I am not used to the new baseball season. I was startled seeing a line on a box score that said: “Attendance: 0.”

After Anthony Fauci’s first pitch fiasco at the opening baseball game, I watched a video of Trump playing catch on the White House Lawn with Mariano Rivera. It was not my most gracious moment.  I was hoping that the president would throw like an unathletic, eight-year-old girl. While his motion was not the best I had ever seen, it was not bad. And I found another way to be disappointed in life.

Our priorities are interesting. Baseball players and other athletes appear to get almost instantaneous results from Covid-19 tests. People I know have had to wait ten or twelve days to find out if they are infected.

“‘It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard.” Anna Burns, Milkman.

I read sad words recently. While foreign countries have long admired, feared, envied, imitated, and despised the United States, for the first time, foreign lands pity us.

Are there fights between Ivanka and Jared when they discuss which of them should be a presidential candidate? If not, what do they fight about?

“In my family, if we didn’t count our chickens before they hatched, I don’t think we’d have been able to do very much counting at all.” Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.

How public figures are regarded often depends on the partisan leanings of the viewer. One group of people think Adam Schiff is an asshole. A different group think Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan are assholes. But don’t we all agree that Mitch McConnell is an asshole?

Have the proliferation of Zoom meetings lessened the rate of sexual harassment?

I have read that at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy is the belief that Trump will save the world from a vast pedophile ring. How is that reconciled with Trump’s words of good wishes to Ghislaine Maxwell?

The vehicle in front of me on the interstate had a sticker reading, “Keep America Great” as well as another Trump sign. This is not an unusual sight except that it was a commercial vehicle for a computer business. I wondered if it is a wise marketing move to put political slogans along side of the company’s phone number. Wouldn’t this drive away some customers? Or are more potential clients attracted than repelled by a partisan display? And if the political displays are some sort of marketing effort, are they tax deductible as a business expense?

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” Santayana.