Introducing Princess Potato

Introducing Princess Potato

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We have a new kitty living with us!

As you may recall, if you follow my blog, we had a cat named Sashimi. When I introduced her, I mused on the moral implications of devotion to a pet. We humans, at least in the advanced economies, have achieved a high level of comfort and ease. This we readily extend to certain non-humans that we admit into our families. And why shouldn’t we?

In 2023, Sashimi passed away, as all living creatures must inna final analysis. That left a big hole in our household’s heart, and it was a while before we were able to accept a new cat into the house. But time heals all wounds, as they say, and this year turned out to be fortuitous for this sweet creature to move in with with us: Potato the Cat.

What happened was Gavin went to Alaska for a couple weeks, so she came over from next door, back to the house where she had been originally adopted by another family.

Wait, what?

Cue tape rewind sound, as some backstory are required.

So Sashimi had a brother named Sushi. The two sibling cats came into Aileen’s life when they were thrown in a box (yes, thrown) in front of her theatre, sometime around 2010 or so. They were neglected and abandoned kittens, lucky not to have perished. Sashimi had a dead tail, which eventually fell off, and she spent her life without a tail.

Sashimi and Sushi were living with Aileen and Gavin and their two sons at the time that I came along into their lives. Sadly, Sushi died after eating a piece of metal or something. He had this unfortunate habit of eating odd things, perhaps a cope coming out of his traumatic kittenhood. It was sad that Sashimi was now alone, so her humans thought of getting her a companion.

As it turned out, their next door neighbors had just adopted a stray kitten, but were planning to move away and needed to find her a new home. So Aileen and family adopted her, and named her Potato. She moved in with them to be Sashimi’s new pal, but unfortunately the two cats did not get along very well.

Maybe Potato, too, was traumatized; she had apparently been nearly starved to death when the neighbors found her. She started off as a very reclusive cat. She would hide away in the house for hours on end, and you would only see her for short periods when she surfaced for food. Eventually she would come out to look for attention, and could be very needy.

Anyway, when the neighbors moved away, Aileen and Gavin bought their house! The plan was to move in and renovate the other house. It didn’t really work out that way, what happened instead was a global pandemic, and I moved in to the new house. I have lived there ever since. Sashimi came over to live with us, so at that point each cat had her own house.

After Sashimi died, we tried bringing Potato over occasionally, but she did not like being in the new house. Maybe Sashimi’s spirit (or odors) still lingered. Potato would complain and stay near the door so we would just bring her back. But then this summer, after we got back from Europe, Gavin went off to Alaska for a trip of his own. We didn’t like the idea of Potato being alone in the old house for two weeks, so brought her over – and this time she was comfortable with it. She stayed!

So now she has officially moved in, returning to the first house she moved into as a kitten. She has bcome very content here, and very affectionate. She joins us for TV time, and sleeps in our laps. It’s nice to have a cat again.

The Decade of My Childhood

The Decade of My Childhood

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I recently read The Seventies by Bruce J. Shulman, a history of the decade just after I was born, published in 2001. I call the 70s the decade of my childhood, not the decade of my youth, which I would say was the 80s. But my generation grew up fast, and I remember feeling all grown up in the late 70s, and picking up on the free-wheeling energy of the times. But possibly all teens feel this way.

Specific events of the Seventies that I remember include the Nixon Presidency – but only having a vague sense that he was strongly disliked. I was a very young child during his second term. I remember the Bicentennial and the Tall Ships, President Carter, the Three Mile Island disaster, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iran-Hostage crisis.

I remember disco, and even dancing to the contemporary disco hits when I was in junior high school. But I was really more into progressive rock, and nerdy stuff like Dungeons & Dragons (I started playing in 1979, even before the kids on Stranger Things). And I remember being infected by the rebellious, free-thinking spirit of the age.

Which takes me to what I thought was the most remarkable thing about this history of the decade, which is how well it aligns with what Strauss-Howe generational theory says about the time period. Any long-time follower of this blog knows how much credence I give to the generational approach. Schulman doesn’t specifcally discuss generations, beyond acknowledging that the Baby Boomers were the young people during the 1970s. But a lot of his analysis fits with Strauss-Howe.

