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Prior to arriving at my dad’s place near Tampa, I spent a day and a half in Savannah Georgia, a short but very intriguing visit that offered up some interesting historical, cultural, and political observations. I’m not going to tackle those here, though, as there is something else burning in my mind that I just can’t ignore—something my dad and I saw together that literally blew me away. I must share.

Prior to my visit, I’d been to Florida seven or eight times: several times as a kid and the rest starting just after my girls’ seventh birthday (they’re twins). As one might expect, there’s a big difference between visiting Florida as a kid and visiting it as an adult with kids. When you’re the kid, the focus is on hanging out at the pool and going to the theme parks—you’re oblivious to the parental effort and cost. As a parent, it’s hard to think about anything other than money, especially when it’s tight and your kids want you to pay for two separate parks, seeing as Universal has spread “Harry Potter World” across both of its establishments in order to fleece the public as much as possible. Five years ago, the cost to visit each park was something like sixty-five bucks per person. Of course, Universal “magnanimously” discounted five bucks from each of my kids’ tickets to both of its parks. It was insulting, really, and I recall imagining a very specific thing Universal’s board of directors could do with that overly generous ten–dollar savings.

But I digress. The point is that when you travel with kids, it’s not actually your vacation—it’s everyone else’s. When I started to think about this solo visit, I was determined to make the most of it. And after the last two years that we’ve all somehow managed to stagger through, this trip felt like my own personal quest for the Holy Grail as much as a vacation and family visit, only in this case, my quest entailed reconnecting with a part of me that I’d lost. It’s hard to know exactly what part of me, though, given that the chaotic events of the past six or seven years had significantly disrupted my life as well as the lives of millions of others. But as Tom Baker from the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special says, “Things do get lost, you know.” The presumption is that not all that’s lost is lost for good.

One of the things I’ve really focused on in therapy over the years is the idea of thinking about what I want rather than what everyone else wants. We shouldn’t be our own afterthought. The more I held this idea in my mind, the more determined I became to do something uniquely “me”—and something free of politics so I could share it with my dad. He and I don’t see eye to eye in that arena . . . at all.

I was born in 1969, three months after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon, leaving that big footprint behind for posterity and forever establishing his place in history. Like so many boys of that era, the first thing I remember ever wanting to be “when I grew up” was an astronaut. That was followed, of course, by Captain Kirk, but the goal of becoming a “real” astronaut came first. In the 1970s, the Apollo space program was in full swing, and between that and growing up with Star Trek (TOS) re-runs and the occasional Space 1999 , I was all about it. And it wasn’t just kids that were energized by space exploration; the Apollo program was part of our national identity, binding people together of all ages, from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and all races. People were glued to their television sets with every launch while Cape Kennedy’s launch site attracted thousands of viewers outside its fences.

Cape Kennedy Space Center! That was the answer! When I mentioned it to my father, he was all in. Not only did the space center have the two renowned Apollo and Saturn V exhibits, but it also had the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit. I’d seen other cool space stuff in the past: the Apollo 11 command module, a Russian Satellite, and a bunch of other stuff. But Atlantis was something special. I couldn’t wait!

I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of my brain making the additional calculation that, as a federal site, Cape Kennedy would have mask mandates in full effect. And after spending several days in Georgia and Florida over the course of my trip, it had become clear that a large swath of the public in those states questioned whether Covid was even real. I’d go further to say that many of those “questioners” even debated whether the vaccines were a trick created by communist, pagan gods bent on the destruction of Christianity and American democracy as we know it . . . or at least as they know it. Anyhow, the last thing I needed was to come down with Covid.

So, on the morning after Thanksgiving, we eagerly jumped into my dad’s car and hit the road. Route 4 cuts across the state heading northeast from Tampa toward Orlando. Now, I know what some of you must be thinking, that this must have been a long and boring drive across the pancake that is Florida. And as much as I sometimes like to have a bit of fun at Florida’s expense, I do find some things about it quite interesting, in both good and bad ways.

