Old Man, Talking

Equality is one of the major social and political issues around the world and has been since the late 18th century when a handful of upstart countries decided that feudal systems of landed gentry and enforced caste systems needed to be overthrown. Those early demands for equality changed the world, but there was one problem: they weren’t equal. People of color were valued less than the European Caucasians who were running everything. Indigenous people were considered disposable. Women? Forget it, they hardly had any value at all.  That attitudes have changed since those days is good, but let’s not overlook for a minute how much of a struggle was required to establish those changes and how much those same people groups continue to struggle to maintain tenuous equality that is threatened constantly by those who maliciously believe in white supremacy. How we value human life is under constant attack and, as the world progresses, it is likely to get worse, not better, unless we start talking about it now at a pedestrian level, not academic. Part of the challenge is that we don’t realize how often the value of life is at the epicenter of our thoughts, actions, and conversations. When I look at some of the articles on my reading list this week, the titles tend to bury the lede in this regard. The Atlantic has “Nora Ephron’s Rules For Middle Aged Happiness.” Author Deborah Copaken explores the value of a uterus and a friend. Slate asks, “When Will It Get Too Hot For The Human Body to Survive?” Matthew Lewis considers that as one heat record after another falls, hundreds of people are unable to survive the high temperatures. Spoiler alert, there’s a link between the value of the environment and human life. The Guardian is on the list twice, once with the story of how a 71-year-old woman changed her life, and ostensibly the value of that life, by lifting weights, and again with the dark story of how “Three Americans Create Enough Carbon Emissions To Kill One Person.” Whose life doesn’t matter in that scenario? Vice jumped into the conversation with an article on how workers are quitting jobs that fail to sufficiently value their work, and their lives.  One of the most disturbing articles this week, evoking emotions from compassion and grief to fear and distress, comes from the San Francisco Chronicle’s “The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.” How does it change the value of a person’s life if we can simulate what they might have said months, even years after they’ve died? Producers of a documentary on the life of famed chef Anthony Bourdain came under fire when it was revealed they’d used artificial intelligence to duplicate his voice, causing it to sound as though he were reading letters that, in real life, he’d never read. At least, not out loud. What value do we have after we’re dead? What is the value of our own voice? We’re having these conversations, we’ve been having these conversations, without consciously realizing that at the essence of all these topics we’re questioning the value of life—ours, our friends, neighbors,

The letter came late Monday evening and I didn’t see it until Tuesday morning. “Dear Mr. Charles Letbetter, I am pleased to offer you admission…” Despite several challenges and questions, anxiety and worries, I’ve been given permission to continue learning, filling my head with a level of knowledge substantially greater than what I currently possess. I am both excited and frightened by the prospects.  Almost immediately after sharing the news on social media, someone responded something to the effect, “Goes to prove you’re never too old to learn.” While I would agree that age should never be a factor in deciding whether to continue one’s education, there remains a point where one is challenged to confront the limits of one’s mind. Is there a ceiling, a limit, on what a given mind can learn? Obviously, our instinctive response is that no, we continue learning our entire lives and there is always something new, some recent piece of information that we need to know in order to function in our society. Limits on learning do not and cannot exist. Given what we know about the limits of memory, however, it seems logical to me that there would be a top-end to how much one person can actually learn beyond short-term rote memorization. Passing a test has never been a sufficient measure for how much information one actually retains at a level necessary for application. How much useable knowledge can our brains store? This question worries me as I consider going back to school. What professors ask of students is a depth of understanding, and the ability to communicate that comprehension sufficiently, at levels I’ve not had to produce in over 40 years. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever faced an education challenge as steep as what sits before me. Are there pre-existing boundaries to what I can achieve? I need to know. Learning is easy until it isn’t When I consider whether there are limits on my ability to learn, looking at the topic strictly from a personal perspective without any generalizations outside my own experience, there are both reasons to be encouraged and reasons to be concerned. I have two examples and both, interestingly enough, involve creative software. The first is WordPress, the online platform that not only serves as the foundation for all my websites, but those of many others including The New Yorker, BBC America, and Sony Music. WordPress issued a significant upgrade this past week, which can be a nightmare for heavily customized websites. Changes in the core software create new ways of doing basic functions, often re-writing existing pieces of code in order to extend what can be done, or create security limitations. The core also provides new functionality so that websites can do more while running efficiently. The larger one’s website is, the more critical these changes become. Sitting on top of the WordPress core are these third-party pieces of software called plugins. Plugins provide specific functionality by making calls back to the WordPress core. For example, the ability to include audio on this page requires a plugin. The ability to share the content of this page on social media requires a separate plugin. Even how the page layout is constructed relies on plugins. With so many different plugins, it is easy to see how changes to the core can cause a lot of work for the people who write software.  Updating plugins can be tricky. Smaller plugins,