In Strauss-Howe theory, the 70s fit inside a social era they call an Awakening, whose dates they give as 1964-1984. Schulman also allows that the spirit of the 70s extended beyond the exact years of the decade, giving his boundaries as 1969-1984.

An Awakening era is characterized by spritual fervor, new movements that question existing values and institutions, and a shift in focus from the collective to the individual, and from the public to the private. All of this is captured by Schulman, including how the 1970s saw increasing distrust in and revolt against government, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

This book came out not long after Strauss and Howe published Generations and The Fourth Turning, but Schulman doesn’t seem to be aware of their existence. Which makes it all the more fascinating that he comes to the same conclusions as them.

My goodreads review follows.

The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics by Bruce J. Schulman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A definitive look at the decade of my childhood, the 1970s. Author Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of American history, is older than me, but not by much, and would also have lived through this decade during his youth. The book covers developments in politics and culture, and how the transformations of the 1970s led to the social regime current at the time of the book’s publication in 2001, just at the eve of the next transformative era.

The key points that Schulman repeats throughout his book are that the 1970s mark a shift in priority from society to the individual, and in trust from the public sphere to the private sphere. What’s fascinating to me is that this observation aligns with the framework of Strauss and Howe generations theory, including the time range he gives to what might be called the “long seventies,” 1969-1984. Schulman doesn’t explicitly discuss generational effects, except to acknowledge the existence and importance of the baby boomers (his own generation).

The books has nine chapters, covering a variety of topics. Nixon gets his own chapter, as his Presidency marks two important political turning points: the beginning of the disempowerment of the New Deal liberal establishment, and the planting of the seeds of deep public distrust in government that would blossom ten years later during the Reagan Revolution. Schulman makes a great point about Watergate: that the lesson Americans learned from it was not that Nixon was corrupt, but that all government was corrupt. One can easily see that this belief haunts us to this very day (I write this in 2025).

Trends covered in other chapters include the dawn of identity politics and the end of the 1960s-era dreams of integrationism, the shift in political and cultural power from the Northeastern United States to the South and West, the emergence of new styles of film and music, and the rise of new religious movements. The 1970s saw a relaxation of norms and standards and a turning away from traditional values, and a corresponding new brand of conservatism that developed in opposition to these trends.

As already noted, running through this decade was a society-wide movement away from the public and collective and toward the private and individual. It culminated in the Reagan re-election in 1984 and “Morning in America.” At that point the young generations had completed the “hippie to yuppie” transition. Business had replaced government as the trusted engine of productive achievement, and entrepreneurship had replaced political activism as the preferred mode of personal expression and agent of social change.

I was fascinated by Schulman’s claim that the 1970s have a lowly reputation as a dull and meaningless decade. Perhaps, living through it at his age, he recalls the disillusionment coming out of the previous socially charged 1960s. His attitude may be common for his generation; as a slightly younger Gen Xer, I have a warm nostalgia for the era that I think is more typical of my age cohorts. Schulman clearly does have a personal relationship with the time period; this comes out the most in his write-up of the Punk and New Wave genres of rock music, which must have been his favorite growing up.

Overall, this is a nicely written and well-researched account of a social era, though I was a little annoyed that there was so much descriptive text in the end notes that I was constantly flipping back and forth between them and the main text. I suppose Schulman was trying to keep his narrative lean and on point, which he does achieve. A great read, and I do love how well this book aligns with my favorite generational theory.

View all my reviews

On Regret

On Regret

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A wise man once said, “the funny thing about regret is that it’s better to regret something you have done than to regret something that you haven’t done.”

When the Buddha Bear thinks on regret, what comes to mind the most is regret in love. Who hasn’t looked back at their past and wondered at missed opportunities, or mistakes made, in the realm of romance and love?

I know, I know. The Buddha Bear has opined before about the difficulty of living in the past and how regret limits us in the present moment, the only moment we truly have. But certainly we can think about what regret means and how understanding it can inform our choices in the present.

