The internet reviews are in:

—This album sucks. I bought this album based on good reviews here but this is honestly the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life. Mozart was no genius, he was just some weird guy who got famous.

—While somewhat of a good book, you cannot help but realize that Mark Twain was a racist… You could never make this into a movie.

—I first read this book 15 years ago in high school. Then I read it again (or was supposed to) in college. Now, I get the (mis)fortune of teaching it to a new generation of students who need to be bored to death with American Literature classics. Students, I have a confession to make. I understand Huck Finn. I can explain Huck Finn. But nothing puts me to sleep faster than this pile of literary poo.

—I bought this painting print for my bathroom, but I can’t get beyond my suspicion that this artist doesn’t know how to draw hands. The clumsy attempt to hide

them behind a misshapen bowl just screams AMATEUR. I would not buy another Monet painting.

—Most boring movie ever made. The airplane is fake. Too many random characters wearing fez hats. Basically, it’s just a movie about people in tuxedos standing around a piano talking about “the letters.” Also, why is it in black and white? I waited an hour for an explosion. It never happened. Save your time. I don’t understand why anyone would watch “Casablanca.”

—Why are people calling Itzhak Perlman the best violinist in the world? I agree with many reviewers here, it sounds like he’s scared to play passionately. I mean, he’s a decent musician but…

—I’m 35 and this is the first time I read Harper Lee’s book. In the end I really just felt disappointed. There was a lot of racism in it, and no character development or resolution.

—Norman Rockwell…

Her name is Joeann. She works at the Hampton Inn in Jackson. She tends the dining room, making the breakfasts, and cleaning off tables.

She is easy to talk to.

“I learned how to be friendly from my mama,” Joeann says, warming up my coffee. “My mama believed in being kind to everybody she meet.

“But don’t get me talking about my mama. Won’t be a dry eye.”

Joeann is mid-fifties. Cheerful. With an armor-piercing smile. She has rich mahogany skin, short dark hair, and a face that seems to glow.

“My mama was humble. She went to a little country Baptist church out in Pochahontas. She had 10 kids, and we were all crazy. Daddy was a brick layer.

“Everyone in Jackson knew Mama. They knew her as the woman who’d help anyone who was hard up.

“She’d take anyone in. You know, strays. Didn’t matter who they were or what they done.

“One time, some local kids didn’t have nowhere to live, ‘cause they parents died. They was orphans, overnight. So my dad went and collected the

children, five of them kids. He brought them all home to live with us. Even the little baby who was still nursing.

“My mama raised’em all. Just like they was her own. And just like that, she had 15 kids in her house.

“People’d always ask her, ‘Ain’t you tired of raising kids, Bernice?’ She’d just say, ‘I don’t have time to be tired, I’m too busy trying to get to heaven.’”

“Another time, she was babysitting for a family up in town, they had a son who had some bad problems. When he became an adult, he struggled with addiction and drugs. Whenever he came home from rehab, his own mama wouldn’t let him in her house, on account of his problems, and his stealing.

“So, my mom would take care of him. She’d cook him hot meals, give him…

Somewhere in Louisiana. The Best Western. It’s late. The temperatures are freezing. I cannot feel my extremities. I am pretty sure the rock rolling around inside my shoe is my toe.

I am parked beneath the entrance canopy, unloading our luggage onto a hotel cart. There is a man standing by the sliding doors. Carhartt and jeans. He’s on a video call.

“Can you believe it?” the woman on his phone says.

“I can’t believe it,” he says quietly.

“I wish you were here,” the woman on the phone adds. “I love you so much. I miss you so much.”

He is a large man. Maybe six eight. Broad shoulders. Heavyset. With hands the size of supermarket chickens. He could be a linebacker.

His phone call is over. He buries his face in his hands. I don’t think he’s crying. But he’s releasing some kind of emotion.

I ask the man how he’s doing this evening.

“Brother,” he says. “I’m SO good.”

I have two choices here. I can (a) be nosey, or I can (b) do the right thing and let this

man live his life in peace without inserting myself. I should choose Option B.

