Couple Laments Trip to Napa not Bougie Enough

Napa, California

A wine tasting at an upper tier winery in Napa is fraught with expectations. Will it be truly special enough to make the specials feel that they are special? It is the feeling of the thing that matters, and feelings are subjective. Will the experience make one forget that all pleasure is a mere vacuous distraction from this long march to the grave? Will it be enough to make some VP of accounting for some random exceedingly important widget maker feel the weight of his exalted position in life? And what happens when it falls short, when it isn't bourgeois enough?

Just such an experience afflicted poor Renard McPhereson and his new wife Trina just recently. After some time recovering from the encounter, they felt the courage to open up about the harrowing experience.

“I don’t even know where to start,” said Renard indignantly. “It all began when we pulled up to the enormous metal gate with the logo of the winery on it. We used the gate keypad to dial in, explaining that we had a tasting appointment. Ridiculous! It felt like we were on some squawk box ordering Mc Donald’s.” At this the 26 year old Trina plaintively mewled, “Eww!”

“Surely they could have had an actual person, perhaps a footman at the gate with a splash of bubbly there to greet us. Instead we had to wait until we pulled all the way up to the winery parking lot to be greeted by some millennial with a $200 haircut, sculpted beard, and Patagonia vest. Where was the properly dressed footman? I don't mind the pretensions of the proletariat as a general rule. Hiding class distinctions in the capitalist structure is helpful to prevent things like guillotines, but this is Napa!"

On Renard went, bravely telling his tale of woe, with Trina chiming in occasionally with an “Oh my gawd,” or “seriously," or her favorite, “eww!” His critique began with their pedantic host. His title was “Executive Enological Experience Expert," and somehow that all fit on his name tag. He had little interest in Renard or his bouncy bride, and spent the time name dropping about this celebrity winemaker and that celebrity winemaker, and how the clay loam this and alluvial that and the Sun on the ridge at 4:33 pm each day made truly exalted wines worth $2000 a bottle. But in all of this, Mr. Shimmering Beard oil audaciously ornamented with the fat watch clearly didn’t notice how important Renard and his trophy wife really are, how they like to name drop too, how they like to talk about their wine collection. He showed no interest in them at all! It was as if Mr. Italian Loafers thought Renard and Trina were the lucky ones to be there; that they were just another appointment printed on special linen paper. 

Not only that, but they didn’t even call to see if Trina likes black truffle, which she doesn’t! The whole tasting menu lacked any personal touches. The Iberico ham leg displayed in the tasting room was a nice touch, but it wasn’t even from Huelva! 

The interview ended with Renard simple dissolving into incoherent ranting. “It was all so derivative, unsurprising, more ponderous lighting of barrels and perfectly appointed rooms and polished glass and pretty gourmet food bites of caviar and cheese from some terribly important farm. And the multi-million dollar architecture merely to introduce them to Mr. Fake Smile. Where was the footman? And every one of these places is like that, with minor variations for the style of the fountains! I’m just bored with it all! Bored! Bored!” And he began to trail off and stare blankly, obviously compensating for his pain with anger. 

Church Finally Achieves Total Behavior Quotient Sufficient to be The Gospel

At year 20 of its life cycle, Taycan Church of Newport Beach has finally achieved a total behavior quotient such that it can reliably rise above the charge of hypocrisy and represent itself as the hope of the gospel in the world. 

In a bold move that pushes the church beyond theology and into the deepest areas of cultural need, Taycan Church has been tracking the overall behavior quotient of their church for 20 years, believing that Christian behavior has been so bad that the world cannot hear the gospel. 

Said pastor Jerome Stevenson, “Jesus told us to peach the gospel at all times and sometimes use words. We finally realized that what matters is not what Jesus did as a dry point of historical reference or declarative theology, but what is happening through us now. How have our hearts and hands changed as a result of experiencing Jesus? Most Christians make the gospel unbelievable by their lives.”