That funny thing about regret holds true because action is what makes consequences knowable. Action allows us to discover ourselves and the nature of our circumstances, where inaction can only lead to us questioning, “what if…?”

Inaction can come from negative conditioning, from hesitancy and fear that result from previous bad experiences. We get burned in love once, and can never love again: it is a familiar story. But if we stop ourselves forever from acting on the impulses of love, we shut ourselves off from a whole world of possibilities.

Certainly there are prudent reasons to refrain from acting on romantic desire, one might say. The obvious one is that one might be romantically attached already, and not wish to betray one’s lover’s faith.

But even for those who are single, there are prudential concerns. Consider the scenario of finding one of your coworkers attractive. If you act on your desires, you might imperil your job. You might be accused of harassment.

There’s a reason there are prescribed methods for seeking romantic relationships – dating apps, for example. This makes it clear what the boundaries are and generally the workplace is not considered appropriate for seeking a romantic partner.

Even if a coworker reciprocated your feelings, and you were able to make something work out, there are problems with mixing work and romance. It could complicate your lives, and the ability to find work-life balance. It could be disruptive for your other coworkers, causing them to question your biases, or provoking jealousy.

But consider the other side of the coin. True love is a hard thing to find. If it comes to you, even in the workplace, you should seize it! Why should you let such nuances of social convention hinder you from finding happiness in this short life?

I hope you don’t think the Buddha Bear is advising you to recklessly pursue every love interest you encounter, like some blundering Casanova. He only means to say that when life presents you with possibilities, which is all that it does, the only way to manifest an outcome is to make a choice.

Even if the choice is a mistake, some good might come of it. And playing it safe and doing nothing isn’t necessarily the best option. There may be someone whom you think of as a dear friend, yet something more might be there, in possibility. How will you know if you don’t take a chance?

So take that chance – it might be the only way to avoid regret.

As a wise woman said, “my advice is always answer the question better that than to ask it all your life.”

This post was inspired in part by this sad and wistful song from Taylor Swift’s latest album. Yes, a Buddha Bear can listen to pop music; it is a treasure of trove of insights into the meaning of life.

Let the wisdom of the Buddha Bear guide you!

As American as Spooky Fun and Branded Merch

As American as Spooky Fun and Branded Merch

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In a recent post, I praised the NFL for being woke by inviting a Spanish-language Puerto Rican rapper to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show, and lambasted the MAGA reactionaries for throwing a hissy fit over it. I called out MAGA for wanting to bring the United States back to the white supremacy of what they think of as the “good old days” – Hispanics need not apply for the role of American.

In my argument, I brought up academic Michael Lind’s idea of how the United States has gone through periodic redefinitions of itself as a nation. As part of that evolution, Lind recognized the emergence of four cultural mainstays of our national identity: baseball, American football, Thanksgiving, and our unique way of celebrating Christmas.

It is because of football’s iconic status as an American pastime that it is so meaningful that the NFL made its gesture of inclusivity to Hispanic-Americans. By the same logic, this is why the gesture upsets MAGA partisans. Personally, I commend the NFL, and that’s all I have to say about that in this post.

Next, I wanted to speculate on what new cultural elements might now be considered essentially American, given the progress of recent decades.

In the realm of professional sports, surely we would have to add basketball. It is more popular than baseball now. It was propelled to international fame by the wild success of the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, with star former player Michael Jordan now a multi-billionaire. And college basketball’s “March madness” NCAA tournament has been a staple of office betting pools for at least twenty years that I can remember.

I would also add the blockbuster film franchises that have emanated from Hollywood, and which also have global reach. They may be repetitive, each movie following the same formula as the last one, but that’s kind of how audiences want them. They are like a fast food version of entertainment – you know what you are going to get. Based on box office alone, the really big franchises are Star Wars and Marvel, and it was smart of Disney to buy them up, as the luster has come off of its original fairy-tale inspired brand.

For a new essentially American holiday, I nominate Halloween.