When I was growing up in rural Kansas and Oklahoma, July 4, Independence Day, was billed as the one holiday that brought us all together. Regardless of our origin, our heritage, our belief system, we were all Americans, damn it, and July 4 gave us a chance to all celebrate our freedoms. That was the way it was billed. We had something that no other country in the world could claim. Over the years, though, what I’ve learned, individually, and what we’ve learned and begun to talk about as a nation, is something far removed from the idyllic picture that was painted for us. There has never been a point in the history of the United States where everyone was free. The country itself is founded upon stolen land. The blood of genocide soaks the soil of every farm and every city that dots the landscape from sea to shining sea. The eternal stain of enslavement discolors all the 13 original colonies and fostered the racism that still, to this very day, keeps people of color from being genuinely free.  Now, I’m not one to say don’t celebrate the birth of this nation. That’s not my place. You celebrate what you want to celebrate today. But before you light that first firecracker or grill that first hot dog, or wave your flag in that parade, let’s take a moment to get real about what the true history and status of this country is. My country ‘tis of thee, embraced misanthropy, of thee I scream.  Pull back the covers, take a look at the wounds and the disease. Then, if you still have the stomach, we’ll talk about celebrations. Stolen Land, Stolen People Thievery is at the heart of what we now know as the United States. Of course, not many people call in that. Instead, we hear words like conquered and settled, and explored. But who was conquered and what was settled? Exploring sounds like an innocent enough activity, but the reasons for doing so only worsened the crimes being committed.  North America was not unpopulated when the first Europeans landed here. From Jamestown to Plymouth, the people who dared to cross an ocean, looking for freedom from their own oppression, considered themselves better than those who were already calling this land home and didn’t care that in order for them to establish what they wanted in a country, those they called savages would have to die.  History tells us that the number of indigenous peoples was reduced because of diseases most likely introduced to the continent by Spanish explorers in what we now call Florida. They were weak, their numbers too few to provide any real resistance to the light-skinned invaders. While that is true to some degree, what is also true is that many tribes only wanted to live peacefully. If the Europeans had made an honest effort to work alongside the indigenous tribes rather than trying to steal their land and their means of livelihood, they might have found surprising amounts of cooperation among people who wanted to preserve their way of life, not become converts to some foreign religion.  Unfortunately, the invading forces from Europe weren’t inclined to cooperate, share, or leave well enough alone. They wanted everything for themselves and if that meant they had to eliminate the natives already here, well then, that was just the way they had always operated, from the Roman Empire forward. There was no reason in their mind to think differently. Then, as if it wasn’t enough to steal the land and kill its people, they had to bring over other people of a different color, people stolen from yet a different continent, because they simply couldn’t survive in the manner to which they were accustomed if they had to do all the wo...

As I’m writing, I’m sitting at my desk listening to the sound of thunder as it rolls across Indianapolis and I have to giggle as I recall a line from a song going back to 1968. The line, penned by Bobby Russell, written for the late Roger Miller, is, “God didn’t make little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” I laugh because Russell couldn’t have been more accurate. Looking back through my Facebook memories, which now serves as a historical repository of things I probably shouldn’t have said publicly, it has rained often on this date, ruining plans for photoshoots as this storm threatens to do the same for one scheduled for today. Hell yes, it rains in Indianapolis in the summertime. When taken in the context of the preceding verse, the line in the song is meant to demonstrate the strength of the love one person has for their partner/spouse/mate. Eliminate the verse, though, the part that talks about stumbling out of bed and feeling the love of the unnamed lover, and the meaning of the chorus flips 180 degrees.  “God didn’t make little green apples.” What are you, atheist or just stupid? “It don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” Everyone in Indianapolis would beg to differ.  There are several challenges in play here. One is the inadequacies of the English language where the words we use may have multiple meanings and dozens of inferences. When we read, we have to consider what all those definitions mean and which inferences are influential before we can begin to understand what is being said. Without that context, misunderstanding an email or a social media post is easy. Another issue is differences in culture. Some words and phrases are acceptable and common within specific cultures but used outside those cultures, by people who have no obvious relationship to that culture, the same words and phrases become offensive. This type of error gets people fired from jobs and canceled from society for being culturally insensitive.  Then, there’s the matter of what one doesn’t say when an author fails to address what the reader sees as an obvious point and the inferences that omission has. If God does make little green apples, are you saying that he also made some things intentionally sour and capable of making one nauseous? Are you saying love is sour and nauseous? Or is the rain reference a sexual metaphor of some kind? When we begin trying to “read between the lines,” and do so inaccurately, one can easily concoct offenses that are nowhere near what was intended. We also have to consider the question of whether what one says publicly inherently taints what one creates for all time. A serial abuser, unchecked for decades, creates multiple popular and Oscar-winning films. Calling out the abuser and punishing them for their crimes is appropriate, without question. What of the things they created, though? What do we do with them? There’s an additional wrinkle in this facet of the conversation. What if we don’t find out about a person’s flaws until after they’re dead? The antisemitism of Henry Ford and Walt Disney is well-known now, but during their life, that knowledge was limited to insiders who didn’t say anything. Do we stop driving cars made on an assembly line? Do we boycott Disney+? How do we judge people with flawed histories and can we separate them from their work? We have become a society where everyone feels they have the right, even the obligation to judge the words and works of everyone else, especially those in power or with anything approaching an element of fame. Perhaps we would do well to police ourselves and those whose criticisms...

