Birthday Rant: Celebrating 40 years with 40 gripes

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One day at the Bunker Club, Bennett Brinkman and I brainstormed the idea of a Birthday Rant — a commentary series to introduce NonDoc’s employees better and an opportunity for those employees to opine on particular points they’d like the world to consider.

Tricked like Huck Finn into painting the proverbial fence, Bennett ranted first, calling for better access to the Oklahoma City Boathouse District and inexplicably irritating our illustrious mayor into an awkward Twitter thread.

When my 40th birthday arrived in October, I hardly had time for an obligatory existential crisis, much less commentary on the state of one thing or another. I’ve been a grumpy 40-year-old man for a decade and a half, or so my acquaintances have long chided. What relevant rant could I possibly proffer with elections afoot and court hearings amuck?

Eventually, it hit me: Lean into reality. Mock up the writeup that only 40 years on a calamity-bound planet can produce.

So, what do my friends and coworkers hear me bemoan when we receive a bad press release or traverse an illogical intersection?

Well, here are 40 such missives, brainstormed for two months and presented in more of an order than I would care to admit.

Enjoy them or not. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and I’m feeling lukewarm.

Five key complaints

1. Stop centering body text: Recently, the cool kids have taken to center-justifying the text of their social media statements, websites and even press releases. It’s terrible and tough to read. There is a reason left-justified text has remained the romance language standard for so long: It’s much easier to read. In fact, centering your random text blocks can pose a legitimate accessibility issue for those with dyslexia and related conditions. Don’t be cute, be understood.
2. Synchronize the stoplights: I love Oklahoma City, but I hate its stoplights. If someone in the traffic division is willing to ride around town for an afternoon, we can identify many intersections begging for efficiency. Yielded left turns? Midnight flashing yellows? Less red-light tyranny? Let’s make a video, and let’s be heroes.
3. Support local music: Turning around at the door because a bar with a band has a $5 cover might be the lamest you will ever look. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost a lot to have a little class. For the price of one less light beer or shitty Chardonnay, you can have art in your community. Oklahoma is blessed with throws of talented musicians, but markets matter. We don’t get to keep the venues or voices we don’t support.
4. Paywalls are not the way forward: Support local journalism. Support national journalism. Support all journalism when you think it’s done well. But at the risk of sounding hypocritical, journalism is not the local music scene. We cannot turn people away at the door because they don’t have an extra $5. Accurate civic information constitutes a public good, and we have more than enough evidence from the last 15 years to know that locking journalism behind paywalls doesn’t work out well for the public or the professionals trying to make a difference. Those of us who can support media should, and I’ll be the first to donate the Washington Post $1,000 if Jeff Bezos — the second richest person in the world — agrees to drop the paper’s ridiculous paywall, which serves more as a barrier to public knowledge than the last-ditch business strategy it’s made out to be.
5. It’s time to put ibogaine through FDA trials: Never heard of ibogaine? Good job, big pharma. The synthesized version of the psychedelic and ceremonial African iboga root is legal in several countries as a controlled way to treat serious alcohol and opioid addiction. It has never received a clinic trial in America, and that needs to change.
   

   Public relations relations

6. Stop looping me on your emails with the government.
7. If you’re taking the time to run for office, take the time for a professional photo.
8. If the “press release” is not on your website and socials, why should I put it on mine?
9. If you refuse to take questions at your “press conference,” you are simply holding a “fools convention.”
10. If your press release is about a legislative proposal, link to the damn bill.
11. Statements must come from humans, not inanimate entities. Attributing language to governments and institutions is too slippery of a slope.
    

    A plethora of policy priorities

12. Put better toilet paper in the State Capitol. It’s the people’s palace, and we deserve to poop like it.
13. Make Oklahoma’s “public notice” law require “newspapers of record” to put their government-mandated advertisements online — and in front of any paywall. The current subsidy of print newspapers is antiquated and serving the public poorly.
14. It’s time to require — and fund — the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to equip state troopers with body-worn cameras.
15. Oklahoma’s Legislative Compensation Board can set any system it wants for state lawmaker pay. As such, please create a bonus for non-leadership members who only file four or fewer bills each year.
16. Legislative committee chairpersons must play defense as much as offense. The job demands killing bad bills.
17. Legislative leaders convicted of bribery should not have portraits in Capitol hallways.
18. Air pumps at gas stations should be free.
19. The movement toward a cashless society disproportionately harms the poor.
20. For those crafting the next GO bond proposal in Oklahoma City, replacing the residential waterlines that break seven times a day should be a priority.
21. The PACER website for accessing federal court records is an American embarrassment. Make it free and functional.
22. Fixing the disastrous disconnect between mental health resources and law enforcement will require more than advertising campaigns for 988. Each time I have called 988 seeking mental health help for people in OKC, the operator has told me to call 911. Either make 988 worthwhile, or significantly reform the 911 system with all that extra phone fee money the state now collects.
23. Do not be fooled by those peddling misinformation to vilify the concept of Medicare For All. America can only have a true system of quality health care when the person living in the park has the same basic access to care as the person living on Park Avenue.
24. Our long struggle to create tier-three access for electronic health records is mighty embarrassing, albeit good for fax machines.
    

    Grumble, grumble, sports

25. End the MLB TV blackouts, Manfred.
26. Artificial turf on college baseball fields stinks.
27. One more baseball gripe: The Classen SAS High School at Northeast ballfield should be a functional community asset. Instead, it sits fallow nine months a year behind lock and key.
28. In football, offensive coordinators without under-center packages in their playbooks look lazy.
29. The shotgun from the one yard line looks ludicrous. Either one yard line.
30. For OU’s fourth-quarter Toby Keith memorial, ditch that boot-in-ass bash and play his far better banger, Ford Truck Man.
    

    The home stretch

31. Speaking of driving, learn to use a roundabout and find freedom from traffic congestion.
32. Stop littering.
33. Speaking of trash, limit Facebook, Twitter and other doom scrolling by visiting news websites directly. Create a NonDoc.com shortcut on your iPhone.
34. For all the fun of modifying Google Maps locations, someone should flip the names of The Presley and The Ellison in OKC.
35. Dear journalists: If a source cusses, put it in a quote.
36. Fuck your leaf blower.
37. Dear bar owners, tenders, doormen and the like: Stop trying to enforce a law that doesn’t exist. State statute explicitly does not require identification to drink in a bar. While OKC city code says someone whom “an ordinary person would conclude on the basis of appearance may be under 21 years of age” must have ID, it is completely legal to serve people with crows feet and gray whiskers when they left their ID in another purse or pair of pants.
38. Speaking of bars, more need bottle, can and cup recycling.
39. Speaking of the environment, true conservatives urinate outside when possible and private.
40. Be present in the moment. It’s hard, but important.

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