Seeing grapefruit and orange trees in random places is cool, especially having grown up in the Boston area where the nearest citrus trees were probably a thousand miles away . . . probably in Florida. On one of my previous trips to the Sunshine State, I saw an old grapefruit tree on a McDonald’s property next to the drive-thru. Awesome! And although Florida’s forests are often reminiscent of the woods around the little town of Wrentham, Massachusetts, where I grew up (lots of maples, oaks, etc.), the Spanish Moss hanging off those trees like tattered blankets is a reminder that this is not New England.

Florida has some of the most interesting—and batshit crazy—wildlife of any place on the planet. On the one hand, there are animals that are truly amazing to behold: dolphins, manatees, and a variety of vibrant bird species. But on the other hand, there are animals . . . scratch that, creatures, that frankly scare the bloody hell out of me: alligators the size of canoes and ginormous swamp-dwelling pythons that eat alligators the size of canoes. And as if that’s not enough, there are myriad poisonous spiders, other deadly snakes, and let’s not forget that horrifying brain-eating amoeba thing. A lot of Florida’s nature seems bent on our destruction, and yet the folks here seem almost oblivious to it.

Here’s a perfect example: On the last day of my visit, I decided to take a walk around my dad’s retirement community on some of the paths that wound their way past a small golf course, a shuffleboard space, and other recreational spaces. I used the opportunity to call my brother at the same time to let him know how the visit had gone. As I strolled along on my merry way, I came across a pond. The trail encircled it, so I decided to follow it around, but I paused when I noticed a very strange-looking log with weird ridges along the top. A point of family history: my brother attended the University of Miami for three years, so he’s quite familiar with the peculiarities of Florida’s unique biosphere. A few paces closer, and I realized it wasn’t actually a log . . . it was a seven-foot-long alligator! My brother was all over it!

“Don’t get anywhere near it! Those things can run like thirty miles an hour over short distances,” he warned. “If they get near you, run around them in circles. They handle like a station wagon.”

As if I needed any additional incentive to get as far away from the damn thing as possible. Maybe it cornered like a pregnant yak, maybe it didn’t, but I wasn’t about to find out. When I got back to my dad’s place, after warning everyone I saw along the way to stay clear of that pond, his response to my panicked recap was as follows:

“You just ignore them,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?” I asked incredulously. I wanted to be a good citizen, maybe save a few lives, or at least some of the retirees’ small dogs that could potentially end up serving as nature’s chicken nuggets.

“They (the authorities) only come if the alligators are over ten feet.”

It still stuns me, but apparently, such is Florida. I guess that explains why so many people there also don’t seem to care about Covid—it’s not ten feet long.

Anyhow, we cut across the state, and as we passed through Orlando a few hours later, it became clear that it was taking a lot longer to get to the space center than we had anticipated. I had done some research prior to leaving and learned that because of Covid, or maybe just because of the sheer volume of visitors, the Apollo and Saturn V exhibits were only accessible by bus, and appointments for these buses had to be made upon arrival. I hadn’t thought this would be an issue, but the later it got, the more I revisited that assumption. When we finally arrived, around one in the afternoon, it was already too late. I was disappointed, but I’d seen traveling exhibits from the Apollo era before, and at least we could still see the space shuttle. There was no way we were going to miss that.

After a delicious burger in their “pretty decent” cafeteria, we hurried as best we could through the throngs of masked visitors toward, as the website states, “a mighty full-scale space shuttle stack of two solid rocket boosters and orange external tank” that rose up over a massive sign: The Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Beyond that, the entrance to a creatively architected building seemed to loom above us, with rows of windows that swooped over the entrance like a thruster blast engulfing the structure.

Once inside, we discovered a long line of fellow NASA lovers (or people dragged there by their NASA-loving friends and family), snaking its way around several corners. Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and after a twenty-minute wait, the doors finally opened, and they ushered us into a large octagonal room where three massive video screens were hanging above a bank of three double-doors. The docents had us sit on the floor. Why they didn’t have seats for us, I will never know (I could have Googled it or asked someone, but then I wouldn’t’ have been able to use that “I will never know” line.)

