Sweating The Small Stuff

"Sweating the Small Stuff at its best is a fun, non-sequential read on the can and at its worst a reminder that 3.99 could have been spent on a large order of nachos at Taco Bell."

Note from Ben: Hello Banter readers! If you’ve been reading us for a while, please consider purchasing Banter contributor Rich Herschlag’s new book on Kindle, ‘Sweating the Small Stuff’. Writing anything of length is a phenomenally difficult task, and completing an entire book is an act of self discipline only few are capable of (thus far I am not one of them!). Rich’s book is a hilarious, subversive read and well worth the $3.99 admission price. All proceeds go directly to Rich. Thank you!

by Rich Herschlag

When about one year ago it became clear that COVID-19 was going to put all of us in a stranglehold for an undetermined period of time and that there was no guarantee any of us as individuals would break free, I wrote out a list. It wasn’t exactly a bucket list, because I vowed to do whatever I could to emerge and drag everyone with me I could. You could call it a f_ck it list or any number of things, but it was essentially a sheet of paper with a bunch of tasks I would probably not have take on outside the confines of a pandemic or some comparable crisis, assuming there was one. The list included calling friends I hadn’t spoken to in years, relearning Spanish, replacing the decrepit deck behind our house, and a resolution to stop making so many lists.

Somewhere near the bottom of the page in third-grade penmanship was “finish and publish Sweating.” About 20 years earlier, my lifelong friend Matt and I were having a conversation about how much we hated self-help books, most of which were designed solely to help large publishing houses.  At the center of our crosshairs was the king of the hill, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. Like Matt, my entire life was based upon sweating—sweating out exams, at-bats, asking out girls, getting on a NYC subway unarmed at 3 AM. I don’t remember which one of us uttered the following: Who are these people telling us not to sweat? I have a feeling it's the same people telling us not to masturbate.

Sweating the Small Stuff was thus born. The idea was to churn out 100 short essays mocking the arrogance of folks full of 20/20 hindsight on how to be philosophical when your house burned to the ground. We got off to a good start.

I bought a book on getting out of debt. I put it on VISA. I had a book on self-motivation. I never finished it. I once shoplifted the Bible. I had a book on improving your memory, but I misplaced it. I bought a book on obsessive-compulsive disorders. Then I returned it. Then I bought it back. Then I returned it again. This went on for quite some time. Eventually, I kept it and carefully underlined all the vowels.

We agreed to jot down funny little laments at odd times otherwise wasted, such as waiting on the line to inquire about $658 in roaming charges, which produced observations like this one:

I liked the old days. You knew how to fix your own car. Blood, urine, and stool samples were not part of a job application. You had more friends than cable channels. You knew your doctor’s name. You held the same job for more than thirty-six months. You weren’t offered a second mortgage every forty-five minutes. Baseball players knew how to bunt. Manhattan and Queens had the same area code. You didn’t need a Kevlar protective vest at middle school.

The random observation game was going so well we decided to make it a little harder. Instead of slapping any old sentimental heading on a given essay, the title had to be a well known adage cleverly corrupted by the alteration of a single word. The first few came forth like foam from a soda can.

The grass is always greener on the other bride.

No good deed goes unlitigated.

There is a sucker born every nanosecond.

We were off and running. And then something happened. It was kind of hard to write really funny mini-essays that fit the bill, kind of hard to come up with elegantly warped adages, and even harder to pair the two. Sure, every once in a while one of us had a mock aphorism epiphany that reignited our passion (The Lord twerks in mysterious ways). But mostly we generated lots of scraps of paper and digital files that refused to be pounded into a single coherent, pithy volume meeting our original specs.

Something else happened, too. To paraphrase John Lennon, life is what happens while you’re busy writing unpublished manuscripts. During this brief interlude, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, we had another baby girl, we went to war, we went to war again, New Orleans went underwater, our financial system crashed, we moved out of our old neighborhood because a stray bullet struck our house one night, we elected a Black President, we lost power for eight days after a massive tropical storm, both our girls developed a more sophisticated sense of humor than mine, Vlad Putin elected a new American President, and neither last nor least, Matt thought of “It takes one to blow one” in the waiting room of a Jiffy Lube.

But something about the pandemic forced me back to a PC a thousand times faster than the one we started on to finish stitching together the stray witty shards. It’s been a helluva year. My mother-in-law caught you-know-what in her nursing home and had a blood oxygen level in the low 80s before somehow bouncing back. Our older daughter had to put hundreds of plant pathogen samples in a freezer at 60 below, vacate her lab, and was then told to complete a research paper without the results. Our younger daughter tested positive for you-know-what and spent the final six weeks of her college career staring at a laptop in her room. Our cat got run over by an Amazon truck (perhaps ironic for this age, but not my idea of a joke). The IRS put a lien on our house. In other words, we’re among the lucky ones.

Sweating the Small Stuff came out a few days ago. There is no mention of the 45th President. There is no mention of coronavirus. The first few readers have told me it’s a hoot, which is not bad for two decades of sporadic work. In any case, thank you for sticking with your friends, your families, your values, your country, and most of all thank you for making it this far in my thinly veiled sales pitch. Sweating the Small Stuff at its best is a fun, non-sequential read on the can and at its worst a reminder that 3.99 could have been spent on a large order of nachos at Taco Bell. To me, completing the book will always be a lesson that small things can still nag at you relentlessly even when the entire world is imploding, and that complaining can rise to an art form if you get enough “likes.” Best of all, for me and my oldest friend, Sweating the Small Stuff is a parting shot without having to part.

You can purchase a copy of Sweating the Small Stuff on Amazon kindle for $3.99 here!

Read the latest for Banter Members:

Mitch McConnell's Last Stand

The Senate Minority Leader is running out of bluffs over the filibuster, and the Democrats must now move in for the kill.

Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

by Ben Cohen

The Democrats’ voting rights bill, HR 1, is perhaps the most important piece of legislation in modern American history.

If passed, it will create a national system for automatic voter registration, ensure nonpartisan redistricting commissions to put an end to partisan gerrymandering, and place strict transparency requirements for political advertising. The 800 page bill is truly colossal and would radically reform America’s arcane voting system that has been horrifically abused by Republicans for decades. It would help end the GOP’s minority grip on power and help ensure elections were free from political and corporate interference.

Naturally, Republicans are terrified, and are doing everything in their power to stop it. Without control in the House or Senate, the GOP only has the filibuster to put a stop to the bill, and Mitch McConnell is making his final stand to ensure the Democrats do not end the 60 vote standard for passing major legislation.

No filibuster, no Mitch

McConnell is 79 years old. He has just spent four bruising years defending Donald Trump, has watched his party lose control of every branch of government, and is at war with the former president over what remains of the GOP.

McConnell knows his party is on the brink of complete collapse should Democrats end the filibuster and pass the voting rights reform bill, so he is putting all his efforts into thwarting it. On the Senate floor last week, McConnell issued a chilling threat to Democrats.

“Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump… everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama… would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if they break the Senate,” said McConnell.

“If the Democrats break the rules to kill Rule 22, on a 50-50 basis, then we will use every other rule to make tens of millions of Americans’ voices heard,” he went on.

“We’d strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side. Nationwide right-to-work for working Americans. Defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities on day one. A whole new era of domestic energy production. Sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn. Concealed-carry reciprocity in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Massive hardening of security on our southern border.”

The severity of McConnell’s language reveals much about the current state of the GOP and McConnell’s state of mind….

To continue reading this, go here.