The downside of that approach, of course, is that I piss off 50 percent of the country.

As a writer, I’d rather piss off everyone.

You can go ahead and call it existential nihilism, if you must.

I prefer to call it something else—the big picture.

To find it, I don’t have to look far—it’s lying on the bookshelf.

It starts here.

…Imagine a world in which everyone, but especially people with power and influence, holds an expanded view of our place in the cosmos. With that perspective, our problems would shrink—or never arise at all—and we could celebrate our earthly differences while shunning the behavior of our predecessors who slaughtered one another because of them.

The cosmic perspective reminds us that in space, where this is no air, a flag will not wave…

And goes here.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

…Lots of the people [are] mean, and most of them [are] miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

The Answer to the Great Question…Of Life, the Universe and Everything…Is…Is…Forty-two.

Where the vinyl lies, there’s more.

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

—

I’ll take a quiet life

A handshake of carbon monoxide

—

No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)

No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)

No alarms and no surprises, please (let me out of here)

Not to be outdone by this.

I tried so hard and got so far

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter

I had to fall to lose it all

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter

So please, during election season, don’t ask me what team I’m on.

Because we all know the answer:

The Milwaukee Brewers.

The post How I Deal With Election Season appeared first on ComposeMD.

Back in January 2024, I did one of these, and according to Google Analytics, at least four people engaged with the content.

As they say, don’t argue with success.

That’s why, almost three years later, I’m back with round two.

This time will be a little different.

All you get is YouTube clips, complemented by small blurbs courtesy yours truly.

A link to the answer can be found at the end.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1. Oprah Winfrey was born in Mississippi but raised in this city, even attending middle school and high school here.
2. Al Jarreau was an R&B legend, winning ten Grammy Awards in his lifetime. He was born and raised in town.
3. Gene Wilder made a career on the big screen, playing all sorts of roles including Willy Wonka. Like Jarreau, he was born and raised locally.
4. Rachel Brosnahan, too, has dominated the acting world, hitting it big in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She was born here before moving to Illinois.
5. Steve Miller made quite a name for himself in the music business, but not before spending his early years in the burg of interest.
6. Liberace, among other things, could shred the piano, thanks of course to his upbringing around here.
7. Dan Jansen, all these years later, is still the only speed skater you know. He won an emotional Olympic gold medal in 1994 and, more importantly, was born and raised you know where.

The answer to Guess the Burg can be found HERE.

The post Guess the Burg… appeared first on ComposeMD.

But I digress.

This is about my dream, one that could come true as early as this week.

It involves cork, rubber, and yarn, all covered in cowhide and 108 stitches courtesy some factory in Costa Rica.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Pennsylvania grow batches of maple trees, the ones used to make wooden sticks that can smack the cowhide.

You may know this whole operation as baseball.

And that of the Major League variety, headquartered in New York City, is the stuff dreams are made of.

You’ve obviously heard of Field of Dreams, but try this one on for size.

Team A plays in the league’s smallest market by population, a diminutive metro of just 1.5 million. For perspective, that’s around the same as Providence, Rhode Island, and Louisville, Freaking Kentucky.

The squad has never won a World Series, toiling away in relative anonymity for the greater part of six decades.

Its stadium is somewhere near the Great Lakes, a euphemism, as you know, for the Rust Belt.

The place gets cold, and let’s be honest—no one grows up saying they want to live there. In fact, the city that anchors the metro is down 178,917 residents over the past 65 years.

Relative to size, the team pays its players generously, though its payroll is still only the 19th-highest in the league, greater than that of only 11 other teams.

Team B plays in the league’s second smallest market by population, home to around 2.1 million. Compared to that, even Portland, Oregon, feels like the big city.

The outfit hasn’t won the World Series since Harry S. Truman was president. If you’re a numbers person, that was in 1948.

Its stadium, too, is somewhere near the Great Lakes, and yeah, the place is Rusty as hell.

It’s a magnet for lake-effect snow if not necessarily people. In fact, the backbone of the metro has lost 551,200 dwellers over the past 75 years.

The team pays its players almost in accordance to market size, sporting the lowest payroll in the entire league.