Our front porch this Halloween

Halloween, or All Hallows Eve, is one of those Christianized pagan holidays dating back to the middle ages. It is connected with the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marks the end of the harvest season, and came to the United States via Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 19th century.

By the early 20th century, familiar Halloween traditions such as parties, costumes, and trick-or-treating had developed in the U.S. But it was really with the post-WWII baby boom and the rise of suburbia that you started to see the annual spectacle of hordes of kids in costumes swarming neighborhoods on Halloween night.

Each postwar generation has had their own special experience of this holiday. Boomers were there at the inception of the modern mode of celebration. They were trick-or-treating in an era when the suburbs were safe enough for kids to wander unsupervised, and to prank middle-class homes without risking being shot to death. From their childhood comes the sentimental imagery of Linus from Peanuts waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

The Boomer childhood marks the rise of a Halloween costume industry, in parallel with the rise of television, as children wanted to dress as their favorite TV characters. Costumes then, and going into the era of my generation’s childhood (that would be Gen X), were cheaply made, and featured plastic masks and vinyl coveralls you wore over your clothes. They seem chintzy, even bizarre, in retrospect, but how could any Gen Xer like me look back at images of those days and not feel the twinge of nostalgia? Here’s a fantastic archive of these photos: Vintage Halloween Pictures of Generation X.

Those old costume companies have all gone out of business, replaced by the monolithic Spirit Halloween, whose retail outlets spring up perennially all around the nation each October. Meanwhile, the amount of pop culture intellectual property available as merchandise has exploded, with new icons being created each year (anyone dressing as a KPop Demon Hunter?). The industry is huge, set to reach new spending records this year.

In the lifetime of Millennials, Halloween has grown as a celebration for adults only, with new expectations. As the movie Mean Girls put it, it’s the one night a year when a girl can dress like a complete slut and not be judged for it. Any costume, apparently, can be made sexy with a little effort.

A more wholesome trend is the family Halloween costume cosplay, reflecting society’s growing family focus over the decades since Millennials started being born. In photos shared each year on social media, the young post-Millennial generation is enfolded into the holiday tradition with joy and creative spirit.

Halloween is so big now, I don’t see how it doesn’t have equal stature with Thanksgiving and Christmas. These three holidays together, coming at the end of every year, are part of the ineluctable rhythm of American life. Yeah, they’re highly commercialized. The way we celebrate them is unsophisticated, often to the point of complete kitsch.

That just makes them all the more American.

“I Protest Hate Because I Love the USA” – No Kings 10:18:25

“I Protest Hate Because I Love the USA” – No Kings 10:18:25

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These are the words Aileen chose for one of the protest signs we brought to the No Kings event on October 18, 2025: “I Protest HATE Because I LOVE the USA.” A rebuke of the statements by GOP leaders that protesters were coming out because they hated their country. A protestation of the true meaning of patriotism: to stand up for what you know is right, despite the efforts made by the powerful to silence you.

I had a different message on my sign, not a statement of intent but a challenge to the GOP-led government: “3 BRANCHES ? OR 3 RING CIRCUS?” A critique of the travesty they have made of the U.S. Constitution.

The circus theme fit because we were there as clowns this time, representing the Philly Clown Party, a small but growing group of friends that started meeting up in the city this summer. It was Aileen’s idea to run with the clown theme, as a way to build connection through fun and play. Through tactical frivolity and joyful resistance. And to take responsibility for this greatest show on Earth that is the United States of America.

This is our circus.

These are our monkeys.

We were originally planning to go into Philly to march, but Aileen had to work in West Chester in the late afternoon, so instead we went to a No Kings in Pottstown in the morning (it went from 10 AM to noon) and then to the West Chester rally at 1 PM.

I must admit I was a little anxious as we were driving in to Pottstown that the rally might not be well attended, given all the mudslinging against it (that is mud, right?) by the administration. Boy was I glad to discover those worries were unfounded, as there were far more people than had been at the June rally (when, admittedly, it had been raining). The energy was amped-up, and there were even some folks in inflatable costumes, the new symbol of the Resistance.

