Treasures I uncovered today in my storage unit:

• Gershwin “Preludes”: A Festival of Sharps, Accidentals and Hand-Breaking Intervals
• Hy-Vee Hy Value Card from the dawn of the Dark Ages when barcodes and loyalty programs were first invented and scannable plastic key fobs were REVOLUTIONARY UTILITARIAN ACCESSORIES
• 2€ coin from my last whirlwind tour of London, Paris and Barcelona—the European economy and the very status of the UK in the EU have been in precipitous flux since I so carelessly brought it home a decade-plus ago and removed it from European circulation
• Hand-made What Would Fred Do keychain given to me as an opening-night gift by a long-ago Ginger in a long-ago Follies where we’d together looked for Astaire-piration as we choreographed our featured white-tie-and-marabou-trim number
• Adventureland pay stub from my living-the-dream summer of 1986 where I sang and danced up to 13 shows a day, 6 days a week for two-digit wages that even then were probably criminal
• Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum”: A Festival of Flats, Accidentals and Knuckle-Breaking Tempos
• Blockbuster card that’s laminated in plastic so thick it’ll outlast, global warming, thermonuclear annihilation, cockroaches and the trump family’s concurrent prison terms

THE UNDERLYING ROOT OF MY FURY ABOUT TRUMP AND HIS UNCHECKED, UNFETTERED, IRREPARABLE DESTRUCTION OF THE NOBLE AND HERETOFORE INCREASINGLY SUCCESSFUL AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

I can't believe that in the entire Democratic party's top leadership, we can't find one person to define a unified brand and a clear message and a single-concept campaign of voter-ready talking points and sound bites and kick what is an easily, EASILY kickable collective trump-party ass.

Do Democratic leaders have NO competent marketing consultants on their speed dials? Do they have NO concept of how every successful company and organization and big celebrity and small-time social-media sensation and trumpian cancer packages and sells itself in the consumer marketplace?

Never even mind the eventual filleting of the electorate into deep-dive targeted marketing; Democrats don't even have a rudimentary umbrella concept to sell to and fire up and unify frustrated, horrified, furious, and NOW MORE THAN EVER EASY TO SELL TO AND FIRE UP AND UNIFY American voters.

In my 30 years of dealing with more inept, incompetent, road-blocking advertising clients than I can count, I've NEVER seen one so disorganized and aimless and market-averse and pathetically unable to grasp even the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

Trump and his laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank sycophantic orbit have figured it out; they discovered they could fire up legions of low-information, emotionally inarticulate, festering-in-xenophobia voters with overly simplistic, lost-in-the-bombast irrational, who-cares-if-it's-blaringly-hypocritical-to-the-point-of-being-blatantly-untrue promises of dropping-magically-out-of-the-sky JOBS and ten-dollars-a-month TAX SAVINGS and dangerously aimless NATIONALISM and hush-hush racism and IF THIS FUCKING MORON CAN SOMEHOW GET RICH AND BECOME PRESIDENT THEN THERE'S HOPE AND PROMISE FOR ALL OF YOU FUCKING MORONS TOO HERE BUY THIS SHITTY MAGA HAT THAT WAS MADE IN CHINA.

Jesus, Democratic leaders. I have tons upon tons of experience in successfully developing and accomplishing this essential marketing strategy for big and small clients in multiple countries. I've never done it in the political sector, but how hard can it be giving how less-than-low you've set the bar? I'm just a small-potatoes writer in an only-four-Representatives state whose ideas you'd never even look down on from your top-of-the-national-party level, but at least I can recognize the foundational problem here. And I and every other competent marketing professional--clearly more than you--know exactly what you need to do to fix it. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

So. Much. Fucking. Winning.

But at least we've created all those domestic jobs and enjoyed the robust economic benefits of multiple trade wars and repealed the unarticulated evils of the ACA and bolstered our international standing and retained all those best people in the administration and lowered our collective golf handicap. 

Platelets!

My dad sold dinnerware door-to-door in college, and he carried tiny, adorable little plate samples with him to show potential customers the available patterns. The tiny, adorable little plate samples somehow just resurfaced in our house, and I can hardly stand how cute they are.

Suck it, business majors!

My nephew leaves for college today

So I'm offering him some parting, favorite-uncle advice on here even though he's probably not what you'd call a devoted member of the Read Uncle Jake's Blog Every Single Day Club.

