A History of this Blog in Header Images
This month marks the 9th anniversary of this blog. I started it back in February 2017, partly in response to the ongoing political crisis. I had been blogging in the 2000s, back when the “blogosphere” was young, and then taken a break. But the situation in 2016-17 compelled me to get back into the habit of commenting on current events. You remember what was going on. What’s still going on.
I wanted the blog to be not just about current events, but about my experience in the midst of them. I had just turned 50 years old, and I would be writing from the perspective of a middle-aged man, who was in the later stages of his career, and in the early stages of building a life partnership with a significant other. I chose to name the blog In The Zeitgeist to evoke the idea of being present in a particular social and cultural moment. My understanding is that there are different kinds of social eras with different themes and moods. Ours is one of crisis.
The software I chose for creating the blog, WordPress, lets me have a collection of randomized header images when you view the site. If you refresh your browser page while reading one of my posts, the header image will change. For my header images, I decided I would have a simple rule: they all had to be pictures taken with my smartphone. In other words, they are images taken of life “on the ground.”
There are a couple of exceptions, which are pictures taken by other people on their smartphones, of me. But every header image is a real life moment, contemporaneous to when the blog was published, where I was there, in the zeitgeist.
I thought it would be illluminating to go through some of the images, and see the evolution of the blog, and of my life and our times, over the past ever-so-eventful years.
Below is the first image I used. Yes, I took this with my phone, while on the road, driving, of the car in front of me. Go ahead and smack my hand. The image introduces a major theme of the time period – the Resistance to the current administration, which sprouted immediately in the wake of the 2016 election, and hasn’t finished yet. Back in 2017 I still lived in North Carolina, and I wonder if this car is still out there.
Next is a shot of the corporate campus in North Carolina where I worked at the time I started this blog, a lovely site in the forested (and pollen-y) piedmont region of the state. I think the tobacco-free sign pegs it as fitting in with the current social era. Ironically, not far from that sign is where the smokers would congregate, just outside of the campus on the street.
You might notice this image is a bit larger than the previous one. There is a ideal aspect ratio for an image to be the header, but sometimes I make them a bit bigger if that helps the framing. There have been quite a few good shots I’ve taken with my phone that couldn’t become header images simply because they weren’t sized properly.
Next is another Resistance image from early 2017 – this one taken in Washington, D.C., at the Women’s March on January 21. It was at the time the largest protest in American history. I still remember the enormous size of the crowd and the intensity of the energy. The people were reeling from what had happened, and this event inaugurated their response to the tyranny that was starting to unfold.
I like the guy in the lower right with a thoughtful expression. Here’s a post to go with the image: Where the Baby Boomers Led Us.
As a rule, I do not disguise my partisanship in my writing, but I must still acknowledge the perspective of the Trump supporter. Not everyone saw him as a tyrant; some saw him as a savior (and apparently still do). Trump’s supporters are part of the zeitgeist, too, and are in the background of daily life, especially here in Pennsylvania, where I now live.
The next image is a photo taken in Scranton, PA, when we were travelling through there on our way to visit my sister in New York. That was back in 2019. This truck was parked prominently, visible from a restaurant we had stopped to eat at. Presumably it was there from the previous election year.
I moved to Pennsylvania in 2018, after landing a job in Wilmington, Delaware. I rented an apartment in a town called West Chester, and had a commute that was about an hour long. The office where I worked was in a gentrified area of the city along the banks of the Christina River, called the Riverfont. It was a nice place to go for a lunch walk.
Here’s a shot of the river (the building where I worked is not visible):
Sometimes when uploading a header image, I’ll crop it in a fun, or dare I say artistic way, as in the next example. You might wonder what this could possibly be a picture of, given my rule that header images are always taken with a smartphone. That is, they are always a photo of something in my environment. What is it?
I won’t keep you guessing; it’s a close up of the stage set at a Vampire Weekend concert, on their Father of the Bride tour. There was a giant globe behind the band. Photo taken on September 4, 2019 at The Mann Center.
I moved to PA in 2018, and then two years later, we were in the pandemic. There’s a number of header images that capture the pandemic as it unfolded, a progress visible in the public space as signs went up – both public service messages and protests by the people.
Of all the pandemic images, the one below is my favorite. It was taken in the summer of 2020 at a small Black Lives Matter protest in our community in Twin Valley, PA. Aileen is in her pandemic garb, holding a sign. Back then, people masked outside, just to be safe. Remember that?
Next is another pandemic picture, taken in 2020 a little later than the one above. Lockdowns were still in effect. Vaccines were not yet available. I figured since I shared a picture of Aileen, it was only fair to include one of me as well. I managed to get into my own shot thanks to the reflective properties of window pane glass. I’m taking a picture of a sign on a restaurant apologizing for being closed because of “the ban.”
Can you tell that I’m wearing a cloth mask, and that I have a glorious pandemic beard? My beard got really long that year. It got to be such a pain to maintain, as well becoming quite stinky, that I trimmed it back, even though I never stopped working remote after that – and still haven’t.