It’s a dream come true, that of the possibility that Team A and Team B meet in the 2026 World Series.

The coastal elites will tune out, not wanting to confront a metaphor that shines a light on their overpriced and overrated existence.

The owners will fume, knowing their argument that a salary cap is needed to help small markets will ring hollow, trying their best to downplay the cap’s effect on profits and thereby franchise valuation.

In the grand scheme of things, absolutely nothing will change—big egos and big money always win.

But for one glorious week in October, the little guys on the little lakes will be able to play pretend.

—

Team A = Milwaukee Brewers

Team B = Cleveland Guardians

—

Addendum on October 20, 2026: Team A made it, but Team B didn’t. We’ll call it a minidream.

The post Will My Ultimate Dream Come True? appeared first on ComposeMD.

That’s the question I found myself asking when, on October 9, 2026, I got the following email:

Hi Amol,

My name is Anuj Agarwal, I’m the Founder of FeedSpot.

I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog ComposeMD has been selected by our panelist as one of the Top 20 General Knowledge Blogs on the web (2026 Edition).

20 Best General Knowledge Blogs to Follow in 2026

You can also add your website link and other social media handles to get more visibility in our list. Continue

I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 20 General Knowledge Blogs on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!

We’d be grateful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning about the Top 20 General Knowledge Blogs list in any of your upcoming post.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Best,

FeedSpot

It’s 2026, which means there’s a high risk someone is stroking my ego and/or looking for money. There’s also a high risk AI was used to create the message, but the use of singular nouns where the plural form was warranted seems to rule out that possibility.

Anyway, let’s dig.

FeedSpot is a content aggregation platform, allowing users to interact with their favorite blogs, news websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, RSS feeds, social sites, and so on in one place.

Apparently, the company generates revenue in a handful of ways:

• Content creators can pay for sponsored placements, higher-ranking positions, badges, etc. In fact, the Continue link in the email seems to serve as not-so-subtle bait for these paid features.
• Marketers and PR professionals can pay for access to FeedSpot’s massive database of content creators which includes contact information.
• Regular users can pay for ad-free reading and other such upgrades.
• Ads.

All of the above leads to a few questions.

Is FeedSpot monetizing content that itself is not being monetized?

Is my site still a general knowledge site?

Is the old ComposeMD logo better than the new one?

Isn’t it somewhat flattering to be on the same list as Knowable Magazine, Big Think, and Mental Floss?

Am I not falling for the ego trap?

Regardless, this is the blog post/advertisement that FeedSpot requested, specifically with these two lines:

• Feedspot is an RSS reader that lets you subscribe to blogs, news sites, and any website you want to keep up with.
• To take advantage of our branding features and get enhanced visibility in the list, try FeedSpot for Publishers.

But, again, does this even mean anything for me?

I have no idea.

Nor do I particularly care.

Because for better or worse, whether or not there’s external validation, the blog is here to stay.

The post Does This Even Mean Anything? appeared first on ComposeMD.

And that’s precisely because, well, I don’t really know it.

Such is life when, in 1977, a place watches you open your eyes for the first time but doesn’t stick around long enough for you to remember what you saw.

It’s there, a lingering curiosity, your familiarity with the town coming via a data center.

It’s that dot on the map, about 90 miles north of Chicago, where the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic rivers reach the western shore of Lake Michigan.

There were once multiple native groups, followed by 17th-century French explorers like Jacques Marquette.

The Brits eventually took over, chased by the Americans.

The city was incorporated in 1846, gaining its footing as a wheat shipping hub before branching out and attracting all sorts of immigrants, especially from Germany.

Northwestern Mutual, Rockwell Automation, Harley-Davidson, Pabst Brewing Company, Miller Brewing Company—they were all born there.

Then came the rest—the Great Migration, segregation, suburbanization, and a decline in the number of manufacturing jobs.

The city’s population peaked in 1960 at 741,324, now hovering around 562,407.

Two words come to mind: Rust Belt.

But it’s 2026, and more importantly, it’s October.

In other words, I don’t give a sh*t about any of that.

During the tenth month of the year, the mundane—namely economics and politics—take a back seat to the defining feature of American life: baseball.

