’s that seemed hilarious at the time… did not age well into the 2020’s.
8. The single greatest thing you could have done with your stimulus check in March would have been to stick it in the stock market and spend it now.
9. There are still people who believe in the Bill of Rights. As in, my right to not wear a mask is more important than your right to not get sick from me not wearing a mask.
10. Cats religiously follow their own daily schedule in the house, and we were completely unaware of it when we went to the office.
11. The taste of a Starbucks cold brew from the $5 bottle that can be bought at the grocery store and lasts more than a week, is exactly the same as the taste of the cold brew we spent $5 a day on from the store by our office.
12. We own way too many clothes.
13. In retrospect, having to wait an extra 10 minutes to order food at a cool restaurant because the place was too busy and understaffed… really wasn’t that big of a deal.
14. Whether we like our neighbors or not.
15. “Urban hiking” is a real thing.
16. You really can fool some of the people all of the time.

I’m sure there are more lessons that we learned. Add yours below!

I cannot claim to be the world’s most charitable person. But if you are considering spending $133 on a DNA test for your dog while unemployment is still at a near all-time high due to COVID, may I suggest donating that $133 to a food bank instead. Or make a donation to an animal shelter or any organization providing needy pet owners with free pet food. Thank you.

It’s crazy to think how a person you never met could have a huge influence on your life.

It’s spring of 1988 and I’m a high school sophomore. It’s just about that time for me to begin thinking of where I might want to apply to college.

I knew I really didn’t want to go to UW (ironic since I ended up teaching there later), and WSU seemed really really really cold. Since I had grown up in New Orleans, schools in the south seemed like a reasonable option.

Somehow I got tickets to the NCAA Sweet 16 weekend in the Kingdome. My friends and I went to the games, and this school I had never really heard of was clearly the class of the group. Steve Kerr was lighting up threes. Sean Elliott was doing whatever he felt like doing. And leading the whole charge was this older gentleman with white hair named Lute Olson.

I don’t know what it was about that Arizona basketball team that made me look into the school as an option. Why would a New Orleans kid living in the Pacific Northwest want to move to the desert? But something took Arizona from obscurity to a front runner, and it all started with that basketball team. And years and years later, the friends I made there are people I still talk to almost daily.

So RIP Lute Olson. You personally had nothing to do with my life decisions, yet somehow the success of your team got me interested in the school I ended up attending and resulted in me meeting people I ended up having lifelong relationships with. Thank you.

So, imagine for a moment, that you are the leader of the free world. You have made some mistakes, but you also have fervent supporters. As you enter your re-election year, an alien spaceship materializes out of nowhere and begins to attack the entire world, your country included.

This is clearly unexpected. One might even say unprecedented. You would have to carefully consider what to do next.

Now, as the leader of the free world, you have some advantages on your side. For example, if you wanted to, you could assemble the smartest collection of individuals on the planet to be your closest advisors. On a daily basis, you could be interfacing with intellectuals from around the world, who collectively are focusing on the most advanced technologies known to man. On top of that group, you could also assemble a “tiger team” of people whose single role is to disagree with your first-team’s initial analyses, creating a dialogue of debate based on facts and science. And then, after all of the math and logic has been debated, you might have a cadre of close advisors – long-time allies and confidants who you have shared success with. A group of people you trust to help you understand the words the intellectuals have thrown at you.

So knowing that you have this all-star team of brainpower and creative ideas at your full disposal, and staring in the eyes of a global catastrophe, one might think to themselves, “Hmm. Well, this is going to take a while to solve. I probably should have my people pull together an 18-36 month plan. In fact, I should probably call all the leaders of other large nations, and coordinate how we want to work together. And then, I should probably assemble all the governors, and implement a national organization that will address the issues over the next 1-3 years.

At this point, your campaign manager may come up to you and say, “Well do you realize that if you implement an 18-36 month plan to address a global crisis during an election year, you’ll basically be forcing voters to abandon a war-time plan if they vote for your opponent? The other candidate will literally have no chance of beating you. That doesn’t seem fair at all.”

You might look at your adviser and say, “Politics be damned. I care about the American people. Let’s show our world leadership, and then unite the country so we all fight this battle together. If history says I didn’t fight a fair campaign because I united a nation during a campaign year to fight a common enemy, then well, I’ll just have to deal with those ramifications down the road.”

In some parallel universe, this logic occurred. Unfortunately, in ours, these paragraphs are a work of collective fiction.