What followed was a brilliantly produced documentary-style reenactment of the inception of the shuttle program that started in the early 1970s when one lead engineer walked into a room full of other engineers and scientists, threw a model of a simplistic shuttle design at them like a paper airplane, and boldly declared that this was the future. The presentation ended with an image of the Space Shuttle Columbia sitting on the tarmac on April 12, 1981, waiting to make her maiden voyage, one that would change spaceflight forever. As the screens faded to black, the three double doors opened below them. The docents led us into a roughly octagonal theatre with multiple screens that projected the various visual perspectives one might experience if looking outward from within the shuttle’s cockpit right before takeoff. The screen directly in front of us showed the shuttle’s complex array of control panels and instruments, a few blinking every now and then, others with more urgency.

The lights dimmed and the quintessential NASA launch-countdown voice echoed through the theatre: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

“We have a go for main engine start,” a second voice declared.

“Seven . . . six . . . five . . .”

“We have main engine start,” the second voice again. The building shook as the simulated rockets fired with a deafening roar.

“Four . . . three . . . two . . .” Both voices synchronized.

“One . . . zero . . . We have lift-off!”

The view through the simulated windows shifted as the launch tower fell away and the shuttle hurtled skyward. The Earth spun around us as the shuttle successfully performed its first roll. It looked and felt so real that I had to reach out and take my dad’s arm to steady both of us. Minutes later we were in orbit, looking down at the great blue orb we call home. We were so fixated on the screens that we didn’t notice the wall in front of us had completely opened up, leaving behind only a dark mesh screen between us and what lay beyond.

As Earth orbit spun above and around us, the theatre lights came up, and there she was, in all her “unsimulated” glory . . .

Atlantis. She hung at an angle as if locked into orbit around the planet. Her cargo arm was extended as if reaching for a satellite. Adrenaline rushed through me at the site of her, and my eyes opened wide in amazement. My hands tingled, my breath caught in my throat, and for an instant, I had never seen anything so beautiful: Atlantis, seemingly floating in the air before us. The mesh screen slowly rose into the ceiling, and I stepped forward.

The world fell away, and for a moment, it was just me and her, all alone in our own little universe. And then it hit me. Atlantis wasn’t just a spaceship, not just a line-item expenditure in some bloated budget. Not a political tool. She was, and remains, an idea and a vision of what we as a people are capable of doing when we act as one. And that’s how the Space Shuttle Atlantis came to be—not because of some billionaire jackass magnanimously creating his own little space program by gathering up scientists and engineers as if he were their renaissance-style patron.

It struck me how far we had come since that first launch, when America really was one nation despite our political differences, when there were very few billionaires (if any at all). A strong democratic government belongs to all of us, just like that beautiful spacecraft that hung before me. And government spending to realize the dreams of what we can become and accomplish as a nation and as a people is not socialism by any means, no more so than the accumulation of extreme wealth is a capitalist concept. There is a word that describes a system where a small segment of the population controls a disproportionate amount of its nation’s wealth: monarchy. And as our form of government becomes increasingly more monarchical, there can be no more shuttles. If we want to reclaim the true spirit of America, we have to be better; we have to take back the wealth that belongs to all of us and channel it into changing the world. Together.

It’s time for a new dream, a shared dream. It’s time for a new Atlantis.

Lost in Shadow

I gasped as my eyes adjusted to the bright blue sky of this frigid morning. Unlike Seattle’s balmy forty-seven degrees the day before, it was at best in the mid-thirties, and I was immediately relieved that I had brought my winter hat! I put it on and took stock of my surroundings. As I noted in my previous post, it had been twenty-eight years since I’d set foot in Manhattan. I’m not a big city guy, having grown up on the very edge of the Boston suburbs in an old colonial farm town, and I’ve always found true urban areas to be overwhelming; nonetheless, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer scale of the place.