1. Lie low for a while. Get your bearings. Meet lots of people. Learn how to find the positive in every new person and every new situation.
2. Develop these habits now because you'll use them over and over on every new adventure your life takes you on.
3. Make it a priority to find the quietest corner of the quietest library on campus so you'll know exactly where to take yourself when you need to concentrate.
4. Also make it a priority to find any and all private bathrooms on campus.
5. Because sometimes all you'll want more than anything in the world is to poop in peace.
6. Peanut butter and jelly is always a perfectly acceptable meal.
7. Creamy, not chunky.
8. We're not savages.
9. Do your homework as soon as you get home from classes every day.
10. There is no dread-filled panic as profoundly deep as the one you will feel at 11:07 pm on a Tuesday when you realize your paper on Information Age existentialism didn't write itself while you binged on Friends reruns all evening.
11. Never schedule classes before 9:00 am. After you graduate you'll spend the rest of your life getting up at 6:00 to trudge off to work until you die. So enjoy your last waning years where you can still get away with sleeping in.
12. Plus you'll leave yourself an emergency catch-up-on-your-homework cushion each morning if you didn't do your homework when you got home the day before.
13. Like I told you to.
14. "Despacito" is not allowed to be your song-of-the-summer-before-college memory for the rest of your life. Pick something less commercial and more personal.
15. NOW. Before it's too late.
16. Because -- like your prom theme -- it will come up in conversation more often than you'd expect.
17. You will eventually think that your roommate is weird.
18. He will eventually think the same about you.
19. Always remember that the true fact is he is actually way weirder than you.
20. He will probably snore.
21. Or fart when he thinks he can get away with it.
22. So will you.
23. This is called bonding.
24. Febreeze.
25. Roommate bro dates are not a bad thing.
26. You're gonna be living on top of each other anyway, so you might as well be friends in the outside world too.
27. No homo.
28. Call your parents.
29. Often.
30. And text them.
31. And call them.
32. And your sister.
33. And your grandparents.
34. ESPECIALLY your grandparents.
35. You can keep communicating with me just by trading inappropriate memes.
36. I still care about you and how you're doing in school, but I can get all that information from your mother. I really just want more inappropriate memes.
37. Get at least two college jobs: one related to your major so you can have meaningful experience on your résumé when you graduate and one in the dorm cafeteria -- it has short shifts, it's an easy way to make petty cash and you're going to be in the cafeteria around that time anyway.
38. But don't broadcast this strategy on social media because the other kids will see it and try to get those jobs before you do.
39. It's an ugly, cutthroat world out there.
40. Always make sure your backpack is fully zipped when you're traveling between classes. I helplessly watched an expensive chemistry textbook plummet into a rushing river as I was crossing the bridge above it in The Great Poorly Zipped Backpack Disaster of 1987.
41. I was out like 50 bucks and half a semester's worth of lecture notes.
42. Plus I already sucked at chemistry. So this was a pretty epic setback.
43. ALWAYS. ZIP. YOUR. BACKPACK.
44. Get a credit card. Use it only to buy stuff you know you have the money to pay for. Pay it off in full and on time each month. Without fail.
45. This will show the banks you're responsible with your money (and don't think they don't talk to each other) and it will help you build a good credit rating.
46. Good credit can eventually get you more buying power when you're an adult, easier approvals when you rent your first apartment, more options when you buy insurance, and lower interest rates on your car loans and mortgages.
47. Always. Pay. Your. Credit. Card. Bills. In. Full. And. On. Time.
48. You're a good kid. You're actually an awesome kid. Our whole family is so proud of you and who you are and everything you have the potential to become that we probably not-so-secretly burst into tears sometimes just thinking about you.
49. You're gonna do great things. You're also gonna do mistakey things and maybe even catastrophically stupid things. But never forget that you can come to any or all of us if you get into trouble or you need help or even if you're just lonely and you're kind of hoping one of us will drop everything and drive four hours just to see you and take you to dinner. Because we will. And we hope you know we will, without question. We will always have your back.
50. Inappropriate memes.

JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

I'm pretty sure someone you know spent the day lying by omission too

In fact, he dodged whole sessions of questions.

You are so easy to ridicule that I feel obligated to tell you that "ridicule" means "make fun of"

#AmericaFirstEmoji!

Is Ivanka still gonna make all her Imploding(R) brand knockoff shoes in China too so she can keep empowering Chinese women with below-poverty wages?

Oh, wait -- those people still don't matter. Especially now that we have a hashtag proclaiming we're all about #AmericaFirstPatrioticEmoji!

Well hello, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau!

"I ran across your resume on Monster and your experience fits nicely with what we are looking for at Farm Bureau. I’d like the opportunity to discuss your resume with you further."

Why is my inbox suddenly overflowing with vaguely written, nonchalantly lying emails equating my 30 years' writing experience with a burning desire to sell insurance? And no, Jackie Schneiter of Farm Bureau, you didn't "run across my resume on Monster." I haven't updated my Monster profile since I lived in Chicago so I'm more than certain that Monster's algorithms have suppressed it as inactive and your desperate little search bots had to dig long and hard to find it. If you want me to not make fun of you by your made-up email name and your actual company name on Facebook and on my blog, your first six words to me are not allowed to me to be lies.

But it's lovely that you look forward to hearing from me. Just wait by your computer. I'll get back to you promptly. (Also six words!)

I made my first meme!

 Go out into the world now, little meme. Make friends. Go golfing. Create jobs. Fly free!

The biggest con job gain "in years"

To its fleeting credit, Faux News doesn't SPECIFICALLY link job growth to man-boy's sweeping economic-stimulus tweets here. But we've entered a brave new world where Kellyanne Conway unblinkingly wins every Fact Smackdown! lightning round to stay on narrative and Betsy DeVos mathematically eliminates dinosaurs and real news is fake news unless it's actually fake news, which is -- DUH -- real news. And Faux News writes grotesquely misleading tweets that link to grotesquely misleading articles and its willfully ignorant followers provide zero intellectual pushback because IT KEEPS HAPPENING.

And Donna Karan gets all bunchy and uncomfortable under my boobs but I'm gonna keep wearing it because JOB GROWTH.

Read the fucking Faux News misleading bullshit article here

We are only just beginning

Pathological liar? Delusional simpleton? Crooked demagogue? DeVos valedictorian? My money's on job creator.