I grew up in an environment I’m not sure still exists today. Maybe it was because of the small towns and rural areas in which we lived or maybe it had something to do with the fact that my father was pastor of the largest, sometimes only church in the area, largest only determined by relative size—120 people was a huge and unusual event. My brother and I were taught to treat everyone we encountered as friends. There were no exceptions, despite the fact we quickly realized that our parents didn’t hold themselves to the same standards. We had an obligation to make friends with everyone. Period. For many years, I assumed that everyone had the same mandate. This was more than being polite, mind you. Saying hi, smiling, waving if you were too far away to speak without yelling, all of those behaviors were for anyone we might recognize, and a smile was always appropriate even when passing a stranger. Being a friend meant actually caring about who people were, what they enjoyed, what interests we might have in common, and spending time together. By the time we reached high school, though, that illusion of being friends with everyone began to dissolve as I realized that, despite my attitude, not everyone wanted to be friends back. In fact, there were a lot of people who didn’t want to be friends at all. I was the preacher’s kid, too well behaved, too involved in music, and too naive regarding sex and other common topics that I had been shielded from. There was plenty of reasons to not like who I was as a teenager, and being the obstinate person I am, I doubled down on those traits rather than trying to resolve them.  Then, eventually, along comes social media and the term “friend” gets a new definition, one that doesn’t actually require interaction or shared values, or like interests, or much of anything else. With the advent of social media, friends didn’t have to be people we know at all. In fact, there are a lot of people on most friends’ lists who have never met, never will meet, and have never as much as messaged each other.  When asked now if someone is a friend, we have to clarify whether yes, we know that person, or no, they’re only friends on Facebook or Twitter or some other site. I have friends on Facebook who I find interesting but don’t expect our paths to ever cross. I try to keep up with people who were classmates in school, especially those who were friends at one point or another, but with many of those I know I could never continue anything more than a superficial relationship now. The same applies to extended family members, cousins, and such. I feel an obligation to care about how their lives are going, the ups and downs and changes, but rarely am I compelled to interact with any of them.  Are any of us true friends? By most general definitions, no, we’re not. We don’t have that kind of relationship. Friendship doesn’t always require direct interaction, but it does require an understanding that, even when we’re silent, I still like you and I still care. And as I get older, the number of people on that list, the number of people I want on that list, grows smaller and smaller. The Disappointing State Of Maturity The changing state of friendship is not something rooted in deep science. There are too many variables, too many differing conditions, to foster any kind of reasonable scientific study as to whether there is a biological or neurological reason for reducing the number of friends we have as we age. There are plenty of practical and psychological reasons, though, and those are rather obvious if one gives the matter a moment’s thought: * Moving* Changing jobs* Getting married* Having children* R...

T. S. Eliot wrote: Twelve o'clock.Along the reaches of the streetHeld in a lunar synthesis,Whispering lunar incantationsDissolve the floors of memoryAnd all its clear relations,Its divisions and precisions,Every street lamp that I passBeats like a fatalistic drum,And through the spaces of the darkMidnight shakes the memoryAs a madman shakes a dead geranium. In the hands of Trevor Nunn, with the music of Andrew Lloyd Weber, those words become Midnight, not a sound from the pavementHas the moon lost her memory?She is smiling aloneIn the lamplight, the withered leaves collect at my feetAnd the wind begins to moanMemory, all alone in the moonlightI can smile at the old daysI was beautiful thenI remember the time I knew what happiness wasLet the memory live again Chances are you can hear the music as you read or hear the words. “Memory” may be one of the best-known songs from a musical to have ever been recorded. The song is sung by the character Grizebella, an old, beleaguered cat to whom life has been far from kind. All she wants is to be accepted, to be loved, and it’s only in the play’s final moments does she sing that a new day has begun, and one is left wondering whether she has finally received the acceptance she wanted or if, perhaps, she has passed on to a brighter world. Cats is a strange musical so there’s plenty of room to question the meaning of everything, assuming it has any meaning at all. Memories, though, the kind you and I have, are strange things. We hold on to them tightly, trying to maintain a grasp on things that we know happened, or we think we know happened, and when we sometimes find out that what we thought we remembered wasn’t really a thing at all, it’s disturbing, unsettling, and disruptive to our entire thought process. If we can’t trust our own memory, what can we trust? What Is Memory, Anyway? When we talk about memory, we often think we understand the subject without really understanding the subject. Memory, defined concisely, is our ability to recall events, items, or pieces of relevant data that we have experienced in some form prior to the moment we remember them. That part seems easy enough, doesn’t it? But chip off that brightly colored, heavily enameled paint a little bit, and things get a lot more complicated rather quickly. First, there’s the matter of whether we’re defining memory as a biological function of the brain, or as a cognitive function of the mind. They’re not the same thing and cannot be studied in the same fashion. Let me see if I can explain this without getting too terribly academic. When I ask my neurologist if I’m losing memory function or just going insane, he divides memory first between short-term and long-term. Long-term memory is then divided between explicit or conscious memory and implicit or subconscious memory—memories you know you have versus memories you don’t know you have. Explicit/conscious memory is then divided between episodic memory, things that happened to you, and semantic memory, things you know about the world for whatever reason. Implicit/subconscious memory is divided between priming, memories that help us define objects or words, and procedural, motor memories that are automatic, like how to drink from a cup without spilling coffee all over your shirt. Those are all functions of the brain that can be measured and studied if your insurance is willing to pay for it.