Aileen met another Steve in Pottstown!
Me clowning around

We stayed in Pottstown for the full 2 hours, almost, giving ourselves a little head start out so we wouldn’t get caught in traffic. When we got to West Chester – wow! The crowd was huge and the energy was through the roof! This was our fourth protest of the year, ever since we went to the People’s March on Washington in January, which seemed desultory to me. This was the first time in a long time that I felt the same level of enthusiasm as at the Women’s March in 2017.

I honestly didn’t take a lot of pictures, which is why you don’t see many here. But I know you can find loads of photos and videos of marches all across the country, because they have been filling our feeds since Saturday. It’s a testament to the millions of Americans who see what is going on and are pissed off, and are also able to express themselves in peaceful and humorous ways. When the people feel that democracy has failed and that the government no longer represents them, they have no choice but to take to the streets.

By the end of the event I was on a high, wanting to do it all over again.

We had a late lunch/early dinner afterwards, and another customer took this awesome shot of us together:

I know the government got the message, and I know the wannabe king is unhappy about it, but you know what? A clown’s job is to make fun of the king.

I hope you’ll join us in doing so.

The Philly Clown Party is just getting started, but we already have a YouTube channel. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/@PhillyClownParty

MAGA’s Bad Bunny Conniption Exposes Their Retrograde Agenda

MAGA’s Bad Bunny Conniption Exposes Their Retrograde Agenda

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The National Football League announced last month that rapper Bad Bunny, who is Puerto Rican, will headline the halftime show at the Super Bowl next February. This got MAGA in a tizzy – as everything nowadays must of course become poltically partisan.

Rapper Bad Bunny giving the opening monologue on Saturday Night Live’s Oct 4, 2025 episode

Trump lackey and chief Congressional obstructionist Mike Johnson claimed that someone with a “broader audience” would be a better choice. He suggested an 82-year old country singer named Lee Greenwood (I had never heard of Greenwood until I saw the clip where Johnson mentions him). Doesn’t Johnson know that Bad Bunny holds the record for the most streamed album of all time? Clearly he has a very broad audience!

OK, I’ll be nice. Maybe MAGA missed that Bad Bunny has broad appeal because they don’t stream music, they still listen to Lee Greenwood albums on their old vinyl collection. They’re just a bit behind the times, is all.

But I don’t think that’s where Johnson’s mind was. MAGA’s problem with Bad Bunny is that they don’t think of him – a U.S. citizen, of course, like anyone else born in Puerto Rico – as an American. From the MAGA perspective, Bad Bunny’s broad audience is the wrong audience.

His audience is the Spanish-speaking part of America, the people they are trying to exclude. The people current acting President Stephen Miller is actively trying to remove from the country, and that scatterbrained Homeland Security boss Kristi Noem promises to sic her ICE-troopers on at the Super Bowl itself.

Look behind the headlines to see how MAGA is really behind the times. We all know it’s true: America is becoming more racially diverse. The Spanish-speaking population has grown significantly in my lifetime. This is the trend that MAGA’s policies are trying to somehow reverse, returning us to the great again Golden Age the Boomers grew up in, when America was all white and all Christian.

Never mind that the only way to do this is illegally, outside of the bounds of the Constitution, and at great moral cost. They’re fine with that. White supremacist America has ethnically cleansed the continent before, and they are trying to do it again.

I don’t think this will be possible, given the geographic expanse and huge population of the United States, compared to previous centuries. But I could be wrong. I don’t really know how bad it will get.

In an earlier post, I reviewed a book by Michael Lind called The Next American Nation. In the book, Lind argues that we have gone through other periods of resistance to newcomers to America, leading into eventual assimilation and expansion of the definition of who counts as an American.

First it was just Anglos, the original “Mayflower stock”, so to speak. Then Germans and other Northern European Protestants. With some fuss, the Irish. The freed African slaves following the Civil War. And, early last century, Eastern and Southern Europeans.

We had taken a long journey from being a Protestant offshoot of England to becoming a “Judeo-Christian” melting pot nation. In this melting pot recipe were certain ingredients that give America its distinct cultural flavor. Our unique Thanksgiving holiday, with all its traditions. Our way of celebrating Christmas, including our version of Santa Claus. Our two big major league sports – baseball and American football.