Let’s rewind the clock.

Back in 1957, the Milwaukee Braves, recently relocated from Boston and on their way to Atlanta, beat the mighty New York Yankees to win the World Series.

Later, other teams in other sports would make the city proud.

In 1971, the Milwaukee Bucks, led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, won the NBA title. Courtesy Giannis Antetokounmpo, the franchise repeated the feat in 2021.

In 1977, not long before I was born, Marquette University (remember the French guy?) won the NCAA men’s basketball championship.

But in this flashback, only two years truly matter.

The first is 1969, the year the Seattle Pilots joined Major League Baseball, becoming the Milwaukee Brewers (remember those breweries?) the next season.

The other is 1982, when the Brewers made their first World Series, only to lose in devastating fashion to the St. Louis Cardinals, blowing a 3-1 lead in the sixth inning of the seventh and deciding game.

The Brew Crew has never been back, securing the squad’s status as one of five to have never won the Fall Classic.

And that gets me to my plea, the one where a 48-year-old man begs the team that broke his heart at age four (I don’t actually remember) to make things right.

The Milwaukee Brewers are the best team in baseball, and the time has come for them to reach the pastime’s pinnacle.

So please, bring home the bratwurst (remember the Germans?).

The post My Embarrassing Plea to the City of Milwaukee appeared first on ComposeMD.

You’ll just have to trust me on this one.

I’ll even show you the lyrics—in a minute.

Let’s start with the woman who doesn’t rest, like ever.

That’s how, during the highest-grossing concert tour of all time, she worked on two albums (technically three, as the first had 31 songs).

Then, when the tour ended, rather than sleep, she married the man with the goofy smile—you’ll see that in a minute, too.

Like she said:

You only need to find one person in this entire world

Who doesn’t find you completely insufferable

And I have an important announcement to make

I found mine

(My wife is still deciding about me.)

Anyway, that man, who catches footballs for a living, happens to be from Cleveland Heights, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland.

And that’s how the most famous person in the world just released a song called “Cleveland!”

You’ll find it on The Life of a Showgirl (one of the aforementioned two albums), The Encore edition to be exact.

When you read the lyrics, as promised, you won’t find any mention of New York, LA, Chicago, and Miami.

What you will see, after a shoutout to the haters, is a love story, with references to a childhood porch, Cleveland, and The Heights.

It’s a veritable Rust Belt romance.

The lyric video is even rife with images of The Land.

This is something that the Great Lakes, minus Chi-Town and Toronto, never see.

Just run the list, west to east, starting with Duluth, then Milwaukee, Toledo, Detroit, Erie, and Buffalo.

No one famous is crooning about those burgs anymore.

Yet thanks to holy matrimony, we now have the mediocre pop tune “Cleveland!”

That gift, however, does leave one glaring question:

Why, Mr. Kelce, could you not have been from Rochester?

The post Why “Cleveland!” Is My New Favorite Song appeared first on ComposeMD.

And that’s where the similarities end.

He doesn’t know me.

And I don’t know him, even after reading the book he just released.

It’s not necessarily a literary masterpiece.

But it does tell his story—and his version of events.

And it left me with all sorts of questions.

Why did anyone care when an individual kneeled during the national anthem?

Isn’t the right to protest what keeps us from being North Korea?

Why is Colin Kaepernick so obsessed with identity anyway?

Must he describe every single person with an adjective referencing skin color?

Isn’t that archaic?

By doubling down on flawed categories, is he actually moving us forward?

Or backward?

Isn’t identity complicated?

On some level, isn’t it fabricated?

How can anyone argue that NFL owners didn’t collude to keep Kaepernick out of the league?

How can anyone who understands business blame them?

Does anyone actually think the NFL cares about things like player safety and social justice?

Would Kaepernick have been signed if he were playing better?

Did his divisiveness plus mediocrity make him expendable?

Was his way of protesting police brutality the best way?

Could he have gone a different route?

Should he have gone a different route?

Has he accomplished anything?

Didn’t he have an obvious point?

Isn’t police work remarkably dangerous?

Was the backlash proof of racism?