I sit here writing, day after day, fountain pen in my hand, coffee by my side, and my mind is focused first on whatever I’m writing that morning, whether it be the next chapter in a novel or an essay or notes I need to remind me what I have to do that day. Hardly a day goes by without me sitting at the desk, the first two hours of the morning consumed with writing. Outside of the ink on paper and the diminishing level of coffee in my cup, I don’t tend to notice much else. The only light on is the desk lamp. Sounds of animals at their food bowls are ordinary enough that I don’t give them a second thought. Everything blends into a sort of white noise that settles into the back of my mind, providing a steady, undramatic soundtrack to my steady, undramatic morning. All that is until recently, when I’ve started noticing changes in how my hand looks as it holds the pen. I’ve never had a thick or fleshy hand; they’ve always been thin, like my mother’s and her father’s before her. The blood veins sit high, prominently across the top of my hands, which comes in handy on the rare occasion that I’ve needed an IV placed there. My skeleton has never been especially well hidden and as a result, there’s a certain form I’ve come to expect, a specific silhouette guiding the pen across the notebook. Looking down this morning, though, what I see is different than it was six months ago. My skin sits more loosely over that mix of bone and cartilage. It fits, not like a glove, but like a tailored drape, the line of my fingers curtain-rod-distinct as gravity pulls the fabric of my skin below. There are little lines that almost look like cuts but aren’t. They’re simply the wrinkles of a fabric that is no longer taught and firm. This morning, there’s another scratch, a tear in my fabric. In demanding my attention, one of the dogs has grazed his paw across my skin and caused it to tear. I don’t think this one will leave a scar as others have. I pick up my coffee mug and take a drink. I just refilled it so its weight is slightly heavier. I lift the mug to my mouth and set it down again, no more than a three-second activity, but I see that the mug’s handle has left an indentation in my skin that takes longer to disappear than it did to create. These are all things that didn’t happen before. My hands were never a point of concern. Their appearance has always been unremarkable, but now, every time I look at them for more than a split second, they scream to me, “Be careful, you’re getting old.” The Real Effects Of Living What I’m experiencing is not the least bit unusual. In fact, almost every human over the age of 60 is experiencing some of the same changes in varying quantities based on family history, diet, living conditions, and other mitigating factors. If I bother to turn on the computer, which I am loathed to do as I dislike its light at this sacred hour, I am told that everything I am noticing is perfectly normal and to be expected. The slackness in my skin is caused by a loss of elastin, which is common after surviving this many years. The thinning that seems to make my veins and bones more prominent is caused by the epidermis losing mass. A flattening of the area where the dermis and epidermis come together causes my skin to be more fragile, requiring me to guard against tears and punctures that might not have bothered me before. Thinner blood vessel walls mean I am more easily bruised when I bump into things, even when I don’t realize that I’ve bumped into them. Accenting what I already see is the knowledge of what is coming. Loss of fat below the skin in the cheeks, temples,

We finished the first season with a feeling of complete disillusionment. There were so many things going on that didn't feel as though the earth was spinning in the direction it needs to spin. We took the time to stop, to think, to explore, and to study. That adventure ended up taking us to some places we hadn't anticipated. To explain how this great mental exercise took place, you need to understand a bit about my early morning routine. My day is divided into four parts: thinking, doing, napping, and winding down. Mostly. Sometimes. Not every day quite fits neatly into that schedule but that's another topic. What set off this exploration was my morning schedule. My alarm goes off at 4:00 AM every morning, not because I have someplace to be that early, but because I enjoy the quiet that pre-dawn provides. Even the birds are still asleep when I get up and I like that level of quiet. I let the dogs out, start coffee, and then go about handling a handful of chores—making sure the animals are fed, dealing with laundry and a cantankerous washing machine, cleaning up the messes the cats made during the night. I put my teeth in my mouth and then sit down and look at my phone for the first time. There are always plenty of notifications, mostly social media that I brush off unless something is directed specifically toward me. I pay attention to critical matters, crimes that happened within a mile of where I live, things that might affect me or my family, and then put the phone down. By now the coffee's done. I fill my cup and move into the living room where my desk is crowded with books and fabric and medicine and mail and notes to and from teachers. Everything that doesn't have a specific home, and a few things that do, end up on my desk. Funny how that happens. Most mornings, I reach for a notebook, take the lid off my fountain pen, and start writing. This is the most pleasant part of my day. I love the feeling of the nib on the heavy paper. Watching the ink as it swirls and forms words on the page thrills me. I pay careful attention not only to what I'm writing but how I'm writing it. Are all my words angled at the same degree? Are there any odd gaps or words shoved too close together? If I am going to feel any level of personal satisfaction, it's most likely to be right here, at this moment. So when that moment stopped generating that feeling of satisfaction a few weeks ago, I had to stop and consider why. What changed? Was I doing something different? Was I being affected by something that hadn't bothered me before? I needed to find answers and in finding those answers I discovered some things about myself that made me uncomfortable. By the end, I realized something difficult to admit: I'm going to have to change. The World Isn't What It Used To Be There was a time, not all that long ago, when I thought I knew what the world was. I thought I knew what was right and what was wrong, what was truth and what was a lie, what was good and what was bad. What I've come to realize across the past few weeks is that none of that holds true anymore. Nothing that was, is still. Let me explain. We know change is a constant. We expect that and from the earliest point in our lives, we've learned to adjust to those changes. We stopped taking a bottle in favor of a cup, moved from liquid foods to solids. We stopped wearing diapers and learned to go to the restroom on our own. We learned to dress ourselves in clothes that we like wearing. We maneuvered our way through school grades, each one significantly different than the one before it. We get change.