Massive, densely packed buildings, representative of a variety of historical construction styles, stretched out as far as I could see in every direction, leaving me to wonder if there were any alleys left in the city at all. Rising far above the surrounding structures, the Empire State Building gleamed in the sunlight—an archaic steel and glass beacon. I wondered if there was some kind of ordinance limiting the height of any new construction within a certain radius of that iconic structure. I could have Googled the answer to that question, but I didn’t want to ruin the mystique. Having every shred of information at our fingertips is just no fun sometimes.

So, there I was in New York City, looking down the street at the Empire State Building, wondering what to do next. Successfully navigating the subway and taking that ride had been the first challenge, one I had clearly completed with expert finesse and skill. I decided to simply wander. Given the age of the Empire State Building, I figured more interesting architecture could be in the vicinity (being a total history nerd, I like that sort of thing), so I picked a random direction (and yes, I could have looked at my phone’s GPS, but again, where’s the fun in that?) and walked. I crossed several main streets, narrowly avoiding getting flattened twice by city busses as they tried to thread the needle of the traffic lights. I passed cops barking at both cars and people in the center of every main intersection and finally made my way into a maze of smaller side streets flanked on either side by much lower buildings.

As with the larger thoroughfares, every building brushed up against every other, but something else caught my attention. Despite the fact that it was a sunny late morning, the taller buildings blocked out the light, draping the more diminutive buildings in shadow. Stepping down that boulevard was like walking backward in time; a twenty-story (ish) Art Deco building, complete with its thin-lined yet ornate style, drained the light from a smaller turn-of-the-twentieth-century building fronted by a cement edifice. Next to that, an even smaller and older brick building huddled in the near dusk of a shadow within a shadow.

I paused to consider the street, the buildings and the story they told. Although not uniformly true, the older the construction, the shorter the building. I’m no architect, but it seems like the “important” people, the so-called captains of industry, want the buildings that house their centers of power to be taller, or somehow better, than the neighboring ones. They want them to say, “Look at me, I’m awesome!” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, height was the bar. In the modern age, it’s not so much height as it is design; but in any case, none of these important people ever wants their evil lairs to be overshadowed by anyone else’s.

Each iteration of new, taller, and better-constructed structures stole the light as surely as an old sailing ship could steal the wind from another, casting the old into shadow. Sunlight shone down and splashed against these new ego-shrines, enshrouding them in its warm glow, as if the light of heaven itself bathed their prominence in some kind momentous ritual anointment. In turn, temples of the modern age cast shadows upon those structures that came before, plunging them into an eternal twilight. And as that cycle persisted, those shadows and that twilight coalesced into a new kind of night, one that exists outside of our human concept of time.

They say that over time pollution causes stone edifices to blacken, giving them a dirty and worn appearance, but looking at the aged scarring on the nearest of the Art Deco structures, I wondered if it could be something more. Perhaps, I thought, as the shadows emerged and intensified with each new arrival on the block, the absence of light caused the darkness itself to fuse with the solid reality of the buildings. Even beyond that, perhaps these egocentric power centers had spawned something malevolent—brought about by the self-absorbed and self-focused acts of our captains of industry—that cast its own shadow of greed, which clung to the buildings like dried slime.

Such thoughts brought me full circle to the current state of the world, especially the pandemic and how it has affected the modern workplace. With so many people working remote and companies slowly realizing that people no longer need to be confined to an office to do their jobs, physical work sites are going to become a thing of the past for many of us; the change is inevitable and it’s good. Consequently, some companies have been pushing back against this change by converting employees to “hybrids” who work on-site for X number of days per week, but still, such an alternative provides much more structure than will be needed or desired. The truth is, the virtual workplace is here to stay. And if the world truly goes virtual, how will the important people continue to prove to us how relevant they truly are? I suppose some of them will keep sending people into space in an ultimate act of self-aggrandizement while others will turn to flooding social media with half-truths and lies to remind us they still exist. Some will magnanimously donate millions of dollars (probably no more than six or seven dollars for the average person) to their pet nonprofits and projects and construct ever more buildings simply to advertise their own namesakes. Ultimately, I wonder if their efforts will be fleeting. The internet has taken on a life of its own, seemingly casting its own all-pervasive shadow—one that looms over the tallest of our buildings . . . one that even our captains of industry will be unable to escape.