Did the backlash turn a simple act into a national crisis?

Do I need to pick sides?

Is it not okay to see all perspectives?

Isn’t a binary view of the world oversimplified and juvenile?

Why do they play the national anthem before these silly games?

Isn’t that disrespectful of the national anthem?

Why do I keep watching the NFL?

Why do fans embrace those with domestic violence and murder charges?

Yet they shun those who peacefully protest?

Do I agree with Kaepernick?

Do I disagree with Kaepernick?

Will I ever be as brave as Colin Kaepernick?

The post The Truth About Colin Kaepernick appeared first on ComposeMD.

But when you’re immersed in Great Lakes segregation, it’s easy to know when you’re not.

This all started on September 21, 2026.

I was somewhere in the Rochester metro area, partly lost, as the space was new—to me.

Thankfully, I had help.

My first guide came from near Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. We talked briefly of his love for hip hop, agreeing that Kendrick had bested Drake.

The second guide was from Fort Erie, Ontario, just across the Niagara River from Buffalo. The trade war, mercifully, was not affecting the flow of humans.

We devised a game plan, a divide and conquer, if you will.

As I made my way through the maze, I flipped between English and Spanish. Punjabi would have come in handy as well, but that would be a project for a different time.

I stumbled upon a duo with hijabs speaking Arabic. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and discussed a management strategy—in English, of course.

Here, the housing segregation that had decimated the region seemed, if only for a moment, like a mirage. Suburbia bled into the urban, the blend sprinkled with hints of rurality.

Melanin dosing spanned the spectrum, from the no-dose to the low-dose to the intermediate to the frankly dark.

A quick listen could tell you if an exchange was with an African American or an African. The same, I suppose, was true for those differentiating actual Asia from somewhere like Milwaukee.

When hunger called, which it always does, I ordered the Italian option, served by a Ukrainian.

The process took an extra minute, as income levels were no barrier to intellectual conversation.

Because in the most diverse place in Rochester, we all shared a common goal.

Some focused on prolonging life.

Others discussed dying in peace.

But mostly, what I felt was hope.

The post The Most Diverse Place in Rochester (NY) appeared first on ComposeMD.

It’s just that, as I looked into her eyes, I couldn’t tell if she could see me back.

What I wanted to say, it required eye contact.

How do you tell a 36-year-old, one leg down from the sugar, that the other may have to go too?

Of course, being a nephrologist, I didn’t know for sure. But the smell told me more than any vascular surgeon could.

My job, mostly, revolved around blood cleaning, also known as prolonging life.

It sounds fancy, but that was the easy part.

No one prepares you for the poverty.

No one tells you about the depression.

Then, there was the tobacco, clogging the pipes that were already clogged by the sugar. That’s why the limbs would fall off.

Type I diabetes, in that world, meant death by subtraction—with clean blood.

It was 2021, and I had decided to come up for air, something known in human resources as work part time.

It wasn’t so much the oxygen that I needed, just a view outside the rabbit hole.

I had a lot of catching up to do, as the molecular mechanisms of kidney disease don’t necessarily teach you about what’s going on in the world.

I started to devour books, followed by the internet. It was the pre-ChatGPT era, and I was the guy scraping blogs, Reddit, and YouTube, all for my very human brain.

Categories had to be filled.

History.

Language.

Music.

Sports.

I stumbled across all sorts of stories.

I learned about a girl from the Bronx, pretty smart I’m sure.

She landed at Princeton—and then on the Supreme Court.

Sonia Sotomayor is now 72.

She’s been living with type I diabetes since age seven.

I also learned about a kid from New Jersey, pretty talented I’m sure.

He wrote tunes with his brothers and then on his own.

Nick Jonas is now 34.

He’s been on insulin since age 13.

Finally, in my desire to be more worldly, I learned about a boy from Hamburg, Germany, rather athletic I’m sure.

He had a particular gift for tennis.

Alexander Zverev is now 29.

He’s been a diabetic since age four.

And he just won his second Grand Slam.

Being a nephrologist, I learned, can come with hope.

You just have to know where to look.

The post How Being a Nephrologist Jaded Me appeared first on ComposeMD.