Archives 2021

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