Into the Light

It had been over two years since I had flown, a full six months before the pandemic hit. So, with my kids spending the week at their mom’s and me “flying solo,” I decided to fly for real to spend the holiday with my dad in his retirement community near Tampa. No offense to anyone from Florida, but it’s not my favorite place in the world, so I decided to do something different this time. Let’s face it, we’ve been in lockdown now going on two years, but to me every day has felt like March 3, 2020, the day I found out my office was going 100% remote—the day the isolation began.

I’ve always wanted to check out Savannah, Georgia, as it’s a very old and unique southern city that was originally founded as a utopian community in 1733 by one James Oglethorpe who set rules that included, among other things, no slavery and no lawyers, but more on that in a future post. Conveniently, the city just happens to be within driving distance of my dad’s place. With that, my plan was hatched. I would fly into Savannah for two days, rent a car for twenty-four hours to drive to my dad’s, then fly out of Tampa back home to Seattle.

Now, I’m not one to skimp on things that matter, and if I had been traveling with my kids, I would have certainly chosen better flights, but since I was solo, I opted to save a bunch of money by choosing pretty much the worst red-eye flights in the history of red-eye flights. With the money I saved, I booked a room at a historic bed and breakfast called the Eliza Thompson House, built in 1847, which turned out to be awesome! (More to be written on that in a future post.)

As with all journeys, they never go exactly the way you expect. My initial flight departed Seattle a full two hours late, causing me to miss my ungodly 7:00 a.m. connection at JFK. The next flight they could put me on departed at 3:55 p.m., leaving me with about eight hours to sit around between flights. I thought about waiting at the airport so I wouldn’t have to go back through security but decided to “screw” that thought . . . life’s too short. With my decision made, I strode out of the secure area, committing myself to whatever came next.

I boarded the AirTrain light-rail system, hopped off at the actual NYC metro station, and was immediately proud of myself for knowing how to purchase a card for a bona fide subway system (Seattle’s light rail is only about a hundred years behind the Northeast’s. . . . Yes, I’m a subway snob. I’m from Boston, what can I say?) Still basking in the warm glow of my victory over the forces of the card machine, I stepped up to the turnstile, fumbled with my card . . . and got stuck. I slid the card forward, backward, upside down, and inside out, but nothing happened. I was, however, particularly successful at looking like a complete moron. To add icing to the “imbecile cake,” when I finally did get it right, I almost missed getting through the turnstile, not realizing that I had a limited amount of time to actually push through the gate. A good Samaritan brusquely ushered me through, with a verbal “Go, man!”

Feeling like I had safely crossed the border into another country, I hurried down the worn granite steps toward the platforms. Two tunnels cut across a large, low-ceilinged room. Red and white tiles on the walls formed arrows indicating which way the trains traveled and spelled out the name of the stop, which I have since forgotten. To be fair, I’d only had about two hours of sleep and was lucky I could even remember my own name. Heavy steel supports, spread out every ten feet, formed a metal forest through which I could see dozens of fellow travelers, the tunnels, and the approaching trains. I didn’t have long to wait before the telltale vibrations of an oncoming subway shook the platform. Getting on the subway was easy now that I’d mastered the mystical art of swiping the metro card. I have to say, I really miss those old coin tokens; they made more sense, plus they were just cool.

It had been years since I’d ridden an actual subway; in fact, I’m not even sure when the last time was. I suppose it was in San Francisco riding the “Muni,” and maybe the “T” in Boston before that. Subways are fun, and as a total history geek, I’m especially interested in them and trains in general. (Sidenote: sections of Boston’s subway lines, dating back to a horse-drawn railcar system from the mid-1800’s, are still in use. Crazy, right?) Once I had settled into my seat, the doors slid shut, and the train jerked forward. I thought, Now would be a good time to figure out where the hell I’m actually going. I had several interesting options, including Penn Station and the World Trade Center. I thought about trying to hit a museum, but with only four hours, I didn’t really have enough time to do much, given that it took about forty-five minutes to get from the airport to Manhattan and back again. I landed on the Penn Station stop for nostalgic reasons.