At the end of 2020 was a pivotal election. The next photo was taken on November 7, the day that major news outlets called the Presidential election for the Biden-Harris ticket. Aileen and I drove down to the Wilmington Riverfront (where I used to work, though by 2020 I was somewhere else) for a rally.
The picture is taken from outside a fenced in area. We didn’t actually get in to where we could see any speakers, I guess you needed an invite. We were with a lot of other people like us, outside the fence. Being surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of supporters but separated from the actual politicians is kind of emblematic of what it’s like being a partisan Democrat nowadays – the party doesn’t really represent you, but you have no choice but to vote for them, given the alternative.
Life isn’t only about work and politics, you know, and neither is this blog.
Board gaming is a major hobby of ours, and a good number of the header images capture a game in play. I think this is the funnest of the photos, as it also captures our love of kaiju (giant monsters). The game is called Rampage, and the photo was uploaded in 2021.
Sometimes I do street photography – who doesn’t in this age, when our smartphones have such good cameras? This photo I liked so much I couldn’t resist making it a header image. It was taken at night in a parking lot in Wildwood, NJ, around Thanksgiving in 2021.
The years keep passing by.
Here’s another example of street photography – in fact, it’s on the street where we live:
Some time in 2022, a bunch of these signs sprouted up in our area. It’s not a very big sign (the shot is a close up), but it’s prominent from the road. I think someone is trying to program us all to behave better.
2023 started off rough. I lost my job, though luckily I found a new one pretty fast. Our sweet sunshine kitty, Princess Sashimi, got sick and passed away in May. This picture of her was taken in her last months:
Next is another well framed, artsy shot. It’s just the sun, high in the sky in the middle of the day, with some ovehead power lines in the foreground. What’s different, and is giving the sun that reddish halo, is this was in June 2023, when the air was smoky from wildfires in Canada for something like a month. It was quite a remarkable time; the burnt wood smell was always in the air, and it was just a little bit hard to breathe outside. A new kind of apocalypse for us to experience.
Theatre is a big part of our lives, as you might know from reading this blog. Every summer since 2021, Aileen has been working with students on a summer production, as part of a program called The Arts Bubble, which she started during the pandemic to give youth an arts outlet during lockdown. Their first show was Chicago.
I do have images from earlier productions, but for this post I’ve been saving up to show you this one, from City of Angels in 2023. Tiernan played Stone, a private detective. It was his first lead role and I was so proud of him. He is seen here in the middle of a musical number (on the left, seated). I just love the energy of this shot.
A good number of the header images are landscape photos, taken in various places, including the back yard. But also places I’ve visited. Of them all, this next one is the by far the loveliest. It’s a sunflower field that used to be near us, in Elverson, PA, but unfortunately has been replaced with some kind of commercial development. This is what it looked like at its peak in late summer:
Fast forward a year, to the fall of 2024. I was so excited when I finally got the chance to see the Northern Lights, which I’ve also wanted to do, and right here in Pennsylvnia! Now I don’t have to go to Iceland or wherever. In fact, that fall I saw two celestial phenomena for the first time in my life: the aurora borealis and a comet (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS). See: My Sky-Watcher Life List Gets Two Checkmarks in One Week!
Well, it’s back to the politics as 2024 was another election year. My country stupidly reinstated an extremely unqualified, felonious POS as the President.
This sign came up on I-476, which connects our town to Reading, PA. The phrase “Do Not Obey in Advance” is Lesson #1 from Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Someone must have been ready because this was up immediately after the election. The image is low res since I zoomed in and cropped it after taking the photo while driving (there I go again).
No time for regrets; in May 2025 we headed to France and Italy for a long planned vacation. I got to see Paris and Rome for the first time in my life, and we got to travel while there was still a chance.
Next up is the first example of a photo taken not by me, but by someone else; Aileen, in this case. It’s obvious why. I thought it would be amusing to have a picture of me playing a civilization game on my phone (I am literally doing that) while standing in front of possibly the most iconic monument from an ancient civilization on the planet. And you get to see what my regular, non-pandemic beard looks like.
Then it was back to the U.S. in June. Fascism was on the rampage.
Aileen and I went to the No Kings marches and rallies that year. By far the best attended one was the one on October 18. It felt like the energy level were back to where they had been at the Women’s March in 2017. The people weren’t going to take it any more. We attended two different rallies that day, and it was exhilarating to participate. After the rally in West Chester, we sat down to an early dinner. We were both dressed as clowns – a little bit of tactical frivolity.
Here we are at the restaurant, photo taken by a friendly customer using my phone. I thought it fitting to end the post with a Resistance image, just as I started with one.
Well, there you have it. 20 different header images that are included in the random rotation on this blog, roughly in order of when the pictures were taken. Little snapshots of life on the ground in the Crisis Era, from the perspective of an ordinary middle class IT worker guy.
It’s 2026, and time marches on. I haven’t yet posted any new header images this year, but I’m sure some eye-catching scene or special moment will come along. Until then, persist.