what have we learned

a. South Jersey and the South Bronx aren't proximic.

b. Drinking yourself to sleep every night is only viable for 15 or so years.

c. Experimental rock won't sustain a family.

d. When you have a kid, it gets easier to understand the decisions your own parents made.

e. That said, never let your kids sense that one parent is strongly considering murdering the other. Even as a joke.

f. Diet Mountain Dew doesn't promote weight loss. Also, drinking eight cans a day makes your piss glow in the dark.

g. If you hide from everyone you know, you'll feel lonely.

h. Having had one bad shrink doesn't justify losing your mind in isolation.

i. Internet scrabble, web porn, and panicked scanning of the Times for disasters aren't effective forms of therapy.

j. It's okay to leave some folks behind, but those make stronger ghosts than they ever were friends.

k. Mr. Ramsay doesn't make a good model for a father. Working 60 hours a week doesn't make for a good father (provided you don't have to to sustain your family).

l. Religion is weird, sure, but it ain't worse for you than cable TV, free market economics, or getting your face ripped off by a chimp.

m. The media hasn't given sufficient attention to the loneliness of that chimp's death, out of his head on Xanax, shot by the pigs, limping back to the familiar to curl up and bleed to death, stranded between the world of beasts and the world of men.

n. Avoid nonprofit Kool-Aid and you may be able to sustain a home, personal, or artistic life.

o. If you work in workforce development, don't regard the workers with contempt. You're useless, you're retrograde, you're a sack of shit if you think the people you're trying to help are inferior and somehow to be saved by your brilliance.

p. Employers can't take care of their low-income workers. Neither can rinky-dink worker associations. Unions can.

q. That said, weak unions, unions destroyed by in-fighting and cow-towing to employers, are useless.

r. All you need is love. And money.

s. And artistic fulfillment.

t. And an end to that feeling that things are hosed, off-kilter, headed south.

v. Friends and family. Music, books, and movies.

w. Your child's smile. Your partner's sense of humor.

x. A vast moving to the left of the American political landscape, caps on income, free health care, jobs for everybody, etc., followed by a sincere effort led by the U.S. to actually better the world, rather than bullshit/seemingly failed anyway efforts to liberate the strategic oil value of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

y. A bullet in the brain.

z. Just kidding. but to, you know, put that death wish into it's proper context.