When I was twelve, living in Boston, my mother had taken me and my siblings on a cross-country rail trip. Penn Station had marked the end of the first leg and the beginning of the second of that adventure. I managed to stay mostly conscious as the train bumped along, despite having barely secured three hours of sleep on the plane. I dozed several times but was awake enough to disembark at the correct stop. With the train behind me, I hurried across the station and up the stairs toward the surface. It had been twenty-eight years since I’d set foot in Manhattan. Once at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, I realized I still had the ticket stub from that prior visit to one of the World Trade Center Tower’s observation decks. I paused for a moment, put my hand to the tiled wall, closed my eyes, and offered a quick nondenominational prayer to those who perished on 9/11. I took a long, slow breath, nodded, and continued. The stairs rounded a corner, and a blinding white glow washed over me from the opening to the street above. It felt cinematic, and I could almost hear a dramatic soundtrack ringing in my ears as I stepped into the light.

It’s been a long pandemic. I’ve been isolated at home like so many of us for what seems like a decade. I’ve got kids half the time, and they have been great at giving me purpose and connection, but the other half of the time it’s just me and my two kittens who occasionally seem to like me “all right.” I’ve always considered myself an extrovert, but after more than a year and a half of this shit, I get anxious if I’m around too many people for too long. We’ve all been traumatized by the global catastrophe as well as the political insanity which has rocked the U.S. for what seems like yet another decade.

In the “before times,” I worked as a consultant/coffee-shop warrior for over five years, and at the end of 2018, when I finally got a job in an actual office, it was a relief. But those days are gone, and they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) coming back. With everyone remote, we’ve taken cars off the road, reducing traffic stress and the environmental impact of driving. The work-from-home thing was tough at first. But even though I was technically “working from home,” I rarely worked in my actual house. I’ve never liked to mix work with home life—there are just too many distractions, and I’m not afraid to admit that a big one is my Xbox.

Now, after such a long, chaotic stretch of time, I find myself loathe to return to the office. Corporate executives eventually discovered that not only could their businesses function with most of their staff working remotely but actually function more efficiently than they had before the pandemic. Of course, the rest of us already knew that the “office” was becoming obsolete, especially those of us who were working in tech. Despite that, rather than allowing us all to continue to work remote, some of us (myself included) were reclassified as “hybrid” employees. It doesn’t take effect until the new year, but I decided to see how it would feel by going in for a day.

I thought I knew what to expect, because back in the summer of 2020 with Covid in full swing, I had come to the office to retrieve a coat from my desk. Besides me, the only other living soul in the building was the security guard sitting at the front desk. I found things exactly where we had left them. Saint Patrick’s Day decorations hung from the ceiling and were taped to cube walls. Forgotten coats hung on the backs of chairs where they had been hastily left as the world began to change. Parts of the building sat in darkness, and fluorescent lights flickered here and there, where, under normal circumstances, they would have been replaced. It looked as if everyone had fled a zombie apocalypse.

This time it was different. The decorations had been removed along with everyone’s personal belongings including the long past expired food in the fridges, but the place was still a ghost town. Empty chairs and pieces of modular cubicles had been taken apart like giant Legos and piled in every corner. Several rows of workstations had been assembled in the center of the room with untouched paper nametags taped to their monitors for people that might someday return. A few employees meandered about here and there, and it was nice to see folks I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. But the place gave off a quiet, eerie vibe, and for some reason, despite the lighting, shadows seemed to be lurking in the corners of my vision.

I found my desk, said hello to the one coworker in my section, and plugged my laptop into its docking station with an audible click. I pulled up to my desk and got to work. For a bit, I actually got some work done in the quiet, Zen-like ambience, but after a few hours, I started to feel anxious. I wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but as the day wore on, it started to make sense. I had this feeling of a “before time,” of a forgotten past, as if I were sitting at a desk in a building in an abandoned town. I half expected to see a tumbleweed blow past.