“You sound pretty happy,” I say.

He nods. “I just got some good news.”

The man goes onto say his wife called to tell him she’s pregnant.

I congratulate him. He is overjoyed. He says thanks, and he says isn’t it amazing how the doctors said he’d never have children and here he is about to be a daddy, and can you believe it, and isn’t it funny how sometimes doctors tell you one thing and then God just goes and does another thing, and now, if I’ll please excuse him, he’s got to call some other people.

He makes another video phone call. This time, it sounds like he’s calling an older woman. The elderly woman on the phone says, “What’s up,…

Dear Texas, I am driving through your state today, and I just wanted to say that I am a big fan. I’ve always loved your heart. Your mind. Your hands. And above all, your Willie.

Also, your food. Your brisket. Your beanless chili. Your batter fried steaks. Your jalapeños and chiltepíns.

Your Kolaches.

I love your unabashed sense of regional pride. And I love how you manage this while also defying stereotypes that are so wrongly cast upon you.

I have never been able to successfully generalize Texans. I have sipped Shiner Bock with Sephardic Jews who judge chili cookoffs. I have visited the Sri Meenakshi Devasthanam temple, guided by a Hindu cowboy. I have attended Pentecostal potlucks held by non-English-speaking Guatemalans.

This is why I love your culture. It’s wholly and completely your own.

Your Lapland Cajun humor. Your Mexican pathos. Your African-American grit and perseverance. Your Great Plains cheerfulness. Your German work ethic. Your Scot-born stubbornness. Your Irish tolerance for distilled corn liquor.

Your Cherokee, Comanche, Apache soul, Caddo, Choctaw, Karankawa, Ysleta del

Sur Pueblo, Alabama-Coushatta, and Kickapoo.

You are “Austin Weird.” You are acres of lonesome prairie. You are the majestic Hill Country. You are miles of Monahans sand dunes, without a gas station in sight, testing the weary road-tripper who really needs to pee.

You are 80 mph wind gusts in Amarillo. You are Bob Wills. Blind Lemon Jefferson. Stevie, Strait, and Selena.

You are arresting vistas, beautiful rios, and a pristine Gulf Coast. You gave the world the towering Guadalupes, the mighty Chisos, the soaring Franklins, the magnificent Davises, and most of all, you gave us H-E-B.

You are the “Cradle of Liberty” in San Antone. You are “America’s Stockyard” in Fort Worth. You are a Yellow Rose. A bluebonnet. The Piney Woods, the Palo Duro Jacob’s Well, and Doctor Pepper.

When I began writing, as a young man, I was sometimes given the job…

Texas. The Hill Country. The local Walmart has a poster on the wall. It hangs near the entrance of the store. The poster is faded and aged, containing many three-by-five photos, housed in clear plastic sleeves, all in rows, on display for the world to see.

The poster calls itself the “Wall of Honor,” even though you’d have to go out of your way to actually notice the poster. Let alone honor it.

The modest snapshots of military veterans peer down at us busy shoppers as we all hurry past, moving so importantly, each carrying our plastic bags of mass-produced, homogenized consumer crapola.

On my way out, I see the poster and something makes me stop and take a closer look. I am standing before the Wall of Honor. And I’m struck by how many World War II-vets are on this wall.

Their generation is disappearing steadily, we lose a few dozen of them every day. You don’t see their pictures much anymore.

And yet as I write this, February

is almost here. Singapore fell in February of ‘42. The Germans surrendered in Stalingrad in February of ‘43. Dresden was bombed in February of ‘45. Iwo Jima was that same February.

I wonder if school kids still read about Iwo Jima.

My father was a World War II fanatic. An amateur scholar of the War. He was always reading about battles, studying conflicts, and learning about the aircraft. He read Ernie Pyle aloud to me. He adored Bill Maudlin.

My father painstakingly built tiny World War II airplane models, and model tanks, then gifted them to all my little friends, making sure each of us boys knew about the heroes who sacrificed their lives so that we could have the freedom to be in Cub Scouts and eat Spaghetti-Os and play with our Stretch Armstrong dolls in peace.