The pastoral team of Taycan church has developed a detailed missional algorithm that tracks tithe contributions, time spent in devotional activities, service activities, church attendance, care for the planet and disenfranchised groups, along with various other good Christian behaviors, and then measures for negative behaviors like greed with money, rage driving, racism, drinking alcoholic beverages too much on weekdays, watching bad things on electronic devices, failing to recycle, and so on. The system then assigns a value for each parishioner. The aggregate score must then rise above the minimum score that pastoral experts have established for "generally good secular behavior." And Taycan church has finally risen above the minimum score. 

"Now what Jesus did can finally make sense to the watching world," said pastor Stevenson. "Jesus inspires us to be our best selves, and at Taycan at least we are finally seeing the difference he can make." 

Critics have noted that some of the reason that Taycan's total aggregate score improved over the past 20 years is that the truly sinful people left the church for churches that teach the old understanding of the gospel, but that is merely unsubstantiated speculation. Pastor Stevenson is confident that his church has by all metrics improved to the point that Jesus is alive and well in the superior collective of Taycan Church. 

Parents Who Can Afford it Buy Boat Instead of Sending Their Kid to Christian School

Dallas, Texas

Bob and Wendy Richey are your average suffering upper middle class parents. They only have two houses, unlike many of their friends who have lots more, and they certainly can’t afford private schooling for their two designer kids.

As committed Christians, they know there is a lot of whacky teaching going on in the public schools, but the public schools are free, kind of. They already pay for obscenely high property taxes in both of their gated communities. 

“We are as disturbed as any that our kids are being taught things we don’t believe about gender and sexuality and the unborn and socialism and postmodernism and identity politics grounded in Marxism and atheism and pretty much everything that is of deepest value in education, but what can we do?”

When it was pointed out that their community was one of the fortunate communities to have a truly Christian high school, in the sense that the school actually teaches theology as a tool to unlock all the arts and sciences, Bob answered that the school in question was “absurdly expensive,” and “how could Christians of conscience charge so much?” and that “Jesus would be a socialist and give away education for free because he said to suffer the little children and all that..." 

"And furthermore," Bob noted, "It's all going to be a waste of money when all these Christian school kids go off to college and become a bunch of clones of the secular universities and the secular culture!" 

And then Bob, exasperated in his own confusion but also blaming the interviewer, slammed the door on his F-350 pulling his 28 foot Cobalt and sped away.

Genius Social Commentator Works Hard to find Flaws in Flawed Human Beings

Washington, D.C.

Liberal voices everywhere are pooling their impressive intellectual resources to find all the flaws.
Said Zephyr Livegood, “So few people today are willing to do the heavy intellectual lifting in our culture.” Grateful that all the world’s brightest and best people live in our times in the shining liberal wonderlands of our big coastal cities and big altruistic universities, she went on:

“We need better leadership than we have had! I mean, while it is true that guys like Washington and Jefferson founded an impressive imperialistic nation—and all I’ve done is get a degree from the University of Virginia and write some blog posts—they were still the bad guys, much worse than me and my friends! We don’t have slaves, or even buy stuff made in Indonesia. All our clothing comes from a Portland co-op."

In an effort to appropriately identify the flawed people, Zephyr was kind enough to supply us with a list of people with whom we can compare our lives to feel superior: 

1. All the people who wore black face at some point in their miserable racist lives, except liberals like Jimmy Kimmel and Robert Downey Jr., because of the context and everything. 
2. Anyone who ever miss spoke on social media or in a college paper or in a high school yearbook or while in preschool.
3. The Police. Obviously!
4. Writers of tone deaf satire. 
5. White people. Even the mostly white people. And even the poor white people. 
6. Men. Especially the white ones. 
7. Rich people. (Except rich black people. And also except all the rich celebrities who think the right way.) 

8. Black people who vote Republican. 
9. Anyone who offends against the ever changing standards of incoherent postmodernists. 

