It was on October 16, 2026, in the day’s earliest seconds, known commonly as midnight, that I found inspiration courtesy the Christ-centered school in Middle Tennessee.

Some kid from the underground, one with a strange last name, had just dropped a track called “Known It All Along.”

I took a listen, paid respect to the gifted artist, and knew immediately what needed to be done.

I needed to prove that talent is not always genetic.

These are the top 10 things that I have known all along.

10

I would spend half my life growing a gut and the other half trying to get rid of it.

9

In one way or another, everyone is an assh*le.

8

Most opinions are about as dumb as mine.

7

I should’ve done private equity instead of whatever the hell this is.

6

Suburbia is torture disguised as success.

5

Nihilism beats the alternative, especially when the alternative is sacred.

4

Sometimes a higher meaning is found really low.

3

Truth and honesty equal mediocrity.

2

The political spectrum would work better as a circle than as a line.

1

Thank God for nephrology.

The post I’ve Known It All Along (a Top 10 List) appeared first on ComposeMD.

It needs to exhibit a command for the English language, and it needs to be fair. These are all things that our Supreme Leader, much like Kim Jong Un, would expect.

Knowing all that, who better to make it than me, the guy who shares DNA with MAGA types?

Cue the music.

“Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel

If you’re reading this, you can be sure that Donald Trump will outlive you.

“One Step Closer” by Linkin Park

Few political pundits realize that the clip shown here has shaped Trump’s approach to diplomacy.

“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath

On the day before starting a war with Iran, Trump consulted with a dead Ozzy Osbourne and took this advice to heart.

“Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine

Second only to the track by Linkin Park in terms of influence, this clip helped mold Trump’s relationship with democratic institutions.

“ABC” by the Jacksons

And finally, no other song can explain the Supreme Leader’s concision and eloquence quite like this one.

Note: This article was inspired by Vivek Ramaswamy.

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It was absurd, irreverent, and, well, classic Kurt Vonnegut.

As an aspiring writer, I thought I’d try to sound like him.

Consider this an exercise in fiction—I don’t believe anything I’m saying.

—

Kurt Vonnegut reminded me that humans have a favorite hobby.

It basically revolves around slaughtering each other.

Usually, they slaughter each other over fairy tales.

A fairy tale is a made-up story.

—

When humans slaughter each other, the ones not being slaughtered are supposed to pick sides.

No matter which side they choose, they’re wrong.

Some of them say both are right.

Those people are called diplomats.

—

Other humans are anti-fairy tale.

Why teach kids fairy tales if they just grow up to slaughter people who read different fairy tales?

And so on.

Those people usually get slaughtered, too.

—

Before the anti-fairy tale people say how they feel, they usually start drinking.

Then, they start writing books.

Typically, no one reads them.

Bestsellers change numbers in retirement accounts, but they don’t change anything else.

—

The ones slaughtering each other talk a lot about tradition.

Tradition is the fairy tales your parents teach you.

The alcoholic authors call it brainwashing and child abuse.

The slaughterers call it education.

—

Humans like to feel important.

You may have heard of the word ego.

That’s what all the slaughtering is for.

They say it helps the ego.

—

I’m back, it’s me again.

We’ll call this metafiction.

Metafiction is a style used by Vonnegut where a work of fiction draws attention to its own artificial, made-up nature.

Maybe if the fairy tales used it, the slaughterhouses would close.

But the egos would need something else to do.

ETC.

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And no, I’m not talking about showing up to a school board meeting and actually getting a book banned.

Yes, I have to share the world with such parenting tactics, but I prefer not to cave to the peer pressure of incompetence.

I’m talking about getting a book banned the old-fashioned way—as in writing one.

But how?

Have a look.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Social mobility, even in a society that boasts about it, can be a mirage.

If achieved, the resultant material wealth may or may not correlate with peace and contentedness.

In that regard, for some, the American Dream is the wrong life game to play.

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Male teenage angst is real.

Trauma, including the loss of a loved one, can compound the anguish, especially if not discussed openly.

