Category Archives: Uncategorized

January 4^th

I am so totally disgusted by the con man president (he doesn’t deserve a capital p) today. I am embarrassed for our country. I just honestly don’t know what else to say that hasn’t been said by a thousand others. January 20^th cannot come fast enough

January 5^th

I didn’t post yesterday’s missive, yesterday, because I was debating if I wanted to bring politics into this space. But as I thought about it, it really isn’t about politics this time. It’s about right and wrong. It’s about being graceful in defeat. Its about banishing bullies.

I’ve tried to stand up for what is right and just my entire adult life and when I analyze the last four years, what pains me the most are not the policies (some of which I agree with), but rather the antagonistic, bullying, sarcastic, caustic approach that has been taken to all communications and relationships. 

It’s like The Godfather met Dave.  Or as someone else put it, the movie Idiocracy was not supposed be a documentary.  As I said above, January 20^th cannot come soon enough.  Then hopefully Twitter will ban him for life.

I love my dog – she’s an 18mo golden retriever – but sometimes she is beyond pathetic. Normally she’s sleeping in her dog bed in my room, at the foot of the bed. Last nite, I have no idea what got into her, but at 3:42 am, I was woken by a yip.  When I went looking for her, I found her half on, half off the couch, trying to climb up onto it.

So, what did I do? I helped her up of course, and then went back to bed.  Okay, so maybe I’m the pathetic one.  Or maybe I was just too asleep to critically assess the situation.  For those who have and love dogs, you totally get this. For those who don’t, you wouldn’t understand – and that’s okay.

As part of a pandemic related purging, I’ve been going through boxes of stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years. I’ve always been a bit of a pack rat and I have 2 or 3 good sized totes with letters, cards and things accumulated over the years.

Going through them and purging seems like the right thing to do. After all, 50 cards from my grandmother, long passed, really doesn’t mean anything, to anyone, but me. As I looked at them, I frequently could not remember the year – the occasion was generally a birthday or a holiday – but in looking at the aggregate, I came to realize how much I was in my grandmother’s thoughts. And the process was repeated in my mind over and over as I looked at cards and letters from friends, and other relatives – many of whom are now gone.

This purge has made me both grateful, for the memories of the relationships I’ve experienced, and somewhat sad for my kids, in that this type of physical memory of friends and family won’t be there for them when they reach my age.  I have amazing correspondence from friends in high school and college because we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have email, and we wanted to stay in touch. We don’t write letters any longer – we don’t have to. So we probably stay more in touch in the moment, but the long term physical reminder won’t be there.

So, this brings up a question for me….  Do we need physical reminders of experiences, to be able to remember them (and relationships really are experiences). Without a totem/talisman/ tchotchke, will we truly remember our past experiences in distinct events (many that make us who we are today) or does it just get blended into some amorphous bundle that lose the boundaries of time and event?

Sometime around 5^th or 6^th grade, I developed a love of reading. It has always had the ability to fully transport me to an alternate reality. First my parents, then my partners and kids have all commented on how hard it can be to pull me back into the now.

This holiday season, I got a new book to read and realized that in the pandemic driven, hard to focus, year of 2020, I had started and not finished three books. There are books you don’t finish because they just are not that interesting or engaging. And then there are books you don’t finish because you just haven’t gotten to the end yet.  The three I had going were of the latter variety.  So, I committed to finishing two of the three before starting anew.

Today’s finish was “These Truths – a History of the United States” by Jill Lepore. I’ve been a student of US and modern world history for as long as I could read, and I learned a lot in this book. It’s 800 pages that clearly help you understand the exceptionalism of the American Idea, and how as a nation, we have so often failed to live up to the promise of the idea, while continuing to evolve it. It is that paradox that we live with every day and through every political decision. It’s a long read, but if you want to better understand the context of our time (history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme) it’s a great read. 

2020 started off so positively. I think for a lot of people. And then it cratered, I think for a lot of people. We all have our personal stories. Personal triumphs. Personal tragedies for 2020. For some, 2020 will be a year they can never recover from. For some, it will have demonstrated resilience they had not expected.

For me – I lost my mother in 2020 – not to covid, but because of covid, I could not be with her in her last days and hours. I had to say goodbye to a dog that had been a faithful companion for 16 years.  I had to watch my daughter’s softball season get cancelled – a team that she overcame a great deal of personal anxiety to try out for and join.

But I also got to watch the flexibility and adaptability of my daughter when it came to school. It would be a stretch to say she thrived with remote learning, but she took to well and made it work for her. And I was part of a working revolution with both my wife’s employer and mine, as they were able to pivot and shift and adapt to an ever-changing threat landscape.

For me, 2020 will be a lost year.  A small percentage of my total life. For my daughter, my fear is more for the experiences she lost as there are so few years that form the basis of who you will become. We’re all formed by the times and events we live and survive through. I wonder how history will look back on 2020.

Most responsible people want less regulation in their lives. Less government interference, fewer rules, less paperwork. The problem with this is that there are far too many people, companies and governments that aren’t responsible.

We bear the cost and burden of regulation, not because most of us are responsible, but due to the minority that are not. And wishing it were not so, won’t change it.

My writing muscle has atrophied over the past couple of years. I used to write 2 or 3 posts a week when I first started my marketing agency. Then over the years, it dwindled to once a week, then once every couple of weeks and for the past 2 years, really nothing. So, 2021 seems a good year to get back at it. Look for more to come – right here. No agenda. No real theme. Just ramblings of a dad, a tech worker, a marketer, a consumer and a person curious about the world at large.