In bygone days, when people had first started working in offices, there had been no alternative to having the proverbial “butts in seats.” Back then, everything had been on paper and filled out in triplicate. Workers could hear the rhythmic hammering of typewriter keys reverberating through marble halls, mixed in with the groaning of art deco elevators moving up and down on pulleys—seeming as if they might snap at any moment—followed by the loud dings as they approached each floor. The clomp of dress shoes and heels pounding on the hardwood floors added to the cacophony of those seemingly ancient spaces.

This is not that. The 20th century has since passed, and although the corporate world has fought to maintain the status quo, those days are gone. Twenty years into the new century we find ourselves with the technology to work and connect with people across vast distances without disrupting our work and even with all of that in place, it still took a pandemic to push us into this change. When Amazon recently tried to force their workers to return to their offices, the workers revolted, and even the “Great Behemoth” was forced to roll back its plans. And with the “Great Resignation,” workers have suddenly found themselves with power again.

Because that’s what it’s really about: power. In the early 20th century, the advent of unions forced corporations to provide better working conditions, benefits, and hours. Think what you want about unions, but in the beginning they were necessary and forced well-needed change. It’s different now with unions greatly weakened and with far less membership and power than they’ve had in the past. But in a way, an organic union of workers has come together across all sectors who have realized they aren’t where they want to be or being treated the way they should be. And all of a sudden, workers have power again.

We are at an inflection point of runaway corporate control and of a new kind of “Robber Baron.” It’s time for corporations and power brokers to give back—time for them to work for us, or at the very least, with us in partnership. It’s time for us to spread the wealth for the public good, not in a stereotypical socialist way but in a cohesive everyone’s-on-the-same-team way. It’s time for us to retake the public trust and for all of us (rather than a select few) to decide where our money and resources should go.

I’m not sure where the world is headed with a rolling Pandemic still in the mix any more than I’m sure where the working world will end up. I am sure of one thing, however: the days of everyone going “to the office” are over. Good riddance!

–Dave Page

I’ve noticed a recurring theme as I’ve moved through life. I forget myself—forget where I’ve been and what I’ve accomplished. I get stuck in the same moment, the same feeling at a single point in time. Some might call this impostor syndrome, but I think it’s more sinister than that. As I’ve watched my friends and family evolve over time, I’ve observed that some of them remain the people they’ve always been, while others have changed dramatically. I have no idea what this means in the grand scheme of life, but it seems significant.

At a core level, I’m the person (or persons) I’ve always been: I’m still that kid secretly reading the sci-fi novel hidden on his music stand while the band director rehearses the woodwinds (I was a trumpet player). The camp counselor sitting at his “word processor” in the staff lounge on his free time. The twenty-something pounding away on the keys of that same word processor in his first apartment in Seattle. That former husband sitting with his laptop at the coffee shop in his Illinois exile. The new dad driving his kids around town until they pass out, stopping in random parking lots to work on his novel. . . . And this guy sitting here today writing this.

But most of all, I’m a writer. It is who and what I am. But writing has never paid the bills, and no matter how successful I feel in a technology career that finances my life, that writer in me is not where he wants to be . . . has not accomplished what he set out to do. And for that he often feels incomplete and defeated. I constantly have to remind myself that I’m published; that I’m a member of the Authors Guild, the Sci-fi Writers of America, and the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers; that I’ve had hardcovers and mass-market paperbacks in bookstores; and that I’ve appeared at a few conventions. And yet, even as I write about these accolades, they just don’t seem to matter because as I measure myself against where I want to be relative to my true purpose, I’m just not there.

The career trajectories of my peers are so vastly different than my own: some are rich, many are successful, and some are even in positions of power. And here I am, forever the writer with a dream. The level of effort those folks put into achieving their goals is the same level of effort I’ve put—and continue to put—into my writing. Until my writing meets with the same success, there will always be something missing.