In my generation’s lifetime, the challenge has been assimilating Hispanics, Asians and Muslims, adding them to the melting pot. Hispanics, being the largest population, are bearing the brunt of a backlash that seeks to flip back the calendar to somewhere in the 1950s. The huge irony, of course, is that Spanish-speaking people have been on this continent for longer than English-speaking people have.

Gentle reminder about Spanish-speaking America. This map is from the book The Dominion of War by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton.

Welcoming Latin Americans as part of the broader United States of America is the true expression of American values, the true fulfillment of America’s destiny to become a land of freedom and opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, or national origin. So kudos to the NFL for inviting Bad Bunny to the Super Bowl – an iconic annual event that helps define America – because that clearly moves the country in the right direction.

The assimilation of Latin Americans into the U.S. is already happening in many ways, of course, no matter what anyone does. I’m just glad that the NFL is embracing this instead of fighting it, unlike the backwards-thinking MAGA regime. Even if the NFL is only doing it with their profits in mind. To show my appreciation, I will probably watch the Super Bowl, even though I don’t normally follow sports.

Shame on MAGA for trying to take us backward in time, in such a cruel, repressive, and un-American way.

See y’all at the No Kings marches this weekend!

COVID-19 Retrospective

COVID-19 Retrospective

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Do y’all remember that we had a pandemic? And that it was a seriously big deal, that had the world in a panic?

At the onset, there were overwhelmed health care systems. As it went on, overflows of bodies. Mass graves. People were scared. This new virus was killing at an accelerated rate.

I remember watching a dashboard of the spreading infection. Before it really hit the U.S., thinking – maybe they’ll do something to stop it. Maybe the authorities will figure their shit out and it won’t be so bad here.

Then the red dots started spreading on the U.S. part of the map. It dawned on me that no, there is no stopping this. I called my boss to tell him I wouldn’t come to the office any more, but would work from home (lucky me with my email laptop job), and hours later got a notification that was sent to the whole company: don’t come to work.

We were in lockdown.

Remember how we knew so little about how this “novel coronavirus” spread that we were spraying sanitizer everywhere? There was actually a rumor for a bit that people were becoming infected when they pumped gas. We kept gloves in our car for the gas station!

And the shortages as people stocked up. Supply chains were in crisis. Suddenly it was revealed that toilet paper was the essential commodity of civilized life. Medical supplies in particular were in short supply, to the point that the Governor of Maryland was hiding testing kits from the Feds. Can you believe that shit?

Was it all a massive overreaction?

That’s such an unfortunate word, IMO, because it implies there is some way to know what the exact correct reaction should have been. But of course there is no way to know that, just as there is no way to know what the outcomes would have been had we made different choices as a society.

What if there had been no lockdowns? There would have been different rates of sickness and mortality and different effects on unemployment and inflation. But would these outcomes have been preferable, even if one could come to agreement on preferences? One can speculate, form a theory, but one cannot test the theory because, by the nature of time and choice, the data are not there.

The simple truth is, leaders faced a high degree of uncertainty, and the glaring fact that, in the initial waves, COVID-19 was an extremely deadly contagion. It both spread easily and had a high mortality rate, and it’s no wonder we were all spooked.

Just consider this: in 2020, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease and cancer. That’s insane for a disease that didn’t exist the year before. It’s hard to imagine what an “overreaction” would look like for such a thing. Please do click on that link and look a little closer. For one age cohort, the core of my generation, it was the leading cause of death in 2021. No wonder we drank so much.

I made this chart using our actual spending in 2020, I won’t deny it

I remember how much I blogged about coronavirus in those early years of the pandemic. As the emergency eased, officially declared over by President Biden in 2023, I mostly dropped the topic. In 2024, COVID-19 was no longer in the top 10 causes of death. Accidents and strokes had restored their respectable statuses under heart disease and cancer, the twin grim reapers awaiting us all in our advanced years.