Those World War-II vets were his heroes. When he was growing up,…

The sun is shining in Austin, Texas. The hotel dining room is full of young people for breakfast. They are all tourists. I can tell this because they are wearing T-shirts that say things like: “Austin is Special.”

There is one young woman in the dining room, however, who stands out from the crowd.

She is maybe early 20s. She is wearing an oxygen cannula attached to a tube coming from a fanny pack. She is sitting alone at a table, eating breakfast by herself.

The young people in the dining area surround her, but I don’t think she is one of them. She sits on the periphery, engaged only in her simple but serene act of eating.

Meantime, her contemporaries play on their phones, clutching their devices tightly, hunched at the necks, faces lit with the phosphorous blue analgesic glow of their personal handheld opiate delivery apparatus. Nobody makes a sound.

But the girl is dining in a kind of tech-free reverie. She wears a half smile on her face. As though she doesn’t want to

miss one moment of this beautiful morning.

She looks out the window at Austin. A warmth emanates from her. It’s not a blinding glow, like a bonfire. But a Chinese lantern-like light, warm and soft.

I notice the purple track marks on her pale forearms. There are white bandages on her legs. She is slight. So small a breeze might knock her over. Her hair is midnight, pulled into a ponytail. I see a scar on her neck from where a PICC line once had a place in her life.

“Are you having a good morning?” I ask.

“I am,” she says with a smile.

She seems out of breath when she speaks. Like maybe there is some congestion in her chest. “How about you?”

“Ditto,” I say.

Another smile.

She goes back to eating.

The others in the lobby don’t even seem…

Today is National Puzzle Day. So, I bought a jigsaw puzzle at the grocery store. The box features an ornate cathedral with red roses and blossoming foliage. The cathedral is in Germany. The puzzle cost $9 bucks. I almost choked on my gum.

My mother and I used to do jigsaw puzzles. Big puzzles. We did them together. I was no good at jigsaws, but she was an expert.

Long ago, puzzles cost 75 cents, and provided hours of distraction. We needed distractions back then. We welcomed anything that took our minds off my father’s untimely death, and the gloom that came thereafter.

My mother looked for distractions that made us laugh, things that made us smile, games, puzzles, crafts, or road trips.

Once, she took us to Branson. She took me to see a Dolly Parton impersonator. The show was spectacular. After the performance, the woman in the blond wig hugged me so tight she nearly suffocated me with her enormous attributes.

When my mother saw me swallowed by the

buxom woman, she shrieked and started praying in tongues. She yanked me by my earlobe, drug me away, and played Pat Boone tapes all the way home. And I have been a lifelong Dolly Parton fan ever since.

Anyway, my mother loved doing things with her hands. She made large quilts from old T-shirts, she gardened, she did puzzle books, anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, she knitted, crocheted, and painted.

She played cards with me, sometimes checkers, and she was a Scrabble fanatic. But jigsaw puzzles. Those were our thing.

My mother started each puzzle by saying the same thing:

“We gotta find the corners first, that’s how you do it.”

The idea was that once you found the corners, the rest of the puzzle would come together. Thus, we would sift through 2,500 pieces, looking for four corners. Once we found them, we’d dig for the edges.

We’d place…

The names have been omitted to protect the guilty. But the story is true.

The young man was quiet. He was a lowly fry-cook, salting endless baskets of French fries. Flipping acres of patties. Dropping pre-fried, shrink-wrapped, chemical-preservative-injected chicken breasts into nuclear silos of boiling synthetic lard.

He was always drinking chocolate milk. That was his thing. He was always holding a carton. Breakfast, lunch, and snack breaks.

The kid was nice-looking, but messy. His hair was overgrown, but not stylishly so. More like he’d waited too long between haircuts. His clothes were wrinkled. His shoes, past their prime.

His shift manager finally got curious about him. One day, she started asking questions. What was his story? What about his family? What was his favorite baseball team? That kind of stuff.

