Just days before one of the most consequential elections in American history, we’re in hell. There are myriad reasons — a global plague, racial injustice leading to unrest in the streets, deadly wildfires attributable to an international environmental crisis that has become exasperatingly susceptible to political ping-pong, a worldwide rise in authoritarian regimes — but we are in hell mostly because our very way of life seems imperiled by the politics of the times, whichever side you are on. That’s the thing: There are two sides, and nothing safely in between. The current political climate has riven families, destroyed ancient friendships, tested marriages.

The stakes are so elevated, the alternatives so stark, the consequences so potentially dire, that the principal emotion generated — inflamed by highly partisan media, and social media, on the left and the right — is something that very much resembles hatred.

Weingarten

Celebrity spotting in DC is hit-or-miss.

Gene Weingarten

I saw Gene Weingarten on the metro Friday evening. He looked familiar from a reading of I'm With Stupid I attended, but that was some time ago and he seemed more recognizable from the unflattering cartoon portraits by Eric Shansby that appear in his humor columns.

Weingarten is a connoisseur of the tragic, comic, and silly.

I thought about saying hello but he was busy reading The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived by fellow Washington Post writer Tom Shroder and I didn't want to bother him.

The Alibi Club

Getting on the metro escalator one day I noticed a decrepit building across the street. I looked up 1806 Eye Street on the way down and became familiar with The Alibi Club before I reached the mezzanine. Described as D.C.'s Viper Room, it was founded as an exclusive gentlemen's club in 1884, a spin-off of the stately Metropolitan Club around the corner. I've been curious about these sanctuaries since reading about the hero of Memoirs of an Invisible Man taking refuge in New York City private clubs.

I made a habit of looking around for VIPs whenever I passed by. I have only ever seen one sign of life in the building, when an apparent caretaker came out, locking the door behind him. I didn't bother him. The Metropolitan Club, in contrast, has a doorman and men in suits regularly enter and exit.

Muhammad Yunus

I learned of the Nobel Peace Prize winner in The Price of a Dream, a profile of his organization, Grameen Bank, which demonstrated how small, profitable loans to impoverished Bangladeshi villagers can effectively relieve poverty. Microfinance has a mixed reputation these days, but still seems to me a dignified and useful development strategy.

Yunus is speaking at George Washington University tonight, in the same auditorium where I saw Freeman Dyson and accomplished the feat of making myself four handshakes from Napoleon. Dyson told a story (as I recall) about a parade in France, in which the emperor gave an apple to a little girl. At festivities surrounding the 1889 centennial of Bastille Day, Dyson's grandfather met the girl, now an old woman. Freeman Dyson provided the third link, and I am fourth in line. Perhaps I ought to be more pleased by being once-removed from Feynman.

Someone named eadwacer (related to Eadwaker?), who uses the Forever Labs logo, tells a variation of the story.

A sosumi is sort of the opposite of a guilty pleasure, something you don't care for that you are supposed to like. In the words of Gene Weingarten, the word's inventor: "A sosumi occurs when you just don't like someone everyone else thinks is great. For me, an example is Jimi Hendrix. Another, Chris Rock. Another, Monet. Another, The Bee Gees." Chatological Humor, 31 January 2006.

Weingarten is a humor writer at the Washington Post, known for giving Dave Barry his first job. "Pearls Before Breakfast" won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Another favorite is "The Problem With the French ... is that they have no word for rapprochement."

I like to include things as well as people: foods, pastimes, bands. My sosumis include soup, professional sports, Kurt Vonnegut, and eggplant. What are yours?

On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day—chosen completely at random—turned out to be Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing.

—blurb for One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America

Young, healthy people are most likely to do life-threatening things late at night on Fridays and Saturdays, so organ transplants often occur at 1 or 2 a.m. on Sundays and Mondays. That’s because it takes roughly 24 hours of lab work and paper-pushing to set everything up; felicitously, 2 a.m. also happens to be when operating rooms are free of scheduled surgery.

The Style Invitational is a weekly humor contest running in the Washington Post since 1993. Gene Weingarten anonymously served as the Czar until 2003, describing the contest as "the last pure meritocracy on Earth."

Week XXIV was one of my favorites, in which entrants were asked to "ruin some great line of film or literature, by adding to it."

"The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Of course, mouse plans aren't that big a deal anyway." (Mike Genz, La Plata)

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Small world, eh?" (Jean Sorensen, Herndon)

"You must ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky? That is to say, do I, the punk, feel lucky? It's irrelevant whether I, Dirty Harry, feel lucky." (Joseph Romm, Washington)

"We'll always have Paris. Except when the Germans are using it." (Storm Marvel, Columbia)

"The horror, the horror. It really gets to me, sometimes." (Katharine M. Butterfield, Potomac)

So many more great entries in the link.

How about you, Hubski? Submit the funniest ruined line and win eternal acclaim. Feel free to recycle the tag and create your own invitational.

I got nothing, but maybe you lot will inspire me.

One day, I felt an ache in the groin. It started mildly but gradually became incapacitating.

I saw a series of urologists, none of whom could find anything wrong with me. Several of them prescribed medications; one of these, Urised, has the spectacular side effect of turning your urine blue. I do not mean cerulean blue, like the sky on a balmy summer day. Bic pen blue. Once, as I was standing at one of those trough urinals in a bathroom at a football stadium, I became aware that the man next to me was staring down at me, slack jawed. An opportunity like this occurs but once in life. I zipped up, pulled a cigarette lighter out of my pocket, and spoke into it in a robotic voice: "Gardak reporting. Earth colonization plans complete. initiating return to mother ship."

Urised didn't relieve my problem. Nothing did. My doctor eventually asked me if I was having stress at work or in my home life.

I said no, not really. And he just stared at me. A thunderclap of silence. And finally I said, "Well, except my girlfriend wants to get married and have a baby and I think the company I work for might be about to go bankrupt, plus I have no talent, no integrity, and no future."

And the doctor gave me his diagnosis: "You are a young man. Enjoy your life."

And the pain went away.

The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death. by Gene Weingarten

That is The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death., also by Weingarten.

Whenever there is a march on Washington, I try to get out of the way. I was going to add that I'm not a fan of Al Sharpton, but reading about him makes me think he is pretty cool for a television talking head. I didn't realize that he has lost more weight than he currently weighs.

Around 2006, my youngest daughter Ashley poked me in the stomach and said, 'Dad, why are you so fat?' That kind of hurt my feelings. I grew up in civil rights and politics, so I'm pretty thick-skinned, but when your daughter says it, I started being conscious.

Long-time Weingarten fan here, but I can't bring myself to read this again. It was grueling the first time. It is well-done, though, and I recommend it to any current and potential parents as a kind of inoculation.