But the disease is still with us, of course, and it is still dangerous. I caught COVID just last month, in fact. I immediately went on the antiviral PAXLOVID, because I do not want that nasty thing multiplying in my body.

SARS-COV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID, is not like influenza or the common cold. It gets into your system and it does damage everywhere. Long term damage that could lead to long COVID, or to some other condition down the road that reduces your lifespan. As one substacker explains it, catching COVID is like smoking cigarettes – you can keep doing it over and over, but you will pay for it in the long run.

Is the pandemic over anyways? There’s no end date given on Wikipedia’s helpful page of deadly pandemics, so I guess not. There COVID-19 sits, nowhere near the death toll of the Spanish flu, history’s GOAT pandemic, but catching up to the slow burn HIV/AIDS.

Luckily, the U.S. is a world leader in medical research. Right? Oh no...

The Old Ways

The Old Ways

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This isn’t a very deep post today, just some fun observations.

I am a domesticated creature who typically doesn’t go out very much. Also, I am unemployed, so I don’t have anywhere to go anyway. When everyone else in the household is away at work or at school, I do have one activity for exercise – walking about town, weather permitting (I should go to the gym, but that’s another story).

I live in a shabby little town in Pennsylvania, where there are just enough side streets to create walking circuits through the small neighborhoods that bracket either side of the busy main drag (the traffic is almost all going through town).

The main drag of Morgantown, PA

Most of Pennsylvania is small, dilapidated towns – well, that and forested mountains. That’s because of the state’s irregular geography, and its historical development, which has encouraged small, localized municipalities to spring up everywhere. These patterns have also suppressed economic development, hence the dilapidation. It’s an aesthetic. This is a land that embraces its weathered past.

The myriad muncipalities are typically “townships,” though the town where our address is located is simply a “Census designated area” within a township. Don’t ask me why. I’ve blogged about life here before, which is kind of like being in a liminal space between the DEI city and the MAGA country.

The point I wanted to make with this post is that when I’ve been out walking, multiple times now cars have slowed down, and the drivers have lowered their window to ask me for directions! Like, don’t they have a smartphone for navigational purposes? Apparently, not everyone does.

Not to stereotype here, but invariably the driver will be an older white person – a Boomer, I’m sure. Ok, maybe they could be a Gen Xer since our generation is now entering its early 60s, but I’m pretty sure they are Boomers. They might be looking at a piece of paper, presumably with the directions they were trying to follow written on them, but as often happens with that old fashioned approach, they wrote something down that turned out to be illegible. I’m making up a story here.

Of course, I am happy to help these lost drivers, and I always can, since I have a smartphone. Which the drivers would know, since my phone is always out, because as I walk I play a casual game called Pikmin Bloom. Some of us here embrace the new ways of doing things. I just thought it was interesting that there are still people out there following the old ways.

Reflections at the End of the World

Reflections at the End of the World

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Once more I am on the job hunt. So far, it doesn’t seem much different than in the past. There are positions out there for which I am qualified. I have registered successfully for unemployment compensation, as I have many times before in my life.

In my job searches, I am limiting myself to remote work. The convenience of it is too much to give up, if I don’t have to, and so far there have been multiple remote positions to apply for. But obviously, if the search drags on, I will have to cast my net wider and consider going back to commuting – perhaps only on certain days of the week, in the now common “hybrid” mode which combines working from home with working on site. The point is, I might not be so lucky as I was a couple years ago, when I easily transitioned from one remote job to another.

I worry, actually, that I might be really unlucky at this juncture. With insano-fascist-guy upending the American economy via his unhinged policies, the job market is in trouble. Companies facing the uncertainty of the times are freezing hiring. We might even be heading into a recessium. I’m almost 60 years old, not a good age to have my career suddenly stalled.

I recently wrote on my substack about the problem of “gerontocracy” – our political leadership skewing older than the population, and therefore being out of touch with the needs of the American people. I made the point that this is a bigger problem for Democrats than for Republicans, and helps explain the Republican rise to power. Currently my generation, the middle-aged generation, are the primary Trump supporters. Democrats are either the older generations on their way out, or younger Millennials.