But the kid was a clam. He sat in her office, sipping his milk, looking at his lap.

Then came the day he called in sick. It was the first day he’d missed work. He never called in sick. At first it was

no big deal. But then he missed 16 days of work, and the manager got worried.

One weekend, she decided to drop his paycheck off in person—since automatic deposits hadn’t been invented yet. It was the perfect excuse to visit him.

The first thing that struck her was the poverty of his neighborhood. The homes were falling apart. Most had dual axels. Deceased appliances littered each yard. Obligatory blue tarps, atop nearly every roof.

His kid sister answered the door. Kid Sister said Brother was busy taking care of Mama. Then, Sister ran off to fetch him.

The manager peeked into the house. The place was a wreck. There were missing floorboards. The kitchen looked like the aftermath of an Asian land war. Somehow, the manager experienced a deep knowing, in the recess of her spirit: This boy was his mother’s caregiver.

“What’s wrong with your…

The transmission of her car has given out. Every day, she hitches a ride to work because she is broke.

She works hard. Too hard. And when she’s not cooking in the kitchen of the medical rehab, delivering trays to patients, she’s a full-time single mother.

Sometimes, her kids visit her at work. They get thirty minutes for supper. Her breaks are never long enough.

The strain of day-to-day living is wearing her thin. She is overworked, underpaid, vehicle-less.

One day, she meets a patient. An old man.

In the three months he’s been in rehab, nobody has seen him move or speak. Most days, he faces the window with his jaw slung open. Empty eyes.

She’s delivering food to his room. Her emotions get the best of her. She collapses on a chair and has a meltdown.

She bawls because life is unfair. Because a busted car sits in her driveway and she can’t afford to have a mechanic look at it.

The old man stirs in his wheelchair.

His facial muscles move. And in a few moments, he looks like a man who’s

never suffered a traumatic brain injury.

He stares straight at her. His eyes sparkle.

And in a voice as clear as a bell he says, “God sees you.”

Then.

His face goes slack. His eyes become hollow. His mouth falls open, he begins to drool again.

All day, she thinks about him and his words. In fact, she thinks about it so much she can’t sleep.

The next day, she’s delivering food again. She speaks to him.

He doesn’t answer. He is completely unalert. So, she tells a few knock-knock jokes.

His face cracks a slight grin.

It moves her so much that she hugs him until she is crying into his chest. She tells more jokes.

She eventually gets a strained laugh out of him.

Then, he surprises her. He hugs her with rigid…

In the summer of 2099, researchers developed a new groundbreaking drug. When ingested this new medication impaired one’s ability to judge others.

The medication affected the prefrontal cortex and had no side effects. Nobody really knew how it worked—even scientists didn’t fully understand it. But it worked.

They named it “Iudicio Vacuus.” Once you ingested the little pink pill, you lost the urge to qualify anything as good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative.

Even a user’s ability to judge life events as good or bad was temporarily suspended. No longer was there such a thing as good fortune or bad fortune. No longer was life unfair. There was no “fair.” Things just were. Life just happened.

At first people were afraid to take it. They were afraid this drug would numb them. Politicians, media outlets and preachers warned against it. But as it turned out, refraining from judgement gave users a certain “high.” And remaining non-biased was severely addictive.

And then everything changed.

The media outlets were the first to be affected. Namely,

because journalists were clearly addicted to the substance. And thus, they stopped offering opinions and just reported stories.

Soon, journalists lost interest in maintaining careers with media organizations and began resigning, opting for more meaningful work such as, for example, shoveling excrement.

Finally, all news organizations went belly up. Namely, because nobody was viewership tanked. The public didn’t seem to need to be told what to think anymore. Media outlets simply couldn’t sustain public interest unless they could compel people to choose sides.

The next changes to occur took place on the war front.

It all began when a soldier who was addicted to the drug had the unexplained desire to meet his enemy. He removed his anti-ballistic gear and walked right into the battle zone, waving a white flag.

His fellow soldiers tried to stop him. “You’ll be shot!” they all shouted.

But…