Here’s a phenomenon I’m seeing more and more: baby strollers with a built-in slot designed to hold cell phones, tablets, or other screen devices.

I don’t mean the slots near the handles, allowing Mom to insert her cell phone and watch YouTube influencers as she’s pushing Junior — strollers had those slots ten years ago. No, I’m talking about device slots at the baby’s eye level, allowing Mom to insert a tablet or a second cell phone, so a drooling infant can watch videos while seated in the stroller, while Mom watches videos as she pushes the stroller.

Humanity is so very fucking doomed.

♦ ♦ ♦

A small band of entitled white people torch billboards and blow up bridges, making a messy statement against sprawl and progress, and then they try to outrun some cops trying to arrest them.

I’d heard great things about The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, but somehow never read it until a few weeks ago, and it definitely gets thumbs up.

The book’s main perps are rednecks, which surprised me. They’re all basically Republicans, driving drunk and tossing beer cans out their car windows, even as they complain about the encroaching suburbs and yak about how much they love the unspoiled wilds. These characters love the National Rifle Association, spew bigoted comments about natives, women, etc, and trade wisecracks like “Register communists, not guns.”

It’s a good read, though. I enjoyed the casual vulgarity of it all, the untidiness and obvious contradictions. It’s more fun that way, than if Abbey had written these guys (and one woman they all leer at) recycling their tin cans, eating vegan, respecting Mother Earth, and working at a food bank during their non-vandal down time.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Since her surgery and the complications, Mom has recovered most of her strength and personality, but she’s changed in one unexpected way — she’s no longer obsessed with watching the grossest entertainment on television. Instead she watches MSNOW (formerly MSNBC), with occasional side trips to CNN, and nothing much else.

Mom hates Donald Trump, which is my favorite of the few things we have in common. But I hate television. Almost anything on TV, including MSNOW and CNN, leaves the audience dumber than before they’d watched, and I’m not immune. My IQ drops every time I glance at the screen at Mom’s house.

At my request, though, Mom’s willing to mute the sound, and watch only with captions. The silence is appreciated, sincerely. I glance at the screen far less often when they’re not talking, saving endangered brain cells, so thanks, Mom.

Decades ago, I used to watch what was then MSNBC, and it wasn’t as awful then as it is MSNOW. Now it’s 24/7 news with almost no news at all, just talking heads saying Exactly What You’d Expect, as they discuss inside-politics and news that doesn’t matter but dominates the news.

Always, every damned day, they dissect Trump’s popularity polls, citing numbers which matter to nobody. They analyze polls about upcoming elections, and after the election they analyze the vote — state by state, how did blacks, browns, whites, men, women, blue collar, white collar, religious, and the not-religious vote? They’d analyze the vote by voters’ height if the data was available.

If there’s a Congressional hearing, the cameras will be there and air every moment, gavel to boring gavel, and MSNOW’s dozen pundits will all parse and re-parse every witless word. Later that same day and into the next morning, their parsing and re-parsing will be re-run.

When President Trump holds a press conference, getting facts all wrong and insulting his perceived or imagined enemies while his mind wanders everywhere and he’s unable to focus on any topic for more than mere seconds before taking a tangent to some other topic, MSNOW will carry every moment, live and later on tape, without ever pointing out that a buffoon is runni9ng the nation.

Then it’s “breaking news” that the President has signed a bill, that there’ll be Congressional hearings tomorrow, or that the Vice President is giving a speech, “and we take you there, live!”

All this they do, because it’s cost-effective. Doing actual reporting of actual news would be expensive, so while the world almost literally burns, MSNOW provides the shallowest news coverage that could plausibly be described as news coverage.

And it’s always at least a day behind the “real time” of my internet surf cycle. Whatever scandal or event I’ve read about online on Monday will be the main topic on MSNOW all day Tuesday, and they’ll still be talking about it on Wednesday.

And only one, two, or maybe three news stories are discussed. The rest of the news is never mentioned. I’ve glanced at MSNOW during my Mom-visits often enough to have seen perhaps twenty hours of their ‘coverage’ over recent months, without even a moment seriously addressing climate change, or Trump’s military murders in the Caribbean, or any topic that wasn’t all over that morning’s fluffy headlines in mainstream media. You’d be better informed, I think, spending fifteen minutes skimming headlines at The Guardian, than watching MSNOW around the clock.

Last week, for example, Trump made more bullshit claims of rigged elections, this time in California. No evidence is offered, of this or anything Trump lies about, because there is no evidence, but MSNOW spent days debunking Trump’s lies as if they’re serious allegations.

