The man is a whole magic show in himself. Maybe I’ll say more about that later. For now, here’s this.

Post World War II, in Germany, Werner Herzog and his brother Till were constantly famished. Their mother fed them dandelion leaves. For a stand-in for sugar, she made a syrup from pine shoots. A week’s supply of bread was one “longish” loaf she bought with ration coupons, which she scratched lines into with a knife to indicates each day’s allotment.

“My deepest memory of my mother,” writes Herzog, “burned into my brain, is a moment when my brother and I were clutching at her skirts, whimpering with hunger. With a sudden jolt, she freed herself, spun round, and she had a face full of an anger and despair that I have never seen before or since. She said, perfectly calmly: ‘Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs, but I can’t. All right?’ At that moment we learned not to wail.”

Herzog concludes, “The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me.”

So I am not complaining. You might think I am, sometimes. I nitpick about small things, okay. But that’s just fussing. That’s all it is, fussing.