Often, the ones tasked with helping can make things worse.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Thought control and conformity have always been and always will be a part of the human experience.

Deep thinkers can make those around them uncomfortable.

The uncomfortable, in turn, resort to things like book bans.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Racism was a problem in the Deep South.

As a result, justice was not always served.

Thankfully, people are not necessarily what they seem.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)

America’s early-20th-century approach to psychiatric institutionalization may have been overzealous.

Unrelated to that policy, sexuality and mental health can overlap in myriad ways.

When any type of control becomes oppression, the results can be tragic.

In other words, to achieve the mission, I have to do just one thing: tell the truth.

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And by you, I’m referring to me.

It turns out, as I’ve come to find out over the years, this affinity for bad beer was a birthright.

In the land of Trump, birthright citizenship may not be guaranteed, but no one—and I mean no one—can take away my right to bad beer.

Yes, I’m a Rust Belt fanatic, but I also need to tell the truth.

And while the home of Harley-Davidson knows how to make motorcycles, I’m not one hundred percent sure the same can be said of the brewskis.

Let’s just say I had to take two TUMS to make it through writing this piece.

Milwaukee, the city of my nativity scene, had it all: German immigrants, water, grain, hops, and cold storage.

This formula gave rise to the Big Four, or Five, otherwise known as the breweries that colluded to give me recurrent nausea from 1995-1999, referred to by my parents as the pre-med years.

Consolidation, relocation, and just plain shuttering have altered the landscape considerably, but nothing can negate what the city of Milwaukee has done to my body and the bodies of countless other hardworking college students.

Pabst Brewing Company

Founded in 1844 in Cream City and now based in San Antonio, the company and its iconic Pabst Blue Ribbon (PBR) have quenched the thirst of many a tight-jeaned hipster and contributed to incalculable hangovers.

Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company

A Milwaukee staple since 1849, Schlitz hit the fritz in 1982, with the rights to the name changing hands a few times since then. You can thank these guys for Old Milwaukee. Enough said.

Valentin Blatz Brewing Company

A thing since the early 1850s, Blatz beer is now apparently produced by Miller Brewing Company (see below) under contract for Pabst Brewing Company (see above). For obvious reasons, I’ve never tried it.

Miller Brewing Company

Founded in 1855 and now under the Molson Coors umbrella, Miller has been poisoning customers for the greater part of two centuries. I mean, is The Champagne of Beers really a brag?

A. Gettelman Brewing Company

The smallest of the five, Gettelman opened shop in 1856 and is now part of Miller (Molson Coors). If you thought Old Milwaukee was bad, Gettelman proved with Milwaukee’s Best that it could get even worse.

The good news, of course, is that in the Rust Belt, we don’t worry about trivial details like quality, revenue, or even continued existence.

Because when bad beer is all you got, you wear it with pride—sucking in, of course.

The post How One City Made Such Bad Beer appeared first on ComposeMD.

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

I’m assuming that white is not considered a color?

And I’m assuming the category is one of struggle?

Sure, I’ve been called Muhammad (wrong religion—I’m atheist), sand n-word (wrong part of the world), and Geronimo (even wronger part of the world), but can I really claim oppression?

Is Sundar Pichai oppressed?

How about Satya Nadella?

And how oppressed are all the doctors I work with?

Or, for that matter, the one I live with?

There’s more.

What happens during the Upstate New York winters, when I embrace four months of no sunshine and write blog posts no one reads? Do I become POP (Person of Pallor)?

What about halfsies?

Does place of birth matter?

Does life experience play into this at all?

Or are we limited to a visual assessment regarding the collective action of hundreds of genes?

Regardless, in the era of hyperindividualism and self-determination, I feel I should have some say in the matter.

Rather than BIPOC, I kindly request that you refer to me in one of the following ways:

• A Ball of Cells (BOC)
• A Ball of Atoms (BOA)
• A Collection of Particles (COP)
• A Morsel of the Universe (MOTU)
• Ashes (A)

Thank you.

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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.

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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.

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