Anyone with a non-negative IQ no longer needs debunkery to know Trump is constantly lying, and nobody needs seven different hosts on seven different shows debunking the same Trump lies seven times.

It’s not too late, Mom — and America. Turn it off.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of my frequent bus routes goes past a Catholic high school, with a big electronic sign out front. When the sign announced, “FATHER-SON CORNHOLE GAMES THIS WEEKEND,” I laughed and laughed.

For Christians and other innocents, cornhole is a beanbag-tossing game, but I spent some years living in San Francisco, where cornhole is slang for anus-play.

♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve been eating vegetarian since May, and this item has been in my notebook since March, so it’s outdated, but it still pisses me off:

Fast-food has always been unhealthy as hell, but at least it was cheap. Now it’s unhealthy as hell, and priced the same as a real restaurant meal, or even higher. At McDonald’s, I ordered two Filet-O-Fish and nothing else — $16. At Burger King, two Whoppers and nothing else — $19. And they were Whoppers without cheese!

At my favorite diner, I can eat two juicy quarter-pound hamburgers with the works, each accompanied by an order of sizzling, delicious fries, plus a cup of coffee with endless refills, and it adds up to $18-something.

So seriously and permanently, fuck your fast-food, fuckers.

6/17/2026

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You turned the page, of course.

The zine is over, but you paid your three bucks, you deserve the regular 60 pages. I’ll fill the rest of this final issue with letters to the editor, some of which are worth reading.

But first, I want to say goodbye with something more thoughtful than two glazed doughnuts and a cup of coffee.

The point of the Pathetic Life project was to be honest about myself and my life, and find something in each day that was worth writing about, maybe even worth reading about. Did I pull it off? Meh. Overall, I’d give Pathetic Life a B-. Some of the writing doesn’t embarrass me, and as for the rest, well, I tried, except for the days I didn’t.

The calendar says there’ve been 761 entries, not counting a few days doubled up and a few days skipped. If half of those — 380 or so — were worth the bother, that’s 380 more than if I’d talked myself out of it, which I almost did.

Publish my diary as a zine? What a stupid idea. And maybe because it was a stupid idea, I started typing.

Now it’s about finished, but the pathetic life goes on. It’s nice to skip the part of every evening when I’d stare at the typewriter and wonder what the hell’s worth writing about from that shitty day.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but so far I’m having a blast. There are movies to see, zines and books to be read, and every twelve minutes I might ride the J Church to the end of the line and back, just for the view. And then I’ll come back to the hotel, and not write about my day.

For the future, my plans look just like the past: I expect to be living alone, scraping by, laughing at idiots but broken inside for as many years as the world allows, and then I’ll be dead and forgotten. It was fun while it lasted — the zine, and being me.

And by the way, you know that stupid idea you have? That thing you’d like to try but haven’t, because it’s dumb or impossible or hopeless? Do it anyway, and then write a zine about doing it, and maybe send me a copy.

Metro Transit has gone green, they say in their ads, by buying a bunch of all-electric buses. They’re made by a company called Gillig, and they’re lousy.

The first sign of a problem with these buses is, literally, the sign — the external readerboard which lists what route the bus is running. The signs are electronic, like everything on the bus, but even on the new buses’ first day in service (and still now, months later) the electronic route number and name are often gibberish, with the lower half of all the letters missing, or the text flickering in some electronic code instead of English.

Metro gave these new buses an ugly paint scheme, in assorted florescent colors that vary from bus to bus and even from the front of the bus to the back. A bus should look like a bus, not a piece of pop art, so old folks like me know it’s the bus.

Inside, the seating arrangement is the worst of any bus I’ve ever ridden, with only two front-facing seats in the main seating section, surrounded by about a dozen sideways seats. Can’t speak for other humans, but my body wasn’t built for going sideways at 30 miles per hour. It leaves my back and neck sore, especially if the driver is too enthusiastic with the brakes and acceleration, or the bus goes over some bumps. And all buses go over some bumps.

There are another dozen front-facing seats in the balcony, but most of those seats have a wall or a wheel-well that reduces the foot space. And I got big feet.

And anyway, you have to climb stairs to get to those seats, and climbing stairs is not my great talent, especially in stop-and-go traffic. So I’m usually stuck in a damned sideways seat on these damned electric buses.

And they’re usually the only buses running on the #105 and #128, two routes I frequently ride. So my back and neck frequently hurt. And I’m frequently grumpy on the Gilligs.