Perhaps I should have known earlier in the week that events weren’t going to go as smoothly as I’d hoped. Given that all the adults were vaccinated, we decided to risk getting together for our youngest child’s birthday only to be reminded that, oh yeah, there were reasons we didn’t do that before the pandemic put everyone in quarantine. It was a minor infraction in the grand scheme of things, but in hindsight, it serves as a red flag that the rest of the week wasn’t going to get much better. We watched the Derek Chauvin trial end defense testimony on Thursday without the defendant taking the stand, wondering what that might mean. Then, after going to bed early Thursday evening, we woke up Friday morning to the news that there had been another mass shooting, this one a mere 17 miles from my front door. Eight people dead, including four from the Indianapolis Sikh community. My heart immediately sank as we waited with everyone else in the city to see if anyone we knew was among the deceased.  Then, we discover, well after the fact, that a 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo, was shot and killed by a police officer in Chicago. Bodycam footage gives the officer no defense for the shooting. He said stop and the child stopped. He said “raise your hands” and the child raised his hands. There was no gun. Sure, there may have been one somewhere back in an alley, but it damn sure wasn’t in that baby boy’s hands. And still, the officer shot.  I’m not sure what else I can say at this point that I haven’t already said one place or another. The past four weeks have all addressed some aspect of gun violence in our culture, a culture that is wholly unique to the United States. No other country in the world has the strangely obsessive gun culture that we do. We’ve talked about police and the impossible situation we find ourselves in trying to balance public protection with the reality of a racist, militarized, and too often corrupt police force.  I was listening to Ari Fleischer on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute this morning, and heard journalist O’nika Nicole Craven talk about her interview with a 60-year-old black man, the same age as I am. He told her how that looking at the atmosphere of the 60s and comparing it to now, he doesn’t see any change. All the marches, all the activism, all of it has resulted in nothing of substance, largely because of politicians who systematically dismantled any gains made.  Ari then talked with The Marshall Project’s Maurice Chammah who discussed the racist and militaristic origins of the phrase, “thin blue line,” and how the symbolism has come to represent a level of white supremacy within policing that poisons the entire system all across the nation. One might see a glimmer of hope when one of the world’s top three publishing houses, Simon and Schuster, announces that it won’t distribute a book about the Breonna Taylor case written by one of the cops who participated in her murder. But the company isn’t the original publisher of the book. The book’s publisher is Post Hill Press which has a long-running history of perpetuating false and misleading information in its books.

One of the hallmarks of growing up as part of the Boomer generation is that our education centered primarily around two general concepts: That the United States was the greatest country in the world, and that we were the champions of freedom around the world. These concepts came out of a shell-shocked vision that needed to somehow justify not only the number of lives lost in World War II but also the ongoing actions in Korea and Vietnam that took lives without quite so clearly defining why we were there in the first place. Our parents and grandparents felt a need to instill in us the idea that we, more than any other country in the world, had saved the planet from Fascism, and that we, more than any other country in the world, were free to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want.  Freedom was a big word that carried a lot of emotion. When we would study history, comparisons were made between ancient cultures and the freedom of the contemporary United States. When we would study other contemporary cultures, direct lines were drawn between their difficulties and the lack of freedom their people had. Over and over, we were told that it was our freedoms, as outlined in the Articles of the Constitution, that set us apart and made us superior to every other country in the world. No one else even came close. That line of teaching worked through elementary school with little difficulty, but by the time we became teenagers, and definitely, as we entered high school, the flaws in that freedom theory started becoming evident. The high school imposed a dress code. Hey, aren’t we free to wear what we want? School administrators closed the campus so that students couldn’t run to a local drive-in for lunch. Hey, aren’t we free to eat where we wish? Then, they started assigning parking spots for those who drove to school, issuing tickets if you weren’t in your assigned spot, or possibly marking you absent! We were sure that our freedoms were being violated by those rules! What we couldn’t see at the time was that administrators had reasons for each of those decisions. I’m not saying they were all good reasons, but they were present. The dress code was implemented out of fear of gang activity present in a neighboring school system. The closed campus was the result of students being involved in multiple accidents during the lunch period. The assigned parking spots made it easier to know if, when, and who was slipping away from campus and skipping class during the day. From the perspective of the school’s administrators, they were doing their job in keeping us safe. From the perspective of students, each new rule violated yet another right.  Looking back now, the entire debate seems rather trivial. If gangs were going to divide the school, uniforms wouldn’t have stopped them. Students were still hurt in accidents, just not during the lunch period. Plenty of kids found ways to skip class without moving their cars. I might have been one of them. No one’s activities were being curtailed to any point of personal detriment. What that environment did, however, was created in our generation a sense that we had to ferociously, continually, adamantly, defend our rights, both real and imagined, against every manner of attempt to truncate them through one method or another. We argued about what the government did. We argued about what the government wasn’t doing.  Sadly, what we never really understood was that personal rights are only one part of a larger equation. And while my parents were persistent in teaching that with all those rights came both specific and implied responsibilities, not everyone got those lessons, and even fewer passed them down to the next generation....