In the fall of 2018, after several years of career instability, I struggled to hang on to my writer identity as I drowned in debt and could barely keep myself afloat. It felt as if that core part of me was slipping away and was in danger of being lost forever. In the midst of that, I took a contract job at Microsoft where I was able to stabilize my finances, if only a little. It gave me time to breathe and to think. What I found was the writer had not vanished—I had not forgotten. And in that moment, I started writing something different: an anthology of some of my various writings. Before each story excerpt, I’ve written short commentaries in which I share some background about how I came up with the idea as well as recount some funny stories. The project became sort of a “semi-memoirish” fiction anthology, turning my own life into the story—the story of me, the story of the writer. That effort of remembrance has finally come to fruition as this latest work is nearly complete. As writers do, I’m starting to plan for this launch and when that happens, the writer will be a writer . . . again.

Today is my 52nd birthday. And in the spirit of starting fresh with a new year ahead of me, I think it’s time for me to share a different side of my writing. I’ve thought about writing a blog for a long time, but it’s always felt so daunting. When I recently asked my twenty-something daughter if people still read blogs, her answer simultaneously comforted me and made me feel old. According to her, blogs have become sort of “retro cool.” Once past feeling somewhat shocked by her response, I was convinced that now is the time. Retro is cool!

So I thought I’d start by describing how I’m treating myself on my birthday before diving into some of the thornier issues of the day:

1. Coffee with one of my daughters
2. A crepe at my local coffeeshop (chicken, pesto, mozzarella, tomato with the addition of goat cheese . . . yum!)
3. Some video gaming (Fallout 76, with a dash of Horizon Zero Dawn)
4. Pizza for dinner with my other two daughters
5. Visits and drinks with some close friends at my place

Wow, that all sounds pretty damn good! Happy Birthday to me!

Now for the “other” stuff. As I embark on this blog, I think it’s important for readers to know where I’m at emotionally, physically, and spiritually, especially after the turmoil of the past four years.

I’ve taken this directly this from my dating bio, which in hindsight might explain my current lack of a dating life—but hey, it’s real. Here is what I know:

• There is no normal. Whatever normal used to be, we are about ten miles past that. We survived four years of daily abuse by an ignorant psychopath who took up residence in the White House, a man who fashioned himself as some kind of neo-Stalin but who in reality made Mussolini look like a super-genius.
• We survived an insurrection (still ongoing behind the scenes), during which we came about five minutes away from losing our democracy.
• Let’s not forget the isolating joy of an endless pandemic, which continues to be spurred on by political lunacy and an alarmingly large number of covidiots.
• And as if that wasn’t enough, the world is literally on fire.

Yes, things are pretty grim, but we haven’t lost on all fronts. There have been silver linings and victories both large and small. Here are some that I can personally attest to:

• For those of us who work in offices, we’ve learned (for those who didn’t already know) that working on-site full-time is pretty dumb and pointless. Working partial weeks in the office, or completely from home, reduces car pollution, gives people more time back to their lives, and reduces stress. My company’s leadership was stunned to find out that not only could we function off-site, but we could perform just as well if not better. Duh! (Smack to their collective executive foreheads.)
• Resorting to video conferencing for just about everything opened the door for us to reconnect with friends and family who are far away.
• Those of us with teenage kids got to spend more time with them (while they can still manage to be in the same rooms with us).
• The pandemic has pushed us to plan creative vacations, reigniting the “road trip,” popular for so many of us when we were growing up. I’m waiting for station wagons with fake wood paneling (á la the Family Truckster) to reappear on the freeways of America!
• We have a new administration in office that not only cares about the rule of law and democracy but actively works to strengthen it for everyone. (If you disagree, this might not be the blog for you; however, it isn’t my intention to make this a political blog, so you could just ignore those posts and look forward to my others). Some future blog post titles include “A phone call is a partnership” and “My cats hate me.”

And that seems like a good place to stop. Thanks for reading! And check out my published fiction page!

-Dave