10. Hitler, mostly for being white, like Trump, and like the Police.

Curiously missing from her list was any mention of people like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, or people of that ilk. 

“Grace must be earned with pledges of fidelity to one's comrades. Some people give grace cheaply to anyone who seems sincere in asking for it. We give it only to those who prove to us that they are truly sorry for having been white. We must see public humiliation, cancellation, and groveling obeisance to the collective. Only then will we possibly consider--what is that word--forgiveness."

Austinite Worried Heaven Won’t Be as Awesome as Austin

There is a city set upon a hill, a land flowing with craft beer and whisky, a utopia where Teslas abound and where the bodies and the beards are sculpted with an attention to detail that people in cities like Oklahoma City or Topeka or Fresno give to basic human survival. High paying jobs in technology abound for the deserving alphas that swarm to the farmers markets with their dogs, whose lives are immeasurably better than most of the members of the human species.

Twenty-eight year old mega-church attendee and software developer Boone Higgins boasted that Austin is the perfect city. “When I graduated from San Jose State, I was worried that I wouldn't find another place like the Bay Area. I had heard Austin was a sanctuary city for single young semi-Christians, but it turns out that this place is utopia. There is so much to do and see and buy, and there are so few unintelligent or unattractive people, and also virtually no children. I love it!"

As to Austin's reputation for materialism, Boone said, "The people here are rich, but in an authentic distressed-designer-jeans wearing kind of way. They are also environmentally conscious and spend their money in ways that love and respect the planet, like buying overpriced Yeti products. They give a generous minuscule amount to their mega-churches that don't seem to need it. They buy electric vehicles and solar panels and live on the lake, where they can commune with the divine in the simplicity and beauty of nature, sometimes on their boats. They don't build roads so that the trees can give us fresh air and hiking trails, which of course leads to miserable traffic, but who cares? I work in tech and live downtown and telecommute most days."

When asked whether Boone not only didn't want Austin to change, but that perhaps he didn't want to change to learn to appreciate something deeper and truer and better than Austin, like heaven, Boone responded by looking confused for a few seconds, and then sheepishly muttering, "that's deep," and then shuffling away to ponder this over a Thirsty Goat IPA and tacos.

Charity Gala Brings in Enough to Pay for Charity Gala

Fort Worth, TX

Three months ago, Redeemer Christian School of Fort Worth announced a windfall from their 1920's Great Gatsby themed charity gala aptly titled "The Grande Affair." The event brought in a whopping 400,000, but also cost the school just over 350,000.

But The Grande Affair truly was "grande," with the e on the end of the word. It was held in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, complete with a sumptuous four course meal delightfully headlined by Lobster Thermidor. One attendee stated that the event "was a triumph," and also that she was wearing Dior. A bouncy housewife near her wearing Gucci gushed about how everyone was so generous and so beautiful and so committed to God's work at Redeemer Christian. "Events like this show you just how many people in the community love Christian education and love to show off their money to each other. It is truly moving to see how a few wealthy families can turn an entire organization into a group of groveling dependents, and how one event can display this with such clarity and beauty."

Though the event did little to advance the endowment fund due to the massive cost of the event itself, it was heralded as a true success. School president Dr. Renard O'Neil explained that "this is an investment in getting the attention of rich donors and their circle of friends. It is our effort to compete with so many other worthy events like this, where the rich can exchange services in an elegant and bibulous environment and also feel that they are supporting a worthy cause."

The headline event of the evening was, of course, the auction, where rich donors were regaled with the crackling wit of the auctioneer while offering their vacation homes and other wares to each other. The big winners of the evening at the auction purchased a week in Vail, a week in Fiji, a parking space with lighted signage for their teen, and also immunity from expulsion should their teen ever surprise the school by breaking a rule or two.

The best news of all is that since the school made so little on the event, it will need to do it again next year. Themes for next year's event are already in the works. The best ideas so far are "Water to Wine," "Raising Olympus," "Aristocratic Utopia," and "Let Them Eat Cake."