I took some time off this past week for reading, writing, thinking, and sleeping, each of which was very much needed. I went to a decent-sized town, a college town, that I had passed through while traveling on the train a few times, but had never had time to explore. I looked forward to the idea of getting out and doing a bit of wandering. So, fighting 30 mile per hour winds, I drove three hours across the Midwest plains to a place called Normal, checked into my hotel, and began to settle in. The room was nice even if the view out the window was that of the hotel roof. I took a nice nap and when I woke up, I decided that I should probably start the process of deciding where to eat. I have a rule when traveling that I don’t eat at chains or fast-food restaurants. Part of the joys of being someplace new is trying out the local cuisine, preferably mom-and-pop type places where the flavor of the food reflects the flavor of the people who live there. I typically rely on Yelp or some other review-based system to help me find which places are most popular and then match the reviews with my interests and dietary limitations. Looking at the reviews, there were a number of restaurants that looked interesting and when I glanced over at the adjacent map, it looked as though several of them were relatively close to the hotel, which I always appreciate. I chose one, a barbecue place with rave reviews, put the address into my phone, and leave. I didn’t really bother looking at how far it was, or the fact that the GPS said it was going to take 15 minutes to get there. Obviously, the trip was longer than I anticipated, augmented by the fact that the number of one-way streets down purely residential neighborhoods had me convinced that I had to have either missed the restaurant or was going in the wrong direction. I doubled back on an adjacent street, tried again, and only became more confused the longer I drove. When I finally gave in and listened to the directions being given to me, I made it to the restaurant in a matter of minutes and went on to enjoy a thoroughly delicious meal.  This type of thing happens to me far more often than I like to admit. I’m not good at following directions. I want to follow my instinct, instead, and my instinct does not have a good track record. In fact, my instinct is so bad that Kat frequently tells people that if there is a difficult way to do something, I’ll find it. She’s not wrong.  There are long-standing jokes, to the point of stereotyping, about men not stopping to ask for directions. Those jokes are older than the invention of the automobile. Foldable maps or digital GPS are both things intended to make the process of finding a place easier, but when we ignore the directions given, we often find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time with nothing to eat. We do the same thing in other areas of our lives as well. We always have. So much so, that we’ve built points of religious commemoration around some of them.  Humanity, both corporately and individually, frequently finds itself at decision points where we’ve accomplished something of great significance but then have no idea what to do afterward. How do we find ways to build off the emotional high and keep moving forward? What do we do if what brought us to this point is incapable of taking us forward? How do we respond when what worked last week doesn’t work today? Finding those answers is often not as easy as listening to the directions on an app. If only life worked that way. Is There A Ralph’s Around Here? Both our Jewish friends and our Christian friends had significant holidays this past week. For Jews,