A generational shift in power is surely going to be a fallout of this tumultuous social era. I can see – in the long term – MAGA burning out and the Millennials taking over with a more progressive agenda. At that point, Gen-X will be sidelined. With the demographic collapse making Social Security less sustainable, we will probably also be impoverished. There won’t be a lot of sympathy for us, especially if we’re seen as the ones repsonsible for the worst of what is to come.

Those are some depressing thoughts, I know. It’s just where my head is at right now. It would be just like my generation grow old just as the gerontocracy was being eliminated. Another boat missed.

I’m going to take advantage of the time I have been given to do more writing. Maybe some political activism.

And I would appreciate more subscribers to my Substack if you can: https://stevebarrera.substack.com/

Peace out.

Doubt: A Review

Doubt: A Review

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Last weekend (August 15-17), I had the privilege of attending performances of Journey Theatric Sanctuary’s production of Doubt: A Parable. This was presented at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center on the HACC community college campus in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Doubt: A Parable is a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play by John Patrick Shanley, about a nun who is Principal at a Catholic school and suspects a priest of taking liberties with a young boy. She attempts to get to the truth of the matter, enlisting the help of a younger nun, and of the boy’s mother – hindered as she is by the Church’s strict patriarchy, which makes reporting her concerns according to the rules a hopeless cause. It’s a challenging script with a difficult subject matter.

Director and Journey Theatric Sanctuary founder Troy Cooper assembled a stellar cast of four actors, each of whom was perfect for their role. Griffin Yeyna opened the show as the priest, Father Brendan Flynn, giving a sermon on the topic of faith and doubt. In a later monologue in the role of teacher, he came across as an easygoing authority figure. But in his scenes with the nuns, he sometimes squirmed under their questioning, and sometimes lashed out with indigant rage.

The main character in the show, the stern and determined Sister Aloysius, was played by veteran actor Aileen Lynch-McCulloch, who brought her experience to bear to bring out the layers in her character. Sister Aloysius was hard-headed and persistent in her pursuit of the truth, adamant in her beliefs on the proper relationship the clergy should have with their parishioners and students. She employed a kind of Socratic method in her probing questions as she recruited the younger nun to her cause, and as she interrogated the priest. She also had a worldly sense of humor that got laughs from the audience at times, breaking the tension in the very taut script.

Her counterpart, Sister James, was a less experienced nun, played by Jess Mooney in just her third role on stage. Mooney brought a sweetness and eager naivete to her character, which made her susceptible to Father Flynn’s charisma, and hesitant to see his potential dark side. Janae Yellock as Mrs. Muller, the young boy’s mother, had only one scene, but she brilliantly portrayed a 1960s era black mother, used to navigating a world of both male and white supremacy. Mrs. Muller’s strategy for guarding her son’s interests was an unsettling and eye-opening surprise for Sister Aloysius.

These four actors did excellent work expressing the subtleties of their characters’ different viewpoints. Each, in their own way, had blinders on that limited their perception of the whole truth of the matter at hand. Each, consequently, faced their own doubts. Caught up in the turmoil of these conflicting perspectives was the fate of one little boy.

The design of the quite beautiful set helped underscore this theme, being split into two sections with starkly different appearances and color palettes.

Journey Theatric Sanctuary’s production of Doubt: A Parable was tense and emotionally powerful, doing justice to the company’s stated mission of demonstrating the transformative power of theatre. I wish it had had a larger audience and/or a longer run, because there was so much talent brought to bear which deserved to be seen.

I note here that Griffin Yeyna and Aileen Lynch-McCulloch have appeared together before, in Reading Theater Project’s November 2023 production of Lauren Gunderson’s Silent Sky. They have great chemistry on stage, and I would love to see them opposite one another again. Also, in the interest of full disclosure I must mention that I have known Aileen for many, many years and she is my dearest friend.

Journey Theatric Sanctuary’s website is here: https://www.journeytheatricsanctuary.com/
I wish this new theatre company the best of luck growing its program and expanding its outreach.