The Cake You Didn't Eat

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If there's one thing I know about nutrition, it's that cable news is the three-layer cake of a healthy diet. Although I've been caught with a slice more than a couple of times, hearing me talk, you'd think my fork never passed the first layer. In fact, I once told a woman I don't eat cake because it goes straight to my thighs. The truth is, I keep my diet in check, erring on the side of caution, so long as caution is savory and high in fat. Cake, however, remains a sample-size dose for me.

Before the frosting is dry, I'd like to discuss the Fox News scandal(s). This is not to criticize their top brass for being objectively hypocritical, but instead, I want to criticize everyone else. Before I get there, allow me to digress for just a moment.

We all want to live the good life. In its pursuit, many of us try something on for size that we later learn doesn't fit. As much as it would be nice to have our cake and eat it too, have too much of a good thing, and sooner or later, nothing fits.

Having spent my fair share of life piercing some things and tattooing others, I'm no foreigner to the life of wearing things that don't fit anymore. Occasionally one is covered up with facial hair, but unless your torso follicles produce a natural man sweater, others are there for everyone to see if the weather is nice.

Whether it's a tight T-shirt or a bad take, we all look back on something and blush a little. But one man's polyester suit is another man's luxurious gaberdine. Getting through life means getting over some things and getting away with others, so let's not let life get away from us. Sometimes you need to own up to the tattoos of the past or endure the painful removal process, which, whether you like it or not, will take a few freckles with it.

Imagine for a moment that the tattoo we'd like to remove is a tattoo on the mid-thigh of an entire nation.

Back in early 2020, we all were wondering why our friends were sharing some blog from Medium about how viruses spread. We were pissed that they canceled our drinks when it took a herculean effort to find a mutually fitting date, to begin with, while everyone around us seemed perfectly fine. Plus, our mouth was already watering for a particular gin drink on the menu of the cocktail lounge we'd been looking for an excuse to go to for some time now. This is obviously a metaphor for our entire nation, and to be clear, we understood when we saw what happened next.

Two weeks later, we were closing everything down. We would never have made it to drinks anyway. Look around us and half the people are wearing masks, and other people were explaining why they didn't work but condemning Anthony Fauci for agreeing with them. And then again for changing his mind.

Just another two weeks, and now we're calling people racist conspiracy theorists for suggesting that a virus escaped from a Chinese virology lab that studies the same family of viruses and happens to be near the outbreak's genesis. Next, we discovered something called disinformation; although we don't know what it is, but we'll know it when we see it.

Before you know it, we're all trying to find new websites to hang out on that will favor the narrative we want to hear while millions of people die.