I know I’m not the only one who didn’t miss there being a continual litany of mass shootings during the past year. One of the few benefits to everything, and everyone, being locked down was that there were no large gatherings where anyone could shoot at people. What the events of the past two weeks seem to be telling us is that our national trigger finger was getting itchy. States had barely started talking about easing restrictions when BOOM, we have two significant shootings one week right after the other. Neither makes a lick of sense, they never do, and the useless response of politicians has become so predictable we can pretty much start quoting sources before they have a chance to speak.  There are a number of worrisome points to the entire situation and one of those at the top of the list is the danger that these traumatic events become so frequent that our minds begin to glaze over the important details, such as the lives that are lost. The victims of this week’s shooting in Boulder, Colorado, ranged in age from 20 to 65. None were expecting that an act as simple as buying groceries or going to work would bring the end of their lives. No one ever does.  51-year-old Terri Liker has worked at the King Sooper store for over 30 years. On this particular morning, she was in one of her favorite positions bagging groceries. She loved the people who shopped there and doing things for them. 25-year-old Rikki Olds had finally moved out on her own thanks to her position as front-end manager at the store. The oldest of three siblings, she was raised by her grandparents and stopped regularly to check on them. Denny Strong was the youngest victim at 20. He had worked at the store since he was in high school. He dreamed of becoming a pilot and was working extra shifts to save money for fuel. Interestingly enough, he was also a strong gun rights advocate. Former New York photo director Lynn Murray was at the store filling an Instacart order. She enjoyed the less-hectic pace of life in Boulder. Her two adult children remember how she doted on them and made them the best Halloween costumes. 61-year-old Kevin Mahoney was a former Chief Operating Officer in the hotel industry and the father of Erika Mahoney, news director for KUZA public radio. She posted pictures of him smiling as he walked her down the aisle at her wedding last summer and spoke of his excitement over her pregnancy. 23-year-old Nevin Stanisic was the son of Serbian refugees who moved here hoping to escape the violence of their home country. Nevin was in the store repairing machines at the Starbucks, often working with and alongside his father, but his father was not with him that day. Suzanne Fountain, 59, was known to her neighbors as an avid gardener who always shared her excess. She was especially proud of a peach tree she had planted. When not gardening, Ms. Fountain helped people turning 65 navigate their way through all the forms and paperwork they needed to file. Lonna Bartkowiak managed her sister’s boutique, Umba, where she sold yoga and festival wear. She enjoyed attending festivals such as Burning Man and had recently become engaged. She had only gone to the store to pick up a prescription when the shooting began. She was 49. Boulder Police Officer Eric Talley has gotten plenty of attention as the first officer on the scene, shot before backup had a chance to arrive. The father of seven might be best remembered as one of three officers recorded rescuing a duck and her ducklings from a sewer drain last year. His wife says he was actively looking for a new job that wouldn’t put him in so much da...

Sex work is work and it's past time we treat it as such. I have a friend who manages a nightclub. Specifically, she manages a strip club. It’s not one of the big, fancy, super-expensive clubs with dozens of “private” rooms you hope no one sees you entering. This one is smaller, more intimate, and more supportive of the women who work there. She doesn’t require them to weigh in, track their BMI, or any of the other sexist bullshit some clubs demand in the name of “maintaining quality.”  We have another friend who has been taking pole dancing lessons for a while. This week she messaged Kat that she wanted to be a stripper and asked for any recommendations. There are several things to consider when deciding to enter the space commonly referred to as “sex work,” but the biggest was the fact that this friend had never been in a strip club in her life. Her only concept was what she’d seen on television and in movies.  Kat went into full-on Momma Bear mode. If her friend wanted to be a stripper, Kat was going to make sure it was someplace safe, both physically and emotionally. She contacted our friend who manages the strip club. They made arrangements for them all to meet at the club one evening so that the would-be stripper would have a chance to see what it’s actually like on an off night, ask questions to both the managers and the other girls working there. They gave her the low-down, holding nothing back, explaining the shortcomings as well as the benefits. By the end of the night, our friend had agreed to give it a try.  Now, I want us to stop right here so you can ask yourself a question. How do you feel about a young woman taking a job stripping versus, say, working in a daycare? How do you feel about us supporting her in this particular ambition? Most importantly, how would you have responded if you were the one she came to for this advice? On one level, none of those questions matter. You don’t know my friends, they didn’t ask you anything, and outside my telling you this story, it’s none of your business. At the same time, though, how you answered those questions reveals a lot about you, your attitude toward sex work and the people it employs, the way in which you judge people based on their profession rather than their humanity, and the misogyny that your brain automatically applied to that situation.  The attitudes that many people feel when topics like this come up are not new, but neither are they justified and it’s time we stopped sweeping them under the rug in hopes that they’ll just go away. Why? Because when we don’t pay attention, bad things happen, people get hurt, and too often, people die.  The murder of eight people at Atlanta-area massage parlors this week, and the ridiculous excuse that was given for them, raises a truck-load of issues. There’s anti-Asian sentiment that has seen a dramatic rise in the past year. There’s the gun control issue where a 21-year-old man was able to purchase a gun and use it to commit murder on the same day. There’s the matter of law-enforcement appearing to be sympathetic to the shooter, saying he, “just had a bad day.” All of those are worthwhile conversations that we cannot begin to tackle in the next 20 minutes. So, we’re going to focus on sex work, our antiquated views, the damage done by those views, and why we need to change things. Do You Like Sex, Mr. Lebowski? It would, in my opinion, take a rather warped mind to consider The Big Lebowski anything remotely close to an erotic film, but the conversation not only comes up but porn becomes a significant plot point. When we first meet the character, Maude, she is wearing a leather harness and asks the Dude,