♦ ♦ ♦

One afternoon, riding the #128 with very few passengers, I kinda knew the driver, so I asked him if he liked these new electric buses. And he talked for a block: “I hate ’em. Nothing but trouble, a control panel like a fighter jet, a million dumb doodads, with always one or two of them not working. One day the back doors won’t open, the next day the turn signals won’t signal, the next day the signs are out of whack…”

“Oh, I’ve seen that about the signs. And I’ve seen two of these new buses getting towed back to the bus barn.”

“It might’ve been me. I’ve had two runs end in a tow with these suckers.”

He was saying all this while the Gillig was zooming at 35 mph in a 30 mph zone, so I said, “What about the acceleration?”

“That’s the only thing I like about these buses. They got some gumption and get-up-and-go.”

So I said no more, but that’s what I hate most about the new buses. Too much get-up-and-go. Most buses, diesel or electric, run on putt-putt power, but I’ve driven cars that couldn’t go from zero the thirty as quick as these buses. And that ain’t good. Slow and steady is better for my body. I’m really not looking for a land speed record on the bus.

♦ ♦ ♦

All of which brings us to a sorta sucky day a few sorta sucky weeks ago. It was windy, slightly rainy, but I’d forgotten my jacket, and that morning’s sideways ride on an electric bus had left my back and neck in moderate pain all day.

I was a little wet, a little cranky, a little pained, waiting for a bus toward home, and here it comes and it’s one of those damned electrics. It was nearly full, so my choice was a sideways seat or no seat at all. I took a damned sideways seat.

Before I’d sat down, the driver accelerated, too abruptly. Half a block later, he braked roughly in traffic. Then, at a bus stop, he braked hard and it sent a fresh jolt up my back and across my neck. After a few passengers came aboard, the driver accelerated too enthusiastically, again. At a light, my neck was turned 90 degrees and I was watching — the bus driver had plenty of time and space, could’ve stopped smoothly at the red, but instead he stopped with a jolt. And the bus was going down a fairly steep hill at this point, so I had to hang on tight to keep from slipping from the sideways seat I was in to the sideways seat beside me.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, perhaps ever-so-slightly too loud. I popped up from my seat, grabbed a stanchion, and said still too loud, “I’ll just stand.”

Indeed I stood in the aisle for the rest of the ride. Which ain’t great for my legs, but it’s better for my back than being pushed and pulled with every nudge of the brake and gas. And it turns out, it wasn’t a long ride.

Was it rude to say “Jesus fucking Christ”? It was a prayer! And this was a bus, not a library! And I would’ve had nothing more to say — I was looking out the window, not for an argument.

After a block or so, though, I swiveled my sore neck and made eye contact with the driver, who was glaring at me in his rear view mirror, so I glared back.

A block later we were still glaring at each other, and he said to me, “You gotta problem?”

“No problem,” I said, and that’s all I said.

He was still glaring at me, and after a few bumps and brakes he said, “You sure look like you gotta problem.”

“That’s just my face, man. It’s a problem face.”

That’s a laugh, right? My back hurt, my neck hurt, and I just wanted a damned bus ride. But he was still glaring at me, so at the next stop light I added, “Anyway, now that I’m standing, you probably won’t cripple me slamming on the brakes.”

“I can try,” he said, and tapped the brakes, but it was a tender tap, not enough to topple me or even stir anyone. The other passengers were hanging on already.

“You’re doing it on purpose?”

“Doing what? I’m just driving the bus.”

“Driving the bus shitty,” I said.

And at that, the driver pulled to a too-sudden stop at the curb, and said, “This is where you get off.”

It wasn’t a bus stop, and we were a mile from my destination, but that’s where I stepped off. The door closed, the bus roared away without me.

Usually I’m chill with bus drivers, even lousy drivers. If I don’t say thanks as I’m stepping off the bus, it must’ve been a particularly bad driver, and this time I didn’t say thanks.

Maybe I deserved to be evicted from the bus, maybe I didn’t, but I’ve watched other passengers get the boot, and you can’t win. If you stay on when you’ve been ordered off, the driver radios the police.

So I walked two blocks in the rain to the next stop, then waited fifteen minutes in the rain for another bus, filling my increasingly soggy notebook with what had happened, and hoping it might make an amusing story. You’ll be the judge of that.

When the next bus came, it was another damned electric bus. All the front-facing seats were taken, so I rode in a sideways seat.

6/15/2026

Transit Takes

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