Or The Benefit Of Being Lazy Man, the weather in the early part of this past week was insanely nice. After all the snow and below-freezing temps, having warm days with reasonably clear skies felt wonderful. I was able to walk out in the yard without having to wear a jacket, play with the dogs, chat with neighbors I’ve not seen all winter, and enjoy what passes for reasonably clean air in the middle of a Midwestern industrial city.  For a moment, one afternoon, the temperature was so warm, so pleasant that, just for a moment, I considered pulling my hammock off the shelf. I didn’t because when I turned around I was hit by a cold breeze reminding me that it’s only mid-March and any hints of Spring are actually a cruel tease to remind us that we don’t live in a warmer climate where fourteen layers of clothing are seldom necessary. By Thursday it was raining. By Friday morning the temperature was back down to 41 degrees. I had to tell my 10-year-old that, sorry, you have to wear a coat to the bus stop again. She wasn’t happy. I can’t say I was, either. But ah, for that moment, I remembered what it is like to lie in that hammock, the dogs running back and forth underneath wondering why they can’t join me (there’s a 300-pound weight limit they would quickly exceed), the lingering fragrance of mosquito repellent in the air (cough, cough), my straw hat tipped down over my face, swinging gently in the breeze, pretending that I don’t hear the kids arguing over who’s cheating at whatever video game their playing. I miss those days, as brief and intermittent as they were.  I also miss sitting in coffee shops and watching people come and go and when I think of sitting in coffee shops, I can’t help but remember where I started my people-watching habit, long ago in the days before 9/11 when one could sit at a gate in the airport without having to purchase a ticket and simply observe people’s habits and idiosyncrasies and personality quirks as they waited for their plane. Much of what I’ve learned about human behavior comes from those moments where, for all practical purposes, I wasn’t doing a damn thing but sitting there drinking coffee. Just sitting there, wondering why so many people were flying to Akron, or sympathizing with a parent who was sending a child off to college, or noticing that more than half the people on that flight to LA weren’t wearing shoes, just flip flops, and genuinely wondering how flight attendants managed to not bitch-slap the woman insisting, for the fifth time, that she really needed an upgrade to first class because she was afraid of sitting next to someone who “smelled foreign.” I used to kill an entire afternoon or evening sitting at the airport like that, watching people, inventing characters around them, and inevitably coming away with ideas and concepts that would fuel the next round of whatever creative project was fermenting in my brain.  We’ve been told over and over, with endless articles and studies coming out almost every week, that we need to slow down, take it easy, be more mindful, and focus more on not being so focused. Not everything we do has to be about achieving the next goal, ticking off the next box on a list, or adding another bullet point to our resume. We need time to stop and do nothing, and even if we know that and think that we’re including downtime in our schedule, we’re probably not doing enough. Sit with me for a moment and let’s talk. The Laziest Man In LA In the very beginning of The Big Lebowski, the Dude is in the supermarket feeling up a quart of milk for which he will soon write a check, and the Stranger describes him as “a lazy man, and “the Dude was certainly that--quite possibly the...

One of the most famous scenes in the movie The Big Lebowski is when Walter accuses Smokey of having his toe over the line when he rolled. Walter’s adamant that the frame be marked with a zero.  Smokey, not surprisingly, disagrees. “Bullshit, Walter!” is his exact response. Then, Walter says one of the most quotable lines in cinema history. “This is not Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.” The Dude tries to find a compromise. ‘... it's Smokey. So his toe slipped over a little, it's just a game.” Walter’s not having it, though, because he lives by a code that requires everything to be fair, even to the point that he lets his ex-wife use him as a free dog sitter because, in Walter’s mind, that’s fair. He says, “This is a league game. This determines who enters the next round robin, am I wrong?” Walter is so committed to this sense of justice and fairness that when Smokey continues to insist that he wasn’t over the line, Walter pulls a pistol out of his bowling bag and says, “Smokey my friend, you're entering a world of pain.” Smokey turns to The Dude to reign in his bowling partner but Walter doesn’t give The Dude a chance to respond. Instead, he primes the gun, points it at Smokey’s head, and screams, “HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE CRAZY? AM I THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES? MARK IT ZERO!” The thing is as ridiculous as Walter’s actions seem, and no sane person would condone his brandishing a gun for something as inconsequential as a foot foul, there are a lot of people who share the same level of anger over injustices they perceive to have been committed against them. Some of those perceptions are grossly false and the anger being displayed is ridiculous to the point of being disturbing. Others, though, are very real and in some cases, deadly. The people of Myanmar saw their democratically-elected government overthrown by their military. As they’ve protested this past week, people have died. Ethiopia has kidnapped and subsequently released reporters who told of possible genocide in Tigray. And in Nigeria, kidnappers who target students at boarding schools are being rewarded with cash and cars when they give the students back. All over the world, we can find injustice of the most extreme variety, but a lot of things that are not fair, are not right, are actually legal and the people being cheated often feel they have little recourse in solving the problem. We’re not going to be able to address all the injustice in the world in one day, but let’s take a few minutes to shine a light on some of those legal-but-exploitive actions that target the most vulnerable people among us: the poor. This Isn’t A New Problem One of the stories carried in all four of the Xian gospels is that of Jesus angrily, and to some degree violently chasing the money changers out of the temple. The story is unique for many reasons, one of the big ones being that this is one of the few times where Jesus lets loose with his anger and takes an action that appears anti-social. There is some disagreement as to whether this happened once or twice, based on different terms used in the gospels, but those ancient charges seem based more on a misunderstanding of that society and the language around it. One thing for certain is that there were severe consequences for Jesus’ actions. Within a week of this event, he was dead.